The Word of God is the ground and shaping force of all things, the cosmic and the personal, the material and the spiritual, and even the perverse or misshapen opposed to the Word by an inadequate human word. The Christian faith revolves around language, from creation, with God speaking the universe into existence, to the identity of Christ as Logos, in which language is attached to God and Christ, and those created in his image, as person. Then there is the subversion of original communion and communication in the “knowledge of good and evil,” and the confusion of languages at Babel, in which the individual is split and the community is divided (by language). This failure of the personal and the communal is reversed with the word of Christ (the gospel), the preaching of the gospel, the reversal of Babel at Pentecost, or simply the form in which faith comes, through Scripture and tradition. Language is primary, whether God’s word through creation and redemption, or human language as either a possible counter-force or a taking up of the Word. The medium of creation, fall, and redemption is linguistic, each gauged by the measure and practice of the Word.
The Language of God as Ground
The story of Scripture (both, “story” and “Scripture” being terms of language) can be told as ultimate reality opened through language. In Genesis (1:3, 6, 9) “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” He brings the physical universe into existence directly through His spoken command. “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth… For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm” (Psalm 33:6, 9). God compares His spoken word to rain and snow that do not return empty, stating that His word “shall accomplish that which I purpose” (Isaiah 55:10–11). It is his means of creation but an exercise of divine will, of accomplishment in creation. “The word of the Lord was rare in those days… Then the Lord called Samuel, and he answered, ‘Here I am'” (1 Samuel 3:1, 4). The encounter with “I am” brings the realization of “Here am I.” Personal encounter with the personal word is the realization of the personal. God speaking is the story of history and its culmination: “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:1–2). “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:1, 14). God’s ultimate self-revelation (Logos) takes on human language and physical form, so that the word become flesh has the one who created by his word becoming part of what is created. One word meets the other in Christ.
There are numerous subcategories which revolve around and refer to language, such as signs. These signs might be miraculous or not, but they are signals that are only apprehended in contrast or continuity within a system of meaning. The overall system of meaning, in which the symbols and signs of Israel are comprehended, for example, is the law, the judicial, and the sacrificial. The signs Christ is instituting partake of a different system of meaning, grounded in the relation of love, incarnation, and the interpersonal dynamics of the Trinity. Even categories such as silence, mystery, and the apophatic, are recognized in conjunction with language, but the order which they are surpassing (Hinduism, Buddhism, Christian mysticism) is determinative of meaning and significance. So, for example, in Paul’s picture of prayer in Romans 8, human language may fail, but the searching and groanings of the Spirit take up from there, but this is not an Eastern departure from the mind but on a continuum with the divine and human mind (Rom 8:27).
The Splitting of the Divine Ground
The negative role of language in Scripture pictures language as splitting, separating, or alienating. Where there was an original singular identity, language, and meaning (a corporate identity), the choosing of an alternative source in the knowledge of good and evil in Genesis, or the law in Romans, brings about the alienation of shame and focus on the I: “I heard the sound of You in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid myself” (Gen 3:10). ‘I’ does not appear previously, and Adam repeats it in four consecutive bursts. Paul, in describing the universality of the event in Adam, describes a split within the ‘I’, with one half of the ἐγὼ pitted against the other in a struggle in which human agency is entirely relinquished to sin: “So now, no longer am I the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me” (Rom. 7.17).
The most famous place in Scripture where language splits and separates is the Tower of Babel (in Genesis 11:1–9). Originally, “the whole earth had one language and the same words” but humanity attempted to build a city and a tower reaching to the heavens to make a name for themselves and avoid being scattered, but God confused their language so they could not understand one another, forcing them to separate and scatter across the earth. As Kenneth Tanner notes, “Babel’s imposed diversity of language was a gift that limited for millennia the damage of fallen humanity’s collective narcissism and our self- destructive tendencies.”[1] The antagonism that Paul describes within himself and Adam, becomes a mode of creating human diversity. “Babel’s gift of language diversity was also an expansion of humanity’s cultural possibilities. All the difference in dance and dress and food and color and architecture and sport and art and so on— the beautiful variety of humanity we enjoy— flows from an ancient, gracious dispersal of humanity at Babel.”[2] Alongside this positive disruption, multiplied tongues, however, become a dividing point. Language and its pronunciation in the “shibboleth” by which the Gileadites set up blockades along the Jordan River to catch fleeing Ephraimites (Judges 12:4–6), leading to the execution of 42,000 Ephraimites.
Violence and difference due to language must be the oldest (dis)organizing principle in human culture. Nehemiah started a language reform, as “In those days I also saw that the Jews had married women from Ashdod, Ammon and Moab. As for their children, half spoke in the language of Ashdod, and none of them was able to speak the language of Judah, but the language of his own people” (Ne 13:23–24). Language was and is a primary marker of identity and division. Think of Peter caught in a lie in the High Priest’s courtyard due to his accent: “‘Surely you too are one of them; for even the way you talk gives you away.’ Then he began to curse and swear, ‘I do not know the man!’ And immediately a rooster crowed” (Mt 26:73–74). Language can unify in a singular identity, or it can betray and divide.
Thus, there are two roles for language or the word, and while not always opposite, there is a dynamic difference between the two. Recognizing language as primary, might lead to any number of false conclusions, pitting the material against the linguistic, or imagining language floats free of and is not dependent upon embodiment. Creation as spoken, or creation through the Logos, points to recent scientific verification that both DNA and the sub-atomic world, grounding the embodied and cosmic order respectively, are not primarily some sort of hard substance but information systems. Likewise, the human brain is not primarily a chemical cauldron, synapses and nerves, but shaped by language and its processes. The unifying and dividing qualities of language are to be seen throughout.
The Brain or Mind that Needs Transformation
Some researchers claim that the different psychologies, divided or unified, are reflected in the physical brain and its processing of language. This is illustrated in the work of brain researchers such as Ian McGilchrist, who describes the brain as organizing and organized into two hemispheres, or two modes of regulating information (see here). The “master” is supposed to be the brain’s right hemisphere, which is the side most connected with the holism of personhood, as it relates vitally, and humanly to the world, taking in what is “new” without concern for objective closure. The left hemisphere is focused on detail and analysis, and rather than connecting to living things, tends to focus on the static and lifeless, on machines, numbers, and abstractions, and while both sides of the brain are involved in language, the left brain tends to reify the word. Rather than recognizing the metaphorical, emotional, and integrating role of language (connected to the right hemisphere), in the left hemisphere there is rejection of the metaphorical for the literal, and a rejection of the personal for the impersonal. The left brain is the organizing bureaucrat which is all about procedure, organization, predictability, abstraction (decontextualization), and which has no room for uniqueness. Justice, in this realm, is not a sense of making things right so much as making everything equal. In this realm, “Increasingly the living would be modelled on the mechanical.”[3] Production, speed, scale, and quantity are the focus, and not quality. Those “with schizoid or schizotypal traits will be attracted to, and be deemed especially suitable for, employment in the areas of science, technology, and administration” which have become the shaping forces of our time.”[4] One might extend McGilchrist’s theory to suggest a left-brain theology and atonement as well, in which Christ is made to serve the law and his death makes up for any lack or failure in regard to the law, with the law defining and determining Christ, or one might propose a right-brain theology (in line with Paul) in which Christ does not complete human obligations in regard to the law, but suspends the punishing effects of a defective orientation to the law.
Before McGilchrist, Julian Jaynes pictured human evolution as the passage from bicameral brains, with divided brain hemispheres, to the melding of the two hemispheres (see here). In the bicameral period, it was as if the left side of the brain existed as an unquestioned authority through which the various cultural authorities spoke. The burial of the important dead, as if they still lived and spoke, is common to almost all ancient cultures. The Egyptian pharaohs, preserved in their pyramids, the kings of Ur entombed with their entire retinues buried (sometimes alive) for continued service, along with food and drink and even yoked draft animals, point to a static (unquestioning) entombed culture.[5] The undead, and the authority they represented, continued to speak through hallucinated voices or through the gods (often the dead are simply deified). In Assyria, Mesoamerica, and Japan, the dead are directly called gods and the various mystics or priests might be possessed by the dead so as to give them voice. Hesiod speaks of a golden race of men who became the “holy demons upon the earth, beneficent, averters of ills, guardians of mortal men.” Four centuries later, Plato refers to heroes who after death become the demons that tell people what to do and he has Socrates mention that in his own time “God-possessed men speak much truth, but know nothing of what they say.”[6] Socrates marks the point before which the human condition is to listen and obey but not to question or discern.
Jaynes is tracing a time when, in the bicameral period with its bicameral brain, everyone heard the voice of authority, but as the brain shifted only the possessed, idols, oracles, or mediums give voice to the gods. Cuneiform literature often refers to god-statues speaking, and the Old Testament refers to speaking idols (Terap) and depicts the king of Babylon consulting with several idols (Ezekiel, 21). Aztec history began, according to their reports to Spanish conquistadors (following their own perverse God), when a statue from a ruined temple belonging to a previous culture spoke to their leaders and commanded them to set out across the lake so as to come to a new land. They were sent zigzagging here and there, following their own Moses, into a new land. In Peru the conquering Spaniards presumed the voice ordering the culture was the Devil. The first report back to Europe said, “in the temple [of Pachacamac] was a Devil who used to speak to the Indians in a very dark room which was as dirty as he himself.”[7] It did not occur to the Spaniards to question their own genocidal authority. Jaynes’ theory suggests a metaphor more on the order of evolution or growth, in which the shaping force of left-brain law is only slowly overcome.
Even if we take McGilchrist and Jaynes as an exemplification of the psychological reality with which we are familiar, at a minimum they provide a picture of the possible why. We could use any number of illustrations or applications. We might illustrate this left brain, rule bound, reified language model as standing behind the Western theological tradition, from Augustine to Calvin. The Augustinian misreading of Romans 5 (“all sinned in Adam”) as it develops into Anselmian divine Satisfaction and Calvinist penal substitution, illustrate a singular point, and that is that law and language, are caught up in a turn from a relational understanding of reality to its opposite. This opposite might be described as reified language or law, but it is object-centered (deceptively material centered, in that language is a material medium apart from relationship), but it is also dealing in death as an absolute (perhaps a hidden absolute). Calvin’s transformation of hades into eternal torturous existence, illustrates the point that there is an eternalization of what is finite, created, and material. Rather than Christ delivering from mortality and death, Calvin has him delivering from eternal categories connected to the law. There is the absolutization of law, setting relationship on law, which is the same as the reification of language. The focus on sin, prior to death or as the cause of death, illustrates the same thing, language, law, determines the ground of being. In other words, we might live our entire lives, experience all of reality, and understand even all of our Christian faith, from the split, law bound, reification of language, in its dividing role, rather than its uniting role in the Logos.
The Uniting of All Things, Including the Mind, in the Word
The coming of the Logos is the reuniting on the basis of a shared person and Word. It is the reversal of Babel indicated in the sign at Pentecost with the gift of the Holy Spirit. “And there appeared to them tongues as of fire distributing themselves, and they rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit was giving them utterance” (Acts 2:3–4). As A.W. Tozer describes, “That which came upon the disciples in that upper room was nothing less than God him-self. . . . The God who had appeared to them as fire throughout all their long history was now dwelling in them as fire. He had moved from without to the interior of their lives. The Shekinah that had once blazed over the mercy seat now blazed on their foreheads as an external emblem of the fire that had invaded their natures.”[8] The Spirit brought them a new and vivid consciousness, the actual presence of God, in and through the new tongues, the shared language. There is a healing, unifying presence in the shared person of the Word, which is not language per se but is a new order, or ordering, of language.
I presume the transformation of the mind, taking up the Word, meditating upon these things day and night, is something on the order of a reshaping of our brain, a reordering of our thought world, so that the chatter of the divided, antagonistic, jealousy invoking, disease ridden, neurotic thought, is quieted as the unifying, binding, loving, relationship-oriented world of the Spirit, brings about a new order of thought. A brain-divided, alienated, hostile order, must slowly give way to a new order, no longer tossed about like a wave but made sure and steadfast in love. We can pray with Jesus, “that they (we) may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me” (Jn 17:21).
There may be a dividing word, but the true ground of reality is united: “There is one body and one Spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all” (Eph 4:4–6). There is ultimately One Word. This is the Word and reality drawing all things together. As Paul admonishes the Colossians, “Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you, with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (Col 3:16). This is the perfect bond of unity in love (Col 3:14). Sing this Word, meditate on this Word, dwell in this Word, and let this Word saturate throughout, as this is the unifying ground of all that is. The brain, the mind, the person, is literally reshaped by the power of this Word grounding reality.
[1] Kenneth Tanner, Vulnerable God: How Jesus Upends Our Assumptions About God – and Shows Us How to Be Human (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2026), 202.
[2] Tanner, 202.
[3] Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Modern World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 430.
[4] McGilchrist, 408.
[5] Even the ordinary dead were often treated as if they still needed feeding. In Mesopotamia it is recorded a dead person was buried with 7 jars of beer, 420 flat loaves of bread, 2 measures of grain, 1 garment, 1 head support, and 1 bed.
[6] Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (p. 161-341). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.
[7] Jaynes, 174-175.
[8] A. W. Tozer, God’s Pursuit of Man (Moody Publishers, 2015), 105. Cited in Tanner, 201.