Grammatical Structure and Direction

Those rules, of old discovered, not devised,
Are nature still, but nature methodized.

Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (1709), lines 88–89

In order to address “the grammar deficit” that we are increasingly seeing in our freshmen classes, last year my colleagues and I considered developing a new 100-level course to be required of our English majors in both literature and writing streams: a grammar course designed to provide the interpretive and generative concepts, terms, and practices that are foundational to our academic discipline. Being the one who suggested the idea, I volunteered to draft a New Course Proposal for approval by the Academic Program Committee. One of the required fields in the template for New Course Proposals is an explanation of “how this course relates to the mission of the university.” Redeemer University identifies itself as being in the Reformed tradition associated in the nineteenth century with Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck and in the twentieth century with Herman Dooyeweerd, Dirk Vollenhoven, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Alvin Plantinga, Evan Runner, and Albert Wolters.^[1] My assignment, then, was to provide a Neocalvinist rationale for a freshman course in grammar. Let me tell you about the journey that took me to Grammatical Structure and Direction.

The story actually begins with a friendly running disagreement that I had with my late father, Jelle Faber, some forty years ago. I was an undergraduate in Honors English at McMaster University, the publicly funded university in my hometown of Hamilton, Ontario. As an undergraduate in the mid-1980s, in an English department increasingly divided between Structuralist and Post-structuralist theories and practices, I was attracted equally to the solid authority of Quirk and Greenbaum’s A University Grammar of English in my linguistics class and to the provocative challenge of the social construction of meaning in my critical theory class. Those spirited but respectful conversations with my father centered the general dilemma between Structuralism and Post-structuralism in a specific question: “Is grammar prescriptive or descriptive?”

My father was a systematic theologian, who taught dogmatics at the Canadian Reformed Theological Seminary from 1969 to 1989. His position on the prescriptive nature of grammar most certainly reflected his understanding of the normative function of theology for individual and corporate faith and life: systematic theology and prescriptive grammar seem to align. More recently, however, I got to wondering whether my father’s gentle insistence on the prescriptive nature of grammar may have been learned much earlier, perhaps in his elementary and secondary schooling. My father was a proud graduate in 1943 of what he called his “beloved” Gereformeerd Gymnasium (“Reformed Grammar School”) on the Keizersgracht in Amsterdam. This academically rigorous school was established in 1889 on distinctly Reformed foundations, and served as a sort of feeder-school for the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam (hereafter, “Free University”). Dr. Jan Woltjer (1849–1917), a classical scholar and founding faculty member of the Free University, was the prime mover behind the Gereformeerd Gymnasium in Amsterdam, served as its first rector, and remained attached to the school until his death in 1917 (see Van Swigchem et al. 1964). Woltjer argued that epistemology begins with basic principles and that Christian education at all levels, therefore, must practice a pedagogy that derives from the Word of God. Unlike secular humanism and natural or scientific determinism, the origin of Reformed Christian philosophy lies outside of itself: its authority is derived ab extra, from the divine Logos. Two graduates of the Gereformeerd Gymnasium from the generation before my father, D. H. Th. Vollenhoven and Herman Dooyeweerd (class of 1911 and 1912, respectively), later studied under Woltjer at the Free University and became leading figures in the Reformational movement. All this got me wondering whether Woltjer of the Gereformeerd Gymnasium and Free University is the common denominator of my father’s position on the prescriptive function of grammar and of Redeemer University’s Neocalvinist heritage (see Nijhoff 2019).

I set out to discover whether Jan Woltjer’s various rectoral addresses at the Free University might provide the Reformational rationale for grammar that I was looking for. As a classical scholar, Woltjer distinguished between philology and grammar. Philology is what the classicist practices when interpreting the particular usage of a word, whereas grammar is what the linguist grapples with when describing deep language. Because I had recently read Herman Bavinck’s Christianity and Science, I associated Woltjer’s distinction between temporal philological phenomena and perduring structures of language with Bavinck’s distinction between empirical knowing and scientific knowing: the former describes the historical data, while the latter gets to “the idea that animates them all,” with each supporting the other (Bavinck 2023, 114). Woltjer’s project at the Free University was to align the roles of classical philologist and Christian philosopher by identifying the transcendent principle of language in the Logos, which is simultaneously the atemporal, transhistorical givenness of language and its various incarnations in time and space. H. van der Laan has described Woltjer’s Logos-doctrine as the creational structure upon which language builds, the transcendental base on which the superstructure of language rests. The Logos-doctrine is “the basis for the origin, existence and development of creation, in particular for the human being as image of God and consequently the basis for philology, history, and philosophy” (Van der Laan 2000, 58).^[2]

Instructive though Woltjer may be in conceiving of language in terms of the Incarnation of the Word in “The Word: its origin and interpretation” (1908), this rectoral address does not explicitly ground grammar in a universal given that includes both the extra-temporal and the historical aspects of language. So I turned to Herman Dooyeweerd (1894–1977) to see how his theory of the cosmonomic idea can help resolve the question of grammar’s prescriptive or descriptive nature. Dooyeweerd’s 1939 critique of Woltjer marks the reorientation of ontology and epistemology from the Scholastic emphasis on the Logos to the Neocalvinist starting point of the Creation (Dooyeweerd 1939, 215; see also Dooyeweerd 2004, 67–86). The cosmos is subject to structural norms in the various modes in which they function, but they are effectively intertwined so that no single entity can be reduced to its individual aspect. Unfortunately for me, Dooyeweerd does not fully disclose the potentials of the lingual aspect in A New Critique of Theoretical Thought. To begin, Dooyeweerd registers his discontent with the name that he gives this modal aspect: “The term ‘lingual,’ as a general modal qualification of the aspect of symbolic signifying, is not adequate” (Dooyeweerd 1953, 126n). The sections of A New Critique that deal with the lingual aspect tend to do so in relation to something else, as in Dooyeweerd’s critical discussion of Husserl’s conception of “pure” or “logical” grammar, against which Dooyeweerd argues for the dependence of the lingual aspect on other modes, particularly the historical, cultural, and social aspects (Dooyeweerd 1953, 17). At the same time, however, Dooyeweerd does emphasize that language is not reducible to merely its material factors as a social construction: “There would be no theoretical concept of language possible, if the modal meaning of language were only a historical phenomenon enclosed in the stream of cultural development” (Dooyeweerd 1955, 223 [italics added]). Dooyeweerd’s transcendental critique of immanence includes the conviction that the lingual sphere must derive its normative structure from beyond itself.

There seems to be agreement in the field of linguistics that languages function within a given framework. The question is: Where does this framework originate? Is it something extrinsic to humans, operative in the world around us? Or is it intrinsic, connate with and essential to being human? Woltjer had asked in 1908 whether human language emerged through an evolutionary process or “descended through creation from the prototype in the Divine being himself.” It is a matter of faith, Woltjer immediately added, to hold that “the word of man [i.e., language] can only be explained by the fact that he is God’s offspring, created in the image of Him with whom the word was before it determined the being and essence of all things as the creative word” (Woltjer 1931, 146).^[3] If the normative force of grammar is to be sought in biblical anthropology, which attribute of God shapes humans as creatures of language? In the philosophy of religion, “the grammar of God” refers to relationships within the Trinity and with creation. Just as syntax governs the relationships of time (tense, conjugation, etc.) and space (noun, case, etc.) in human language, so “the grammar of God” is shorthand for the relationships among the Persons of the Trinity and with the world. In replacing reason with relationality as the divine image in human beings, we shift the basis for linguistic syntax from reflecting the grammar of thought to reflecting the grammar of relationship. Such a shift from Man-as-Reason to Man-as-Relationship aligns with a Reformed biblical anthropology in which human beings are created to be covenantally responsive and responsible in their obedient submission to the Creator and their faithful dominion over creation. The intrinsic, prelinguistic structure that permits communication in language is attributable to being made in the image of the “grammar of God.”

At this point in my exploration in and around Amsterdam, I was ready to formulate a tentative Neocalvinist framework for grammar. Using K. J. Popma’s notion of structure-for, one can begin with the divine blueprint for the lingual aspect: “Language is given with human life; we can think as little about the origin of language as we can about the origin of the human circulatory system or metabolism” (Popma 1956, 11, 70). If there is something normative about the structure-of language, including grammar, it must derive from within the created framework that makes language possible. However, I would argue the modal characteristics of the lingual aspect are also present on the other side of Dooyeweerd’s boundary between divine and created—within the triune Godhead. Rather than viewing language as the representation of thought, as Woltjer does, I view language as the performance of relationality, the enactment of relationship.^[4] Instead of construing grammar as the mirror of logical, mental, or cognitive processes (as in Woltjer), I understand grammar broadly as ordering relative location in time (verb, tense) and space (noun, noun-cases), and more narrowly in the syntactical functions of relationship that indicate intention (grammatical mood), subordination (clause), predication (voice), location (preposition), and so on. Although the divine speaking in the creation account is not literal but figurative, the words “Let there be light!” are ordered in a dynamic interplay of the speaker, the spoken, and the spoken-into-being. The very grammar of the fiat, in the jussive mood, is essentially relational. Consequently, when locating the normative origin of the structure-for and structure-of language, one does not have to choose among theology (the mind of God, as in Woltjer), ontology (the order of creation, as in Dooyeweerd), or anthropology (the image of God, as in Popma) because all three point to relationality. Whether the relationship function of the lingual aspect is grounded in the perichoresis of the triune Godhead, in the hesed relationship initiated by God’s covenant with creation, or in the unity of humanity, its nuclear meaning is love. In the Prolegomena to A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, Dooyeweerd states that “the central command of love” is “the radix of all modal aspects which unfolds the divine law in temporal reality”: “Love is the fulfillment of the law” (Dooyeweerd 1953, 61) (Rom. 13:10).

Strange as it may sound, the performance of relationality is realized on the level of the syntactical relations among the functions of words within sentences. The most typical indicative sentence in English is S-V-O (subject, verb, object): “The boy hit the ball.” A noun or noun phrase in the subject position has meaning as subject only in the presence of the predicate of the sentence; without verb and object, the noun has only semantic meaning. A noun or noun phrase only functions as object in the presence of a transitive verb that is activated by a subject or when it follows a preposition. A transitive verb functions only in relation to its object. Agreement is an essential grammatical principle whereby the subject agrees in number with the verb in the predicate. Present participles must never dangle: They are syntactically joined to the noun or noun phrase that they describe. The morphology of the sentence changes in other grammatical moods, but the essential relationship remains. Sentences in the passive voice retain the relationship of the actor and the acted-upon in its deep structure, but with the agent as the object of a preposition rather than the subject of the sentence: “The ball was hit by the boy.” Syntactical analysis of even the most complicated sentence will necessarily demonstrate the functional relationship that each word has with others. A subordinate clause is subordinate by virtue of the independence of the main clause to which it is subordinated. Relative pronouns, obviously, are related to the antecedent nouns they replace. Conjunctions conjoin. Copula verbs couple.

But what’s love got to do with it? When grammar is understood as the structure of syntactic relationships by which individuals communicate coherent propositions about reality to others and when love of God and neighbor is the fulfillment of the lingual aspect, speech acts that realize the nuclear meaning of language are characterized by selfless generosity, unconditional benevolence, and unqualified grace. The Dooyeweerdian framework of modal aspects associates these latter characteristics with the social and ethical aspects, but I am suggesting that language, per se, is governed by relationality. The rules of grammar, then, have this claim on me: By obeying these rules I can realize the final cause (telos) of language, which is love. Albert Wolters’s distinction in Creation Regained between structure and direction would imply that grammar is the structure and rhetoric is the direction, but I suggest that grammar itself has a directional component in that adhering to its rules makes speech and writing conducive to relationship (Wolters 2005, 87–114). Certainly, the category of rhetoric brings the lingual aspect into the situation of the listener or reader, engaging the social, aesthetic, political, and ethical spheres, where the speaker or writer’s choices of form, diction, tone, style, and delivery are matters of the heart. But the speaker’s submission to the rules of grammar is always already a submission to the good structure-for creation that makes relationship through language possible. In the lingual sphere, I obey the structure-law of grammar, not as onerous requirement dictated by an abstract system, but as an obligation of love to my neighbor (Rom. 13:8).

The case for a course in grammar for English majors at Redeemer University rests on the confession that creation has a normative purpose and structural design for all aspects of human culture, from Adam’s naming of the animals in Genesis to the chorus of praise around the throne in Revelation. An understanding of the rules of grammar not only has the practical benefit for the student when interpreting or creating written texts, it nurtures an appreciation for the orderly nature of the Creator, the Creation, and the human creature that enables meaningful relationships with God, the world, and our neighbor through language. Grammar teaches humility and gratitude for a structural framework which is beyond ourselves and which gives meaningful shape to prayer, confession, lament, poetry, conversation, debate, and every conceivable verbal articulation as God’s image bearers. An intentional, active, and loving use of grammar is the human response to the grammar of God.