English professor Portia Hopkins joins Mark and Rex to discuss the role language plays in theology. They note that all theology is shaped by language and it is extremely important for the church and the Christian today to be aware of the theological and social implications of language.

TRANSCRIPT

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Welcome to Jessup think I'm your host Mark Moore, and Rex Gurney your co host. That's right. And on today's episode, we're joined by, by a heavy hitter,

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Portia Hopkins, former chair of our English department, and still a mainstay of it.

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Yeah. And we have a conversation that covers theology and language and specifically how language affects theology. And it's a fascinating conversation. And so we hope you enjoy. Yeah.

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Well, yeah, and today, we really do want to talk about the topic of language in theology, and specifically how language affects theology. And for me that this, this kind of idea, or this topic was really illuminated by a radio lab episode. So radio lab comes out of W. NYC. And they were kind of, I would say, they're kind of pioneers on that hybrid between radio shows and podcasts. And I actually have my theology class, they have to listen to a segment. So there's nothing on the screen Actually, we had to put like a moving picture on the screen just because I'm like, I know you need something so like, is that hard for them to do? They like squirming? Yeah, I know, like, we're gonna well up all of our maturity. And we're gonna listen. I also have to, you know, explain to him what the radio is. You know, it used to be a thing where you didn't get to choose what was on it, you get to choose the channel and turn it on or off. But But radiolab did a an episode, actually, it was an episode on color, and how we see colors where they came into, or you know, as we started to kind of denote when they came in the language, things like that. And they do a segment on the color blue is just fascinating. So they kind of start with looking at ancient writings. So ancient Greek looking at Homer specifically. And they realized through it actually, it's actually through a guy named William Gladstone. So he was like a four time or five time Prime Minister of England, he just loved Homer. So he wrote, like a three volume, like, just the epic tome on on Homer. And he started to notice when he was doing that, that Homer used color in really weird ways. And then he came to that really shocking conclusion. He doesn't use blue at all, like not one time, which is really amazing. I mean, I think and even when I heard that, I was like, well, we I mean, blue is many people's favorite color. So yeah, you know, and, and within the episode, they switch, they kind of start with that, which that was intriguing. They switch to he's a professor of neuro psychology, and he's working with a tribe in Namibia. And, and they don't have a separate word for blue. And so he showed them a screen with 1212 squares on it. And 11 of them are very well, we would call green. I mean, they they look green, and then one of them is blue. I mean, it is the blue is blue, you've seen and that tribe members as they would look at the screen, couldn't didn't notice a difference. Like he would ask them, did any of the squares look different to you? and not do you can you know, a difference just and they double check that none of them are colorblind? Yeah, like that does as an issue, like some of our friends that we may remain nameless. But, but they didn't have that word. And so that's kind of like the, and they kind of noted like, it wasn't that they couldn't physically see it, they were seeing it. But the word somehow unlocked their ability to see it right. Or to see the difference in man, that concept of me just was like, wow, that like that really brought to the forefront like Oh, how language and it made me think of this the word God. I mean, many times we don't realize this, but God did not give himself the name God, that Go