The Question of Promises
On Taking the Lord's Name in Vain, Pt. 2
We continue on with our series on the Decalogue. A brief reminder: our book club on MacIntyre’s After Virtue will begin in January, for supporting subscribers. I’ll be sending out a reading schedule soon.
The Vanity of Promises And The Problem of Mortality
We can think of the problem of taking the Lord’s name in vain as having concentric circles, all of which are a problem. In order, beginning with the outermost regions, and moving toward the foothills of the holy mountain:
The Swears. The casual utterance of God’s name as a swear word is to treat God’s name as a dish or a tire iron, a tool in the verbal kit to be pulled out to really emphasize how we feel about something. Pepper a little divinity into your disgust or shock and it really drives home the feels surrounding this or that terrible event. All of the iterations of taking the Lord’s name in vain have to do with treating the unutterable name of YHWH in some improper kind of way, but using it as byword is, it seems, doing the name of the Lord a backhanded tribute: this event is truly horrific and only God’s name would be an appropriate response to it.
In this way, “OMG” is a trivialization of what seems to be something actually intended to convey gravity. To say “dear Lord” at a moment of true horror is to invoke God’s presence as the only reasonable response: we are at the end of our wits, and only God will do. There is a danger here, however, in viewing God as that which happens when we exhaust our resources: that God is one more in a chain of explanations, that which we reach for when we can reach for nothing else.
And so, the swears fail not because we are using God’s name profanely, but that, in being one more tool in the toolkit, God’s name becomes common.
Justifications for Worship. If the first type makes God too common, this type makes God undergird our seriousness. In invoking God’s name to underwrite meaningful activities, or bringing God into the picture to justify political victories, God’s name isn’t brought into the unplanned and uncontrollable miseries, but significant and planned ones. No need to go into detail here: we can name instances in which a political victory is a move in the direction of Transcendental Justice or in the direction of God’s Will. In contrast to the first type, which happen almost by spontaneous combustion, this second type is that which comes along to put the seal approval on planned and organized activity.
In this instance, we find ourselves wanting to do great things, for God, and trusting that the success of the action is in fact God’s good pleasure. But Scripturally speaking, there are a number of instances when getting what we want is just us falling into a pit we dug, divine judgment of letting the glutton gorge themselves. If the first type reaches for God as the explanation of the inexplicable, then the second type reaches for God as the guarantee for the perfectly ordinary. The first makes God an invoked but absent explanation; the second makes God superfluous.
Staving Off Chance and Death. We are now in the foothills of the commandment, closest in to what is at stake. We have moved from invoking God’s name around somewhat serious things to the most serious things: invoking God’s name as a security deposit underneath our promises.
Most commentators, when approaching the reasons for the commandment, land here. To invoke the name of God is to underwrite the oaths that we make, the promises we vow to keep, over against the felicities of time and even over against death itself. For to invoke God’s name in oaths and promises is to say that not I but the LORD will keep this word: though I fail, the LORD will avenge me.
The problem with the oath, however, is that of course we will not keep our words, not in the long run. I cannot promise to always love my children, because there will be one day that my breath will run out, and with it, my love. I cannot promise to never forget the most important people to me, because one day, my mind will fail, as the minds of my grandparents and their parents failed them. To make an oath is to speak in bad faith, knowing that we will fail in advance, with God our vouchsafe. To invoke God’s name under our oaths and promises is to secure our promises even when we cannot keep them, for God will not forget.
But to bind God to our oaths is to get it exactly wrong. To swear by Jerusalem or by God’s power is to not only overestimate the value of our ability to promise, but also to bind God to our wishes and aspirations. The things which occasion the use of God’s name have here been put from less serious to more serious, and if there was anything worth invoking God’s name around, it is that God alone can secure the things we love against even death itself.
God is not the kind of being who secures what we wish: we are secured already as those creatures that God wishes. To invoke God’s name over against death is not just misguided, but redundant, for God has already—in Christ—secured the fragile human even if the face of death. What God has not secured is our aspirations. There have been, and will yet be, many things that I have ambition for, or aspire to see in the world, which will come to nothing.
That God has not secured my aspirations and ambitions is, in the end, fine, because God’s aspirations for the things I love are deeper than mine. And there are worse things than death: as we have already seen, living as an idol is far more self-defeating. Keeping God’s name as God’s is to seek God’s face, God’s help, but not in a way which ensures that God secures the future in a manner befitting my designs.
"There is a danger here, however, in viewing God as that which happens when we exhaust our resources: that God is one more in a chain of explanations, that which we reach for when we can reach for nothing else."
Except that there is a training ground necessary to reach for God as our first and only resource. In our youth, which can sadly reach into middle-age, we are apt to trust horses, chariots, and our own efforts. Eventually, with enough "dear Lord" pronouncements, we may repent and learn to reverse the order: seeking God first for permission or guidance as to which horse or chariot or personal effort--if at all--to employ. The disciple uttering "dear Lord" in horror may in fact be in petitionary prayer. Let the Spirit be that judge. The tongue may rudder the heart away from the horror and toward "the LORD, the Maker of Heaven and earth". To suggest such utterances an auto-break of Commandment Three may be a heavy sentence.