March 2, 2012— updated 15.9.2016

An Essay of Definition in Seven Parts

In 1983, I sat at a picnic table in Kodiak Island’s Buskin River State Park and I listened as the resident caretaker explained why he and his family had left Hawaii earlier that spring: it seemed that his children had begun to speak the creolized form of English for which Hawaii is known. He didn’t want his children to speak “bad English,” as he called Hawaiian Creole, not understanding that a Creole language will develop with the children of any population that communicates in a naming system, a jargon, shared among the population but that is not the first language of the population—and that the creolized language is a legitimate language that uses the words of the jargon as its words, but with a grammar of its own development.

I had, a few years previous, given a pickup truck to an immigrant to Alaska from the Caribbean island of Martinique. The fellow and his family spoke a form of creolized French and when he was excited, he would revert back to this French Creole and no one in Alaska could understand what he was saying, which sometimes worked to his advantage.

When peoples of many languages come together as they did in the holds of slave ships or as they did below decks on English sailing ships that regularly stopped in Hawaii, these peoples, each having a first language with a well-developed grammar, needed only to master a naming system, again a jargon, in which the words of the dominate culture were used for the names of tools or sails or weather or whatever. But the human mind communicates in language, and if a language isn’t readily available for use when a child begins to use language, the human mind will invent a language with a fully developed grammar in which it can communicate with itself. Usually, the words of this new language will have been borrowed from parents; hence, if the parents speak to each other or to others in a jargon, the words of the jargon will be appropriated by the new creolized language. Black Vernacular is such a language as is Hawaii’s Pigeon English and the French Creole of the Caribbean.

The languages of Christianity as spoken by Trinitarians or as spoken by Arians—distinct languages, each—are languages of oppression, of accusation, of persecution: they are the languages of dominating cultures. And they leave Sabbatarian Christians speaking a jargon; i.e., using a naming system that employs the words of the oppressors in a way that subverts greater Christendom. But there is now entering the Elect, the chosen ones, Sabbatarian Christians who were never a part of greater Christianity; who know little of the language of the accusers. Plus, the adult children of Sabbatarian parents have reached the age when they can be, if the Father chooses, born of spirit as infant sons of God. They cannot subsist with a Christian jargon as their parents have. They will invent a creolized language in which theological matters can be discussed. And it is to this end that this essay initially in seven serialized parts has been written … these seven parts conclude the essay as of 02 March 2012, but may not ultimately conclude the essay.

With free Acrobat Reader® software, you can view and print the commentaries.

03-02-2012 Part One The Langugage of Redemption	03-02a-2012 Part Two The Familiar as the Enemy of the Unfamiliar
03-02b-2012 Part Three Born of Spirit vs. Filled with Spirit	03-02c-2012 Part Four Sons of Light
03-02d-2012 Part Four Addendum	03-02e-2012 Part Five Out of the North Country
03-02f-2012 Part Five Addendum	03-02f-2012 Part Five Addendum 2
03-02f-2012 Part 6 A Language of One's Own	03-02f-2012 Summary

---