Language and God

So the other day I helped P'Phung translate "With All I Am" by Reuben Morgan into Thai.  Probably because I'm such a nerd, I find language fascinating.  Or maybe just words - how they're used, developed, original meanings, etc. (I just looked it up on wikipedia - it's called morphology)  In any case, I wish I had studied some of this at UCLA.  So here are some interesting things to think about.

1. Again, noting that I have no prior experience studying linguistics, I think it's safe to say that language itself is a cultural expression and its usage in different communities or societies reflect different values or beliefs of that community or society.  Anyway, assuming that most of the readership are Korean-Americans, it's interesting to see how the hierarchical or honorific forms that exist in Korean reflect the societal values of hierarchy and honor, while English really has no such thing built into the language itself which reflects its very egalitarian values.

(People thinking about very high liturgical churches might think about the "thee" "thy" "thou" language as an expression of some type of holiness or honor, but it was used during the old old days to express intimacy and familiarity. "You" was actually used in formal situations.  So all those hymns and songs that we sing that we think is using archaic and non-"God is my friend" language really does imply that personal and intimate relationship with God, seen in its proper context of course.)

Thai also has honorific language built into the language itself but unlike the Korean language which for the most part uses honorific conjugations (I could be wrong, I only studied up to Korean 5), the Thai language uses different words for higher beings - kings and gods/God.  So all the nice conversational words I learned and memorized are pretty useless when I read the Bible because Jesus does all his verbs in the honorific form.

Anyway, my simplistic conclusion to that one is that Americans and our "Jesus is my homeboy" Christianity do not have the built-in language values to describe the holiness and transcendence of God.  Or is it the language which is the expression of our cultural values that creates our Jesus Homeboy Christianity. I don't know, did the chicken or the egg come first?  And Thai's would feel uncomfortable talking about God in too much of a colloquial language because God is supposed to be high and beyond us. 

Yet God is amazingly both!  Here's one of my favorite verses about this from Isaiah 57:15, "For thus says the One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: “I dwell in the high and holy place,
and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite."  God is fearsome, bigger than the universe, transcendent, holy, set apart, all-powerful, yet He calls us friend, we are adopted into His sonship, and we can cry to Him "Abba, Father."  Too bad human language can't seem to capture this.

2. One of my favorite Thai words is glap jai which means "to repent."   Glap is used in phrases like glap baan which means "return home" or glap rot which means "u-turn" and jai means "heart or mind." Its literal meaning is returning your heart or turning your heart around. Now that's a great definition of repent, like the original Greek word metanoeo which means to change one's mind.  Yet the primary definition of the English word "repent" is to feel sorry. (I guess if you study that word in Latin it means something like "do penitence again" but what does that even mean for us 21st century folk?)  And that seems to carry over into American Christianity where if we sin, repenting just means we feel sorry about it and God forgives us and everything is good and dandy.  The Thai and Greek word carries the full meaning of repentance which is not merely feeling sorry, but changing or turning your heart around, that is towards God.  It's more of an action than it is an emotion.  We turn away from our sins, not just feel sorry about them.

3. Coming in at a close second is the Thai word santi suk which means "peace".  This word is really cool because it's a word created by Christians because the original Thai word for peace is santi which comes from the Buddhist conception of peace, namely a peace that comes from the absence of everything.  In the Buddhist worldview is the point of life is to remove oneself from all desire then peace is empty.  I think the world that is under pervading influence of Buddhism has this conception of peace.  Have you seen those "coexist" or "peace" bumper stickers with all the symbols of world religions?  Is peace really an ideal that's so simplistic that all these different religions with different worldviews are going to somehow retract some of their conflicting beliefs for this false sense of peace?  You believe what you want and I'll believe what I want, let's just not step on each other's toes and we'll call it peace.

But no sir, that is not the Christian peace, santi suk. The Thai word suk means joy and you put that with santi and bam! you got santi suk which would mean something like a joy filled peace.  Now that's on track with the biblical definition of peace which comes from the Hebrew word shalom which the ESV Study Bible describes as "where a person's life with God and with everything else is in ordered harmony, both physically and spiritually, and “all is well.”"  Real peace is not the merely the absence of conflict or a withdrawal from the enemy but it is full-force unrelenting march toward the enemy with love.  Real peace is not passive, but is active in bringing about joy and love and harmony in all things.

4. The last word I like is the Thai phrase for saying sorry, khoe thoot. It literally means "I ask for your punishment." I wonder what kind of cultural value that denotes hahaha jk.  It's just funny.

Hope that was interesting, and if not, too bad I'm a nerd. =)