The nature of language is a topic of significant recent interest to liturgical scholars. The following article outlines some of the most difficult questions these scholars address. These questions can also be helpful to worship planners and leaders as they reflect on the language they use in worship.
Introduction
Language is one of the primary ways that a people’s culture is indicated and transmitted. Liturgical language is that set of words, usually vernacular but not necessarily colloquial, with which the Christian assembly publicly prays. What are the many issues that concern us as we choose the language for our liturgy? In order to give our conversation specific focus, we shall consider the liturgical use of the tetragrammaton (YHWH as a name for God; cf. Exodus 3) as our primary case in point as we attempt to list the questions concerning liturgical language before the Christian churches today.
God’s Unspeakability
We begin where all liturgical language begins: the Bible. In Exodus 3, in a written record of a long-past religious experience, we are told that God appeared to Moses in the mysterious form of a burning bush and revealed divinity as merciful. When Moses asks the divine name, the answer in our text is one typically Hebraic in its mystery: four sacred consonants are given, YHWH, perhaps meaning I AM WHO I AM, perhaps meaning something else. The story demonstrates a fundamental religious conviction of the Hebrew people: human language cannot articulate divinity. God cannot be completely grasped by the human being: only the revelation, here the tale of the burning bush, can be spoken. Thus, when the Hebrew people read this story in the liturgy, and when they inculturated this legend into contemporary use since they believed that God’s height and depth cannot finally be spoken, they refused to pronounce this divine name. This intuition concerning the unknowability of God lives on in the most profound theologians—Augustine and Aquinas, for example—as well as in Christian mystics, for whom the via negativa testifies to the inability of human language to speak fully of God.
Questions about God’s Unspeakability. How much is the unspeakability of God a Christian concept, and to what extent ought this idea guide our decisions about liturgical language?
Biblical Roots
To circumvent pronouncing the divine name, the Hebrews substituted Adonai, a cultural title for the male authority figure, for the sacred name of God. This was not intended as an accurate translation, or, in the words of current translators, “a dynamic equivalent,” but as a substitution of an honorific title for God’s proper name. Apparently, the Jews felt free to adapt the scriptural tradition for purposes of liturgical use. Another example of this tendency occurred when the rabbis incorporated into their liturgy the passage describing God in Exodus 34. They were perplexed that the text stated that God would not forgive: since their experience was that God did forgive, their quotation of the Exodus passage reversed the negative. It is frustrating that the process of these decisions has been lost to us, who would probably find the controversies all too familiar!
Questions about Biblical Roots. In what ways is Christian liturgical language bound to biblical language? Can liturgical language alter or contradict biblical language? How do we come to agree on a new rendering of the original Hebrew and Greek? How do we render the androcentric bias of the biblical languages?
Translation
The Hebrew text was translated into the Septuagint by the Hellenized Jews in yet another example of inculturation. Throughout the translation, one can see Judaism influenced by the Greek theological idea that God can indeed be known and spoken by the philosophical mind. Plato believed that there was precise correspondence between the divine mind and the human mind. It was possible to attain, even to remember, divine truth. We see the Greek idea replacing the Hebraic, for example, as the Septuagint rendered El Shaddai, yet another mysterious name for God in the Hebrew Scriptures, as “God Almighty.” A conceptual adjective has replaced the ancient and mysterious metaphoric image of divinity. In the Exodus 3 passage, the tetragrammaton drops out of the Septuagint completely, replaced first by the Greek words Ego eimi, and later by the Greek word for the male authority figure, Kyrios. This noun was used contemporarily both as the common title for a man and as the exalted title for the emperor.
Questions about Translation. Are there traditional translations of biblical language which because of contemporary culture we must now alter? How do we inculturate biblical ideas into our tongue without making the gospel captive to culture-bound categories?
Christology
As Christians redefined the Hebrew religious language, Christianity became distinct from Judaism. “That Jesus is Lord” reuses both the image of Joshua and the title of Kyrios: in such redefinitions of central Hebrew terms, Christianity was articulated. The primary break from Judaism came in the Christian use of the Hellenistic Jewish title for God, Kyrios, as also the title for Jesus. That Easter baptisms are Pascha, that there is in Jesus a new covenant, that we are anointed as priests, that we are the tribes of Israel renewed: these are only a few of the central Jewish words and images which acquire new meaning for Christians.
Questions about Christian Speech. How can Christianity continue to use Hebrew ideas and texts typologically, i.e., redefined with reference to Christ, without the anti-Semitic implication that Christians have replaced Jews in the heart of God? How can liturgical language remain Christologically orthodox?
Analogy
As Christians continued the endless task of translation of the gospel, they came to rely on Thomas Aquinas’s discussion of religious language for their intellectual foundation. Aquinas attempted to combine the Hebrew idea of the incomprehensibility of God with the Greek hope for Platonic correspondence in his brilliant concept of analogy. Aquinas hoped that analogy would allow Christians to speak the truth about and to God. When language became too obviously metaphoric—God being a rock or a lion—Aquinas relegated it to a lesser position, for Greek inquiries into truth were biased against metaphor’s “deficient resemblance.” Concerning Exodus 3, Aquinas found “He Who Is” the best name for God, because it met perfectly his understanding of the philosophical nature of divinity: the name said best that God is God’s essence.
Questions about Thomism. Is analogous language more true about God than metaphoric? Which liturgical language is analogous?
Metaphor
However, most of the twentieth-century world is no longer Thomist. The great chain of being is broken. Since a hierarchy of being is no longer assumed, analogical language cannot be trusted as more truthful than another language. Nominalism proposed that words were not God-given labels, and eighteenth-century philosophers suggested that language has its meaning only within a community of discourse. Contemporary theorists of language like Paul Ricoeur suggested that metaphor is the highest form of human expression; it is the addition and transfer of meaning, the creation of complex discourse, the building blocks of human thought. There is no clear distinction between literal and metaphoric language: words have meaning only within the sentence and within the community. Religious language is a meaningful self-contradictory expression in which the community understands certain meanings by a series of noises it makes together.
Questions about Metaphor. How does the church inculturate its traditional belief in the truth of inspiration into a secular culture in which language has no exterior proof? How does the metaphoric quality of liturgical language influence our composition of liturgical language? What is the relationship between metaphoric religious language and the doctrines of the faith? How do we teach metaphor to a computer age?
We have traveled from an oral Semitic legend about the sacred name of God to many current questions about what words Christians use in the liturgy. As far as I know, all contemporary Christian traditions use the name for God and the title for Jesus as a noun designating the male authority figure. There are obvious problems with this word: In American English the word Lord is archaic; in many Romance and Germanic languages the word is the same title normally addressed to any male. Yet the Christological significance of this word makes it extremely prominent in the liturgy. The layers of religious transmission are known only to a few, and the metaphoric quality of the word is seldom probed.
Of course, all these problems concern not only the sacred tetragrammaton. Scripture scholars remind us that the central image throughout the entire Bible is the royal metaphor. King, kingdom of heaven, city of God, majesty, to reign, to inherit, to anoint, the King of the Jews, the ascension, apocalypse, even Son of God: all this language is derived from the ancient near eastern religious idea of the divine origin of the monarch, and inevitably becomes altered in the history of translation, as well as being redefined in the light of Christ.
Liturgical language is the traditional and yet inculturated speech of the assembled community, the church’s treasury of metaphors offered to honor God and to enrich the body of Christ. The past asks us in the present whether we are being biblical and orthodox, and the future begs us to alleviate human misery with the mercy of God. Our liturgical language must continue to address these great and many issues. It is clear that our tasks with service books and hymnals are never done.