Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 83:2 (Fall 2021)
Article: What’s In A Word? The Trinity
Author: Pierce Taylor Hibbs

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What’s In A Word? The Trinity

Pierce Taylor Hibbs

Pierce Taylor Hibbs is Associate Director for Theological Curriculum and Instruction in the Theological English Department at Westminster Theological Seminary.

Drawing on the linguistic metaphor in John 1:1 and the work of Kenneth L. Pike, Vern S. Poythress, and John M. Frame, the author argues that every word in human language has derivative coherence and meaning rooted in the original coherence and meaning of God’s communicative behavior. Every word of human language is rooted in two triads: classification/instantiation/association and grammar/phonology/reference. Each of these triads is rooted in the Trinity. Thus, every word of human language is revelational of and dependent on the persons of the Godhead and their coinherence.

Literature has a way of drawing out our curiosity. In the second scene of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare had his leading lady ask a now famous question: “What’s in a name?” Juliet was no philosopher of language; she only posed the question because family reputations were getting in the way of romance. Still, the question has drawn attention over the years in linguistics, particularly signification, and for good reasons. Names can seem purely conventional, and yet they are deeply meaningful in their sundry contexts.

We might expand Juliet’s question to “What’s in a word?” Theologians, I argue, should be especially fascinated by this, for the answer goes back to the very nature of God. That is what I aim to show in this article.

Now, let me start by saying that the question “What’s in a word?” is not the same as “What is a word?” Many philosophers of language have spent years developing an answer to the latter. Entailed in that question is a word’s meaning. In the twentieth century, Wittgenstein (in his later work) suggested that “the meaning of a word is its use in the language.”1 For Saussure, “the meaning of a term is defined by its position in the system of language of which it is a part.”2 A word, for most structural linguists, was a signifier arbitrarily tied to that which

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it signified. For post-structuralists and deconstructionists, a word was a sign that could only refer to other signs, making a labyrinth of signification.3

“What’s in a word?” is a more mysterious question. It moves beyond discussions of signification to address what (in fact, who) make...