the Word

some writers eschew punctuation on grounds that it impedes their creativity or restricts their style too much but the fact is its hard to understand what they mean sometimes because the words run together like skeletons without meat or skin barely connected either in idea or coherence still less in anything resembling the proper use of the english language but thats just the point they say because we need no longer bind ourselves by the outmoded grammatical constructs of ages past and instead should revel in the freedom of the new age which isnt really a new age at all but they dont know that for them history is an endless progress toward the perfection of mankind an apotheosis based not on order and meaning but on self expression and the celebration of license, neither of which are solid foundations for any age, whether old or new.

the rejection of punctuation isn't creative. creativity demands a certain observance of tradition and accepted forms coupled with an ability to push those forms to their known limits. Cormac McCarthy doesn't use quotation marks, but following his characters' dialogue isn't difficult. e.e. cummings manipulated the order of words and their punctuation as few others have been able (despite his many imitators), but meaning is still conveyed through his poems, often very beautiful meaning.

Throwing out the tools of language is tantamount to throwing out language itself. When Jackson Pollock started splashing paint on canvases, he wasn't reinventing painting as an artform, he was declaring it dead. Gertrude Stein didn't love words; she hated them, and so tortured them and her unfortunate readers by making them do things they weren't meant to do. William S. Burroughs wasn't even a writer in the proper sense, he was a crazy man intent on smashing English into a fine powder the same as he did with his drug cocktails every morning.

Christians who try to imitate this style are betraying not only their craft, but their faith. Christ is the Word, the organizing person of the Trinity that brought order from chaos by speaking when the Spirit hovered over the deep spaces. He didn't speak anarchy to create, He spoke clearly so that each element would know exactly what it was supposed to do and how it was to arrange itself.

When God delivered the Law to Moses on Mt. Sinai, He did so in meaningful phrases, not a jumble of words that Moses had to ponder just to make some kind of limited sense of. Through the Prophets God spoke plainly, both of judgment and redemption, wanting Israel to understand and turn from their sin and uttering accordingly. Christ on earth revealed the mind of the Father and His will in poetic speech that, while hard to accept, isn't difficult to understand.

The purpose of language is not to obscure truth, but to divulge it, to elaborate on it, to explain it to those still lost in the wasteland of meaninglessness and hazy communication. Those who speak in darkness may think it's powerful, or artistic, or even simply cool, but their rebellion against God makes them fundamentally unreliable judges. There is one Judge who decrees, one Speaker to whom we must listen, and one Word that is truth powerful enough to save. We hear it and respond because the message is plain.

Not everything a Christian writes needs to be the Gospel explicitly, but everything every Christian writes should reflect the Gospel. A "stylistic" choice as fundamentally flawed as the abuse or rejection of punctuation is not a reflection of God's truth. It's a depiction of man's chaotic and disjointed rebellion, a sad commentary on his foolishness apart from God, and a pathetic attempt to establish a false truth apart from Christ's. As followers of the Word, we must in turn reject this pretense of autonomy in favor of the celebration and presentation of meaningful truth, whatever its critical reception.