God's Poets

My wife tells me I use the word “like” too much.  I don’t accept this criticism merely on the grounds that I’m too proud to admit to it.  After all, this tendency is all the more embarrassing when applied to a man who wants to teach, write, and make his career essentially out of communication.  I should pay more attention to it; the habit is far more insidious than I think I want to acknowledge.

It is insidious because it is symptomatic of a fundamentally more crippling cultural phenomenon: the decay of language.  We say “like” because we are at a loss for how to express ourselves.  We say that “Marcy like, freaked out,” because we’re not exactly sure how to describe Marcy’s response to the deer that jumped out in front of her car while she was driving 75 miles per hour.  And not without cause: fear is a difficult phenomena to capture.  Anxiety, horror, trepidation, and panic – each of these words add precise coloration and nuance to “fear,” yet remain distinct enough not to be interchangeable.  My point here is simply that our society’s inability to speak with clarity is not entirely unforgiveable.  Day to day experiences, conversations, joys, and annoyances are frustratingly difficult to communicate.

But that is precisely the magic of language.  Language allows us to talk about the mysterious, to speak the unspeakable.  Of course, no author is naïve enough to tell you that he can completely and perfectly capture what it means for a mother to suffer through losing a child in a five paragraph essay.  Suffering – like most human experience – is far too deep for that.  But that doesn’t mean that suffering is entirely incomprehensible, an enigma so opaque that we can’t say anything intelligent about it at all.  Language is finite, but not so finite that it cannot begin to encroach upon the territory of the infinite.

This is, as I understand it, the fundamental aim of the poet: to give utterance to the unutterable.  The durability of friendship, a desire for transcendence, our capacity for awe and wonder – these things are simply too precious to go unmemorialized.  Thus history’s poets, playwrights, and novelists have spent sleepless nights arduously constructing temples of human language in which to enshrine the inexhaustible depths of human experience.  And, at some level, we realize the importance of this enterprise. Whatever your opinion of him, Shakespeare is, in fact, still being taught in school.

When I consider this idea of a “poet” a bit further, it strikes me that theology, then, is fundamentally a poetic discipline.  The entire possibility of “doing theology” is predicated on the ability to say something meaningful and intelligible about Him who cannot be understood.  If mystery cannot be communicated, then theology is pointless.  This is why many of the church fathers and medieval theologians linked the human capacity for speech so intricately with the image of God: with language, the finite creature can, albeit imperfectly, communicate the infinite.  Language proves man’s capacity for mystery.  He can be a mystic because he was first a poet.

The upshot of this discussion is that the mere existence of theology is far more of a miracle than we dare to admit.  The fact that, in spite of our ultimate inadequacies and imperfections, something intelligible may be said about God and His dealings with man ought to fill us with far more wonder than it does.  Furthermore, imagining “theology as poetry” gives the discipline a certain dignity that I think, although deserved, it has often lacked. Not that our culture is especially prone to revering our poets, but at least the poet (often) has the luxury of a charitable audience.  Few people pick up George Herbert looking for a fight; I imagine hundreds have picked up Karl Barth with that very intention.  Maybe there would be less of a disconnect between a Christian’s mind and his heart if he read theology the way he read poetry: with the expectation that, because of what he is reading, his world and his God will get a little bigger, a little brighter, and a little more awe inspiring.

Our culture often thinks of the work of theologians as pedantic, if not impious – how dare anyone presume to know the unsearchable depths of the wisdom of God?  Perhaps, perhaps there is the occasional heathen who writes theology out of presumption.  Just like there is the occasional poet who writes a love song out of spite.

But it is far more likely that the theologian writes for the same reason that the lover sings: because he is in love.  And it is usually this kind of love that bids us make inroads into the mysterious and capture the unspeakable wonders of existence, agonizing into that night, laboring for that perfect metaphor, that perfect adjective, that perfect use of language which will let the world know why our beloved is worth more than all the world can give.