A Grammar of Theology
January 15th, 2010
If God appears in the world primarily as the one who is revealed and therefore also as the one who reveals, since nothing else would be sufficient to reveal God, it is possible to understand there to be three parts to this appearing: 1) the God who reveals; 2) the God who is revealed; and 3) the God through whom God is revealed. This conveniently trinitarian appearing of God could by summarized succinctly in the phrase, “God, through God, reveals God,” or even, “God Gods God.”
Interestingly, this trinitarian construction parallels the grammatical structures that characterize the English language, along with most others. God appears in it as subject, verb, and object, forming a complete, albeit unusual, sentence. It might even be argued that the trinitarian conception of the Christian God is necessitated by this very linguistic structure, which would be only one example of how human understanding requires God to appear according to its own limits. Conversely, it might also be possible to understand a certain kind of human grammar as a reflection of the trinitarian mode of divine revelation. More likely yet, perhaps a certain structure of human existence, of human being in the world, has produced both of these effects, necessitating both the trinitarian nature of its grammatical structures and the trinitarian form of divine revelation, as God reveals God to us through the structures by which we have our being and our understanding.
Thus, even the trinitarian nature of God might be said to be an incarnation, a revelation that makes itself appear such that it can be apprehended but not comprehended, a tautological revelation that neither affirms nor denies God but merely recognizes that any God worth the name would remain beyond any human understanding, that any God worth the name would appear, if at all, only according to the limits of our humanity.
To say “God Gods God,” then, is really to say nothing at all, and yet it may be everything that can be said.
9 Responses to “A Grammar of Theology”
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From Word to Word by Jeremy Luke Hill is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.
January 16th, 2010 at 7:45 pm
Sorry Luke, this maybe a little more esoteric at this point. But still very interesting in the least. I like how you have taken, whether intentionally or not, something such as Tetragrammaton [which is more like tatra-characton or tetra-digiton, as characters or digits] and made it something like Trigrammaton, using proper grammar.
January 16th, 2010 at 7:50 pm
Also like to point out that your expression, ‘God Gods God’ is also a very interesting Celtic Christian Theological point, in direct opposition to the consensus of Ex Nihilo and that the entire universe is made up of differentiating expressions of God endorsed in the formats he saw fit.
January 16th, 2010 at 9:11 pm
This is only tangentially related, but it is possible to write complete, simple sentences in Hebrew without any verbs.
“Moshe ha-Melechk” means “Moses is the King”, though no conjugation of ‘to be’ appears in the Hebrew sentence.
January 16th, 2010 at 9:33 pm
um, if I might ask, why would it need to conjugate ‘to be’ if the statement is saying he ‘is’ king?
January 16th, 2010 at 9:34 pm
obviously it doesn’t need to, but why is it important that it hasn’t, is really what I was asking.
January 16th, 2010 at 10:28 pm
d,
That is really interesting. I have no Hebrew background, but would it be possible to make a similar sentence about God: e.g. “God is God” but without the verb “to be”?
January 17th, 2010 at 12:29 pm
The problem is that there is no Hebrew word for G-d… it is all euphemism. But, I think it would be possible to say “Adonainu adonainu” (our lord is our lord) or “Elochkim elochkim”. I will ask next weekend in Hebrew class.
I have never seen a sentence with the same noun twice like that, but I have a lot to learn still. Something that comes to mind here is a tautology that appears in the Hebrew bible: “I am that I am.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_that_I_Am
In any case, this tautology is not a trinity either.
January 17th, 2010 at 1:33 pm
Actually, I have heard, reliably or not not, that I am that I am, to be translated literally would be ‘I am that I am the ising one’ or ‘I am the ising one that is’. Or some such strangeness to the English mind.
January 17th, 2010 at 1:53 pm
d,
Yes, I am reminded of the “I am that I am” construction also, which Richard Kearney in The God Who May Be argues should be understood as reading something like “I am/will be that I am/will be” because of the ambiguity in the verb being used. Again, I do not have the Hebrew knowledge to comment on this, but it would be very interesting to me if this tautology could be reduced even further, doing away with the verb, to say something like “I that I” or “God that God”.