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Pericope Study
The Center for Theology, LRC
The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 10, 2000
The Epistle Lesson: James 2:1-10 [11-13] 14-17
1. “If you really fulfil the royal law, according to the scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’ you do well. But if you show partiality, you commit sin, and are convicted by the law as transgressors. For, whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it.”
By the phrase “showing partiality,” James refers to the previous verses where he describes various actions of the assembly concerning the arrival of first a rich man in gold rings and fine wardrobe and then a poor one in shabby clothing. The rich one gets a seat of honor while the poor cools his heels, standing, afar. James reminds his readers that God has “chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which he has promised to those who love him.” He also reminds them that it is the “rich who oppress you …who drag you into court….(and) blaspheme the honorable name which was invoked over you” (i.e., the name of Christ).
James is aware of the human tendency to honor wealth and prestige, while ignoring or even disrespecting signs and persons of poverty. At the cusp of the 21st century, we still have the phenomenon, in the church and elsewhere. Too many times in too many places, Christians find themselves honoring wealth and power at the expense of the poor, whether in membership, in praise both written and vocal, in allocation of resources, or in time commitment. What we have also, on other side, is a curious turn on the nature of privilege, this one purporting to honor God’s “preferential option for the poor.” It is part of living the gospel-as well as living the law-to feed the hungry, visit the sick and imprisoned, care for the orphans and widows. With hundreds of millions of people alive who are among the poor of the earth, feeding and clothing them is part and parcel of discipleship. But there are advocacies less salutary, less noble. Various perspectives have emerged that give honor to the status of victim, per se, chiding or scolding the believer even to embrace as God’s good creation behavior that scripture plainly calls sin. “Showing partiality,” whether to the rich or to certain species of victim, violates the royal law to “love your neighbor as yourself.” The “dividing line” between good and evil runs not between economic or social classes, or between races or genders, but within the human heart. “Whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point becomes guilty of all of it.”
2. “What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works? Can his faith save him? If a brother or sister is ill-clad and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.”
Is James speaking of the works of the law or the fruit of faith-the works of faith? Certainly not the works of law! Faith in Christ is God’s gift through the Holy Spirit, who calls, enlightens, and sanctifies. That we are justified by faith is God’s declaration and God’s gift, the former imputed on account of the righteousness of Christ-His life, death, and resurrection. Forensic grace-God’s declaration of righteousness-“correctly recognizes salvation as pre-eminently the work of God, … making sure that it attributes nothing to man who in sin and finitude is helpless to save himself.” Justification by faith is based on the righteousness of Christ for us, as imputed righteousness.
3. Is justification by faith based also on the righteousness of Christ in us, as infused righteousness? This was signal to the quarrel of the Reformation. In a review of two books in the current edition of Touchstone, S. M. Hutchens argues that justification is based on both: “the Scriptures teach it is most certainly both…. In each case, Christ for us and Christ in us, the righteousness of Christ is alien to man the sinner. But in each case also it becomes truly his own, so that man is justified-Christ’s righteousness is imputed to him-not only forensically, but every bit as much intrinsically, for only the righteous man can act righteously before God-only the worthy can become worthy; only the sanctified (that is, in whom Christ dwells as his righteousness) can be just, as only the justified can become holy.” (p. 42)
4. Hutchens continues: “Forensic justification, the freely given declarative justice of God, cannot be used to exclude intrinsic justification, the righteousness of Christ freely given to the sinner so that he is justified by the work of Christ that becomes his own. God justifies no man apart from Christ, and the declaration of righteousness toward man is in fact the declaration of the righteousness of Christ that is in and for him.” (p. 42)
5. There is more, much more: “The doctrine of justification of faith alone apart from works is an attack not only on an orthodox doctrine of salvation, but on orthodox Christology and anthropology as well, since it divides the faith of Christ, by which we are justified, from the work of Christ, by which also we are justified, misplacing the justifying work of Christ in man, as well as the works of Christ that the man of faith receives as his own. Those who propose it habitually confuse the works of the law, by which St. Paul teaches that no man is justified, with the work of Christ in us by which both Paul and James assure us that we are, and in which their teaching on justification is one….. The center of the point of contention is not Christ himself, but man in Christ, who partakes of His being, and hence has himself a divided nature while still in the flesh, as St. Paul teaches in Romans 7 (esp. 7:22-25). The doctrine of simul justus et peccator, while formally correct, is misleading when it is read in accordance with abstract concepts of righteousness and sin, instead of meaning that man as the object of salvation is at once Adam and Christ. As Adam he is lost and helpless; in Christ, through true obedience to the Father, he is not: his cooperation in his salvation is true co-operation, his person is truly, by substitution, but still truly, that of Christ, and because of this, grace frees him to merit what he undeservedly receives. He is Adam and Christ, disobedient and helpless on the one hand and obedient and full of grace and its power to obey on the other. As in the character of such paradoxes, any combination, mixing, or separation of the categories produces error…. (p. 42)
“To divide justifying faith and works in time as though the first exercise of faith was without works while subsequent works may be performed in faith is precisely what James was denouncing when he taught that faith cannot be abstracted from works: ‘Show me your faith apart from works, and I by my works will show you my faith.’ (2:18) There is no support whatever in this passage for those whom it has forced to admit that faith and works must always be together, that faith must be demonstrated in works, but still will not straightforwardly confess that ‘a man is justified by works and not by faith alone,’ for in order to say this, as James does (2:24) justifying faith and works, while two, must also be one.” (p. 45. From “Getting Justification Right,” Touchstone, July/August, 2000, pp. 41-46)
6. Hutchens’ view is predicated on the understanding of theosis, “Christ in us by the donation of grace, our righteousness and hope of glory.” As Dr. Sammeli Juntunen (who will be one of the principal lecturers in the November 12-14 Aquinas/Luther conference) argues in one of the books Hutchins is reviewing (Union with Christ: The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther, ed. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson): “For Luther the ‘being of grace’ is participation in Christ, ‘who comes into a very intense union with the believer, but who nonetheless remains his own substantial reality without becoming part of the essence of the believer or being reduced to an accident in this essence.’ (This participation is so ontologically intense) ‘that the actions which Christ works in a Christian can be considered the actions of this Christian in question himself…..Christ does not work in a Christian only as an extrinsic “power”, but also as the principle of spiritual being and spiritual action who gives himself to the Christian in such a way that Christ becomes intrinsic in the Christian.’” (p. 45, from Braaten and Jenson, p. 154-56)
7. Hutchens concludes: “The Finns have shown to my satisfaction that Luther’s conception of union with Christ contained within it a positive understanding that Christ’s person and that of the Christian are related in such a way that justification may be said to be not merely forensic, a matter of Christ for us, but intrinsic-Christ in us-as well. But in other places Luther demonstrated that he badly misunderstood the gospel, particularly in his failure to distinguish sufficiently between the works of the law, which do not justify, and the works of faith-the works of Christ in the redeemed, which are by grace verily his own-which do. This is made clear by his persisting inability to reconcile Paul and James.”
8. This debate is only now beginning, as to the Lutheran views-in Luther, in the Confessions, in the current discussion with Roman Catholics and other communions. It may be a bit much to impute (!) to James that kind of understanding of “Christ in us” as well as “Christ for us,” as theological precondition for his assertion that “faith without works is dead.” But the discussion is a long way past the old “works righteousness” slur. No one wants to count “the works of law” in the economy of salvation, whatsoever.
But what about the “works of faith,” the works of “infused” righteousness-or, better put in terms of theosis: indeed the work of Christ in us? If Christ is in us-in the Holy Spirit; and in, with, through, and under the bread and wine-then why not speak of infused righteousness as well as imputed righteousness? We are yet a long way from the answers. But the questions are raised, as above, and the discussion is joined. Look for more to be addressed on this, and attendant issues, in the Aquinas/Luther Conference of November 12-14!
--Larry Yoder
JLY - 09.05.00
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