Advent Season—Week Two: ‘Peace’
This is the second in a series of reflections for the four-week season leading up to Christmas that’s known in the church calendar as Advent. Each week (each of the Sundays) is traditionally focused on a biblical theme: hope, peace, joy, and love. This typically involves lighting candles on an Advent wreath—a purple/violet candle on weeks one, two, and four, and a pink/rose candle on week three, with some traditions adding a fifth white candle on Christmas Eve for Jesus’ birth.
We noted last time that the first theme (of hope) is a strange one, insofar as the way the word is commonly used today does not reflect its biblical meaning. The same is true of the theme we’ll be looking at today. Let’s start with some background to explain how that can occur, helping us understand why it’s a problem.
We need to begin with what’s called the ‘sign theory’ of language. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure argued that no word carries a fixed and determined meaning in and of itself. Rather, there’s a dynamic relationship between the ‘signifier’ (the word we use) and that which is being ‘signified by’ the word. The word we use to point to something has no intrinsic connection to the ‘thing’ of which we’re speaking.
For example, we speak of ‘Googling’ as a signifier for conducting an internet search—that which is being signified. Another example would be that when I say ‘cat’, it immediately calls to mind for the hearer a mental picture of a furry feline creature broadly corresponding to the one I’m imagining. My use of the word ‘cat’ has served as verbal shorthand to enable us to avoid having to delve into the dictionary and use several sentences to explain what I’m talking about. It reduces the instances when we need to ask questions like, “What’s a ‘cat’?” The word cat has no direct relationship to a cat; it’s simply a verbal tool to ‘signpost’ us to a cat. The reality is the cat, not the word cat.
This becomes even more obvious when we realise that what a word is signposting in English is not what it’s signposting in another language. In French, the word ‘pain’ signposts ‘bread’. In German, ‘gift’ signposts ‘poison’. Even in English, a word by itself does not always tell us what it’s pointing to: the word ‘desert’ can mean either an arid terrain or abandoning someone.
Furthermore, a word only serves as a useful tool to ‘point to’ something for so long as it retains a meaning that the two parties continue to understand in the same way. If my use of ‘cat’ causes others to visualise a ‘dog’, then it’s no longer working as intended.
An obvious example of this would be the word ‘gay’, which used to point to a person being ‘carefree, frivolous, and jolly’, but now also (and indeed, more often) points to them being ‘homosexual’. Similarly, the word ‘queer’ was once used as a term of abuse, but it has now shed those connections and is deployed as a technical term by the LGBTQ+ community.
When it comes to so-called ‘biblical’ words, similar problems apply. Yet here we encounter an additional challenge, when there is no contemporary English word that adequately corresponds to an ancient Hebrew, Greek, or Aramaic word (or even to a concept). And so, too, vice versa—instances in which they had no words that adequately correspond to ours.
Easy examples of this problem are modern words that describe and define medical conditions or scientific matters of which the ancient world was unaware (and hence inevitably had no words for). They may have had words to describe something’s visual manifestation (‘how it looked’, or ‘its effects’), but not the thing itself, or its cause, as we now understand that to be, living in an age of science where our knowledge is light-years beyond that of the ancients.
For example, when the Gospels speak of Jesus healing ‘demon possession’, this was against a backdrop in which conditions such as schizophrenia and epilepsy were unknown. This does not mean that there was no such thing as demons or demon possession (then or now), but it should cause us to reflect that what was central in the stories was not the diagnosis but Jesus’ healing of the person. Very importantly, we should not leap to presupposing the same (‘biblical’) diagnosis—with deliverance ministry as its solution—for how someone may present today, since the causes and the appropriate treatment of apparently similar symptoms may not be the same.
A more controversial example—worth mentioning because it illustrates the ‘sign theory’ extremely well—is the modern word ‘homosexuality’ (and its counterpart ‘heterosexuality’). These new words were created (in Germany) only in the latter part of the nineteenth century to signify the emerging scientific awareness that same-sex sexual orientation occurs in a minority of people by nature (rather than by wilful—and hence, sinful—personal choice, as previously believed).
Hence, when a Bible translation (such as the NIV, the NASB, or the ESV) chooses to use the word ‘homosexuality’, it is reflecting an ideological view rather than a purely linguistic view. It is not a direct scholarly translation, since ancient world languages had no equivalent.
This is not to say that no ancient language words were pointing to male-male same-sex sexual activity—and in each case, it was male-male; there are no female-female verses (and hence even less justification for using the word ‘homosexual’, a term that includes both)—but there are complications in knowing what, exactly, they were condemning, and why; not least because a good deal of euphemism was involved. (To this day, euphemistic terms are often deployed when matters of sex are being spoken about.)
The point is to be aware that it is ideology, rather than linguistics, that has concluded those verses to be speaking about ‘the same thing’ as today’s same-sex relationships and hence—for those conservative publishing houses—justifies the use of a blatantly anachronistic word. In so doing, they are passing that impression to their unsuspecting readers, as ‘The Bible says’.
But back to this week’s Advent theme, which is peace. The Hebrew word usually translated as ‘peace’ in our English Bibles is shalom. It’s understandable (per the goal of communicative efficiency that is intrinsic to the ‘sign theory’ working as it should) that Bible translators would want to find one word for it. And yet, that robs the word of its far richer and deeper original meaning.
Most Christians will read ‘peace’ as signifying an absence of conflict (like the ‘peace talks’ currently seeking an end to the war in Ukraine) or, perhaps more often, interpret it in a personal spiritual way, as a sense of inner peace, a tranquil soul. While these meanings are not absent, they very much fail to do justice to the biblical word.
Shalom is when everything in life is as it should be—when everything in life is right, and good; when individuals and communities are thriving. Ultimately, it’s describing the life of the age to come (what we call ‘heaven’ for short, or the fullness of the kingdom of God). But there’s also a biblical sense in which God would have us experience more now, and help others to experience more now, even in the troubles and trials of this present life.
Being the ‘peacemakers’ who Jesus blesses in the Beatitudes (in the Sermon on the Mount) does include helping to resolve conflict and bringing someone’s inner world into peace with their outer world, but it’s way more holistic than that—it’s wanting to bring greater shalom into every area of life. This takes us beyond simply ‘spiritual peace’ into a deeper and wider well-being and wholeness. This includes, in a relational sense, peace with God and one another, but also the world as it should be in every area of life, eliminating injustice and unrighteousness; all of the wrongs in life being ‘made right’. It carries the sense of ‘life in abundance’ and defeating the enemies that seek to ‘steal, kill, and destroy’ life in people, which Jesus said in John 10:10 that he came to bring about, spiritually and materially.
Finally, eagle-eyed readers may have spotted that I’ve been talking so far about the Hebrew Old Testament word. So what about the New Testament? Around 200 years before Jesus’ time, when the Old Testament was translated into Greek (Greek was the lingua franca of the Mediterranean world, much as English is today), in what we know as the Septuagint, or LXX, the translators chose the Greek word eirēnē to translate shalom. When eirēnē is then used by the later New Testament writers, it retains that Hebraic meaning.
Whenever we see our English word ‘peace’ in the Bible, we should keep in mind this far broader, holistic meaning of the biblical concept. In particular, let’s not reduce it to just a personal inner peace or tranquillity of soul. Our calling to be ‘peacemakers’—bringing greater shalom into our communities and the lives of people we know and meet—goes far beyond.
PS eirēnē is where we get the name ‘Irene’, and also, the word ‘irenic’.
PPS It’s worth remembering the sign theory of language when people say that ‘biblical’ words have inherent power; the power lies in that which is being signified, not in words that signify it (whatever the language).