a word before we begin

The title alone is going to make a few of you nervous, and I would hate to lose you on the first page over a misunderstanding, so let me clear it up straightaway. This is not me telling you to go around with a filthy mouth. It is not a permission slip. It is not a wink and a nudge to talk like the world talks. If that is the fear, set it down. That is not where we are going at all.

Here is where we are going. The church has gotten itself tangled up about something, and I want to gently untangle it. We keep a list of words we call bad words, and we treat the saying of them as a sin, a real one, the kind you confess. And I have a simple question about that list, one I do not think most believers have ever stopped to ask. Where is it? Who wrote it down? Because if God wrote it, then it binds every last one of us and we had better learn it cold. But if He did not, if it is the world’s list that we quietly baptized and handed back to Him with His name forged at the bottom, then we have done something He takes very seriously. We have bound a conscience He left free. We have added to His Word. And He has a word or two about people who do that.

Now, some of the teachers you love land in a stricter place than I am about to. So do some of the teachers I love. I want to say plainly that I think no less of them for it, and you are not a fool if you end up disagreeing with me before we are through. But I have read the Book on this as carefully as I know how, and I owe you the honest report, which is that it does not go where we have so often said it goes. It goes somewhere freer. It also goes somewhere far more demanding. Both at once, and that is the strange and wonderful thing I want to show you: when you set God’s real standard for the mouth down next to our little list, His is not the easier of the two. It is heavier. It just weighs the right things.

And yes, the title is a joke. You already finished it in your own head, did you not. Hold onto that, because it is going to turn out to be the whole point.

chapter one

the list that isn’t there

I am going to say the boldest thing in this whole booklet right now, on the first page of the first chapter, so that everything after it has to answer to it. Here it is. You cannot prove from the Bible that saying a coarse word is, all by itself, a sin.

You cannot. I have looked. Better people than I have looked, for a great deal longer. It is not there. There is no list. God never handed down a column of forbidden syllables, never said here are the words, do not let these particular sounds cross your lips. And think about it: if He had, we would have it. It would be printed in every Bible in every language, identical, and every new believer would sit down and memorize it like a spelling test the first week.

There is no list. God never handed down a column of forbidden syllables.

Now sit with how strange that absence is, given the weight we hang on it. We have made a clean vocabulary into one of the very first marks of a Christian, one of the first things we tell a new believer to tidy up, one of the fastest ways we size up whether a stranger is walking with the Lord. And the God who wrote down, in plain words, what He thinks about murder and adultery and theft and idolatry and gossip and pride, the God who was never once shy about naming a sin, somehow forgot to give us the list of bad words we spend so much energy enforcing on His behalf. He did not forget. It was never His list.

Hear me carefully, though, because my point is narrow and I want it to stay narrow. I am not saying words do not matter. They matter enormously, and the second half of this booklet is going to lean on you about that harder than you may enjoy. I am not saying there is no such thing as a sinful mouth. There is a great deal of sinful mouth in this world, and the Bible has plenty to say about it. My point is smaller and sharper than either of those. It is only this: the sin is never in the word itself, in the bare sound of it. Go hunting through Scripture for a list of forbidden words to prove me wrong, and you will come back with empty hands. And that ought to unsettle you a little more than it does.

Because look what follows. If God did not write the list, somebody else did. And if somebody else wrote it, we had better find out who, and on whose authority, before we spend one more day binding it on every conscience in the church and quietly grading each other’s holiness by it. So that is our errand. Let us go find out whose list this actually is.

sin and the effects of sin

is waiting for you

Every booklet is free. Sign in with your email and we send you a code.

sources & notes

  1. Melissa Mohr, Holy Sht: A Brief History of Swearing (Oxford University Press, 2013). Mohr organizes the whole history of English profanity around two poles, the “Holy” (oaths and the divine name) and the bodily, and documents that the sworn oath, “by God’s blood,” “God’s wounds,” was once far more shocking than any body or bodily-function word. The surviving medieval oaths ‘sblood (God’s blood) and zounds* (God’s wounds) preserve that older and graver register.
  2. Mohr, Holy Sht*, chapters on the medieval, Renaissance, and Victorian periods, which trace the reversal by which oath-profanity faded into mild exclamation while sexual and scatological words rose to become the gravest. A taboo that reverses itself across the centuries is, by that very fact, a social custom rather than a fixed moral law.
  3. Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language (Riverhead, 2019), on digital-age punctuation and tone, including the “angry period” and the way a terse reply now reads as cold. The theological application, that intrinsic properties do not drift while conventions do, is the author’s.
  4. W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, entries on krima and katakrino (judgment, to condemn), establishing damn and damnation as plain theological terms for condemnation to judgment. Scripture uses them in exactly that sense: Mark 16:16 (“he that believeth not shall be damned”) and Romans 13:2 (“shall receive to themselves damnation”), KJV.
  5. David Wilton, Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends (Oxford University Press, 2004), together with the etymological entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, on the true origin of the f-word and the falseness of the acronym legends. The word is of Germanic origin, cognate with Dutch, German, and Scandinavian words meaning roughly “to strike” or “to move back and forth,” and was recorded in English by the 15th–16th centuries (dictionaried in John Florio, A Worlde of Wordes, 1598). Acronymic word-origins are essentially unknown before the 20th century, and the same false-acronym pattern (“Ship High In Transit”) attached to the s-word is equally baseless.
  6. Benjamin K. Bergen, What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves (Basic Books, 2016), on the grammar of intensifier-swearing, which shows that the most severely tabooed word now functions in ordinary speech chiefly as a contentless intensifier, so that the severity of its ranking and the emptiness of its meaning have come wholly apart. The theological inference is the author’s.
  7. Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, on James 3. The “direction, not vocabulary” principle rests on James 3:9–10, where with the same tongue “bless we God… and therewith curse we men, which are made after the similitude of God”, locating the offense in what the speech is aimed at, not in its sounds.
  8. W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, entry “Corrupt, Corruption” (sapros). In Ephesians 4:29 the Greek sapros means rotten, putrid, decayed, the same word used of a bad tree and its fruit (Matthew 7:17) and of rotten fish (Matthew 13:48). It describes the character and effect of speech, the opposite of agathos (good, edifying), rather than any catalogue of forbidden words.
  9. J. Vernon McGee, Thru the Bible, on Matthew 12 and 15, on the heart as the true source of defiling speech (Matthew 15:11, 18–19; Matthew 12:34–35, “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh”). The related terms treat filthy and foolish speech as categories of character, not vocabulary lists: aischrologia (Colossians 3:8) and the foolish talking and coarse jesting of Ephesians 5:4.
  10. Warren W. Wiersbe, Be Wise (on 1 Corinthians), on the difference between what is lawful and what is edifying. The distinction rests on 1 Corinthians 10:23 (“all things are lawful… but all things edify not”) and 1 Corinthians 8:9 (“take heed lest by any means this liberty of yours become a stumblingblock”): liberty governed by love, not a rule of bare permission.
medium