Christian speech

Robert Louis Wilken has a very fine piece on the “church’s way of speaking” in the Aug/Sept issue of First Things. He points out that the church’s faith is not merely “doctrinal propositions, creedal affirmations, and moral codes” but “a world of discourse that comes to us in language of a particular sort.” Further, “Christian speech is not primarily the technical vocabulary of Christian doctrine” but “the language of the Psalms, the stories of the patriarchs, the parables of the gospels, the moral vocabulary of St Paul’s epistles.” When we employ the church’s speech, drawn from Scripture, “we learn to live together as a community, to breathe in harmony. We learn to think the Church’s thoughts, share its loves, and live by its precepts.” As a city, the church has its own language that marks it from other cities: “And, like a city, the Church draws its citizens into a shared public life, one marked by its central cultic activity, the Eucharist, and by other rituals, such as Ash Wednesday, Palm Sunday, and Corpus Christi. The Christian society has its own calendar that sets the rhythms of the community’s life, offices, institutions, laws, architecture, art, and music, its own customs and mores, history and memory.” (OK, I was with him except for Corpus Christi.)