Faith
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Thinking the Faith, Praying the Faith, Living the Faith is written by the PC(USA) Office of Theology and Worship.
Thinking, praying, and living the faith is at the core of ministry in the Office of Theology and Worship. In the following videos, learn more about what thinking, praying, and living the faith means to the leadership of the Office of Theology and Worship. Discover why it matters and what difference it makes in our lives, work, and worship.
Charles Wiley
Barry Ensign-George
David Gambrell
Christine Hong
Karen Russell
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"Reality Is What I Say It Is!"
I helped a friend think about how to structure an event for network partners the other day. As we were working on W. Paul Jones’ Theological Worlds: Understanding the Alternative Rhythms of Christian Belief, we realized that we moved readily between all these worlds because of our facility with metaphorical language and the symbolic nature of the sacraments.
However, this is not the case with all Christians. I remember the day my sixteen-year-old discovered, to her utter astonishment and dismay, that not everyone sees the world as she does. “Well, . . . but of course my reality is reality!” she protested. True enough. Her reality is a reality, but not the reality. It is simply a perspective on Reality, which exists in God.
Something much bigger beyond all our feeble attempts to name its ineffability is at work in the world through our human realities. If God is reduced to human language, our God is way too small, a mere idol of our own thought and/or language, which is a cultural construct. Language for God, like all language itself, as Lakoff and Johnson demonstrate, is fraught with metaphor, pointing beyond itself to a greater reality that we all participate in and seek to draw attention to with language. Our language is not the thing itself.
But the language is important! Changing a metaphor can change the way we see something and our experience itself, which, in turn, affects reality. For example, we can spend time, or kill time. In one metaphor time is a resource we use as a valued commodity. In the other, time is a living being we can kill. Is time something we manipulate for our own ends, or something we live with or within like a baby in the womb (yes, the irony of using another metaphor is noted!)? How we think of time changes our experience of it and how we choose to live out our days--i.e. thinking we're in control of our days, or thinking time holds us or is a threatening other we're always trying to do away with.
Changing the metaphor changes the way we think about time itself. It doesn’t change time in and of itself, of course. As Shakespeare noted, “a rose by any other name smells as sweet,” but changing a label can change how we experience
something. If we suddenly start calling a daisy a rose, we will start expecting all daisies to smell good, and when they don't, we will discount them as "less-than," perhaps eradicating them as weeds and thereby miss out on their own unique beauty.
There is an is/is not quality to metaphoric language that helps us perceive what is not or cannot be known by using terms with which we are somewhat familiar. I may say my pain feels like hundreds of villagers with torches moving up my spine. Of course, literally this is not true. And yet there’s a sense in which it is: there is a burning sensation on the move up my spine.
Our Christian faith depends upon metaphoric facility. The Bible is fraught with figurative language. The sacraments give us a way to participate in Reality by serving as symbols that point us beyond themselves to God’s Reality. Christ is the bread of life, but he is not reducible to bread. The cup is the cup of the new covenant, except the new covenant is not what’s held in that cup; it's so much bigger. Baptism symbolizes new life in Christ that can’t be instrumentally tied to splashing around in a bit of water. We know this. We have a metaphoric facility that enables us to say that Christ is our good shepherd at the same time that we say he is the lamb of God—and we can affirm this without worrying about the inherent logical contradiction.
Those without such metaphoric facility, though, scratch their heads at the illogic of our use of language in the church. So we may have to do some teaching around our use of language in order to help a thorough-going secular people see into the deeper Reality of the triune God we know best in and through Jesus Christ. The church is thus a unique place of education that enables a more visionary way of seeing reality than perhaps the more pragmatically-oriented educational system does. Public education has been oriented to passing tests lately, and the Miller Analogy Test is no longer a component of college entrance exams. Analogical reasoning, our forte, is not as valued in secular education, so we need to do some more fundamental education in the church now regarding how we use language so that people can see this God we’re forever talking about.
As we do that education, we may also realize that we’re more able to float readily between different faith expressions without losing the integrity of conviction or being concerned for the Reality of God, who is beyond all our stumbling linguistic attempts. We can accept the expressions for what they are and work toward building bridges that help us move with facility between the different Christian theological worldviews and value everyone’s reality as a perspective on Reality.
- Posted at 11:43 a.m.
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