Godbreathed: What It Really Means for the Bible to Be Divinely Inspired by Zack Hunt

Author:Zack Hunt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MennoMedia
Published: 2023-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

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Cussin’ for Jesus

I started cussing at a very young age. I wasn’t brought up to cuss. Swear words weren’t a part of my family’s vocabulary, at least not that I was aware of. We were holiness people, and holiness people didn’t cuss. But kids at school did. Not in class, obviously, but definitely on the playground or whenever teachers weren’t around, and they could impress everyone in class with their adult vocabulary. As soon as they did, I followed right along. Not in front of anyone, of course. Even as a first grader I had a holiness reputation to maintain. But as soon as I stepped off the bus and saw it drive far enough away that I knew the bus driver couldn’t hear me and rat me out to my mom later, I would scream whatever new cussword I had learned that day at school at the top of my lungs.1

I was a weird kid. As I got older, I didn’t really get any less weird. I was a good evangelical teenager, which meant cussing was forbidden, or at least reserved for only when I needed to look cool in front of the right people. Instead of actual profanity, I used evangelical profanity. What was evangelical profanity? A laundry list of words that sounded almost like actual profanity, but weren’t technically cuss words, so we could feel sure we weren’t going to hell for letting unwholesome language come out of our mouths. Words like “heck, “son of a biscuit,” “shut the front door,” “frickin’” and literally just saying the word “bleep” (as in “What the bleep?”) were just a handful of the many entries in our lexicon of evangelical profanity.

You can imagine, then, the feeling of unbridled jubilation I had when I discovered there is genuine, bona fide profanity in the Bible. It’s true. Not in our English translations, obviously. That would be too scandalous and profane. But it’s there in the original Greek. In his letter to the Philippians, Paul writes, “I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ” (Philippians 3:8). That bit about rubbish? It’s a sanitized translation of the Greek word skubalon. The unsanitized, more literal translation would be “sh**.” I genuinely find “rubbish” a poor translation decision because, in sanitizing the word, we lose just how passionate Paul was about the gospel. Alas, no one asked for my opinion during the translation process.

Regardless of translation or tradition, there is simply no place for the profane in our sacred spaces. Whatever its form, the profane is an unwelcome interloper that defiles the holy, rendering it debased, impure, unworthy, and obscene. As a people called to holiness, to standing apart from the rest of the world as a city on a hill, a light in the darkness, or whatever biblical metaphor you prefer, we Christians

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