Blogotional

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other word would smell as sweet."

--From Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

As a mathematician/scientist those are words that I often live by. I remember well my high school chemistry teacher, Merle Schulenberg, absolutely chewing me a new one when he asked me what the Pythagorean Therom was and I said quite proudly,

x-squared plus y-squared equals z-squared.

"NO it's not," he bellowed, "'x' could mean anything, as could 'y' -- what the hell are you talking about?" yes, he said 'hell' in front of a class of high school juniors in 1973, Merle was like that. Needless to say I was quick to respond with, "the square of the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the length of two sides." Do you see the point? 'x,' 'y,' and 'z' are arbitrary labels assigned to the lengths of segements in a right trangle, but they could just as easily be greek letters -- in fact they were when Pythagorous write the thing - they are meaningless without definition.

This is something you deal with in math/science all the time. You are going to write an equation to describe something so you start with the defintions. I am fairly used to symbols being arbitrary for a specific definition.

But this also makes foreign languages incredibly difficult for me. You see words and grammer convey levels of meaning and nuance that cannot be so precisely defined and that are far less arbitrary. Translating from English to Russian is not as simple as substituting 'c' for 'x' in a shorthand rendering of the Pythagorean Theorem.

These thoughts came to me as I consider this post from Adrian Warnock.

If this article is cessationism then I am a cessationist. To me though it seems to be firmly on the charismatic side of the fence since the article argued for a continuation of gifts of the Holy Spirit.

This whole discussion, excluding the lunatic fringe of both sides, is really a battle over defintions -- and it's fairly important because the words bring so much context with them. Adrain confessed in another post that he had never experienced anyone coaching someone in tongues -- something that I absolutely took for granted as a part of pentecostal/charasmatic movements. The word "charasmatic" carried for me many undertones of fakery and charletonism that Adrian simply had no experience with - quite refreshing actually, even if it does strike me as a bit naive.

In the end this discussion will never resolve for this very reason. The words involved carry way too much context for each individual using them. For some of us the word charismatic will ALWAYS invoke that context, even when offered innocently, as it is by Adrian.

In the end, I find assurance in this sad state of affairs. Behind our words and contexts is the same Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We change - He does not. I find comfort in the fact that His mysteries are greater than my language. We will never truly figure this out because He is God, and we simply are not - we are but creation.

So often we let our ideas get in the way of our God. Last week I wrote a couple of times (here and here) about the soul's dark night. That is the point where our emotions and thoughts fail us -- that's the point where all we can do is relinquish control and rely on God. Smart as I am, this is the point where I always end up in big theological debates. I know I'll never understand, and I know I want to know God, so I relinquish and I rely.

Our words, no matter how good, are insufficient to contain His glory.