|
This would include, not only swearing in God's name to tell the truth in a court of law and then failing to do so, but also
the teeny-bopper's repeated 'Oh, my God' which doesn't signify much
of anything.
Ogden, Utah
There's an outfit out in Ogden, Utah, which, incredibly enough,
refers to itself as a church. One of their internet personalities
makes a habit of referring to women as 'ho's.' Not, as in 'the paddy
wagon disgorged the ho's arrested during the night;' those, at
least, might reasonably be suspected of solicitation. No, the 'ho's'
to this crew are college-educated women. This influencer is called
by his flatterers the Christian Andrew Tate, a title he likes very
much and likes to retweet. He is a lot like Andrew Tate, except
he's much shorter. Listening to this crew is like dunkinig your head
in the septic tank.
How do they rationalize their behavior, over against God's plain
command not to do that? They are part of the eco-system revolving
around Douglas Wilson, a PaleoConfederate who operates a cult in
Moscow, Idaho. When confronted with plain scriptural commands to
knock it off, what they do, and this is very much their normal way
of operation, is to traverse scripture from one end to the other,
looking for individuals who have not, at all times, arguably kept the
cited instructions to the letter. And what does it mean if there are?
Well, it means God cannot seriously have meant the instructions in
the first place! It means there is no law, do as you please; God
cannot possibly object to what people actually do.
This way of reading the scriptures goes back to Robert Lewis
Dabney, one of their favorite Bible teachers. There were scriptures
which were, to say the least, inconvenient to him, like "If thou buy
an Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve: and in the seventh he
shall go out free for nothing." (Exodus 21:2).
He had committed himself to defending Southern slavery, so anything
that raised a question mark over slavery was an embarrassment. And
their protocol at that point is to look for loop-holes, look for
non-conforming instances, look for exclusions, even if you have no
reason to think the loop-holes might apply to your case. When the
slave traders went to Africa, they were the foreigners, not the
merchandise they were buying, so how can any exclusion of foreigners
from Moses' protective umbrella apply to
them? It certainly doesn't, but the point is that there is an
exclusion, and so God cannot seriously have meant what He said in the first
place.
How does this apply to filthy language? Some prophets sometimes
use colorful language. Therefore, anything goes. What, are you a
prophet? The logic is, anything God does, we can do, too. Obliterate
entire populations? Whee!
Pied Piper
As mentioned above, Douglas Wilson is the great trail-blazer who
discovered that Christians can drink, curse, and raise trouble just
as well as the rest of them. He is always talking about his
experience, growing up, of not sitting at the cool kids' table. This
approach appeals, of course, not to new converts who are zealous for
the things of the Lord, but to children raised in Christian homes,
who never chose these disciplines for themselves, and frankly don't
see the point. The value propositon he is offering is antinomianism,
and it sells like hot-cakes.
The Bible is unambiguous on this point of purity of thought,
word and deed. "But now ye also put off
all these; anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication out
of your mouth." (Colossians 3:8). They
just don't want to do it. And so hearing
this, they embark on one of their romps through world history to
discover whether everyone who ever lived has obeyed this rubric at
all times. If not, why then, obviously, God never meant it, not
seriously. This method of Bible-reading was invented by Robert Lewis
Dabney; the verse he found inconvenient was Exodus 21:2, "If thou
buy an Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve: and in the seventh
he shall go out free for nothing." Far better just to do what He
says and ask questions later.
|
