Verbs, Nouns, and Spiritual Pedagogy

A new study shows that infants use action verbs to understand new nouns. In other words, “hearing what an object does is how they learn what an object is.” It makes me think about the way we think and teach about God. We want to use adjectives and nouns to understand God: “he’s the loving, omnipotent, supreme being, etc...”

But the writers of the bible thought about God differently. To the Hebrews, God wasn’t a bundle of propositions, but a personal being best understood by his actions: He’s the God that made promises to Abraham, freed the Israelites from slavery, parted the Red Sea. He’s the God that clothed himself in skin and walked among us, who died, and was resurrected.

This narrative approach to understanding God (with all its rich action verbs) is a humbler, but more effective way to teach and facilitate spiritual “bonding” or “attachment” to God. It seems that as infants, we forge attachments to our parents because long before we understand what they are, we understand what they do. Why should spiritual attachment to a heavenly Father look any different?

So if we can loosen up on our rigid nounish doctrinal statements, we might find a greater voice and resonance in our culture by talking less about the stuff that God is and more about the stuff that God does.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/infants-use-verbs-they-know-to-learn-new-nouns/