Why Jesus Does Not Let Us Take (any) Oaths - Zach Johnson

Lesson Transcript

The first time I took an oath was actually in order to receive a high school diploma. I'm a dual citizen with Ecuador, so I was wearing an Ecuadorian flag sash, and I was holding the flag. Each one of my Ecuadorian classmates bent one knee, took the flag in their hand, kissed it. I was the final person to get back. I bent the knee. There was a group of military men holding intimidating rifles with bayonets, watching all the citizens do that. I took the oath.

Whatever Jesus is trying to teach on oaths, he lays out, I think, very clearly in the book of Matthew. Then James says, above all, that we should be paying attention to what this means. Then also, Jesus isn't only prohibiting something; he's then telling us how to live. He says, "Let your yes be yes and your no no." And so Jesus is really trying to teach us, "Hey, your words matter.

What you commit to matters." I hope that when you see the word swear, your Christian instinct is to evaluate what's being asked of you against Jesus's teachings rather than just sort of glance over it and ignore it. Our guest today is Zach Johnson. He's serving at Sattler College, and our topic is concerning taking oaths and what Jesus said about not taking oaths and how that applies to us. That's a personal issue for Zach as well. So Zach, could you begin?

Maybe just a brief introduction and why you care about this topic. It might seem narrow to some of us. Yeah, it's great to be here, Marlon. Thanks so much for hosting me. The first time I took an oath was actually in order to receive a high school diploma. I was a missionary kid in Quito, Ecuador. If you travel around the world, there are a series of things that people set up, oath taking being one of them, or some sort of week.

Where we took an oath was in the, they called it the pledge to the flag in order to even receive an official diploma from high school. The first time I took an oath, I was wearing, I'm a dual citizen with Ecuador, so I was wearing an Ecuadorian flag sash, and I was holding the flag. Each one of my Ecuadorian classmates bent one knee, took the flag in their hand, kissed it, and said, "I swear to an oath that had been read aloud before the ceremony." I was, as the final, for some reason, I was the flag bearer.

I could tell you more about that. I was the final person to get back. I bent the knee. There was a group of military men holding intimidating rifles with bayonets, watching all the citizens do that. I took the oath. Didn't really, I'm just going to say, I didn't think anything of it. It was just a ceremony that happened. Our high school did it. We were a, we were, it was like a Christian, used to be a boarding school, very evangelical in nature. Six months later, I was, I joined the U.S.

military, went to the Air Force Academy, and then took another oath of allegiance to the U.S. Constitution. Then in order to get a security clearance, then had to renounce my citizenship to Ecuador and didn't really think anything of it. But I've taken a series of oaths in my academic life and then professional life that I'll just say I'd never thought about, and nobody really made a big deal.

It wasn't until a little bit later after I had encountered a church here in Boston called Followers of the Way that they sort of illuminated this idea that, hey, there's a group of people who take the teachings on those very seriously. And so that's sort of my introductions to oaths was my journey from Ecuador as a missionary kid into the Air Force and then out of the Air Force. Then when I did that, I became a conscientious objector, and the last straw for me was actually a teaching on oaths.

I'm very, very passionate about why I chose not to stay in the Air Force, even though it was acceptable to me. It was always, I'll say my heart's intent was to follow Christ. It wasn't until later on in my life that somebody just opened the door and said, "Hey, there's this teaching on oaths, violence, loving your enemies." And so the oath was actually the last straw for me that was sort of the issue on why I decided I couldn't stay in the military and serve out a government fashion.

And so the oath is a, it's a very important thing for me because it was sort of a critical juncture in my life. I thought about it a lot, prayed about it a lot, read about it a lot, and it continues to have implications for the guys that I talk to and actually women in the military who sort of bump into me or something I've written or something. And so I talked to a lot of people about it. The oath was the final juncture that led you to leave the military.

I'm curious because you mentioned you had to renounce your citizenship to Ecuador. Looking back on that now, does that count as breaking the oath in the high school ceremony? Yeah, I mean, I beg God for mercy that I feel that my decision to take one oath and then six months later to take another oath, and when you compare the two sets of words, I would say they're mutually exclusive with each other.

And so you can't, but this just goes to show that I don't think one person can have complete allegiance to two things simultaneously that are in conflict with each other. A great case being, can you be an Ecuadorian soldier and a U.S. soldier simultaneously? The answer to that is no. The U.S. military knows that. It's a very obvious thing to me. But yeah, I would say it was a breaking of the original pledge to the Ecuadorian flag that I took.

Yeah, so on this topic of oaths, what I know there's two passages in the New Testament that address it directly. I'll just go ahead and read them and then let you make the comments you wish. The first one from Matthew 5:33-37.

Jesus says, "Again, you have heard that it was said to those of old, 'You shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn.' But I say to you, do not take an oath at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great king. And do not take an oath by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. Let whatever you say be simply yes or no.

Anything more than this comes from evil." And then from the letter of James, very short. "But above all, my brothers, do not swear either by heaven or by earth or by any other oath, but let your yes be yes and your no be no, so that you may not fall under condemnation." Yeah, so these are the two primary passages when you look at, hey, let's talk about why not to swear oaths. There's a few other passages that are worth looking at, but we won't have the time to do that.

Then really interesting to track the history of oaths through the Old Testament and into the New Testament to kind of do case studies on oaths. There's a lot of great examples of oaths gone wrong in the Bible too. And so I actually think it's really interesting. But just to interlock these two teachings, a lot of people, when they look at the book of James, you'll find striking connections to the Sermon on the Mount.

A lot of people say that James is almost, you could say, a commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, making the argument that James is the half-brother of Jesus. Then he would have heard Jesus give this sermon however many number of times. I'm not going to try to make that argument. Then I always like to say, in any book, when you get to these above all moments, we should be saying, all right, somehow James is saying that this is one of the most important things I'm going to say in my short little book here.

James has five chapters. He says, "Above all, don't swear." And so whatever Jesus is trying to teach on oaths, he lays out, I think, very clearly in the book of Matthew. Then when you look at how important it is, I would say that because it's there so clearly in Matthew, and then James says above all that we should be paying attention to what this means. There are three general camps of interpreting the oath passage here. One is the.

Where I fall into, it's just that we should take Jesus's words very literally and take them very seriously. Whenever we're in any circumstance that even smells like an oath, our instinct should go up and we should say, "Hey, Jesus taught something about this. I should be paying attention to what he was prohibiting there." Then also, Jesus isn't only prohibiting something, he's then telling us how to live.

He says, "Let your yes be yes and your no no." And so Jesus is really trying to teach us, "Hey, your words matter. What you commit to matters." Then so that's my camp, the literal prohibition on oaths. I can get into a little bit of, I think we'll get into, hey, what's an oath and what isn't an oath. Then there's this other camp. Marlon, you actually pointed me to this. I hadn't read it through it a little bit, but John Calvin wrote a lot on oath taking.

There's a sermon by John MacArthur that I bumped into about oaths as well that I think represents this well, is that some oaths are okay and some oaths are not okay. It's kind of one of the lines I remind myself is, "Do not swear at all means swear sometimes." That's sort of the second camp. I'm poking fun of it a little bit because I think you really have to do some justification there. But that camp, they're still looking at the teaching and trying to apply it in everyday life.

They're saying that, hey, really, Jesus was talking about some sort of Jewish abuse of oaths that was happening, but it's not completely relevant to us, i.e., government oaths, oaths in courtrooms, things of that nature. Then the third camp is like, it doesn't matter completely. It doesn't matter for our context, sort of for another point in time. I did want to say that between those first, I think those first two interpretations are probably where the audience falls between and is most familiar with.

I think they care and I think they want to know. I really think that just like hermeneutically, what's going to define where you land on this is some sort of idea of how you view the Old Testament and how we interact with it. People in my camp view the Sermon on the Mount as a perfection of the Old Testament. The Old Testament was almost like a babysitter, or I like to say a pedagogos in Greek, that it was an incomplete set of laws.

Then Jesus came and gave us and illuminated a new reality that we needed that the Messiah would bring. The other set sort of doesn't view the Sermon on the Mount that way and sort of likes to treat the New and Old Testaments holistically, that they can't be incompatible with each other, which I don't think they are. But this would be a great example of one where it's like, well, hey, there are people taking oaths in the Old Testament, so it can't mean that Jesus is prohibiting oaths.

It's just a different treatment of how you view the Old Testament. I am a huge fan of what I laid out as Sermon on the Mount as constitution for being a Christian. And so I just wanted to frame that's kind of how I think about the Sermon on the Mount in general. Yeah, and we're going to have to dive into that a little bit more. I'm curious on the third camp saying it doesn't matter. Do you bump into a lot of people saying that explicitly, or is it more like, why bother thinking about it?

Or is there an explicit argument that. I'm not trying to, there's a certain set of passages in the New Testament that make no sense in our context. A lot of people, if it doesn't make direct application, they might not take the time to think about it. There's a category of don't eat strangled food. A lot of people that I've run into are not thinking about that. When they run into this teaching in the New Testament, they're like, this sounds like nothing I know of. It doesn't really apply to me.

I think it's more of that camp that since it seems so foreign, that it's one of those non-applied teachings that must have been only to a specific audience. I think it's more of that type than rather than blatantly ignoring things. Does that make sense? Yeah, that makes sense. Even from my own standpoint, I think a lot of others, the closest that I've ever actually come to encountering the question of, am I going to swear an oath or not, is a driver's license form that has the word swear on it.

I've never been in the situations that you described at the opening of the episode. There's probably a lot of other people who have just never had anything that forced them to think much about it. Yeah, I mean, the examples that I'll give, obviously there's the political and military examples. This is where I give a talk on voting as it relates to oath taking as well, where if you're a voter, you will endorse that Christian will go. The president, a lot of the U.S.

presidents at least pay homage to Christianity to some way, shape, or form. They'll go take an oath on a Bible every time you vote. If you vote, in my mind, you're actually condoning the act of taking an oath on a Christian Bible. We can talk more about that. Politically, in the voting sphere, I think people should think about it more. Then I was just called into jury duty earlier this week, ironically.

I give, for those of you who interact with that sort of interaction, you'll interact with oaths in the courthouse and the legal system on jury duties. Then usually there's some way, shape, or form of swear verbiage in a lot of legal contracts that you'll see for driver's license, for loans. I have to do it. I have to actually circumvent oath taking to get a little parking pass in my neighborhood that says I live where I say I live.

It's written in there, and that's where I do want to make a distinction that there is definitely a difference between being able to say that something's true in an oath. I think it's helpful to make that distinction. But then at the same time, yeah, we'll make that distinction. But I think we'll encounter it in one way, shape, or form.

I hope that when you see the word swear or that your Christian instinct is to evaluate what's being asked of you against Jesus's teachings rather than just sort of glance over it and ignore it. Yeah. How do you circumvent it? Is it a paper form and you can literally cross out a word and write in something else out of curiosity on the parking pass? Yeah. The parking pass, I'm sure they're annoyed by us, but you can apply online.

We'll print it out, cross out the word, initial it, say something else, and then sign it and mail it in. You get that option. That's a circumvention. Even on legal documents, that's what I do. Even religiously now, you see that oath taking is no longer required in the legal system, and they're starting to take out the oath-like language that appeals to God.

I don't know if you've heard some of the presidents still at the end of an oath or a lot of the military oaths, you say, "So help me, God." Then at the beginning, you can either swear or affirm, and you can kind of choose which word you're comfortable with. In those circumstances, I just think that, hey, it's already being half circumvented for you. Ignore the exact fraction. Then the Christian's duty is to evaluate the words themselves.

Then that kicks into the second part of Jesus's teaching, let your yes be yes and your no be no. Then it's up to you to evaluate, hey, what am I agreeing to? If there's some sort of thing that you shouldn't agree to, you shouldn't say those words. That's sort of my plea for a lot of people is the oaths that people say are, I would say, impossible to fulfill as dutiful Christians. I just think people should be thinking a lot more about it.

I hear you bringing it back from just the point about language, or is it an oath to, well, don't say things if you can't actually commit to them, the things we kind of glibly sign. Just for me, for example, in the military, the reason that I decided not to, I was a second lieutenant, and every time you go up a rank, you take another oath of office, hence the officer line in the military. There's a line in there, "I will protect the Constitution of the U.S.

against all enemies, foreign and domestic." Then there's this thing that you're agreeing to, that I take this obligation freely without any purpose of mental evasion. Basically, whatever enemy comes, I'm going to defend it no matter what. There's nothing stopping me from fulfilling that duty. When I actually talk to a lot of Christians about why it's acceptable, they actually repeat back to me. They're like, "Actually, I should be in here because I'm a Christian.

If there's ever anything that goes awry, people like me should be a stopgap between unchristian behavior and the government." But then I like to say to them, then you shouldn't be saying yes to those words because realistically, you have every intention to break that oath given that it goes against your allegiance to Christ, which is not what the country is asking of you.

I like to sort of play a little bit of devil's advocate with people there on why we shouldn't be committing to do something in all circumstances when realistically we're like, no, I'm actually trying to be the moral conscience of the country, etc. There's certain things around oaths, and hopefully we can get into defining them. But then you have to at least look at what you're saying yes and no to.

Then that's where I think it cannot be an oath, but you shouldn't agree to a set of words that you disagree with and might compromise some behavior on another conviction that you have. Well said. Let's go from there into that question. Yeah, how do you define an oath? Yeah, there's a couple of lexicons, but I like to define an oath generally with three components that you typically see in oath language. Like I said, oaths come in various shapes and sizes. These components are more generalities.

The three components are, one, some sort of attestation of truth. You're saying something. The second one is that you invoke the name of a higher power, energy, object, person, relationship, etc. You say something, and then you invoke it, and you're saying, hey, I'm saying this on behalf or under the cover of this thing. You read it there. Jesus is actually saying, don't take any oaths. Don't take them by heaven, by Jerusalem, by this, by that, by the earth. He's listing the things you shouldn't take oaths by.

You're invoking something. Then the third, which is really interesting, is actually an invitation to punishment by the thing you invoke, given that you don't fulfill the set of words that you attest to. I think those are the interlocking components that generally make up oath language. One, some sort of attestation of truth or commitment that you're going to do something. It could be a promise, could be a set of words, too. Bringing in another name that sort of gives you top cover, the name of God.

Some people have seen it in pop culture. You swear by your mother, like, by my mother's name or by my dead grandfather. I promise you this is true. Then the third is an invitation of punishment of what happens to you if you don't fulfill the oath. I think that's a helpful way to think about what is an oath and what isn't an oath. There's some really classic pushbacks on, hey, I've gotten married and taking wedding vows. I get that they're similar in nature, like is a wedding vow an oath?

I would just argue by nature of the definition that I just gave with those three interlocking parts, that there's very different things between an oath and then making a commitment to somebody that you're going to try your best to fulfill. You're allowed to do that. It's just the invoking that God is a higher power and trying to set up these two standards of truth that I think the world operates on. There's normal standard of truth, and then there's oath power truth, which gets you in trouble if you lie under that.

Then there's meaningful differences between the two. You see that in actually the news every day, where let's say that you're a congressional witness. Are you familiar as a witness, what happens to you? You get put under oath. If you lie under oath, it's more significant than if you lie while you're not under oath. It's a very interesting system that the world is set up to kind of, I would say, creates these two platforms of truth.

One is sort of normal life, where you're almost expected not to have to tell the truth. Then there's this, well, unless you're under oath, then you have to tell the truth. If you don't, then you can get actually convicted of different types of perjury and things like that or giving false testimony under oath, which I think Jesus is trying to warn against. But yeah, that's my general definition there. Yeah. Can we poke on some examples a little bit? Yeah, absolutely.

The one that feels most classic to me of getting all your components together is something like Jezebel in the Old Testament. Elijah has killed the prophets on Mount Carmel, and Queen Jezebel's like, "May the gods do this to me and more also if I don't kill you by the morning." That clearly brings it in. Then you jump to the other extreme. I had to fill out paperwork to get a sales tax exemption for Anabaptist perspectives.

On the form, it says something like, "I declare under penalty of perjury." If we go to the dictionary and look up perjury, it would say it's lying under oath. But there was nothing. The only thing my signature did was acknowledge that I'd get punished. Yeah, this is still where I'm lenient. I'm more lenient on contract language because were you filling it out with a pen? Or do you remember if it was online or not? That actually was on paper. This is where people still look at me sideways when I do this.

But when I see those statements, you're allowed to, as a signer, cross things out and make notes, and they still accept it. Whenever I still look for oath type language, I'll cross it out and I just say, "I don't take oaths, but I'm telling you this is true." I've never had a problem with that kind of behavior. I know it's kind of playing, it kind of seems like a funny game to play.

But I think it is important to just push back and say, "I don't take oaths, but I can still participate in society." I have a really funny example with my conscientious objector trial. There was a military lawyer called a JAG who brought my witnesses to the stand, and he put a bunch of people under oath to tell the truth in my own trial, like my friends, my fellow military officers. But when it came to me and another brother in the church who was giving testimony, he knew we wouldn't take oaths.

He came up with something different. He's like, "Are you going to tell me the truth?" We just said, "Yes." I view that as not an oath, just a confirmation of I'm truthful. I do think that you're still allowed to participate in the processes around you. However, it's still worth it to clarify with people that you don't take oaths and you're not invoking God. Even in that language, you're allowed to say, "I'm not taking an oath here. I'm just telling you this is true. That's fine." That's not unacceptable to me.

Does that make sense? Yeah. Even in that, I'm sure you'd do that in some of those wordings that say, "I swear generically." Even under something like penalty of perjury, you would want to put a handwritten note on if you could. Yeah. You're allowed to do that. There's nothing stopping you from doing that. This is where I'd still think that God will be merciful if you miss a word in a contract and you didn't. I don't think you can be tricked into taking an oath that you didn't know.

That's where I think some of those things, I'm much more lenient on, like, "Hey, this is not that big of a deal." However, if you're being marched in front of a general and you're throwing up your right hand and there's flags out, you should be thinking, "This is definitely an oath. This has oath environment written all over it." There's categorical differences between some of the different types of oaths you'll take or will be asked to take. Yeah. Yeah.

I just point out historically, at least in English and American law, there's provisions there because from what I could tell, the Quakers took this very seriously and wouldn't take oaths. Eventually, people decided to accommodate it. Yeah. I actually think the U.S. is a very, with people like with our convictions, the Quakers did a ton of work to at least make it normal to push back against even the use of violence, the use of violence and oath taking to try to create some separation of church and state.

The Quakers did a lot of groundwork where people are kind of familiar with refusing to take oaths. They'll kind of look at you and be like, "Oh, that guy must be a Quaker or something." But it's still familiar, whereas other places, it's less familiar. I do think the Quakers did some work with similar convictions before us. Back to the wedding example for just a little bit.

The wedding vows, if there's language in there like, "Do you do this before God and these witnesses?" or something like that, does that in your mind bring up more of those elements of an oath? I mean, it makes it seem more like an oath. But to me, when you're making a commitment of marriage, honestly, what for me separates it is that, how do I say this? There's not a meaningful difference in the way that you behave afterwards based on what you say.

This is where I think marriage is a unique category in its own because I personally think it's a sacrament where there's a one flesh union occurring. There's something I think the Bible says that there's something really happening at a marriage. I think it's almost a category in its own that even the New Testament says, "Hey, marvel not. A man and a woman shall become one flesh." This is how God designed it. There are consequences there, but I don't think that that is the same.

But actually, it's really interesting because marriage has, I think, spiritual and legal ramifications to people. I think there are spiritual realities. However, I don't think that you're really inviting punishment into the marriage. I think that you could make the same set of vows without the language of before God and these witnesses. I just think they're similar. They're almost the same, but you're not swearing. You're not using the language that Jesus is warning against.

I know I'm going to kind of take the scapegoat, the cop-out answer in saying, "Hey, there are similarities, but I do think they're different." This is the ultimate cop-out. Jesus taught not to swear, but he didn't teach not to get married. At the end of the day, we know that there's meaningful differences between the two. Some of it's a little mysterious. I can't nail all of it on the head, but I think it's fair to say that.

Then on the other end of things, I like to remind people that this is relevant to my story, that the oath seems inconsequential to people. But when I wanted to leave the military, it was very, very, very clear that the government had a claim on my life. If I left, I owed this amount of money or federal prison because I had taken that oath. It seems inconsequential, but legally, it has pretty drastic consequences down the line that some people aren't familiar with. I wasn't familiar with it.

I think there's some sort of difference between vows and oaths. I'm not super prepared to flesh out all the meaningful differences, but I'd at least like to say that they're different. Yeah. No, that's helpful. Again, you're stepping back from the language a little bit and saying, "What's going on here? What's the reality of getting married?" Slightly off from our main thread, but I did an interview with a New Testament scholar, Matthew Bates. He talks about baptism as an oath of allegiance.

I asked him a little bit about that in the interview. But one of the things I was thinking is, well, yes, if you're getting baptized as an adult, you know what you're doing. While this is giving total allegiance, it doesn't matter what you say or what you don't say. It has this consequence of allegiance like these countries are asking for. We mentioned a couple of times John Calvin or John MacArthur, and what you said is that second position on oaths as, well, Jesus is saying there's some oaths you shouldn't take.

I'd like to look at that a little bit. I'm quoting a few things from John Calvin because he's such a classic, at least for a lot of thinkers today as well. He's a classic. Oh, please quote him. I think you should. Yeah. Just a few pieces. This is actually from his commentary on the Ten Commandments, I believe, or the Sermon on the Mount. He takes the Sermon on the Mount as kind of explicating the Ten Commandments. He defines an oath as calling God to witness that what we say is true.

I'm noticing there right away that it doesn't have quite all the three components that you mentioned. He argues that it's basically invoking God to confirm what we're saying. We should only swear by God, not by an idol or a king. But then he goes and makes commentary about Anabaptists, who rejected oaths from the beginning. He says, "They inconsiderately make a stumbling stone of Christ, setting him in opposition to the Father." He's talking about the way we read the Sermon on the Mount.

He admits that it's kind of difficult to understand what Jesus is saying. He then keeps going there, explicates that argument from the Old Testament. But then he also brings in the claim and says, "Well, Paul was a disciple of Jesus and he swore," and gives some examples there. I think you indicated a little bit about how you'd respond to that position, but I invite you to say more. You can reference MacArthur's sermon or Calvin or whatever. Yeah.

I actually did another podcast specifically on the early, it was kind of like a 500th year remembrance of some of the Anabaptist ideas. I researched a little bit on views of oath taking. What I found was you're right there. The early Anabaptist leaders blatantly rejected oath taking across the, I mean, Michael Sattler, Felix Mons, Conrad Grebel, George Blauroch, Menno Simons.

You are right in saying that there was already, there's the Reformation with Calvin and then the Radical Reformation with the Anabaptists there. I actually think it's super illuminating to say, "Hey, there is a debate there between the Anabaptists and Calvin. What should our instinct be to solve this debate?" This is where my position is, is that there's history before the Reformation and we should be trying to trace it to what was happening before them.

This is where I think the early Christian witness plays a huge role in why I've leaned towards the prohibition of oaths over the acceptance of oaths that I think the Reformed world has sort of begun to teach. I sort of like to just say that this is a little bit comes back to how I treat this influences how I treat a bunch of other things in the New Testament.

Oaths, in my mind, it's tied to other things in the Sermon on the Mount, like divorce and remarriage, the use of violence ad infinitum on some of the Sermon on the Mount issues. But I don't know if you've heard me talk about this before. I picked this up from some of my discipleship that in general, there are three categories of churches or traditions.

There are tradition zero churches, which basically acknowledge that the Scripture is the ultimate authority, but it's not the only authority that we should be able to appeal to church history, actually, as an additional layer of interpretive authority on the Scriptures. I think that's the most compelling category to be in. Then there's tradition one.

There's tradition one churches, which basically say, "Hey, there's a Scripture as an authority, but there's also the authority of man that we can layer onto this," where you can add additional layers of requirements. You can think of a lot of examples I like to bring up because the Catholic Church is so dominant, like vows of celibacy for priests, all sorts of ideas where they've appealed to this sort of man-made authority. Then there's tradition zero. Sorry, I got my own.

Tradition one, tradition two is when you add it. Tradition zero is when you kind of say, "Hey, I'm alone with Scriptures. I get to be the interpretive power of what this says based on where I am." I would say that John Calvin and the Reformers' treatment of that leans more towards being alone with Scripture than appealing to the early Christian witness. That's just where I would really, really recommend just people briefly taking a swath of what was happening in the first 300 years of Christianity.

There's a book I recommend all the time called Caesar and the Lamb, where Christians are dying left and right on the refusal to take oaths. People are just telling them, "It's not that big of a deal. Just say this thing and serve in the Roman government. If not, you'll die." They're like, "I'd rather die." I think that with Calvin and the Anabaptists, I think the Anabaptists are much closer to that tradition one, tradition one authority. John Calvin says that they're tradition two.

He's saying that they're putting the stumbling block. You get what's happening there. But honestly, I think that it's a more historically faithful interpretation. I would just push people to say that the acceptance of oath is a novel interpretation of Jesus's teaching, and it's changed over time. That would be my compelling argument to say, "Hey, the best way to figure this out is with church history and to look at how it's changed over time.

The closer it is to Christ, the more we should trust it." I tell the story of the first documented conscientious objector. There's a story of Maximilian where he's just, I've read it in a couple of podcasts before. The Roman guy is just pleading with him, like, "Please just take this. I don't want to hurt you. Take this duty. Take this seal." He kind of says he doesn't have to serve. Maximilian says, "No, I'm a Christian. I won't do that." Ends up getting his head cut off, and his dad is watching.

I just think that that's much more the way that early Christians interacted with Jesus's set of teachings. Yeah. All that being said, lots of things to look up. But the early Anabaptists, I would say, were consistent with really taking that first stance on not allowing oath taking. That's why they were so, in addition to baptism, you brought up Matthew Bates. Baptism and citizenship were so tied together at that point in time that to try to untie them was very dangerous to people holding power.

The early Anabaptists were challenging a lot of the status quos on how the church would use its relationship with the state to maintain influence. Oaths were a part of that, I would argue. I'm on the same page, especially when it comes to the relationship of the Sermon on the Mount and the Old Testament. As you mentioned earlier, I don't feel that same need that Calvin or somebody in that theological stream does to harmonize everything in the Old Testament perfectly there.

What about some of these examples that people bring up from the New Testament? Paul saying, "Look, God is my witness when I say this," or things like that. Or there's another one I came across when Jesus, at his trial, the high priest says, "I adjure you and ask the question." Some people have argued, "See, Jesus accepted being put under oath." Yeah. Those two. The Paul example is hard for me because I feel like people use it as a gotcha moment, but I don't think it's a gotcha moment.

When you look at Paul and what he's trying to do, he's trying to, you remember the road to Damascus where Paul is approached by Christ, or arguably Christ, "Why are you persecuting me?" There's a certain number of people who are able to appeal to Christ as a witness.

I would say it's the people who spent time with him while he was on earth, the disciples, their disciples, people who interacted, that when they write the New Testament, they're saying, "Hey, I was with Christ, and this is what he said." There's that category of people.

I would put Paul in that unique camp of people who are able to say, "Hey, Christ approached me and said this." I think that that's what Paul is trying to do with his writings and his audience there, that he's trying to unify the Jews and the Gentiles. That's one of his huge ministries. I know that it's not the completely satisfying answer, but out of all people who are able to say that Christ was there for this, I think Paul is one of those people. This is another pet peeve of mine.

Other people who claim to say, "Hey, Christ told me this," or, "God told me this." That's a hobby horse of mine is when people use language like that. This is very tangential to oaths. I think people should be very, very, very careful to claim that they're speaking for God or something like that in our day and age. But Paul is one of the few people that can. Then Jesus with Pilate there. I would just try to simply say that I think we could get into the Greek on what is it? Is that the right translation? Adjure?

Does that mean that that's sort of he had been put under oath and at some point in time, he raised his hand in front of Pilate or some court and said that he was going to say the truth? But I think that Jesus's witness is much more silent than anything. I don't think that there's that oath taking moment. Yeah. Anyway, that's my general argument. If it would have been an oath, Jesus would have refused it. I think maybe that's the slight escape. But I agree. It's not like an airtight. It's not an airtight issue.

There's a lot of different angles to approach it. I'm still most convinced by the position I'm taking on it, despite the fact that there's a couple of answers there or a couple of counterexamples of like, "What about this? What about this?" But I don't think they're compelling enough to say, just to bring it back to the very beginning, why did Jesus spend this time teaching about not swearing?

Then why does James say above all on it, if it really, I guess my question back is like, so why did he teach on it in the first place? Why does James reiterate it? Why do the early Christians lose their lives for it if it wasn't supposed to be interpreted the way that we're interpreting it? I'm sure some people might pitch to you the Rome is different than the USA type arguments and stuff like that. There's a lot. I've encountered those arguments too. Yeah.

No, I'm not going to buy the argument that America is different from Rome when it comes to making oaths. They make the same kinds of claims and the same kinds of totalizing claims and paint themselves as this huge force for good in the world and all of that that just have a lot of parallels. But the passages from Paul where he talks about calling God his witness or God is my witness, I wish I had it in front of me here.

As I've thought about them, it has seemed more to me like he's trying to impress on the people he's talking to that he's saying this in all seriousness or whatever than just something that Jesus told him. Yeah. This is where my wife and I were actually talking about this, preparing for this. There's another phrase that Jesus uses. I need to look at the language. Jesus sometimes says, "Verily, verily, I say to you." Then in the Greek, that's the Greek that's Amen. Amen. Yeah. Amen, amen, lego humine.

The other de-escalating moment for those two is to say, "Hey, they're actually trying to draw attention to a certain phrase they're going to say within a larger moment of teaching," kind of like the above all. I think Jesus, it's more compelling than Paul, where sometimes you get it. You're in a conversation, you tune out, and you got to bring people's attention back to what you're saying. I think that there's actually an argument there with Jesus and like, "Why does he have to say, 'Truly, truly, I say to you'?

What's that? What's he doing there?" I actually think he's trying to contrast a belief that they have and he knows that they believe something, but he's saying, "Truly, truly, I say it's another way," something like that. I'll just admit it's a little bit harder, and I don't have a slam dunk.

I actually haven't come across a slam dunk like, "Oh, this is how I fit Paul's language here within the oath taking." I will say it doesn't seem like he's inviting punishment or going against what Jesus is saying there, like swearing. But I'd still avoid language like that myself. It still feels like it's pushing it. Yeah. It's pushing the limits for me. That's right.

It's interesting, the Slightheim Confession, which is before Calvin, very early in the Anabaptist movement, has an article against taking oaths, and they address this objection a little bit. Others say, "If it is then wrong to use God for truth, then the apostles Peter and Paul also swore. Answer. Peter and Paul only testify to that which God promised Abraham, whom we long after have received.

But when one testifies, one testifies concerning that which is present, whether it be good or evil." It seems to me what they're trying to do is to say, while they're talking about the present, they're not making any commitments for the future about what they're going to do or not going to do. Right. They're not making a commitment or anything along those lines. Yeah. I'm compelled. I think it's a good argument. I find that interesting. It was published and available before John Calvin wrote.

It obviously didn't convince him, but this was an earlier thought. But even Sattler, I pulled something up on him. When the Anabaptists were being martyred, he then takes Jesus's teaching and he says, "At his trial," I'll just read something. "At his trial, Sattler defended the Anabaptists' refusal to take any oaths by citing Matthew 5 there, justifying their stance with Matthew 5 as the law of Christ for Christians.

This view of simple, truthful yes or no should suffice for a Christian, and invoking oaths was a practice of old law that Christ had superseded." Yeah. I like that. That Christ's teaching supersedes. It's sort of like the proverbial trump card that you get to pull out. That seems pretty simple, but yeah. Yeah. Very good. Thank you. Anything else you'd like to close with? Not necessarily.

I know that this is an odd, it's an odd, I think people are like, "Why is this such a big deal?" It's a weird thing to sort of have a hobby horse about. When I get asked to talk about it, I feel like there's not too many people who like to talk about it passionately. But I do think that at the end of the day, Jesus and God weigh our words heavier than we do. I think that's if you read the New Testament, I always am struck by there's a few passages I read and I'm like, "I kind of want to zip my mouth.

I want to have a zipper on my mouth sometimes and be very careful to think we should be very careful to open that in a lot of different scenarios, especially with gossip, especially with teaching truth or leading others away from truth." I do think that this is another category of when we are using words just to be very careful and diligent, slow to speak, and consider what we're committing to.

I think that that in itself is a good principle to draw away from oath taking is just to say, "Hey, we're called to be a people who weigh our words before we use them." I'm a very talkative person, so I'm sort of pointing at myself here is that words matter and the above's all matter. This isn't an inconsequential teaching, and it really does change sort of your stance on this will limit you into what types of activities you're partaking in.

I think in a really good way, not taking oaths precludes you from serving in certain positions. That's where I think that Jesus was more of a genius than we might give him credit for. I don't know how much foreknowledge Jesus had of the future and which systems would require oaths to participate in it.

But I do think that he did have foresight to warn his believers that, "Hey, I'm going to give you this teaching and stick to it, and it will keep you on the straight and narrow." I do think that that oath taking is part of that set of teachings, building your house on the rock, not on the sand.

Not to dismiss it as inconsequential because it's in the set of teachings that we sing about, we teach our kids about building your house on the rock, and just not to write it off too quickly, even though it might not touch your everyday life. Also, not to be scared. I think that's a huge part of what I'm trying to say. I don't want to be like, "Hey, you should fear every time you sign your name." This is another example. Sorry. We won't get into this, but I actually haven't settled this yet.

When you click the box after buying a software package, it's like 10 pages long, and you click that box that says, "I've read and understand this." Man, that one actually really gets me still. Are you allowed to click that box if you didn't read the 10 pages? You should get back to me on that one. But I don't think that we need to fear God as somebody on the gotcha moments on some of the legal contracts.

I'm also trying not to take a fear-mongering stance and really just trying to reiterate just kind of having it in your toolkit of Jesus's teachings and not letting it slip over time. Even to preach on it every once in a while in churches, I think, is really good. I don't know. Our church tries to recycle some of our important doctrines every once in a while so our children don't forget. I think about that all the time. Like, "Hey, I've gone through this stuff. I know my sons probably won't.

How do we keep these things alive?" I don't know all the answers to that, but at least recycling, studying history is a great way to do it. Having a podcast talking about it. Thanks for the invitation. Yeah. Thank you, Zach. That was precisely part of our thought process is that this is something that can seem obscure or whatever, doesn't get talked about a lot, and we wanted to address it. Thank you for joining us for that. Absolutely.

Then if you're wanting to read, I do think you'll be inspired by the early Christian witness of martyrdom for this teaching itself. Just to reiterate that some people did literally lose their heads to adhere to this teaching. I think that that should also paint some sort of meaning for how important it was, even though we don't face the same consequences. Thank you to our audience for joining us for this podcast.

If you enjoyed this discussion on oaths and some of Zach's story, we did get a little more of his story in a previous podcast, Exiting the Air Force, which we'll link below, and you can follow us there.