Minced Oaths



“Huh?” you may ask.  So for those uninitiated, a little background:  I grew up in a fairly conservative Christian home, attended Church of the Open Door under J. Vernon McGee’s teaching, and was a student for 12 years at Culter Academy, a Christian school in L.A.  Along with learning to value God’s word, I also was taught that there were certain words a Christian didn’t say - some of them because they were foul and dirty, and some because they “took the Lord’s name in vain.”  There was, and I believe continues to be to this day, some confusion over which were “cuss” or “curse” words and which were “swear” words, but nonetheless they were decidedly bad.  I’ll leave it to you to Google (or Bing, based on which set of geeks you want tracking your every click) “minced oath”, but basically it’s a euphemism that is used in place of a term or phrase that might be found to be unacceptable.  What I was taught was that it was basically a sneaky way of trying to say bad things in a manner that sounded more acceptable, or not sinful.  And of course, they were emphatically on the list of no-nos.  In other words, “gosh” and “golly” were examples of “taking the Lord’s name in vain,” and great care had to be taken to avoid them in order to maintain a pure and holy life.

Rubbish.  Which is a minced oath for what I really think of this line of reasoning.  This won’t be a scholarly treatise on the original language of the scriptures which reference the concept of taking the Lord’s name in vain.  I commend such a study to you, however.  From my reading of the (rather few) verses, including the Third Commandment, I’m convinced that the meaning has to do with action more than speech, though speaking can be an action.  “Vain” is simply a word for empty, meaningless, or misused.  As with so many other things in life, we like to get caught up in the detailed actions of others so as to let ourselves off the hook.  But we all screw up.  We all make mistakes.  We all break the commandments.  The apostle Paul said the Law (including the Ten Commandments) was given to us to lead us, as a teacher would lead students, to an understanding of our utter inability to live up to God’s standards and therefore our need for a savior – one who could save us from the condemnation which the Law prescribed for those who broke it.  That savior is Jesus Christ, the anointed one of God the Father, his Son who alone could live a perfect life and fulfill the Law for us.  Only by faith in him - leaning on him, living as if what he said and what was said about him were in fact true - can we escape what we so richly deserve – an eternity of misery away from the presence of God.

Does this mean I think we should pepper our speech with words and phrases which demean the glory of God and who he is?  Absolutely not!  And I include here what Jesus referred to as “vain repetitions” in our praying.  The scripture does tell us that it is out of the heart that the mouth speaks.  So I submit the secret to meaningful speech about God, or anything else for that matter, resides in the heart of man.  And, by the way, it’s not that bunch of muscles in your chest pumping blood.  The Bible uses heart to mean our inner person – the center of our being.  Fill that up with all things God-ly, and you’ll find your speech and actions becoming more and more Christ-like.  If you believe Jesus was perfect, as I do, and made no mistakes, then it stands to reason he never said a vain, empty, meaningless, or misused word.  Nor did he ever do anything that misrepresented God or demeaned his character or glory.  That’s a goal worth striving for.  And how do we strive?  Paul said in his letter to the church at Philippi in Asia Minor: “everything else is worthless when compared with the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”  And how do you get to know someone really well?  You gotta hang out with him, include him in everything you do, learn everything you can about him, and make him the most important item on your to-do list.

Before I wrap this up, a word about foul, dirty expletives (you know, the kind which get deleted – like mine above):  So many of the words we (I) say are empty, meaningless, and repetitive.  Many times they are meant to shock or make us sound cool.  Mostly they prove we have nothing worthwhile to say.  One of Paul’s definitions of sin was anything not of faith.  So we (I) sin all the time.  This topic and how it relates to my life proves that’s true of me.  But sometimes only an otherwise foul word will adequately express an emotionally deep idea.  See Philippians 3:8 in the old King James or new Message, where the word Paul uses to describe his efforts at being righteous without Christ is translated as “dung.”  The other translations use minced oaths to translate it – euphemisms that may be more acceptable (maybe not politically correct, but certainly religiously so) – but still no one uses the common vernacular.  Nor will I here.  I’ve written about this before (http://thevissersitudesoflife.blogspot.com/2012/01/word.html and http://thevissersitudesoflife.blogspot.com/2012/01/so-ive-stopped.html), and I wouldn’t want my redundancy to seem repetitive all over again, so I’ll just close with a minced oath:  Study the Bible, get to know Jesus better, and enjoy the heck out of life!