Learning from the source

This week I have been lecturing on using evidence in academic writing – using sources, referencing, quoting, paraphrasing, etc – and how it's not good enough just to quote someone second hand. You actually need to go back to the original source and see that the middle man has conveyed the meaning of the source text accurately. Otherwise it's like Chinese whispers and you never know what convoluted rubbish you could end up with!

I was reminded of Paul's exhortation to Timothy (2 Tim 2:2) to entrust the gospel of Christ to reliable men who would be able to continue to faithfully teach others – passing the baton on, but ensuring it's always the same baton and doesn't get switched for something else in the middle of the race. We need to keep going back to the source – the Word of God, the gospel of Jesus Christ – so that we never just assume we know what it's about and then pass on a twisted or faulty message.

Around the same time I heard that message from 2 Timothy (preached by the faithful Richard Chin at St Michaels Wollongong), I read Amos 2:4-5, where God pronounces judgement on Judah because they have forgotten God's law and have been led astray by their lies, which presumably have resulted from just that same problem – the Word of God was no longer being taught faithfully, people weren't going back to the source but were hearing distortions and allowing them to continue.

So Paul exhorted Timothy to 'preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching (2 Tim 4:2). And we need to always go back to the source to test what we hear or read against the original source.

“Sainting” and “sanctifying”

I saw a 'news' segment on Mary McKillop a few days ago. They were talking about some letters that Mary McKillop had written during her life, and it was apparently newsworthy that the letters revealed how human she was. Well, she was human, after all. The fact that she is to be declared a saint later this year means precisely that she was human, otherwise there would be no need for her to be sainted. I find the whole 'sainting' (canonisation) thing quite strange. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the noun 'saint' derives from the Latin sanctus, meaning 'holy'. Sanctus itself is derived from the verb, sancire, meaning 'to consecrate'. The related English verb, sanctify, derives from the Latin santificare (holy + make), meaning 'to make holy/righteous/pure'. The Dictionary also tells us that the usage of 'saint' as a verb, meaning "to enroll (someone) among the saints", dates only from the late 14^th century.

Those who are called saints in the Bible don't do anything particularly special – no miracles supposedly performed by them after death – but are simply Christians, who have heard, understood and been changed by the gospel of Jesus Christ. They become saints not through a process of 'sainting', decided by humans based on what they are supposed to have done after they died, but by a process of sanctification by God while they are still alive. Once they have died it's too late. Furthermore, sanctification is not based on what people do, but based on God's mercy and their faith in His promises to make them righteous.

When Jesus prayed to God before his crucifixion, he said "Sanctify them [the ones whom God had chosen] in the truth; your word is truth... for their sake I consecrate myself, that they may also be sanctified in truth" (John 17: 17, 19). Sanctification gives new life to those who turn from sin to serve God, as Paul says in the first letter to the Corinthians, "Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?... But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God." (1 Cor 6: 9, 11). And the writer to the Hebrews tells them (us) that it is by the will of God that "we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all" (Hebrews 10: 10). So Christians are already saints in life, and will continue to be saints for eternity!

Some 'saints' I know.

A linguistic approach to history

To the historian equipped with the proper tools, it is suggested, any text or artefact can figure forth the thought-world and possibly even the world of emotional investment and praxis of its time and place of production. Not that any given text can alone call up the whole world of its origin or that any given set of texts can reveal its world completely. But in principle, it seems to hold that we today possess the tools to probe texts in ways only dimly perceived or, if perceived, not fully utilized by earlier intellectual or other historians. And these tools, it is suggested, are generally linguistic in nature. (White, 1987:187)

The above quotation is taken from the work of a scholar not of linguistics, but of historiography and intellectual history. It is from Hayden White's The Context in the Text: Method and Ideology in Intellectual History. The potential of a text or artefact to 'figure forth the thought-world... of its time and place of production' (White, 1987:187) is a point of departure that is common to both historians and linguists. White is sympathetic to the ideas of linguistics and discourse analysis, advocating a 'semiological' approach to text as the most productive approach to questions concerned with meaning production and the meaning systems by which the meanings in a text are produced.

'Semiological', in White's sense, means 'the tradition of cultural analysis that builds upon the theory of language as a sign (rather than a word) system, after the manner of Saussure, Jakobsson, and Benveniste' (White, 1987:191). One of the schools of linguistics that has developed out of the theories of Saussure and Jakobson, among others, is systemic functional linguistics (SFL). It provides considerable explanatory power for the whole range of linguistic phenomena, from intonation in speech (at the level of phonology) to syndromes of meaning (at the level of semantics) and beyond to the patterns of cultural tendencies. What I have argued in my recent work from my PhD research is that indeed we do have 'the tools to probe texts' to reveal how they 'figure forth the thought-world' of their time and place of production, and that the tools and concepts offered by SFL are ideal for this kind of job.

I'm hoping to post here, over the next little while, some of my thoughts on how linguistic tools can be used in historical enquiry, and particularly the study of media history.

References:

White, H. (1987). The Context in the Text: Method and Ideology in Intellectual History. In The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, 185--213. Baltimore & London: The John Hopkins University Press.