Christ in Grammar and Syntax

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!