Inevitably in our interaction with other Christians, we will encounter differences in beliefs on different questions and issues. Some of the differences may be minor, and some may be more significant. But how do we assess how important a given difference really is?

This has been a particularly interesting question for me lately, we have been reviewing applicants for the position of pastor at our church. With this process, we have been reviewing many statements of doctrine, philosophy of ministry, sermons, and other communications that express a variety of beliefs. With the large number of different beliefs that can be covered, we naturally occasionally encounter some that we perhaps disagree with to some extent. But how important is that?

We often tend expend to a large amount of energy in establishing and defending our beliefs, with the main focus on whether something is right or wrong. But how do we know how important each of these beliefs are? How do we determine which ones are critical, and which ones aren’t?

Typically, these decisions seem to be prone to be a very subjective and vague determination, directed by pretty unhelpful measures, like how strange I think someone’s view is. Those seeking to be more objective, may choose to apply a more verifiable standard. We can divide issues into essential and non-essential, with the essential beliefs typically being something along the lines of a statement of faith, or orthodox creed.

While this is a helpful step, and a great and simple way to describe the variation that exists, a simple binary division still does not address the fact that our beliefs exist on a wide spectrum of importance. Many beliefs might be considered non-essential, but still could have a very large impact on our perspective and behavior. Beliefs can range from totally shaping our lives, to being very important, to somewhat important, to slightly important, to completely irrelevant. Placing beliefs on this spectrum requires a closer look than just determining if it is part of a statement of faith.

For a more objective assessment, I would suggest three measures:

• Epistemic: This is an assessment of how confident we can really be in our position. Some beliefs can be easily corroborated, having been upheld by centuries of orthodoxy, and we may hold these beliefs with greater confidence. Other beliefs may be more esoteric, or have been hotly contested, with many brilliant people evenly divided on both sides of a belief. It is sometimes foolish and arrogant to claim a strong confidence in the latter beliefs.
• Theological: The theological measure is an assessment of how a belief affects our perspective of God. How much does this belief shape our image of God? However, we must be very careful with this measure, often this can easily turn into a circular logic fallacy attempt to defend a belief, with both sides thinking their perspective is most God glorifying because they think it is true.
• Empirical: The empirical measure is an assessment of how much we can actually measure a real distinction in behavior due to a belief. Does a particular belief cause truly distinct behavior? We must exercise caution here as well. We frequently tend to expect a certain behavior, based on our own understanding of someone’s belief. We can easily fail to look no further than our expectation, or even allow our expectation to bias our interpretation of behavior. However, to properly assess a belief by this measure, we must make an honest look at if behavior is really affected by the belief.

Hopefully these measures might provide a little more objectivity as you consider which beliefs are important and really how important they are. There are certainly beliefs that are indeed are very important, and others that are not worth much energy. Are there any other measures that you would apply?

When someone harms someone else, they should be punished.

This is perhaps the most basic and instinctive description of justice, and virtually everyone, every culture, every religion would agree with this notion. As Christians we are called to pursue justice, but we face the common trap of simply allowing our definition of justice to be defined by our culture. The Bible calls us to a much deeper and nuanced understanding of justice.

To put it in simple logical terms, justice is a battle against injustice. When see injustice in the world, it is our natural instinct to try to find the perpetrator and punish him. And indeed, this is extremely valuable. But, we must not think this is the end of the battle against injustice. In Ephesians 6:12, Paul makes one of the profound and powerful statements about the real source of evil and injustice:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

Paul clearly articulates our natural instinct, that our fight against injustice is against specific individuals, and then directly refutes it. Quite simply, Paul says, fighting injustice by merely fighting against specific individuals is misguided. There is someone else to blame.

This by no means easy or natural. Our instinctive appeal to justice is naturally drawn toward finding blame with someone, some individual that we can point a finger at, accuse, and punish. When the Bible refutes this instinct, it goes against our instincts. And it is always hard to go beyond our intuitions, and look deeper. While it is certainly true that restraining individuals is critical part of pursuing justice, it is important to understand, from scriptures, that the primary forces of evil aren’t originated in individuals schemes, but the systemic and pervasive strategies and schemes of powers and principalities.

Not only does the human tendency towards blame-based injustice point the blame in the wrong direction, it can also lead to wrongly dismissing injustice. As many voice the frustrations and pain of pervasive and systemic injustice that has been sown, a frequent response is to distill this down to individuals. When others look for individual perpetrators and their intentional acts of evil and can’t find them, then they can easily and wrongly assume that injustice must not exist. This, according to scriptures, is a false conclusion. The vindication or condemnation of individuals and their acts of injustice can neither verify nor confirm the much more widespread and insidious reality of systemic injustice.

So does this mean the battle against injustice is hopeless? Without being able to fully address injustice by tracking down and punishing villains, are we without any real concrete means for bringing greater justice and righteousness into the world? John provides further insight, that points to where we go from here, in 1 John 3:8 (b):

The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work.

To understand this verse, imagine for a bit that there was a developer that was having a new housing development built, but realized it was being built with rotten wood that would not stand. So he hired a demolition crew to come in, and destroy the house. Now imagine the developer shows up to check on the demolition crew and finds them sitting around looking at the building, and so he asks when they are going to start tearing down the building. They respond saying that their approach is to carefully avoid adding any more rotten wood to the construction. The developer might say that is well and good, but he wants it torn down. The crew again responds that they don’t want to actually tear anything down, that the problem was the improper building materials, and so they think the best thing to do is to make sure they don’t add anymore faulty materials to the building. Of course at this point, the developer would naturally fire this crew, and look for someone that would actually destroy the building and not just avoid causing any further problems.

Likewise, let’s consider what John is saying about Jesus’ purpose. He doesn’t say that Jesus came to *avoid* the devil’s work. John’s description of His purpose is completely different than suggesting he came to try to get people to avoid contributing to the devil’s and encouraging people to avoid sinning and harming others. This isn’t even remotely close to what John says. John says that Jesus came to destroy the devil’s work. This isn’t just avoiding complicity, it is actively undoing and destroying and tearing down the fruit and consequences of the devil’s labor, work, and efforts.

So what is the devil’s work? To be clear, it is not simply some abstract offense against God. It is the real pain and frustration we experience in our lives and in our world. If we are willing to listen attentively, it is not hard to see the depths of the devil’s work of injustice around us. If we are paying attention at all, we should hear the pain and frustrations of racism, inequality, abuse, and violence.

Combining these two teachings should reorient our perspective on justice, on how we respond to these cries of frustration. The natural instinct to find someone to blame and give up if we can’t find a villain is misguided. Systemic injustice won’t be solved by finding a particular police officer, politician, or other leader to blame. Or even worse, it certainly won’t be addressed by blaming victims of injustice, accusing them of just getting what they deserved.

The reality is that the enemy’s strategy is pervasively and insidiously woven into society. Let’s consider the devil’s work in racism. As John Piper recently said, “Racism is part of the seamless fabric of sin in human life.” The truth is that today, most people are not intentionally engaging in racism or perpetrating inequality. And this is an important distinction to make: we generally are not actively engaging in malicious acts of racism. However, at the same time, as humans we are all prone to making imperfect judgments. We are all prone to having our judgment slightly clouded by stereotypes and fears. Of course we aren’t aware of these tendencies, we aren’t making malicious judgments, but the subtle nature of our racial tendencies is exactly why we can’t see it. We are all racists to some degree, because we are all sinners. I am racist, you are, even the greatest champions of equality have bits of racism. And we have also inherited bits of racism here and there in our society.

These slight bits of racial inequalities may seem so subtle as to be completely innocuous in isolation. But our society consists of innumerable layers. Slight differences in education, culture, family life, geography, civil treatment, inherited wealth, and so on, gradually add up. After the collective impact of dozens of layers of subtle inequality add up, the reality of racism becomes real and substantive. The final impact of these layers can easily be measured and verified and the pain and frustration of that experience are deeply grounded in reality.

Is our ability to recognize and respond to injustice, constrained by our desire to identify the perpetrator of the injustice? Again, our response can be to enter into the blame-game, and find someone to blame that will befit our ideological tendencies. Jesus’ purpose was to destroy the works of the devil. That means undoing and tearing apart the results of racism. The devil has worked to leave many minorities in the state of disadvantage and hardship. We undo and destroy that work when we work to advantage and benefit those that have been on the painful side of these disadvantages. When we defend and lift up those that society has stacked the odds against, we are destroying the devil’s work.

When we see injustice and seek to blame, we are letting powers and principalities continue their strategy. But every time we step beyond this, helping those that we might otherwise accuse, defending those that are victims of the systems and schemes of these powers, we are undermining their work and strategy. Helping those who have the odds against them is an act of destroying the devil’s work.

Profanity is typically condemned by Christians. However, is this view backed by scriptures? I’ve been interested in considering the verses that speak to this, and apply this to the meaning of profanity to wrestle with what scripture really says about profanity.

There are several verses that are usually quoted in regards to profanity, including Col 3:8, Eph 4:29, and Eph 5:4. So do these verses really condemn profanity? They do indeed speak to the subject. But, what Paul actually condemns isn’t exactly “profanity”, but rather “filthy” or “corrupting” speech. Quite simply, it is just not accurate to precisely equate these concepts with the English tabooed four-letter words. Furthermore, if we were to back-translate our English profanity into Hebrew and Greek, we would find these words actually appear in scripture. Relevant magazine has a great post explaining how profanity is used in scriptures, and particularly even by Paul. The scriptures on this subject, are not concerned with outlawing certain words, but directing the content of what we say.

We have a tendency to interpret these verses as a banned list of words due to our tendency to be attracted to legalism over relationship. Legalism is attractive because it allows us to define a specific set of actions that we avoid or participate in to gain divine favor. Unfortunately legalism always separates us from God, because it is about mechanism to achieve benefits, rather than God Himself. A relational understanding is more difficult, because we have to seek to understand the purpose behind scriptures. As we look at these verses, we must seek to understand the purpose that God is seeking for speech, rather than just trying to simplify into a legalistic definition of acceptable and unacceptable words.

Again, the words used in these verses indicate that we are to avoid corrupting or filthy speech. This points to avoiding communicating a message or ideas that are degrading to other people, or degrading the beauty or purity of situations or moments.

To consider how this intersects with English profanity, and its usage, let’s consider some of the reasons why profanity is typically used:

• To express intense and strong emotions–It is not uncommon for people to exclaim expletives, that have absolutely nothing to do with the sexual or excretory meaning of the word, but rather to express their extreme emotional experience. The Bible is filled with intense emotional experiences, that are readily expressed, and it would seem rather absurd to suggest that the Bible wants to condemn language that communicates intense emotion. And again, it would appear that Paul even demonstrated the use of expletives to express his intense emotions.
• As a social cue–Often profanity is used as a signal of association with lower status or classes. Profanity is partly defined by the cultural selection of words that are acceptable for “civilized conversation”. Profanity is sometimes used as a way of indicating affinity with a lower class, as opposed to upper class that wouldn’t use such language. Interestingly, this type of association is actually Biblical. Jesus explicitly identified himself with “the least of these”, and Paul’s word selection may have been, in part, an act of this identification, demonstrating that though he used to be an elite Pharisee, he now identified with the commoner.

While these are some situations where it seems to me that profanity can be used appropriately, there are certainly situations where it is used destructively.

• Degradation of others–“F*** you” is almost always used for the purpose of degrading or insulting another person. It is not simply an expression of emotion or association. It is used to maximize insult. Also, in general, sexual profanity is frequently employed in ways that degrade women, implicitly or explicitly reducing them to having nothing more than sexual amusement.
• To degrade conversations–This certainly isn’t specific to profanity; crude humor, and even just careless joking, can often move a conversation from meaningful to meaningless, or from beauty to parody very quickly. Again, this isn’t about specific words, but we should aspire to avoid to being a force that is pushing the conversation towards the meaningless, and there are indeed words that can be more likely to move in that direction. For example, sexually-based profanity often functions to degrade the beauty and value of sex.
• To be offensive–This is not an absolute intrinsic evil of profanity, plenty of people are not offended by profanity, and we can not condemn profanity for being offensive if no one around us is offended. This is relative to the audience. However, if you are aware that your audience may be offended, a loving approach to your audience demands avoiding needless offense. Now, it is worth remembering that sometimes offense is needed. The Bible has numerous messages that can be offensive and hard to hear. However, in general gratuitous or unnecessary offenses that only become barriers to more important communication, should be avoided. If you prefer to refrain from using profanity (as I do), this might be a good reason.

These are some guidelines that I think could be applied to profanity. Hopefully that might give us some ideas for looking at these scriptures with deeper, more relational understanding. As Solomon said, “There is a time for everything and a season for every activity under the heavens”, and most likely this concept applies to profanity as well.