Changing Signs of Truth: A Christian Introduction to the Semiotics of Communication

by Crystal L. Downing

Because Protestants define themselves in contradistinction to their Roman Catholic "parents," they vilify those parents in order to avoid regarding themselves as delinquent children-much as hippies vilified the "Establishment" values of their parents. Similarly, since the Western church-what we now call Roman Catholic-defined itself against Judaism, it tended to vilify its "parents": those Jews who did not follow Christ.20

Influenced by Kant, G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) developed a model of human progress toward absolute knowledge, which he equated with God. Individual minds, inevitably "alienated" from the universal spirit of absolute knowledge, attain self-consciousness the closer they get to this absolute. This process of advancement has become known as "the Hegelian dialectic": progress occurs when accepted signs of truth (an established "thesis") are challenged by contrary signs (an "antithesis") until the best of both are united in a higher understanding of truth: a "synthesis."22

Hegel put mind first in order to emphasize how consciousness shapes society, Marx put economic conditions first in order to emphasize how society shapes consciousness.

Marx focused on progress in the production of material goods.26 Marx's view is therefore called "dialectical materialism."

Marxism establishes capitalism as the thesis of nineteenth-century European culture: bourgeois businessmen own modes of production like factories, hiring working-class people-the proletariat-to make money that benefits not the workers but the capitalist bourgeoisie. The proletariat goes along with the system because capitalist assumptions have molded their minds, alienating them from their own self-interest. The b...

Strauss published The Christ of Belief and the Jesus ofI-listory (1865), establishing a dialectic that still functions among many scholars today: the thesis of Christ's divinity, undermined by the antithesis of Enlightenment reason, is synthesized by Christians who want to follow Jesus without believing in the supernatural. Known as "demythologizers," such Christians often feel quite enlightened in their de-mystification of the past, while remaining naive about their equal but opposite mystification of the future. Believing in human progress, they have merely substituted a doctrine of Enlightenment humanism for belief in the divinity of Jesus.

Christian signs change over time, usually in response to cultural influences. In the case of "fundamentalism," connotations of the sign shifted due to those Christians who applied "inerrancy" to the scientific accuracy of Scripture-even though the Bible was obviously not intended to be a scientific treatise.

Irish Protestant James Ussher (1581-1656), who published a timeline of the Old Testament in 1650. Basing his timeline on the stated ages of the patriarchs and the number of"begats" chronicled in the Old Testament, as well as upon the suggestions of earlier scholars, Ussher argued that the Earth was created the evening before October 23, 4004 B.c.

thinking they were protecting the Bible as an inerrant source of truth, they were actually proclaiming a human interpretation of the Bible as inerrant.

The sign "fundamentalist" thus changed meaning since its original reference to the modernist-fundamentalist debates. And it continues to change. In our own day it has become a sign of any person-whether liberal or conservative-who so mystifies their position that they refuse to value people who disagree with them.

The certitude manifest in both kinds of Christians -convinced of the absolute truth of their party's position-demonstrates what one specialist in sign theory calls the "Fundamentalist Fallacy... instantiated when one assumes that his/her own philosophy is the only valid philosophy ... (and demands a universal agreement on such a statement).1134

In The French Revolution: AHistory (1837), Carlyle noted that during an assembly convened soon after the fall of the Bastille (1789), revolutionaries in favor of conserving the president's agenda sat at his right hand, while those who wanted to change it sat to his left. Carlyle thereafter referred to "the Left" and "the Right" to describe their differing positions.36 Thanks to Carlyle's signs, people who want to conserve tradition tend to be aligned with the political "right" while people who advocate change tend to be aligned with the political "left."

Christians on the edge, of course, read it both ways, acknowledging that we still worship Yahweh even as we study the changing signs by which Yahweh is revealed: from God's tongue speaking out of the burning bush in the Pentateuch to God's tongues burning above speakers at Pentecost. Pentecost itself illustrates the (re)signing of truth: the tongues of fire recorded in Acts 2 were new signs given to followers of Jesus who had worshipfully re-signed themselves to the traditional celebration of Pentecost, a Jewish festival held seven weeks and a day after Passover.

The original audience of the "good news"-whether shepherds or readers of Luke's Gospel-would have recognized "this will be a sign for you" as part of Jewish tradition, repeated often in the Hebrew Scriptures: Exodus 13:9; Joshua 4:6; 1 Samuel 2:34; 14:10; 2 Kings 19:29; Isaiah 37:30; 38:7; Jeremiah 44:29 (and many other variations). The phrase therefore signaled ancient truths, each "sign" standing for God's Word. And we are to assume the same about the "sign" lying in a manger.

Jesus recognizes that to be human is to be embedded in a particular society. Humans understand God according to the language-the traditional signs-of their culture. Jesus was embedded in culture as well;

to deny that Jesus was embedded in signs of his times would be to deny his humanity.

Those who legalistically maintain the sabbath, therefore, act as though God desires the flourishing of the sign itselfrather than of what it stands for.

Matthew's account of (re)signing the sabbath also refers to (re)signing the temple. First Jesus reminds his critics that, due to slaughtering animals on the sabbath, "the priests in the temple break the sabbath and yet are guiltless." Then he makes an extraordinary claim: "I tell you, something greater than the temple is here" (Mt 12:5-6). To many listeners of his day, these words qualified as blasphemy. After all, the temple, with the ark of the covenant at its center, was where the Spirit of God resided.

Christians on the edge, I would suggest, respond neither with inerrancy nor with agnosticism. Following the Word of God, they offer, instead, the (re)signing of truth.

the Bible as the Word of God is both fully human and fully divine. Thus, while skeptics stand on one side of the coin to say that God's Word is fully human, and inerrantists stand on the other side of the coin to say that God's Word is fully divine, Christians on the edge affirm both/and rather than either/or thinking.

Parker Palmer comments on Bohr's insight with the following comment: "truth is a paradoxical joining of apparent opposites, and if we want to know that truth, we must learn to embrace those opposites in

C. S. Lewis, for example, felt the need to "rule out the view that every statement in Scripture must be historical truth." Nevertheless, he believed "that the over-all operation of Scripture is to convey God's Word to the reader ... who reads it in the right spirit."" For Lewis, "the right spirit" is not one that seeks to either prove or disprove the Bible's scientific and historical accuracy: opposite sides of the same coin. For him, the right spirit is on the edge; it is a spirit that believes in the resurrection of Jesus while aware that the Bible has certain inconsistencies in the way it points to the same ultimate reality. The right spirit opens itself to the Holy Spirit, seeking in the Bible truths for life lived in relationship with our creator and redeemer.19

Lewis was merely following the example of Luther and Calvin, who themselves followed the example of early church fathers by ascribing to a principle of "accommodation": "God spoke to his people as a parent speaks to a child," accommodating the truth to their understanding.20

According to Augustine (354-430), one of the most influential shapers of Western Christianity, we can only be certain about one infallible truth in the Bible: the Love of God. At the end of the fourth century, he wrote a treatise called On Christian Doctrine in which he argues, "Whoever, therefore, thinks that he understands the divine Scriptures or any part of them...

Nevertheless, some Christians seem more passionate about protecting the holiness of an inerrant sign (the Bible) than about humbly considering how to be transformed by what the sign...

Before twelve inches became standardized in Scotland during the twelfth century C.E., people determined length by a man's foot (hence the word foot). A barn in one village might therefore differ in size from a barn elsewhere-depending upon the size of the builders' feet.

First, if we genuinely believe that the Holy Spirit still moves among God's people, having guided the process of canon formation itself, we must be open to new signs.

Second, if we genuinely believe that the Holy Spirit still moves among God's people, we should believe that the Spirit enables us to identify truths that transcend the biblical inconsistencies identified by C. S. Lewis and the manuscript errors identified by Bart Ehrman. Rather than giving up on the truth of Christianity, as did Ehrman, we might endorse (re)signing: resigned to Scripture as God's Word to those who listen in faith, we acknowledge the possibility of a faithful re-signing.

one becomes an intellectual not by appropriating ready-made signs like glasses, buns and books, but by creating new signs-in response to the old-in order to help people think in new ways.

Philip Gosse (1810-1888), a well-respected marine biologist and lay pastor for a Plymouth Brethren congregation, regarded the celebration of Christmas as inimical to biblical Christianity and hence "nothing less than an act of idolatry." As his son Edmund recounts, "He would denounce the horrors of Christmas until it almost made me blush to look at a holly-berry."

Perhaps we should welcome current cautions concerning Christmas, for they imply the power of the sign. By being told not to use religious images or the common holiday greeting, people are reminded that the word "Christmas" references more than an excuse to pile on pounds as well as presents-or to place gargantuan plastic Santas on front lawns.

The word itself reminds them that the celebration began as a mass to celebrate Christ's birth.

To stay on the edge, therefore, Christians need to understand how signs m...

Practitioners, called semioticians, analyze how signs make meaning and ...

While linguists focus on the wording and working of languages, semioticians range over broader territory, analyzing, in addition to words, the nonlinguistic ...

As Vic Gatrell notes in his history of laughter, aristocrats in the eighteenth century considered excessive laughter to be a sign of the lower classes. Lord Chesterfield (1694-1773), whose Letters to his Son is considered a "classic" statement of "proper" behavior for a gentleman, describes "frequent and loud laughter" as characteristic of "folly and ill-manners."8

some Brits arbitrarily coined /goose flesh/ in the early nineteenth century, perhaps influencing the American /goose bumps/, both based on the bumpy flesh of a freshly plucked goose.15

Aristotle's Treatise on Rhetoric not only discusses the words a speaker uses, but also the signs that make the speaker seem credible and trustworthy to his listeners. For him, signs have rhetorical power when the rhetor excels in three areas: 1. logos: an astute pattern of reasoning 2. pathos: sensitive appeal to audience emotion 3. ethos: manifest credibility19

Perhaps due to Cicero's influence, the classically trained Tertullian (ca. 160-ca. 220 c.E.) began inscribing Christian theology in Latin, becoming known as the "father of Latin Christianity" and the first known Christian to employ the sign /Trinity/ (trinitas in Latin).

before he addresses the issue of eloquent preaching, Augustine focuses on how signs work, defining a sign as "a thing that causes us to think of something beyond the impression that the thing itself makes upon the senses." And, like Plato, Augustine finds it important to distinguish natural signs (signa naturalia) from conventional signs (signa data), noting that "even signs given by God and contained in the Holy Scriptures" are signa data, "since they were presented to us by the men who wrote them."23 In other words, language-even that in the Bible-cannot capture the fullness of God, who far transcends all human signs.

This might explain why Augustine so valued his mystical experience of God: as a validation that believers can commune with their uncreated

how we understand God's self-revelation through the incarnation of Christ is through the signa data of biblical accounts: created signs that cause us to think of the Unc...

Augustine therefore argued that an astute reading of Scripture necessitated not only informed assessment of literal versus figurative language but also appreciation for the Bible's historical contexts. Only by understanding signs, then, can a c...

semiotician Umberto Eco identifies Augustine as "the first explicitly ...

Aquinas was especially interested in the signs of Scripture, stating in his Summa Theologica, one of the most influential texts of Western Christianity, that "the things signified by the words can be themselves signs of other things."27

The word "semeiotic" and the related "semeiology" did not appear in the English language until the seventeenth century (OED). John Locke employed "semiotika" in 1690 to refer to "the doctrine of signs" he was exploring in his "Essay Concerning Human Understanding."30

In his Course on General Linguistics, Saussure challenged the traditional approach to linguistic signs.

Before Saussure, the study of language, known as "philology," focused on historical changes in language. Calling this a "diachronic" ("through time") approach to language, Saussure advocated, instead, a "synchronic" ("at one time") approach. He therefore studied the differences among signs at one particular moment in history in order to assess how signs make meaning through their contrasts with each other.