Quotes about Language

Christian is a great noun and a poor adjective.

The Psalms show us what healthy spiritual life looks like. You name everything that's happening inside of you. You give it language and expression, You articulate exactly what the desolation feels like. If you don't drag it up and give it words, then it's buried down in your being somewhere. And it will come out in other ways. Unhealthy, destructive ways. You'll keep it bottled up. And you'll be miserable.

Because if something is wrong with your God, if your God is loving one second and cruel the next, if your God will punish people for all of eternity for sins committed in a few short years, no amount of clever marketing or compelling language or good music or great coffee will be able to disguise that one, true, glaring, untenable, unacceptable, awful reality.

So when we talk about God we're using language, language that employs a vast array of words and phrases and forms to describe a reality that is fundamentally beyond words and phrases and forms.

An image of God doesn't contain God, in the same way a word about God or a doctrine or a dogma about God isn't God; it only points to God.

it's through Moses that God makes four promises to these slaves. I will take you out. I will rescue you. I will redeem you. I will take you to me. There's a reason why these four promises are so significant — they're the promises a Jewish groom makes to a Jewish bride. This is wedding language.

So if that's it, if that's the point of it all, if that's the ticket, the center, the one unavoidable reality, the heart of the Christian faith, why is it that no one used the phrase until the last hundred years or so?

An existing individual is constantly in process of becoming,... and translates all his thinking into terms of process. It is with (him)... as it is with a writer and his style; for he only has a style who never has anything finished, but 'moves the waters of the language' every time he begins, so that the most common expression comes into being for him with the freshness of a new birth.

Metaphor is the only possible language available to religion because it alone is honest about Mystery.

I can't think why fancy religions should have such a ghastly effect on one's grammar. It's a kind of intellectual rot that sets in, I'm afraid.

I respect a man who knows how to spell a word more than one way.

The symbolic language of the crucifixion is the death of the old paradigm; resurrection is a leap into a whole new way of thinking.