Devotional 117: The Vow to God: A Promise of Special Obedience

The Confession Read

An oath is to be taken in the plain and common sense of the words, without equivocation, or mental reservation. It cannot oblige to sin; but in anything not sinful, being taken, it binds to performance, although to a man's own hurt. Nor is it to be violated, although made to heretics, or infidels.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 22, Section 4

Introduction

There is a story told of a man in the sixteenth century who was asked directly by the authorities whether he was harbouring a Catholic priest in his house, and he answered no. What made his answer remarkable was that he had, in the secret chamber of his mind, added a qualification to that no: "No," he said within himself, "I am not harbouring a priest who has committed treason," and because the priest he sheltered was, in the man's own conviction, innocent of any treason, the word no was, as he would have put it, "morally true." He spoke one thing aloud and meant another in his heart, and he called this art mental reservation. The authorities, being neither omniscient nor versed in this art, heard his plain word and went away deceived, and the man felt his conscience clear, for had he not spoken the truth? Had he not, in the secret meaning he assigned to his words, given a true answer? The Westminster Divines, to their eternal credit, would have none of it. They knew this doctrine, for it had been developed with great subtlety by certain Jesuit casuists in the generations immediately before them, and they saw in it something far more dangerous than a clever trick of speech. They saw a corruption at the root of all human communication, a worm gnawing at the very tissue that holds society together. If words can mean one thing to the speaker and another to the hearer by a private qualification known only to the speaker, then language ceases to be a bond between men and becomes a veil behind which every man may hide. The oath, which above all other utterances must be a point of absolute certainty, a fixed star in the moral firmament, would become a shifting light, meaning whatever the swearer privately intended it to mean, and the God who witnesses the oath would be left to guess at the man's meaning while the man's words told a different story. The section before us this morning is, in one sense, the simplest of the four we have studied. It contains no elaborate definitions, no careful distinctions between assertory and promissory oaths, no lists of conditions to be weighed. It is a clean, sharp blade of a sentence: an oath is to be taken in the plain and common sense of the words. And then it drives the point home with three quick strokes: it cannot oblige to sin; it binds to performance even to one's own hurt; and it is not to be violated even when made to heretics or infidels. In those four short clauses, the Divines demolished the whole elaborate edifice of equivocation and mental reservation, and they did it not by meeting the casuists on their own ground but by asserting a principle far older and far simpler: that when a man speaks before God, he is to speak as a child speaks, plainly, without a trick in his mouth, meaning exactly what his words convey.

Scripture Foundation

The first text to which we turn is the one that lies at the very heart of this section, and it is indeed cited among the proof texts that the Assembly formally annexed to the Confession. It is a verse from the fifteenth psalm, that brief and searching description of the man who may dwell in God's holy hill: "In whose eyes a vile person is contemned; but he honoureth them that fear the LORD. He that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not" (Psalm 15:4). The Hebrew verb for sweareth is nishba, drawn from the same root as the number seven (to seven oneself, to bind oneself by a sevenfold knot), and the phrase "to his own hurt" is the single Hebrew word le-hara, meaning to the evil of it, to the bad, to the loss, to the injury. The man of God is described as one who has sworn an oath and, when the consequences of that oath turn against him, when it costs him his property, his reputation, his peace, or his safety, does not change. He does not look for a loophole. He does not argue that because circumstances have altered, the oath has lapsed. He does not whisper a mental qualification that would release him. He took the oath, and he keeps it, and the hurt that comes from keeping it is part of the worship he offers to the God who witnessed it. Here, in a single verse, is the whole of our section compressed: the plain and common sense of the words as they were spoken, the binds to performance even when the performance is costly, and the changeth not that is the opposite of every form of equivocation. If we turn to the book of Joshua, we find a narrative that brings this principle to life with the starkness of a judgment. When the Israelites entered the promised land, the inhabitants of Gibeon, fearing destruction, resorted to a stratagem. They disguised themselves as travellers from a far country, showing mouldy bread and patched wineskins, and they said to Joshua, "We are come from a far country: now therefore make ye a league with us." Joshua, suspecting nothing, "made peace with them, and made a league with them, to let them live: and the princes of the congregation sware unto them" (Joshua 9:15). Three days later, the truth came out: the Gibeonites were not from a far country; they were neighbours, Canaanites, dwellers in the very land God had given Israel to possess. The congregation murmured against the princes, and there was reason: they had been deceived, and the oath had been obtained through fraud. Surely, one might argue, an oath obtained by deception cannot bind. The Gibeonites had lied to secure it. They had not dealt in good faith. No plain and common sense of the words applied here, for the very premise of the league was false. But the princes answered with a word that echoes across the centuries: "We have sworn unto them by the LORD God of Israel: now therefore we may not touch them" (Joshua 9:19). The oath had been sworn by the LORD God of Israel, and that divine Name was the seal that held it fast. The Gibeonites had deceived, but Israel had sworn, and because the LORD had been called to witness, the oath stood. The Israelites could not unswear what they had sworn; the Name that had been invoked could not be uninvoked. And so they kept the oath to their own hurt, for by keeping it they suffered Canaanites to dwell in the land and became entangled in obligations that would cost them dearly in the generations to come. It is a perfect illustration of what the Confession teaches: the oath binds to performance even when the other party is unworthy, even when the oath was entered under false pretences, because the ground of the oath is not the good faith of the recipient but the faithfulness of the God invoked. A second Old Testament narrative presses the same principle into a different shape. In the days of Zedekiah, king of Judah, the king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, set Zedekiah on the throne and made him "swear by God" to be a faithful vassal (2 Chronicles 36:13). It was an oath between a conqueror and a conquered prince, sworn by the name of the LORD. Zedekiah, tempted by the promise of Egyptian help, broke his oath and rebelled. But the Lord sent word to him through the prophet Ezekiel with a severity that is startling: "As I live, saith the Lord GOD, surely in the place where the king dwelleth that made him king, whose oath he despised, and whose covenant he brake, even with him in the midst of Babylon he shall die" (Ezekiel 17:16). Consider what is being said here. Zedekiah broke an oath made to a pagan king, an idolater, a man who worshipped the gods of Babylon, and God Himself declared that He would judge Zedekiah for it. The oath bound Zedekiah not because Nebuchadnezzar was worthy of fidelity but because the LORD's name had been invoked in it, and God will not have His name used as a thing that can be taken up and set down at convenience. "Seeing he despised the oath by breaking the covenant, when, lo, he had given his hand, and hath done all these things, he shall not escape" (Ezekiel 17:18). This is the Confession's third clause made visible in history: the oath is not violated, although made to heretics or infidels, for the God who hears it is not the God of the recipient but the God of the swearer. The psalmist adds a further dimension to this teaching, one that searches the heart rather than the history books. "He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully" (Psalm 24:4). The phrase "sworn deceitfully" is a rich one in the Hebrew. The adverb is mirmah, which means deceit, treachery, the kind of fraud that wears an honest face. The man who may ascend the hill of the Lord and stand in His holy place is the man whose oath contains no hidden trick, no private meaning that subverts the public word. His yea is yea and his nay is nay, and what he swears before God is what he means before men. The clean hand and the pure heart are joined to the oath that has no deceit in it, for where there is a reserved meaning behind the spoken word, the heart is not pure: it is divided, holding one thing in the mouth and another in the inward parts. And the New Testament supplies the final norm for this whole doctrine in the person of Christ Himself. Of Him it is written, "Who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth" (1 Peter 2:22). The Greek word for guile is dolos, which originally meant a bait, a snare, a trick by which an animal is lured to its destruction. In moral contexts it came to mean any form of deceit, any double meaning, any word that carries a concealed hook. Christ's speech was without dolos. When He spoke, He spoke what He meant, plainly, openly, without reservation, without a hidden qualification. He is the pattern to which the swearer must conform. And in John's Gospel, when Nathanael approaches, Jesus says of him, "Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!" (John 1:47). The same word, dolos. Nathanael is praised because his speech is single, because what he says is what he means, because he does not carry a private cipher with which to decode his own words while leaving his hearers in the dark. This is the character that the Confession is describing: the man without guile, whose oath is taken in the plain and common sense of the words, without equivocation or mental reservation.

What the Divines Meant

The Westminster Divines wrote this section with a specific historical controversy burning in their minds. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a school of Catholic casuistry, particularly associated with the Jesuits, had developed and refined the doctrines of equivocation and mental reservation with an ingenuity that would have been admirable if it had not been so morally corrosive. The doctrine held that a man might, under certain circumstances, especially when questioned by hostile authorities about matters of faith or when under persecution, speak words that were technically true in some sense known only to himself, while the plain meaning of those words was false and intended to deceive the hearer. The classic formulation distinguished between equivocation, which used a word in a double sense (answering "No, I did not" while meaning "I did not with the pen I now hold" or "I did not today"), and mental reservation, which restricted the meaning of a statement by a silent addition in the mind (answering "I have not seen him" while mentally adding "that I am obliged to tell you of"). The more extreme forms of this doctrine were memorably satirised by Blaise Pascal in his Provincial Letters, where he exposed the absurdities into which the principle could descend, but the Westminster Divines had no need of satire to see its danger. They saw, with the clarity that belongs to men who know that the God of truth is the witness of every oath, that this doctrine struck at the very foundation of human trust. When the Divines wrote that an oath is to be taken "in the plain and common sense of the words," they were asserting that the meaning of an oath is not a private matter between the swearer and his own conscience but a public matter between the swearer and the community of hearers. The words of an oath are to be understood as any reasonable person would understand them, in their ordinary and straightforward signification, and not in some esoteric sense known only to the speaker. The swearer may not retreat behind a private dictionary. He may not assign to his words a meaning that his hearer could not possibly infer from the words themselves. He must speak as one who knows that language is a bond between souls, and that to break that bond by a secret meaning is to break faith with the very nature of speech, which God ordained for the communication of truth. The phrase "without equivocation" strikes at the use of ambiguous terms with the deliberate intention of deceiving. Equivocation is the art of choosing a word that has two meanings, one of which is true in a narrow sense, while the other is plainly false and is the meaning the hearer will inevitably take. It is, in effect, a lie dressed in the clothing of a truth. The Confession will have none of it. The man who swears must swear words that carry their meaning on their face, and when he chooses a word that admits of more than one interpretation, he is bound to use it in the sense that any honest hearer would naturally take. The phrase "or mental reservation" goes deeper still, for it addresses not the ambiguity of the word but the secrecy of the heart. Mental reservation is the silent qualification that the swearer adds in his own mind, by which he alters the meaning of his words without the hearer's knowledge. It is, in the judgment of the Divines, a species of lying, and the fact that the lie is spoken only by implication does not make it any less a lie. The words themselves, when taken together with the mental addition, are technically true, but the swearer has used the form of truth to convey a falsehood, and that is an abuse of the very name of God that he has invoked. Having established the character of the oath as plain and honest speech, the Divines then turn to its limits and its obligations. "It cannot oblige to sin." This is the boundary that conscience sets upon every oath. No oath, however solemnly sworn, can bind a man to do what God has forbidden. If a man has sworn to commit a theft, or to bear false witness, or to join in an unjust cause, the oath is void from the moment it is spoken, and the man who keeps it adds the guilt of disobedience to the guilt of the rash swearing. The authority of the oath, which derives from the authority of the God invoked, cannot be used to contradict His commands. This is the principle that protected the three young men in Babylon, who would not worship the golden image though the king commanded it on pain of death, and the apostles, who answered the council, "Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye" (Acts 4:19). An oath to sin is not an oath but a snare, and the only lawful course is to break it by repenting of having sworn it. But where the matter is not sinful, the obligation is absolute. "In anything not sinful, being taken, it binds to performance, although to a man's own hurt." This is the heart of the matter, and it is the point at which the Confession touches the deepest nerve of Christian character. The oath binds the swearer not only when it is convenient, not only when circumstances remain as they were when he swore, not only when the other party proves worthy, but when it hurts. The hurt may be financial: a man guarantees a debt and must pay. It may be social: a man pledges his support to a cause and it becomes unpopular. It may be personal: a man promises fidelity and fidelity becomes costly. But the oath holds, because the God who heard it is the same God who witnessed the making of it, and He has not changed. "He that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not" is the description of the man who may dwell with God, and the Confession will not lower that standard. The final clause is the one that most offends our natural instincts: "Nor is it to be violated, although made to heretics, or infidels." Here the Confession reaches beyond the bounds of the visible church and asserts that an oath sworn in the name of God binds the swearer regardless of the religious standing of the person to whom it was made. The oath made to a heretic, a man who denies the doctrines of the faith, is binding. The oath made to an infidel, a man who does not profess Christianity at all, is binding. The reason is not that the heretic or the infidel is worthy of trust, but that God is worthy of trust, and He has been invoked as witness. To break an oath because the recipient turns out to be a heretic is to say, in effect, that the faithfulness of God depends on the orthodoxy of the one who receives our promise, and that is a doctrine the Divines would have found not only false but blasphemous. The oath is bound in heaven, and the unworthiness of the creature does not release the swearer from his obligation before the Creator.

Theological Depth

The doctrines of this section have been explored by some of the deepest minds in the Christian tradition, and their voices enrich our understanding of what the Confession teaches. Blaise Pascal devoted a considerable portion of his Provincial Letters to exposing the casuistry that made equivocation and mental reservation respectable in the schools of the Jesuits. Writing with a blend of moral passion and devastating wit, Pascal quotes the casuist Escobar, who taught that a man might answer a question in words that are literally false so long as he has a private meaning in his mind that makes them true. "If a man is asked," Pascal writes, "'Did you see that?' and he answers 'No,' meaning in his heart 'I did not see it any day but this one,' although in fact he did see it yesterday, his answer is true." Pascal's letters were a sensation across Europe, and they did more to discredit the doctrine of equivocation than any formal treatise could have done. Beneath the satire lay a serious moral argument: that the abuse of language by private reservation destroys the possibility of human community, because it makes every word a potential deception. If every man may qualify his words by a secret intention, then no man can trust the speech of another, and the bonds of society dissolve. The only remedy is the one the Confession lays down: that words must be taken in their plain and common sense, and that no secret reservation can alter the meaning of what a man has spoken before God. Thomas Aquinas, writing four centuries before the Westminster Assembly, had laid the foundations upon which the Divines built. In the Summa Theologica, Aquinas treats the oath as an act of the virtue of religion, by which a man calls God to witness. He insists that every oath must be accompanied by judgment (the deliberate consideration of what is sworn), truth (the conformity of the oath to the facts), and justice (the lawfulness of the thing sworn). On the question of equivocation, Aquinas is clear: a man is bound to speak in such a way that his words convey the truth to the hearer. If he uses words in a sense that the hearer cannot understand, he is guilty of deception, and deception in an oath is a form of perjury. The Angelic Doctor therefore supplies the metaphysical ground for the Confession's teaching: an oath is an act of worship, offered to the God of truth, and it must therefore be an act of truth in its entirety: in the words spoken, in the intention of the heart, and in the understanding of the hearer. There is no room in Thomas's system for a private meaning that overrides the public sense of the words, because the public sense is the sense by which the community lives, and the community is the body for whose sake the oath is sworn. Samuel Rutherford, the Scottish theologian and one of the Scottish commissioners to the Westminster Assembly, knew the cost of covenant-keeping as few men have known it. When the Solemn League and Covenant was sworn in 1643, Rutherford bound his soul with that bond. When the political tide turned and the Episcopal party prevailed, he suffered for his fidelity: deprived of his professorship at St. Andrews, summoned before Parliament, living his last days under the shadow of a treason charge. Yet he never wavered. In his writings on the Covenant, he insisted that an oath sworn to God binds the conscience irrevocably, that the covenant is not a conditional promise to be kept only while convenient. His own life was the commentary on the Confession's phrase "binds to performance, although to a man's own hurt." He kept his oath to his own hurt, and he did not change. Hugo Grotius, the Dutch jurist and theologian, brings a different perspective to this doctrine. Writing on the law of nature and nations, Grotius argued that the binding force of promises and oaths is not dependent on the religion of the person to whom they are made. In De Jure Belli ac Pacis (On the Law of War and Peace), he insists that the obligation of an oath is rooted in the nature of God as the witness of truth, and that this obligation holds regardless of whether the recipient is a believer, a heretic, or an enemy. "Faith," Grotius writes, "is to be kept with all men, even with those who are unfaithful in other things, and even with enemies." His argument is grounded in the natural law: a promise is a promise because man is made in the image of the God who keeps covenant, and the breach of faith is a violation of that image. Grotius thus supplies the jurisprudential foundation for the Confession's insistence that an oath is not to be violated, although made to heretics or infidels. The obligation is not civil but moral, not ecclesiastical but divine, and it rests upon the unchangeable character of the God who hears every word that is sworn in His name.

Puritan Application

Let us bring this searching truth down into the daily life of the believer, for the principles of this section are not confined to the courtroom or the council chamber; they reach into the ordinary transactions of every Christian's life. First, let the plain and common sense of your words govern every promise you make, not only your oaths. The Confession speaks directly of oaths, but the spirit of its teaching extends to all the speech of a Christian. The man who cultivates mental reservation in his business dealings, who says a thing is "as good as new" when he knows it is worn, who represents a product as "the best price available" when he knows a better could be found, who signs a contract with a private mental qualification that reduces his obligation, that man has learned the habit of equivocation, and he will carry it into the oath when the oath comes. The Confession calls us to be men and women of such plain speech that our yea is yea and our nay is nay, and that when we add the solemnity of an oath, our words mean exactly what any honest hearer would understand them to mean. Let every promise be a kind of oath, and let every oath be a piece of heaven's own truthfulness let down into human speech. Second, expect that keeping your word will cost you something, and count that cost before you give it. The Confession does not say "binds to performance, although to a man's convenience" or "although to a man's temporary discomfort." It says "to his own hurt." There is a hurt that comes from faithfulness. It may be the hurt of paying a debt you could have escaped, of honouring a promise that has become disadvantageous, of standing by a commitment when the person to whom you made it has proved unworthy. The world is full of men and women who change when the cost rises, who look for a way out of their promises when the price of keeping them becomes high. The Christian is called to be different. The Christian is the man or woman who, having sworn to something that is lawful and good, keeps the oath though it cuts against the grain of self-interest, because the God who heard the oath is the God who does not change, and we are called to be like Him. Let the psalmist's description be written upon your heart: "He that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not." Third, never use the faith or character of another person as an excuse for breaking your word. This is the hardest application of the section, and the one that most directly addresses the Confession's final clause. It is painfully easy to rationalize a broken promise by saying that the recipient did not deserve it, that he was a heretic or an infidel or a person of bad character, and that therefore the obligation is discharged. But the Confession will not let us off so easily. The ground of the oath is the name of God, not the worthiness of the recipient. You swore by the Lord, and the Lord heard you, and the Lord holds you. If the other party to the oath proves to be a liar, a deceiver, an apostate, or an enemy of the gospel, the oath still stands, because it was not his character that bound you but the character of the God you invoked. This principle has far-reaching applications. It means that a Christian who has sworn a business contract with an unbeliever is bound to keep it. It means that a vow of marriage, sworn to one who later proves unfaithful to the faith, is not thereby dissolved. It means that a promise made to an enemy, an oath extracted under duress, a covenant sworn in a time of peace with one who has since become an adversary: all of these hold, because God heard them, and God does not release the swearer because the circumstances have changed. Fourth, guard your tongue against the small equivocations that prepare the way for the great ones. The doctrine of mental reservation did not spring into existence fully formed; it grew from a thousand small habits of dishonest speech, from the little "white lies" that seemed harmless, from the convenient ambiguity, from the answer that was technically true but deliberately misleading. A man who permits himself these small deceptions is training his conscience to accept equivocation, and when the great occasion comes, when he stands before the magistrate or the altar, he will find that his tongue has learned the trick of mental reservation and will practice it without his even noticing. The Confession's call to plain and common speech is therefore a call to a discipline that must be practiced daily. Let your conversation be without guile. Speak what you mean. Let your words carry their meaning openly, so that no one who hears you is left to guess at what you truly intend. In an age of spin and nuance and careful qualification, be a person whose words are as transparent as glass, so that when you swear before God, the oath is simply the fullest expression of the truthfulness you have practiced all your life. Fifth, look from your own oath-keeping to the covenant-keeping of Christ. For here, at last, is the gospel that underlies all this searching demand. You have broken oaths. You have equivocated. You have privately qualified your promises in ways that dishonoured the God who heard them. You have kept your word when it was easy and looked for a way out when it was hard. The law of the oath, in its purity, stands over you as a witness against you, and if the Confession were only a demand, it would crush you. But the Confession points beyond itself to the One who kept an oath that cost Him everything. Christ, of whom it is written that "he did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth," bound Himself in the eternal covenant to be the Surety of His people, and He performed that covenant to His own hurt. He swore, as it were, to bear the sins of many, and He bore them to the cross. He promised to give eternal life to all whom the Father had given Him, and He paid for that promise with His blood. When every human oath fails, when your word has been broken and your promises lie in ruins, His word stands. He is the faithful and true Witness, the Amen, the One whose oath is sworn in the plainest and most common sense of the words: "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." He means exactly what He says. Rest in that. Build your life upon that. And let the confidence that He has kept His oath to you be the strength by which you keep your oaths to Him.

Prayer

O Lord God, Thou God of truth, who canst not lie and dost not deceive, we come before Thee confessing that our words have not always been plain, nor our promises always kept. Thou hast searched us and known us; Thou knowest the secret reservations of our hearts, the private meanings we have assigned to our words, the qualifications we have whispered to ourselves that others could not hear. We have sworn and not performed. We have promised and withdrawn. We have spoken words that were true in form but false in intent, comforting ourselves with the thought that we had not lied when in truth we had deceived. Forgive us, for the sake of Him in whose mouth was found no guile, who spoke openly to the world, who kept covenant to the death and did not change. Teach us, O Father, to fear the weight of our own words. Let the plain and common sense of our speech be the measure of our truthfulness, and let no secret reservation pollute the words we speak before Thee. When we are tempted to deceive, grant us the courage of a single tongue and an honest heart. When the cost of keeping our word rises, sustain us by the example of the One who sweareth to His own hurt and changeth not. When we are tempted to break faith because the one to whom we swore has proved unworthy, remind us that it was not his worthiness but Thy Name that bound us. We bless Thee that Thou hast sworn an oath to save Thy people, and that Thou hast kept it. We rest upon that promise, for it is the only ground of our hope. Thou art not a man that Thou shouldest lie; Thou hast spoken, and Thou wilt do it. Keep us in that faithfulness, and let every oath we swear be an echo of the great covenant Thou hast sworn in Christ Jesus our Lord, to whom be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen.