Jesus On The Morality Of Language

In Matthew 5:22, Jesus condemns abusive language alongside murder (in the previous verse) and unjust, baseless anger.  Like much of his statements in Matthew 5, his mention of the word "fool" in this context has convinced some that it is literally sinful to ever call someone a fool no matter what the situation or one's motives are.  The context is clearly one denouncing words that express a denial or dismissal of a person's metaphysical value in a way that degrades them as a person.  Indeed, even the footnotes indicate that another word Jesus refers to, "Racca," is a term of contempt.  What this means, of course, is that the word "fool" is not the actual problem: the motive of the speaker is.

Jesus himself calls certain people fools (Matthew 23:17), so he would not have meant that the word fool is inherently sinful.  The evangelical subset that thinks "fool" is a sinful word might assert that Jesus can do things that would be sinful if committed by humans, and thus he is somehow an exception.  However, as a morally perfect being, this would not follow; calling others fools is not the true issue at hand in Matthew 5.  In fact, his words are not the only time the Bible uses the word in a way that shows it is not automatically a slanderous or abusive to use it--and there is no basis for it being sinful apart from these things.

The author of Proverbs also plainly calls certain people fools, and not in a slanderous or dehumanizing way.  The very idea that it is evil to call people what they are is antithetical to the Bible, especially in light of the fact that the Bible condemns lying and repeatedly emphasizes treating people as their deeds deserve.  Neither Jesus nor Proverbs is consistent with the belief that calling someone a fool ignores their human rights and status as a bearer of God's image, and therefore the word itself is not Biblically problematic at all.

Even if Proverbs uses the word in reference to a hypothetical figure standing in for those driven by irrationality, selfishness, and laziness instead of a particular person who really lived, it is nonetheless true that other books of the Bible outside of the gospels would contradict the words of Jesus if calling someone a fool was universally sinful.  This is the kind of inconsistency shallow Christian ethicists who misrepresent the specifics of Biblical morality and emphasize vague acts of kindness over particular more prescriptions are so easily willing to overlook.

The Bible never condemns calling someone a fool if they truly are selfish or irrational, but it does condemn actions and words that degrade fellow humans (Deuteronomy 25:3, James 3:9).  In the case of language, intention is what dictates the moral nature of one's words because intention it what determines what a person's words mean in the first place, and thus there are certainly contexts and motives that make a particular use of the word fool sinful.  The word itself, though, has no inherent moral standing because words have no meaning apart from their intended use by their speakers.