Written by James E. Bruce |
Tuesday, July 11, 2023
The question about atheists and oaths does not need to be resolved by making philosophical arguments about the rational instability of atheism; by exploring sociological data suggesting atheists are an honest bunch; or by offering probabilistic judgments about whether a certain atheist will tell the truth in a particular instance. These questions, though interesting and helpful, do not determine the answer to the question of whether atheists can take oaths in a church court. Instead, we must look to an oath itself. An oath requires God as witness and judge. To suggest that an atheist can offer an oath contravenes the meaning of an oath. We must look to the third commandment.

Should atheists offer testimony before a church court? Given the desirability of truthful testimony, the relevance of the ninth commandment to this question is obvious: Can someone be trusted not to bear false witness against his neighbor, if he refuses to call upon God as witness and judge? That’s an important question, and one we should consider.
But it’s not the most important question. The third commandment is determinative in a way the ninth commandment is not. The Westminster Assembly understood the connection between honoring God’s name and telling the truth in court. Indeed, the word perjury occurs only once in the Westminster Larger Catechism, and the catechism identifies perjury as a sin forbidden by the third commandment, not as a sin forbidden by the ninth.
The most pressing question is not whether an atheist will bear false witness. The most important question is whether we can neglect to require God’s name when we must require it. The third commandment clearly teaches us that we must not walk away from God’s name when it is required. Because an oath is one such instance, atheists should not offer testimony before church courts, so long as church courts require oaths.
HONEST ATHEISTS
Before we consider the importance of the third commandment, let me say something about a question raised by the ninth: Can an atheist speak truthfully about judicial matters, even if doing so will harm his own interests? Here I may differ from those with whom I am in overall agreement. My answer is straightforward: of course. I happily grant that many atheists will tell the truth with great care.
But the question isn’t whether atheists can tell the truth (of course they can) or whether they will tell the truth (presumably many will). The question instead is whether their promise to tell the truth impresses upon them an obligation to tell the truth that is equivalent to a believer’s oath that calls God as witness and judge. The answer to that different, but related, question? Of course not. An oath is greater than a promise, just as a promise is greater than a mere statement. An atheist can recognize the difference between an oath and a promise, even if he believes it is irrational. God does not exist, he may say, but if God did exist, then calling upon him as witness and judge would be a very solemn thing, indeed.
So let’s be clear: The following arguments do not depend upon a characterization of atheists as uniquely horrible or especially prone to lie. On the contrary, the arguments assume that many atheists will tell the truth. The issue is not the moral character of the atheists. The issue is the nature of the oaths themselves, and the third commandment.
TWO ARGUMENTS ABOUT OATHS
Let’s make our case explicit:

Oaths just are statements that call God as witness and judge.
Atheists cannot make statements that call God as witness and judge.
To say atheists can take an oath without calling God as witness and judge is a contradiction, because that’s just what an oath is.
To permit an oath without using God’s name is a violation of the third commandment, because God’s name is required for an oath.

We will assume that everyone agrees with statement 2, that atheists cannot call God as witness and judge. So the first argument focuses on statement 1, on what an oath is. The claim is that a so-called “oath” without God is actually not an oath at all. The conclusion of the first argument, statement 3, follows from the first two statements: To say that an atheist can take an oath is to say that someone who claims not to believe in God can claim to believe in God as witness and judge, which is incoherent.
The second argument focuses on the honor due God’s name. For me, this argument, which concludes with statement 4, is determinative. The first argument shows that calling God as witness and judge is required for an oath. The second argument shows how the third commandment forbids us from neglecting to use God’s name when his name is required. Because oaths require God, we cannot neglect to mention him in them.

A GODLESS OATH IS NO OATH AT ALL

First, let’s ask what oaths are. To address this question, let’s think about how we identify anything at all. Usually, we appeal to a thing’s specific difference, that is, what distinguishes what we are talking about from other things that resemble it. For example, if you ask for a spoon, and I give you a knife, you’ll say you want the scooping thing, not the cutting thing. By contrast, if you ask for a spoon, and I bring you a shovel, you’ll say you want a utensil, not a digging tool. We identify things by acknowledging what they resemble and by emphasizing what distinguishes them from everything else.
Back to oaths: What is the specific difference between solemn speech and an oath, between stating something firmly and swearing to it? One word: God. In an oath, someone calls God as witness and judge. Indeed, an oath just is calling God as witness and judge. Put another way, there is no such thing as an oath without God as witness and judge. There is only one kind of oath, the one that calls upon God as witness and judge. Solemn speech that does not appeal to God may be called an oath by others, but calling something an oath does not make it an oath. Calling upon God as witness and judge makes something an oath.
How can I be so clear about oaths? Three things: Scripture, the Westminster Standards, and the practice of oaths in the history of the world.
My case rests considerably more on Scripture and the Standards, but I’ll first say something briefly about history. A survey of pagan oaths offers this concluding remark: “Even if effective military means were at hand, the gods provided the only written sanction. A treaty was not actually in effect unless it involved the solemn affirmation by the divine that one would be faithful to the details of the agreement” (Donald L. Magnetti, “The Function of the Oath in the Ancient Near Eastern International Treaty,” The American Journal of International Law 72:4 (1978), 829). The oaths of the Vulture Stele call upon different gods as witness and judge; one early Mesopotamian king wrote to another saying, “Let us swear a great oath by the gods.” Hundreds of years later, the Hittites made a variety of treaties, which included gods as witnesses as well as curses and blessings. Likewise, the ancient Hippocratic Oath calls upon Apollo and other gods. Rather than taking each century in its turn, let’s move forward to this more recent oath:
I do believe in one God, the creator and governor of the universe, the rewarder of the good and the punisher of the wicked. And I do acknowledge the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by Divine inspiration.
This oath for legislators came from the 1776 constitution of “tolerant Quaker Pennsylvania,” in the words of Mark David Hall. Even the current Pennsylvania constitution offers unique protection against disqualification from office for those who acknowledge “the being of a God and a future state of rewards and punishments.” God is witness, and God is judge. Other states have more stringent provisions about unbelievers, but these provisions have been unenforceable since Torcaso v. Watkins, 367 U.S. 488 (1961). Nevertheless, they offer textual evidence for my claim that the difference between a solemn declaration and an oath just is calling God as witness and judge.
But who cares? We have developed a better political system than the Hittites, and we have progressed beyond Euclidian geometry in mathematics. Why should we cling to a pre-1961 consensus — a consensus the civil authority has itself abandoned — if doing so prevents key witnesses from giving crucial testimony?
First, we are speaking here of church courts. In civil matters, someone who does not believe in God has an externally enforced motivation to tell the truth. The threat of a perjury conviction serves as an incentive to fulfill the requirements of one’s pledge. Even if you do not think God will judge you, the state may, and the amount of information collected on each one of us increases the likelihood that attempts at deceit will be discovered. We can treat civil oaths without God not as actual oaths but as recognitions by testifiers that they will perjure themselves if they testify falsely. Of course, such is not the case for a church court. There is no threat of perjury, and, for the atheist, no threat of excommunication, either. He is not in the church, so he can hardly be expelled from it. By contrast, in the civil realm, the threat of perjury sharpens the mind.
But, most importantly, the Scriptures and the Standards themselves understand oaths as solemn declarations calling God as witness and judge. To define oaths differently is to depart from their clear teaching. We cannot change what something is merely by speaking of it differently. Saying that a woman is a man or a man is a woman does not make it so. Calling a godless promise to tell the truth an oath does not make it an oath.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, June 12, 2022
When we choose to worship, we fight our own sin. When we choose to believe that God knows what he’s doing and declare so in song, we help to bolster our soul’s conviction that to fight temptation and embrace holiness is worth is. We fight the lie that all the ways we’ve fallen short disqualify us in any way from the embrace of the Father who loves us.

Jericho falls after a band march around it (Joshua 6)—perhaps leading us to imagine they finally after seven days figured out the modular frequency of mortar so their trumpets tumble stones from atop one another. Jehoshaphat places the choir on the frontline (2 Chronicles 20)—perhaps making us wonder just how bad their last performance was that the King ‘rewarded’ them with a position in the vanguard.
We could find many more examples. Music, and more broadly the worship of God, play a decisive role in the warfare of Israel. Is it the same for us as New Testament believers?
I think it is—we usually need a reason to think something isn’t continuing as a principle from the Old to the New Covenants, but when things do continue, they are usually transformed.
Think of it like this: as I write the most prominent war in the world is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The current invasion has been going on for about six weeks (as I write—as this is published over three months), though we tend to forget that this war between Russia and Ukraine has been waging quietly on the frontiers of Europe for over eight years. Here’s the question, can our worship stop Russian aggression? Can we intervene in this conflict through what we might do as a gathered church directed towards God in heaven?
It’s pretty obvious that the answer is “no.” Our worship cannot stop the war. Though, let us never forget, our prayers can.
That being said, if the principle works the same way for us, what is our warfare against? As is so often the case, what is physical in the Old Testament is spiritual for us.
So, we’re waging war ‘spiritually’ as we worship God. But who, or what, are we actually fighting?
Or to frame the question a different way: I’ve been reading the Psalms a lot recently. I’m trying to learn how to pray them. One of the challenges I’ve encountered, especially in Books 1 & 2, is the proliferation of enemies. I’m always coming up against them. It’s easy enough to see who David’s enemies were, but if I’m supposed to then appropriate these prayers as my own, I need to know who mine are.
And, tempting though it is, I don’t think other humans who have upset or hurt me personally fit the bill very well—especially not that other guy in your church who upset you. There’s a different remedy here than asking God to smash the teeth in his mouth (Psalm 58).
Not that some people who’ve wounded me personally haven’t made themselves my enemies—I’m quite comfortable thinking that the cowboy builder who ran away with my savings and left me with a home on the verge of burning down is my enemy, but my warfare against him has to at least begin with forgiving him (Matthew 5).
We struggle with this, in part because we’ve drunk of niceness until we’re sick, but mostly because our lives are comfortable. The church has enemies. But, we are told, our real fight is not against flesh and blood (1 Corinthians 10). So, what are we fighting? Here are five initial suggestions.
1. To believe the church is the bride
Sometimes getting to church on a Sunday to worship God is an absolute mission. I don’t mean the challenges of getting everyone you need to out of the house in vaguely appropriate clothing on time to make it before the meeting actually starts.
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As Augustine explained, Jesus came in the likeness of sinful flesh so that our sinful flesh might be cleansed and purified. This shows that it is not the flesh itself at fault, but the sin that corrupts it. That sin must die so that we might live. Thus, Augustine affirmed the created goodness of the body, and with it, the goodness of Creation. He also reminded his listeners that Jesus was born without sin so that we who have sin might be reborn through faith. 

From the earliest days of the Church, Christian theologians have marveled at the paradoxes found in the incarnation. Among the earliest expressions of this marveling comes from St. Augustine, the most influential theologian in Western Christianity. 
Augustine was born in 354 in Thagaste, a Roman city in modern Algeria. A brilliant thinker, he initially rejected Christianity as an intellectually empty faith, despite the faithfulness of his mother. After wandering through various pagan philosophies, the equally brilliant St. Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, showed him how Christianity was superior to pagan philosophies. Augustine became a Christian, and eventually returned to Hippo, where he was elected bishop. 
Augustine was an expert orator. He had been a teacher of rhetoric in Milan when he met Ambrose. As a Christian, he used his intellectual abilities and communication skills to address both the pressing theological issues and conflicts facing the Church in the late fourth and early fifth centuries as well as the challenges brought by opponents of Christianity. He also employed his impressive skills in his preaching. In his many years as bishop at Hippo, Augustine preached many Christmas sermons that discussed various aspects of the incarnation. One of his most striking sermons addresses the many paradoxes involved in God taking on human flesh. For example, in what is known as Sermon 184, which Augustine delivered sometime before A.D. 396, he pointed out the paradox of God’s sovereignty with the vulnerability of becoming a child: 
The one who holds the world in being was lying in a manger; he was simultaneously speechless infant and Word. 
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