There are a few memories that I can recall with precision that were formative for my moral development as a child. The year was 1992. I was 11 years old. In my evangelical household swear words and then some not swear words like “sucks” were not on the linguistic menu. My parents were also fastidious about filtering my entertainment consumption. Bart Simpson was disrespectful and He-Man was demonic. There, after all, can only be one master of the universe. The odd exceptions were films and tv shows that depicted military and military adjacent realities. I use the term military adjacent because sleazy-violent James Bond was a regular at our house. The Bond films were also probably the most entertaining films available to be rented for free from our public library. Free was the price that worked best with our budget.
In the winter 1992 my brother was a freshman at Marquette University and exercising all the privileges that, yes come with being an adult, but also, in his case, being the one Carney sibling who most consistently played fast and loose with my parents expectations. His liberated moral framework enabled him to go see A Few Good Men. This is exactly the kind of film that would prove to be a moral anomaly in our house. Its liabilities include an R rating, excessive violence, murder, and language akin to a Kanye West album. Its strengths? The United States Marine Corp. Home for Christmas break my brother reported having seen it and was effusive in praise for the film. My mother, and this is the memory I’m referring to, asked with a grimaced face, “but isn’t there a lot of swearing?” My brother, an ROTC student with an inside look, answered matter of factly “It wouldn’t have been the same without the swearing.”
This was my first exposure to the notion that a profanity could have utility beyond being taboo. I want to blow past all the riveting developmental experiences I had in my moral vocabulary, formed by places like a high school football locker room and by people like Bill the welder, who I worked next to in parks and rec, who could use the word fuck with such efficient fluency that it might features as a verb, adjective and noun all in one sentence, and move to the summer after my first year of seminary. I was taking a one week long three credit class on Philippians and Philemon. Here local readers will appreciate learning that this class was taught by none other than one Dr. Todd Still, a man who employs a sesquipedalian vocabulary so effortlessly that I’ve sometimes wondered if he was fathered by Geoffrey Chaucer. It was in Dr. Still’s class where, God bless him for not shielding us from the possibility, he focused our attention on Paul’s usage of the Greek skubala. The bible verse in question is Philippians 3:8, “More than that, 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 skubala, in order that I may gain Christ.” If you do that neat trick where you enter a bible verse into biblia.com (a logos product) it gives you a bunch of translations. And what are those: “rubbish” NRSV, “refuse” ASB & NKJV, “dung” LEB, “garbage” NIV & the Message. I’m tempted to close the case right there because … Eugene Peterson, but as my friend Billy Mays says, “but wait there’s more.” There is a note about Philippians 3:8 in the NET bible, which markets itself as a bible with “tens of thousands of notes,” that reads, “The word here translated “dung” was often used in Greek as a vulgar term for fecal matter. As such it would most likely have had a certain shock value for the readers. This may well be Paul’s meaning here, especially since the context is about what the flesh produces.” While I think this is helpful in establishing that etymological development of skubala connotes fecal matter, the claim shock value may be overstated. In his article “Obscenity in Paul? The Question of σκύβαλον,” Michael Aubrey shows that skubala is used by Aretaeus Of Cappadocia (translated “fecal matter”) in describing jaundice in the 2nd C, and Soranus, in conjunction with the Greek ἐποχή (translated stoppage) to describe what appears to be something like constipation. Aubrey’s point is that in both examples skubala is being used in something akin to medical journals.
Aubrey’s argument is salient, but here I pose an objection borrowed from linguistics. The Saussurean paradox, “to understand a community’s language, one must study the language of a representative of that community, and to understand the representative’s language, one must study the language of the community.” Said differently, how can we be sure that Paul’s use of skubala in the 1st C. as an itinerant preacher/missionary connotes the same thing for a pair of medical journalists in the 2nd C. even if we can be confident the denotation was similar if not the same? The connotative evolution of language unfolds at a blistering pace, and profanity is no exception. In his article “The History of Swear Words: Where the &%@! Do They Come From?” Alex Orlando narrows the cultural forces that give occasion cussing to religion, sexual acts, and bodily fluids, but also points out that the profane also tends to be bound to time periods. In ancient Rome cursing was often derived from masculine identity, in the Middle Ages the preoccupation was with religious identity and symbols, and most of our current cussing vocabulary was hatched during the Renaissance.
As for Paul’s usage of skubala, we probably can’t be certain. One cue may come from the text itself. While we can’t determine the shock value of skubala, I think it is worth pointing out that the larger context is Paul renouncing the value of identity as it pertains to flesh (Greek sarx), ergo, skubala is a wasteful by-product of flesh.
As for me, I hope Paul’s usage does have shock value. I think it makes his point mean more. In case you didn’t go to a Christian college I’ll share the following. If you were a late Gen Xer or early Millennial at a Christian university you likely saw sociologist Tony Campollo speak in your chapel. Tony had this rhetorical trick which, though I’m sure would have fallen flat on Berkley’s campus, was wildly effective in Evangelical circles. Tony, in his fiery tone, would abruptly drop a “shit” in the middle of his message. The murmuring would begin. “Did he just say that?” Heads would look to authority figures present. Tension would build. Tony would keep speaking as though nothing happened. His content turned to the dire conditions of the third world children that might be supported through Compassion International with your dollars. But it didn’t matter, no one was paying attention, we were all still baffled that he said shit. And then Tony delivered his punchline, “but you all care more that I just said shit in chapel than you do about starving kids.”
Here shit’s potency is derived from the cultural context of its offensiveness, but to show the extent of language’s pliability I offer another shit story in which the lexeme’s status is elevated to that of the doxological (IMO). I was recently given a copy of Brian Doyle’s book One Long River Song: Notes on Wonder. I haven’t been this nurtured by someone’s writing since Wendell Berry’s Fidelity. In an essay called “The Creature Beyond the Mountains,” Doyle writes creatively and humorously about the sturgeon, a prehistoric and monstrous fish that abides in the Columbia River among other places. In Cascade Locks, OR near the Bonneville Dam there is a Sturgeon Viewing & Interpretive Center. And there Doyle reports that there are three large sturgeon. Two eight footers and a ten footer named Herman, the most famous sturgeon in Oregon. Viewing the sturgeon takes some patience. They are not immediately visible, but regularly swim within eyesight afforded by a viewing window. Doyle makes a practice of viewing the viewers. Nuns, children, truck drivers, Seahawks fans, etc. Here I’ll yield to Doyle:
“The most memorable viewing for me that day was a young man with a small boy … the boy, wearing a cowboy hat, seemed to be about three years old … Herman slowly filled the window like a zeppelin. The boy leaped away from the window and his hat fell off. No one said a word. Herman kept sliding past for a long time. Finally his tail exited stage left and the boy said, awed, clear as a bell, Holy Shit, Dad.”
From the mouth of babes. I recently stumbled onto a Facebook post, presumably not intended for my eyes, in which I was accused of being a “pastor of a hipsters church for 15 years.” Here “hipster” was clearly intended to be pejorative (though now that thinking about it, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard it being used any other way). My immediate response was to gather the self-descriptive data that would imply otherwise. I wore khaki cargo shorts well past 2010. I drank a steady diet of Mountain Dew and Miller Lite for most of my adult life. The last time I listened to a music album not instrumental or produced after 2007 was 2008. I’m a long way from craft beer and skinny jeans. And still I decided to concede the point. I knew what my accuser was intending to imply. UBC has a habit of trying to be avant-garde. Sometimes that instinct produced cringe moments and sometimes it produced beautiful moments, but I never regretted the effort. And why? Because in my experience the effort to evolve with culture and language and fail while sometimes succeeding was so much more worthwhile than settling into the safe and rote, which to be candid is what so much of church liturgy does in the name of tradition and orthodoxy.
Shit is a collection of phonemes that means nothing in 99% of languages around the world. But in 2002 in Bethel University’s chapel service it had the power to convict, and one day at an Oregon fish observatory it was the vocabulary of worship. Someday it may evolve out of meaning. So let us be stewards with it while it has the potential to mean something.