Towards An Ethic of Speaking.

The Gossip Painting, Albert Edelfelt

If there's a tough discipline in listening well, there's an even more rigorous discipline in speaking well. No, not diction and articulation; not rhetorical power and verbal agility; not virtuoso semantics and linguistic improvisation. Speaking well is a different word game. I mean an ethic of speaking; the moral control and relational healthiness of our conversation; knowing when to speak and what to say, and when to be silent; and therefore a self-imposed quality control on our use of words.

Every year I choose a couple of Bible books to live with and engage with through the year, in the hope that deep and faithful engagement with the text will lead to a deep and faithful living of the text. This year it's the letter of James and the book of Ruth. More of Ruth later. But having just read James for the umpteenth time, it's hard to miss the fact that he has quite a lot to say about an ethical and spiritual underpinning of our use of words. In Chapter 3 James gets to the point, bluntly:         

Not many of you should become teachers, my fellow believers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.We all stumble in many ways. Anyone who is never at fault in what they say is perfect, able to keep their whole body in check.

Let everyone be quick to hear, slow to speak and slow to anger (1.19)

No I can't claim to be never at fault in what I say. In fact most of the time, being realistic, I'd settle for being a bit less at fault in what I say. A major study of James is titled Speech Ethics in the Epistle of James, near 400 pages of careful and penetrating exegesis of a text which has 32 ethical imperatives, and 28 of them are to do with speech.

Probably just as well James didn't have to contend with Facebook, Twitter and Emails in first Century Palestine. It's a cultural commonplace that these three modern media formats give a freedom of speech that has enormous potential for good and for harm. An agreed and supported ethic of speaking, writing, and social communication is hard to achieve, and yet the audience for what we say is larger than ever, and more immediate across distance, than even we might have imagined twenty years ago. So it's an interesting piece of speculation, "What would the Wisdom writers of Proverbs and James have advised would be Tweeters and image constructing Facebook users, about the use and abuse of social media?" That I need to think about a bit more.

Which raised the idea that each Wednesday for a while I'll do a post on the wisdom of James. The letter that is, not yours truly.