I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips… Isaiah 6:5

Faced with the glory of God near the outset of his ministry, the prophet Isaiah reacted in horror, believing himself ruined. In the dazzling splendor of God’s holiness, the prophet abhorred himself and the society that surrounded him; God brought him to a devastating consciousness of his utter unfitness to stand in God’s presence.

Of all the ways Isaiah might have felt a horrifying self-awareness before God’s holiness, it was as “a man of unclean lips” in a society characterized by the same impurity of speech. The prophet’s lips would later be cleansed by a burning coal from the altar, and he would be appointed as a messenger to the nation.

The prophet’s epiphany concerning himself and his society is instructive for we who are also marked by the sins of our societies of perverse speech. The disease that Isaiah identified was not merely a matter of discrete acts of sinful speech, but a more fundamental disorder of speech, such that the very organs of speech, the lips, could be described as “unclean.”

The corruption of the organs of speech is not an uncommon theme in the Scriptures. In his epistle, James depicts the tongue as a fire and as a “restless evil, full of deadly poison” (Ja 3:1–12). Picking up language from the psalms, the Apostle Paul writes in Romans 3:13–14,

“Their throat is an open grave;
they use their tongues to deceive.”
“The venom of asps is under their lips.”
“Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.”

In the book of Proverbs, the organs of speech can be personified, perhaps especially when they are not mastered by their owners (e.g., Prov 18:6–7).

By tracing sins of speech back to a corrupt source, Scripture reveals a problem that is both more fundamental and more comprehensive. “The false witness breathes out lies” (Prov 14:5), as lying has become entirely natural to him. He lies compulsively and unthinkingly; the liar does not merely deliberately craft isolated lies but has a life marked by falsehood throughout. When the organs of speech are themselves corrupt, all speech that proceeds from them will be corrupt: a fundamental corruption becomes a comprehensive corruption.

As Hannah Arendt wrote,

It has frequently been noticed that the surest long-term result of brainwashing is a peculiar kind of cynicism—an absolute refusal to believe in the truth of anything, no matter how well this truth may be established. In other words, the result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.^[1]

We can expand this observation to include many other similar categories: in a society of corrupt speakers, the entire world of discourse is undermined, and basic orienting categories of healthy speech are broken down. In addition to truth and falsehood, the honorable and the shameful, the holy and the profane, truth and fiction, fact and opinion, fact and ideological or partisan “narratives,” faithfulness and treachery, reality and games, principle and tribalism, the decent and the obscene, sincerity and irony, gravity and levity, the official and the personal, the public and the private, the high and the low, candor and the pursuit of desirable “optics,” reality and appearance, and, with the advent of AI, even the human and the non-human can be so confused as to leave a society’s world of conversation devoid of the differentiation upon which meaningful and moral speech depends.

Our society is manifestly such a society of corrupt speech, in no small measure due to our prevailing forms of media. For those immersed in our society’s world of discourse, its insidious corrupting effect will be nigh unavoidable. Our speech as Christians can be debased and co-opted by it, leaving people cynical and distrustful, devaluing the word more generally.

If we are to consider Christian use of speech, especially in more exceptional cases, it is important to begin by reflecting upon our sources and societies of speech. Failure to do so in our discussions of obscene, offensive, vulgar, mocking, and imprecatory speech has too often had a permissive effect, giving license to immature Christians to throw themselves into full participation in the corrupt world of society’s discourse, unwary of its deep perversion and dangers. Christian speech has been adulterated to serve our passions and our parties, and, preoccupied with the ludic spectacles of social media, the weightiness of the word has been forgotten. Speech becomes glib and flippant.

Living as people of clean lips among a people of unclean lips requires searching self-examination and extensive corrective practice. The New Testament has much to say about the sort of speech we should be cultivating. For instance,

• Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear (Eph 4:29).
• Let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking, which are out of place, but instead let there be thanksgiving (Eph 5:4).
• But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator (Col 3:8–10).
• Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person (Col 4:6).
• Remind them to be submissive to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle, and to show perfect courtesy toward all people (Ti 3:1–2).

The verses above suggest that living as a people of clean lips starts with and focuses upon the cultivation of positive practices of speech: gracious, gentle, peaceful, benedictory, courteous, respectful, wise, self-controlled, holy, guileless, pure, loving, and edifying speech. It is notable that, even though there is evidently a place for speaking obscene, vulgar, offensive, light, and imprecatory words, as the participants in this Conversation have persuasively argued, such speech is not accorded a focal place. Rather, it is only as we become a people marked by the positive and healthful practices of speech the Scriptures enjoin that we will be able to speak these other words, words important in their place, appropriately.

Without the cultivation of purity, even condemnatory speech about the obscene can become prurient, and discussion of the vulgar can coarsen. It is shameful even to speak about the things that some people do in secret; it is only through the light that they can be rightly exposed (Eph 5:7–15). Where gracious and gentle speech has not been cultivated, harder words cannot be effectively spoken. Where there is no habitual practice of blessing, imprecations (even those of Scripture) will poison people’s spirits. Where people do not pursue peace, they can pervert the confrontational words of Scripture when they speak them. Undignified people are incapable of speaking truthfully about what is base.

How do we live as people of clean lips among people of unclean lips? How can we faithfully speak of the obscene, the base, the profane, the vulgar, and the cursed without being corrupted by the attention we give to them? The prophet Isaiah’s epiphany about the uncleanness of his lips and those of his society came through an experience of the resplendence of God’s holiness. This is where we must also begin.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wise speech. It is found in such things as an acute awareness of our sinfulness and the corruption of our societies, humility before our Creator, a persistent sense that all we are and do is exposed to his sight, loving devotion to his word, obedience to his commandments, trust in his care, extolling of his Name, seeking of his face, and pursuing his approval over all judgments of men. Cultivation of the fear of the Lord requires devotion to the forms and realms of speech that excite it, particularly to the focal practices of Christian worship in which they are most centered. Where we are not devoted to the fear of the Lord, the insidious corruptions of our societies’ speech will inevitably overwhelm us. To the degree that the fear of the Lord is lacking or weak among us, we will also be unfit to speak rightly of the obscene.

Alastair Roberts (PhD, Durham) is adjunct Senior Fellow at Theopolis and is one of the participants in the Mere Fidelity podcast.. He blogs at Alastair’s Adversaria and tweets using @zugzwanged. 

NOTES

[1] Hannah Arendt, On Lying and Politics (Library of America, 2022), 47