Slander Is Never Love

Slander is never love. It is a common word used in the church as something to be condemned. Yet, it often seems that either no one takes the commands to avoid it seriously, or what is often more likely, people just don't know what it is. So let me give a definition that makes sense of all of the biblical data. 

Let me first start out by saying what slander is not. Slander is not critiquing someone's ideas. Slander is not critiquing someone's sin once that person has been put through due biblical process and found to have been in sin. Slander is not announcing sin to the community as a means of repentance once that due process has taken its righteous course. 

Slander, instead, seems to be a one-sided case where there is a prosecution but not a defense. The prosecution at hand consists of simply any suggestion, inuendo, or claim about another person, without the witnesses needed to convict and without hearing or just consideration of any clarification and defense from the other side, that places that person in a non-flattering light. Slander, then, is anything of this nature that would cause another hearing the suggestion, inuendo, or claim about a person to think less of that person.

This is actually what bearing false witness looks like. Bearing false witness is not just something in a court of law. It is also something done in the public and private courts of social communities. Bearing false witness is viewed as a capital crime in Scripture. Those who participate in it are given the harm that it would have caused if it was not found out to be false, even to the point of the death penalty, and Christ indicates that it is a type of murder of one's brother, an ecclesiastical version of Cain murdering Abel, that brings the punishment of Gehenna upon the "Christian" who participates in it. Psalm: 140:11 states, "May slanderers not be established in the land; may disaster hunt down the violent." The Hebrew phrase for "slanderer" here is "a man of the tongue," which is in parallel to "a man of violence [hamas]." It refers, then, to one who does harm with the tongue.

Participation in slander would include, not only being the one who makes the suggestion, inuendo, or claim about another person without witnesses and hearing the other side's defense, but also doing nothing about it when such claims are made, for instance, by joining in or not countering the practice through explicit rebuke.

Slander is the opposite of truth and therefore the opposite of God's character who brings everything into the light. Slander mixes darkness and ignorance with light and knowledge so that what has a kernel of truth to it is taken out of context, twisted, and given a lie to join with it so that small kernel of truth becomes a complete and utter lie. It is no mere coincidence that the word used often for Satan is diabolos "devil/slanderer." 

Slander is an interesting thing. It likely exists, as in the case of Jezebel and Ahab, for the purpose of getting something. Perhaps, what it seeks to steal is another person's personhood in order to gain money, the power, or even just peace of mind because some people just don't like when others have something they do not. For Alexander the Coppersmith (2 Tim 4:14-15), it sounded like he just didn't like Paul's teaching. For Diotrephes (3 John 9-11), it seemed to be power and influence so that he did not want to acknowledge that of the apostles like John. Even a pagan like Pilate realized that the slander brought against Christ was due to the fact that the Jewish leaders were jealous of him (Matt 27:18). They did not like the masses listening to him instead of to them. They resented him for the influence he had upon the people. They resented him for the condemnation they felt by his words. Slander was the vehicle through which their peace of mind was secured. 

As some of you know, we just had a major church split. One in which I have been heavily slandered. Truth be told, I've been slandered for years in my ministry, so it was really nothing new. But that isn't my main concern. My main concern, believe it or not, is whether people believe the Bible when it comes to understanding the truths of ministry and discipleship. But I have another concern and that is to be extremely careful about not becoming to others what has harmed me and my family so much over the course of these many years. I don't want to become a slanderer to fight slanderers. Then we're all damned. I would rather those who have slandered be corrected and come to the right, and I very much want no participation in it. If that means we lose the political battles because slanderers usually win those, so be it.

I don't actually know why slander works so well on people. Maybe it's laziness. It's just too much work to check with the other side and with witnesses for a fair social trial and we just end up believing whatever information is most accessible. Maybe it's confirmation bias. If someone already doesn't like the person being slandered, it's just easier to believe what one wishes to justify their dislike. After all, if I dislike someone for no reason, that makes me a bad person. Hence, I need to find good reason to dislike them and slander confirms my inclinations to be justified rather than sinful. Maybe it's just that we trust people we know or are closer to us and distrust people we don't know, and so we are willing to believe whatever is told to us. For whatever reason, in our fallen estate, we tend to excuse or invite slander and even justify it "because it's true," even when absent of God's justice to confirm it, not through mere personal opinion and perception, but through facts that are born from both credible prosecutorial witnesses and the defendant's own testimony and witnesses. 

We see this in every election cycle. Very few people know what candidates actually stand for and what they will do in office anymore. Instead, elections have become a game of who one likes the most, and therefore, slander is the only way to procure votes in one's favor and take away votes from his or her opponent. We see it in schools. We see it at work. We see it in our families. And we see it, unfortunately, in the church.

Of course, in a fallen world where all of our sweaters have pieces of yarn that can be pulled out, anyone can choose to ignore the mostly knitted sweater and point to the fact that a yarn or two is yet unfinished. These would be truths if not taken to extremes and twisted in such ways so as to suggest that the whole sweater is but a pile of yarn. I'm sure the things that I have been slandered for have a small kernel of truth to them, even if they are miniscule truths. I'm sure the things for which you have been slandered all have some truth to them. Half truths, and what are often even 1/20 truths, is how slander forms and takes flight in any given community. Everyone can claim that their slanders aren't really slanders because they're true. The devil is right to say that the Scripture teaches that God will protect the Messiah from harm but he's twisted that idea into a complete lie that he should conclude that tempting God is permitted. Likewise, God doesn't kill the bodies of Adam and Even in one sense when they eat the fruit of the tree, so what the devil told Eve was actually a truth. But it was twisted into the idea that God wouldn't place them into the realm of death that day so that they actually would die in another sense that day and in the ultimate sense in the future. When Jezebel had two "witnesses" slander Naboth, I'm sure Naboth was speaking quietly to where no one could hear him well or maybe he was frustrated with something at the banquet. A sliver of truth is often seized upon as an opportunity for slander by men of low character, and any such scenario would have given an opportunity for these the Bible calls "worthless men" to use that soundbite of reality to fill in whatever context they wanted to add to his situation in order to present him as guilty of a serious crime. 

Slander is poison because one cannot participate in it without taking upon himself the nature of the devil. In contrast, truth is of the Spirit of God and no one can speak a truth in the full light of its true context without taking upon the nature of God Himself. Likewise, no one who slanders can escape his transformation into the image of the Adversary. We know that the devil's end is hell and hell is no place for a professing Christian, whether to end up in it at the judgment or to be headed there in the here and now.

But most of all, since it is contrary to God's nature as love, it must be despised rather than consumed by us. If we are to be recognized as those who belong to Jesus Christ, slander must be the furthest thing from our lives. This means loving someone enough to get the facts straight, to only pursue a perceived deficiency that will do good and elevate the community and the person from an eternal perspective, rather than from nefarious motives, to gather up credible witnesses and to hear the defense or confession from the one on trial. Love does no wrong to a neighbor, and so slander is never love.