Quotes about Language

As Pope Benedict XVI said in his address to the United Nations in April 2008, the language of rights is borrowed from the great Christian tradition, but if you cut off those Christian roots, you get all kinds of abuses, each claiming the postmodern high ground of victimhood but only succeeding in debasing the coinage of rights itself.

having a hard enough time explaining to his disciples that he had to die; they never really grasped that at all, and they certainly didn't take his language about his own resurrection as anything more than the general hope of all Jewish martyrs. How could they possibly have understood him saying something about further events in what would have been, for them, a still more unthinkable future? Of

All our language about future states of the world and of ourselves consists of complex pictures that may or may not correspond very well to the ultimate reality. But that doesn't mean it's anybody's guess or that every opinion is as good as every other one. And—supposing someone came forward out of the fog to meet us? That, of course, is the central though often ignored Christian belief.

Famously the KJV translates agap? as 'charity'. Many grumbled when modern translations replaced it with 'love'. Not many realized that the modern translations were simply reverting to what Tyndale had had in the first place.

We have also seen that it is easy to mistake literary representation (the use of vivid imagery to denote space-time reality and connote its theological significance) for metaphysical representation (whereby a 'spiritual' or 'transcendent' being is the heavenly counterpart of an earthly reality); and that in this confusion it is all too easy to imagine that language which, in a culture other than our own, would be recognized as highly figurative, is flatly literal.

Art is a visual language, and Christians have a responsibility to learn that language.

Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and aspirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry, or savor their songs.

if you talk to a man in a second language , your talking to his brain ,if you talk to him in his mother language you're talking to his heart -

For it is God's business to create, and people's business to name.

I felt as if the words I had spoken that day had soiled my tongue and mouth.

I pass billboards that announce in black and white, in English, 'Jesus loves even you'. I feel uplifted by the unexpected encouragement; I'm only slightly alarmed by the 'even'. (page 336)

we Christians must show again that we are both people of the Word and people who believe in words. Words are never mere words for us