I. The Words Beneath the Words

Listen, for a moment, to an ordinary conversation. A woman at the next table is telling her friend about her week. She mentions her manager, her daughter, her landlord, a neighbor she waved at that morning, the man who fixed her car, her mother on the phone, and someone from church whose name she cannot quite remember. In the space of three minutes she has named eight people, and in naming them she has done something she almost certainly did not notice: she has placed each of them. Each name has arrived with a small invisible tag attached — a tag that says what sort of person this is in relation to her, what she owes them, what they may ask of her, how near or far they stand. She did not have to stop and explain any of this. Her friend did not have to ask. The words carried the placement quietly, the way a current carries a leaf.

This is the first thing to notice, and the hardest to keep noticing: speech about persons is never flat. It never simply reports. Every word we use for someone — son, client, stranger, friend, wife, neighbor, boss, brother — arrives already carrying a picture of what that person is and how that person stands in the world. We rarely pause over this, because the pictures are familiar and the words come easily. But the pictures are there. They shape what we expect, what we permit, what we are willing to do, and what we would feel ashamed to do. Long before we form an argument about human nature, we have been making small confessions about it every time we open our mouths.

Consider how quickly the weight of a sentence shifts when a single word changes. My coworker is struggling and my brother is struggling are grammatically twins. They are not, in any other sense, the same sentence. The first locates a person in a shared task; the second locates a person in a shared life. The obligations implied are different. The kind of response that would count as fitting is different. The sort of silence that would count as neglect is different. Nothing in the grammar tells you this. The words themselves do. They come pre-loaded with an account of what a coworker is and what a brother is — an account so familiar that we use it without examining it, and so powerful that we feel it the instant someone misuses it.

What we are bumping into here is something philosophers have a long word for: ontology. The word sounds forbidding, but it names something very near to us. Ontology is simply our working account of what really is. Every person has one, whether or not they could describe it. And every language has one, stitched into its nouns and pronouns and titles and kinship terms. When we say father, we are not only pointing at a man; we are assuming a whole order of things in which fatherhood is a real standing and not merely a biological fact or a household role. When we say neighbor, we are assuming that nearness creates a kind of claim. When we say stranger, we are assuming that it does not — or that it does so differently. These assumptions are not decorations on the words. They are the words. Strip them away and the words become noises.

This is why speech is never innocent of teaching. To speak is to instruct — oneself first, and then whoever is listening — about what persons are and how they are bound to one another. A child learning the word mother is not merely learning a sound attached to a face. The child is learning, beneath the sound, that there is such a thing as a mother, that this person is one, that being one means something, and that the child stands in a particular place before her. All of this is absorbed before the child could say any of it. By the time the child can speak in sentences, an entire small ontology has already been planted. The same is true, in subtler ways, for every relational word the child will ever learn.

And because this is so, changes in how we speak of persons are never only changes in style. They are changes in what we are quietly teaching one another to believe. When an older word falls out of use, the reality it named does not vanish, but our ability to see that reality clearly begins to dim. When a newer word takes its place, the reality that word assumes begins to feel like the only reality there is. The shift happens without announcement. No one votes on it. It simply becomes easier to say one thing than another, and over time the easier saying becomes the settled seeing.

So before this book speaks of people — before it examines particular words, particular relations, particular confusions — it asks the reader to slow down at the level of ordinary speech. Not to become suspicious of language, which would be exhausting and finally impossible, but to become attentive to it. The words we use for one another are not the surface of our thinking about persons. They are closer to the root. What lies beneath them is not more words but a picture of the world — a picture Scripture has a great deal to say about, and one that the habits of our speech can either illumine or obscure.

The claim of this opening, then, is simple, though its consequences are not. The way we talk about persons is not neutral reporting. It is quiet confession. And the first step toward speaking truthfully about people is to notice that we have been confessing something all along.

II. Speech Encodes Ontology

The word ontology can sound like a gate locked against ordinary readers, but the gate is not really there. Ontology names something very simple: our working account of what really is. Every person carries one. A farmer has an ontology. A child has an ontology. The question is never whether we have one but whether we have noticed the one we have. And the surest place to notice it is not in our arguments, which we rehearse, but in our speech, which we do not.

Language is a kind of sediment. Layer upon layer of human seeing and saying has settled into the words we inherit, until each word carries not only a meaning but a small world. When we pick up a word to use it, we pick up that world with it, whether or not we intend to. This is especially true of the words we use for persons. A word like son is not a blank token that we fill with whatever content we please. It arrives already shaped — shaped by generations of households, by Scripture’s long testimony about fathers and sons, by the felt weight of inheritance and naming and belonging. To call someone a son is to set him inside that shape. We may not be thinking about any of this when we speak. The word thinks it for us.

This is why relational words behave so differently from merely descriptive ones. If I say a man is tall, I have reported a measurement. If I say the same man is a father, I have not reported a measurement at all. I have placed him inside an order — an order in which there is such a thing as fatherhood, in which fatherhood entails certain standings and obligations, in which someone else is therefore a child in relation to him. The word does not simply describe him; it locates him. And the moment he is located, a whole set of expectations quietly comes into force. We expect him to protect, to provide, to teach, to bless, to be answerable in ways a stranger is not answerable. None of this is stated. All of it is carried.

Consider how easily this can be tested. Place two sentences side by side. The woman next door was crying. My sister was crying. The grammar is almost identical. The information, in one sense, is the same: a woman, tears. But no one who hears these two sentences hears the same thing. The first sentence leaves us free; the second binds us. The first invites sympathy; the second summons it. The difference is not in the facts reported but in the ontology each sentence assumes — one in which sister names a real bond that a mere proximity does not, a bond with claims attached. The hearer feels the claim before the hearer could explain it. That feeling is ontology doing its quiet work through speech.

The same test runs through every pairing we might set up. My coworker and my brother. The client and the guest. A user and a child. The tenant and the neighbor. The employee and the servant of the Lord who happens to work here. Each pair uses grammatically similar constructions to name persons, but each pair carries a different account of what those persons are and how we stand toward them. To swap one word for another is not to rename a fixed thing. It is to move the thing into a different order of being. The person has not changed. The world the word places the person inside has changed.

Scripture is unembarrassed about this. It does not treat relational language as mere social convention to be updated as fashions shift. It treats such language as truth-telling about the order God has made. When Boaz calls Ruth my daughter (Ruth 2:8), he is not being sentimental; he is naming a standing that will shortly carry real weight in real decisions. When the Lord Jesus Christ says, Whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother (Matthew 12:50), He is not loosening relational words into metaphors. He is tightening them — insisting that the realities those words name are most truly found where obedience to the Father is found. When Paul writes to Philemon about Onesimus as a brother beloved (Philemon 16), he is not decorating a letter; he is reordering a household by reordering the word used inside it. The Bible assumes throughout that to change what a person is called, rightly, is to tell the truth about what that person is.

This means that every time we speak of another human being, we are doing at least two things at once. We are referring — pointing at someone — and we are placing — setting that someone inside an order of being. The pointing is obvious; the placing is almost invisible. But the placing is where the ontology lives. A society’s deepest convictions about persons are not usually found in its treatises. They are found in its common nouns.

And this is where speech begins to teach. A child hearing the word neighbor used of the family across the street, again and again, in tones of readiness and goodwill, is being taught an ontology of nearness — taught that proximity carries a claim. A child hearing the word strangers used, again and again, only in tones of warning, is being taught a different ontology — one in which the unknown person is first of all a threat. Neither child is being lectured. Both are being formed. Years later, when each grows up and meets an unfamiliar person at the edge of their property, the word that rises first in the mind will do more than any argument to shape what happens next.

To speak, then, is already to teach — and to be taught — about being. This is not a burden we can set down by resolving to speak more carefully, as though ontology were a coat we could hang up at the door. It is the nature of speech itself. The only real question is whether the ontology our speech carries is true. Does the picture of persons quietly embedded in our common words match the picture Scripture gives us of what persons actually are? Where the two match, our speech steadies us in the truth even when we are not paying attention. Where the two drift apart, our speech schools us, hour by hour, in a subtler error than any we would knowingly affirm.

That is the reason this book begins so far back. Before we examine particular relations — husband and wife, parent and child, neighbor and stranger, brother and sister in the Lord — we have to see that the words themselves are already at work. They are not waiting for us to assign them meaning. They are assigning meaning to us. And if we do not learn to listen to them, we will keep saying more than we know, and believing more than we have examined.

III. Why Relational Language Matters

It would be possible, having come this far, to treat what we have seen as an interesting observation and no more. Language carries ontology; relational words carry pictures of persons; we speak more than we notice. All true. But if the matter rested there, the argument would be a curiosity rather than a calling. The reason relational language matters — matters enough to write a book about — is that the realities such language names are not optional features of human life laid over some more basic human stratum. They are the stratum. Persons are not first solitary units who afterward enter into relations. Persons come into being in relation, are sustained in relation, and are finally known in relation. To speak of them rightly is therefore to speak relationally. To speak of them otherwise is not to describe them more neutrally but to describe them more falsely.

Scripture opens on exactly this note. The first human being is not presented as a self-contained specimen who later acquires ties. Before Adam has done anything, he has already been placed — placed before God who made him, placed within a garden given him to keep, placed under a word spoken to him, and very shortly placed beside a woman made for him and from him (Genesis 2:15–24). The account does not begin with the individual and then add the relations as furniture. The relations are the room. When the Lord God says It is not good that the man should be alone (Genesis 2:18), the statement is not a comment on Adam’s mood. It is a statement about what a human being is: a creature whose very being is ordered toward another. The woman is not an accessory to a finished man. Her arrival completes the picture of what man, as man, was made to be.

The rest of Scripture holds this line. Israel is constituted as a people by covenant, not as a collection of private selves who happen to share a territory. The law given at Sinai is saturated with relational nouns — father, mother, son, daughter, brother, neighbor, sojourner, widow, orphan, servant, master — because the life God is shaping is a life of standings and bonds, not a life of isolated agents pursuing private goods under shared rules. When the prophets indict the nation, they almost never indict it for failing at abstractions. They indict it for failing at relations: fathers who have forsaken their children, judges who have forsaken the poor, priests who have forsaken the Lord, a people who have forsaken the covenant. Sin, in the prophetic vocabulary, is very often a relational word used in the negative.

The New Testament does not shift this footing; it deepens it. The church is named by relational nouns — body, household, brethren, flock, bride — and the apostolic letters instruct believers chiefly by locating them: husbands here, wives here, children here, fathers here, servants here, masters here, elders here, younger men here, widows here (Ephesians 5–6; Colossians 3; 1 Timothy 5; 1 Peter 5). The instructions make sense only because the locations are real. Husbands, love your wives (Ephesians 5:25) is not advice to men in general about women in general. It is a word addressed to a particular standing, assuming that the standing actually exists and actually binds. Strip out the ontology of relation and the command becomes unintelligible. Keep the ontology and the command lands with the weight it was given.

This is why relational language matters with a practical seriousness that abstract talk about persons rarely achieves. Relational words name the channels through which the substance of human life actually moves. Obligation moves along them. Love moves along them. Authority moves along them. Belonging moves along them. Correction, protection, provision, honor, shame, comfort, grief — none of these travel through the air between free-floating individuals. They travel along the named bonds between a father and a son, a husband and a wife, a brother and a brother, a neighbor and a neighbor, a shepherd and a sheep. When the word for the bond is strong and clear, the traffic moves. When the word is weakened or missing, the traffic slows, falters, and at last stops, though the persons are still standing there in plain sight.

One sees this in small things. A man who can still call the woman beside him my wife with meaning — with the whole weight of what that word has carried through Scripture and history — finds certain duties rising almost unbidden when she is in trouble. The word does part of the work for him. A man who has learned instead to call her my partner is not thereby freed into a purer love; he is left with a thinner word, and the duties that used to ride on the thicker word have to be summoned now from somewhere else, if they can be summoned at all. The love may still be there. The vocabulary that once helped carry it is not. Over time, what a vocabulary will not carry tends to be set down.

This is the quiet law behind a sober observation: what we cannot name, we struggle to honor. It is not that naming creates the reality. The reality is given by God, prior to our speech. But naming tracks the reality, marks it out, makes it visible, passes it on. A people that still uses the word neighbor with its older weight will go on practicing a certain kind of nearness even when individuals among them forget why. A people that has replaced neighbor with resident or stakeholder has not thereby improved its neighborliness; it has only lost the word that used to keep the practice in view. The practice, deprived of its name, begins to drift. Within a generation or two, people are surprised to find that something they never stopped approving of in theory has quietly ceased to happen in fact.

The pastoral stake in all of this is not small. Speech that flattens relation eventually flattens conscience. If the words we use for one another no longer carry the standings Scripture says we actually occupy, then the promptings of conscience that those standings are meant to produce begin to misfire. A man who has been taught to think of his children as the kids — a cheerful, generic noun with no particular claim attached — will find it harder, not easier, to feel the specific weight of being their father when the weight is most needed. A woman who has been taught to think of her aging mother as an older adult in my life will find the specific duties of a daughter harder to locate when locating them matters most. The feelings of care may still be present; the shape that care ought to take becomes blurred. Conscience works best when it is trained by true words. It falters when the words have been smoothed.

There is no recovering persons as persons without recovering the relations in which they actually stand, and there is no recovering those relations without recovering the language in which those relations have historically been named and known. This is not a matter of preferring old words to new ones for the sake of their age. It is a matter of preferring true words to false ones for the sake of the truth. Where a new word names the reality as faithfully as the old, the new word is welcome. Where a new word quietly edits the reality — softens a standing, dissolves a bond, turns a covenant into a contract or a kinsman into an acquaintance — the new word is not a neutral substitution. It is a small untruth, repeated until it feels natural.

This book is written on the conviction that a great many such small untruths have accumulated in the way modern people, including modern Christians, talk about one another, and that the cost of them is larger than it appears. The cost is not chiefly intellectual. It is pastoral, familial, ecclesial, and finally doxological. When the words we use for persons stop matching what persons, before God, actually are, the life that those words were meant to serve begins to starve at the root, however green the leaves still look.

That is why relational language matters. Not because language is everything, but because language is where the truth about persons either takes root in ordinary life or quietly fails to.

IV. How Modern Speech Habits Obscure Older Frameworks

If the case made so far is sound — that persons are constituted in relation, and that relational words are the channels along which the substance of human life actually moves — then a question presses itself forward whether we invite it or not. How are we, in fact, speaking of one another now? Not in our best moments, when we are trying to be precise, but in the ordinary traffic of our days, when the words come without thought. What ontology has settled into the common nouns we reach for first? It is worth saying plainly at the outset that the aim here is not to scold anyone’s vocabulary. It is to look steadily at drifts that have already happened, to name them, and to consider what has quietly gone missing while no one was watching. There are at least three such drifts, overlapping but distinguishable, and each of them bears on how we now see — or fail to see — the people around us.

The first is the drift toward functional and transactional nouns. A great many of the words that once named standings have been replaced, in common speech, by words that name roles in an exchange. A husband becomes a partner. A father becomes a provider or a parent figure. A pastor becomes a leader or a communicator. A congregant becomes a member in the thin sense the word has in a gym. A citizen becomes a stakeholder. A guest becomes a customer. A patient becomes a healthcare consumer. The change is rarely announced; it simply seeps in, one usage at a time, until the older word sounds quaint and the newer word sounds professional. But the two words are not interchangeable. Husband names a covenantal standing before God and one’s wife; partner names a cooperative arrangement between two parties. Father names an office with real authority and real tenderness attached; provider names an economic function that any sufficiently funded entity could in principle perform. The new vocabulary does not merely describe the same reality in modern dress. It describes a reality that has been quietly reshaped — flattened, de-covenanted, made contractual — to fit the vocabulary. When a man begins to think of himself chiefly as his wife’s partner rather than as her husband, he has not simply updated his speech. He has, without noticing, adjusted downward his sense of what he is to her and she to him.

The second drift is toward generic individualism. Where older speech would specify who stands in what relation to whom, modern speech often prefers the empty noun. People are doing this. Individuals are feeling that. Persons are affected in such-and-such a way. The sentences are grammatical; they carry information; and they specify almost nothing. This is sometimes defended as a gain in precision or neutrality, but it is neither. It is a retreat from placement. To say people are lonely is to say something true and unlocatable. To say fathers are estranged from their sons, wives from their husbands, neighbors from the houses on either side of them, old women from the churches that used to know their names is to say something that can be addressed, because it has been placed. Generic nouns protect us from discomfort by denying us the grip on reality that specific nouns would give. They let us speak of the human situation as though it were weather — something that happens, vaguely, to everyone and therefore to no one in particular. Scripture almost never speaks this way. When Scripture speaks of sin or sorrow or love or loss, it almost always places them. Cain and Abel. Sarah and Hagar. David and Bathsheba. The widow of Nain and her son. The two walking to Emmaus. The particularity is not ornamental; it is how the truth is actually told. A habit of generic speech is therefore not a neutral preference. It is a small, steady training in unplacement, and unplacement is very close to what alienation means.

The third drift is toward therapeutic description. In this habit, relationships are named not by their standing but by their feeling-state. A marriage is not a covenant but a close or strained or toxic or supportive bond. A family is not a household under a head but a healthy or unhealthy system. A friendship is not a loyalty but a positive connection. A congregation is not a flock under shepherds but a supportive community. The adjectives are not always wrong — friendships can in fact be loyal and also positive; marriages can in fact be covenantal and also close — but when the adjectives migrate inward and become the nouns, something has shifted. The relationship is now defined by what it feels like rather than by what it is. And because feelings vary, the relationship itself begins to feel variable. A husband whose marriage is a close relationship will, on the days when closeness ebbs, quite naturally wonder whether the marriage is still there. A husband whose marriage is a covenant will know, on the same day, that the marriage is still there and that the closeness needs tending. The ontology carried by the noun does different work than the ontology carried by the adjective. When the adjective takes over, the bond is hostage to the mood.

These three drifts do not operate in isolation. They reinforce one another. Functional nouns strip standing from relation; generic nouns strip particularity from persons; therapeutic adjectives strip durability from bonds. Together they produce a common speech in which persons appear chiefly as interchangeable individuals participating in cooperative arrangements of variable emotional quality. It is a thin picture, and it is the picture our ordinary vocabulary now quietly carries. Most of us absorbed this vocabulary without being argued into it. It was in the air, in the forms we filled out, in the counsel we received, in the way institutions addressed us, in the way we heard ourselves being talked about. By the time we began to use such words of ourselves and one another, they had already begun to use us.

The effect on older frameworks is easy to miss precisely because the frameworks themselves do not immediately disappear. Kinship is still kinship; covenant is still covenant; household is still household; neighborliness is still neighborliness; stewardship is still stewardship. The realities endure, because they are given by God and not by us. What fades is our ability to name them. A father is still a father after the word has been thinned to provider, but his sense of what being one requires of him grows dim. A neighbor is still a neighbor after the word has been replaced by resident, but the reflexive claim nearness used to make upon him slackens. A congregation is still a flock after the word has been replaced by community, but its instincts about shepherding and being shepherded grow uncertain. The frameworks remain standing like buildings whose names have been scraped off the doors. People still enter and leave them, but fewer and fewer know what the buildings are for.

It is worth pausing over one consequence in particular. When older relational frameworks lose their vocabulary, they do not tend to be replaced by better ones. They tend to be replaced by the market and the clinic. The market supplies the functional and transactional nouns; the clinic supplies the therapeutic adjectives; and between them they furnish almost the whole of our current relational speech. This is not because the market and the clinic are uniquely sinister. It is because they are the two institutions in modern life that have been most willing to offer people a complete vocabulary for their situations, and vocabularies, once offered, tend to be used. A Christian who has not been given — in the home, in the church, in the reading of Scripture — a thicker and truer vocabulary for persons and relations will find himself reaching, without malice and without noticing, for the vocabulary most readily to hand. He will speak of his wife as his partner, of his children as his kids, of his church as a community, of his father as a parent figure, of his own griefs as a mental health issue, and he will wonder, from time to time, why the words feel slightly off, without being able to say why.

A brief caution is in order here, lest the argument be mistaken for something smaller than it is. The point is not nostalgia. Older words are not better because they are older. English is a changing language, as every living language is, and not every change is a loss. Some older words carried confusions that needed to be retired, and some newer words name realities the older vocabulary had no way to name. The argument is not that any word now falling out of use must be rescued. The argument is that a specific kind of loss has been occurring — the loss of words that named real standings and real bonds — and that this loss tracks, and contributes to, a specific kind of impoverishment in how we see one another. The recovery called for is not a recovery of old diction for its own sake. It is a recovery of the realities the old diction tracked, which means, in practice, a recovery of words — old or new — that can carry those realities faithfully.

This is why the chapters that follow will move slowly through particular relational words rather than offering a general theory of language. A general theory would leave the drifts we have just named untouched, because the drifts do not live in theories. They live in common nouns. To address them, one has to go where they live — into husband and wife, into father and mother, into son and daughter, into brother and sister, into neighbor and stranger, into shepherd and sheep, into servant and master, into the small ordinary words by which we place one another every day. Each of those words has a history, a Scriptural weight, and a present condition. Each has been pressed on by the drifts described in this chapter. And each can, by God’s kindness, be used again with something nearer to its true weight, once we have seen clearly what has been happening to it.

That is the work the rest of this book sets itself. But it cannot be undertaken honestly without first admitting what this chapter has tried to make plain: that the speech we have inherited is not the neutral medium we have assumed it to be, that it has been quietly schooling us in a thinner account of persons than Scripture gives, and that the first step toward speaking truthfully of one another is to notice, without panic and without pride, how untruthfully we have already been speaking.

V. What This Work Aims to Do

Having seen that speech encodes ontology, that relational words carry the weight of real standings, and that modern habits of speech have thinned our vocabulary in particular and traceable ways, a reader is entitled to ask what, precisely, this book intends to do about it. The honest answer is that its aims are modest in scope and serious in intent. It does not propose to reform the English language, which is not the sort of thing any book can do. It does not propose to legislate a vocabulary, as though Christian speech could be repaired by issuing a list of approved nouns. It proposes something both smaller and, if the Lord is pleased to bless it, more useful: to help the reader see what is already happening in the words he uses, and to place those words, one by one, back under the light of Scripture, so that what he says about persons begins once more to match what persons, before God, actually are.

The first aim, then, is to slow the reader down at the level of ordinary speech. Most of the damage done by thinned relational language is done at conversational speed, in the unguarded moment when a word is chosen without thought. No amount of later reflection can catch up with the formative power of what we have already said a thousand times without noticing. The only remedy is attention — a patient, unhurried willingness to hear our own speech as though it were someone else’s, to let the familiar become strange for long enough to be examined. This book will try to create that pause again and again, not by asking the reader to do anything unusual, but by setting ordinary words alongside their Scriptural weight and letting the contrast register. A reader who, by the end of these pages, finds himself hesitating a half-second before saying partner or the kids or a supportive community — not out of fastidiousness, but because he has begun to hear what those words are and are not carrying — will have received most of what the book can give.

The second aim is to make visible the ontological commitments already embedded in how we name one another. There is no such thing as purely descriptive speech about persons. Every name we use places the person named inside some account of what persons are. Those accounts are not always Christian. Some of them, as we have seen, are market accounts; some are clinical accounts; some are simply the accumulated residue of a culture that has forgotten how to speak covenantally. The question is never whether our speech assumes an ontology. The question is which ontology it assumes, and whether the one it assumes is true. This book will try to bring those buried assumptions to the surface word by word, not to shame the reader for having carried them — most of us carry them without having chosen them — but to let the reader see them plainly and weigh them honestly. A commitment one has noticed is a commitment one can examine. A commitment one has never noticed will simply go on doing its work.

The third aim is to recover the grammar of relation as Scripture uses it. The Bible is not a dictionary, and it does not offer a list of approved relational terms. What it offers is richer and more demanding: a sustained, unembarrassed use of relational language in the full weight of its meaning, across every kind of situation human life presents. Scripture speaks of husbands and wives, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, brothers and sisters, neighbors and strangers, shepherds and sheep, masters and servants, kinsmen and sojourners, and it does so with a steadiness that assumes all of these standings are real, all of them are given, and all of them carry obligations and affections that cannot be dissolved by preference. To learn to speak as Scripture speaks is not to adopt a pious dialect. It is to let the mind be retrained in the standings themselves, so that when one uses a relational word, one uses it with something like the weight the biblical authors use it with. That retraining is the long work this book is trying, in its small way, to support.

The fourth aim is to help Christian speech about persons begin to match Christian belief about persons. It is an uncomfortable fact, though an unavoidable one, that many believers hold in their confession a high and covenantal account of human life while speaking, in their ordinary hours, in the thinned vocabulary of the surrounding culture. The gap is not hypocritical; it is usually unnoticed. But it is costly. A man who confesses at church that marriage is a covenant made before God and speaks at home as though it were a cooperative arrangement between partners will find, over years, that the speech shapes his sense of the marriage more than the confession does. Hours accumulate. Confession happens weekly. Speech happens constantly. Whichever account of the relationship is carried by the more frequent words will, in the end, be the account by which the man actually lives. This book is written for the reader who would like the two accounts to line up — who would like the speech of ordinary days to confirm, rather than quietly erode, what he believes on the Lord’s day.

The fifth aim is to keep the discussion concrete. It would be possible to pursue these questions at a level of abstraction that impresses no one’s ear and changes no one’s speech. That is not the plan here. Each chapter will take up a particular relational word, or a particular pairing of words, and work through it at close range: where it stands in Scripture, what it has carried historically, what has pressed on it in recent generations, what is quietly at stake in the ways it is currently used, and what it might look like to use it once more with its proper weight. The pace will be deliberate. Some chapters will dwell on words so ordinary that the reader may wonder, at first, why they deserve sustained attention. The answer, in each case, will be that these are precisely the words through which relational reality either takes hold in a life or slips quietly out of it. It is the common nouns that are doing the shaping, and it is therefore the common nouns that must be examined.

A word should be said, finally, about what this work does not aim to do. It does not aim to produce a comprehensive theology of personhood; that would be a different book and a larger one. It does not aim to adjudicate every contested question in contemporary usage; some of those questions lie outside its scope, and others will be touched on only where they bear directly on the words at hand. It does not aim to offer a program for cultural reform; the reform of a culture’s speech is not in any author’s gift. And it does not aim to make the reader feel clever about his vocabulary at the expense of his neighbor’s. Sharpened speech that issues in contempt has been sharpened for the wrong use. If these chapters succeed, they will leave the reader more patient with the people around him, not less — more able to hear what their words are carrying, more ready to speak to them in words that carry the truth in return, more disposed to the slow, kind work of helping others see what he himself has only lately begun to see.

What the book aims to do, in the end, is very old and very simple. It aims to help the reader tell the truth about the people God has placed around him, in the ordinary speech of ordinary days. Everything else is in service of that.