May 19, Pentecost (Acts 2:1–21)
Acts points us to a better communion, one that preserves and celebrates diversity.
Does the same holy spirit that confuses language make true communication possible? Many commentators have read the story of Pentecost as a reversal of the confusion of languages characteristic of the Tower of Babel: just as God confuses the language of overambitious humans in Genesis, so the coming of God’s Holy Spirit at the birth of the church allows for linguistic differences to be overcome. And just as it is problematic to read the Tower of Babel account as a theological lament against human diversity, so too it would be dangerous to see the Spirit’s establishment of the church via communication (with its same roots as the words communion and exchange) as somehow overcoming or flattening diversity. What is a better alternative? Can the text point the way?
Progressive Christians have long sought to onboard the best insights from broader critical theories and social justice movements when it comes to language, particularly intersectional language. We try to remember that we cannot helpfully talk about income disparities in the United States without being attentive to race, that we cannot for long discuss class without discussing gender, and so on. And thus preachers, worship leaders, teachers, and others who speak language about God and humanity into the public sphere have learned to think along multiple dimensions when it comes to what we represent with our language and how—dimensions such as race, class, ability, sexuality, and so on. This is theologically necessary work.
But like all theologically necessary work, it brings with it temptations and dangers. The danger is that we who seek to speak about God and humanity while doing justice to differing degrees of complexity might soon develop a Babel-like linguistic pride, a pretension that any one person or group can attain the perfect language: intersectional, all-encompassing, doing equal justice to all difference and complexity. Such linguistically idolatrous pretension would be little better than the very theological languages that intersectional language has sought to replace: the singular (White, male, European, etc.) voice, the “universal” language of the theological colonizer.
