The Middle Voice

The Basic Idea

The New Testament was written in "Koine Greek" (street Greek) which was the popular language of the Mediterranean area at the time. The Classical Greek of Plato and Aristotle, the Greek of 500 years earlier than that had already changed in many ways by the time of Christ and his followers.

One of the changes was the loss of the "middle voice". This loss is now general in most modern languages. English has an active voice, (I do all the action) and a passive voice (the action is done to me), but it lacks a middle voice, or what we would call an interactive voice (we do this action interactively).

An example can be seen in the activity of dance. One person leads and the other follows, but when a couple are very good, they both know he actions and seem to "float around the room" interactively dancing with each other. Neither is dragging their partner around like a rag doll, and neither is being dragged around. Both are independently acting, but doing so interactively. It seems that most of our really enjoyable activities are interactive. It also seem that what God is inviting us into is a life interactive with himself, one that is engaged in the world in which we are placed.

One of the reasons I like photography so much is that it is a medium which is open to interpretation by the observer, and so draws them into the discourse about the subject at hand, interactively. Native stories tend to do the same sort of thing and are used for didactic purposes for that reason.

Maybe we will see a return of this voice now that so much of modern life is interactive, and we struggle to coin individual words like "synergy" to bridge this grammatical weakness of the English Language.

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