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Language, Medium and Rhetoric

The mystery of language

Words are a preacher’s stock-in-trade. As we have seen, live communication is a relational event, which invests words with tone and value which go far beyond anything that could conceivably be captured in a dictionary. Nonetheless, words themselves and the language-systems of which they are a part have a mysterious character and force which must be reckoned with.

A successful act of communication requires the adoption not just of a language but a particular ‘register’ of language appropriate to both speaker and hearers. For instance, a preacher who uses the language of a theological lecture will not communicate effectively with most congregations. There are, however, deeper questions to consider here, arising from the modern philosophy of language. Without getting mired in abstruse philosophical debates, we will seek to tread a path between extreme positions in order to identify some key facts.

First, it is now generally recognized that we are all embedded in language, yet have power to shape it. Language shapes our thinking and living in profound ways from the earliest stage of life. This recognition has come in response to the over-confident view of the Enlightenment that as humans we could be masters of language, deploying it at will for our purposes, and able to decode the language of others with the aid of authoritative guides such as dictionaries. Some have gone so far the other way as to say there can be no thinking without language. Without adjudicating on that point, we are wise to recognize that no speaker can simply select and control what they say at will. But this does not mean we are helpless tools of an impersonal system. Words can still work for us in creative ways. But they do this not so much as tools to be selected objectively from a toolbox, but rather as an internal lump of clay which invites being shaped into particular forms.

Perceiving this should save us from two unfortunate errors. On the one hand, it is futile to seek to escape from the ordinary language that has formed us – whether the common language of our upbringing or the specific ‘Christian’ cultural language that forms our heritage of faith. Both are a part of the ‘givenness’ of what we have to work with, and any attempt to leave behind either (in the interests, perhaps, of being more ‘accessible’ to our hearers) is doomed to failure. On the other hand, we should not imagine we are imprisoned by these inherited languages. We are free agents who can mould the clay in ways that are both authentic to us and available to our hearers to receive. Otherwise we are doomed to mere repetition. Unfortunately, some preaching seems to court this error. Cliché may be religious-sounding, and accord well with orthodox doctrine, but that does not stop it being cliché.[1]

Moreover, there is a creative element to being a receiver as well as to being a sender. Not only is it possible to invest creatively in the words we hear, bringing our own associations to what, to the speaker, might seem a perfectly ordinary sentence; we are actually doing it, consciously or unconsciously, all the time. We are interpreting beings, as linguistic philosophy since Martin Heidegger has recognized.[2] A single word – ‘waves’, ‘rose’, ‘hospital’, almost anything – may draw to the surface of a hearer’s mind specific memories or expectations, as well as vague hopes, delights and fears. That sensation then shapes and colours not only the meaning the hearer receives from the word, but their reception of all the communication that is to come.

Without frank recognition of this combination of the given and the creative in our use of language, discussion of the subject of preaching and, indeed, of specific sermons will be fraught with pitfalls. As R. E. C. Browne put it, the sermon is to be located neither in the mind or script of the preacher, nor in the ears of the hearer, but in that uncertain yet fertile space between them, as the gift of language is moulded, almost simultaneously, by each.[3]

The second modern insight into language relevant to us here is that words do have meaningful reference beyond themselves to a ‘real’ world, but also shape our perception of it. Although words are part of language-systems in which their relationship to each other is crucial[4] – thus, for instance, we cannot understand ‘red’ without reference to ‘black’, ‘yellow’, ‘green’ and so on – the label ‘red’ really can be applied to certain objects. The notion that there is no reality – or at least no accessible reality – outside language probably lies behind some of the nagging scepticism about words and their effectiveness which undermines preaching as well as other communicative events. Is E. M. Forster’s jibe about ‘poor little talkative Christianity’[5] the more stinging because words, in the end, refer only to other words?

Common sense as well as a Christian understanding of the creation, however, suggests that there is more to reality than language alone. Words evoke pictures, places, memories, ideas. At the simplest level, when we follow a sign saying ‘exit’ and then find our way out of the building, we have experienced the fact that there are words, and there is reality, and the two are not the same. This is one of the important senses in which words can be said to work (we will come to another shortly). They fulfil their function of pointing, not just to other words in the ‘system’ of language, but to reality beyond the system.[6]