Language is an immaterial feature that the Creator integrated into the whole of his vast material creation. Every aspect of God’s visible creation undeniably speaks a language testifying to its Creator, who integrated an inherent affinity between his material and immaterial creation. Thus, embedded in the vast heavens is a language declaring God’s glory, speaking without speech, revealing knowledge without words, and uttering truth without sound. This is what David, the psalmist, affirms, “Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world” (Ps. 19:1–4). Likewise, within each species of animals, our Creator, in his eternal wisdom, implanted a language, an ability for them to communicate through sounds, gestures, and instincts uniquely suited to their respective natures. Birds signal others with intricate songs, bees dance to direct others to nectar sources, and wolves howl in unison to signal unity or claim territory. These forms of communication, though frequently overlooked, are profound reminders that every creature, animate or not, in God’s creation has a language.
Far more profound is man’s language, which, contrary to frequent assertions, is not a human construct but a gift bequeathed by God. We speak only because our Creator, who speaks, bestowed the gift of speech to man formed after the likeness of God, who creates, reveals, relates, and redeems. When God spoke both material and immaterial creation into existence and endowed man with the skill of language, speech with words became a crucial, integrated feature of the created order. Hence, from the beginning, the Creator’s word communication with and among humans prophetically anticipated its mysterious fulfillment in the incarnation of Jesus Christ—the Word of God made flesh. This article explores the theological trajectory of language, from its origin in God, whose creation foreshadows the new creation, reaching its culmination in the Incarnate Word, offering a vision of language not only as a means of human expression but as a divine medium for revelation and communion.[1]
1. Readers who desire to explore a theology of language in greater depth may consider Vern Sheridan Poythress, In the Beginning Was the Word: Language, A God-Centered Approach (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009).
1. Because God Speaks, Man Speaks
Genesis 1 reveals that God’s reported speech is performative, creating reality from nothing.[2] He spoke the entire creation into existence throughout six consecutive days, with words of command to form the heavens and shape the earth (Gen. 1:1–2). He spoke and light burst forth, separating the light from the darkness, which he named Day and Night (Gen. 1:3–6). God’s speech separated the waters above and below (Gen. 1:6–8), divided the seas and dry land (Gen. 1:9–10), populated the earth with vegetation (Gen. 1:11–13), hung the sun and moon and heavenly lights in the sky as lights to rule the day and the night (Gen. 1:14–19), filled the seas with living creatures and the sky with birds (Gen. 1:20–23), and ordered the earth to bring forth living creatures according to their designated kinds (Gen. 1:24–25).
2. Philosophers of language call this a “speech-act.” See Gregg Allison’s Christ Over All article, “Speech Act Theory, Scripture, and the Holy Spirit.”
Then, on the sixth day, the Creator’s performative, creative speech turned to divine deliberative discourse: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” to have dominion over the creatures that fill the seas, the heavens, and the land (Gen. 1:26). Unique among the Creator’s land-dwelling creatures is the last one formed from the dust of the earth, as with the land animals. By forming man after his likeness and in his image, the Creator distinguished man from every other aspect of his creation (the heavens, the earth, vegetation, and animals), all of which speak wordless languages. All man’s essential qualities reflect God, his person, attributes, and senses. Because the Creator formed man to resemble his own likeness, God, who sees, hears, and speaks, bequeathed to man eyes, ears, and a mouth. Hence, our ability to acquire and intelligently employ a language, or more than one, is no mere tool for communicating with one another, but a medium for praising the Lord God who made us in harmony with creation’s wordless praise. Formed in God’s likeness, we see, hear, and speak because our Maker sees, hears, and speaks, a point implicit in the rhetorical questions of Psalm 94:8–9.
8 Take notice, you senseless ones among the people;
you fools, when will you become wise?
9 Does he who fashioned the ear not hear?
Does he who formed the eye not see?
We are replicas of our Creator; he is not a copy of us. Thus, Moisés Silva reasonably observes that while we speak of anthropomorphisms that portray God with human attributes, we may better speak of ourselves as theomorphisms, because we are formed after his likeness, not he in our image.[3]
3. Moisés Silva, God, Language, and Scripture: Reading the Bible in the Light of General Linguistics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990), 22. My own work on God’s revelation and the function of anthropomorphism convinces me that its proper definition emerges from the soil of Scripture: “Because God formed Adam from the ‘dust of the earth’ and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, making him in his own image and likeness, God makes himself known to his creatures in their likeness, as if he wears both their form and qualities, when in fact they wear his likeness” (Ardel B. Caneday, “Veiled Glory: God’s Self-Revelation in Human Likeness—A Biblical Theology of God’s Anthropomorphic Self-Disclosure,” in Beyond the Bounds: Open Theism and the Undermining of Biblical Christianity, eds. John Piper, Justin Taylor, Paul Kjoss Helseth (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2003), 161.
Adam’s assigned role was to till and guard the Garden of Eden without eating fruit from the one tree God banned with speech: “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:15–17). Then, to instruct the man that his solitude called for a complementary mate, God required him to name the animals (Gen. 2:18–20). Made after God’s likeness, man—chief among the creatures—imitated his Creator by classifying the animals. Like his Creator, Adam engaged in performative speech, which was no mere zoological exercise, but an act implying perception, discernment, and authority. Adam received dominion over the earth’s creatures in keeping with the Creator’s design by carrying out a significant aspect of his divine image-bearing. He employed his God-given language to participate in God’s creative design as a steward over creation through understanding, naming, and exercising dominion. This assignment taught him that none of the creatures he classified corresponded with his creational design, preparing the man to welcome a mate who would complement him in every way, including bodily, for an intimate familial relationship, akin to what he witnessed among the animals. Thus, the Creator formed man’s companion, not from the ground but from a portion of his side, whom Adam called Woman “because she was taken out of Man” (Gen. 2:21–23). “So, God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27).[4]
4. For a brief but potent read concerning these issues, see Vernard Eller, The Language of Canaan and the Grammar of Feminism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982).
2. God’s Speech Structures Man’s Speech—All Languages Are Ordered by God
Language, which the Creator bequeathed to man, is not a human social construct but a cognitive creaturely structure resembling intra-Trinitarian communication. God designed our speech to function as an integrated representation of reality, visible and invisible. This representation is grounded in divine truth, which establishes language as a medium through which humans can relate, understand, and communicate the order of creation. The Creator wove the essence of speech into the fabric of material and immaterial existence, making words not only a means of expression but a reflection of the divine order and purpose. Thus, human language, bestowed by God, serves as a testament to the inherent harmony and structure within God’s created order, a testament that ultimately finds its profound fulfillment in the Incarnate Word, Jesus Christ.
Yet, the original harmony of the Divine Word, man, and world became ruptured through the sinful corruption of language, which exploited speech contrary to its created design: truth-telling, a spoken correspondence to reality. Man’s sin originated from yielding to a false verbal representation of reality when the serpent disputed the Creator’s prohibitive command: “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” (Gen. 3:1). The serpent uttered a lie: “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:4). Language, the God-given aural vehicle for conveying truth, became a tool for deceit and all kinds of evil. The man and his wife “exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Rom. 1:25).
Instead of obeying God’s first command, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen. 1:28), like Adam, humans became disobedient, proud, and rebellious. Instead of obeying this cultural mandate to take dominion of the whole earth, they exploited the Creator’s bequeathed singular unifying language to construct a culture that defied the Creator. They gathered in one place, built a high tower, and defied God’s command to fill the earth (Gen. 11:1–9). Consequently, God judged humanity by fragmenting his bequeathed solitary language into numerous tongues, scattering the people across the face of the earth into countless groups divided by tongues, each with languages they understood in common. The implication is that individuals within the same families could not understand one another. So, they formed new relationships with others and bonded together around newly shared speech patterns.
Until Babel, all human speech adhered to a single, common language, an invisible but discernible structured system governing how words and sentences formed and were understood. The Creator, who authorized the universal grammar rules that provided the framework enabling humans to communicate clearly and effectively, from that one common language established thousands of different languages, dividing humans by the strange sounds their tongues spoke, their ears heard, and their minds processed. Previously unknown sentence structures (syntax), word formations (morphology), sound systems (phonology), word meanings (semantics), and the uses of language in context (pragmatics) erupted, generating a din of sounds that separated individuals from established relationships and attracted them to strangers whose words they understood.
As numerous and diverse as the languages became when God generated them from one common source at Babel, all reflected divinely authorized rules and patterns. The rules of any language, often referred to as its grammar, function both prescriptively and descriptively as a structured system that governs how words and sentences are formed and understood.[5] These guardrails provide a framework that instructs users how to speak or write to communicate clearly and effectively. These governing patterns include syntax (sentence structure), morphology (word formation), phonology (sound systems), semantics (meaning), pragmatics (language use in context), and phonics (correlation of sounds and written symbols). Native speakers and writers instinctively internalize these rules, so when English speakers use multiple adjectives to describe an object or a person, even if they cannot articulate the rule, they correctly rank them according to the following order: opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, and purpose.[6] This inviolable hierarchical order reflects not a human artifice but God’s created order. Thus, “My Greek Fat Big Wedding” is a violation of nature, as is an “old kind woman” or a “leather office green chair.” Yet, violations of another simpler grammar rule abound even among academics. For clarity, a single-word restrictive modifier must be placed directly before the word it restricts. Yet, English speakers, including scholars, routinely misplace the restrictive modifier, creating ambiguity, confusion, even theological error, as with the Beach Boys’ song, “God Only Knows.” As written, the title puts a restriction on God instead of on all others except God: “Only God Knows.”
5. Educators, editors, and style guides rely on and enforce grammar as prescriptive, instructing language users how they should speak or write according to received established standards. On the other hand, linguists tend to speak of grammar as descriptive, portraying how language is used by speakers without rendering assessments of accuracy. While grammar books tend to prescribe how to use a language correctly, by collating how speakers and writers use a language, dictionaries describe real-world usage.
6. See Tim Dowling, “Order Force: The Old Grammar Rule We All Obey Without Realising,” The Guardian (Sept. 13, 2016).
3. The Prophetic Word: Revelation Through Language
Despite sin’s inherent corrosion of language and sinful humans’ calculated corruption of communication for malevolent purposes, God continues to speak to sinful humans. Throughout the Old Testament, God chose prophets as his mouthpieces. The formula “Thus says the Lord” appears repeatedly, affirming that divine speech is mediated through human language, which itself needs redemption from the decay of depravity. The prophets do not merely deliver messages; they also embody them, living out God’s Word in dramatic, symbolic, and often costly ways.
The revelation of God in the Old Testament is intensely verbal. The Torah is written, read aloud, and memorized. The Psalms, Israel’s hymnbook, teach how to pray and sing God’s words back to him as praise. The covenants are linguistic realities grounded in God’s promises and stipulating belief that springs into obedience. God’s self-revelation, while sometimes manifest in visions and miracles, is most frequently and enduringly expressed through words.
Yet the limitations of human language remain evident. God’s ineffability constantly presses against the constraints of human language. God is utterly holy. His thoughts are not our thoughts (Isa. 55:8–9). The prophets themselves struggle to articulate the fullness of divine revelation. Moses says he is “slow of speech” (Ex. 4:10). Jeremiah objects that he is too young (Jer. 1:6). The Word of God is both near and transcendent, intimate and overwhelming.
4. The Word Incarnate: Christ as Fulfillment of Language
Many mistakenly adopt the notion that John’s Gospel correlates the Word which was “in the beginning with God . . . and was God” with the Logos of Hellenistic philosophy found in Stoicism and Philo’s writings. The Word of whom John wrote is not an abstraction or intermediary but personal. He is God become human. Long before John wrote, “And the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us,” (John 1:14), the Old Testament frequently presented “the Word of the Lord” as God personified. The psalmist declares, “The heavens were made by the word of the Lord, and all the stars, by the breath of His mouth” (Ps. 33:6). Likewise, the prophet announces, “Then the word of the Lord came to Isaiah” (Isa. 38:4; cf. Jer. 1:4; Ezek. 1:3). “The word of God” brings judgment and deliverance (Isa. 55:11; Ps. 29:3–5). “The word of God” heals Israelites from a disease that inflicts certain death (Ps. 107:20). It is not in doubt that the Old Testament influenced John to write “the Word was God.”
The Word’s incarnation is the climactic embodiment of the theology of language. In Jesus Christ, God does not merely speak another message. God is the Word; he is the Message in human flesh. The Word, eternally with God, takes on flesh and enters human history, human culture, and human language. The Word incarnate is no metaphor but a miracle.
Christ’s Incarnation is not only the union of divine and human natures, but the union of divine and human language. Jesus speaks in Aramaic, reads the Hebrew Scriptures, and engages with Greek-speaking Gentiles. He teaches in parables, debates the Pharisees, comforts the grieving, and cries out from the cross. Every word the Word speaks is the Word of God, but now in human form, speaking human words.
The Word, who spoke the heavens and earth into existence long ago, is the same Word whose performative words inaugurated the new creation by opening and closing ears as he taught the crowds, healed maladies, forgave sins, exorcised demons, created wine from water, fed a vast multitude, and raised the dead. He decreed the leper, “Be clean,” and it was so (Mark 1:41–42). Again, he commanded Lazarus, “Come out,” and the dead man arose and emerged from his tomb (John 11:43). With access to the Word, the four Evangelists preserve fragments of intra-Trinitarian communication as when a Voice from heaven declares at his baptism, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11) and a Voice from the cloud announces at his transfiguration, “This is my beloved Son; listen to him (Mark 9:7). Yet, the time came when the Incarnate Word also embodied God’s silence. On the cross, the Word cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34; Ps. 22:1), but Heaven was both dark and silent. At last, alone, he uttered the fulfilling performative utterance, “It is finished” (John 19:30), signifying the fulfillment of the Word’s redemptive mission.
5. Pentecost and the Redemption of Language
A fitting theology of language does not terminate at the cross because the Word of Life arose from the tomb. Thus, on Pentecost, the Word poured out the promised Spirit, empowering the apostles to speak in multiple languages the wonderful works of God in Christ Jesus (Acts 2:4). Pentecost in Jerusalem was more than a reversal of Babel’s judgment. Whereas Babel signaled God’s scattering judgment by confusing tongues to render family members strangers to one another, Pentecost signified the Spirit’s unifying blessing, enabling strangers to hear and comprehend the message concerning the Word in their own tongues.
The early church became a multilingual, multicultural body bound not by a single language but by the single Word—Jesus Christ. The New Testament, written in Greek, the lingua franca of the Roman Empire, spread the Gospel far beyond its Hebrew roots. The Word, who came from heaven to tabernacle among us, is to be proclaimed to all the nations. Hence, a theology of language calls for the Scriptures to be translated into every tongue to aid in proclaiming the Word of the Lord and the discipling of all the nations.
Conclusion: The Word Who Reveals God to Us is Now Our Word with God
The story of language in Scripture begins with God’s speech creating all things and climaxes with speech that redeems. From the “Let there be” of Genesis to the “It is finished” of the cross, and onward to the “Come, Lord Jesus” of Revelation, language is the thread that ties creation to new creation.
With the coming of Christ, the Word is no longer only spoken, but embodied in human flesh. The Word, who was with God and is God, made known him whom no one has ever seen, the immortal, invisible, the only God (John 1:1; 1 Tim. 1:15–17). To fulfill his mission, the infinite took on finitude, the transcendent became immanent, and the eternal became bounded in time. Here is his glory: the Word who was with God, who inhabited the prophets’ speech and numerous prefigurations for long ages, stooped to clothe himself with flesh to dwell among us, becoming our redeeming Word, whose “sprinkled blood speaks a better word than the blood of Abel” (Heb. 12:24), for the Word is now exalted to the right hand of God where he speaks for us, pleading his own sacrificial death on our behalf that we shall never again be separated from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom. 8:31–39).
