Oh yes, it is time to get nit-picky! Because being verbs deserve their own rant.
If you've ever received any writing instruction at all in
your life, chances are you've heard being verbs viciously denounced as weak,
lazy, and restrictive. They acknowledge only bare existence, you've
heard. They convey inherent lack of effort, they warn you. And, being
verbs limit an object to a single correlation.
Yes, sometimes yes, and emphatically yes to those
statements, respectively.
Let's back up a bit. The English language has
ensnared us native speakers in a syntactical prison that requires us to organize
our sentences into subject (the actor), verb (the action),
direct object (the thing being acted upon) word order. If you're not Yoda,
or a poet, deviations from that structure generally mean incorrect grammar.
However, when an author uses a being verb (am, are, is, and the moods and tenses
thereof), the direct object is no longer a direct object. Instead, that noun is
called a predicate nominative. It functions essentially as a second
subject.
For instance, a subject-verb-direct object sentence such
as "Jane sees Spot" cannot be reversed to read "Spot
sees Jane" without changing the meaning. Certainly the two sentences
may both be true at the same time, but they express different scenarios
entirely. On the other hand, the sentence using two predicate nominatives such
as "That dog is Spot" can be reversed perfectly without
changing the meaning whatsoever: "Spot is that dog." The
predicate nominatives and the being verb allow "Spot" and "that
dog" to be mutually inclusive terms. To be sure, there are other dogs, and
other creatures named Spot, but now, that particular dog is inextricably
linked to that particular name by grammar.
That is the often underappreciated beauty of the being
verb. It takes two separate terms and binds them into one entity. For some
reason, aficionados of the English language disapprove of such limitations.
Now, I am a native speaker of the English language, but
I've never taken English grammar. So my writing and speaking and other wordly
communication suffers from the colloquial contaminants running rampant through
all casual conversations. Sometimes I think I'm better with Latin and Greek
grammar than I am with the English variety (though, that's not saying much).
Admittedly, it's been a while since I've read anything in
Greek, but I pulled out my Graecum Novum Testamentum (Greek New Testament) and
gave it a read the other day. Doing so, I was struck by what I noticed. There
are copious amounts of being verbs in the Bible written in association with
God.
Back to English for a brief moment. Generally, when we
describe a person, we use an adjective to associate the attribute with the
individual. For example: "He ruled as a just king" or "She
behaves like a good friend" or even "I read a truthful article."
These might even be phrased with being verbs: "He was a truthful
king," "she is a good friend," or "it was a
truthful article." In these instances, the author is taking two concepts—justice
and king, goodness and friend, truth and article—and linking them. They still
remain separate concepts, but in describing the king, friend, or article, the
author takes justice, goodness, or truth and applies it to the subject. But an
adjectival application does not have the same force as an inextricably linking
verb.
That is not the case with the being verbs of the New
Testament. God is love. God is light. When Jesus said, "I am the
way, the truth, and the life,” he didn't mean that there is some concept
outside of himself that applies to him, he means that that thing begins
and ends with him. There is no concept of truth somewhere outside of God
that we could take and apply to him: he is truth.
Human beings cannot comprehend God. We are
imperfect, he is perfect. We are corrupt, he is holy. We are inherently
lacking, he is inherently complete. Those concepts are central to the entire
point of the Gospel. We cannot comprehend God. However, we can
comprehend, in essence, what "love" is. We can understand what
"light" means. We can grasp what "truth" entails. It's not
just that we have a "loving God,"—though we do—or a "truthful
Saviour"—though that is certainly true as well. We have a God and Saviour
outside of whom there is no such thing as love, and no concept we could call
truth. By using being verbs to describe his person, God reveals to us a key
element about his nature: he is.
Being verbs reflect the very person of Christ Jesus, who
bound God and Man into one, inextricably linked, being. They
bridge the gap between two concepts and make them singular, just as he did, and they
reveal to human beings the nature of God to the fullest extent that we can
understand, exactly as Christ did. I love being verbs! They're like little forms of Jesus embodied in grammar, and deserve a bit more credit than we, users of the English language, give them.
Best wishes,
Nicole
P.S. Listen to the actual professionals who know how properly to use and abuse the infuriating rules of the English language. Especially if they're the ones giving your work a grade or deciding whether or not it goes on to be published. My little tirades are just the rantings of a slightly miffed amateur who noticed something other languages have that ours doesn't!
