Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. President Trump's recent executive order not only renamed Lake Ontario to Lake America, it changed how millions of Americans remember what the Great Lakes are. And Hames just doesn't have the same ring to it as Holmes.
So far, President Trump has also renamed mountains and military bases and even floated renaming the Strait of Hormuz as the Trump Strait.
Now, political renaming is not new, of course, not for either side of the political aisle. As Bill Maher joked last week in his opening monologue to real time, quote, the liberals say you can't just go around changing things to fit your political agenda. Just ask any Latin ex-birthing person. Yes, things are renamed all the time.
Sometimes they reflect the ideological shifts of a culture. Other times they reflect the growing ego of a leader. In recent years, mountains have been renamed and then renamed again, as have streets and holidays and food products and sports teams. More drastic and more consequential is renaming babies as fetuses, men as women. Mothers, as birthing persons, and the vast majority of everyone who ever lived as cisgender.
And that's because there is a real power in naming things, and especially people. The more important the thing named, the more consequential the naming is. A name, in other words, is more than just a random label. Names frame how things are seen and understood. And this is an arena of thought where a postmodern analysis comes close but ultimately misses.
The influential German philosopher Martin Heidegger had a profound impact on how later postmodern philosophers would understand language and reality. He proposed that humans could not really access reality outside of our language. Quite memorably, in an essay that was titled Language, Heidegger wrote this, quote, In the naming, the things named are called into their thinging. Thinging, they unfold world in which things abide, and so are the abiding ones. The postmodernists that he influenced took this notion even further, that our language does not merely describe reality, it actually creates reality.
Jacques Derrida famously said that there's nothing beyond the text. Reality is only what we describe. And of course, it's true that our words are incredibly powerful. What we call things, what we call people or pets, really tends to stick. Think of how powerful it is to name a day to ourselves as being either hard or blessed.
What we name our children, what we nickname our spouse becomes more than just a mere identifier for them. It becomes in a very real sense who they are. Perhaps the best example is how a name invented by an oldest grandchild, an otherwise random sound, maybe like babbo, becomes what a grandparent is called for the rest of their lives. What the postmodern has missed in all this is that there is an actual reality beyond our words. Yes, our words do have creative power, but that's only because we're made in the image of God, whose words brought reality into existence.
The power of our words reflects, in fact, the order of reality. We name our pets. Our pets do not name us. We name the forests and the lakes and the oceans where animals live. And it's not the other way around.
And naming, especially, is prominent throughout Scripture, from the second chapter of Genesis to the second chapter of Revelation, and basically everywhere in between. Naming provides key markers for a person's journey through life and with God. And there's a profound distinction between what God names and what God tasks His image bearers with naming. Adam was to name the animals, but in part that was a way of realizing the truth of what God had said about him, that he was alone and that that was not good. Because names matter, we should always take the God given task of naming seriously.
But at the same time we should never think that we can rename reality into something else. We play our language games, demanding pronouns, calling good evil and evil good, or denying that there's a real world beyond our words. But in the end, it is always and only God's words that ultimately determine what is, what is good, and what is true. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored with Dr.
Timothy Padgett. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download podcasts. And for more resources or to share this commentary with other people, go to breakpoint.org.
