I was in the States for 8th grade, and near the end of the year was getting ready to go on a summer mission trip to Mexico with a friend’s youth group. One day as we were getting ready for P.E. and reflecting on the orientation meeting we’d been to the night before where we began learning basic Spanish phrases. Our conversation went like this:
her: “Why do we have to learn Spanish? Why doesn’t everyone just speak the same language?”
Me: “it’s because we messed up at the Tower of Babel.”
Her: “…the tower of what-now?”
This morning I was reminded of that situation during my morning Bible/coffee/journal time.
So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the languages of all the earth, and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth (Gen. 11:8-9).
What struck me this morning was not the confusing of the languages. This morning my mind went to the divisions within the Church…the variety of theological languages. In the story of the Tower of Babel, God confuses the people’s languages so that it’s not as easy for them to work together, so that they give up building a tower that reaches to heaven. I will often hear people wonder why there are so many divisions within the Christian church…why there are so many denominations and perspectives. And I wonder if this story of the Tower of Babel applies, somehow. The danger of a dictator is a lack of accountability. The danger of a monopoly is total control and a lack of competition. I wonder if the danger of a unified theological language is a lack of humility. With the scattering of theological languages, it is harder for us to ‘build a tower to heaven.’ “God”–the divine…whatever you want to call it–remains mysterious and slightly out of our individual and collective reach. Many of our questions remain unanswered. There is still much we do not…and cannot…know about the Divine.
And that is good.
The New Testament story of Pentecost in Acts 2 is frequently set against the story of the Tower of Babel. In Genesis, the one language is confused into multiple languages, and people are scattered. In Acts, people from around the world hear the Good News in their own language. To me, that’s a call to embrace the variety, not try to eliminate it. The different ways we speak about God keep us humble and remind us that finally ‘God’ is beyond each of our languages and beyond the sum of all our languages. The point is not to achieve a unified understanding of this Divine Mystery…the point is not to build a tower that reaches Heaven. Perhaps ‘God’ wants to remain a bit out of our reach…a bit beyond our comprehension. Why? Because the mystery leads to interdependence, relationship, wondering, discovery.
I just wish we weren’t so possessive of ‘our language’ as the ‘right’ or ‘supreme’ language to speak about God. I wish we were better at seeing the beauty in these multi-lingual expressions, and better able to embrace that this thing we’re each trying to describe, experience, access, explain…is WAY broader and more mysterious than any one way of talking about it.