James 5 - IVP New Testament Commentaries

How Can We Identify the Rich in the Epistle of James?

There is a fundamental difference between any word and that which is signified by the word. The complexity of the difference is multiplied when whole sentences are involved, and then multiplied many times over with paragraphs, letters, essays or entire books. There is additional difference, and therefore an automatic communication gap, between the writers themselves and even their most immediate readers. The gap is widened still more when there are years or centuries between writers and readers.

Both phenomenology and deconstruction have so founded their modern theories of interpretation on this rupture between word and meaning, between writer and reader, that meaning in a given message has become viewed as indeterminate. This results in a contemporary skepticism regarding the possibility of knowing the true meaning of any text; and it makes the task of biblical hermeneutics all the more urgent for Christians today. If our discussions of interpretive problems in the biblical text are, in the end, nothing more than assertions of personal opinion ("Well, I think the passage means this . . ."), then we are conceding the crucial arguments of interpretive skepticism. We may as well agree: truth is relative; communication is subjective; the establishment of meaning is hopelessly lost in the gap between the biblical writer and the modern reader.

It is not that we have to be able to resolve every interpretive difficulty with an absolutely clear solution. Some aspects of certain biblical texts may remain obscure. Yet we need to be prepared to demonstrate by careful procedure whether we have hermeneutical principles and tools by which we can bridge the gap and arrive at sound conclusions about the original, intended meaning of a biblical text. Do our hermeneutical tools yield results?