Others have given great reviews about how Jonathan writes and organizes his book or the facts and statistics. If you want those, skip my review. My review is about the heart of the book and more so a confession…

I didn't want to read this book because Merritt grew up Southern Baptist. I judged him for it and I’m sorry. Just about every "nondenominational" church my family visited was essentially Southern Baptist and the message at each of them was “don't ask questions, God must be teaching you a lesson, and just have faith”. Merritt actually opened me up for more questions and cracked a layer of hardness off my heart. I found myself convicted over and over as I was confronted with various words I have discarded over the years. This conviction came as a gentle reproach and I so appreciate Merritt’s example for this. It’s like watching him rip out old sticky carpet in a hundred-year-old building and revealing a gorgeous hardwood floor underneath. Carpet isn’t always easy to rip out though, it usually smells foul and you get caught by the nails and tacking once in a while. Reviving languages takes work, but it’s beautiful and redemptive once restored. The book also opened my ears to hear how others have heard sacred words weaponized or circularly defined by more confusing and meaningless words. Overall, I was surprised by this book and have profound respect for Jonathan.

Merritt the Younger Again Proves He Is His Father's Equal. Jonathan Merritt and I grew up in roughly similar church traditions at roughly the same time in roughly the same geographic area. His father would eventually become President of the Southern Baptist Convention, my pastor would later become President of the Georgia Baptist Convention. Growing up, while not knowing of Jonathan specifically, his father was among *the* most respected men I had ever heard. As in, there was a deacon or two in my own small church, there was Charles Stanley, and there was James Merritt.

I began reading Jonathan's own work a few years ago with the release of A Faith of Our Own, and both it and the next book Jesus Is Better Than You Imagined were as though Jonathan was in my own head, even while speaking - as he does here - of lessons he has learned in his own life.

In this particular book, Jonathan again teaches us using lessons he has observed over the last few years of his own life and winds up touching on many issues of our day even while speaking to eternal truth.

At the end of the first part of the book, when he specifically tells more conservative thinkers that they may not like all that is to follow and brings up the Hebrew concept of midrash, my fears were raised. I just read another ARC of another contemporary that grew up a couple hundred miles away from our home region but in a similar background and time who had used the concept quite a bit in her new book, and let's just say I wasn't impressed with that effort.

Jonathan quickly dispelled the fears though, and actively sought to explain his own new understanding of the various sacred words we use in religious speak, particularly among Christians. He never claims authority, he just claims conversation and what he has found the words mean for him, and invites the readers to consider for themselves. Yet again, it turns out that he largely sees them exactly as I have come to - even without me realizing I had been on my own similar journey over the years. In one particularly poignant moment, he speaks to a word he used around the time of the publication of his last book and what he now thinks of it. In another, he uses Fred Rogers to explain the concept of neighbor. And in another, he exposes a revolutionary concept for thinking about a word that Christians have used far too long as a divider between the "righteous few" and the "pagan hordes". (My words in quotes there, not his.)

In the end, Merritt the Younger winds up finding a truth that I had tattooed on my own skin nearly a decade ago, and he exposes it in a new, fresh way for things that I had never considered.

That truth?

Jesus didn't define our words so much as redefine them in revolutionary ways. Ways that still speak to us 2000 years later, if only we will consider them anew.

Won't you join us in unpacking, examining, and rediscovering the ancient sacred words all over again?

The first few chapters of this book challenge the reader to examine their relationship with religious language and the cause of that. It helped me understand the growing, evolving definitions that I’ve had since I was a kid. Some of the main points stretched further than I could get down with, but a good read.

Learning to Speak God from Scratch is a hopeful guide for anyone who finds themselves undergoing an evolution of faith, or asking questions about the evolution of American Christianity as a whole. If you are deconstructing your faith but don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, this is for you.



Fans of Jonathan Merritt’s religion reporting will find his same honest, straightforward, and compelling writing here. At the same time, the book is full of personal stories and relatable anecdotes that Christians from a variety of backgrounds will resonate with. 

The first half of the book explains Jonathan’s research about sacred speech in America, and can be a bit dry at times, but is still interesting and provides needed context for understanding the significance of the conversation.



The second half of the book, though, is where I found this book most interesting, compelling, and heartfelt. Here, Merritt offers a series of essays in which he examines words often associated with Christianity—sin, grace, pain, neighbor—and unpacks how his understanding of them has changed over time.



This book gave me needed permission to continue asking questions about my own faith, and also gave me a framework by which I might do so. 

This book is a needed and helpful guidebook for anyone who is deconstructing their faith but wants to do so with hope.



I received an advanced copy of the book, but the thoughts here are my own and are not given in exchange for the book.

Learning to Speak God from Scratch by Jonathan Merritt. This book begins with Merritt's realization that making a move from Atlanta to New York City silenced his ability to have spiritual conversations. The phrases and ideas behind them that made perfect sense in the south often were completely undiscovered by the New Yorkers that he was suddenly surrounded with. Through this, Merritt begins to think about the decline of spiritual conversations, spiritual language and the feeling that some words are either too fraught with baggage to even come to a consensus their meanings. What does it mean for our faith if we withdraw from using these words and from having spiritual conversations? After pondering the reasons for use of sacred words and where we are linguistically, Merritt continues by sharing several words and how those words have been altered in his spiritual vocabulary, using personal anecdotes and reflections.

This is truly a beautiful book, and I think it is an important conversation. We come to words like God, sin, suffering, lost, and grace with our own backgrounds and our own presuppositions, and we often don't realize that someone else's background and connotations surrounding those words are very different. When we add in meanings through church history and in the biblical languages, things can get very confusing indeed.

It was just such a book as this, Kathleen Norris's Amazing Grace, that made me see, when I was close to rejecting my faith that I needed to wrestle with God rather than run away from him. God was big enough to handle my doubts, fears and often, accusations. (That book still has a place in my top five favorite books ever.) Merritt's book is perhaps not as well done as Norris's, but his book digs into the idea of lost languages and speaks to modern issues in a way that is much appreciated, and that young seekers may even relate to better. His personal reflections are top notch, and I might have really found a few things that hit me where I live, especially in the chapters on "disappointment," "neighbor," "self-esteem," and "lost." In fact, I copied so many quote from the chapter on disappointment into my commonplace book that I might as well have copied the whole chapter.

I am thankful that I paused to read this book, and I will definitely be exploring the bibliography, probably starting with Borg and Taylor's books, so I expect I will be taking up this topic of spiritual words on my blog often in the coming months. This book receives my highest recommendation. (Book 41 of 2019)

"If we do not use sacred words, then our minds will be less attuned to transcendence. If we do not have spiritual conversations, then we'll be less shaped by our spirituality. And if our moral language is vanishing--with the decline of words like grace, mercy, honest, courage, and wisdom--then we can expect our communities and culture will reflect this shift." (41)

I listened to Learning to Speak God from Scratch as an audiobook over a few days. Some chapters are interested or worthwhile, but it’s not said much that was new to me. I’m not sure what I expected getting into it, but this wasn’t it.

The author spends a good amount of time sharing his experience of moving to and making a home in New York City while trying to use this thread to support the “linguistics and words” theme of the book. the metaphors were loose, but I suppose this was his attempt at humanizing his work. I found the stories distracting, especially considering the linguistics content wasn't as academic as I thought it would be.

Instead, the author takes Christian words, a chapter at a time, and either shares about his own journey of using the word in a different way ("broken," for example), suggests that Christians consider the varied meanings and adopt more holistic understandings of overused words ("sin," "love," "grace," "saint") or shares his revelations about the greater context of words ("saint" and "family"). He'll share the historical and biblical context here and there ("confession" and "sin"), but doesn't propose much instruction instead of sharing a hopeful vision that Christians will become more thoughtful about the words they use as he's been learning to do. This is, I believe, what he means by "speaking God from scratch."

I do think it could be a bit of an eye-opener to more conservative Christians, but his approach isn’t all that direct and is kinda wibbly wobbly as he hops from topic to topic, all topics loosely tied together with Words Are Important idea. This read more like a collection of casual essays than a deep dive into a new way to speak about Christianity.

Dumbfounded

Thank you Jonathan for this book on speaking about God. I’m speechless. You have turned my way of thinking on its head and for that I am grateful. I especially appreciate the “rewriting” of John 1 from Erasmus - in the beginning there was Conversation. May I be faithful to carry on the Conversation.

Jonathan’s Merritt’s _Learning to Speak God from Scratch_ is the kind of book that sticks with you long after you close the cover. Merritt argues that “[w]e are word-shaped beings who live word-shaped lives within word-shaped communities.” He argues that words are holy gifts from God that we often fail to use well.

After making a case for the importance of words, Merritt challenges readers to reimagine the way that we use the words of our faith. Words like creed, disappointment, and even God take on new meaning and new depth under Merritt’s careful and thoughtful exposition. Rather than shying away from words that have come to be seen as critical or judgmental, Merritt asks us to reclaim their meanings. By doing this, Merritt believes that we can better engage with our faith and with each other.

Merritt’s writing is accessible, eloquent, and clear. His passion for the written word and his compassion for people come through on every page. My one critique is that the inclusion of so many words sacrificed more in-depth analyses and discussions around each word. That served mostly to encourage me to explore more on my own.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in exploring their faith in a unique, new way or anyone who is interested in the way that the use of religious words has changed over time.