What Do Names Do? Do They Reflect or Do They Evoke?

What Do Names Do?  Do They Reflect or Do They Evoke?

The opening words of Martin Buber’s magnum opus, I and Thou, begin: “Basic words do not state something that might exist outside them; by being spoken they establish a mode of existence.”

When Buber says that “Basic words do not state something that might exist outside them,” he is gesturing toward a fundamental divide between two very different ways of understanding the status of language.  For purposes of this essay, I’ll say that that distinction rests somewhere between “reflection” and “evocation.”  And by that I mean that some hold that their words accurately reflect what is outside them and others hold that their words evoke meaningful perspectives that enable the contours of human life to be defined in particular ways.  Let’s look at this distinction a bit more closely.

Most of us hold to a fundamentally modern understanding of language.  On this account, words refer to features of the environment that exist outside them.  And these words can more or less accurately fit, or reflect, the features of the world that exists beyond them.  So we place a lot of emphasis on precise measurement (because we presume words can accurately reflect what is being spoken about) and evidence accumulation and empirical testing (because we presume enough words that correspond to visible facts add up to a coherent, rational and true picture of what exists outside).  This is the mainstay of modern apologetic exercises such as Josh McDowell’s Evidence that Demands a Verdict.

At the same time, when Buber says that spoken words “establish a mode of existence” he is gesturing toward the other side of the fundamental divide.  Instead of accurately reflecting features of the world, language is seen as evoking meaningful relationships with one’s self, one’s neighbors and one’s God.  Or to quote Walter Brueggemann at length:

Our new intellectual environment acknowledges that human agents are in process of constituting reality and that formative work is done through rhetoric.  This means that speech is not merely descriptive, but it is in some sense evocative of reality and constitutive of reality.  Indeed, even the older assertion that speech only describes is itself an act of advocacy.  That claim did not appear to be an act of advocacy because all counteradvocacies were driven from the field by the domination textured as objectivity.

And in line with Buber and Brueggemann, I would submit that in Genesis we can easily see how language, specifically our God-given capacity to name and so constitute our world in meaningful terms, is more evocative than it is a matter of accuracy.  Look closely at the passage in Genesis:

Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky.  He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.  So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals.

Now it’s clear that man did not make the animals, God created them all.  How did he create them?  He spoke them into existence.  Just a few passages earlier God said: “‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”  The Word of God evokes a reality, as the Book of Genesis shows.  Similarly, in bringing the animals to man so that he could name them, God bestowed upon man the basic conditions for agency.  Using a name, indeed the act of speaking, is a great responsibility with concrete consequences.  Witnessing (that is, speaking and living as a parable of Christ) the gospel of Jesus Christ to others can transform lives.  Singing and praying aloud together builds and sustains community bonds.  And boldly speaking in His name can get you and your companions killed as we see time and again in the Gospels and Acts.  Our God-given capacity to speak words and use names are fundamental to living in the Way.  They are how we humans can constitute the reality of the Kingdom of God, which is at hand and equally on the tip of our tongues, here on earth.  Our efforts are weak, faltering, broken and ever incomplete and so we pray “kingdom come,” which means that we pray for the kingdom to “take over at all points in the personal, social, and political order where it is now excluded,” to use Dallas Willard’s words.  The Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven is co-created by God and man through Jesus Christ, through His Way and Light made flesh in us.

What do words do?  I’ve argued that by speaking words we evoke worlds into meaningful existence.  Our words don’t accurately reflect features of the surrounding environment; rather, they demarcate those features and make them significant to us and our way of life.  A cow is a cow not because it is a cow, but because we name it “cow” and make it so, as God allowed us to do.  This entails that doctrines and denominational platforms, for instance, that take up reams of paper and righteous effort are words that do not reflect any necessary feature of God or His Way, they do not name any essential features of our spiritual environment.  Rather, doctrines are officially accepted names and stories that demarcate one segment of believers who follow the word and way of God in their own idiosyncratic fashion from other segments of believers who follow God differently.  This is both a freeing notion and a frightening notion.  It entails that what words we use, in whose name we act, and with whose story we align ourselves, we are in some sense evoking a world into existence and supporting and sustaining the kingdom of heaven on earth, or we aren‘t.  Discerning what words to use and when to use the appropriate name and tell the appropriate story is part of the difficult task of the disciple trying to walk through the narrow gate.