James, Wisdom, Torah
How I read a difficult letter
The letter of James is a puzzle. It's been a puzzle for a long time. We're going to begin today's reflection with Martin Luther, who is famous (on this topic) supposedly wanting to remove it from the New Testament. That's not exactly accurate. He did call it an 'epistle of straw', which he meant in comparison to other NT books, and drawing upon the imagery of 1 Cor 3:12-13. For Luther, James’ epistle was a 2nd-tier text in the NT (along with Hebrews, Jude, and Revelation), because it wasn't apostolic and didn't have enough gospel in it. He nonetheless preached through it five times.
I think this goes to the heart of Luther's hermeneutic. Luther interprets all of Scripture through his Law/Grace dichotomy, and so James sounds like Law, which means its antithetical to Gospel. For Luther, the point of the Law is to show us how hopelessly incapable we are of fulfilling its demands, and thus drive us to the Gospel. This is also how Luther sees Matthew 5-7, the Sermon on the Mount, functioning; an interpretation that still has wide currency.
And so here is why I think Luther's wrong on this point. If you conceive of the Law as fundamentally a set of demands that God places upon human beings, and especially if you think they are purely deontological and somewhat arbitrary, then I think that you actually lack the interpretive tools to (a) understand the Old Testament on its own terms, but also (b) coherently read moral instruction in the New Testament. I'm not saying that Luther is doing that, but I think at a more popular level we end up in this kind of position.
There's two things that we reconfigure. The first is that we need to keep doing the kind of work to understand how within the Old Testament the Torah works as divine instruction in life. My gut feeling on this is that the English nuances of 'law' and 'justice' and the like exert a kind of gravitational pull on our reading of, say, Deuteronomy, that is distorting our reading of the Law. That's really for another time though.
The second of these is how (complex!) the New Testament talks about 'Law'. I think Rosner does a great job of this for Paul. I don't think that James stands in that same 'stream' within the New Testament though. But simply recognising that Paul can speak of the Law in three main ways, and that he has a consistency and complexity to it, and that Law functions for Paul's moral instruction primarily as a source of Wisdom, gets us a long way.
James’ moral instruction in his letter draws upon, and parallels, Jesus' Sermon on the Mount in remarkable ways, and I think reading the two in tandem or conversation is particularly illuminating for how James works. Not least because how the Sermon on the Mount 'works' is also an interpretive conundrum. I wrote a series of posts bouncing off Pennington's take on it, which I found very persuasive. But to save you a long read, I think Jesus in Matthew 5-7 is laying out a real way of life for his disciples, that is prospectively founded upon the redemptive work of the cross, the grace of forgiveness, and the work of the Spirit, and that is expressed as being 'whole' and living a 'flourishing life' in these last days. I think it shows the deeper intention of the OT Torah in reconfiguring our hearts, not just our externalities, and in doing so teaches us a path of true and divine wisdom.
Take all that, and shift it over to James. I think he's doing the same. He is not, as later Reformers understood, laying a foundation of preaching Christ's death and resurrection. Rather, he is working through particular topics that have to do with living out the implications of the gospel, through a 'from the heart' reading of Torah for (especially Jewish-background) New Testament believers. He's teaching us the path of wisdom to a holistic and flourishing life.
