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What language does God speak, and how can the metaphor of language help us better understand our relationship to God? Dr. Jean Kidula, Professor of Music at the University of Georgia, shows how thinking about dialect expands our ways of thinking about the music we use to worship God.
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Resources Mentioned on This Episode:
- Music in Kenyan Christianity: Logooli Religious Song by Jean Kidula
Transcript of The Language of God with Jean Kidula, on Music and the Church with Sarah Bereza Ep. 44
Sarah Bereza: Let’s start out by talking about Song as a kind of metaphor, song as something that is a way to speak with, and to, and about God. What do you think about that?
Jean Kidula: That I think has been a fundamental part of many religions, that people use song to speak to God, to speak about God, to speak for God. In that sense, a mode of communication or as a representation, or as a way of emphasizing particular types of either words, activities, injunctions from God – where song becomes an effective carrier or an effective mode, or the Word itself, you know, because it’s more than text, just words themselves.
Because in the song there are ways that you actually pitch it that gains attention. So we have lots of instances in many religions where people intone or recite, and it’s not real speech, it feels like recitation or something. And then it develops into song when people start to emphasize certain aspects of it as being maybe crucial or central to the message. So it’s it’s not a novel thing to think like that – not just about the text, but actually about what how you pitch it, and how you tone it, and what pitches you use, what emotion you’re going to portray in whatever melodic, rhythmic, or harmonic gestures you use, that sometimes are associated with particular messages, or particular people, or deities. So it’s not a strange thing.
Song Dialects Can Teach Us About the Language God Speaks
Sarah Bereza: So we have this metaphor of language for song, or song as a language and as a means of speaking to God, and with God, and about God. And then we have this understanding of a song as a dialect. So it might be like a genre song or regional practice something, something that’s localized. And you’ve said something really interesting about this, and I’m going to quote you now, “Some dialects collectively denote an understanding about the language God speaks.” So we have the Christian here (or collectively as a congregation), speaking to God, and we have God speaking to us.
Jean Kidula: I get fascinated by God as a believer because I am so different from you, but He speaks to us in the dialect that we understand individually. And you have a tribe of people that are part of your musical group, who speak a certain dialect of music, and I speak another dialect, and maybe there’s some that we speaking in common. God understands all of them. That’s where I come from. The differences that we have, tell us something about our own differences. But at the same time, they tell us something about the diversity of who God is.
Sarah Bereza: Like how big God is?
Jean Kidula: Not just, yes, let’s see how big God is. But how, like my father used to say, how vast is the sum. You know that that verse that says “how vast is the sum of them, were I to number them?” The thoughts that God has, for me, personally, are so vast, or His ways are so magnificent. And it’s like a kaleidoscope of colors. And you might like blue. And just one shade of blue, and blue is a dialect of of color. I don’t think that many people think about how the others relate to God as a dimension of the glory of God. So sometimes people think a dialect is the total language. A dialect is just one type in the language.
Sarah Bereza: Yes, just one piece.
Jean Kidula: Yeah, it’s just one piece in the language. And we fight a lot, trying to get other people to speak our language.
Sarah Bereza: “I’m saying it the right way.”
Jean Kidula: And we fight for those kinds of things. A lot. You know, you go to church and people are like, “Oh, I don’t like that song,” and somebody else is like, “I love it.” And we’e like, “How can you love that?” And it’s like telling me that I only have to love that little sliver that you love. But there’s so much more to it than that sliver. And for me, the different sounds that exist, that speak of God and to God, and about God, are even bigger than the dialects that exists in Christianity. And the dialects that exist in Christianity are many, many over time. There are many of us. And amazingly, God speaks through the times, and the places, and the people – to all of them at the same time. So there’s a Scripture that I can’t remember exactly where it is. I think it’s in somewhere in Isaiah, he says, the things that we know are the ones that are the ones that God has revealed to us. Sometimes we behave as if what we know, is the total amount of knowledge.
Sarah Bereza: As if we know all the things about God.
Jean Kidula: Yeah. All the things that there are to know.
Sarah Bereza: Yeah. As if we’ve arrived at all the knowledge we can have.
Jean Kidula: And sometimes every generation does that. We do something amazing like we discovered an airplane. And it’s just this brothers trying to fly over a small piece of space, and they think they’ve arrived. When Boeing comes up and has this crazy, huge planes that are bigger, more faster, more magnificent, and they think they’ve done something amazing. Who knows in 20 million years, they may be some crazy people somewhere else will come with something that’s even more. Every generation often thinks that they’re the ones who have epitomised whatever it is that humanity is about in terms of song, in terms of invention, in terms of even our understanding of Scripture. We’re sitting in a library full of people’s thoughts about the Bible. And the books are many. And they’re not enough. There actually are not enough.
Sarah Bereza: They can’t contain all of it.
Jean Kidula: And God continually reveals himself to every generation. And we read what He did to those who came before us. And they thought that was the ultimate. And then you read the Scripture again, and you get a new thing and you’re like, how can God speak to me today, in my context, so deeply? That’s where I like to go with this thought – thinking about song as a type of expression, a type of communication, a way to worship. But there’s so many dialects to it. And you can think about genre – there are many ways we have expressed that kind of dialectic subdivision. But to think about it like that, gives me room to respect somebody else’s expression in another time or another place to this same God that we worship.
Sarah Bereza: This is making me think of how, so often in our religious spaces, we’re very concerned about being correct and right. “I have the right way and you have the wrong way because you do it differently than I do.” And this is a complete different way of understanding difference, right? Because it’s not wrong to have a different dialect than somebody else. And it’s not wrong to speak to God in a different way from somebody else if your dialect is different.
Jean Kidula: That’s the dialect He gave you. And maybe in speaking to you and learning your dialect, I get richer, because I’ve learned something more that I’ve added to what I know. And a lot of times, new styles and new dialects are born because we interact with each other. “Oh, this seems to fit so well with this.” And they put together something, and then people look at it, and they’re like, “It kind sounds familiar, and I don’t know if I like it. I don’t know if I don’t change is scary. … So it’s, I think about it also in the way that I believe that I believe about the body of Christ being made up of many members, and each member having a thing. And sometimes you have some members who want you to do their job. You know, maybe you are called to help others. But the other people are not called to do that. But sometimes it’s such a huge calling on some other people’s parts that they want everybody to do exactly what they do. Because they think that’s the perfect way to do it. And then a few years later, somebody else comes and says, “oh maybe you could have done this,” and you’re like, “Oh, yeah, it sounds like something somebody was saying a few years ago.” But the way they said it wasn’t exactly…. So, I mean, this is just one way that I acknowledge that there will be other people who will interpret these things differently. And that’s part of the glory of God, the mystery of God that we can even be twins and then still think differently. Same mom and dad and came out in the same hour, the same way. And then we just don’t understand how can you think so differently. That’s the mystery of God. That’s how it’s unfathomable.
Sarah Bereza: I was reading something from Fr. Richard Rohr, who’s a Catholic priest and mystic. And he said something to the effect of, “God is a mystery. And a mystery isn’t doesn’t mean that God is unknowable, but that God is infinitely knowable.” And I think that’s kind of what you’re saying: that there are so many ways of speaking to God, with God, about God – an unnumberable amount of dialects. And we can continue to learn and know grow from each other. And that doesn’t diminish, it makes things bigger.
Jean Kidula: It helps us to see the bigness of God. It doesn’t make God bigger. It’s us whose eyes begin to be opened to the wonder of who He is. And then he gives us a little bit of that capacity because we are able to learn other people’s dialects. And so, we are made in His image that way, that we have some of our capacity. But we are not all knowing the way He is, all awesome.
Jean Kidula: I think about dialects that way. … The Queen’s English, which I grew up learning, and then I came to the UK ,and I went to some part of London and I didn’t understand what English they were talking because that was not the standard dialect that was exported to the colonies. So there’s union stuff like that, that people think you should aspire to sound like. But those Cockney English people, they eat food, they make it, they communicate with each other, and I can learn the dialect, and do what they do and learn how they do it. And maybe they’ll even learn new words from me, because I come with other experiences that they’ve never heard before. And I enrich their vocabulary that way.
Sarah Bereza: This is a wonderful way of thinking about being part of the body of Christ. Would you like to talk about this in the context of Kenyan song?
Kenyan Songs and Dialects
Jean Kidula: Oh, yes. Let me try. Kenya was actually created as as a political entity by the British – made up of different people with different types of languages and dialects. I always have to tell my American students that, because they assume that there are many dialects in Kenya but they’re not many languages. But there are different languages. and there are different dialects.
Sarah Bereza: And as I understand it, dialects are a subset of language.
Jean Kidula: Yes. And there are sub-dialects too. Just like we think about British English and American English, and then within British English you have this very vast amount of Englishes. My linguistics friends tell me you can say “Englishes.” I don’t know if it is proper English. That’s what they say. So for example, the way I am identified in Kenya,linguistically, as Luhya. But the Luhya are a collection of at least 20 different groups who could sort of understand each other. Linda like Norwegian and Swedish, you know, that kind of relationship and Danish. So you can see that some of them are closer to each other, and some are farther. But there’s some structures that are similar, and things like that. And these are part of the Scandinavian group, which is bigger than those three, with , yes, you know, with some that are very much much less known than the bigger groups because of conquest and Empire. You know that happened in Europe a lot.
So, the British confined the Luhya in a particular space because according to a lot of things that I even see today, if you had many sons and the compound was too small, the others migrated and went elsewhere. So there may be some people who speak a dialect of my language in Uganda, or in Maui that I might actually understand almost all of it. Because of those kinds of migrations, and then they would set up like that, but with the coming of colonialism, they try to confine people and make them not move around. Unless they insisted that, oh you need to move now because we need your land or whatever they were doing with moving people around. So in western Kenya, this majority of the Luhya is settled in western Kenya.
My particular Luhya subgroup is called Maragoli, and we are at one end of the spectrum, and there’s another end of that spectrum called Bukusu. And I barely understand what they say. But if I sat down and really concentrated and listened, I might be able to make sense of the sentence but the intonation is different. The words, when they say them, they mean the opposite of what we mean. There are things in that language that if I wasn’t paying attentio,n I would not understand anything. But if I paid good enough attention, I would start to make out what’s going on. Kinda like if you sit with a German long enough, and you are English, you might be able to make sense of it.
Yeah, so there is Bantu languages – that’s a much bigger group. And then within the Bantu, we have the Luhya, and then within the Luhya, we have these 20 subgroups. And within the subgroups, we have different kinds of dialects within those subgroups. Now, imagine that there are 40 languages in Kenya like that, like completely different languages, and then all the dialects. So imagine the different kinds of music that each of them makes.
Sarah Bereza: That’s the kind of unfathomable to me.
Jean Kidula: Well, and we are not the ones with the most amount of craziness. Tanzania has even more, Nigeria has even more. So a lot of African countries, most African countries are made up that way. So imagine growing up in such an environment. And then add-on to it. Are there missionaries who came from Europe, different countries in Europe, and the United States with their musics? And then lay on top of it, the Imperial British Empire, insisting on us learning whatever the British thought was important for people in the British Empire to know. And the British didn’t come alone. They almost always brought indentured people from from India, Pakistan, Burma. So we have all those Hindu people in there. …
So imagine in that kind of climate, how diverse the musical languages are. And you have to learn one or two because you are in school, and the school is Christian, and depending on where those Christians are from – Catholic, Anglican, iPresbyterian, Lutheran – so you’re singing Lutheran hymns, Bach chorales, and you’re singing American gospel. Yes, this is the world that was exposed to me growing up because I’m growing up in the late 60s, early 70s, and coming out of colonialism, it’s still very rich over there. … So imagine that’s the kind of musical world that you grew up with.
And then on radio, you’re listening to Cuban rumba, and Brazilian Samba, which also has been translated into some African types from Congo, Zaire, Angola. You’re growing up with all these sounds. So if you’re gonna think about musical styles that are going to be in the church, you have to think okay, so which one of this is sinful and which one is not? Most probably the African ones will be excluded because of the prevailing worldview about the worthiness of African music in the church. So that’s what will be excluded. And so will the Hindu ones and Arabic ones. The Hindi ones will be excluded because of Hinduism, and the Arabic ones will be excluded because they were associated with Islam. But they’re all in the soundscape that you are surrounded with, on top of whatever else is happening in your village. So if you were to think that God created all this, and we only got whatever taste it was, of whoever migrated there, and whatever they had learned from wherever they came from. And wherever they came from, had a whole lot more than what they came with. And that’s how big is God? Just how big is God?
Sarah Bereza: You’re going right into the truth. That’s what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about truth. We’re talking about what it means to be a person of faith and what it means to worship God. Do you want to talk about ethnodoxology? I think some of our listeners won’t ever have heard of it before. So can you even tell us what it means?
Ethnodoxology – the Praises of the People
Jean Kidula: Ethnodoxology is is actually a term that was coined by a man called David Hall. It was a fusion of the word, the Greek word that means “people, ethnicities,” and doxology as “praises.” The people who have adopted this term for usage, tend to be people who work in the arts in mission, because a lot of times people associate praises with the arts.
Sarah Bereza: Yeah. Or express their praise through art.
Jean Kidula: Yes. And many people think about art and praise in church as if it’s only song. Many times people don’t include preaching because preaching is a rhetorical art form – a good preacher has to be good with words and the way he puts them together or she puts them together, and the rhythm you know, it’s an art form. …
The International Council of Ethnodoxologists is a group of people who think through these things. They were interested in, first of all, helping people or encouraging people to recognize, first of all, that whatever art form God has given them that’s amazing- or crafts, because you know how people have some amazing crafts, poetry, – that all kinds of things with that He has given them are all equally valid. It that, you know, British art form isn’t better than a Portuguese one or a Zulu one, because we have no idea what motivated that kind of thing in time and in space. So part of it was to encourage people to know that what God has given them to praise Him, is God-given and they can use it. They should not be afraid to use it and think, “okay, maybe if my art form was more like Michelangelo, then it would praise God better.”
Sarah Bereza: Like to be more worthy? This is how people talk about children sometimes that if only they could understand better than they could, you know, a better Christian. Or if only you know, they could read well, or whatever it is that the little child can’t do, then somehow they’re lesser than.
Jean Kidula: Jesus said you need to be like a little child to actually enter the kingdom of heaven. Because the kid trusts that what what they have is acceptable. And then if it isn’t, they learn. So there’s that part of it.
The other part was, for some of them, it was a frustration with wherever they were serving, where people were embarrassed or ashamed of what they had. So they always wanted to learn the latest Hillsong, because they thought, God will listen to that one better than He will listen to their own song, even if they don’t understand what Hillsong is talking about because it’s in another language. Some people would try to learn English songs, because it’s a big language – because they think that’s the language that God understands. He doesn’t understand the little language.
Jean Kidula: This has a history. They were coming out of that terrible history of missions, which was related to political and economic colonialism as well. And mindset at the time, and whatever people are trying to accomplish for themselves at that time, that demeaned everybody else except the conquerors. So we had all these things feeding into helping the church to praise God with the arts, that they know well. … So that’s part of the motivation that brought together the idea of having people think about praising God. All the people praising God doesn’t mean that you all praise God in the same language.
Sarah Bereza: Yeah. Like that’s not what being part of the same body means.
Jean Kidula: Because being part of the same body doesn’t mean all of you are fingers. All these many languages that God has allowed or created, or enabled, have words or have the potential. They all can be used in the praise of the living God. So that’s where ethnodoxology started. It’s an encouragement for people of all nations and tribes. You know, that passage in Revelation that says that at the throne, there will be people of all languages and tribes. How will you know them unless they utter it?
Sarah Bereza: That’s a powerful question. How would you know they were from all nations know if they weren’t speaking.
Jean Kidula: Speaking their own tongues. You know, somebody might look like an Indian, but maybe they’re half Indian and half Norwegian. They just happened to look Indian. But until they speak, you may not know. … So the way we will praise God, or we ought to every day as we come to the throne, because every day we come to the throne, right? It’s every language, every tribe, every nation, like that. So the song that comes from your nation isn’t better than the song that comes from my nation. It’s what we do with that song that makes a difference. It’s Who we worship with that song that makes for who is a Christian and who isn’t really, because we will sing songs to all kinds of things, for all kinds of reasons. So that’s where one starting point for ethnodoxology, but there are different strands that people have.
Sarah Bereza: It has been really wonderful to talk with you. … This is the gospel here. So I’m really thankful that you’ve been on the podcast today.
Jean Kidula: Thank you for having me.
