Short Prayers 7: Twaddle

Job opens his mouth in empty talk, he multiplies words without knowledge.” Job 35:16

From Small Talk to Twaddle

There are two kinds of small talk. The first kind builds relationship. When we are introduced to someone new we may discuss the weather or ask questions about one another’s families. In such an instance, the content of what one says is not very important. What is important is that the conversation lead to a working relationship or perhaps even a friendship.

The second kind of small talk is twaddle. Here the content is decisive. But instead of saying something important, the twaddler wastes everyone’s time with silly or tedious clichés and inanities. Instead of the deep we get the shallow. Instead of the profound we get the superficial. Instead of progress we get stalemate.

Twaddle is important for bureaucrats and other people in authority. It provides a nice smokescreen for hiding inadequacies and failures. One can pretend to be addressing the pressing issues of the hour, yet fend off all serious discussion by drowning it in a gush of vacuous verbiage.

When our favorite politician states emphatically, “now, I want to be very clear,” get ready. What follows will be anything but clear. Pompous? Yes. Clear? No.

Ecclesiastical Twaddle

For this reason, many of our church leaders through the centuries have turned to twaddle. The depth and drama of the gospel message which demands total and unyielding commitment is too much for us to take sometimes. So it is convenient to tout twaddle, that is, to articulate the right words of the faith—sometimes even with eloquence—all the while secretly hoping they are empty words.

What has happened, complains the nineteenth century Danish gadfly, Sǿren Kierkegaard, is that twaddle has become our orthodoxy. In his book, Attack Upon Christendom (Princeton University Press, 1944), he writes,

But strangely enough the New Testament takes no account of the thing there is all-too great a mass of in this world, which is the content of this world, that is of twaddle, twattle, patter, smallness, mediocrity, playing at Christianity, transforming everything into mere words…twaddle has taken advantage of this to establish itself as the true Christian orthodoxy…This orthodoxy, so strong in number, so weak in mind, take advantage of the fact that one cannot truthfully denounce it as heterodoxy, hypocrisy, etc. (Art: He Qi, China, 1999)

Karl Forehand identifies one symptom of a sick church. “Religion attracts traumatized people and then doesn’t provide the means for them to find healing. It wants to–it promises it will–but it seldom gets the job done.” One possible diagnosis: twaddle has replaced the gospel message.

Combating Twaddle with Short Prayers

Twaddle is probably impossible to fight directly. The only thing we can do is return again and again to the original report in scripture of what God has done in Jesus Christ. We can retrieve the gospel message that through the shedding of blood our sins have been forgiven and that through the raising of a dead Jew the whole world has received the offer of resurrection into a new creation. This is staggeringly good news of unfathomable importance for both our inner life, our spiritual practices, and our social responsibility. We just need to call it to mind in those moments when we find ourselves awash in twaddle.

When addressing God in a short prayers, we’re likely to select what is important rather than trivial. Twaddle, Begone!

SHORT PRAYER

Lord God of Sabbath, who with a mighty sword and an outstretched arm did smite the Egyptian army and rescue the Hebrew children from slavery by a foreign power, please deliver us from twaddle. Amen.

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Ted Peters is a Lutheran pastor and emeritus seminary professor. He is author of Short Prayers and The Cosmic Self. His one volume systematic theology is now in its 3^rd edition, God—The World’s Future (Fortress 2015). He has undertaken a thorough examination of the sin-and-grace dialectic in two works, Sin: Radical Evil in Soul and Society (Eerdmans 1994) and Sin Boldly! (Fortress 2015). Watch for his forthcoming, The Voice of Public Christian Theology (ATF 2022). See his website: TedsTimelyTake.com.

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