The gospel of John equates Christ with the Logos who is both with God and is God. The term Logos comes from Greek thought and has been translated as the “Word” in Christian parlance. With this move of Logos as Word, it is no wonder that words and language become identified with the nature of God Himself.
From this, it is only a tiny step away from the privileging of words, linguistic concepts, and verbosity over wordlessness, non-conceptuality, and silence. Hence, the resultant obsession with and attachment to words, concepts, and verbosity on the part of large swathes of the Christian church, particularly in evangelicalism. To me, this is tragic.
Our perspective warped, we fail to acknowledge the wordless, non-conceptual, and silent nature of God in His essential being. We caricature God as incessantly speaking and verbose, a wordy God but never a silent quiescent God. By extension, we feel compelled to be verbose and wordy as well. We privilege conceptual linguistic modes of prayer and worship, to the extent that we demonize wordlessness, non-conceptuality, and silence.
From endless verbosity stems endless activity, busyness, distractedness, and attachments. The sense of egocentric self gets pumped up in this frenetic quagmire of wordiness, narratives, and concomitant self-making. For the construction of self and identity is inextricable from our constant chattering and conceptualizing.
Fearful and resistant, we forget that we may have misread the nature of God rooted in our misreading of the term Logos. By reclaiming the full orb of meanings of the term Logos—looking to dimensions of this concept that speak to the rational principle or logical order of the universe, which exists and is true regardless of the words used to express that order and thus is not necessarily linguistic—we may yet fathom God in renewed ways that incidentally show more consonance with non-western, non-Hellenistic paradigms. I can think of Asian notions of the Dao 道 and Dhamma/Dharma 法.
Seen in this light, it stands to reason that Christians may well have much to learn from Asian traditions that have plumbed the heights, depths, lengths, and breadths of the Dao and Dharma free from the contortions of post-Christian Hellenistic thought.
