Of Language and History

This morning, on my usual early morning walk in the cold, I listened to a fascinating lecture by Dr. Sarah Williams, entitled Recovering Belief in History. Her doctoral and post-doctoral work has been in the area of Modern Religious History, a field dominated, she says, by a presumption of the secularization theory. As as result, the tendency has been to explain all religious change in the modern period by analysis of change in economic, class and other external social phenomena, and to disregard, almost by design, the language of self-reporting of individuals about their own religious experience and motivation. Dr. Williams expects that the rise of postmodernity will actual force a change in that situation, allowing (or requiring) serious historians to develop methods of investigation that bring the language and practice of belief back into the discussion of history.

Part of my own fascination with her talk was the connections I saw between her own scholastic world and the world of the churches of my experience, and my own frustration with the fact that "faith" was not something that could be discussed as it had actually developed in my own life and story, but something that had to fit into a pre-determined form that looked nothing like my experience.

But beyond that, there was much of her reports of the odd juxtapositions of folk and church belief in the lives of those she interviewed that made me think about how the language of church shapes, and mis-shapes, the life and faith of those exposed to it. As a result, my belief that we need to pay much closer attention to the effects of our language patterns in the church was re-inforced. How do we guard against the tendency for our language to promote a kind of "magical" understanding of the rituals of our faith, on the one hand, and also against the tendency of our language to promote a kind of "moralism" on the other?

Perhaps here too the rise of postmodernity, with its emphases on diverse forms of expression, will force us to multiply the metaphors and the media we use to express matters of faith — will force us out of our lazy habits of focussing too much on the one right form of expression, a habit that certainly plays into the hands of misunderstandings.