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It’s Like…You Know…Okay?

This post has been sitting in the ‘drafts’ for a while, but tonight I actually saw a video shared on Facebook that makes the point much more strongly than I was orgininally able to.

A portion of a sermon by Martyn Lloyd-Jones (on Ephesians 6:15, ‘feet shod’) got the ball rolling on this line of thought:

Have you a definite position? Are you prepared to stand in it, and say, ‘I will never yield, I will never move from this?’ The moment you begin to compromise on this Word of God you will soon be slipping and sliding both in doctrine and in practice. Some people are constantly contradicting themselves; they praise the Protestant and the Nonconformist Fathers in the first half of their address or article; then criticize them in the second half. That is not ‘standing’; that is sliding. They do not know where they are, and no-one else knows.

As the Apostle Paul says in 2 Corinthians 1:19, the Gospel of Christ is not yea and nay at one and the same time. That is true of politics, of ecclesiasticism, of ‘the world’; but it is not true of Christ.

I recently listened to a Mars Hill Audio anthology on the subject of ‘words.’ An author, who was being interviewed, made the point that she theorizes the common American usage of the term ‘like’ as a conversation filler has more to it than meets the eye (or ear in this case). Like is a term of equivocation. It is the language, obviously, of ‘likening.’

Jesus uses such language when he likens the kingdom of God to certain stories or things. The kingdom of God is like a man in search of costly pearls, etc. But Jesus used the term ‘like’ in order to convey ideas and concepts in concrete terms. He actually wants us to know what the kingdom is like in terms that we can understand and relate to.

I am afraid it is not so with many modern Americans. Perhaps the word simply slips out as an unconscious filler in the midst of brain lags. Perhaps not. Perhaps we have been trained, unlike Jesus, to never say things concretely, but to equivocate and make our language as ambiguous as possible so as not to offend or contradict anyone else. Rather than standing in their speech they are sliding.

Here’s a clip from Def Poetry Jam that says it more clearly than I have been able to. I don’t know who the man is yet, but I appreciate his articulation of the idea:

C.S. Lewis on Poetic Language: An Easy Way to Introduce Children to the Concept of Poetic Language

I was attempting today to explain to my daughter what poetry is. I went digging for a great C.S. Lewis quote I thought summarized it well:

I begin with three sentences (1) It was very cold (2) There were 13 degrees of frost (3) ‘Ah, bitter chill it was! The owl, for all his feathers was a-cold; The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass, And silent was the flock in woolly fold: Numb’d were the Beadsman’s fingers.’ I should describe the first as Ordinary language, the second as Scientific language, and the third as Poetic language…Two and three are improved uses of the same language used in one. Scientific and Poetic language are two different artificial perfections of Ordinary: artificial, because they depend on skills; different, because they improve the ordinary in two different directions.

He continues,

The superiority of the Scientific description clearly consists in giving for the coldness of the night a precise quantitative estimate which can be tested by an instrument. The test ends all disputes…On the other hand it does not, of itself, give us any information about the quality of a cold night, does not tell us what we shall be feeling if we go out of doors.

On the superiority of poetic language, he adds,

This is the most remarkable of the powers of Poetic language: to convey to us the quality of experiences which we have not had, or perhaps can never have, to use factors within our experience so that they become pointers to something outside our experience.

He is adamant that poetic language does more than convey emotion:

…Such language is by no means merely an expression, nor a stimulant, of emotion, but a real medium of information. Which information may, like any other, be true or false…but it suffers from two disabilities in comparison with Scientific: (1) It is verifiable or falsifiable only to a limited degree and with a certain fringe of vagueness…(2) Such information as Poetic language has to give can be received only if you are ready to meet it half-way. It is no good holding a dialectical pistol to the poet’s head and demanding how the deuce a river could have hair, or a thought be green, or a woman a read rose.

The first quote above is a gem for explaining in non-poetic terms what poetry is. With my daughter I like to use the three categories of Ordinary, Scientific, and Poetic language as an exercise. We take random objects and try to speak of them in each of those three ways. It’s a great exercise in language, and very enjoyable as well.

Quotations are from the essay The Language of Religion, in Christian Reflections