Our Rising Sound

February 08 2008

Poll: recap of poll question “What responsibility do worship leaders have with their tatoos?”

Tagged Under : bible, culture, law, poll, scripture, tattoos

Thanks for everyone’s votes on the tattoo poll. We got a lot of feedback on that one. 70% of you had a balanced approach and thought the worship leaders responsibility with his/her tattoo depended on the tattoo and the congregation. Almost 20% took the Crazy Town approach and said, flaunt those suckers. 15% of you said the leader should hide their tattoos. And the other 15% said it was a mistake to get the tattoo in the first place. That’s a pretty diverse set of responses so I’m excited. I promised my take when we finished up so here we go.

The Levitical law (19:28) that states “do not cut your bodies or put tattoo marks on yourselves”. This is the foundation of the argument against tattoos and the belief that they desecrate the spiritual image of God, the functional image of God due to a mutilation of our body, relational image of God due to the dis-unity it may cause in the church body, and lastly the vision/purpose/being of God by glorifying the vulgar or ungodly things. Many in the church believe this, a small portion believe just the opposite that tattoos actually glorify God and his image by demonstrating our God given artistic body in a exalting way to God.

I, as you might expect, fall between the two positions. The Levitical law exists due to the nature of tattoos in that time, which were a symbol of ownership and devotion. Slaves were tattoo’d to show who they belonged to, or were tattoo’d with a name of some pagan god. Many Old Testament scholars(including rabbis) say this prohibition was to combat idolatry and worship of false gods, in fact some believe there was even an exception to this law where a tattoo was ok for a slave so he did not run away. There’s layered problems in that, but that’s another discussion.
I believe tattoos are not inherently immoral, but rather amoral with the potential to be moral or immoral. I am not bound by the Levitical law but deeper than that the spirit of God that wrote the law. As long as a tattoo is not idolatrous in nature, and that it does not cause dis-unity in the church, I believe it to be a liberty and not sin. There is a very good and in depth ethical evaluation on tattoos done by the Christian Research Institute from which many of my positions basis derive. It’s a really interesting read and if you are thinking of getting a tattoo or already have I highly recommend reading it and devoting a lot of prayer time and practical evaluation of the consequence of the tattoo relationally.