The Language of Scripture

Every language has its own characteristics, its own ways of speaking about the world, which colors the way its speakers see the world. Some languages have words that are not easily translated into other languages. You can convey the idea, but it takes an entire phrase to translate one word, and the connotation of the word often gets lost in the process. 

So in order to really understand a language you have to achieve fluency. You have to know the vocabulary and parts of speech, how to piece together sentences and how to modulate your voice to convey meaning. But since this is your second language to learn, you learn it in terms of your first language. Go to a class teaching Czech and they don’t teach you Czech by speaking Czech. The class is taught in English. The parts of speech are English, the definitions are in English, the explanations are in English. Over time, as you go beyond mere fluency, you may begin thinking in this new language, but until then you experience the world in English, even if you interact with it in Czech. You hear and read Czech, translate it into English into your head, formulate a response in English, and translate it back into Czech to speak or respond.

This is one way to think about Scripture. It is a foreign language we are learning in order to interact with the world as Christians (i.e., Scripture Speakers). This can play out in any number of ways. First of all, it’s a different language than the language of the world. We learn the language of the world as infants growing up in it. We don’t try to learn it, we just do. Scripture is different. It takes intentionality and effort. It requires us to constantly translate life from the language of the world into the language of Scripture and back again. The object is to attain such a level of fluency in Scripture that we can think in it, using it as our primary language rather than that of the world. The best way to do this is immerse ourselves in Scripture.

Secondly, language knowledge disappears without use. If you don’t speak the language regularly, you lose the ability to speak it fluently. So it’s not enough to immerse ourselves in Scripture, we also have to be in the habit of regularly using Scripture as we interact with the world.

The goal is to experience life primarily in terms of what Scripture says about it. To think of wealth, not in terms of Wall Street and business, but in terms of the teachings of Moses, the prophets, and Jesus. To think of immigration, not in terms of “good national policy,” but in terms of the teachings about and narratives of immigrants in Scripture. Sex, power, gender, abortion, foreign policy, global warming—all of it, not primarily in terms of what political candidates, novelists, the media, or even our own selves say, but in terms of how God thinks about these things, as revealed to us in the pages of Scripture. 

—John Coffey