Language Power, Language Play, and Promises to Keep: Language and the Image of God
James Vanden Bosch, Professor of English
Minds in the Making

Editor's Note: This address was presented at a conference of the International Association  for  the  Promotion  of  Christian  Higher  Education in Moscow in August 2005.

Summary

Language is one of God's great gifts. Rather than see language study as tedious or esoteric, Christian educators should see language as essential to our human nature, our bearing of God's image and building of Christian communities-and should not neglect the importance and delight of language play.

Headings

• Introduction
• Christian Views of Language Study
• 'Their Lonely Betters'
• Language and Human Nature
• Language and Education
• Language Power and Language Play

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Sidebars

• Human Nature, Doctrine, and Education
• Christians and the Study of Language at Calvin College

Key Statements

• "Most of us consider language to be one of God's great gifts to humanity."
• "Made in the image of God, we humans benefit from the gift of language: God can communicate with us, and we can communicate with God, with one another, and with other humans from the past and in the future. ... Made in the image of God, we should not have to be told to speak the truth in love; language is the faculty that allows humans to do that naturally-it's how we were made, and what we were given language for."
• "The great gift of language participates in the general ruin of humanity. We use language to destroy, deceive, and manipulate others, not to love them."
• "A Christian education must do as much as possible to honor the home language or dialect of every student. The belief that language is a gift from God cannot be held consistently if only some languages or dialects are so honored."
• "Students in a Christian school must learn what a great gift language is-a gift to be studied, honored, and recognized in others."
• "Language is a great gift, and it is a great gift in large part because of its enormous power-it has the power to describe, analyze, and change the world, the power to transmit knowledge and human achievements over vast periods of time and over great chasms of culture, the power to tell the truth and to deceive, the power to commune with God, with ourselves, and with one another, the power to change the way that we perceive reality, the power to imagine alternative states of being, the power to make people desire certain ways of being and to work for their attainment, the power to change people's minds and hearts and spirits."
• "Christian education must emphasize the importance of language play, both in language learning and in everyday life, in ordinary and in artistic forms of expression."