On Not Speaking God's Name

Taking God's Name in Vain, and One Cheer for Political Atheism

First, a brief mea culpa: I had drafted some reflections on the third commandment—on taking the Lord’s name in vain—and then neglected to put them in order. Life intervened, and the Sabbath reflections jumped in line. Getting back on track now—The Management

The Expansion of the Idols

If idolatry is, as we’ve been discussing it, more of a process than an object, then it’s easier for us to see how the third commandment¹ follows from two commandments about idolatry: the words we use give public shape to the idols, and expansion to their reach. Idolatry begins, I argued, as a process which eventually scoops up our bodies into the process—we become the graven images.

Taking God’s name in vain, then, continues this process in public, in discourse, in argument and imagination. It takes the idolatry process and expands it through our naming of the idol’s processes as those of God’s.

As Patrick Miller put it²:

The proclamation of the name marks off the proper worship of God from practices that come from outside the story and apart from or over against God’s self-revelation and instruction. The verse in which reference is made to proclaiming the name—or causing it to be remembered—spells out succinctly and simply both the…instruments of worship, a simple altar, and the cultic practices appropriate to the place where the name is spoken and the God who bears the name is worshipped…

To take the Lord’s name is vain, he suggests, is to connect God to that which God has not connected Himself to, to invoke God as authorizing something which God has not been revealed through. But avoiding language is not our way forward here.

As idolatry knows, images and practices are not self-interpreting, and well-meaning Christians would do well to learn from the idols here. The oft quoted (and very apocryphal!) statement of St. Francis of Assisi is nonsense on stilts³: one’s public presence is not necessarily sufficient. If I show up at a baseball game, and I treat everyone nicely, it could be because I had good upbringing, or because I—even after nearly three decades in Texas—remain a Southern man at heart. If I open the door for a stranger, it could be out of sheer laziness: I’m already here, and I’ve already propped the door open, so why not just lean on it a little longer?

Likewise, even bad deeds don’t necessarily self-communicate. Damaging actions still cause damage, and communicate something to the damaged , but it’s possible there too that what an action communicates is taken wrongly: sorting out questions of intent is why, after all, we distinguish between manslaughter and murder. In good and bad actions, what is required is something which has to be articulated, put into language, to help us know what it is we are seeing⁴. For it is only by language, in forms of communication, that we have access to one another: the human race has not yet developed telepathy or kything, and even if they did, it would still be a form of communication.

It is through language—signs both verbal and non-verbal—that actions begin to take up space in the understanding of the ones who receive them. It is through language that something new appears and then creates a rupture in our thinking: even art evokes something in us, opening up spaces in us that call for us to answer.

Such is the relation between idolatry and taking God’s name in vain: the object and the invitation, the call to enter into a new world in which the idols are making something from something else. That we somehow think that wordless actions are sufficient to countering the idols is to misunderstand not only what the idols do, but indeed, how they are countered.

Photo by Bertrand Colombo on Unsplash

The Political Absence of God, The Theological Risk of Words

If there is a consolation to be sought in this year’s election cycles, it is that neither of the major candidates for president are talking about God that much⁵. Trump has abandoned the pretense of trying to speak Christian, and Harris keeps her pieties more closely held. Allusions, as I have argued elsewhere, to a better future or past, can be mapped on to some kind of theological moorings, but let’s not make too much of this and acknowledge that this presidential election has largely left God to the side. Whatever their supporters do is beside the point here: the politicians themselves have laid hold of a firmly post-Christian election moment, and, in the process, opened up something very interesting about the third commandment.

For if the 3rd commandment is, in part, about the authorization of God’s name for spaces beyond that which the triune God has specifically been revealed and promised to be known—the Scriptures, the person of Jesus Christ, Communion, baptism—then, there is much to be commended by this year’s election cycle. Thanks for leaving God’s name out of the whole thing!

This avoidance of politicians in this case does not, however, let Christians off the hook for naming what it is that God does. For Christians are those who begin on the basis of how God has revealed Himself, and then begin to work by analogies. We do so by the power of the Holy Spirit, venturing our language forth in trial, error, and argument, by strict connection and loose frameworks. But we are not freed from language.

For if the Word is the one who speaks creation into being, then our own words are always answering that which God is already doing, always giving voice to what God has said, done, and is doing. We are not freed, like the servant in the parable, to hide our words in the ground, or to submerge our words into mute and random acts of kindness, but to risk words which offer something of a counter to the confident assertions of the idols. But this does not mean that our words move in full confidence—for we are speaking of God! Rather, we speak on the basis of what God has already given, and accept that in Christ, there is a kind of weak willingness to be misunderstood.

We find in John 7, for example, a littany of attributions of who Jesus is: a prophet, a deceiver, the Messiah. But in Jesus, we find signs, indicators, displays of identity which do not give themselves up directly. He refuses to offer up more miracles, or to validate himself except by pointing to the Father who has sent him⁶. The only way to know what is up and down—the only way to speak well of what it is that God is doing— is to come to Jesus with the willingness for our words to be drowned and raised up again:

³⁷ On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. ³⁸ Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.”^[c]

There is no way out of vain speculation except to drown our words, our vain attributions. If blasphemy of the Spirit is to call that which is of God the work of the demons, then moving away from idolatry requires a different kind of modesty. Speaking of God, we see in Exodus and here, is a risk, and one which requires that, when we speak, we are willing for our visions and aspirations to first be drowned beneath the flood of the Red Sea, the river of living water, that our words might break forth chastened and modest. The idols’ confidence will be the stones that lead them to the river floor, vanity’s graveyard.

It is only those who, beginning on the basis of what Jesus has done, offer attestation to what God is doing, who find their way out. And that way out leads always through the quiet death of the water, the river of the Spirit submerging our words until only the right ones rise again.

1. Again, using the broadly Protestant numbering.

2. Patrick Miller, The Ten Commandments, 84. If you buy one book on the Decalogue, buy this one.

3. The “preach always, and use words with necessary” doesn’t fit at all a man who was described by his hagiographers as preaching to birds and lions. The man was an itinerant preacher! There is a line from the Franciscan Rule which reads “All brothers, however, are to preach by their deeds”, but the sentiment above seems less apt for Francis’ world—in which few were literate and the Gospel needed expounding by sermons—and more apt for a world concerned with causing offense by street preachers.

4. It’s entirely possible that the one initiating the action knows less about the action than the one receiving it. What I intend for good can be received by another as harm, calling into question my own wisdom, judgment, and competency.

5. Yes, Trump still signs Bibles, and yes, Harris has gone to churches. But as far as staking much on their political vision on some kind of divine mandate or cohesion, they’ve both left that to the side. The same is true, at least in Texas, for the other major races. The absence of God in the political swamp is kind of refreshing.

6. John 7: 28-29.