Do Names Reflect or Evoke? YES

"We create and maintain our worlds with language."
-St. Len of BC

"Even if we don't recognize Jesus at first,
his voice naming us

involuntarily moves us into our heart

and heart language,

and inevitably invokes to us/

evocatively evokes from us

a one-word confession

of who we believe he is."

This was a thesis we considered at our gathering this week as we read from John 20:

Thinking he was the gardener, she said,

"Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him."

Jesus said to her,

"Mary."

She immediately turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic,

"Rabboni!"

Then yesterday I caught Jason's post at Open Source Theology:

What Do Names Do? Do They Reflect or Do They Evoke?

The opening words of Martin Buber’s magnum opus, I and Thou, begin: “Basic words do not state something that might exist outside them; by being spoken they establish a mode of existence.”

When Buber says that “Basic words do not state something that might exist outside them,” he is gesturing toward a fundamental divide between two very different ways of understanding the status of language...

What do words do? I’ve argued that by speaking words we evoke worlds into meaningful existence. Our words don’t accurately reflect features of the surrounding environment; rather, they demarcate those features and make them significant to us and our way of life. A cow is a cow not because it is a cow, but because we name it “cow” and make it so, as God allowed us to do. This entails that doctrines and denominational platforms, for instance, that take up reams of paper and righteous effort are words that do not reflect any necessary feature of God or His Way, they do not name any essential features of our spiritual environment. Rather, doctrines are officially accepted names and stories that demarcate one segment of believers who follow the word and way of God in their own idiosyncratic fashion from other segments of believers who follow God differently. This is both a freeing notion and a frightening notion. It entails that what words we use, in whose name we act, and with whose story we align ourselves, we are in some sense evoking a world into existence and supporting and sustaining the kingdom of heaven on earth, or we aren‘t. Discerning what words to use and when to use the appropriate name and tell the appropriate story is part of the difficult task of the disciple trying to walk through the narrow gate.
full post

Be sure to reflect/reflect on that article, as it interacts creatively with Buber and Bruggeman around these issues.

Maybe naming our missiology creates and names/frames our ecclesiology.
But that's another post:

Chicken, Eggs, Carts, Horses