The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

by Dallas Willard

“You Fool!” But Jesus notes one stage further in the progression of internal evil that may be there without murder occurring: “And whoever says ‘You fool!’ shall merit condemnation to the fires of gehenna” (v. 22). “You fool!” said with that characteristic combination of freezing contempt and withering anger that Jesus had in mind, is a deeper harm than either anger or contempt alone. Twerp or twit usually is not said in anger but even with a certain amusement. Fool, on the other hand, in the biblical sense, is an expression of malice as well as contempt. Actually, that word will no longer do to capture the sense of Jesus’ teaching here and, in fact, is now closer to twerp than it is to what he had in mind. Thus one who would follow Jesus’ “law” by not calling people fools today gets off easy. We have plenty of other terminology that would allow us to go ahead and do exactly what he was in fact condemning, without using the word fool. The dominant sense of fool in our culture is that of a benign folly, as in “Feast of Fools,” an ancient idea that became the title of a popular book some years back. Excuse the crudity, but the nearest equivalent of the biblical fool in today’s language would be something more like stupid bastard or f—jerk, as said to someone who either has just messed up something important we were doing to meet a deadline or has just cut us off in traffic. One would hardly speak of a “Feast of Stupid Bastards” in the same celebratory sense. The fool, in bib...