In closing, I think I ought to explain why, after saying such hard things about words and verbalization, I have given up so much time to just the discussion of words. It is because here we have a good example of the right use of words and of the right way, and the wrong way, to receive them. Words are not to be condemned, but our abuse and misuse of words. We try to make a distinction between words which are abstract or empty and words which are concrete and form a picture. Here are five words, all of them pictures, and yet they seem to be abstract. But it is we ourselves who have made the abstraction. They were not abstractions to Paul, but we have made the mistake of taking the words, not as we should, simply as sign-posts pointing to reality, but as having some virtue in themselves. Therefore, we give abstract meanings to Justification, Redemption, Adoption. We abstract their meaning. But if we come to look at them, we find they had a very lively meaning, that they are actual pictures. Considering Adoption as the special relationship that God had with Isreael, can mean nothing to us. We are lost, we flounder about, when we try to consider such a thing. But when we consider that we are no longer slaves, but sons, that means something to us, and we see the sort of thing Paul had in mind. He did not present his words as having any virtue in themselves, but you may be sure that every time he used a word it had some living experience behind it. And if we look at the words, not as a magical or logical formulae, but as a sign-post to experience, we find that experience.
There is a very fundamental truth behind all this. To quote Quaker Pennington again: "The end of words is to bring men to a knowledge of things beyond what words can utter." Again he says, "All Truth is a shadow except the last. But every Truth is substance in its own place though it be but a shadow in another place. And the shadow is a true shadow as the substance is a true substance." We must conceive of a truth or a thought as a substantial form. It is just as substantial as a table but of a different order of substance. It is just as much of a reality as is God's love, and quite as inexpressible in words. Words can be considered then as the shadow of that substantial form, outlining it and indicating its presence, but never in any real sense reptresenting or expressing it. Shelley puts this idea in poetical form:
"Language is a perpetual orphic song
Which rules with daedal harmony a throng
Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were."
Without words we might not know of the existence of a thought, but even when words are used we are no better off unless we win past them and reach the thought beyond. If we stop and play with the words we are prostituting their function. We have mistaken the shadow for the substance. Of the words which come from Life we have gathered death. The letter killeth but the Spirit giveth life.
There is another way of putting it. Words are to the living thought as the body of flesh is to the soul or real self. Behaviorists are fond of saying that our bodies are machines. This is true. Paul knew that his body was acting mechanically and not in accordance with his will. But Paul knew and we know that all has not been said when we call our bodies machines. They are a special type of machine, known as an organism. An organism has behind the machine an integrating principle which is called Life. In Man, the principle behind the machine we call the self or the soul. It is that which gives the activity of the organism meaning. You will remember that I said the words of Paul partook of the nature of an organism. Now you can see the significance of that statement. When we recognize the body as an organism we know that we cannot exhaust its meaning by considering it simply by itself, weighing its atoms, classifying its properties, cataloguing its forms of behaviour and so on. Instead we look for the individuality behind the body. It is the same with Paul's words. As they are an organism their significance is not in themselves but in the integrating principle behind them, the living thought of which they are the body. If we take them merely as verbalizations, it is like taking a man as so much meat, so much chemical substance. We sometimes do that, as when we consider a man as a unit of labour. That is taking the letter for the Spirit.