Ramsey's Religious Language (1957) started my thinking along the lines of this book's thesis. Being equipped for service in the world becomes an essential part of the educational process.
The Language Gap and God: Religious Language and Christian Education by
Randolph Crump Miller
Chapter: 2: The Challenge of Language Analysis
God and Existence
What we need to do is make sense of the evidence we have. Fifth, the solitary experience of insight must be related to community life.
The Problem of Myth
One of the main problems in communicating ideas or concepts found in the Bible stems from the use of myth as a form of language. This is the point at which we pick up on Bultmann's treatment of the biblical "triple" universe with its unnatural causes, a worldview that is automatically rejected by modern man. Because the modern man confuses the mythological picture of the world with the New Testament that teaches about himself, sin, salvation.
This is especially true of the changing expectations of the end of the age between the time Paul wrote to the. The new understanding is the gift of the new creation, for God is now judge and calls man to decide life or death. (See Christ Without Myth, p. 62.). Turning to the educational insights we can derive from Bultmann and Ogden, we shall consider the following points: the meaning of Jesus Christ, the varied use of myths against the background of the religious issues of life, the use of objective language about God, the need.
Jesus' office as Christ consists precisely in the fact that, through word and deed and tragic fate, he is the bearer of the eternal word about God's love, which is the transcendent meaning of all created things and the last event before which man must determine his existence. ." (Ibid., p. At this point Ogden makes use of the thought of one of the philosophers of language, Stephen Toulmin. (See Stephen Toulmin, The Place of Reason in Ethics. He is the author of The American Spirit in Theology (Pilgrim, 1974 .) Published by Pilgrim Press, Philadelphia and Boston, 1970.
Discernment and Commitment
In religious language, he says, "we use expressions that are strange, peculiar and unusual in some respects." When these expressions are sufficiently parallel to discernment, they "come alive" and "the light dawns." Such situations, which occur in everyday life as well as in religious situations, have, says Ramsey, "an objective reference and, like all situations, are subject-object in structure." (Ibid., p. 28.) They achieve that. Ramsey calls this “object language and more”, that is, language that “exhibits logical impropriety”. personal situations.
34; Meanwhile, as a result, - continues Ramsey, - we can observe that in order to understand religious language or theology, we must first evoke the strange type of situation to which I have given various parallels." (Ibid., p. 47.) This provides a basis not only for theology and communication, but for an understanding of Christian education. This is especially clear in his treatment of “creation ex nihilo.” We use the word creation to apply to anything from God " as " keyword, for the universe of 'creatures'." (Ibid., p. 73) When a revelation occurs, it becomes an actual claim about God rather than a discussion of Genesis as past history.
They were not persuaded by argument, but were "cut to the heart". We can believe that Peter's preaching at Pentecost was successful because it is recorded that three thousand were baptized. But a parable often has an extra sting that other forms may lack: "Go and do likewise." It is not only an occasion for a discovery, but also for. Ramsey anticipates this indirectly with the remarkable conclusion "that in order to understand religious language or theology, we must first evoke the strange kind of situation." (Religious.
The Language of the Heart
This is the language used to establish the theological basis for Christian education. Scientifically simple: This is the language of simplified arithmetic, of a weather report and of catechesis. Poetic-difficult: This is the language of Francis Thompson in The Hound of Heaven or of some of the poetry of T.
Poeticly simple: It is the "language of the heart." An example of Drink-water is Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. This is the language found in much of the Bible, especially in the Psalms, the Beatitudes, and some of Jesus' parables. Poetry is used here in a broad sense that parallels some of the logically unusual qualifiers suggested by Ramsey and.
They think more in terms of the parables of Jesus than in terms of the psalms; When we turn to the language of the Gospel, we see this position confirmed. Poetry as such plays a big role in telling the meaning of Christianity.
Self-Involving Language
The latter is not part of the meaning of the saying but has to do with its impact on people. He may prefer to state it differently, as in "I commit to the basis of being," or "I view the world and myself as under the authority of the creator-God revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ." If a policeman says, "I arrest you for driving too fast," we can show his authority to arrest you as the driver of the car and the car.
We can use different literary forms to present and clarify the beliefs of churches. This means that we need to look again at the educational implications of the suggestions of Ramsey, Bushnell and Drinkwater. This places the responsibility on the teacher and the class, reflecting the larger life of the congregation, to create the kind of interpersonal relationships in which mutual trust is possible.
When everyone is treated as a person, to be respected and listened to, to have an opportunity to tell his story as he sees it, to respond to the story of the gospel if he wants to, there can be be a situation in which both existential and linguistic self-involvement can be invoked. For example, if we accept affirmation or statement of faith as requiring some degree of ability to understand, to acknowledge, to decide and to make a commitment, we need to reconsider the age at which it can occur in the light of of the findings of developmental psychology. He looks at the church, using biblical images, as a community of the Holy Spirit in the world rather than as a withdrawn pietistic community group.
Bliks and Onlooks
Even in the Gospels, some concluded from the same evidence that Jesus was sent from God and others that he was a messenger from Beelzebub. An invitation to share your gaze (see Paul M. van Buren, The Secular Meaning of the Gospel [New York: Macmillan, 1963], pp.) is one way to interpret Christian teaching. As he continues to look, his attention is drawn to some of the patterns, and he begins to look at them in a different way.
This brings us against the promise of the gospel that a person can become a new being in Christ. The promise of transformation, of conversion, of rebirth is at the heart of the Christian tradition. It is said, for example, that many of the racial prejudices which develop in each generation derive from the contagion from the older generation.
In response to the learners' questions, the teacher can join the search by sharing the biblical view, which may need to be established through careful Bible study, including attention to the Bible's language. Perhaps the first story is that of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, in which there is evil in the world that must be known by man. Job, having access to the same facts, saw it in a different pattern, in which he found a basis for his own integrity and for his own understanding of the mystery of God's incomprehensible ways.
A World View and Christian Education
The character of the world is influenced by God, but it is not determined by him, but by the world in its own way. adds novelty and richness to the divine experience." None of the writers mentioned agrees entirely with Whitehead, but he is their inspiration on many points. They agree more or less in the way they view the . . universe around us, and their the vision of God is embedded in their metaphysical thinking.).
Whitehead speaks of God in two ways: in the first (original) sense, he is the conceptual realization of what could be; he is the structure of. 34;He is the poet of the world, guiding it with tender patience by his vision of truth, beauty and goodness.' There is the denial of metaphysics as part of theological thinking, as in the theology of Karl Barth.
At that depth of reality, the element of the personal was there from the beginning. It came into its own in the evolution of the personal; yet people could not comprehend it. The concept of God as immanent in the process of life raises another issue, especially with those who think in terms of substance.
Religious Language and Christian Education
For Northrop, the experience of the "undifferentiated aesthetic continuum" is private, operating at the edge of consciousness, yet universally pervasive. 34; There will be continued openness and commitment, and the resulting action will be the ministry of the Church in the world. First, if we have made a correct assessment of the place of relations in the meaning of language and the framework of communication, we can adopt what we have just said about dialogue.
The "language of the heart" that Drinkwater speaks of is the same type of usage. Both dialogue and engagement indicate linguistically the proclamation of the gospel, which is the source of Christian faith in God and in. This emphasis on a biblical view that focuses on the kerygma fits with most of the approaches we have considered.
Many recent folk songs combine verse and guitar, as the early Psalms combined Hebrew parallelism and harp. The vocabulary of the ecumenical movement, though often buried in the strange jargon of the committee's language, is sometimes a vehicle for. However, it uses many aspects of the language we use when we talk about God.
