There is a language that has no form. It comes out of silence. It has been spoken in every tongue and written in every alphabet. It existed before the first word was set down and it will exist after the last. When people have named it, they have called it Word, Truth, and Life. It has guided them. It has assured them. It has shown them things they could not see before.It is the language of God.To call it that is already a compromise. Words confine. But we are human and we use what we have. We reach for the thing we cannot quite hold and we try anyway. Sometimes the reach is enough. The language of God can be heard in a good speaker and in a friend who says the right thing at the right time. It can be read in a newspaper. It has been read in books that lasted thousands of years.
Some books last because they are true. Or because people believed they are true, which is not always the same thing, but is not always different either. The Quran. The Vedas. The Bhagavad Gita. The Tripitaka. The Tao Te Ching. These are not old books that have been kept. They are alive and keep themselves, because people return to them for what they need and keep finding it there.
The Bible is one of these books. Its reach is longer and wider than any other single collection of writing in human history. It shaped the laws people live under. It shaped the way people speak to each other and what they believe they owe each other. It shaped people who never read it and do not know its name. Whether you believe in God or do not, you live in a world the Bible helped build.
But something has changed. People are turning away. Not all of them and not all at once. But the numbers move in one direction. Fewer people in churches. Fewer people who say religion matters to them. The phone in their pocket gives them access to every spiritual tradition that has ever been recorded.
The loss is not in the turning away from religion. The loss is in dismissing the Bible as finished. As a thing that belonged to another time and no longer speaks to this one. That is not accurate. The Bible is not finished. Most people simply do not know how to read it anymore.
Whatever you believe, you already live in a world the Bible shaped. This book is an invitation to know that world more clearly. To find in its oldest stories something that speaks to where you are right now. To discover that the distance between ancient scripture and your life today is not as great as it appears.
The language of God is still being spoken.
This book will help you hear it.
Laura Barrett Bennett is the senior minister of Unity of Bon Air near Richmond, Virginia. She is also a member of the faculty of Unity Worldwide Spiritual Institute, Unity Village, Missouri. Laura teaches ministerial and adult education students and has traveled throughout the world facilitating workshops, and teaching Biblical History and Interpretation, World Religion, as well as the principles of Spiritual Transformation.
