Please, can someone post a screenshot showing James 3:6-12 in the New Interpreter's Bible? I will be teaching on this particular passage next week.
I would appreciate your responses very much. Thank you.
ON THE PERILS OF SPEECH
COMMENTARY
This is a self-contained essay, beginning with a prohibition (like that in 2:1) to “my brothers” and concluding with a short aphorism (like 2:26) to “my brothers.” The Greek is exceptionally well crafted, with a high incidence of alliteration and balanced clauses (3:5, 9). The use of particles shows that James has done more than string together a number of aphorisms; he has constructed an argument. Its direction is announced in 3:1–2. On one side, 3:2 seems to suggest that human perfection is possible and that control of speech represents the height of perfection. On the other side, 3:1 contains a harsher perception: Speech is a dangerous thing, and the role of a teacher is hazardous.Following this opening set of ambiguous statements, 3:3–4 develops the optimistic side, using the typical Hellenistic commonplaces concerning the control of speech. But 3:5–6 moves in a more pessimistic direction, emphasizing both the power of the tongue and its destructive character. This pessimism is given most explicit expression in 3:7–8, which contrasts human control over creation to the human inability to control speech. The example in 3:9–10 is explicitly theological. It draws the discussion of speech into the ethical and religious dualism of the letter as a whole. Nothing so reveals the destructive power of speech than the cursing of another human. Nothing so vividly reveals double-mindedness than to have that curse proceed from the same mouth that blesses God. The theme of “doubleness” is then developed by a rapid series of contrasts in 3:11–12, all of which have the simple point: This ought not to be so!It is typical for James to announce themes in chapter 1 that are elaborated by later passages. James 3:1–12 obviously develops the statements found in 1:19 that everyone should be quick to hear but slow to speak, and in 1:26 that a pretense of religion without control of the tongue is worthless. The essay also pulls together a thematic interest in the proper and improper uses of speech. Before this section, we have seen several negative examples of speech: the claim that one’s temptations come from God (1:13), the greetings that are flattering to the rich and scornful of the poor (2:3–6), the careless religious discourse of those who wish well for the poor but do not help them (2:16), the superficial speech of those who claim to have faith even without deeds (2:18). After 3:1–12, we shall see other examples: judging and slandering a brother (4:11), boasting of one’s plans (4:13), grumbling against a brother (5:9). Against these negative examples, James will show the positive functions of speech in the faith community (5:12–20).All of the wisdom of the ancient Mediterranean world, both Greco-Roman and Jewish, agreed on certain points concerning the power and perils of speech. From the sages of ancient Egypt, through the biblical books of Proverbs and Sirach, to the essays of Plutarch and Seneca, there is a consensus that silence is better than speech, that hearing, not speaking, is the pathway to wisdom, that speech when necessary should be brief, that above all speech should be under control and never the expression of rage or envy. The mark of the wise person was above all control of speech (see Sir 5:13).James’s miniature essay in chap. 3 would recommend itself to the moralists of his world, not least because it so markedly demonstrates the rhetorical ideal of brevity; he manages to say a great deal in a remarkably short span of statements. His essay also contains a number of the commonplaces of his cultural context concerning speech. First among these is the importance of controlled speech for the sage or teacher (v. 1). It is striking that for the only time in this letter, James uses the first-person plural with reference to teachers, “we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.” Not only are teachers people who use speech more frequently, as public persons who have control over others, but also they are subject to temptations with regard to speech that others are not: arrogance and domination over students, anger at contradiction or opposition, slander and abuse directed toward rivals, flattery of students for the sake of popularity. Such failures were especially grievous in a culture that took teaching seriously as the modeling of virtue.Also staples of Greco-Roman moral discourse on speech are the images of the bridle, which controls the horse by controlling the horse’s mouth (v. 3), and the rudder, which enables a pilot to control by his will a mighty ship. In each of these cases, there is the contrast between the smallness of the instrument and the power it exercises. The comparison between taming wild animals and taming the tongue is also attested in this literature (vv. 7–8). And throughout these writings, we find a similar emphasis on the tongue’s power to effect both good and bad (vv. 5–6).In other ways, James’s essay diverges from the standard treatment of speech in his cultural context. In the first place, he is much more pessimistic in his evaluation of human speech. Hellenistic moralists are aware how difficult control of the tongue is, but they are fundamentally sanguine about the possibility of bringing speech into line with reason and virtue. James is not. He flatly asserts that no one can control speech (v. 8). Indeed, he personifies the tongue, as though it were an independent agent outside anyone’s control: “It makes great boasts” (v. 5 NIV; NRSV, “it boasts of great exploits”). Following the logic of v. 2—if anyone controls speech, that is a perfect person—James does not regard human perfection as possible.James also heightens the capacity of speech to do evil. His characterization of it as “a restless evil, full of deadly poison” (v. 8) is entirely negative. In James’s treatment, the tongue is almost a cosmic force set on evil. Verse 6 is very difficult to translate, but the meaning is that the tongue within our body in effect represents or constitutes the “world” that for James is inimical to God. And in a touch that will be repeated in 3:13–4:8, this opposition is seen as more than human. The tongue is a fire that is “lit from Gehenna” (NRSV and NIV, “from hell”) and itself “sets aflame the cycle of life.” As the alternative translation of the NIV and the NRSV suggests, the translation of this last part of v. 6 is difficult and disputed; the idea seems to be that the power of wicked speech can spread evil through everything in human existence. When compared to similar discourses in the Greco-Roman world, James’s discussion of speech is also more fundamentally and pervasively religious. In the Hellenistic world, silence was sometimes connected to the religious awe associated with the mysteries;23 but for the most part, attention to speech was a matter of cultivating individual virtue. Although it was recognized that speech could do harm to others, more emphasis was placed on the ridicule and shame that uncontrolled speech brought upon the loquacious person. In contrast, James makes failure to control speech the very antithesis of authentic religion (1:26). His religious framework is that of Torah. He evaluates speech in relational—that is, covenantal—terms. Human speech and action must be normed by the speech and action of God, who has chosen to become involved with humans. Human behavior, therefore, is judged not only on its capacity to perfect or to flaw an individual’s character, but above all on the way it manifests right or wrong relationships.Several aspects of James’s religious emphasis are evident in 3:1–12. The theme of double-mindedness (1:8; 4:8), for example, here takes the form of being “double-tongued.” For James, this is not merely a matter of saying one thing and doing another. When the same tongue is used both to bless God and to curse a human person who is created in the likeness of God (3:9), the allegiance by which one claims to live is betrayed in a fundamental way. There is not only moral failure here, but also sin. The theological warrant that humans are created according to God’s likeness is not derived from observation of human behavior; such an empirical survey might lead to quite different conclusions! It is rooted in the tradition and teaching of Torah (see Gen 1:26–28). Something more is at stake here than the perfection of the human sage; what is at issue is the proper mode of responding to God’s creation.When James characterizes the tongue as “inflamed by Gehenna” (3:6 NRSV note), in turn, he is saying something more than that speech is a problem to be solved. He points to the cosmic dualism that underlies the two ways of directing human freedom. In the call to conversion of 3:13–4:10, these options will be developed more fully. The power at work in the tongue is not simply one of human vice, but of a system of values that is positively at enmity with God (4:4), and can be called “demonic” (3:15). There is a larger battle here than that of an individual’s struggle for self-control; it is a battle involving spiritual allegiances. Thus when James says that his readers should be “quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger” (1:19 NRSV), he is not saying anything more than a Hellenistic philosopher would have said. But when he adds, “for [human] anger does not produce God’s righteousness” (NRSV), he adds a level of religious complexity not found in the Hellenistic literature.For James, human speech must be placed in the context of God’s Word. The readers have been told in 1:18 that they were given birth as a kind of “first fruits of his creatures” (NRSV) by “the word of truth.” Such creation imagery is found also in the present passage, with its references to the taming of the beasts and humans’ having been created in the likeness of God. They were also told in 1:21 that they were to receive the implanted word that is able to save their souls “with meekness.” Human speech is qualified by reference to the creative and saving Word of God, which is different from the wisdom of the world.To curse a fellow human being is to break out of the frame of God’s creation and God’s wisdom. It is to place oneself in the frame of competition and envy and violence and murder, which for James means to betray the purpose of creation: “From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so” (3:10). These last words convey almost a sense of despair at the human drive to distort God’s creative will. And so James concludes with a series of rhetorical questions demanding the response, “No!” All of the examples are, in fact, drawn from the order of creation. Surely no one could deny the truth that a fig tree does not yield olives (3:12). But then how could anyone endure the unnaturalness of a mouth that blesses God yet also curses a neighbor?The explicitly theological framework for James’s exhortation enables us to better understand his insistence in 3:1 that teachers would receive “greater judgment.” It is clear that he does not have in mind simply the worse shame they must suffer before human eyes if they fail in speech. He means that those who, as teachers within the Christian community, fail in the fashion he has described will receive a more severe judgment from God. This is the frame of reference for James’s readers: “So speak and so act as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty” (2:12 NRSV).24
REFLECTIONS
James’s discourse on speech is so direct and forceful that little effort is required to apply it to the specific death-dealing acts of speech within communities. James himself has already mentioned some, and he will shortly catalog others. As with so much hortatory literature, the proper response to a composition seems less reflection than confession, an acknowledgment of the many ways in which the disease so brilliantly diagnosed has infected our lives.We are, however, invited to a deeper reflection on the role of language in human double-mindedness by James’s fascinating connection between speech and creation. The clearest indication that the reader should be thinking in terms of the Genesis account is James’s reminder that humans are created according to the likeness of God (3:9), which recalls the first creation story (Gen 1:26). The mention in 3:7 of “beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature” (NRSV) that are tamed by humans also echoes Gen 1:27–28. In the second creation account, the human person is given the power of speech to name all of the living creatures (Gen 2:19). The first and most important gift distinctive to humans is this power to name, to create language, and by creating language also to continue God’s own creative activity in the world.When we realize that language is a world-creating capacity, then we begin to appreciate James’s cosmic imagery in describing its power and its peril. Even the world as it emerges moment by moment from God’s creative energy—the “given” world of natural forces and juices—is reshaped and given its meaning by human language, whose symbols enable us both to apprehend the world as meaningful and to interpret it. The power of language, then, is awesome, for it gives humans the freedom to structure human life according to “the word of truth” so that humans are “a kind of first fruits of his creatures” (1:18 NRSV), or to create a universe of meaning in which God is omitted or ignored. The real peril of the tongue is not found in the passing angry word or the incidental oath or the petty bit of slander. It is found in the creation of distorted worlds of meaning within which the word of truth is suppressed.One of the most distinctive and disturbing features of contemporary culture is the way in which language serves precisely such distorting functions. We dwell in a virtual Babel of linguistic confusion and misdirection. One need think only of the advertising industry to appreciate how pervasive is the use of language to at once deceive and seduce, to consciously create by means of words and images multiple illusions in pursuit of which other humans can spend their fortunes and their energies. Such language weaves its deceptive web with a cunning awareness of how desire, avarice, and envy can “seduce the heart” (see 1:26).We are aware as well how the slippery half-truths of advertising have become the common language of politics, where messages to the public are crafted precisely according to their ability to “sell” a candidate, where lying about and slandering opponents have become recognized as the most effective of all campaigning devices, and where political agendas are advanced by appeals to the electorate’s most primitive fears and most unworthy cravings.The language of various post-Enlightenment ideologies has also worked to flatten reality by eliminating the possibility for transcendence. The language of the so-called social sciences in particular has shaped a world in which human freedom is reduced to a statistical co-efficient and the human spirit is reduced to a function of brain chemistry or social forces. But if language shapes reality, the result of such reductionism is a world in which transcendence is matter-of-factly denied, and in which God’s claim on the world appears as ludicrous as tales of UFOs.Indeed, more than at any previous time, we have become conscious of the power of speech to shape the world we inhabit and thereby also to shape human experience. The emergence of feminism within Christian communities has heightened such consciousness. Women are increasingly aware of how, in the Genesis story, it is “Adam” who is given the power to name, not only the animals but even his female partner. With the power to name comes the power to control, and men have shaped by language a world that in many ways has excluded women and their experience. Now women claim their legitimate share in the “image of God” that is the power to speak. They insist that just as all humans bear God’s image, so also should language itself be broad and flexible enough to include all human experience. Although during the present period of transition relations between the genders are understandably stressful, the opening of language—and thereby of the world—to the creative and powerful contributions of half the human population must surely be regarded as a blessing and a positive receiving “with meekness” of the “implanted word” given to humans by God (1:21). And although communities may in the present period find themselves divided over the legitimacy or propriety of using inclusive language in texts and worship and even in speech to and about God, it must be said that, however painful, this linguistic stretching represents the positive suffering that results from growth rather than the negative suffering that results from suppression.If, as James has led us to reflect, human language is such a potent instrument for the continuation of God’s creative work, as well as for the misshaping of God’s purpose for humanity, several corollaries suggest themselves. The first is that we have an obligation to pay attention to the language we use. The language of faith is not something that can be taken for granted, but must be nurtured. The second is that, even as we preserve the language of faith against those tendencies of the world that seek to shape reality apart from God, so must we work to keep our language open to the mystery of God’s self-disclosure, which never ceases and which encounters us above all in human experience. Our awareness that language can both enable and suppress human creativity is a call to maintain freshness, flexibility, and poetic power within the language of faith, so that all God’s people can find its experience of God reflected within it.Finally, as James 3:1 insists, those who have the special task of shaping theological language within the church—not only the academic theologian but above all the preacher and teacher in each community—also bear the greater responsibility for keeping the language of faith alive. If, on the one hand, their preaching is little more than a lightly baptized form of psychobabble, then they have simply taken into the pulpit the language of the world, which rejects God’s measure. But if, on the other hand, their language is nothing more than a rigid and doctrinaire biblicism, then they run the risk of deadening the language by closing it from the experience of God in human experience. The maintenance of the language is a difficult but necessary responsibility of Christian teachers. Those who cannot bear this greater judgment should not take on the role.
Luke Timothy Johnson, “The Letter of James,” in New Interpreter’s Bible, ed. Leander E. Keck, vol. 12 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994–2004), 202–207.
Thank you Jesse for your answer. It was very useful. Blessings!
Your welcome brother. God's blessings be with you.
