From Babel to Pentecost: Biblical perspectives on language and listenership

Allan Bell

A sermon preached at the Anglican Church of St Luke Mt Albert, Auckland, Pentecost Sunday, 27 May 2007 As a complement to an Inaugural Lecture as Professor of Language & Communication delivered at AUT University, 22 May 2007

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I have long planned this sermon as a complement to my inaugural lecture as a professor at AUT University, which was delivered last Tuesday, 22 May 2007. The two events have been scheduled very intentionally for the feast of Pentecost, when the church celebrates language and listenership. The sermon offers the opportunity to explore some of the theological, spiritual and biblical correlates and foundations of what I covered in that lecture, Giving Voice: Language, Media and Identity in New Zealand. The readings about Babel and Pentecost used on this Sunday form two of the three most important biblical passages for our understanding of language (the third being the first chapter of the Gospel of John: „In the beginning was the Word…‟). In memoriam Preaching is something I have started to do only in the last three years, having resisted the thought of it for a long time. But I am the son of a preacher. My father, the Rev Ken Bell, was a minister of the Congregational Church of New Zealand, and it happens that last Sunday marked the 50th anniversary of his death. He died in a vehicle accident on May 20th 1957, a grey wet Monday morning in Palmerston North during the school holidays - a cataclysm for me as a 9-year-old, some of whose repercussions I have only recognized and addressed in the past few years. I also reflect that I am not only the son of a preacher but also the grandson, nephew (seven times over), brother, brother-in-law, and cousin (also several times over) of preachers. That genealogy of almost biblical proportions seems to indicate there is a certain inheritance running here. So I want this sermon to be in some sense in memoriam of Dad, Kenneth Allan Bell. My subject is language and voice. One of my regrets is that I do not remember the sound of my father‟s voice, although my older sister tells me that he had a warm speaking voice and a rich baritone when singing. Voice is such an individual thing. It is distinctive, intensely personal, uniquely identifiable, embodied, highly physical yet utterly dependent on breath - a word which is the same as „spirit‟ in Hebrew and many other languages. For me to preach, then, is in some sense to learn to speak after my father‟s voice. A language case in point I want to begin the journey from Babel to Pentecost with an item from last week‟s news. Last Wednesday (23 May 2007) the CEO of Television New Zealand, Rick Ellis, appeared before a Parliamentary Select Committee to defend his organisation‟s performance in relation to Maori language and culture. He received a lot of negative coverage when he said that TV1 could not screen Te Karere Maori News in primetime because it would lose too much advertising revenue. To quote from the report in the NZ Herald, 24 May: “We are, at the end of the day, a commercial broadcaster. Let‟s be realistic about this - less than 4 per cent of New Zealanders speak Maori and so putting a Maori language programme in prime time … it simply won‟t rate.”

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It so happened that just the day before, in my augural lecture, I was standing there advocating that television should screen at least 10 hours a week of Maori language programming in prime time in order to give this endangered language a voice in front of all New Zealanders, with the hope of thus contributing to its survival as a living language. Keep this contemporary issue in mind as we go back to the beginning of recorded history with the story of Babel.

BABEL 1

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. 2 And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3 And they said to one another, „Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly‟. And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. 4 Then they said, „Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.‟ 5 The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. 6 And the Lord said, „Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another‟s speech.‟ 8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. 9 Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth. Genesis 11: 1-9 (New Revised Standard Version) The narrative The story of Babel in Genesis 11: 1-9 is one of best known in the Old Testament, coming near the end of the prehistorical section of Genesis. It falls after the account of the great flood and before the story of Abraham, when the narrative of God‟s more personal dealings with humanity begins. Babel is a unified and carefully structured narrative, set in an envelope of parallel and converse expressions. In verse 4, the people declare they will build a city and a tower to prevent them being scattered. In verse 8, God scatters them. The phrase „Come let us‟ is repeated three times - twice about the people: „Come let us make bricks‟ v3, „Come let us build a city and a tower‟ in v4. The third time is about God: „Come let us go down and confuse their language‟ (v7). The vocabulary is also carefully chosen, including a pun which provides a rather misleading derivation for the name „Babel‟ by comparing it to the Hebrew word for „confuse‟ – balal. The context of the story is in the time after the great flood, when the known earth is said to have spoken a single language with a shared vocabulary (v1). The previous chapter (10) gives the genealogies of Noah‟s children and their descendants. It narrates their dispersion across the known earth, repeating for each of the three sons

4 and their descendants the formula that they have been chronicled according to „their families, languages, lands and nations‟. In biblical discourse „language‟ is routinely one of the terms listed along with items such as „land‟ or „family‟ or „generation‟ to indicate the group identity of a people. The Babel narrative recounts one aspect of what occurred during the dispersion recorded in chapter 10. It seems to be exemplary and illustrative rather than describing a unique event of the post-flood migrations and the resulting differentiation of languages. The narrative clearly covers a very long period - certainly centuries, possibly many centuries. It reaches apparently from the initial discovery of bricks and bitumen as building materials (v3) through to their use in the construction of numerous and substantial structures (v5). What does Babel mean? Babel has become a byword for the variety of languages and also for consequent incomprehension and confusion. This is part of the story, but there is more to it than that. In beginning to contemplate this, I am indebted to a particularly insightful commentary by the American Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann - and I have been tempted just to bring it along and read it out rather than writing my own. Central to the interpretation of Babel is the question: what did they do wrong? What was the nature of their fault that God‟s response was so severe, to scatter them and confuse their language? It looks on the surface to be an argument against overweening human ambition, possibly even against urbanism. Against mortals trying to reach heaven and act like God. Against trying to „make a name for ourselves‟ and to preserve it in concrete, as it were, for ever. In this reading, God comes across as a somewhat peevish local deity, afraid of being outshone by a group of ambitious humans, and taking steps to mess them up so massively that they will never again be a challenge. However, it is not quite that clearcut. First, while biblical teaching does recognize the potential that cities have for evil, it also realizes their potential for good. The city is often a very positive and desirable concept in the Bible, from the visions of the Old Testament prophets through to the fulfilment of God‟s purposes in the holy city in the book of Revelation at the very end of the New Testament. So it is not the establishment of a city in itself that was wrong. Secondly, nor was the building of the tower necessarily a problem. The tower would not have been unique in the ancient Middle East, and the description „with its top in the heavens‟ was a conventional claim for a ziggurat. Third, not even the wish to „make a name‟ is necessarily evil, since elsewhere in the Old Testament King David is not condemned for such desires. None of these three possibilities seem in themselves or together reason enough for the scale of response God visited on them. An alternative reading of Babel The key – taking my cue from Brueggemann – lies in the people‟s motivation rather than the acts themselves. The people of Babel built the city and the tower because „otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth‟. This is a clear and intended echo of the mandate given to humankind at creation – „Be fruitful

5 and multiply and fill the earth‟ (Genesis 1:28). A couple of chapters before the Babel story, this mandate was repeated to Noah after the flood: „Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth … abound on the earth and multiply in it‟ (Genesis 9: 1, 7). It is this mandate for created humanity to fill the earth that the Babel builders were refusing to fulfil, and this is where they went wrong. They were trying to anchor themselves in one place, not so much out of any positive motivation but out of a fear of being scattered. They had a fortress mentality, they wanted security at any cost. Their building activity was intended as a means to an inward-looking unity, an isolationism that had no regard for the intent and needs of the wider creation that God envisaged, or even for their fellow-humans. They were therefore out of line with the purpose of creation. They were putting the development of creation at risk not so much by overstepping the mark with God as by understepping what was expected of them. In the light of this interpretation the judgment, which reads on the surface as the act of a rather petty God, is in fact entirely appropriate and logical. It is intended to force the Babel builders out of themselves and to make them disperse across the earth as God had purposed them to do. There is further support for this reading in the use of the Hebrew word for „scatter‟. It can have negative connotations in biblical usage (as when the people of Israel are scattered in exile), but not always. In the previous chapter cataloguing the descendants of Noah, this verb is used positively (e.g. Genesis 10:18) to describe their voluntary „spreading abroad‟ in line with God‟s intention. Monolingualism and power The story of Babel is also in part a story about power inappropriately exercised, about the social and political meaning of monolingualism and multilingualism. The European nation-state was created with the concept that a nation should have one single language, probably best epitomized in France and the French language. Monolingualism is frequently imperial and coercive against other languages. It is not long since Maori children were punished for speaking te reo Maori at school in New Zealand, and that scenario of punishment is a sociolinguistic universal paralleled by stories from Wales, Ireland, India, Africa. For the people of Babel their imperial language was a means to unity and power just as empires throughout history have striven for monolingual domination whether through Latin, Arabic, Greek, Chinese, Spanish, English, or other languages. Monolingualism was part of the identity of the people of Babel, and that identity marker was lost in their scattering. In our day the monolingual impetus of empire is most obvious in the United States where conservative English-only movements strive to ban other languages from public life, especially Spanish. These tendencies are a clear part of a wider fortress mentality in the US, of a fixation with security similar to that of the Babel builders, which has led to the impasse of the US presence in Iraq. It is ironical, given the parallels with what went wrong at Babel, that the visual symbol of the US‟s plight should be the Twin Towers and their destruction.

6 We tend to think of unity as good and dispersion as bad, but both of these have the potential for either good or bad. The people of Babel practised a unity which opposed the intentions of the Creator and the result was that they were scattered. Religion is not necessarily a defence against a wrongful unity. It can in fact serve as the driver and justification for a Babel-like mentality, as it does in our day in buttressing US policies and practices. But in the Babel account God has other ideas because the story is a manifesto for multilingualism and multiculturalism. At the dawn of civilization and the beginning of the ancient Hebrew Scriptures, we have here a charter for language diversity. Influential thinkers (1): Bakhtin To understand Babel I want to introduce a thinker who has been very influential on me. Mikhail Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher of the Soviet era. Most of his foundational work was done in the 1920s, but much of it did not see the light of day even in the Soviet Union until 40 years later, and he was only discovered in the West from the 1980s. There is a story told of Bakhtin that exemplifies his rocky road as a thinker and writer. In the spartan years of the Second World War he ran out of cigarette papers. The only paper he could find was a copy of one of his own manuscripts – so he used it page by page to roll his smokes. The book had been accepted for publication, but unfortunately the publisher‟s copy also went missing during the chaos of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. There was no other copy, and so the book was lost utterly, up in smoke but its author‟s own hand. Bakhtin was a Christian, a religious intellectual in the Russian Orthodox tradition, although probably unorthodox himself in belief. He was however arrested and exiled under Stalin because of his association with suspect religious groups. Centripetal and centrifugal forces in language One of Bakhtin‟s main concepts is a key to Babel - the centripetal and the centrifugal in language, the forces that pull language together or push it apart. The centripetal forces are the pressures to standardization, uniformity and homogeneity. These the Babel builders clearly had, and their tower stands as the defining original case of the centripetal force in language. It also stands as a monument to the futility of that drive. The centrifugal forces are always whirling language apart into diversity, spinning new words, new dialects, new accents, new languages, new voices, regardless of all efforts to the contrary by academies, educators, politicians or pedants. Babel teaches us that God is on the side of the centrifugal, the rich variety and profusion of human language. The range of voices is part of what God intended for creation. So the migration and the language dispersion post-Babel is willed by God not just as punishment but as commission and opportunity.

7 Responsiveness There is a further point in the Babel story. Verse 7 says that the people did not understand each other‟s speech, but the word can also be translated as „listen to‟. They began to not listen to each other. I regard listenership as the core of communication rather than speakership, and again this is something that Bakhtin argued. He explored the concept of „responsiveness‟, of the need for everything we say to have an audience. The audience and their response is, in this understanding, already present in what a speaker says. This has long been part of my own approach to language use, which I call „Audience Design‟ – the principle that we choose to talk the way we do in order to respond to our audience. Central to this is the idea of Listenership, of our Being Audience to the speakers we are hearing, of our active response to what they say and how they say it. It is this kind of listenership that I believe is central to our giving of voice to others, both at the micro level of individual interactions and at the macro level of the social and political. Bakhtin wrote also about the presence of what he called a „super-addressee‟ as essential to understanding human conversation. This is the notion that there is an „absolutely just responsive understanding‟ of what we say, that our voice is heard and understood by God even if not by fellow humans. Even though your current listeners may not understand you, there is a higher addressee who does. The human voice, Bakhtin says, always wants to be heard… „For the word (and, consequently, for a human being), there is nothing more terrible than a lack of response’. The anticipation of a response is embedded in everything we say. The sense that in all our talk we are speaking before God is here conceived as a positive, as a blessing, a reassurance that our words are not lost, rather than as a threat of judgment for mis-speakings of various kinds.

PENTECOST 1

When the day of Pentecost had come, they [Jesus‟ disciples] were all together in one place. 2 And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3 Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. 5 Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. 6 And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. 7 Amazed and astonished, they asked, „Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? 8 And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? 9 Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, 11 Cretans and Arabs – in our own languages we hear them speaking about God‟s deeds of power‟. 12 All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another,

8 „What does this mean?‟ new wine.‟

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But others sneered and said, „They are filled with Acts 2: 1-12

There remains a sense in which Babel leaves language in crisis, which brings us on to Pentecost and its celebration. The story of Pentecost in the second chapter of the book of Acts has often been described as the reversal of Babel, but when you compare them closely this is not really what is going on. Pentecost involves not so much the reversal of Babel as its redemption. Reversing Babel would mean that speakers returned to speaking a single language or hearers returned to hearing a single language. But that is not what happened at Pentecost. At Pentecost speakers talked and listeners heard in a great variety of languages (not in fact in ecstatic tongues) - Acts chapter 2 indicates no fewer than thirteen. What was reversed was not the diversification of languages that happened at Babel but the incomprehension. At Pentecost the languages remained different but they were understood. Interestingly, the result at Pentecost as at Babel was also confusion, but for a different reason. The Pentecost audience understood what was being said all right, but they could not understand why they understood. They were amazed and bewildered (vv 6,7,10) because they knew all the speakers were Galileans whom they did not expect to know their languages. The only explanation offered was by the sceptical, who said the disciples were drunk. This was indeed a possibility because of the festival, but the Apostle Peter countered with a piece of tongue-in-cheek logic that it was relatively unlikely they would be drunk as early as 9am. The commentators have assumed that this variety of languages was given at Pentecost so that people would be able to understand what was being said, but the text shows that is not actually what was going on. The many languages were not necessary for people to understand what was being said. We know what happened next was that Peter stood up and preached to them all, presumably in a single language, and communicated well enough for them to be „cut to the heart‟ (Acts 2:37). They didn‟t need a display of multilingualism to comprehend what they was being said and respond to it. The way that the multiplicity of languages is described makes it clear that this was not a matter of communication but of identity. Acts 2 characterizes the languages three times as the listeners‟ mother tongues - the languages they grew up in, the languages they were born in, the languages they were at home in. These were the languages of their identity, the languages in which they talked about intimate and deeply-felt things. The coming of the Spirit was marked by an affirmation of their identities and of the diverse languages and cultures in which these „devout Jews from every nation under heaven‟ were at home (v5). However, we can also see here one sense in which the effect of Babel was reversed at Pentecost if not the phenomenon itself. Peter‟s sermon used a lingua franca - either Aramaic or Greek. The inheritance and spread of imperial languages meant that diverse audiences were all able to understand a single tongue. This enabled the mass

9 preaching of the early church and the spread and preservation of the New Testament writings. What happened at Pentecost was in some way the best of both worlds linguistically, affirming both identity through community languages and communication through a shared lingua franca. Influential thinkers (2): Bürki This brings me to a second thinker who has influenced me. Hans Bürki was a Swiss internationalist, a trainer for the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. He held a doctorate in psychology and was unusual for his time, the 1970s, and place, evangelical Christianity. While I was a student in Stuttgart in Germany 35 years ago, I attended a student training course with him at Schloss Mittersill, a castle high in the Austrian Tirol with breathtaking mountain views. It was probably the most formative two weeks of my life. Bürki took a holistic view of faith and life and the person, insisted on daily physical exercise as well as worship and lectures, taught breathing as well as devotion and thinking. For me it was also the start of achieving fluency in German. After struggling with the language for my first few months in Europe, I at last began to find a German voice and discover that I have a rather different persona in German than in English. Breath and spirit One of Bürki‟s sayings was „Es fängt alles von dem Atem an‟: „everything begins with the breath‟. Decades later I learned the truth of this saying the hard way. Four years ago I spiralled down into a pattern of shallow breathing which took me to a low physical and psychological point. My recovery and healing from that has made me now always aware of the gift of the breath - of full, deep breath - in a way I never was before. Breath is the foundation of spiritual practice in all faiths and traditions, and for good reason - breath is the bridge between the body and the spirit. Christians celebrate breath especially at this season of Pentecost as we remember the coming of the Spirit who is the breath of God. Breath is also the foundation and engine of the voice. Coupled with my discovery of breath, I experienced a re-awakening of my German language and persona. Then last year on sabbatical leave I lived again in Germany for the first time in 35 years. I was very satisfied to find my German voice return and be strengthened and re-established, and I intend to keep it that way. During that sabbatical period I also returned to Schloss Mittersill for a retreat to reflect and read and write and plan, and happened to find it under the magic of an early winter snow. Mittersill is to me a „thin space‟, a place where the distance narrows between the everyday world and the spiritual. In five days there I achieved a rare quality and quantity of work, including sketching the first thoughts for this paired sermon and lecture – the idea for which had originally been conceived during the time of recovery I have mentioned.

10 The unstifled voice The second thing I recall especially from Bürki was an individual comment about voice that he made to me when I asked for advice on being involved in the arts as a Christian, a fraught undertaking at that time in the evangelical subculture. He remarked, „Ihre Stimme ist irgendwie erstopft‟ – „your voice is somehow stifled‟ - and recommended voice training. I wasn‟t happy with the quality of my own voice, and shied away from taking up the suggestion – until 30 years later. Now I have wilfully set about making the best of the voice I have, risking audition and succeeding in being accepted into a choir although I had never sung in one before, and doing the voice training in both speech and singing. Like many others, I have found that through blending my voice in choral singing I am able to do things which would be impossible to me alone. Together our voices are much more than the sum of the parts. For me also as a listener the voice has a special place. I found in a time of illness that the only music I could bear to hear was a-capella choral music such as plainsong. Blended unaccompanied human voices have a uniquely healing character. In some measure we are our voices. We carry our heritage and ancestry in our voices as in other aspects of our being. A cousin‟s voice may remind us of what an uncle‟s used to be like. So I have been discovering my father‟s voice within me 50 years on. Listenership I want to consider one last dimension of Pentecost that is profoundly a reversal of Babel. I noted earlier that the Babel account could be read as meaning that people did not listen to each other and that may have been an impetus behind their dispersion. The emphasis of Pentecost is on listening rather than speaking. What is repeated and stressed in Acts 2 is not the fact that a dozen languages were spoken but that a dozen languages were heard. Listenership rather than speakership is the key to Pentecost. Listenership – Being Audience – is foundational to the birth of the church, central to its common life, and crucial to human community at all levels. Giving Voice must be complemented by Giving Ear. It was the repeated word of the prophets and of Jesus that the people should listen because by listening we enable something new to break in on us and change us.

CONCLUSION This brings me back to the issue of the Maori language on television, because it seems to me to be a representative moment in the character of our society. As a sociolinguist specializing in the relationship of language and media, I believe there is an urgent need to mainstream the Maori language on primetime television, to give a voice to te reo and an audience for te reo, because that exposure could make the difference to whether it survives as a living language or not.

11 Such an openness to be audience to the voice of this language seems to me a part of our mandate as a diverse, growing, encompassing society - a politics of listenership. I would have us as citizens, and our public decision-makers, embrace diversity in society and language wholeheartedly, not with a grudging commercial eye or a stifling monolingualism. This example strikes me as a litmus one for our society, but in multicultural context we could also talk about Pasifika, Asian, or sign languages and their ethnicities. There is an opportunity here at the level of personal encounter with others as well as the social and political realm. According to last year‟s census, a quarter of Aucklanders are now multilingual - how do we relate to that? To give an ear to this diversity strikes me as an opportunity to either enrich ourselves and our society or to impoverish ourselves. To embrace the opportunity of difference fits our heritage as people of Pentecost, as people of the church which was born in diversity and in listenership, and as people of the God of the centrifugal, who is always driving us out to what is new.

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References Bakhtin, M. M., 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press. Brueggemann, Walter, 1982. Genesis: Interpretation. Atlanta, Georgia: John Knox Press. Bürki, Hans, 1959. Zweierschaft. Wuppertal: R. Brockhaus Verlag.