to renunciation in the sense of killing out the sense of separateness and developing disinterested love is the essence of all true religion.”10
James, then, is tackling a grave misapprehension of what constitutes the nature of Christian religion. It is currently fashionable in some evangelical circles to contrast Jesus with “religion,” conveniently undefined and forgetful that Jesus attended synagogue and revered the Temple as his “Father’s house.” It has also become a cliché in formally non-religious contexts to speak of being “spiritual but not religious,” as if these two terms have clearly defined meanings and can be legitimately placed in opposition to one another. But neither of these constructed rivalries (Jesus vs. religion and spirituality vs. religion) would have made any sense to James or to Jesus, both of whom were observant Jews and both of whom taught that religion is primarily an interior (“spiritual”) reality.
James’s concern is certainly not whether or not one can rightly call Christ’s message “religious”—for him, that can never be in doubt—but, rather, whether or not the recipients of his letter can be said actually to be practicing the religion of Jesus or only paying lip service to it. When James reprimands them for a show of formalism masquerading as “faith,” for having unbridled tongues, for judging and condemning others, for sucking up to the rich and powerful and disdaining the poor (among whom he numbers himself and all followers of Jesus), and so on, he is in fact striking at a series of manifestations of a single recurrent blight on Christian life: false religion. For James, Christ taught true religion, “pure and undefiled,” and indeed it is visible only in the exercising of (to borrow Radhakrishnan’s phrase) “disinterested [i.e., nondiscriminatory] love”—the sort of love Jesus referred to when he said, “So be perfect [which, in context, means ‘be perfect’ in showing love], as your Heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt 5:48). A “religion” that does not demonstrate active care for “the least” (cf. Matt 25:40, 45) and throws aside self-discipline is in its essence false, impure, and defiled. And no amount of “correct theological opinions” can make it true or clean or, in James’s terms, alive.
James is at odds, therefore, with a merely intellectualized religiousness—indeed, with a “theology” that is mostly otherworldly and abstract, that resides in ideas and opinions and goes no deeper, the sort of “theology” that doesn’t leave the study or the lecture hall or one’s own cerebrations: “You have faith [belief] that God is one? You are doing well. Even the daemonic beings have that faith, and they tremble.” (Jas 2:19) His focus is on the things that make for one’s inner purification: “But, if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask for it from the God who gives to all unreservedly and without reproach, and it will be given to him . . . . Every good act of giving and every perfect gift is from above, descending from the Father of the Luminaries, with whom there is no alternation or shadow of change. Having so resolved, he gave birth to us by a word of truth, so that we should be a kind of firstfruits from among his creatures.” (Jas 1:5, 17–18)
As noted above, James is a moralist in the purest sense. He clearly regards genuine religion as integrally ethical in nature. Mystical experience and doctrinal expertise are barren without moral effort and transformation. There is no distinction between justification and sanctification. Faith is made evident by one’s praxis. Again, in words that are meant to hit his readers hard, “faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead” (Jas 2:17). For James, there can be no equivocation on this point. He means, quite simply, that what is left of one’s “religion,” sans practical goodness, loving acts, and, in short, the ethical dimension is nothing but a hollow shell, a thing in decay. A mere intellectual assent to a credo (“I believe . . .”) is not enough. It must become a living thing that bears fruit.
Through his exhortations James seeks to raise “the dead.” That is to say, he urges his hearers to awake and abandon behaviors that are redolent of an unrecognized spiritual death. One need only note his recurring “death” language: the unbridled tongue is “a restless evil full of lethal venom” (Jas 3:8); the unruly passions cause his hearers to “murder” and “fight and wage war” (Jas 4:2); the riches of the rich “will eat [their] flesh like fire” on the day of their judgment because, in this life, they “have gorged [their] hearts on a day of slaughter” and “have condemned—have murdered—the upright man” (Jas 5:3, 5–6). James believes that even among those who profess faith, the seeds of spiritual death can still sprout: “But everyone is tempted by his own desire, being drawn away and enticed; this desire, having conceived, gives birth to sin, and sin fully grown bears death as its offspring.” (Jas 1:14–15) He concludes his epistle with this admonition: “Be aware that the one who turns a sinner back from the error of his way will save his soul from death and will cover over a multitude of sins” (Jas 5:20). And this is precisely what James himself is doing throughout his letter—trying to turn sinners back from their error and cover their sins. He is saving them from death.
“Death” in James’s use of the word is, as I have said, primarily a spiritual condition, or—better—an anti-Spiritual condition. It is akin to the Gospel of John’s warning that one is either reborn or else “perishing” (e.g., the oft-quoted John 3:16). “Spirit” is a word that means literally “breath,” and it is breath that gives life; thus we have James’s peculiar analogy, which to our ears may sound backwards: “For just as the body without spirit [breath] is dead, so also faith without works is dead” (Jas 2:26). Surely, we might argue, he must mean the reverse: after all, works seem to us to be corporeal, while faith is regarded as interior and spiritual. But, not so, says James. Faith, as he sees it, is a body that must be animated, become ensouled, a skeletal framework of truths that must be enfleshed and in-spirited in order to move and touch and heal those with whom it comes in contact. Thus works—visible and loving and reaching out to others, so displaying goodness in action—are what make faith a living reality to those whom it encounters. The shadow side of Christianity in every age has been its all-too-frequent tendency to look beautiful, sound lovely, speak boldly, announce its charitable principles, while meanwhile displaying in its behavior and complicity with the world—“the cosmos” of ungodly hierarchies and falsehoods—the very antithesis of its authentic message. This is true today and it was already true in James’s day. To such a condition, he speaks roughly: “You adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the cosmos is enmity with God? Whoever therefore resolves to be a friend of the cosmos is rendered an enemy of God.” (Jas 4:4) And he adds, once again referring to the Spirit/breath of life struggling within us to enliven the body of a possibly moribund professed faith: “Or do you think it in vain that the scripture says, ‘The spirit that has dwelt within us yearns to the point of envy?’” (Jas 4:5).
It is precisely this animating Spirit “yearning within us” to which I wish to draw our attention throughout this commentary, implicitly if not explicitly. As we have seen already, and will see over and over again, whenever James puts his stress on ethics and works in the life of Jesus’ disciples, he is in fact stressing the Spirit that breathes that life into them. Here alone, James is warning us, is true religion to be found.
As already mentioned, and as will be addressed throughout this commentary, it appears that James was responding to a misunderstood and misapplied Paulinism, one that depreciated corporal works (and thus ethics) as nonessential to salvation. In principle this was a twisting of Paul’s teachings, which—contrary to what Paul actually had intended—mistook “justification by faith” to mean a relaxation of sustained effort to adhere to the moral law. Paul himself, rabbi that he was, had rigorously maintained the moral demands of faith, as every one of his letters demonstrates. A perverted version of Paul’s teachings, however, appears to be what James seeks to rectify in his encyclical.
James’s historical context notwithstanding, the concerns he articulates in his letter are timeless. His epistle is as relevant in our day as it was in his own, and certainly it is just as important for us to heed as any of Paul’s letters. I will be bold enough to mention both here and later that we even need James to temper some of the unfortunate rhetoric we find in Paul, rhetoric
