Reflections

Empty-Talk Masquerading as God-Talk

By Febbie C. Dickerson

In Proverbs 18:21 (NRVS), Solomon writes “Death and life are in the power of the tongue and those who love it will eat its fruits.” The writer speaks to the power of language and its creative force. That which we speak has the propensity to shape our thinking and fuel the ways in which we comport ourselves among others. Christians take rightful pride in making sure that our language and our conversations are life-giving. This often comes in the form of our God-talk, the language we use to present God, God’s work, our faith, or what we hope God will do on our behalf. Yet, if we are not careful, our God-talk can be unhelpful; rather than comforting, it becomes platitudinous or meaningless, empty-talk.

The Proverbs are a collection of ethical short sayings designed to stir our thoughts as well as influence how we live in community with others. The context of the Proverbs is that of a young man receiving instructions from his parents on how to build and live his life. Chapters 1-9 include instructions to trust God (Proverbs 1:7; 3:5-6; 8:35) and to gain in wisdom (3:13; 4:5-6; 11: 9:10), as well as a warning that the young man keep his father’s commandments and not forsake his mother’s teachings (6:20-21). Chapters 10-22 demonstrate how the young man is to live responsibly in his family and community. He should work (12:11, 24; 13:4; 14:23; 16:3; 20:13; 21:5), honor and take care of his family (11:29; 15:27; 19:26; 20:20; 22:6; 28:24), and seek to have a good name (22:1). Proverbs 18:21, concerning the power of the tongue, suggests the importance of proper language in the context of family and community.

While the Proverbs provide a guidepost for our behavior in community, the sayings also demonstrate how the foundation for our life in community with others can begin in our familiar dwelling places. Ideally, our home bases are where we develop rich notions of our lives in God, images of God, the expression of our faith, and our understanding of the Bible and theology. These foundational aspects can be the cornerstones of our meaning-full God-talk.

The ways in which we see God determines how we express our convictions about God. How we live into our own faith impacts how we express and deploy our faith to others. Our view of God also determines how we speak to others about God. In The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith, Marcus Borg asserts that the predominant view of God among Christians is that of a supreme, distant deity, continually watching us from afar.1 Borg suggests that this common Christian understanding of the deity is of a God who is king, lord, judge, and lawgiver, all powerful and all knowing. In the light of these descriptions, God is seen as a taskmaster ready to punish followers for the smallest infraction. If our God-talk is developed from this perspective, it is easy to see how our tongues, even if well intentioned, may be full of death rather than life. For Christians with these views of God, God-talk stressing obedience to a wrathful or judging God becomes a way to demonstrate faith. It appears to be biblical and to reflect theological concepts such as “faith without works is dead.” Such God-talk is focused upon keeping us in line with the “rules’’ of God. It provokes a spirit of fear wherein we are constantly being careful not to run afoul of God, the almighty judge and law-giver. For those whose vision of God is shaped by this God-talk, God is the taskmaster waiting to correct humanity for their sins.

Concerned about the way this vision of God draws upon a portion of the biblical witness, New Testament scholar and theologian Rudolph Bultmann argued that one’s God-talk is anemic if we only speak of God as an authoritarian entity beyond our physical existence. As Christian theology traditionally acknowledges, the transcendent God who is so far away is at the same time the immanent God who is so close. Bultmann suggests that our contemplations and understandings of God are developed in the crucible of our lived experiences, which may yield disappointments and traumas rather than in our oftentimes romanticized local congregations and communities. While there are myriad ways to encounter God, Bultmann argues that it is most often at the depths of despair that we truly experience God.2 Thus, God-talk is deployed to address an existential crisis. As long as life is moving according to our expectations—there is employment, the bills are paid, and groceries are in the pantry and refrigerator—our God-talk is limited or even non-existent.

God-talk, however, matters for the encouragement of others. Unfortunately, it often becomes a platitude or meaningless words to the hearer because we don’t take the time to share our presence. The immediate reaction is to offer an answer or solution. Thus, the “I’ll be praying for you” when one encounters a crisis or the “I’m blessed” when asked how are you doing often rings hollow (even if sincerely intended). Since death and life is in the power of the tongue, our God-talk should be meaningful. Our families, local congregations, and other communal spaces will benefit from God-talk that is full of meaning rather than full of religious platitudes. Meaningful God-talk provides truthfulness for the hearer rather than religious correctness.

The Proverbs, then, provide readers with guidance not only on how to talk about God, but also insight about the ways in which our God-talk is related to our actions with both family and community members. Therefore, meaningful God-talk should inspire us to be and to act in tangible ways with our families and friends. This helps us to recognize the need for God because of human limitations while calling us to be active in communal life.

If our God-talk will be the life that is in the power of the tongue, it must both recognize human limitation and acknowledge existential conditions of life. Our God-talk and expressions of faith should embrace all of life, both the light and dark places. The writer admonishes, “Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring (27:1). Things happen in life that are beyond our control. When we encounter someone in crisis, our God-talk should be a reminder of the presence and handiwork of God. Sometimes, however, God-talk can sound like a subtle critique. This critique seems to be encouragement, but it suggests, for example, that the listener does not have enough faith. Thus, Proverbs tells us “The one who has knowledge uses words with restraint, and whoever has understanding is even tempered” (17:27). Providing life to another through careful words and comfort can be a healthy and life-giving response.

Oftentimes God-talk is centered upon personal piety, but it may be even more helpful if it points persons toward the spirit of God that rests in communal spaces. The fellowship of believers, commonly understood as koinonia, typically has the meaning of being in association with another.3 What I am advocating is deploying meaningful God-talk that pushes us to be more participatory in other experiences by sharing our presence and tangible resources. We may need to do more than tell someone we are praying for them. Since a “friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for a time of adversity,” it may be prudent to stop and be in the moment to offer the prayer that is needed. It is in community that we are called to offer our presence (17:17). Giving our time to another is the essence of being present with another. Moreover, it is also in community where we find some of the best opportunities for solutions to our crises. “Out in the open, wisdom calls aloud, she raises her voice in the public square (1:20).” The brainstorming abilities of the collective can make the work light that moves us toward resolutions. Therefore, being present in community is the act of one person sharpening another, just as iron sharpens iron (27:17).

Finally, our God-talk, if it is to be life in our tongues, should simply push us to be more responsive to human needs. If you have the resources and the ability, do not hold back your aid to another (3:27). “Do not say to your neighbor, ‘Come back tomorrow and I will give it to you’ when you already have it with you" (3:28). To do so, however, requires that we are ready to acknowledge diverse life and religious experiences. We then become focused on the movement of God rather than the individual. It is at this point that we are ready to be the hands and feet of God so that our words, our God-talk, is the fruit of life that emanates from our tongues.

NOTES

1. Marcus Borg, The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 58-59.

2. A counter point of view comes from a friend who is a biologist. She argues that in her work and study of animals, plants, or humanity and their environments, she encounters God daily.

3. Linda Peacore, “Church as Community,” Fuller Theological Seminary, September 29, 2010.

Febbie C. Dickerson is the associate dean of academics and associate professor of New Testament at American Baptist College in Nashville. Her research interest includes the Gospel of Luke and the depiction of women in Luke-Acts. She has essays in several recent books and is the author of Luke, Widows, Judges, and Stereotypes: Womanist Readings of Scripture (Fortress, 2019).

Bearing Witness

By Eric D. Barreto

The pressure was immense. I had to say something. I had to stand for something. Without my testimony, they might never hear the good news.

In the churches where I grew up, we were regularly exhorted to “witness.” That is, I was taught how important it was for me to tell others about what Jesus had done for me. We were given paths through Paul’s letter to the Romans to convince others of their need for Jesus. Jesus’s command to make disciples was as clear an instruction as possible. And were we to avoid this act of discipleship, not only was our faithfulness at stake, so, too, was the possibility of the eternal life of others. Someone else’s salvation stood in the balance.

That was my experience, at least. For others, the notion of bearing witness might draw different and various kinds of images and experiences. Of the streetcorner preacher berating those who walk by, confronting strangers with ugly assumptions about their sinfulness. Of the televangelist pleading for donations made at the edge of hope and despair. Of the youth minister at summer camp declaring the brokenness of teenagers already wrestling with confidence and doubt.

For many of us, bearing witness might feel more like the vestiges of communities we have left behind or the practices of other communities we do not want to claim for ourselves. Bearing witness can thus sometimes feel incredibly burdensome, heavy in a way that replaces God’s grace with the demands of this leader or that one. Bearing witness can feel like an obligation none can really carry. Bearing witness can make us think that those who do not follow Jesus in this particular way are in danger of rejecting God’s grace, that our friends and family and even strangers whose stories we do not know must not be in touch with the same Jesus who has saved me from my sins.

In such accounts, “bearing witness” is not so much discipleship or faithfulness as it is an imposition upon others, a demand that God’s grace meet our pre-determined parameters. Witness in these approaches starts with me, with us, with what I and we must do and with what I and we know to be certain. And so I wonder if we have gotten “bearing witness” all wrong in too many churches. Some forms of witness misapprehend the God who calls us to be witnesses and misshapes the character of God’s grace. But the answer cannot be simply to drop the idea of bearing witness. In some churches bearing witness can seem simply out of bounds—something that churches over there do, but not us! In such churches the ways others have failed in bearing witness in a faithful way can be used as an excuse to ignore the call to make disciples and to witness to others about who God has been and what God has done. To abandon any hope to bear witness faithfully also gets witness all wrong. Instead, I would like to imagine witness as an invitation to see the ways the wildness and wideness of God’s grace spills over into our lives.

“Bearing witness,” you see, is not just an announcing with our lips of how we have come to understand God but also a form of listening to the ways God has moved in and acted among and shaped communities prior to our witness. That is, witness does not bring God’s presence into places previously devoid of the divine. No, our witness can notice, narrate, even interpret how God has moved ahead of us and in that way help us glimpse anew God’s expansive, disruptive, and transformative grace.

In the Acts of the Apostles—a rollicking tale of the ways God calls witnesses to the very edges of the ancient world’s cartographical imagination—we can catch a glimpse of a renewed imagination around witness and what kind of witness God might be calling followers of Jesus to bear today.

Acts of Witness

For many readers of Acts, Jesus’s exhortation to the disciples that they would “be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (1:8) serves as a table of contents for the book. The disciples begin to share the good news in Jerusalem at Pentecost and then proceed to share that good news in ever-widening circles. By the time the narrative closes, Paul is all the way in Rome.

I wonder if too many of us have read this call to be witnesses as a call simply to announce what God has done for me. We read Acts and see Peter standing at Pentecost, Stephen narrating Israel’s history before a crowd that would turn on him, Paul preaching at synagogues throughout the Mediterranean world, and we imagine that witness is primarily an act of declaration, speaking, announcing. But notice what actually happens in the narratives of Acts and in the sermons that proliferate in this story.

First, notice how regularly and consistently the disciples point to what God has done both in the past and in the present. Witness starts with announcing not what they know, not what they have concluded but what God has done. Think of Peter’s proclamation at Pentecost that notes how God manifests the proliferation of “… my Spirit upon all flesh…” (2:17a). I am struck, too, that in Peter’s witness, he preaches even beyond his immediate understanding. The same Peter who bears witness to God’s Spirit falling upon “all flesh” will have his imagination broadened by the Spirit’s disruptive presence when he meets Cornelius in Acts 10.

Second, notice how regularly and consistently the disciples point to the surprising ways God has acted, to the ways God has been faithful to God’s promises even as we sometimes have to wonder how God’s promises and actions cohere. The long and complex narrative of the encounter between Cornelius and Peter culminates in Peter’s proclamation, “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears [God] and does what is right is acceptable to [God]” (10:34). The same Peter who testified that the Spirit would fall upon “all flesh” had to draw near to Cornelius in order to really wrap his mind around that reality. God further surprises Peter, his companions, and Cornelius’ household when the Spirit interrupts Peter’s witness and falls upon all who had gathered (see 10:44!). God, it turns out, is in the business of surprising us, disrupting our assumptions about belonging. When God says “all flesh,” it turns out God actually and truly means “all flesh.” Bearing witness sometimes means being caught up in God’s surprising ways and making sense of them on the fly. Thus, witness might call us to name the disrupted assumptions about God and the shape of God’s grace we have carried with us.

Third, notice how regularly and consistently God’s activity happens in the background of the narrative. Think for instance of the surprising presence of Jesus followers in Rome when we reach the end of Acts with Paul in chains in the capital of the Empire. Who told them about Jesus? Who bore witness to God’s grace to them and helped form these communities of faith? Acts does not narrate those events. It is as if that witness happens in the background static that is God’s surprising activity.

A similar wondering emerges for me in the fabulous narrative of the Ethiopian eunuch’s encounter with Philip in 8:26–40. Philip encounters this educated and rich person whose identities—religious, ethnic, gendered—are complex. I want to turn our attention to the close of the story when after their baptism, the Ethiopian eunuch sees Philip no more and “goes on [their] way rejoicing” (8:39). Philip had been swept away to another place by the Spirit. What did the Ethiopian eunuch do next? Presumably, they returned home singing of the goodness of God’s grace all the way back to a place folks in the world around the Mediterranean might have accounted as “the ends of the earth.” This raises a number of questions.

What if the Ethiopian eunuch delivers the good news to the ends of the earth and thus fulfills the command Jesus gives his disciples in 1:8? What if the Ethiopian eunuch has fulfilled Jesus’s call, a call they did not receive from Jesus himself but from the Spirit that empowered both the disciples at Pentecost as well as the Ethiopian eunuch’s long return to “the ends of the earth?” And what if they did so, what if they bore witness to the goodness of God, and the church had no idea how far and how wide the news had spread? That is, imagine if Acts had continued beyond the twenty-eighth chapter to record a Jesus follower coming to Ethiopia, expecting to be the first to bring the story of Jesus only to discover that the Spirit had moved far ahead because an unnamed Ethiopian eunuch had already witnessed at the ends of the earth.

As it turns out, “bearing witness” needs to account for God’s propensity to make places we count as nowhere into God’s own home and to make peoples we tend to dismiss as outsiders or even interlopers into God’s own dwelling place. Witness never precedes God’s activity or calling. Witness always means swimming in the wake of God’s expansive, always surprising grace.

Centering Witness on God’s Activity

In recent days, I have been thinking of witness alongside the tragic succession of the deadly responses of police to Black women and men. Black communities have been sharing for a long time the dehumanizing and too often deadly encounters with police that shaped how children are taught and how communities struggle. These are old, old stories. And yet so many others did not believe the witness of Black communities until smartphones proliferated and such encounters could be captured digitally. For too many communities, even the testimony of multiple communities members was deemed insufficient. Too many—some naïve, some knowing and complicit—demanded proof, proof that has finally been coming, bearing grotesque but incontrovertible video witness to the truth of the witness of Black communities.

Witness is an act of trust in a God who sends us to see and tell of all the things God has been doing all along. It is also an act of trust that God will be present in places I have never been and among peoples not my own. It is an act of trust that the stories our neighbors tell are true, reliable, transformative.

“Bearing witness,” it turns out, is not a unilateral declaration of an idea, concept, or belief. Witness is not just a series of words or propositions we share with others. Witness is not the sharing of abstract, generic truths to those we assume are ignorant of them. Witness can only happen after my “ears to hear” have been listening carefully for the living Word among the words of erstwhile strangers, when my “eyes to see” have been seeing God’s grace at work among all peoples, and when my body is in diverse spaces. Only then will I notice how God has already acted, how God has already spoken. Only then will I be able faithfully to bear witness. That is, our witness is fundamentally a response to God’s gracious activity, to God’s prophetic call to justice and mercy, to the manifestation of God’s resurrection power unto the ends of the earth.

Eric D. Barreto is Weyerhaeuser Associate Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary. An ordained Baptist minister, he wrote Ethnic Negotiations: The Function of Race and Ethnicity in Acts 16 (Mohr Siebeck, 2010), co-authored Exploring the Bible (Fortress Press, 2016), and edited Reading Theologically (Fortress Press, 2014). Find Dr. Barreto here: ericbarreto.com and @ericbarreto