D AVIES: “ IN THE BEGINNING WA S THE CONVERSATION, NOT
THE WORD ” 33
In the beginning was the word; before the beginning there was silence.
The word spoken by God made all things revealing God as Speaker, yet
God’s speech prior to creation may be classifi ed as silence. “If speech orders
and bestows world, as a multiple and intersecting complex of linguistically
structured realities, then world itself is only to be thought against a gener-
ally unthematised background of silence, without which, the word, which
is difference from silence, cannot be.” 34 God is present both in silence and
in speech, identifi able as both “sameness” and “differentiation.” 35 God’s
presence in speech is a presence for and with creation; his presence in
silence is a presence to himself. The silence of/as God safeguards God’s
ontological otherness and grandeur as ultimately beyond human appre-
hension. At the same time, though, thinking the simultaneity of silence
and speech in/as God announces the genuine fellowship obtaining in the
Trinity, for “language intrinsically implies the indexicality of reference and
address.” 36 In the twin affi rmations of God as silence and as speech, the
equal ultimacy of the immanence and the oikonomia is proclaimed. 37
It follows from understanding the Trinity as a linguistic fellowship that
God’s involvement in and connection to/with the world unfolds within
language and is not extraneous to it. This world—structured by divine
speaking and breathing, that is, by the dialogical Trinity—is accented with
God’s own presence in the incarnation of the Word. Speech and pres-
ence are interwoven, affi rming the createdness of things: their materiality,
embodiedness. The incarnating of the divine Word and Breath marks an
approval of the worldliness and tangibility of existence.
As corporal, creation may be felicitously posited as text. As a text is a
voice-bearing corpus of deferred or replicated presence, so the world—as
spoken into being—is the voice-bearing body of God. The world “bears or
houses God’s voice ... in analogy with textual replications, or refl exes, of the
human body” that proliferate speech beyond the momentary event of speak-
ing into that realm beyond the world that holds the source and ground of all
revelatory speaking. 38 As a modality of embodiment and presence, the text
is a re-presentation of the voice, the presence of the other. This implicates 39
listeners in spatio-temporal relationality as the site of being-in-the-world.
Listeners stand in relation to the voice of the text in the present—and this
constitutes their being, presence, existence in the world.
CONVERSATION, BEING, AND TRINITY: TOWARD A TRINITARIAN... 39