Loved this book. It was encouraging to read someone wrestling with the same thoughts and ideas as I have and a helpful resource for having conversations about faith.

I enjoyed this book and it’s concept. Many Christians hold assumptions about “sacred” words, both good and bad! This book covers many deep topics but in an accessible way.

Such a timely book! While I could nitpick at things I disagreed with overall Jonathan get to the heart of what so many Christians and non-Christians think about how we talk about God. The run-down, overused, and cliche terms are rekindled and reworked to see new life. I'm going to use this as a future resource whenever I preach and one of these topics comes up. The second half of the book that goes over keywords we use is really helpful!

The second half of this book, where Merritt explores "transformed meanings" of sacred words, is good. There are about 15 of these short chapters, so each really just feels like a little bite rather than an in-depth exploration. A lot of this feels like fairly typical post-evangelical reflection, a few of his points I found to be much more different and interesting than something I've heard before.

I really don't understand who he thinks this book is for. The first 80 pages are about rates of engagement with religion, spiritual conversation, etc., and about how words/languages live and die -- which makes me think that this book is for faith leaders, but he claims it is for people who have left/never been part of a church community.

The thing I found most frustrating is that he takes as an implicit assumption the fact that we should be "speaking God." This book is clearly addressing an audience, directly or indirectly, who does not share that value, so it felt like a gaping hole to not tackle this. It felt like Merritt offered the beginning, that religious language has turned people off, and the end, that it doesn't have to -- but not the middle, that there is some reason why people who have been turned off should even bother coming back.

3.5/5

Every subculture has its own jargon. Christianity is no exception. There is “Christian-ese,” those in-culture words that evangelicals tend to throw around (“blessing,” “love offering,” “supplication, “born again,” etc.), and then there are those weightier, sacred words (grace, sin, saint, spirit, mystery, etc.). As religion journalist Jonathan Meritt moved from the Bible to NYC, he came to realize that these sacred words had different meanings or no meanings outside of his "bubble" (he gives an example of a time when he told someone that he was attending a "worship service" and received a puzzled look). In his new book “Learning to Speak God from Scratch,” Merritt examines how and why many of these sacred words are fading from the vernacular, how Christians ought to respond, and then several case studies of sacred words ("yes," "creed," "prayer," "pain," "disappointment," "mystery," "God," "fall," "sin," "grace," "brokenness," "blessed," "neighbor," "pride," "saint," "confession," "spirit," "family," and "lost").

The book is divided into two halves. The first half of the book is fantastic. Merritt explains the nature of languages. Languages live, languages die, and, sometimes, languages live again. English has become the "lingua franca" and swallowed up many native languages (just as other lingua franca have done throughout history). Some languages only survive in professional or academic sectors, like Latin. Some languages are used only for cultic purposes, like Coptic. Irish/Gaelic was fading away but is now being revived. After disappearing for centuries, Hebrew is more prominent now than it was in ancient times. Merritt argues that sacred Christian language is also fading away but, like modern Hebrew, can live again.

So how do Christians (especially Christian leaders) respond to the disappearance of sacred words? Merritt argues that there are two basic ways:

(1) Fossilization - Words are fenced in and protected. Ultimately, this will fail because languages breathe and grow.
(2) Substitution - Words that are too uncomfortable or rigid are replaced with more appealing words. Merritt quotes Rob Bell as a prime example of this: "When a word becomes too toxic and too abused and too associated with ideas and understands that aren't true to the mystery behind the mystery . . . it's important to set it aside and search for new and better ways to talk about it." Of course, this is a "throwing-the-baby-out-with-the-bath-water" situation.

Riffing on prescriptions from Walter Bruggemann (Orientation > Disorientation > Reorientation), N.T. Wright (Packing > Unpacking > Repacking), and Richard Rohr (Order > Disorder > Reorder), Merritt's solution is as follows: "In order to speak God from scratch, we begin with what we have accepted. Then, we break it down, challenging preconceptions. Finally, we build it back up in a way that is more helpful, richer, and beautiful."

In the second half, Merritt attempts to take these dying sacred words and reevaluate them. Unfortunately, this second half was underwhelming. Part of the problem is his word choices (particularly, I'm thinking of "yes" and "pain," which are not particularly sacred words). The other problem is that he doesn't seem to really be truly investigating each word. Rather, he gives preachy anecdotes on each one. Some of these are pretty good and have some teeth (for example, "Maybe we should stop hashtagging blessings and start handing out blessings" [paraphrase]). Sometimes he seems to go far afield of his goal. For example, he spends several pages weighing in on the gender of God and several more pages telling his chronic pain story. Again, most of these reevaluations of words are underwhelming.

Thoughtful framework and examples of how speaking God can become a living and life giving language.

Words change over time. Years ago, the definition of the word "Literally" changed from not just meaning "In a literal sense or manner" or "With exact equivalence", but to also mean "an exaggerated way to emphasize a statement or description that is not literally true or possible." This doesn't mean to word itself changed, but that it's usage did. People didn't "literally walk a thousand miles." They just say it to emphasize how hard walking is.

Jonathan Merritt has noticed how sacred language has changed, and wants to reclaim words that have taken harsh connotations and redeem them, as well as bring new life to words used by many Christian's.

Learning To Speak God From Scratch is sectioned into two parts, with a short introduction.
The first part Merritt dives into research on Sacred Words; mainly what they are, how they are used, and where they are going. He argues for the evolution of the sacred words and their use in every day conversation, while showing the decline of their use, and how this effects culture. He doesn't shy away from the baggage sacred words bring, but uses their abuses to argue for an ever evolving language in Christianity.
The second part is an exploration of some words that Merritt wants us to rethink. With a mixture of research and storytelling, Merritt shows how these words have changed for him and the new life they bring. Reading this section had me all over the place emotionally. Chapters had me shouting "Yes!", laughing out loud, and crying in my car on my lunch break from work. But they also required me to put down the book and digest what I've just read. This is the part where Merritt shines as a writer, not only putting these new ideas out, but making them easy to understand without losing complexity.
Afterwards, Merritt invites us to not only be readers of this idea of Speaking God from Scratch, but to participate in relearning scared words. Using his examples and method, he encourages us to make our own list of words, unload the baggage, and reclaim language previously excluded to the in-crowd of Christianese.

I read Merritt's last book [b:Jesus Is Better than You Imagined|18296142|Jesus Is Better than You Imagined|Jonathan Merritt|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1379901134s/18296142.jpg|25779032] during a spiritually difficult chapter of my life. After leaving a church I had called family for years and seeing the dirty and abusive side of church (again), I was about to give up on any form of Church. JIBTYI reminded me of what the Church can be, and how the faith I belong to is more than the politics. So when I saw the opportunity to get an advanced copy his newest book, I jumped at the chance to read it. Having not read what is was about, I didn't realize how much this book would speak to where I was again, and the lasting effect it would have on me. Having read this already, I'm already planning on rereading it when I buy the final copy.

The first full section is slow and repetitive (we get it, language is important!), but Merritt excels once he starts dissecting single words. I found the chapters on 'family' and 'blessing' particularly good.

As an English teacher and a lover of language, pretty much everything in this book hit home. Merritt makes a lot clear in a way that those in my traditional upbringing haven't been able to express.