The Power of Naming

0:00Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look in an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. President Trump's recent executive order not only renamed Lake Ontario to Lake America, changed how millions of Americans remember what the Great Lakes are, and Haynes just doesn't have the same ring to it as Holmes. So far, President Trump has also renamed mountains and military bases and even floated renaming the Strait of Hormuz as the Trump Strait. Now political renaming is not new, of course, not for either side of the political aisle. As Bill Marjo, last week, and his opening monologue to Real Time, quote, mountains have been renamed and then renamed again as half-street and holidays and food

1:00products and sports teams. More drastic and more consequential is renaming babies as fetuses, men as women, mothers as birthing persons, and the vast majority of everyone who ever lived as cisgender. And that's because there is a real power in naming things, and especially people. The more important thing named, the more consequential the naming is. A name in other words is more than just a random label. Names frame how things are seen and understood. And this is an arena of thought where a postmodern analysis comes close, but ultimately misses. The influential German philosopher Martin Heidegger had a profound impact on how later postmodern philosophers would understand language and reality. He proposed that humans could not really access reality outside of our language, quite memorably in an essay that was titled language Heidegger wrote this, quote, in the naming, the things named are called into their thinking, thinking they unfold world in which things abide, and

2:04so are the abiding ones. In quote, the postmodern is that he influenced, took this notion even further that our language does not merely describe reality. It actually creates reality. Jacques Baradau famously said that there's nothing beyond the text. Reality is only what we describe. And of course, it's true that our words are incredibly powerful. What we call things, what we call people or pets, really tends to stick. Think about powerful it is to name a day to ourselves as being either hard or blessed. What we name our children, what we nickname our spouse becomes more than just a mere identifier for them. It becomes in a very real sense who they are. That's the best example is how a name invented by an oldest grandchild, an otherwise random sound, maybe like Babbo, becomes what a grandparent is called for the rest of their lives. What the postmodern is missed in all this is that there is an actual reality beyond our words. Yes, our words do have creative power, but that's only because we're made in the image

3:07of God whose words brought reality into existence. The power of our words reflects, in fact, the order of reality. We name our pets, our pets do not name us. We name the forest and the lakes and the oceans where animals live and stop the other way around. And naming especially is prominent throughout scripture from the second chapter of Genesis to the second chapter of Revelation and basically everywhere in between. Naming provides key markers for a person's journey through life and with God. And there's a profound distinction between what God names and what God tasks his image bearers with naming. Adam was the name the animals, but in part that was a way of realizing the truth of what God had said about him, that he was alone and that that was not good. Because names matter, we should always take the God-given task of naming seriously. But at the same time, we should never think that we can rename reality into something else. We play our language games, demanding pronouns, calling good evil and evil good or denying

4:12that there's a real world beyond our words. But in the end, it is always and only God's words that ultimately determine what is, what is good and what is true. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-author with Dr. Timothy Pageant, if you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download podcasts. And for more resources or to share this commentary with other people, go to Breakpoint.org.