The Age of Fluidity

Elastic language for yesterday, today, and tomorrow

This Weekend Edition of Ecstatic features Griffin Gooch
Our second feature from the Final Print Edition of Ekstasis

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EACH PLATITUDE rolling off my pastor’s tongue sounded like metal scraping against the side of a cheese grater. I’m either nine or eleven or thirteen and already an atheist. Even though it must have been around 2010, the early-to-mid ’90s wave of agnostic grunge filled my eardrums and swayed me toward ecclesial skepticism. In hindsight, the anti-religious-institution arguments I absorbed through pop culture weren’t very logical or compelling. But the clothes and personas seemed way cooler than any I’d ever seen at my church, and that itself was logical and compelling enough for my unformed frontal lobe to toss out religion altogether.

The Deluge by John Martin

THE PART THAT GOT TO ME wasn’t so much the community or the moral ideas or the character of Jesus, but the language. It was the apathetic yet stylized drawl—overly rehearsed and spliced together like a knockoff MasterClass outline of how an emotional speech should go: when to get loud, when to whisper, where to drop thesis and insert joke. To this day, every time I hear the words grace, faith, or the Word of God says, I still hear my pastor’s voice reverberating through them. The breathy hushed exposition and superficiality—I wanted to get as far away from church as possible. And so I did. I basically committed to the least Christian lifestyle I could dream up, which is still a pretty surefire way to end up in jail. Which I did.

ON THE SUNDAY of the final day of my sentence, the inmates were given a choice to either go to church or stay in our cell. A surprising number chose to remain in their cells, the one they had spent the other 24 hours per day in—an impulse I couldn’t personally relate to. Alongside a small group of others, I sat through the prison missionaries’ hodgepodge of Christian language via acoustic songs and unplugged sermons. A showcase of all the words I’d grown to hate so much. But this time around, I was physiologically shaken, my cynicism totally eradicated. I immediately and uncontrollably burst into tears. The words sounded different, new, the opposite of artificial—real and true and raw. And for the first time, the gospel was real and true and raw.

After the ministry team shared, I said a prayer with them, letting all the language my old pastor drilled into my mind fall out of my own mouth. They finally weren’t platitudes—they were desperate, shaky, and powerful.

The seven years that followed were an intensive training camp of relearning the Christian vocabulary, taking the words wrung of meaning and drenched with cynicism and restoring them to life. Sometimes, I drift back into skepticism, and other times, I jump so far to the other end of the spectrum that it turns into naive optimism.

Yet regardless of which direction the pendulum swings, I’ve come to a conviction: Words come to life when they’re most needed.

C. S. LEWIS NOTES, “As everyone knows, words constantly take on new meanings.” I’m fascinated by how words carry power and even more fascinated by how words that have power one day might lose it the next; why phrases that ignite one generation to faithfully follow Jesus turn into a dead orthodoxy that their kids roll their eyes at.

Over time, words lose buoyancy. Say a word 50 times fast, and after 49 times, it’ll sound like gibberish. Language is always evolving—it’s stretchy and subject to trends. Take a Google Ngram Viewer tour through Christian history and you’ll see how our phrases rise and fall in popularity. Nowadays, many “Christians” are dropping that moniker altogether because of its association with nominative evangelicalism and subbing in “follower of Jesus.” The words born again and believer blew up in the ’70s and ’80s, peaking in 2010, and have been declining each year since. Jesus freak was originally a pejorative that littered Elton John songs, until bands like DC Talk co-opted it—only for it to descend back into obscurity a few decades later.

Gen Z doesn’t “go to church,” they “attend gatherings.” During sermons, they don’t say “amen” and “hallelujah,” they say “wow” and “yup.” They cringe every time someone throws a definite article in front of “Holy Spirit.”

OUR WORDS SHIFT when we need to express something our current vocabulary can’t. Wineskins get old, and so do we. New language is fresh, but as it ages, it loses its edge, and, in the worst case, enters the realm of cliché. This is one potential hazard for Christian terms, what the writer Jonathan Merritt calls “fossilization.” It’s a side effect of a hyper-transient culture: The words aren’t forgotten but overused, until we become so cynical toward them that we refuse to let them have any power.

Language gets fossilized when it’s loaded with too much history. But another problem arises when there’s not enough history. Lots of vocabulary that was meaningful even two generations ago are eclipsed by “cultural amnesia”—the tendency to remove the past, along with its traditions, taboos, mores, and norms, from our daily consciousness. It’s basically the state of being ahistorical: forgetting what lies behind (literally) and straining toward anything novel that lies ahead.

But, as historians Will and Ariel Durant note, language is one of the few “connective tissues of human history.” If our language has no historicity, it gets driven and tossed by the cultural seas of the present moment—a reality hauntingly demonstrated by lexicographer Peter Sokolowski’s confession that those in his profession now pay attention to TikTok trends to modify their definitions.

FOR THE MODERN Christian who has a vested interest in staying in touch with the ancient, this fluidity threatens the power of our words.

Theologian Marcus Borg pointed out that spiritual vocabulary loses both its meaning and power due to “spiritual illiteracy.” People no longer hear these terms as if they’re resounding out of their ancient origins. Rather, they only hear their contemporary distortions. Henri Nouwen commented on this struggle:

When we wonder why the language of traditional Christianity has lost its liberating power for those who live in the modern age, we have to realize that most Christian preaching is still based on the presupposition that we see ourselves as meaningfully integrated with a history in which God came to us in the past, is living under us in the present, and will come to liberate us in the future.

For many, this just isn’t the case anymore. A few years back, Merritt partnered with the Barna Group to take the pulse on religious vocabulary. They found that only 13 percent of self-identifying Christians were having spiritual conversations once or more per week. When pressed about why they don’t have more religious conversations,

Some admitted they felt confused about what spiritual words actually mean. In many cases, the confusion doesn’t necessarily result from lack of knowledge or experience. Sometimes, it’s the opposite. People in insular religious communities might have used some words so often they don’t know what they mean anymore. The words have become shopworn.

ALL THIS BEGS the question: Is there any use in trying to renew old terms? Or should we just let them die and dream up new ones? Do we spend an hour each Sunday drilling in church history and etymology, or do we just flow with the zeitgeist?

If we’re a product of our time and place, which everyone of course is, we’ll naturally adopt new terminology in order to communicate with our context. So, I don’t think there’s any real need to intentionally pursue trendy, relevant terminology—chances are, this will just happen by virtue of being a human in the third millennium.

But in a hypermodern age like ours, there’s still merit in renovating older phrases that connect us to something historical, even when they sound tacky. Not in a nostalgic sense, as if trying to recreate the past, but in a transformative sense, paving the way for the needs of our milieu.

Because of fossilization, it took a jail cell to wake me up to the authenticity of the Christian language. For some of my friends, the pull toward ahistoricity is why they left the faith. Both ends of the spectrum harm, which is why I think a third way, a way of renovating terms according to our present needs, might be the water needed for parched lips.

WHILE I HAVE the utmost respect for language scholars, the process of pruning terminology most often correlates to the needs of God’s people rather than academic movements. When language renovation is left up to small bands of elites, it gets obscured for everyone else.

This is the driving tension that the characters in R. F. Kuang’s novel Babel wrestle with. The speculative novel follows a group of intercultural Oxford students studying in the prestigious university’s language department, housed in a literal tower called “Babel.” During their studies, they come to find that Babel is more than a linguistics undergrad program—it’s the British Empire’s tool for centralizing authority, using language to make a more powerful Britain rather than to create a better world.

The students grapple with the question, “Can we live with the consequences of making language a privilege of the elite, or do we fight to give language back to the people?” They ultimately choose the latter, toppling the tower that dominated communication and decentralizing language for the masses.

It’s fiction, but this story constantly repeats itself in real life. For one, Babel’s arc played out in the mid-20th century via a philosophical movement called post-structuralism.

BASICALLY, GUYS LIKE Jacques Derrida wanted to deconstruct interpretive structure. Things themselves—a dog, a novel, a gesture—couldn’t have meaning, because whatever meaning was imposed on them would be steeped in the interpreter’s worldview.

Post-structuralists deconstruct because they think power dynamics clandestinely lie behind everything: Books shouldn’t be enjoyed because they’re just a tool to keep you distracted. Family is just a construct to keep you too busy to fight corruption. But, in earnest, it’s just fake activism, muddying up terminology for the sake of displaying enlightenment.

In The Best Minds, writer Jonathan Rosen details his own coming of age during the height of post-structuralism’s popularity. Although Rosen was captivated with the movement at first, he began noticing that their lingual gymnastics often minimized the concepts they deconstructed. Derrida or Foucault invoked examples of mental illness to describe how authoritarian powers—the state, the government, the spectacle of society— dominate the masses. True madness was created by the corrupt powers of society, they said; to be deranged was to lack the willpower to resist their control.

Rosen especially struggled to swallow their lectures after visiting his lifelong friend Michael Laudor in a mental ward. Growing up together, Rosen had had a front-row seat to Michael’s brilliance and sociability, as well as to his slow decline into hospitalization for his paranoid schizophrenia. This promising Yale student now stumbled while stringing sentences together, thought he was constantly under surveillance, and could barely read the pages of the books he’d read voraciously his whole life. According to post-structuralists, Michael’s suffering was brought on by a “social construct” that arose from “disciplinary discourse.” Was Michael’s issue simply his own lack of willpower?

Of course not. No amount of post-structuralist prose was going to dismantle his schizophrenia. This was a real neurological disorder, not an academic exercise, and it was chewing up his best friend’s personality.

LIKE THE TRENDINESS of words, post-structuralism came and went. The grand total of their efforts amounted to a feverish paranoia toward authority, a feeling that still haunts the world today. It minimized peoples’ sufferings, taking terminology away from those most in need of it. As Francis Schaffer commented on post-structuralism, “In it, language leads to neither values nor facts, but only to language.”

If they proved anything, it’s that language in the wrong hands, be it a cranky professor or a selfish pastor or a corporate demagogue, can be stripped of its potential to unify. And so, like Kuang’s Babel and Genesis 11’s Babel, the post-structuralist’s tower toppled.

Language doesn’t exist in some esoteric third space, like a Cartesian museum display. Language needs community, needs to pass through lips, needs to be tasted as it moves beyond our vocal cords and enters the throes of daily life—person to person, soul to soul. It’s the connective tissue of the masses, not an academic privilege.

Despite how often Scripture’s been abused by those with power, it is and always will be a rhetoric of revolution for those without any. For a native Greek linguist, the Bible is not very complex. It’s written in laymen’s vocabulary—the kind of casual language you’d use while making a shopping list with family. After reading through the New Testament for the first time, Augustine admitted feeling disappointed. Augustine was the equivalent of an elite Ivy Leaguer, on par with the philosophical heavyweights of his day. But the Bible was written for poor agrarian farmers in an epoch where the literacy rate was only around 10 percent.

Accessible language was a necessity. If the Bible had been written at the caliber of, say, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason—arguably one of the most dense and difficult volumes ever written—then the Bible wouldn’t have been for everyone; it would’ve only been for the Kants and Foucaults and Derridas. As Mark Strauss writes,

There is nothing archaic, solemn or mystical about the kind of language used by the inspired authors of the New Testament. It is the Greek of the street. . . . Just as God took on the form of common humanity when he revealed himself as the living Word, so his written Word was revealed in language that the person on the street could understand.

By using the language of the lowest common denominator, the Christian vocabulary enveloped the entirety of the population, making itself available to all.

Babel and the post-structuralist mindset remind us that language is for the people and serves a purpose. This means that language will always keep evolving and changing because the needs of the people will always be evolving and changing. We’ll always need new ways to communicate our longings, our losses, our jumbles of emotion. To centralize language, like how the Catholic church centralized doctrine before the Reformation, is simpler and more efficient—but only for the arbiters making the calls.

For everyone else, it limits expression. This is why Martin Luther’s efforts to decentralize the Bible, putting Scripture into the hands of the people, was in its own way a toppling of Babel. It took the language of the Christian movement and restored it to its original purpose: a rhetoric of transformation for the lowly, meek, and mourning.

I’M STILL A recovering cynic. Sometimes, I go weeks where every noun in the Christian vocabulary feels dry. But then, a need comes. A desire that can’t be quenched. A loss I can’t ignore. And like a faucet slowly turning, words like trust, contentment, gratitude, and hope start dripping afresh, like sunlight crackling through the spaces in a floorboard. It’s a process, but I’m slowly learning to stand more in line with the psalmist who wrote, “How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth” (Ps. 119:103).

Language is always pointing to something beyond itself. God’s name isn’t actually “God,” but what philosophers call a signifier. It’s the thing that points to the signified—which in God’s case is the Divine Creator, Father of Jesus.

By one scholar’s count, God is given 967 different signifiers throughout the Bible. He’s infinite, self-subsistent. Attaching one finite name from a finite language just doesn’t do the trick. Different signifiers help emphasize different parts of his being (Father, Son, Spirit), angles of personality (wonderful counselor, wise king), and patterns of behavior (advocate, comforter). But none of them would be sufficient on their own.

Their multiplicity is necessary. Sometimes, we just need to express something that nothing in our current vocabulary can. And so we perpetually search beyond our present borders to praise the God without any.

But I don’t ever want to neglect the arsenal of classical Christian terms. It’s like drawing water from a deep well: locating the originality in old words and making adjustments when dry words need animation, always on the hunt for new ways to say old things rather than new concepts to reshape old ideas. To borrow biblical language, we are always putting old words in new wineskins—remembering that the beauty of treasures in old chests is evergreen and not simply nostalgic.

THIS IS WHY I like picturing Christian vocabulary as elastic, rather than static or plastic. Static means no change; plastic means total change. But if something’s elastic, it can bend to accommodate new functions while also snapping back into place.

For me, this is a perpetual project. Every once in a while, I need to redefine or shelve a phrase with too much baggage. Other times, I need to challenge the popular understandings of words like grace. But I remind myself that for every half-hearted, inauthentic, or dead pronunciation of faith, there are millions of Christ followers around the globe clinging to the word faith as if it’s the only thing keeping them moving.

This is why even the most fossilized words can be brought back to life, why post-structuralism’s attempts to control language can’t help but fail, why earnest attempts to worship always supersede academic exercises. The Christian vocabulary rushes alongside the downtrodden, the promising student who lost it all because of schizophrenia, the 18-year-old kid hitting his lowest points in a jail cell.

Babel, post-structuralism, fossilization, and ahistoricity all reveal one central truth: Despite our best efforts to manipulate language—subbing in trendy terms, sticking to old fossils, or trying to control them altogether—words will always be empowered by those who realize their utter and absolute dependence on God.

Everything else is just semantics.

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Griffin Gooch
Writer & Student

Griffin is a writer & speaker with a Master's in Theological Studies from Fuller Theological Seminary. What did you think of this essay? Share your thoughts with a comment!

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