ABSTRACT
The idea of ‘speaking Christian’ comes from the Australian poet Les Murray. 1 Murray is a Catholic and one of his collections is entitled Learning Human. Reading Les Murray I arrived by extension at the idea of speaking Christian. Of course, speaking Christian is a version of learning human, especially given that Christianity is quite literally a humanly embodied faith revealed in a human face. Its fundamental coinage is very familiar: words like water and blood, wine and bread, garden and city. Part of its vocabulary reflects the fundamentals of life in the Mediterranean: lamb, shepherd, vine, husbandman. There follow more abstract ideas like sin and holiness, grace and law, fall and redemption, judgement and forgiveness, bondage and liberation. Then there are concepts involving time and duration, beginnings and endings: for example, creation and recreation, advent (or proclamation) and fulfilment, the transition to a new life through death in the waters of baptism, the transition from the broken unity of the sacred meal to full communion and restored fellowship around the table. All these concepts rest on basic contrasts like the kingdom and ‘the world’. Finally there is a governing sequence running from incarnation to atonement and from resurrection to ascension. It is the relation between these basic elements that is distinctive, and my argument assumes that wherever you begin a symbolic logic would lead to all the others. Speaking Christian has a grammar as well as a vocabulary.
