“God, That Smells Good.” Blasphemy or Worship?
Disclaimer: this discussion features illustrative uses of phrases which might be considered blasphemous. Furthermore, the contents of this post are a series of musings which are designed to prompt thought and conversation, they are not necessarily fully formed or thought out in and of themselves.
I’m sure we can all imagine the situations. You’re frying some bacon, or onions, or making a curry. Your housemate walks in. The smell hits them. And they exclaim, “God, that smells good.” Or the bakers amongst us might have taken some cake into work. It gets passed around. And as one of your colleagues bites into it, their face melts, and the words are heard, “My God, that tastes delicious.” Those of us who’ve been kicking around a bit longer might observe that there has been an increase of this sort of language in our media.
Many would suggest that this trend shows the spread of secularism and an increasing disregard for God. They may be right. But I want to ask, “What is wrong with these expressions?” The obvious answer is that they are acts of blasphemy. But what is blasphemy?
The Greek word from which we get the word blasphemy is used in regards to both humans and God in the sense of insulting or slandering someone, as seen in Romans 2:4; 3:8; and 14:16. But is God insulted by any of the above expressions? Certainly, there seems to be nothing in their content which portrays God negatively. My father has worked with the young men in the church where I grew up for as long as I’ve known him. And I can recall him on more than one occasion stating that whilst you might hear the phrase, “O my God,” used one way in the church building on a Sunday he didn’t want to hear it being used in the way some people were using it on a Friday evening. And whilst it pains me to say it, he might have been on to something. Context is key. On the streets “O my God” is blasphemous. Stick in the word “Lord,” use it in a church, and you’ve got the first line of a hymn. So then, when is a blasphemy not a blasphemy?
Blasphemy has often been linked with the third of the Ten Commandments, “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain,” (Exodus 20:7; ESV). But, what does this command actually mean?
Commentator Desmond Alexander helpfully points out that using the Lord’s name “in vain” encompasses several ways ‘the divine name could be misused: e.g. profane (Lev. 20:3); blaspheme (Lev 24:16); curse (2 Kgs 2:24); defile (Ezek. 43:8); abuse (Prov. 30:9); swear falsely (Lev. 19:12) [i.e. invoke the Lord’s name as an assurance of a falsehood or use it to mislead.]’[1]
We might ask why this is so important? But, we cannot deny that it is important, for, according to the late scholar Alec Motyer, the second half of Exodus 20:7 reveals to us ‘that the Lord’s name is intensely precious to him.’[2] This is because the ‘Lord’s name is shorthand for all that he has revealed about himself’ so ‘any misuse of his name is a personal insult to him,’ much as the way a certain politician’s name has become Cockney rhyming slang is insulting to that politician.[3]
In light of this it should be clear that there are some uses of the divine name which do not show God the respect he is due as the creator and sustainer of the speaker. The use of “Christ” as an expletive, or “God” as an intensifier (e.g. “What’s that God-awful smell?) dishonour God by severing the name from any reference to the person. In the previous examples the character of the person to whom the name refers has no bearing on the meaning of what is said. In these expressions God’s name is trivialized, and as such God is trivialized. These certainly are instances of using God’s name in vain.
But what of the examples we started this discussion with? I want to argue that there is nothing blasphemous in these words but rather in the way that they are often used. Let’s take for example the phrase “My God that coffee smells good.” This phrase does not necessarily trivialize God’s name. Indeed, if we believe in a good God who has created everything, including coffee, then it is natural for those who appreciate coffer to exclaim, “My God, that coffee smells good. Thank you.” Or perhaps just the shorthand, “God, that smells good.”
Andrew Wilson helpfully points out that this world is full of many good things which God has given to us, from pomegranates to purple, from onions to oxygen, to the extent that biblical faith might well be called Charis-tianity (Gift-ianity).[4] As the old hymn says, ‘All good gifts around us are sent from heaven above.’[5] And since, according to the classic Christian understanding, the world is full of the evidence of God’s generosity it is natural that the rightly ordered person should be predisposed instinctively to give thanks to God. In this way the instinctive response, “O my God,” to the gifts of creation, if expressed in conscious thankfulness, is a correct expression of praise to God.
Thus, the problem with these expressions as we commonly hear them is not their wording but their sincerity. It is not that too much is said, but that to little is meant when people invoke God’s name, not to praise him, but instead to praise the coffee. And, therefore, it would be no bad thing if we were to say these things sincerely, particularly given how easy it is for us to forget to be thankful.
Now does this mean that we should all begin reusing these phrases? In a sense it would be great if we could reclaim this language. However, there are a couple of reasons why we should be cautious. The first is that it has the potential to cause offense to other Christians. The principle Paul applies to eating food offered to idols (see Rom 14 and 1 Cor 8) can likewise be applied here, to how we use God’s name. If we choose to use these kind of exclamations to praise God, we should be careful not to cause our fellow Christians to stumble, either by drawing them into saying something which they don’t feel in their conscience it would be right to say, or by offending them with our own expressions, thus causing a divide between us and them. Secondly, there is the fact that there is a significant witnessing opportunity to those around us created by the distinctiveness seen in the reverence with which we use God’s name. It would be a great shame if the Church lost its distinctiveness in this regard.
What then are we to do? Although it may be unwise for us to adopt the ways in which those around us use God’s name, we’ve noted that a proper understanding of creation means that a natural impulse towards expressions of thanksgiving is a laudable thing. Perhaps what that means is that we need to find a specifically Christian form of these interjections. Perhaps the most distinctive witness we could have is not to be found in abstention but in the habitual use of sincerely meant prayerful phrases such as, “Thank you God, that coffee smells great.”[6]
[1] Alexander, T. Desmond, Exodus (London: Apollos, 2017), 408.
[2] Motyer, Alec, The Message of Exodus — The Days of Our Pilgrimage (Nottingham: IVP, 2005), 225.
[3] Motyer, 224.
[4] Andrew Wilson, Spirit and Sacrament an Invitation to Eucharismatic Worship (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2019), 25–26. Purple and oxygen are example from Wilson’s list of God’s gifts which led to his coining of the phrase Charis-tianity; Pomegranates and onions, and the translation Gift-ianity have been added by myself.
[5] Matthias Claudius, We Plough the Fields, and Scatter, 1782, translated by Jane Montgomery Campbell, 1861.
[6] My dear friend Alex Rowe, whose editorial comments have been invaluable in improving the phrasing of this little essay, raised the question of whether the more explicitly Judaeo-Christian name “Lord” would be preferable to the more generic “God” (with a capital G), as the latter may have the potential to go unrecognised in the fullness of its implications in the current pluralistic context with its many conceptions of god and gods. This is an excellent point deserving of fuller consideration, and, as such, we may well return to this subject in a later post if there is sufficient interest.
