James 3 - The tongue

[zulubump]

Hi there, I started the thread about a week ago saying I was struggling with church - thanks for all the helpful replies I got. I'm feeling much better generally about things now. While I am still lacking people I can discuss church/Bible stuff with I thought I'd post some of the things I am confused about on here, if people are up for helping me out with it!

Some months ago one of our lay-preachers gave a service on James 3, which left me feeling angry. In it James describes the tongue as being "evil and uncontrollable, full of deadly poison". I found the service and this bit of the Bible to be very negative and unhelpful. I can see the sense in warning people to be careful of what they say and that words can be very harmful. But surely words can do just as much good! Why say the tongue is FULL of poison and uncontrollable - surely complete exaggeration. The preacher seemed to enjoy emphasising how bad the tongue was and generally talking to us like a room full of naughty children and even told us that texting OMG was blasphemous. It left me feeling unfairly accused of something.

It's things like this that really turn me off church for a bit until I remember that there are good things too.

Sounds like the speaker was a bit of a negative control freak to me. However it is a serious passage with a warning. We can hurt and praise in the same breath, love and gossip about in the same day. It's in us all, and I guess that James is so outspoken about it to help us get this point. James was writing in a context, and in that context there was loads of bitter talk and people backbiting and backstabbing, loads of gossip, slander, and he was bloody angry with them, which was why he was highlighting this in an extreme way.

James' big emphasis throughout the book is personal holiness, and about how we behave being important as well as the grace of God - the whole faith and works thing. He sees holiness as integral to relationship with God, so is suggesting to his readers they look at every area of their life, to take holiness seriously.

I haven't got more time now as doing tea but will have more of a ponder....hth a little so far.

I can understand his point about OMG, as I personally always translate this in my head as 'Oh my God' which you shouldn't really be saying. [I know I just did, but wouldn't make a habit of it, and am trying to teach my 5 year old not to say it either].

I think you have to take the whole Bible together. Some of it is very encouraging, of course the main message that our sins are forgiven by God's grace is the most amazing! Other bits are there to help us to be more holy (as the post above suggested). You can't live your life by 1 verse or 1 sermon, but rather take the challenges and the encouragement and try your best!

Thanks for these replies. I do really struggle with the Bible. I find it frustrating that there is often a wider context that I don't know about and so can't fully appreciate the meaning of most of it. I read bits like this part and just end up feeling hurt that I am thought of as such a bad person with a tongue full of poison. How is God's word supposed to be understood by everyday people like me who get to hear bits and pieces this way and have no way of putting together the bigger picture. Why didn't He give us a better guide? Sorry, bit of a rant. I do seem to end up feeling like an angry child when it comes to the Bible!

Hello Zulubump!

I'm not on MN much these days but I am training to be a C of E vicar and have done some work on the letter of James, which I personally love! I wonder if a little bit of background might help...

James is often described as a Christian-Jewish wisdom book - there's a lot in there about wisdom (like, 'if any of you lacks wisdom, you shuold ask God who gives generously'). Like the Hebrew (Old Testament) wisdom books, like Proverbs, there's an emphasis on wisdom being shown by what you say. Proverbs has got loads of interesting things about speech in there - one of the strongest statements being that 'the tongue has power of life and death', which is obvoiusly, literally true in cultures with the death penalty. It's still true, but less obviously, all the time. You just have to think of some of the awful stories about bullying to know how true this is.

So James is standing in this wisdom tradition, and using pretty similar language to Proverbs to talk about the power of speech. With all respect to your lay preacher, I think it's not so much about saying OMG but it's more to do with the big issue in James' letter, which basicall ycomes down to 'You call yourself a Christian? Show it by the way you treat other people'. One of my favourite verses in James says 'do you with your acts of favouritism really believe in the Lord Jesus Christ of glory?' I love James because it's all about living out Christian faith in community, by loving and serving each other regardless of status or wealth. So I think that the stuff about the devastating effects of speech is about Christians speaking badly of each other and failing to love each other.

As someone who's pretty much always been a member of the church, I hate it so much when people gossip, and bitch about each other behind people's backs. It makes me really angry tbh, and I'm glad that there's a Biblical writer who's angry about it too. It hooks into the theme in Paul's letters about being the 'body of Christ'; if we really understand that we are the body of Christ, and individually are members of it, we start to see that bitching about someone else in your church is so destructive not only to them but to the whole community, ourselves included. There's one line in the letter to the Galatians where Paul says 'If you're going to bite each other, take care tht you don't end up devouring each other' and I think that's much the same thing that James is getting at.

I love talking about the Bible so if you have anything ele you want to talk about, do post!

One last thing Zulubump - when I started my training, I realised how good it is to read whole books of the Bible in one go, rather than broken down into little bite-size chunks like most of us do in church. I can see why we do that, but originally all of the New Testament books were designed to be heard aloud, in one sitting, so that the hearers get a sense of it overall. James takes about 20 mins to read, so it's well worth the time, and there's some beautiful poetry in there. I'd really recommend this with most books of the Bible. I once read the book of Job in the bath!

Great post Clockface :) Where are you training?

zulu - I can recommend the Tom Wright series of books 'for everyone' - so there is Matthew for Everyone etc, all the books of the NT, and he goes through them explaining the context in everyday language, looking at each verse at a time and thinking about what it may mean to us here now - they are really useful for grappling with some of the more difficult verses, which when you read them in their context you realise they're not really difficult. I guess my take on it is God has given us intelligence to think about these issues - hasn't made it simple for us, but given voices to people like Tom Wright who can set it all out and we can then engage with it. I wonder if the Bible would lose some of its wonderful mystery if it was ABC ish?

Here you go Tom Wright For Everyone series

MadHairy, I'm at Oxford, at the college out in the sticks and high on the hill, if that means anything to you!

Those 'for everyone' books are pretty good, eh? The church needs people like Wright.

Hi zulu. I think what you said about feeling hurt when you see 'criticisms' (such as the tongue being full of poison, or the heart being deceitful etc.) really rang a bell with me. I hate being criticised by anyone, and I am very critical of myself/ rather insecure about being an amazing person or feeling loved. I know, for example, if my dh and I are not going through a good patch and he has a moan about the state of the house, that I will respond a lot more badly than if we are close, and I am feeling very loved by him. In those circumstances I feel like, "Yes, he has a point, I'll try and tidy up a bit". In the previous circumstances I overreact, blow up, feel like I've been hit in the stomach by his comment, feel unloved and alienated from him. (Can you tell I've been there a few times? )

Perhaps if you really ground yourself in the fact that God loves you incredibly and thinks you, you in particular, are totally amazing, then the 'negative' things would be easier to take because they're really negligible. Here's a couple of my favourite verses:

?Can a mother forget the baby at her breast
and have no compassion on the child she has borne?
Though she may forget,
I will not forget you!
See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands;
your walls are ever before me.
(Isaiah 49:15-16)

For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother?s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
(Psalm 139:13-14)

I've certainly felt like you about the Bible, that it can be confusing (there can be so many different and very sincere opinions), but I always come back to the fact that it is also incredibly powerful.

Hi everyone, thank you so much for your time and help. I do find it so touching that people I've never met will take the trouble to help me try and understand this stuff.

Clockface, thank you for all the information. I'd be interested to know, if you were to give a talk (sermon/service? - not sure of the right lingo!) on this bit of James how would you approach it? As far as I know there isn't any bad gossiping at our church, but then I'm not all that close to many people, so maybe I am missing something. It just felt so strange to me, having spent a pleasant morning with my family, to come in to what felt like a verbal attack for abusing the power of speech. No context, just bluntly being told about the evil powers of the tongue. And no discussion of how the converse it true, that the things we say can be powerful in a positive way too! Sorry, I am still outraged!

MadHair, thanks for what looks like another good book recommendation. Amazon will be doing well out of me, thanks to you! I've often thought how it seems odd that the very people who might need God the most are perhaps the least likely to be able to make sense of the Bible. I worked for a couple of years teaching basic literacy and numeracy to adults with little or no qualifications. Many of them had very sad and lonely lives. I guess it's another one of my big doubts - why is the Bible so hard to make sense of if God really wants to be accessible to all of us, regardless of race, education, ability etc?

MerryMarigold, I think you have certainly hit on something there. I can't say that I feel sure of God's love for me. I think sometimes I feel it, maybe, but it easily evaporates. And reading or hearing about things in the Bible that I don't like just scares me and makes me think I don't know God at all.

Anyway, at the moment I feel committed to keep searching. I might disappear for a bit because our computer has been playing up and we might take it off to a shop for a service this weekend. I'll be back!

Good question, Zulubump!

I think if I were giving a talk on James I'd emphasise the background to the book - we don't know for sure when / where it was written but it's fair to say that it was probably written in Jerusalem (even more a hotbed of religious / political unrest then than it is now) early on after Jesus' death - probably around the same time that Paul was writing his letters - maybe in the 50s. So Christianity is a young Jewish sect among lots of other Jewish sects at that time. And what James is really getting at, is what marks the Christian out? How do we show our faith in the way we live?

Part of his answer (not all of it) is how we speak. I'd emphasise the wisdom background, esp. the idea that we have the power of choice over our words and we can either choose to bring life to people or to say things that can make people die inside. I really do believe that words are among the most powerful things in the world - I reckon it was Winston Churchill's speeches that got Britain through WW2. I still get goosebumps listening to Martin Luther King saying 'I have a dream.' We can do such enormous good with our words, and such dreadful wrong. So that's a big responsibility, and we need to ask God for wisdom (as it says in James 1). (I did some work recently on 'Speech Act Theory'; the idea that we do things with words. I'm also really interested in socio-linguistics, so this is right up my street!)

So yes, that's kind of what I'd want to say, really. There's a lovely quote by Karl Barth (theologian writing from the 1920s - 1960s) who says something along the lines of 'it's in the coures of speaking that our character, as humans, is formed; we become what we say'. Also Jesus talks about how it's not what goes into a person that makes them unclean (he was talking about kosher food) but what comes out of them (in speech). So yes, I see that as a huge challenge, and somehing that we all need God's wisdom and help with. Something that we'll never get sorted, but we will always be aspiring to - we all mess up, we all say things then kick ourselves. But as Christians it's our duty to do the best we can to show our faith by speaking in a loving way, to forgive and say that we forgive (Hard!!!), to use our words to enhance others' lives.

Does that help at all?

Clockface, thanks for your thoughtful response. I think I'd like what you have to say about speech (more than what James has to say!). I think what I disagree with in James is that he is so overly negative about our tongues, saying that they are full of poison and basically that no good can come out of them at all. I appreciate that the people he was addressing had been behaving very badly, but surely what he was telling them would leave them with the the attitude of "what's the point in trying to be better people if it's impossible". Like telling a child repeatedly that they are bad or naughty - they begin to believe it and think they are incapable of being good. Why didn't James remind them of the positive power of speech and try to uplift them to the idea of using their speech to heal and create harmony etc.

Also, the bit where he says "out of the same mouth come praise and cursing.. this should not be... fresh and salt water can't come from the same spring..". What does he mean by that? I took it to mean that if bad things come from the tongue then it's impossible that good can also come from the tongue. Maybe I've misunderstood, I don't know. Sorry if I sound ranty, I don't mean to be. I do find myself getting angry about bits in the Bible where I disagree with whats being said, but I do want to understand more.

I've thought a bit more, Zulubump, and actually I don't think that the people James was talking to had been badly behaved. James 3 starts with the phrase 'not many of you should become teachers, because you know that you we who teach will be judged with greater strictness, for all of us make many mistakes...' and it's on that basis that he launches into his stuff about the power of words.

So I wonder if what he's getting at is the power of words in the mouths of a religious teacher, as opposed to a believer who is not in that position of responsibility. If you read through James you'll see that he throws in loads of references to various Old Testament stories - he's writing to people who know their tradition (probably anachronistic to say 'they know their Bible')and aspire to teach others. I think that James is witing to these would-be teachers as a kind of apostle-prophet-sage, using the prophetic and wisdom traditions of the Old Testament which are both pretty well known for exaggeration (or hyperbole if you prefer) for the sake of getting the point across. So this can be read as a warning of the power of a spiritual leader - some people think that James was writing as a kind of counter-balance to Paul who was all for having people teach the Christian faith. Maybe James was a bit more conservative - he was certainly very keen that would-be leaders' lives matched up to their words. It's a really interesting question, and what we make of it is interesting!

One of the things I love in James is when he says that the 'word' (the Hebrew Scriptures) is like a mirror. there's so much truth in that - what we see in the Bible, and the way we react to it, reflects us as much as it does God (although some Christians would disagree with me / James on that one and say that it's all about God).

That's an interesting take clockface. I wonder if the guy who was giving the sermon was aware of that interpretation. The way he spoke he certainly seemed to regard the congregation as if we may be full of deadly poison!

I recently bought one of the books recommended on here - a Tom Wright one on John. I am struggling a bit at the moment tbh tho. I went to church today for the first time in a few weeks and am feeling a bit like I'll never fit in and I'll never feel totally comfortable with the Christian faith. I really need to find some people in RL to talk these things over with, but just not sure who to approach. Ho hum.

I was reading about James the other day Zulubump and thought of you!

One interesting thing is that in the 1st century the very strict Jewish sects were super strict about lying - in the community that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls, the punishment for lying was to be expelled from the community for 6 months - that is, without any money, possessions, home. So James is no stricter than others.

Enjoy the book on John! Wright is pretty good. I know I'm not a RL person (well, I am, but you know what I mean! ) but if you want to talk God stuff, here is not a bad place really. Some churches are better than others at allowing people to doubt / question / want to go deeper, so it might be a case of working out where you are going to be happiest. THere are some very good courses that churches run, not just Alpha, or some churches have more informal study gropus whch look at a bit of the Bible / some other such.

Just to add my support to Clockface's too - I'm around if you want to talk through more of this stuff - what do you feel you are particularly struggling with at the moment?

Thanks Clockface and madhairday for your support. I've just come back from a talk with a lady from church who is trained as a Christian counsellor. I'd asked her last Sunday if I could meet her for a chat as there are quite a few things I've felt upset about over the last year or so and they were building up in my head with no one to talk them over with. It was quite scary going cos I knew I'd up in floods of tears, which I did.

Anyway, at the moment the main issues for me are Hell and original sin. I can't deal with the idea of a God that would send us to a never ending Hell. I have been reading the Rob Bell and finding it very uplifting. But has also brought to my attention that most Christians, I guess, don't agree with him. And the idea they might be right is very scary. The lady I spoke to at church hadn't heard of the ideas in the Rob Bell book and was probably a bit doubtful I think.

My issues with original sin started when I went to a service just before I was due to have my son. The preacher started off by reading out part of an article in a newspaper in which the writer had the opinion that we all start off life as basically good and that the things that happen to us along the way influence whether we end up doing good or evil things. He then threw the paper aside stating that was rubbish. I can't remember his exact words but he seemed to be saying that we all start off as bad/evil at heart and the only way to be saved is through Jesus. It made me so sad to think of my young children in that way. I guess I think of all humans as being good and loving at heart, but unable to live up to behaving that way a lot of the time due to our limits of being able to cope with things like stress, illness, social pressure etc. And i think of God as the way (or a way at least) of overcoming those limitations. That through his strength we can get closer to behaving how he would want.

Anyway, sorry for having totally strayed off from my OP. I don't know where all this is leading. I'm quite afraid that all this questioning will just lead to me being an atheist! Thanks for your support in helping me work through these questions.

I have a lot of time for Rob Bell and use his 'Nooma' DVDs for my womens group. I love his new book and think a lot of Christians should read it and be challenged about how we think. that can never be a bad thing. There are some who are vehemently against it but I find it difficult to understand what it is they are against. Bell mainly asks questions, and doesn't make dogmatic statements. It gets you thinking, engaging, talking.

As for that preacher. Hmmm. I find that a negative way of talking about things. I prefer to turn it round and say actually, we are all made in the image of God. What does that make us? Glorious. Good. Wonderful. Loving. all that is good. (and that is a much better way of thinking about it in terms of what you said about your DCs - that actually, this is what they are. How amazing are they?) - and then to say but something went wrong. Sin marred the image. Rebellion against God meant that we messed up this image in us, but it's still there, and you can see it throughout humanity, in every race, creed, colour, age, you can see that image in love, in relationship, in care. You can see it all over MN. And you can see the marred image, the rebellion, too. They are in tension and some display rebellion more than others. But looking at our delightful DCs, what do we see? We see beauty and innocence, we see God's image. (And we often see rebellion, yes DD it's you I'm talking about )

Does that make sense as a better way to see it? That God sent his son to restore this image in us....so our freedom comes in being made more like Jesus, who was like God in perfection, but that we can do this because the image was always there in us?

(I know, too much Rob Bell, and all that)