‘New and Non‐New’

Extract

‘Speak that I may see thee’—a line from one of Ben Jonson’s plays serves to remind us that in language we reveal ourselves in a quite distinctive way. And perhaps nowhere is language more sharply revelatory than in those phrases which fall almost automatically from our lips, routine verbal gestures scarcely attended to.

I suppose, for the average layman, the most sustained theological discourse that he hears exists in the weekly sermon. Even with that general kind of context in mind, there would seem to have grown up in the last few years two kinds of vocabularies which stand in an interesting relationship to each other. As we look at the lists vertically we can see two quite distinct theological profiles—some features of more consequence than others, but taken together, an interesting whole.