Category: 9th Commandment Watch
Friday 2/19/16
Tuesday, 2/16/16
Bleg: Thou shalt not bear false witness
This is addressed to my friends who profess Christian faith but persist in telling or retelling political lies.
It’s only February and I’ve already had it. It’s nine more months — nine agonizingly long months — until the election.
A book popularly known as the Holy Bible (stop me if I’m going too fast for you) includes a famous passage known as the Ten Commandments. (Are you still with me? I can slow down.) One of them forbids bearing false witness. (I know, I know. The Bible is just so unrealistic sometimes, but bear with me.)
Just as Christ elevated the rigor of the commandment against adultery, so too has the commandment against bearing false witness been elevated for Christians:
Respect for the reputation of persons forbids every attitude and word likely to cause them unjust injury. He becomes guilty:
– of rash judgment who, even tacitly, assumes as true, without sufficient foundation, the moral fault of a neighbor;
– of detraction who, without objectively valid reason, discloses another’s faults and failings to persons who did not know them;279
– of calumny who, by remarks contrary to the truth, harms the reputation of others and gives occasion for false judgments concerning them.
Catechism of the Catholic Church 2477.
John Calvin taught that the commandment against false witness prohibits all calumnies (gossip and slander) and false accusations which might injure our neighbor’s good name, and any falsehood which might impair his fortune. Christians must assert only the truth with pure motives for the maintenance of our neighbor’s good name and estate.
…
Martin Luther … described the commandment against false witness to prohibit the public judgment and reproof of his neighbor. One can indeed see and hear the neighbor sin, but one has no command to report it to others. If one judges and passes sentence, one falls into a sin which is greater than his (except for judges, parents, and preachers.)
…
Matthew Henry taught that the prohibition against false witness concerns our own and our neighbor’s good name. “Thou shalt not bear false witness” forbids: … “slandering, backbiting, tale-bearing, aggravating what is done amiss and making it worse than it is ….”
Wikipedia on Reformation and Post-Reformation views of the commandment against false witness.
A powerful statement from my own Reformed past:
Q. What is the aim of the ninth commandment?
A. That I never give false testimony against anyone, twist no one’s words, not gossip or slander, nor join in condemning anyone rashly or without a hearing.Rather, in court and everywhere else, I should avoid lying and deceit of every kind; these are the very devices the devil uses, and they would call down on me God’s intense wrath. I should love the truth, speak it candidly, and openly acknowledge it. And I should do what I can to guard and advance my neighbor’s good name.
Heidelberg Catechism Q&A 112, citing Psalm 15; Proverbs 19:5; Matthew 7:1; Luke 6:37; Romans. 1:28-32; Leviticus. 19:11-12; Proverbs 12:22; 13:5; John 8:44; Revelation 21:8; 1 Corinthians 13:6 (and, yes, you can say that as “one Corinthians” or “first Corinthians”); Ephesians 4:25; 1 Peter 3:8-9; 4:8. This is a catechism of continental Calvinists.
False witness, then, is everything which cannot be properly proved.
The Large Catechism by Martin Luther.
Question 83: What is required in the ninth commandment?
Answer: The ninth commandment requires that we maintain and promote truth between persons and that we preserve the good name of our neighbor and ourselves.
Scripture: Zechariah 8:16; Acts 25:10; Ecclesiastes 7:1; 3 John 12; Proverbs 14:5, 25.
Question 145: What are the sins forbidden in the ninth commandment?
Answer: The sins forbidden in the ninth commandment are, all prejudicing the truth, and the good name of our neighbors, as well as our own, especially in public judicature; … raising false rumors, receiving and countenancing evil reports….
Westminster Larger Catechism. This is a Catechism of Presbyterian Calvinists.
Are you seeing a pattern here?
There are no exceptions for politics.
There are no exceptions for social media.
There are no exceptions for passing along lying mêmes.
So could we cool it with the harshly partisan lies? Please? Pretty please?
I know that if we stop lying, it sort of feels like unilateral disarmament, since apostates, never-Christians and others often seem to have no hesitancy about lying about us and our preferred candidates. But there’s no exception for “they lied, too.”
I have in mind, frankly, mostly the sharing of lying mêmes. Folks, some of those have been around so long they’ve got tenure, but they’re still lies and you can look them up pretty readily. My go-to site is Snopes, but there are others, too.
Don’t make me hate politics more than I do already, okay?
Of course, you may give me one or both barrels if you catch me doing this.
UPDATE: I have added “Bleg” to the title.
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“In learning as in traveling and, of course, in lovemaking, all the charm lies in not coming too quickly to the point, but in meandering around for a while.” (Eva Brann)
Tuesday, 1/12/16
Saturday, 1/9/16
Feast of St. Stephen
- Nothing succeeds like failure
- Judicial UnAmerican Activities Committee
- An Evangelical distinctive
- If Trump, then what?
- Culling and sorting
- Sprawl does not compute
- 1st thing we do is not “kill all the lawyers”
If you’re all blissed out from Christmas and don’t want a downer, you might want to start at item 7, which is at least bracing, and finish from there. I understand.
Continue reading “Feast of St. Stephen”
Wednesday, 12/2/15
On arguing with integrity
Seth Godin’s Saturday blog was evocative for me:
Each of us understands that different people are swayed by different sorts of arguments, based on different ways of viewing the world. That seems sort of obvious. A toddler might want an orange juice because it’s sweet, not because she’s trying to avoid scurvy, which might be the argument that moves an intellectual but vitamin-starved sailor to take action.
So far, so good.
The difficult part is this: Even when people making an argument know this, they don’t like making an argument that appeals to the other person’s alternative worldview.
Worth a full stop here. Even when people have an argument about a political action they want someone else to adopt, or a product they want them to buy, they hesitate to make that argument with empathy. Instead, they default to talking about why they believe it.
To many people, it feels manipulative or insincere or even morally wrong to momentarily take the other person’s point of view when trying to advance an argument that we already believe in.
And that’s one reason why so many people claim to not like engaging in marketing. Marketing is the empathetic act of telling a story that works, that’s true for the person hearing it, that stands up to scrutiny. But marketing is not about merely sharing what you, the marketer believes. It’s about what we, the listener, believe.
Godin links to his book that fleshes out this theme.
I think Natural Law arguments come, well, naturally to me because I’ve internalized some of the Natural Law. I don’t argue that way, rather than from “Thus saith the Lord in Hezekiah 12:14,” because even if Hezekiah tipped me off to what the Lord said, what the Lord said tipped me off to the way things really are, not just to some “do it this way or I’ll hurt you in the bye-and-bye (which you therefore won’t find sweet).”
By my lights, then, I’m not entering dishonestly or manipulatively into someone’s alternative worldview, but (like Hezekiah quoting the Lord to me) pointing out to them what they truly believe because that’s how things truly are. There’s a lot of things that people “can’t not know.”
I guess this means that I don’t accept Godin’s premise that, deep down, people have divergent worldviews about deep-down realities. They merely have really, really thick ideological defenses against admitting reality (“really thick” as in “I’m not all that persuasive”).
Or maybe I don’t see what I’m doing as marketing, but as something more important than that trying to sell soup, soap, or legal services.
Now flip it over. I find very annoying people who have abandoned or never seriously professed the Christian faith, but who try to put their ideas into what they fancy as “Christian” terms — who try to appeal to what they fancy my alternative worldview. This includes, notably, things like the Facebook mêmes on the themes “if you were really a Christian you’d …” or “look how hypocritical these ‘Christians’ are.”
- It generally comes across as insincere or as a form of browbeating a putative intellectual inferior;
- It is generally tone-deaf to how Christians (at least Christians like me) think and talk (what I’ve branded “pretexting”); and
- It generally posits something that isn’t really that way — that is, it tries to say that I as a Christian should believe some way (despite my perception that it’s unreal) simply because that’s what they get out of flying over something Jesus said at 30,000 feet and 500 mph.
I suppose the same could be true of a Christian from one tradition trying to translate their beliefs into one of the significantly different Christian traditions, too.
If I’m right about this “flip it over,” then despite Godin’s theory that they don’t like making an argument that appeals to the other person’s alternative worldview, they make it anyway. Do they think that the thing of which they’re trying to persuade me is no more important and fundamental than soup, soap or legal services? Generally, when people whip out their faux Christian hectoring, they’re talking about some fairly important stuff.
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I hadn’t intended to go here when I started writing, but yesterday brought news of a swarthy politician, who on the face of it, is appealing to people of faith to join him and his blond wife (“Heidi” is her name; how precious is that?!) in prayer, but who does so through a webpage that invites your public endorsement and won’t let you even sign up to pray with them unless you give him your e-mail address.
Since when does one sign up to pray in cyberspace? Does he really believe in prayer or is this a form of pretexting? Although he was targeting a different demographic than me, can I be offended anyway?
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“In learning as in traveling and, of course, in lovemaking, all the charm lies in not coming too quickly to the point, but in meandering around for a while.” (Eva Brann)
Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 