There is a language of the heart that must express the passion of this love-theology
It is clear in the context that his message is to both brothers and sisters in the faith, to the “beloved ones,” as The Passion Translation says
A goal of The Passion Translation is to recapture the emotion of God’s Word, for emotion is vital to God’s message. As Gregory Clapper rhetorically asked, “Is the great range of scriptural language about the ‘heart’ dispensable ornamentation which only clouds the real message of the Gospel, or does this emotion-language itself convey and constitute, in large measure, the real message?” Brian Simmons believes Scripture’s emotion-language is at the heart of God’s Word because it fully manifests the heart of God.
The truth is that pure Semitic languages (Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic) differ foundationally from our Indo-European languages (Greek, Latin, English). Not just having a different grammar and vocabulary, Semitic languages have an entirely different operating system. Their speakers employ spatial tools, rather than temporal (timeline-based) tools, to describe their world. Classical Semitic languages don’t even have past, present, and future tenses as we know them! Semitic thinkers expressed themselves with full-bodied physicality and passion that can be uncomfortable for English readers. What we think of when we hear the word kingdom and what a Hebrew speaker pictures with the word malkuth can be orders of magnitude apart. (más…)
