Beginning with the word

God Himself is speech, language, Word. This is implicit in the opening pages of the Bible. God created heaven and earth, and when we see how that works in more detail we find that He does it by speech. The God revealed in Genesis 1 is a Creator, Maker, Actor, but He is all these things because He is a Speaker. His Word is a creative Word: When He speaks, things are that weren’t before. He speaks light into being, forms an firmament by Word, gathers waters by Word, calls vegetation from the earth by Word, speaks and makes heavenly lights, speaks and creates sea creatures. He not only speaks them into being, but assigns them names. We aren’t told that God is eternally Word here, but the creation account definitely gives us a glimpse of a “chatty” God (Jenson).

Is He inherently chatty? What is implicit in the creation account becomes explicit in the New Testament. John 1:1, alluding to the opening of Genesis, identifies the Word that spoke the world into existence as God Himself: “The Word was toward God, and the Word was God” and “all things came into being by Him” (vv. 1-3). This Word becomes flesh in order to explain ( exegomai ) the Father (v. 18). The Word is the Father’s self-expression to humanity, but He is also the eternal Word. God was never without his self-expression. He was never undisclosed. He was never silent. He is an eternally chatty God.

And the Father indwells the Word. Jesus exegetes the Father, unveils the hidden Father to the world, because the Father is in Him and He in the Father. Whoever has seen Jesus has seen the hidden Father; whoever has heard Jesus has heard the hidden Father – because the Father is in the Word. This is crucial for John’s theology and soteriology, which are the same thing, but it is also a profound linguistic point. In the divine life, there is a Father-Speaker and a Son-Spoken, and the Father-Speaker indwells the Son-Spoken, indwells Him exhaustively, is exhaustively and without diminution expressed in the Son. When the Father speaks the Son, there is no slipped or spillage. The “secondary” character of the Word doesn’t mean that the Word is blemished or imperfect. Within the Triune life, speech is a full expression of the Speaker.

This has huge implications at a number of levels. First, there is no privileging of “thought” over speech in Trinitarian Christianity. Aristotle had a hierarchy of thought, speech, and written text. The thought was the reality, the idea; speech is an image of that thought; and the written text is an image of the image, a sign of a sign. The spoken word is a diminution from the thought, the idea, and the written word is a further diminution from the spoken word. At least a speaker is present to the hearer, and can correct misunderstandings of his words.

There is no hint of this in Scripture. There’s no hint that language is a decline from thought, or that written language is twice removed from reality. In the NASB, the word “say” appears more than 2800 times; the word “think” only 57. And even that is misleading, since some of the uses of think” are literally “say” or “see.” “Know” is used a lot, but it frequently has a personal connotation – “Adam knew Eve and she conceived.” “Thinking in the heart” is usually “saying in the heart.” Even our internal mental operations are often considered as speech in Scripture. And this is true in God as well. “God thinks” doesn’t appear in the NASB; “God thought” doesn’t either.

By emphasizing word over thought, second, the Bible highlights the social and material character of knowledge. One can think (so we believe) in isolation from everyone and everything. That is the paradigm of the thinker. But speech is a social reality, and if knowledge is formulated and communicated in language, it takes form in a social matrix, which means it takes form in material objects, interactions, and artifacts. A pop-Hellenic picture of the thought-speech connection would be: I formulate a thought with clarity in my mind; then I put it into material form in spoken words or letters on a page. For a Greek, putting the pure thought into material words is inevitably a diminution and distortion; that’s the character of matter. It cannot be a suitable bearer for the intellectual. From a biblical and Trinitarian perspective, this is completely wrong. My thoughts are not fully formed in my isolated mind; my mind is full of unformed half-thoughts, and it’s only in interactions with the world outside and especially with other language-users – only in conversation with friends or teachers, reading of books, experience in life – that my chaos of half-thoughts is forged into a cosmos. And there is no necessary dilution in putting my thoughts in speech or on paper. In fact, for many of us, putting thoughts on paper clarifies the jumble in the mind. The material realities of language lend form to thought. Without the word nothing is made that is made.

Third, the God who created the world is language, and His speech, His eternal Word, exhaustively expresses the Speaker’s character. Even when the Word becomes flesh, even when the spoken Word “leaves” the Father and comes to dwell among us, the Father is in His self-expression, the Father is in His word. This means that in the divine life, there is real presence in the Word. The Father speaks, and He is in the Word that He speaks. Even when He speaks into this world, His Word is not distorted, but He is made known in the midst of the creation through His Word. See Jesus the Word and you see Jesus the Father, without creation distorting the Word that he speaks. The original Divine Word expresses the Father’s character. The Word is the personal presence and image of the Father; the Word is the personal communication. And the Word does this exhaustively. There isn’t anything in the Father that is not expressed in the Son. Even the Father’s Fatherhood is expressed in the Son, not because the Son is a Father but because being Son reveals that there is a Father.

Finally, this Trinitarian perspective is the only possible antidote to deconstruction. Aristotle is no solution because deconstruction is already implicit in Aristotle. If you think that the thought is pure presence; and if you think that signification of any sort is a diminution of pure presence, then writing is going to distort and slip and spill. Derrida doesn’t think there’s any pure presence, but that only means he’s Aristotle without an anchor, Aristotle without ideas. For Derrida, the great problem is the secondariness of the written text, and for Derrida “writing” characterizes all communication. Even speech is “writing” in Derrida’s definition, and for Aristotelian/Platonic reasons: Because it is a sign of a reality. It goes out into the world like a prodigal son, and the speaker isn’t there to control it. It goes into a public realm, and there takes on a meaning and significance that is not dependent on the speaker’s intentions or original context. And that means that the word spoken gets interpreted in ever new contexts. Derrida doesn’t think there’s anything to be done about this. There’s no ideal “pure presence.” But it means that there is no closure in interpretation. There would be closure if there were a final word to be spoken, if there were an eschatological word, but Derrida doesn’t believe that there is any such closure.