Yes, you read that right. What can I say? My first reason for doing Christianity falls pretty much into the area of “Tell me you’re a linguist without telling me you’re a linguist.”
They say physics is the queen of sciences, but I disagree. We can’t do physics without talking about language first.
More importantly, we can’t consider Christianity without talking about language first.
Signifier and its complement signified are terms you’ll unpack in any Linguistics 101 course. Probably somewhere at the very beginning because you can’t go very far without introducing them—language, after all, is a system of signs.
The term comes from the writings of a famed Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who’s also called the father of modern semiotics (=the science of signs).
De Saussure was trying to dissect how signage works—how meaning is infused into sounds, letters, gestures, visual representations, and the like.
He came up with a fundamental opposition of signifier vs. signified.
A signifier is a tangible sign. It’s mostly arbitrary, meaning there is no compelling reason why we should call the color that absorbs light “black” and the color that reflects it “white.” The individual sounds of “b-l-æ-k” are in themselves empty of meaning.
The signified is the notion we associate with the tangible sign—the typified, idealized description you find in a dictionary when you look a word up.
But then there’s the third term, the referent—the reality these two are trying to get at, in this case, the phenomenon of light reflection and its perception by the human eye.
There is a functional relationship between these three terms. But they can’t be equated with one another.
For example, if someone calls a woman “bipolar,” that’s a signifier. We can stop our analysis here and talk of the formal aspects only—the sounds making up the word, the pronunciations, the variants, the grammar, the origins, etc.
But what does this adjective mean? In other words, what is the signified associated with the signifier?
There are several options here. One is the actual mental disorder. But the adjective can also be used in the more general sense of “volatile, changeable, erratic,” often with negative connotations.
In this example, I told you it’s used about a woman, and we know this word often appears to denigrate women whose choices may be seen as going against the grain of a patriarchic society, especially if they were compliant with the rules for a long time and suddenly change their mind. (Oh, how suddenly, with no prior notice given whatsoever!)
The signified falls quite broadly in this case. What would be the referent, then?
The referent—the specific woman this word refers to—and the reality of the behavior described as bipolar both remain a mystery. So much so that de Saussure didn’t want to mess with that aspect, judging it beyond the scope of linguistics.
And we are opening a bit of a can of worms here because the truth is we don’t know what exactly is going on with the woman in question.
The adjective only takes us as far. Aside from being vague, it can be wrong, a deliberate lie, a mistake, or a misunderstanding.
But it can also start a conversation—a chain of reasoning that culminates in a discovery.
You probably see where I’m going with this. One of the reasons I still do Christianity is because I find the set of signifiers it furnishes very handy.
It provides a good starter kit for conceiving of the Sacred (=that which we call Sacred) and the spiritual (=that which we call spiritual. To a being like God, for example, there might be no spiritual and no physical, it might be all one and the same: “Everybody is alive to Him,” says Jesus in Luke 20:38.)
I often hear that Christianity (or any other religion, for that matter) gives you answers, but I don’t think it’s the right angle at all.
Instead, Christianity gives you the vocabulary you need to ask meaningful questions. (What is God like? What is spirit? What is salvation? What does it mean to atone for someone? What does forgiveness do? What does peace feel like? Where does shame come from? How did the idea of the afterlife develop?)
To me, Christianity offers the starter gear you take on a lifelong journey.
It also presents a resource for later, when you’re all scraped and sore and miserable, and you puzzle over the contents of your backpack, muttering, “What the hell was I thinking? I should rethink like half of this!”
This moment of regrouping will happen—time and again—as a matter of course.
That is why I also enjoy that the Christian discourse is centered around a library of books, even though there is some discussion about the contents of that library.
(I’m reading through a collection of pseudepigrapha now—basically, texts that didn’t make it into the Hebrew or Christian canon, with some exceptions in the Ethiopian and Syriac Christianity—and it’s eye-opening on so many different levels.)
Despite some disagreement on the canon, I enjoy the fact that, thanks to that specific library, the discourse is grounded, and the core signifiers are set. The source Text makes it hard, or at least harder, to drift into the frou-frou land of subjectivity and cliché.
The fact of the Text is unassailable. There is ongoing, peer-reviewed research into this one and similar ancient texts, like archeology, Ancient Near Eastern studies, and Semitic philologies.
This means that whatever your view of the Scriptures, they are a testimony to something tangible—at the very least, to the development of thinking-at-g/God.
This collection of texts makes the Christian discourse literary criticism by necessity. I think most troubles facing the church nowadays have less to do with dogma or ethics or the crisis of leadership and everything to do with the ignorance of how to read literature and poetry.
In this context of problematic modernity, I like the fact that Christianity is a long-standing religion.
The collection of texts now known as the Holy Scriptures has been developing over a period of close to two thousand years—hard to say how many exactly because you need to make space for oral traditions, family histories, possibly some early entertainment forms, and loose narratives floating around in a community until someone had the idea to weave a few together into a unit, put them in writing.
Then someone else thought, Let’s smooth it out a little.
Then someone else thought, These scrolls kind of go together, don’t they? And so on.
Along with the two thousand years of church history and writings, this makes for an impressive perspective—close to four thousand years of thinking in the direction of the sacred Referent.
I know it’s easy to get hung up on what orthodoxy looks like in the current Western tradition, or, more generally, the tradition we were raised in. But the Christian experience is unbounded by time, culture, or geography.
It’s hilarious to think that the “right belief” originated with the Reformation or the Evangelicals, or progressive Christianity, or whichever one is thought more equal than the others at the moment.
Whatever your doctrinal views, chances are they’ve already been considered. They could’ve been judged orthodox in one milieu or another. I, for one, like this diversity.
Above all, I like that the experience of the Sacred comes independently of these “winds of doctrine.”
As in my favorite book of the Bible, God appears to Job exactly when Elihu delivers a passionate speech about how God is way too transcendent and lofty to ever heed Job’s plea for a revelation.
Finally, here’s the touching thing—in Christianity, we’re not alone in our grasping at the divine Referent.
One of the essential characteristics of the Christian God—that which we call the Christian God—is that They want to be known.
They reveal themselves. They break the silence. They accept the imperfect signifiers we throw in their direction. They work within the cages we erect in fear around the Unknown.
You can see this tension in the Scriptures, too.
When God first appears, They are Elohim (importantly, in the plural, though the Hebrew verb is in the singular. Right away, in the very first verse of the Bible, the signifiers break down—the language falls off. In an irretrievably gendered world, how do you talk of a genderless Being? How do you talk of a Group that acts like One?)
They are also El, literally G/god, but also the highest god of the Canaanite pantheon, a god of creation and fertility, represented by a bull.
They are Yahweh—a god who came from nowhere (scientists are still arguing about his origins), possibly from Edom (?), a god of warfare and storm.
There were narratives and myths associated with the two deities, and you can see these traditions reflected in the Old Testament Scriptures.
You can also see the familiar tribalism, the squabbles.
I got my god on a string. He (He, of course! The ultimate Male!) is better than yours, and he hates you. He created all things, but for some reason, I am His favorite.
(A common theme in many world mythologies: We are the Creator’s pet. There is no humanity apart from us.)
Still, the Referent is patient with this pettiness.
From Their direction, all these little hints reach us through the fog of our fear and arrogance.
No, that’s not me at all. This is who I am.
I don’t come in the storm or an earthquake, Elijah. I come in a soft whisper.
Then, after all these hints, the Referent did something else.
They became flesh. Dwelled among us. Used our crude signifiers to talk of the reality They knew firsthand.
It was absurd at times, of course. People laughed. Threw stones.
He—yes, it had to be a He so people would listen—remarked once, “You’re poring over all these Scriptures like your lives depended on it, but they all point to me!”
“Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets. But in these last days, He has spoken to us through His Son”—a lot of signifiers to unpack here.
This set of signifiers is one reason I still find myself doing Christianity with interest.
Love this!