THE RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE NEWSLETTER
Volume 1, Issue 4 -- July/August 2000

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The Religious Language Newsletter is written and published every other month by Suzette Haden Elgin, Ph.D. (linguistics), from the Ozark Center for Language Studies (PO Box 1137, Huntsville, AR 72740-1137 USA, e-mail OCLS@madisoncounty.net). It's available by e-mail only, in plain text, and is free to members of the Lovingkindness Network (annual dues, $5.00). For more information, contact OCLS; issues are posted at http://www.forlovingkindness.org.
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IN THIS ISSUE: Editor's Note; More on the "Openness Theology" Question; Network Input; Cyberspace; Metaphor Collection; Quotes & Comments; About the Religious Right, and the Religious Left

EDITOR'S NOTE:
If any of you have read the novel (_Peacetalk 101_) posted at http://www.lovingkindness.org and haven't yet written me about it, I'd be grateful for your comments. It's okay to tell me you hated it, or thought it was asinine/boring/offensive/pretentious .... whatever. I've had quite a bit of mail about it, much of it trying very hard to convince me that humankind is inherently wicked and that unconditional love is impossible for human beings. (And that I am therefore, I suppose, wasting my time writing things like _Peacetalk 101_.) My feelings won't be hurt if you tell me the book is awful; not at all. (Remember that the editors who turned it down complained that it was "too violent." You couldn't say anything worse than that if you tried.) I'm genuinely interested in what you think and in why you think it. [The book is there to read for free, by the way, in case I haven't made that clear; it's not something you have to pay for. And it's a very short book.]

MORE ON THE "OPENNESS" THEOLOGY QUESTION

1. Many thanks to Claudia Camp for a long, fascinating, and informative letter on this topic. She begins by mentioning that she's never heard it called "openness" theology. This doesn't surprise me, since the idea seems to have as many different proposed names as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis; one common alternative is calling it the "foreknowledge of God" question. She writes that it comes up every time she teaches a Bible course. Here's a brief excerpt from her letter:

"The Bible and belief in its literal truth notwithstanding, my teaching experience suggests that popular (especially but not exclusively evangelical) Christian belief today is dominated by adherence to belief in God's omniscience and omnipotence. Students are remarkably willing to let go of omnibenevolence in order to preserve the other two. If not let go of it, at least postpone it -- 'everything works to the glory of God in the end' is a favorite line... The white hot level of debate you're finding in the journals does not surprise me, but only because I've had to deal with these issues so often in class. There is NO discussion stopper bigger than the omniscience issue. ... It does indeed turn out that omniscience (and omnipotence) are the bottom line of faith. To question that is to question everything."

[This is one of the areas in which I have found that people who claim to be entirely without any form of religious faith will still argue passionately and endlessly; even when they consider themselves "faithless," they clearly prefer that Something be in charge.]

2. I'd like to throw into the discussion a quotation that may be a tad quaint, but that seems to me to shed some light. It comes from an article by physicist Philip Morrison titled "Cause, Chance and Creation," on pp. 113-126 of _Adventures Of The Mind_, edited by Richard Truelsen and John Kobler, published in 1963 by Vintage Books. On pp. 122 and 123-4 Morrison writes: "Just as one cannot predict the day a given policyholder will die, so one cannot at all predict where the electron is in any given atom in its normal pattern. Nevertheless, if a great many of the identical atoms are inspected, to locate their moving electrons, a perfectly precise and definite pattern will be revealed in the statistics so compiled... The electron's every position is contained in the pattern of the atom. But it is contained only potentially: the pattern has the potential of showing up the electron now here, now there. ... [W]e now see that the myriad particles which indeed do make up our universe form an unfolding pattern of events whose every _potential_ future state may be predicted. But just what events are realized in _fact_ can be foretold only in the statistician's sense, with a sureness that grows the greater the larger the piece of matter, or current of energy, with which the prediction is concerned. There is room to breathe in such a world. Yet it is no world of caprice or chaos." This seems to me to represent, in scientific language, the position of the openness theology scholars. They are saying that God knows (foreknows) the pattern, and has the power to intervene if something is going to do damage to the pattern, but that God has chosen not to know (foreknow) the behavior of the individual particles _within_ the pattern. It seems to me to be an ingenious way to represent what "free will" might be in a universe ruled by an omnipotent deity, and in no way disrespectful. No claim is being made that God lacks the _power_ to determine each and every "particle," only that the choice has been made not to exercise that power. So far as I can tell, the religious groups that are reacting with such horror to the entire idea have read none of the works of these scholars and are relying instead on religious media reports about those works.

3. Finally, there is the question -- does this controversy matter in any _practical_ sense, as opposed to a theological or philosophical sense? And the answer, to my mind, is yes, specifically because of the implications for prayer, especially in the context of current medical research demonstrating that prayer appears to have real-world effects at least in that domain. Suppose prayer might persuade God to a change of mind -- the way King Hezekiah, after being told by the prophet to get his affairs in order because death was at hand, was able to get that death sentence delayed fifteen years by praying. Suppose Walter Wink is correct that human beings can, potentially, "pray the future into being." Then, without question, for those with religious faith there is an _obligation_ to pray. For the fully-practicing devout person, that's no big deal; they already accept that obligation, though probably for other reasons. But for the majority of people, an actual obligation to pray, and a belief that failing in that obligation might have negative consequences in the real world, would be a terrible burden. Selina Rosen tells me that Moses Maimonides claimed that "it is only when a great many people cry out about the same injustice that G-d heeds their prayers." I am inclined to suggest a Pascalian Minimalist Strategy: at least, we could get up each morning and do our bit by praying, "May everything that happens this day and this night be for the best." [I think the source for that prayer is Larry Dossey, but I'm not positive; if I'm wrong, I'd be glad to have the correct source.]

NETWORK INPUT

1. Some time ago, I tried to take a religious language poll for Lovingkindness. I asked all the members of this network to send me a list of the ten or so words from religious language that they considered most troublesome. (I chose that term, "troublesome," with great care.) The reason I haven't reported the results is that in all this time I've had only 18 responses, most with only one or two words, and those varied wildly from person to person. I don't think any more responses are going to come in, however, and so I am reporting the results. No single word got more than four votes, and only five words got that many. They were: "God, love, hell, sin (or sinner)" and "forgive (or forgiveness)."

2. Thanks to Jonathan Jones for a very interesting letter about my startled reaction to the metaphorical statement saying that the Koran is to the Muslim what Jesus is to the Christian, with Jesus the Word made flesh and and the Koran the Word made text. His reaction, unlike mine, was that it was a "pretty mainline statement," but that "for completeness one ought to add the second half: the Islamic understanding of Muhammed (the messenger who brings the Word) is the nearest equivalent to the Christian (or at least the Evangelical) view of the Bible. The alternative pairing (equating Muhammed with Jesus and the Koran with the Bible) is a mistake, but an entirely natural mistake. It's also an increasingly popular mistake among the UK religious right.." And he concludes that it seems to him that "Christianity is not a 'Religion of the Book' like Judaism or Islam, it's a 'Religion _with_ a Book.' "

3. I had many notes and queries asking me for my opinion on this matter of the Southern Baptist convention claiming that women cannot be pastors, and that the claim is made on Biblical authority. Thank you for the correspondence, and for all the materials on the subject that you sent. I don't have much to say in response, other than to express my sorrow about it. And to express my thankfulness that Baptists are not bound by the church document where this doctrine is found, every Baptist being understood to have the right to his or her own interpretation of the Scriptures. (You can find a brief article about this online at http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2000/06/14/baptists.html.)

4. Thanks to Jim White for a correction to the section in the May/June issue about the FCC's ruling against "religious exhortation, proselytizing, etc." in 50% of the content aired on religious radio and tv stations. Jim says the ruling had to do with a religious broadcaster near Pittsburg, called Cornerstone, and that the story I quoted is "a substantial distortion of what was happening in that case." The actual effect of the ruling, he says, is that "religious stations are free to do anything they want on unrestricted channels, but will, like any other broadcaster, have to meet the 50% requirement for educational channels..."

This was followed by a letter from Douglas Dee: "The FCC statement requiring religious stations to devote time to non-religious educational programs was rescinded back in January. More recently, the House of Representatives passed a bill 'prohibiting the Federal Communications Commission from regulating the content of speech aired by noncommercial educational radio and television stations,' according to today's LA Times. Anyone who was worried can relax now."

5. Thanks galore to those who sent me the spoof letter to Dr. Laura. The one that started with "Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's law" and then had chunks like this: "I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as it suggest in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?", and "I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?" If anyone can tell me who is the author of this letter (which was titled "Dear Dr. Laura Schlessinger," I think), I'll credit that person in the next issue.

CYBERSPACE

1. You'll find the book of Luke, "in 30 languages, allowing full-text searching and side-by-side comparison of up to seven languages," at http://mdavies.for.ilstu.edu/bible. Languages include not just the usual ones but also Haitian Creole, Cebuano, Maori, Swahili, and English of four different historical periods. If the translations are reasonably accurate, this is a really useful site. (I can't vouch for them other than to say that the French, in the small quantities of it that I checked, looks fine.)

METAPHOR COLLECTION

1. Margaret Carter sent me this item about C.S. Lewis, who was opposed to there being female clergy in the Anglican Church. She writes, "Being well aware of the effects of language on thought, Lewis pointed out that a child taught to pray to a Mother in Heaven would have a very different spiritual life from a child taught to pray to a Father in Heaven." I think that may well be true, but that it has changed in meaning a great deal since Lewis said it. I think Lewis had in mind the upperclass British Victorian sort of mother, delicate and fragile and cloistered in the home and so on. (I sincerely doubt that he had in mind that woman's laundress.) It seems to me that we don't have a monolithic "mother" metaphor in the way that we do a "father" one, which is not surprising. And I guess that I should acknowledge that although I enjoy his writing, I find Lewis's children (and even his lions) more believable than his women.

2. Two book titles and descriptions from the Crossings Book Club brochure for 2/00: _Parent Warrior_ (by Karen Scalf Linamen), described as containing "real-life stories from the front lines of spiritual warfare." With an accompanying workbook. And _A Spiritual Warfare Promise Book: Daily Strength for the Battle_, compiled by Beth Nethery Feia. I wonder whether my Thomas Nelson book, which they titled _How to Turn the Other Cheek and Still Survive in Today's World_, would have sold better if they had used the title I gave it myself; I called it "Getting the War Out of Warrior." Probably not; probably it would have to be called "The Martial Art of Spiritual Self-Defense," with a subtitle full of combat vocabulary. [My title wasn't very good, either, since my claim is that native speakers of English _can't_ get the "war" semantic content out of words like "warrior" and "warfare" just by slapping "spiritual" (let alone "parent") in front of them.]

3. From _Time_, for 4/10/95, pp. 63-73 ("The Message of Miracles," by Nancy Gibbs), on page 70 -- with regard to the Jesus Seminar: "The invitation to reporters promised that the experts 'will be drilling close to the nerve of the Christian faith.' " Now that is truly tacky! You can just imagine the beleaguered Christian shrieking and spitting in the chair, or giggling wildly with head lolling and eyes crossed from being zonked out on nitrous oxide. I don't even want to think about how the various parts of the dental metaphor would be assigned, as in who/what would be the drill, and who/what would be the dentist.....

QUOTES & COMMENTS:

1. I'm always interested in examples of religious language that turn up outside a religious context. Like Ian Frazier's poem, "Laws Concerning Food and Drink; Household Principles; Lamentations of the Father," with its many wonderful lines like "And though your stick of carrot does indeed resemble a marker, draw not with it upon the table, even in pretend, for we do not do that, that is why," which you can find by going to the website of the Prairie Home Companion radio show. I love the cartoons showing God with a computer that has a "Smite" key. And I found an example recently in a _Forbes FYI_ account of the bizarre (and scientifically unexplained) results of a lightning strike on a house. It began like this:

"Jonah and his good wife, Sarah, know not why the Lord smote their house in Stamford, Connecticut. All day on a Sunday in May last year, a dark cloud formed in the firmament, begetting a powerful lightning bolt that would descend upon them in a fraction of a second from ten miles above. ... Jonah and Sarah dwelt not on the highest hill in town, nor did their house stand alone in an empty field. Rather, they lived in a typical lowland suburb, upright and God-fearing even before the lightning struck." And it goes on like that, after a fashion, for pages. The story is "Power Call: Thirty million volts is God's way of saying, 'Anybody home?' ," by Patrick Cooke, on pp. 43-46 of a recent issue. (My apologies for not writing down the date; I keep forgetting that _Forbes_ perversely refuses to put dates on its supplemental publications anywhere except on the cover.)

2. Here's something from page 93 of Lawrence S. Cunningham's book, _Catholic Prayer_ (Crossroad, 1989), on the word Jesus is said to have used to address God in prayer: "It has been often noted that _Abba_ (the word is Aramaic) denotes a peculiarly intimate form of address to a beloved parent. I have resisted the suggestion that the term should be translated as 'Daddy' as being too jarringly vulgar. Nor does the phrase 'dear father'... escape the echo of middle-class respectability. _Abba_ does not translate easily into acceptable English and should be allowed to stand in the original to give us some sense of the language of Jesus himself. We need to understand it as a term of endearment which comprehends that intimate bond existing between parent and child in the most loving of family arrangements." I do admire that word, _Abba_; it looks good on the page, it sounds good to the ear, it feels good in the mouth. Whether it can be semantically tidied enough to stand alone as suggested, without the "Daddy" or "Dearest Papa" baggage it has been carrying, is another question.

3. My thanks to Frances Green for sending a copy of "Hell Hath No Fury," by Jeffery L. Sheler, pp. 45-50, _U.S. News & World Report_ for 1/31/00. Sheler writes that Jonathan Edwards (responsible for the sermon "Sinners In the Hands of An Angry God" and similar firebreathing preaching) "would scarcely recognize the hell of today. After decades of near obscurity, the netherworld has taken on a new image: more of a deep funk than a pit of fire. While the traditional infernal imagery still attracts a following, modern visions of eternal perdition as a particularly unpleasant solitary confinement are beginning to emerge..." His statistics for a poll asking "What comes closest to your idea of hell?" show 53% for "an anguished state of existence eternally separated from God," 34% for "a real place where people suffer eternal fiery torments," and 11% for "don't know." The contingent for a real place of torment -- which represents the "following" he mentions -- is still a full third of those asked. That's a substantial number. Also interesting, a new poll by the magazine shows that more people believe in the _existence_ of hell now than in the 1950s or even the early 1990s. I recommend the article; it's interesting, and thorough. (In the tiny Lovingkindness poll on troublesome religious language vocabulary items, "hell" got only three votes, by the way.)

4. Jim White sent me a copy of "Religious commitment linked to longer life," by B. Bower, page 359 of the 6/3/00 _Science News_. It's a report on a meta-analysis -- a combined analysis of 42 individual studies published since 1977, for a total of 125,826 participants. It produced the usual conclusion, expressed in the title. One of the studies included was a 1997 project co-authored by social epidemiologist George A. Kaplan, who says that only a few of the studies done since 1977 are any good, and that mixing them with flawed studies doesn't accomplish anything useful. Then there's something I find odd. Bower tells us that Kaplan's project, carried out over 28 years, showed that "those who cited high levels of religious belief tended to live longer than those who didn't" -- but Kaplan says, "There is absolutely no basis for recommending religiosity as a preventive strategy [in health care]." I suspect mediadetritusitis here. "Religiosity" is a technical term; religiosity is considered a symptom of mental illness. Kaplan may well have said the sentence during the interview, meaning that there's no evidence that just going through the motions of religious ritual and practice without faith has any preventive benefit. But I think it very unlikely that he said what Bower intends us to understand, which is that religiousness can be ruled out as a preventive strategy. If it were a medication it would have been "ruled in" long long ago; certainly it can't be ruled out.

5. "The content of _Jesus with Dirty Feet_ is prototypical Gen-X fare. It attempts to place Jesus outside the realm of organized religion, as an iconoclast bucking the system. The book asserts that Jesus 'was not a Christian' and 'never asked anyone to become a Christian...never took up an offering, never wore religious garments, never incorporated for tax purposes.' And Christianity, in contrast to the institutions and rituals with which is it associated in the minds of many Gen-Xers, is 'not a set of dogmatic principles, not a life philosophy, not an outdated old religious institution, but a peculiar band of people.' " This is on the final page of "So Slackers Are Spiritual After All," by Michael Kress, on pp. 510-515 of the 8/30/99 issue of _Publishers Weekly_; the book described was written by Don Everts.

ABOUT THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT, AND THE RELIGIOUS LEFT

Pat Mathews sent me something interesting that appeared on pp. 18-21 of the the 11-12/00 issue of _Sojourners_: an interview with Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson, conducted by Jim Wallis, titled "Hostage to an Illusion." The subtitle reads, "The Religious Right lost its moorings and sold its soul when it chose to play by the politicians' rules." Thomas and Dobson have long been movers and shakers of the Religious Right themselves, and are co-authors of a new book called _Blinded by Might_ which argues that the Religious Right has failed in the U.S. Here are a few excerpts; I recommend the entire interview.

From Cal Thomas, page 18: "A lot of the so-called Religious Right are spiritual shoplifters. They want to move into the arena and steal things without paying the price. The price for the serious believer is to visit those in prison, clothe the naked, feed the hungry, and care for widows and orphans. All of this is hard grunt work; you can't raise money on it -- very few people want to send money in. They want to send money in to stop the 'homosexual agenda,' and they want to send money in to clean up television.... ... The problem for the Right is the same problem we've had from the Left in the past, that we take a selective view of scripture."

[Note: This "shoplifter" metaphor would have been more effective if he hadn't used the word "arena"; he's thinking of "political arena," I believe, but we don't have a verb for "stealing-in-the-political-arena" that matches the verb "shoplift" for stealing in stores. He has one leg up to the knee in a lexical gap.]

From Cal Thomas, page 20: "Politicians are very good at seducing pastors, preachers, and even lay people who are not sophisticated in their ways. The Democrats were a little late getting started on this, but they're coming on pretty strong. Now they are using biblical imagery and religious language with almost as much regularity as the Republicans are."

While I'm here, I want to add that I'm grateful to Cal Thomas for his recent syndicated column titled "Devout Don't Need Court Decisions," in which he gently reminds those demanding public prayer of what Jesus had to say on the subject: Do it in private, behind a closed door. And in which he mentions a quotation from St. Francis of Assisi that I'd never heard before: "Preach the gospel. Use words if necessary." [The clipping sent to me had no date, but arrived in late June looking brand new.]

Copyright © 2000 Suzette Haden Elgin
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E-mail newsletters by Suzette Haden Elgin include The Grandmother World Newsletter, The Language in Health Care Newsletter, The Women & Language Newsletter, The Linguistics & Science Fiction Newsletter, The Religious Language Newsletter, and The Verbal Self-Defense Newsletter. Information and sample issues by e-mail from OCLS@madisoncounty.net.