Henry Krabbendam - James - World Evangelical Alliance

All this should under no circumstance be toned down, either by easing
off on the “world of evil,” or by calling it an added “gloss” (Dibelius, 195).
No, it pollutes and corrupts man’s total being. In general, it rapidly torches
everything in its way, violently destroys everything combustible in its path,
aggressively consumes the entire course of man’s life, one’s own as well as
that of others, and always seems to have enough fire power to accomplish
whatever it sets out to do, ever fueled by the fire of hell, the residence of Satan
(Keddie, 110-111; Manton, 285-286, with reference to Eccl. 5:6).
However, whatever interpretation one chooses, sum total or focal point
of the universe of wickedness, the message is self-evident. It is a devastating
indictment! Here comes the unstoppable Attila the Hun in his destructive
conquest. There goes the doomed Titanic to the bottom of the ocean. Hiroshima,
here today, gone today! The tongue is a one member wrecking crew
that leaves a mind-boggling devastation in its wake. It turns the whole body
into a garbage dump! This message must be received in faith as the diagnosis
of God himself. It is the testimony and assessment of his inerrant Scripture. 283
While the term “body” signifies the individual’s body (the exposition of the
text), it is not improper to conclude that the tongue on a rampage in the
church leaves in that context a similar devastation in its wake (the significance
of the text). After all, while a text has one meaning, it may have many
applications (Johnson, 259).
In greater detail, the operational activity of the tongue as a fire, representing
the world of iniquity, extends to man’s whole personality, “the whole
sphere of human life” (Mitton, 128), the total range of man’s existence as
well as the entire course of his life (literally “the wheel, or circle, of human
existence”). 284 As the concentration point of the unrighteous world it defiles
283 It has been suggested that the text is corrupt, and that the original does not designate the
tongue as the world of wickedness. But this suggestion has been strongly rejected, and properly
so (Martin, 114). Any attempt to water down Scripture ought to be resisted.
284 Dibelius, 196-198, translates the Greek original, trochos tees geneseoos, with “cycle of
becoming,” and points out that the only way to escape this “revolving cycle” is by means of
“the ascent to the intellectual form of the soul.” The dialectic of the one-and-the-many, of the
simultaneous mutual presupposition and exclusion of universality and particularity is in clear
evidence. However, Scripture wants to have nothing to do with this dialectic. The culprit is
neither “the one” nor “the many” (metaphysical), but man’s total depravity that is everywhere
in evidence (ethical). In this context Nystrom, 190, portrays human depravity as a force that
“echoes down the generations,” and defines it in the words of the film, Train Spotting,” as “a
full speed plunge into the hissing cauldron of lust followed by a soothing pickling in the
juices of self-love.” This scenario surely differs from the Greek view of “man and things.”
Grosheide, 1955, 386-387, heads in the same direction as Nystrom with his explanation of
trochos tes geneseoos. He interprets it as a standing Greek expression that takes its cue from a
device (“scheprad”) that goes endlessly round and round for the purposes of supplying water
in an irrigation project. The device consists of a number of buckets. In their upward trajectory
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