By Rod Benson
A society’s deepest convictions often reside in the connections it takes for granted. Who counts as a neighbour? What makes authority legitimate? When does suffering become sacrifice, or possession become entitlement? Such judgements depend on patterns of meaning that precede arguments. A counter-grammar challenges those patterns, exposing the rules by which an established order makes itself appear natural and develops alternative ways of speaking, interpreting and acting.
The term requires precision. It has identifiable uses in literary criticism, deconstruction and architectural practice, without constituting a single, settled theory. Its explicit theological use is comparatively scattered. The strongest account therefore distinguishes documented occurrences of the expression from older intellectual traditions that support its development. Counter-grammar can become a valuable theological concept, provided its genealogy is presented honestly and its critical purpose is joined to constructive judgement.
Attention to language does not require us to regard reality as merely linguistic. Bodies suffer, land is occupied, resources are distributed and people encounter material constraints that exceed any description. Language influences whether those realities are recognised, justified or ignored; it does not bring all of them into existence. Counter-grammar examines the relationship between patterns of meaning and the world they interpret. Its claims must therefore remain answerable to evidence and experience.
From linguistic rules to cultural logic
In linguistics, grammar concerns the organisation of language. It should not be confused with the etiquette of “proper English”: a language variety can possess systematic grammatical rules while lacking social prestige. Consequently, unconventional speech is not necessarily grammatical disorder, and resistance to a dominant standard need not mean resistance to language itself. This distinction matters when grammar becomes a metaphor for cultural power.
Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1916, supplies an important background. Saussure challenged the assumption that language simply attaches names to independently available things. He distinguished the signifier, or sound-image, from the signified, or concept, and stressed the conventional character of their association. His proposed semiology extended the investigation of signs into social life. Neither this account nor its cultural extension amounts to a theory explicitly called counter-grammar.[1]
Nevertheless, a useful implication follows. If cultural meanings depend partly on shared conventions, criticism may investigate how those conventions organise recognition. Consider the distinction between “civilised” and “primitive.” Challenging an insulting label is necessary, but insufficient if the surrounding classifications continue to assign some peoples authority and others backwardness. Counter-grammar, in the sense proposed here, changes the relationships through which such labels acquire their force. It addresses a system of intelligibility, rather than merely replacing its vocabulary.
Ludwig Wittgenstein offers another philosophical route. In Philosophical Investigations (1953), grammar extends beyond sentence construction to the rules governing intelligible uses of concepts. Section 373 connects this understanding with theology. The issue is not merely whether a sentence about God follows ordinary syntax, but what kind of claim it makes and how its concepts function. Scholarly discussion of this passage shows why “theology as grammar” became an important philosophical question.[2]
This approach suggests a practical test. Religious terms belong within activities such as prayer, confession, worship and moral deliberation. To describe forgiveness solely as cancelling a financial liability, for example, would narrow its meaning by importing one particular model. A counter-grammar could expose that narrowing and recover forgiveness as a transformation of relationships. This is an application of grammatical analysis developed here, rather than a claim that Wittgenstein formulated a programme of theological counter-grammar.
These linguistic and philosophical meanings must be distinguished from cultural and institutional uses. Sentence structure, conceptual intelligibility, social classification and organisational practice are different objects of investigation. Their connection is that each involves patterns governing possible relationships. In the theological account proposed here, a grammar consists of recurring rules through which a community connects claims about God with judgements about identity, authority and action. Such rules may be explicit doctrines or tacit assumptions reconstructed from habitual speech and conduct.
A counter-grammar also differs from neighbouring forms of resistance. A counter-narrative tells a different story; a counter-interpretation offers a different reading; a counter-practice embodies a different action. Counter-grammar examines and revises the underlying connections through which these become intelligible. For example, the statement, “Our enemies also suffer” adds information that an established outlook might accommodate, whereas the sentence, “Our enemies’ suffering places us under moral obligation” challenges a rule that excludes enemies from ethical concern. Narratives, interpretations and practices may convey that change, but the change concerns their organising logic.
Poetry and deconstruction
Literary language provides a more direct history of the expression. Poetic effects frequently emerge when familiar expectations are interrupted: syntax becomes unusual, associations become surprising, or repetition forces ordinary words into prominence. Yet the description of literature as deviation prompts the questions: “Which norm supplies the baseline?” and, “Why should artistic significance be defined principally by departure from it?”
In 1960, René Wellek referred pejoratively to stylistics as “a kind of counter-grammar, a science of discards.” He criticised an theoretical approach that concentrated on departures from linguistic norms and which overlooked the literary significance of ordinary language. The phrase is a warning against concentrating excessively on linguistic departures rather than on a mere celebration of poetic innovation.[3]
A surprising metaphor may renew perception without destroying linguistic order. Conversely, verbal disruption can become an empty performance. To call God “Mother,” to describe weakness as strength, or to present an enemy as a neighbour generates tension because of the understanding to which these expressions give voice. Their significance cannot be measured simply by their remoteness from populist convention. A defensible counter-grammar must explain what its disruption makes newly intelligible.
An explicit theoretical use of the term “counter-grammar” appears in Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus’s essay “The grammar of deconstruction.” Drawing on the thought of Jacques Derrida and related debates, they describe the relation of deconstruction to language as a counter-grammar. Their argument resists treating deconstruction as a predictable technique or a universal collection of procedures. The expression names a tension: criticism operates through language while questioning the authority and completeness of its organising rules.[4]
This helps to distinguish counter-grammars from entries in an alternative dictionary. A text may depend on distinctions that its own language complicates, resulting in interpretations that follow those complications rather than impose an external demolition of such distinctions. The possibility of renewal arises within an inherited discourse. For theology, this suggests that criticism of an exclusionary tradition may draw on that tradition’s neglected commitments. Its language of mercy, for instance, may unsettle practices justified by its language of purity.
There is also a methodological tension. Deconstructive attention to items that escape systematisation differs from the construction of a durable alternative framework. Theological counter-grammar often requires both: exposing the failures of an established logic and articulating meaningful principles for responsible action. These activities may inform one another but should not be collapsed. Nor should the term be attributed to Derrida as a foundational technical category merely because commentators employ it.
When institutions have grammars
The metaphor becomes especially concrete in spatial design. Andre Bahremand and Jonas Swienty Andresen’s 2025 project, An Architecture of Counter-Grammar, investigates colonial classifications in museum displays. Their proposal treats placement, sequencing and categories as an unspoken organisation of meaning. It envisages alternative relationships among objects and invites visitors to question inherited classifications. For Bahremand and Swienty, counter-grammar explicitly concerns institutional arrangements rather than sentence structure.[5]
The application of counter-grammars to theology and ethics is my idea. I am not aware of the concept being previously deployed in these disciplines. The possibilities for constructive work in theology and ethics are encouraging. Churches also organise meaning through space, access and procedure. Who speaks from the centre? Who must seek permission? Whose experience becomes testimony, and whose becomes a problem to manage?
Revising a church’s or church agency’s mission statement may accomplish little if such arrangements remain undefined, unanalysed and uncontested. A theological counter-grammar might, for example, include changes to decision-making, worship, property and pastoral practice. Its credibility would depend on whether those changes embody the relationships its language commends.
Theologically substantial grammatical inheritance
Christian theology already possesses resources for examining and revising its rules of speech. Apophatic theology challenges the adequacy of concepts applied to God; it prevents affirmation from becoming a claim to exhaustive comprehension. The history of theological language also includes Julian of Norwich’s maternal imagery for God and Christ. These traditions offer significant precedents for disrupting restrictive theological assumptions, although they should not automatically be renamed historical theories of counter-grammar.[6]
To affirm divine goodness is not to make God one more measurable instance of goodness. To employ maternal imagery is to expand theological understanding without claiming that God possesses a human gender or sexual identity. In each case, theological speech interrogates the assumptions accompanying its own concepts. What appears to be a challenge to established language may become a means of greater fidelity to the subject of that language.
George Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrine provides a major modern foundation for the notion of theological grammar. His cultural-linguistic approach understands religion through an analogy with communal languages and treats doctrines as rules governing religious discourse and practice. This offers a substantial account of theological grammar, explaining how beliefs organise the possibilities of Christian interpretation, instead of functioning only as isolated propositions.[7]
Lindbeck’s framework raises a further question: what happens when a community’s operative rules conflict with its professed commitments? A church might confess that all people bear God’s image while habitually treating onegroup as disposable. Grammatical criticism would examine that contradiction across speech and conduct. Counter-grammar could then describe a reconstruction of communal reasoning, restoring the consequences of a confessed belief that existing practices have suppressed.
Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann offers another close precedent in his Theology of the Old Testament.[8] He organises biblical theology around notions of testimony and counter-testimony, attending to competing articulations of Israel’s relationship with God. The courtroom metaphor makes disputation integral to theological interpretation. “Countertestimony” is his relevant terminology; it should be distinguished from an attribution of “counter-grammar.”
The conceptual connection is nevertheless fruitful. For example, Job’s protests and the Psalms of lament prevent assurances about divine justice from dismissing the testimony of suffering people. Read through a counter-grammatical lens, these texts challenge the inference that misfortune reliably establishes guilt or that faithfulness requires silence in the face of suffering. Their questioning belongs within biblical faith. Counter-grammar names a noble mode of internal theological criticism, rather than requiring a position outside the tradition.
Explicit theological uses and their limits
Two recent online essays provide verifiable uses of the actual expression. Jeremy Prince’s “Money (מָמוֹנָא),” published on 3 October 2025, describes early communal sharing, debt release and provision according to need as a counter-grammar to Mammon. His argument connects economic arrangements with covenantal allegiance: the alternative is enacted through resources and relationships, rather than confined to private intentions.[9] The essay does not independently establish all its historical claims about early communities, nor demonstrate an established academic school, but it renders counter-grammar materially concrete: rival understandings of security become rival arrangements for meeting human need.
A second instance occurs in Alamantra’s “Two Kingdoms: Yeshua’s Revolution and Christianity’s Empire,” published on 9 October 2025. A section entitled “Yeshua’s Counter-Grammar” interprets Jesus’ kingdom language as a subversion of domination through reversal, inclusion and care for the powerless. This supplies another explicit religious use. Its sweeping contrasts between Jesus and subsequent Christianity, however, require more historical qualification than the essay provides.[10]
These examples demonstrate usage without settling the scholarly standing of the concept of counter-grammar. Explicit contemporary applications exist, while the unexplored intellectual resources for a rigorous theological development are considerably broader than the documented use of the label.
What makes a counter-grammar theological
An alternative does not become theologically significant simply because it promotes inclusion, challenges domination or employs religious vocabulary. Its reasoning must explain how its proposals arise from convictions about God, creation, revelation, salvation or human vocation. A Christian argument might appeal to the creation of humankind in the image of God, the character of Jesus’ ministry, the meaning of reconciliation in the context of biblical theology and ethics, or the practical obligations of Christian spiritual formation. The relevant commitments must do substantive argumentative work, rather than decorate conclusions that were established beforehand.
This requirement does not exclude insights from philosophy, social research or the experience of affected communities. Those sources may reveal harms that a theological discourse has concealed and questions it has failed to ask. Theological reasoning must then engage them through its own substantive commitments, allowing both its interpretation of those commitments and its understanding of the situation to be tested. The relationship should be reciprocal: inherited theology informs judgement, while encounter with the world can expose inadequate theology.
Moreover, appeals to revelation, tradition or the gospel do not settle a dispute without interpretation. To be authentic, a counter-grammar must identify the community and tradition within which it argues, explain its theological premises and acknowledge where those premises are disputed. In interreligious engagement, no single reconstruction can be assumed to carry the same authority for every participant. Shared ethical action may be supported by distinct theological reasons without those reasons becoming interchangeable.
By what authority
Internal criticism requires an account of why one interpretation should prevail over another. The presence of mercy and purity, promise and judgement, or welcome and boundary-making within a tradition does not establish that one side always cancels the other. A persuasive counter-grammar must show how the relevant commitments relate, which interpretations distort those relationships, and why its reconstruction better accounts for the evidence. Otherwise, it risks selecting congenial texts and calling the selection renewal.
Scripture, tradition, reason and experience offer a framework for this deliberation, although Christian communities assign them different relationships and degrees of authority. Biblical interpretation requires attention to genre, historical setting, literary context and competing readings. Tradition supplies accumulated reflection and practices of discernment, but also records exclusions and mistakes. Reason tests consistency, inference and evidential adequacy. Experience discloses how interpretations are lived and whose suffering they overlook; experience also requires interpretation and can be partial.
The task is more demanding than merely citing a liberating passage against a restrictive one. It involves explaining an approach to the whole theological problem, acknowledging resistant evidence and making interpretive decisions visible. A Christian counter-grammar may give weight to the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, but must also explain how its account of Christ warrants those decisions. The authority of the reconstruction lies in the quality and accountability of its theological argument, rather than in the critic’s declaration that an established reading is oppressive.
From resistance to responsible reconstruction
A theological counter-grammar is a critically reconstructed pattern of interpretation and practice that exposes and revises an operative theological logic, drawing on defensible theological commitments to enable different relationships and actions. It must identify the logic being challenged, show how that logic works, justify the alternative, and explain its practical consequences.
Subversion carries no automatic moral authority. A counter-grammar may romanticise marginality, flatten legitimate differences or substitute a new hierarchy for an old one. It may portray disagreement as evidence of moral failure and thereby protect itself from scrutiny. Its advocates must ask whether their reconstruction permits criticism, recognises inconvenient evidence and respects the agency of those it claims to defend. A framework directed against exclusion must remain critically alert to its own exclusions.
Its evaluation should therefore include interpretive honesty, theological coherence, empirical adequacy and practical accountability. Does it represent the disputed tradition fairly? Does its alternative follow from its stated commitments? Does it attend to the experience of affected people without treating them as a homogeneous group? Can its consequences be examined and its claims revised? Neither coherence nor good intentions alone is sufficient. The proposed grammar must withstand argument and remain answerable to the relationships it helps form.
The originality of such a project should also be carefully stated. It may be prudent to develop a systematic framework connecting grammatical analysis, theological criticism and constructive ethical practice. Its value would lie in the clarity and explanatory usefulness of that integration, rather than the novelty of its label.
Counter-grammar is valuable because it directs attention beneath conclusions to the patterns that make them persuasive. Its philosophical background illuminates the relationship between language and intelligibility; its literary history shows both the promise and limitations of disruption; and its institutional applications reveal how meaning becomes material.
Theology has the capacity to draw these insights into a disciplined practice of self-criticism and renewal, grounded in explicit commitments and open to scrutiny. The decisive achievement would be a counter-grammar capable of sustaining truthful speech, recognising neglected and marginalised persons, and forming communities whose conduct gives substance to their hope.
Rod Benson lives in Sydney and writes about a range of topics from books and local history to food, faith, philosophy, ethics, research skills, and everyday life. Away from the keyboard, he enjoys cooking for friends, walking in the Australian bush, exploring a beach, discovering new restaurants, and reading philosophy, fiction and poetry. He is married to Emma.
References
[1] Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (1916). Available at https://www.umsl.edu/~gradyf/theory/CourseinGeneralLinguistics.htm
[2] Richard H. Bell, “Theology as grammar: Is God an object of understanding?” Religious Studies 11 (3), Sep 1975, 303-317. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412500008441
[3] Wellek, René. “Closing Statement” in Style in Language (ed. Thomas A. Sebeok; Cambridge, MA: Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1960), 408-419.
[4] Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus, “The grammar of deconstruction,” 2011, available at https://stefanherbrechter.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Grammar-of-Deconstruction.pdf
[5] Andre Bahremand and Jonas Swienty Andresen, An Architecture of Counter-Grammar: Toolkit for reclassifying space beyond colonial logic” (University of Ljubljana, 2025), available here: https://lina.community/projects/3edb2579-0ac9-4565-af78-b7c7160de26d/
[6] See “Theological Language,” St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology, available at https://www.saet.ac.uk/Christianity/TheologicalLanguage
[7] George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (repr. 2009; Louisville, KY: Presbyterian Publishing Corporation, 1984).
[8] Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997).
[9] Jeremy Prince, “Money (מָמוֹנָא),” online article, 3 October 2025, available at https://ebyonim.substack.com/p/money
[10] Alamantra, “Two kingdoms: Yeshua’s revolution and Christianity’s empire,” online article, 9 October 2025, available at https://thebohemianstar.com/yeshua-revolution-and-christian-empire/
Image source: Wikicommons
