Pardon My French, but I'm DISTURBED

It was Shakespeare who said that “the pen is mightier than the sword.” I have always found this to be a concrete description of the way that reality works, not at all some metaphorical rah-rah speech for intellectuals to console themselves for not doing anything real in the world. And so I was especially looking forward to this years Desiring God National Conference on “The Power of Words and the Wonder of God.” Before I ever got to the material, I was treated instead to a showdown in the blogosphere between the usual assortment of Fighting Fundies and their new “Axis of Evil,” Piper-Driscoll-and Paul Tripp—Paul who? Well, for those who are not familiar with his work, Tripp is a bit of a counseling authority in the Reformed world, and his books War of Words, Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hand, as well as his brother Ted’s book, Shepherding a Child’s Heart, have been spoken well of by most people I know. In a little sound-byte-size interview to promote the conference, Tripp repeatedly used the “s” word as an example of profane speech versus edifying speech, and used his children (presumably grown up now) as a case study. Long story short, his assignment at the conference was The War of Words: Getting to the Heart for God’s Sake. The upshot was that we live in the mundane, and words are the power to transcend that and live a life that matters. So I watched the promo before I watched anything else. In the story he relates, he remembers his kids responding to his discourse on that particular word by using the word themselves (i.e. “I think this conversation is “s*@#,” were his son’s thoughts.) As I listened carefully, my thought process went as follows:

1. Hmm—he is saying it a lot.
2. Hmm—is that exactly the reaction I would have toward my kids in that circumstance? (i.e. If my goal was to allow them their “cultural space” in order to show them a better way, would my laughter with them have been sustained through the whole of the conversation, etc.)?
3. Passages like Philippians 3:3 and Isaiah 64:6 are certainly relevant examples of strong biblical language here, but Steve Camp’s response on his blog (cf. http://stevenjcamp.blogspot.com/2008/09/paul-tripp-ing-likes-to-say-s-word-has.html ) to that objection was technically correct if the goal is to prepare people’s soul for the most powerful words.
4. So, I’m disturbed.
5. Wait a minute—disturbed—am I? Disturbed: that’s a word too. What does it mean?
6. Come to think of it: How disturbed am I right now? I am ordinarily much more disturbed with how Fundamentalism has eroded both the Christian mind and the Christian’s cultural mandate—leading to the vast majority of what is wrong with the institutional rot in present Evangelicalism.

In other words, where is the sense of proportion here? Please do not misinterpret this. How much attention should be given to profane objects or concepts as the object lesson of the difference between the holy and the profane is a debatable matter and probably a good discussion. I just don’t want the Fundies to be the arbiters of that discussion. For instance, I would not have said things the way Tripp did, and I don’t want to be a part of condoning anyone getting the wrong idea from the way the words were used. In fact, I suppose that I could write a whole paper about the objectivity of words and the Lordship of Christ over every single one of them that role off our tongues (or keypads). But there are quite a few things at stake here. And so I want to be careful that I do not make the word “disturbed” more profane than the “s” word.

One of the unspoken threads that ran through the conference is that, at a very real level, the mundane is the profane. In light of eternity, nothing is more profane than the mundane. It’s about time some Reformed leaders went in that direction! But how does my usage of the word “disturbed” become more profane than our culture’s choice of dirty words? This would be done by inflating my own dealing with words, in relation to my passion for the eternal things behind those words. The biggest casualty in this general loss of proportion is manly speech from the pulpit that cannot say the same thing that Jesus and the disciples did when calling men to their rightful King. In this way, the Victorian English and the high-brows of Vienna at the turn of the twentieth-century were the most profane people who ever lived, as they bowed and curtsied and shed tears over Wagner, while they heated up the ovens for human flesh. And make no mistake: that is usually how these things relate. Those with the tightest wads usually stash the most corpses.

Because of the lack of eternal proportion that Fundamentalism has cultivated, the vast majority of Christians cannot stomach to be in any conversation with unbelieving potty mouths, and, if we’re honest, we all know why. Our skin is crawling because the lewdness of speech is a form of polemic that makes the Christian subconsciously cower out of any real interaction. Anyone who doesn’t see this has probably never been in any significant cultural warfare—especially at the college campus—where the designation “Prude” is much more significant than “Incorrect.” Incidentally, it also turns back genuine seekers who run into Christians who are itching for want of a bow or a curtsy from pagans who, for all we can be assured, want to kill us anyway. There will be time and place for showing our youth a better way to speak, and to instruct that people only use foul speech when they are not witty enough to reach for something deeper and stronger. All in due time.

We are in a war to rescue the word from the terrorists of Image, yet the word was first captured and sold to them by the hijackers of Practice. There is a long history to this “humiliation of the word.” The answer, of course, is not to match dung slung for dung. The answer is to carpet bomb the crowd with a steady diet of truth claims that is high enough to be invincible but low enough to bring the mob from what is both similar and dissimilar between pop rocks and prime rib. Just as a beautiful woman who is still clothed (there still are some) has the allure of mystery, so a Christian who can have a beer, throw a hail-Mary further than he can pray one, and hold out in a gutter conversation without changing his mind-diapers after every sentence, is a curiosity to an unbeliever. Language is analogical and so must our levels of comfort. In this way, the missionary is really like an intelligence officer or part of a special ops invasion. He will rub shoulders with some sordid characters, just as he was and is. He must, as Kipling said in his famous poem about growing up as a man, “walk with kings nor lose the common touch.” If we do not grasp this, then we will never be world Christians because we’ll spend all day shivering and waiting for the “ly” at the end of a mere word.