More than Words

For 15 years, I’ve written books and articles, taught college English courses, and edited more sentences than I care to count. But not everyone shares my love—especially not my college students.

When I put myself in their shoes, I can see their point. Why would any English speaker want to take a class on a language they already speak? Why would they want to study grammar and writing if they aren’t interested in a writing career? And besides, when will they ever need to use diagrams or recognize nominalizations?

The most important reason to study language is that language lies beneath the reality of all creation. In the beginning, God used words to speak the universe into existence (Genesis 1). From protons to petunias, quarks to quasars, and blue whales to bacteria, Hebrews 11:3 says the visible was created by the invisible, God’s Word. And this same Word tells us how to live in the reality that God created.

Our knowledge of how language works shouldn’t end when we diagram our last sentence in a classroom. We should make a lifetime pursuit of knowing how to properly wield our words. When language comes under attack from those seeking to rearrange or deny reality, we must have a biblical understanding of our responsibility to steward this gift.

The Importance of Language

When God created Adam and Eve, he instilled in them a complete language. The first couple never had to learn how to linguistically communicate the way babies learn to speak by mimicry. We know that this is true by the evidence that followed man’s creation: God spoke to Adam, and Adam responded with understanding and obedience. He then used his God-given language to name the animals and speak to Eve, who understood him and later conversed with the serpent. Because God created Adam and Eve in his own image, we can logically conclude that language for the purpose of conveying complex, hypothetical, and creative ideas is unique to image bearers.

Meanwhile, evolutionists admit to being unsure of how language evolved or how it branched into the many languages we hear around the globe today. They propose that it must have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, but no theory yet stands up to scrutiny.

Reality Through Language

Language helps us understand the world by allowing us to create order. We use language to name and thereby bestow identity upon animal and plant species, geologic landmarks, anatomical features, weather events, heavenly bodies, microscopic organisms, and every other thing we’ve discovered. And when we uncover something new, we bequeath to it a name and description.

Beyond naming the material universe, we also have words for concepts and thoughts. What we don’t have words for, we can’t talk or think about. What we can’t read with comprehension, we can’t understand. Without language, we could not reason or analyze, nor would we have logic to understand logic itself. Even mathematics is a language that describes how the material world functions.

The Creator’s identity is wrapped up in language, and language is a primary means by which he reveals himself to mankind.

The fact that language is the foundation of creation is no surprise when we consider that God spoke the world into existence (Genesis 1) and that Jesus is the Word and the Alpha and Omega (John 1:1; Revelation 21:6). The Creator’s identity is wrapped up in language, and language is a primary means by which he reveals himself to mankind. He breathed out his Word to be written for our instruction (2 Timothy 3:16). Without language, we would not have Scripture, which tells us about our Creator and his desire for how we should live. But when people reject the Creator and his Word as a guide for defining reality, the world devolves into chaos, subject to the individualistic whims of each person.

Attack on Meaning

If God gives us a basis for reality through language, then culture’s grip on reality slips further into insanity through the perpetuated misuse of language.

In his 1888 book The Twilight of the Idols, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said, “‘Reason’ in language!—oh what a deceptive old witch it has been! I fear we shall never be rid of God, so long as we still believe in grammar.”1 Nietzsche believed that if people assume that language is objective, they will believe that language expresses reality. If language is objective, then people will think of the world in specific, objective ways that, according to him, are not true or real. In other words, Nietzsche asserted that by using language to express reality, humans must also presuppose reality itself. He reasoned that because man has observed the effects of the world’s existence, they know there must be a cause. To Nietzsche, humans invented God as a suitable cause and a de facto answer for all the unanswerable.

Nietzsche’s philosophy allows culture to reject the Creator and make its own subjective meaning of creation, thus making reality subjective. But from a biblical worldview, language is a gift from God intended to help us communicate reality. As image bearers, we can contribute to reality with words, just as when God brought the animals for Adam to name. But we can’t redefine the reality revealed in God’s Word. We dishonor God when we attempt to twist reality or reshape it to suit the desires of our flesh. We see this misuse of language today in the LGBTQ+ movement that denies our good creation as male and female and distorts God’s command for marriage as between one man and one woman for life. We see it in misapplied pronouns that adhere to a subjective gender ideology rather than objective biological sex.

Abuse of language shows up in more subtle ways too. The Latin medical word fetus has helped separate the science of prenatal growth and development from the humanity of life in the womb. Too often, scientists use the word evolution to reinforce their worldview when adaptation is the correct word to describe genetic changes within species.

God addresses language in the Ten Commandments. “You shall not bear false witness” tells us that our words should be truthful (Exodus 20:16). Language does, and should, reflect objective reality. With grace, we must resist the cultural pull to misuse language in ways that add to confusion or promote unbiblical choices. For example, we bear false witness by calling a biological female “he/him” or “they/them” or by discussing changes in species in terms of evolution. We rebel against the authority of God’s Word when we attempt to reshape reality by redefining and making chaos of language.

Stewarding God’s Gift

Since God gave his image bearers language to help us understand reality, we should maintain and value language. Here are a few practical ways to steward this incredible gift.

1. Understand language history and structure.

When God confused the language and scattered the people at Babel, he gave each family group a new and complete language. Every language spoken today stems from one of those languages, each of which sprouted many branches and changed due to illiteracy, wars, colonization, immigration, science, and human progress.

For example, English is the fruit of several branches thanks to the Battle of Hastings in AD 1066, in which the Norman (Romantic) and Anglo-Saxon (Germanic) languages collided. English continued to develop over the coming centuries as the British Empire expanded, and the New World of early America brought many people groups together. While letters typically have fixed sounds in other languages, English letters can have many sounds that don’t always depend on the other letters around them. For example, the letter a alone has five different sounds in American English2 (nine in British English).3

Knowing the history of our language helps us understand why learning a language can be hard, giving us empathy for students and immigrants who struggle to learn it. It also gives us context for the way language shapes other cultures. Languages like English and Spanish are structured around verb conjugations (tense, person, mood), noun and pronoun declensions, and gendered nouns and pronouns. Meanwhile, languages like Mandarin have none of those things. Knowing and understanding one grammar well helps us learn other languages—a great skill for spreading the gospel and translating Scripture into the roughly 6,500 languages that still do not have a copy of God’s Word.4

2. Refer to dictionaries and grammar books.

In a secular worldview, humans own language and should be able to use it however they please. In the preface to the American publication of the middle-grade novel The Swifts: A Dictionary of Scoundrels, British author Beth Lincoln writes, “Before the invention of the dictionary, there was no such thing as ‘correct’ spelling—so long as you could be understood, you could spell words however you liked. In fact, I cud rite a sentens lyke thif, and it wud be perfecktly acceptabel.” Lincoln also writes, “It’s important to note that . . . there’s no proper way to speak, or write, or spell. . . . I would say that if a person is rude about the way you speak, write, or spell, they are showing a distinct lack of understanding.”5

While there is a way to be rude about the way someone speaks, writes, or spells, it is a direct slight against God and his good gift of language to give it over to corruptions and chaos.

While we may understand each other for a time by writing phonetically, a lack of standardization leads to chaos and deterioration. For example, no dictionaries or grammar books existed when the Old English tale of Beowulf was written, and today we can read it only with the help of translations and annotations.

Webster wrote his dictionary so that language could be “improved in regularity, so as to be more easily acquired by our own citizens, and by foreigners, and thus be rendered a more useful instrument for the propagation of science, arts, civilization, and Christianity”.

Thankfully, centuries ago, two men—Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster—held a biblical worldview of language and practiced stewardship by writing the first British and American dictionaries. In the preface to his dictionary, Webster explained that he wrote his dictionary so that language could be “improved in regularity, so as to be more easily acquired by our own citizens, and by foreigners, and thus be rendered a more useful instrument for the propagation of science, arts, civilization, and Christianity” and “redeemed from corruptions.”6 He saw that without a standard, corruptions would continue to plague the English language and hinder many aspects of life.

We steward language well when we adhere to scholarly resources and strive to maintain order, clarity, and meaning.

3. Enjoy language.

The Oxford English Dictionary features over 600,000 words. The average English-speaking American adult knows around 42,000 words. Never branching out to learn new words is similar to eating the same food your whole life. Enjoy our language’s beauty by diving into its delicious variety.

Read widely—poetry, children’s books, classics, personal essays, and books on topics you wouldn’t otherwise know about. Find ways to increase your vocabulary, such as by signing up for a “word of the day” email. Make a list of words that you find delightful, then integrate those words into your everyday vocabulary. Test your knowledge by playing word games, such as crossword puzzles, Scrabble, or one of my favorites, Quiddler.

4. Watch your words.

God tells us, “Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person” (Colossians 4:6). Salt draws out delicious flavors of food and preserves it from decay. So should our words be savory, pleasant to society and free from corruption. Like a soup that has simmered for hours, words should be carefully considered and tasted before serving so that they can be adjusted for each situation. Scripture often talks about the effects of wise and kind words as healthy and life giving (Proverbs 18:21; Ephesians 4:29; James 3:9–10). Since our words can have eternal impact, for good or evil, we should strive to use our words intentionally.

The Final Word

As we seek to honor the Creator who spoke reality into existence, we need not view language as something that only scholars should study and preserve. After all, we each use words to bestow meaning, to speak blessings or curses into the world, warping reality or clarifying it. Only by relying on God’s Word can we best understand how to steward our language—which is so much more than just words.