In The Image: Words Matter

On the Power and Integrity of Language

Welcome to the July installment of In The Image — a bimonthly guest column on the intersection of faith and the arts, written by Matthew J. Andrews. In addition to serving as a previous poetry editor for Solum, Matthew is a private investigator and writer. He is the author of the chapbook I Close My Eyes and I Almost Remember and the full-length collection The Hours, which was published by Solum on Easter Day.

Words Matter: On the Power and Integrity of Language

As a father of two, I have come, as if by some innate calling, to embrace many of the stereotypes of paternity: the bad jokes, the disproportioned body, and the penchant for distilling what little wisdom I’ve accumulated into pithy sayings that get repeated ad nauseam. One of the phrases I’ve taken to using with my kids is “words matter,” a reminder most often used when one of them twists the nuances of language to their advantage (think “borrowed” in place of “stole”). I’ve used it often enough that my wife has suggested I tattoo it on my arm or, in moments where I’ve said it to her, etch it on my tombstone.

Just because I’ve run the phrase into the ground does not mean there isn’t truth behind it. As a writer, I am aware of the power of words to not just transmit information, but to add richness to that communication, to lead (or mislead) others with subtly implications of a specific word choice. But it goes much, much deeper than that. Words are the scaffolding we use to construct our understanding of the world, the form around which we shape abstract concepts. A language that doesn’t have a word for something effectively limits its access to that very thing. Words, as it turns out, matter quite a bit.

These are the sort of weighty matters I’ve been contemplating for the last few months as I’ve worked my way through David Bentley Hart’s translation of the New Testament, a unique and eccentric rendition that most definitely succeeds in its aim to make “the familiar strange, novel, and perhaps newly compelling.” Hart’s guiding philosophy was to produce a “pitilessly literal translation” that makes “the original text as visible as possible.” This means Hart not only attempts to replicate the tone and writing style of the authors—“Where the Greek of the original is maladroit, broken, or impenetrable (as it is with some consistency in Paul’s letters),” he explains, “so is the English of my translation”—but tries to do justice to the actual words used, reflecting, when necessary, the depth of their murkiness.

As an example, here is Hart’s version of John 3:16: “For God so loved the cosmos as to give the Son, the only one, so that everyone having faith in him might not perish, but have the life of the Age.” This is, to put it mildly, very different from what I put to memory as a child, for a whole host of reasons. For our present purpose, I want to highlight two.

The first is Hart’s decision to transliterate the Greek word kosmos into English as “cosmos” rather than translate it into the more traditional “world.” Hart argues that “world” is not an incorrect translation, but that it is an incomplete one, with the Greek word more frequently meaning “the whole of the created order, the heavens no less than the earth.” In an evangelical culture where “the world” has become shorthand for “this wretched place where we must persist for a time,” this added layer of meaning to the word is consequential.

The second is “the life of the Age,” which, for those of us used to concluding this verse with “eternal life,” might cause a few drinks to be spewed onto the page. Hart’s translation takes something we think is crystal clear and makes it ambiguous, and that’s by design. The Greek word at issue here is aiōnios, and Hart spills a lot of ink to make the case that it can (and, in antiquity, does) refer to time periods of a variety of lengths, from “a period of endless duration” to “something as shadowy and fleeting as the lifespan of a single person.” Again: not a change that lacks reverberations in our understanding of the text.

I’m not qualified to discuss the technical merits of Hart’s translation choices (and to be clear, there are plenty of people who are who take issue with his end product), but over and over again, I found myself smitten with Hart’s commitment to the power and integrity of language. It’s hard to read this translation and walk away thinking that Hart is just trying to be provocative; there are (many) pages of footnotes and supporting text that provide detailed justification for his choices and how they fit in his aim to be “pitilessly literal.” These notes often contain a good deal of humility, with Hart illuminating the challenges of translating a given word or passage, discussing possible alternate translations, and ultimately explaining why he chose the one he did (and any doubts he may have as a result). Words, Hart clearly believes, are not to be trifled with.

I suspect the sense of unease one gets when reading this translation is not that we disagree with these concepts generally, but with their application in the Bible specifically. We want these texts to be deep and multi-layered, but only to a point; we want the words themselves, the foundations of our creeds and theologies, to be grounded and immutable, as precise as a medical diagnosis, and Hart punctures this fantasy because that’s just not how words work.

Ultimately, this is not a bug, but a feature that should enhance our appreciation of the Bible as literature. As we do in our writing, from our poems and novels to our corporate memos and social media posts, the biblical authors chose the words they did intentionally: for their sounds, for their secondary implications, and, very likely, for their ambiguity, especially for the biggest concepts. In a long discussion on the Greek word logos, Hart lays out the wide spectrum of meanings behind the word, as well as the Jewish and Greek philosophical ideas that informed these meanings, concluding that “the full spectrum of its philosophical connotations could scarcely be contained in a single book.” As you might be not be surprised to hear, he chooses, in most instances, to leave the word untranslated rather than attempt to find a suitable replacement for the inadequate “word” used in most Bibles. “Any attempt to limit it to a single English term,” he argues, “would be to risk reducing it to a conceptual phantom of itself.”

May we all have such respect for the power of words: the ones scratched into our notebooks along with the ones inked onto two-thousand-year-old parchment. May we treat them with the respect they deserve. And may we all—you, me, and hopefully, with some repetition, my children—learn that they matter.

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