Communication Breakdown Part 1

I’m borrowing the title (but not the otherwise unremarkable lyrics) of a Led Zeppelin song from their debut album. The blog is about the language that we use to communicate Christian things to unchurched people, but it has equal application in communicating to church people. This week and next week I want to suggest why there is a dire need to rethink that language.

Let’s start from first principles: what language is—what it’s for, and how it’s used. The clue is in the blog title: “communication.” Words do not have any intrinsic—still less, permanently fixed—meaning. They’re simply tools that serve as “signposts,” pointing the speaker and the hearer to a shared understanding of something. Saying “dog,” or “cat,” using just one word, is way more efficient than trying to define and describe such a creature using many words; just think how long our sentences would become if we had to do that. Communication “succeeds” (words have done their job) when both speaker and hearer immediately see a broadly similar mental image—when the word the speaker has chosen leads both to picture the same thing.

Picturing the dog or cat also brings to mind all of our existing prior knowledge and experience of a dog or cat. Both parties “know what we’re talking about” as the conversation continues.  

Words and their meaning evolve over time. Take, for example, this extract from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, written in Middle English (the version of English spoken from the Norman Conquest in 1066 thru the 15th century):

A Yeman hadde he and servántz namo

At that tyme, for hym liste ride soo;

And he was clad in cote and hood of grene.

A sheef of pecock arwes bright and kene,

Under his belt he bar ful thriftily—

Wel koude he dresse his takel yemanly;

His arwes drouped noght with fetheres lowe—

And in his hand he baar a myghty bowe.

A not-heed hadde he, with a broun viságe.

No, I don’t know what he’s talking about either. I would have to guess. Some words sound remotely familiar, others . . . no idea.      

An easy recent example of how words change their meaning is the word “gay,” which at one time meant carefree and frivolous, but it’s now more often pointing to something quite different for most speakers and hearers: a person who is same-sex attracted.  

There is nothing strange about words and their meanings shifting over time, because, as I say, they are simply tools for communication. They are a form of “shorthand” to make communication more effective. The words themselves are irrelevant, only the “goal” matters—which is, that the speaker and hearer share the same understanding of what the speaker is communicating about. In other words, that the hearers “get it”—that they can say, “That makes sense to me . . .  I can see that.”  

The problem comes, of course, when a speaker uses words and phrases in which there is no longer a shared understanding. We can get away with the odd instance, especially in a one-on-one conversational context, where the hearer can say, “Sorry, by that you mean . . . what?” But imagine having to sit through a reading of The Canterbury Tales—which at nearly 50,000 words would take over three hours—scarcely understanding what on earth it’s talking about. Literary specialists may scorn the idea, but the audience would need to hear Chaucer’s words translated into modern English if they are to “get it.” However beautifully poetic they may sound, and however brilliantly they may have communicated to a mediaeval audience in their day, they are simply the wrong words for an audience in our day. The value of those words today is based solely on nostalgia rather than their current “signposting” power.    

Now . . . you might like to re-read what I’ve just been saying with the Bible in mind rather than The Canterbury Tales (though perhaps you could already see where all this is heading).

Compared to other older literature, the problem with the Bible is that because it’s “the Word of God,” Christians—and Bible translators/publishers—are reluctant to update well-known biblical words, even if they no longer communicate as they once did. There is even a “King James Only” movement amongst some fundamentalist evangelicals that insists that only the KJV, with all of its archaic language, is truly the Word of God. The old joke is that the KJV is the one that Paul used. I guess that because it sounds so old-fashioned, it feels like it’s closer to the original (which is a complete misnomer, not least because it’s now a poor translation by today’s scholarly standards).    

Bear in mind what we said at the start: words themselves have no intrinsic, fixed meaning. They’re merely tools—signposts, pointing to something. “Biblical” words themselves are not “truth,” they are communication vehicles pointing us to truths that lie beyond them. The goal of the words that we choose is that non-specialist hearers grasp that truth. Hence, not only can we change words but we will often need to change them if communication is to succeed.    

To be moderately controversial for a moment, churches are frequently lazy when it comes to vocabulary. It’s assumed by worship songwriters, worship leaders, service leaders and preachers alike that the audience is a specialist one rather than the non-specialist one that it is in reality. Hence, casual “insider language” proliferates—religious words and phrases that are understood only by long-term churchgoers—but even then, often with no common understanding of what they actually mean. Imagine the questionable results we would get if a congregation was asked to sit a theology test on the meaning of words such as “saved,” “redeemed,” “salvation,” “atonement,” “Israel,” “the blood of the Lamb,” “the Trinity,” “holiness,” and so on. That’s despite how often they feature in worship songs sung with great gusto. 

We will look at some of these words in next week’s blog and take a stab at “translating” them into words and concepts that will better communicate today. But for now, let’s just think about the biblical language of “King” and “Kingdom.” Our starting point (for any uniquely “biblical” word) has to be to compare and contrast what they were communicating at the time, and why it was effective, with what they communicate today.  Making such comparisons tells us whether we need to change our language. We’re asking, “What did that word signpost the hearer to then, in Bible times? How and why was it effective then? And what does the word signpost the hearer to now?”

Nowadays, democracy is seen as the best form of government. So much so that, certainly in the West, it’s inconceivable that any other form of government could be valid. But in biblical times—and well beyond—government was typically through autocratic monarchs: kings, emperors, and pharaohs—individuals holding unchallenged supreme power. The “divine right of kings” as it’s called was considered “obvious.” Brittanica.com defines that as “a political doctrine . . . which asserted that kings derived their authority from God and could not therefore be held accountable for their actions by any earthly authority such as a parliament.”

It is against this background that the divine title of “King of Kings” should be understood. It used to signpost something very significant because the role and the power of a king were very significant. But today, a king is a relic of history—the role is exclusively ceremonial, certainly in the West. Kings are powerless. We could say the same about the title of “Lord.”

Where all-powerful autocratic rulers are in place in countries today—mostly in non-Western parts of the world—they are typically corrupt, oppressive dictators; or at least, we see them that way. But we forget that even in the West, it’s only in relatively recent times that democracy has been the standard model, and it’s only been full democracy in very recent times. The UK has been a supposedly “Christian country” for 1,000+ years, yet women have only been granted the right to vote on the same terms as men within the last 100 years. And I’m afraid we can blame people’s interpretation of the Bible for that; by which, of course, I mean men’s interpretation of the Bible. Anyway, to speak and sing of “King Jesus,” and be awestruck by the biblical title “King of KIngs and Lord of Lords,” used to be saying something significant. Not so now.   

“Kingdom” is also problematic. A wholly good and perfect God reigning and ruling “autocratically” in this world (like old-fashioned kings) would surely be a good thing—better than flawed human leaders, even those who are democratically elected. But until the age to come of which the prophets spoke (e.g., Isaiah 9:7; Jeremiah 3:17), when God would establish his throne in this world and govern directly through his personal presence, how is the Kingdom—the “rule and reign of God”—present in this world? How is it advanced? When we sing or pray (in the Lord’s Prayer and equivalent), “Your Kingdom come,” what do we expect the answer to look like? Or are we simply asking for Jesus to come again soon, with no expectations of the presence of the Kingdom before that?

The challenge is how to make “King” language, “Lord” language, and “Kingdom” language communicate to people today. The ideas those words were conveying at the time they were first used would have been seen positively; governance by a king was not considered problematic in itself, unless he was a bad king. But today these metaphors are anachronistic. By all means, keep using them if you wish; after all, there’s no question that they are “biblical,” and our Christian audiences are used to them. But that doesn’t make them timeless in relation to what they communicate. What to replace them with, without doing any injustice to the underlying truths that they originally reflected, is the challenge. They need translation—or at the very least, if translation to other words and other metaphors sounds too radical, they need explanation.