Where simplicity and greatness meet

FEATURE

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THE publication of the massive Oxford English Dictionary was probably the most ambitious literary project ever undertaken.

The aim of the dictionary was to shed light on the meaning and origin of every English word. Begun in 1879, it took several decades to complete. The editor, Professor James Murray was the son of a Hawick tailor.

In a film, soon to be released, based on Simon Winchester’s fascinating true story, The Professor and the Madman, Professor Murray is played by Mel Gibson. The ‘madman’ was an American surgeon who had been incarcerated in Broadmoor hospital, suffering from paranoid delusions and lashbacks, caused by the horrors he had witnessed in the American Civil War. During his years in Broadmoor, Dr Minor became one of the most valued contributors to the dictionary.

Early in the project Professor Murray sent specific instructions to those who had volunteered to take part in the research programme ‘There must be no words in your definitions more complicated than the word being defined.’ I believe Professor Murray’s instruction to keep it simple, should be heeded by all who seek to communicate the Christian faith. I warm to the misquotation, “Though we speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not clarity, it profits us nothing.”

The late Rev Tom Allan described how he once overheard a church elder speaking to two Glasgow teenagers who had no prior connection with the church. The elder spoke to them about ‘being saved’, and the need ‘to be born again’. When he finished, one lad said: “I hope you won’t think I’m being rude, but frankly I have understood little of what you said.” I suspect that for many today on the outside of the church looking in, and some in the church looking out, the church’s traditional and sometimes archaic language, is a real problem.

C S Lewis, one of the infest communicators of the Christian faith, suggested that before being ordained, ministers should first have to pass an examination in translating the technical language of theology into the language of the kitchen and the shop-floor. “Any fool” he said “can write learned language.

The vernacular is the real test.” Today there is a great need for ministers and lay-people who can translate Biblical truths into words plain enough to be understood by the man in the street, and to do this without under emphasising the majesty or mystery of God.

One Sunday in Dornoch Cathedral, a regular holiday-maker said to me at the close of the service: “What I like about you is that you’re that simple.” Though she could have expressed it better, I took her remark as a compliment.

As well as occasionally groaning on listening to abstract academic sermons, my wife and I have also groaned on listening to sermons which were a flood of pious platitudes without any real substance.

For me one honest look into the dark, one serious attempt to shed light on the mystery of life and all its jumbled contradictions, is worth a hundred penny candles. I warm to the preacher’s prayer, “Teach me O Lord the way of treating a Biblical theme that makes it truly seem the latest talk in town.” In speaking to those on the fringe of the church, we have either to lose much of our abstract theological language, or lose them.

Jesus constantly used word pictures. He embodied his message in everyday stories about debtors, farmers, fisherfolk and housewives—a woman who had lost a precious coin, a traveller who got mugged on the highway, a young man who wanted to leave home, labourers standing in the square waiting to be hired, and a builder neglecting the foundations. He spoke of letting our light go out, and salt losing its savour. How clear and simple, yet profound his teaching was.

Edwin Muir said of Robert Burns: “Ordinary thoughts and feelings are not necessarily shallow any more than subtle or unusual ones are necessarily profound.”

Burns could rise to the full height of the ordinary where simplicity and greatness meet. That has been true also of the finest Christian communicators.

This article appears in the November 2018 Issue of Life and Work

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