>The Letter of James
a pastoral commentary
Addison Hodges Hart
THE LETTER OF JAMES
A Pastoral Commentary
Copyright © 2018 Addison Hodges Hart. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Cascade Books
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-5014-7
hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-5015-4
ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-5016-1
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Names: Hart, Addison Hodges, author.
Title: The letter of James : a pastoral commentary / Addison Hodges Hart.
Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018 | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: isbn 978-1-5326-5014-7 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-5326-5015-4 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-5326-5016-1 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Bible. James—Commentary.
Classification: BS2785.53 .H365 2018 (print) | BS2785.53 2018 (ebook)
Manufactured in the U.S.A. October 25, 2018
Dedicated with great affection to my son Addison
and to my daughter Anna.
Each of you has given me great joy in life, and my wish for you both is abundance of peace, serenity, happiness, familial love, and full lives.
“Do not explain your philosophy. Embody it.”
- Epictetus
“To understand is easy; to practice is hard.”
- Bankei
Introduction
This is a pastoral commentary. By that I mean that its primary focus is on the practical concerns of people seeking to live according to the gospel that Jesus proclaimed. I do not consider myself a theologian or scholar in the academic sense. For years, however, my vocation was that of a priest, pastor, and college chaplain, and this commentary on the Letter of James reflects my training and experience in those capacities. It is not addressed to the scholarly community, although I rely on what I have gleaned from it. It is primarily addressed to those—lay and ordained—who are actively engaged in building vital Christian communities.
James’s letter is itself a thoroughly pastoral letter. Like the teachings of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels, it is short on theory and long on pragmatics. It virtually eschews the merely conceptual and abstract (“You have faith that God is one? You are doing well. Even the daemonic beings have that faith, and they tremble”; Jas 2:19). It is concerned with religion, as we shall see below, and religion for James refers to how we live our lives.
James is a moralist in the best sense of that word. He is not given to “moralism”—to mere nagging or scolding—although he does excoriate those whom he believes deserve it. The rich, those who judge others, those who abuse others with their tongues—these, for example, come in for very strong words. But he is a moralist in the strict sense that he defends the morals that Jesus taught. His letter is, in spirit, a moral corrective. We forget sometimes that Jesus, as he is presented in the first three Gospels, did not preach mainly about himself, but about “the kingdom of God.” By that phrase he meant a distinctive way of life, one that intentionally cuts against the grain of the world’s (and the individual’s) greed, power, lust, and exploitation of others. Jesus, then, was a moralist and James follows in his footsteps.
So this is a pastoral commentary on a pastoral epistle. My intention is to apply this letter to our contemporary communities, by first keeping a close eye on what James was saying to his own contemporaries. I will state here at the outset that the New Testament is not a monolithic “book” with a single portrait of Jesus and a single systematic theology. Like the Old Testament, it is a collection that presents us with differing voices and a variety of perspectives surrounding a central faith. None of the individual writers/editors whose work is included within it were writing “New Testament theology,” but were instead addressing disciples who came from a variety of places and backgrounds and that faced various problems from without and within their communities. So it is that, say, the Gospel of John differs in its understanding of Jesus’ person and message from Matthew’s. The book of Revelation presents a picture of a warrior Jesus who looks quite different than the Jesus in Luke who prays that his Father forgive his executioners. Paul’s Christology differs from Mark’s. And so on. That the New Testament coheres for us is, in great part, because we have been taught in our ecclesiastical contexts to see it that way.
As we shall discuss below, the Letter of James stands out as a counter in some ways to a “gospel about Jesus” because—paradoxically, perhaps—it is so faithful to the gospel of Jesus. Paul and the Johannine writings, we must admit, are examples of the former. Jesus becomes for both “the gospel,” as it were. For James, however, “the gospel” is not about Jesus—rather, it is about the “religion,” the way of life, which Jesus taught us to live concretely.
With that provocative thought in mind, then, I propose to explore the background of this letter more deeply and the man who wrote it.
I.
Preliminaries
Martin Luther’s assessment of the Letter of James as “an epistle of straw” is, of course, almost a cliché. But, having mentioned it here, it’s also right to note that he withdrew the remark later. By “straw” he meant that the letter was useful for very little, if anything really. It was of a weak quality and not fit for building anything of lasting worth. This harsh assessment appeared only once, in the original version of Luther’s Preface to the New Testament (1522), as part of a paragraph that also made judgments about other New Testament books. Thinking better of it later, Luther struck the comment, along with the entire paragraph in which it appeared, from the text in subsequent editions of his Bible.
The reformer’s chief difficulty with James, which (despite his editing out the remark) he never abandoned, was that James did not express what he considered to be the most essential message about Christ. For Luther what was lacking was the good news itself. He asserted, and he went on asserting throughout his lifetime, that the Letter of James and the letters of Paul could not be reconciled. He did concede (surely backhanded praise, given Luther’s views) that James was “a good book” because it set forth the law of God. By saying that it was an epistle of law, however, he was unmistakably implying that it was not a proclamation of the gospel—which, for Luther, was summed up in the phrase “justification by faith alone.” There was irony in this, for—as Luther could not help but
