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New Poythress Book on a God-Centered Approach to Language

PoythressITBHere are a couple of blurbs for Vern Poythress’s new book, In the Beginning Was the Word: Language, A God-Centered Approach:

“This book represents a lifetime of theological thinking about the significance of language: about God’s involvement with language, the nature of language itself from phonemes to literary genres, and the diverse ways humans interact with one another, and with God, through language. Here one finds not only a biblical but a systematic theology of language built on the insight that human language reflects the triune God, sometimes in surprising ways. And Poythress includes significant appendices analyzing language in postmodernism, translation theory, speech acts, deconstruction, and more.”
– KEVIN J. VANHOOZER, Blanchard Professor of Theology, Wheaton College

“Poythress does not merely claim that the discipline of linguistics allows a place for God, or that a theistic worldview provides useful context, or that engagement in such studies is somehow useful to Christians. Rather, he comes right in your face with the claims of Christ: God is not merely a possibility, not merely a conclusion, but the starting point for any understanding at all. The present book on language shows that the foundation of human speech is the speech between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, so that without God meaningful language would be impossible. This book is essential for anyone who would pursue an understanding of language. It is also a great help to those troubled by contemporary challenges to the very possibility of meaningful communication”
– JOHN M. FRAME, Professor of Systematic Theology and Philosophy, Reformed Theological Seminary

You can read chapters 1 and2 online: “The Importance of Language,” and “Language and the Trinity.” In fact, Poythress has made the entire book available for free online (in PDF) on his website.

The book is divided into six parts:

  1. God’s Involvement with Language
  2. From Big to Small: Language in the Context of History
  3. Discourse
  4. Stories
  5. Smaller Packages in Language: Sentences and Words
  6. Application

Then nine appendices offer Interaction with Other Approaches to Language.

In a recent interview with John Starke about the book, Poythress expresses his hopes for the book:

I hope that readers will grow in praising God for language.

I hope that they will grow in appreciating the highly tuned complexities of language, and avoid simplistic accounts of language origins and the nature of meaning; that they will avoid in particular modernism, which tends to want to make human meaning infinitely precise, and postmodernism, which tends to multiply meanings without having a divine standard for judgment.

I hope also that they will come away with a robust view of language capable of withstanding the assaults of postmodernist skepticism.

Finally, I hope that readers will take away a robust Christian view of narrative. Narratives (stories) have an immense interest both for common people and for sophisticated intellectualist analysis in our day. I believe that God’s acts in history, in working out redemption through Jesus Christ, are the backbone in relation to narratives in general. There is much potential here, I believe, for a Christian answer to those who reduce theology to stories, as well as to those who enjoy movies but have no inkling of the fact that their interest in the stories told in movies is tied in to the human longing for redemption, which can be satisfied only in Christ.

The book is also available from Amazon.

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