Is It Ever Okay for Christians to Use Vulgar Language?
Is it ever okay for Christians to use vulgar language?
This question is particularly pertinent to me, since my book Charis takes liberties that might offend some people. While the response to my book so far has been good, I've received not a few reactions that go something like… "I don't think my grandma will like this book" or "some people will be offended at your language." One friend of mine was having his wife read the book out loud while they were driving, but he told her to skip chapter 6 (titled "Whore") because he couldn't hear her say those words out loud.
Just to be clear, I don't use any four-letter words in the book. Only five-letter ones. And I never say anything that, in my mind, goes beyond what the Bible (in its original language) actually says.
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The plain and undeniable fact is: The Bible at times uses vulgar and offensive language. In fact, there isn't a single literal translation of Ezekiel 16 on the market. You have to know Hebrew to fully understand that chapter in the Bible, because the Hebrew is just too graphic (The Message comes closest). The same goes for Song of Songs and other portions of the Bible.
But let me share my heart. I want you to know where I'm coming from. I know that the use of crass and vulgar language has become trendy in some Christian circles, and some Christian preachers seem to enjoy shocking their audience simply because they…enjoy shocking their audience. But that's not me. There is nothing in me, and nothing in my book, that is designed to say things in a shocking way simply to get a rise out of some people. Shock for the sake of shock is immature and unchristian. I have no desire to push some undefined envelope just to thumb my nose at people more conservative than I.
However, I also have no desire to censor the Bible where it was designed to offend, stir up, or shake the overly religious out of spiritual complacency.
As I said, the Bible uses offensive, vulgar, and sometimes quite pornographic (that is: "graphic sexual imagery") language. Our English translations will dim down the language, and there may be times when unleashing the original language is inappropriate. But my book Charis is written for adults, not children.
So I deal with Genesis 38 and Ezekiel 16 and Hosea. I don't pass over what Zipporah did to her son in Exodus 4 or Abraham's past life in Ur. Gomer was not a prostitute but a sexually promiscuous woman, and I explain why this matters. The best English equivalent to zoneh, in certain contexts, is whore (that five-letter word). Hosea would have shocked his audience; if our preaching of Hosea doesn't shock ours, then perhaps we're not being as faithful to the text as we should. I'm not trying to be edgy just to be edgy, and I asked my many editors to tell me if they thought I went beyond the actual text (sometimes I did, and those bits didn't make it into the final draft). I put much thought into every word that I said, and every word I wrote I wrote for a reason. Again, my motivation is not to sound hip or crass or vulgar. It's to be biblical.
My motivation is and will always be the same: To proclaim and celebrate the word of God in all its grit and grime. Because the scandal of grace is often buried in a pile of religious bumper stickers trying to keep the gospel strapped in a pew. And if that's how God talks about grace, then so be it. But he doesn't. He talks about all kinds of sin—the deep, dark stuff—that he rescues us from. Because this impresses on our soul the magnitude of his grace.
My motivation with every word in Charis is to be most faithful to the word of God in its original language, and I want to impact my audience with the message of grace in the same way that the Bible would have impacted (perhaps offended) its own audience. That's my motivation. Not to be edgy, not to be cool. But to be faithful to God's word, which I'm determined to teach faithfully.
In any case, I still give this warning in the Preface:
Grace is a dangerous topic. We often want to domesticate it, calm it down, stuff it into a blue blazer and a pair of khakis. But biblical grace—or charis, as you'll see—doesn't like to settle down. It doesn't drive a minivan and it sometimes misses church. To prove this, we're going to venture on a journey across the land of Israel, and I'm not bringing a pacifier. If you need to scream, I'll roll down the window. If you want to get off in the next town, sorry, doors are locked. Grace is a dangerous topic because the Bible is a dangerous book. It wrecks people, it offends people, and it's tough to read from the suburbs. If you're under eighteen, you might want to find another book on grace. There are plenty out there.
