“St. James’s epistle is really a right strawy epistle, compared to these others [Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, 1 Peter, and 1 John], for it has nothing of the nature of the gospel about it.”
Martin Luther, 1522, preface to his German translation of the Bible
Since the Reformation, the Epistle of James has caused problems for Protestants. Its view of faith and works, as well as its view of social relationships is not in accord with either the Reformation or with the economic systems that were present in Western Europe at the time of the Reformation. Much has been written on the relationship between faith and works. I will not be writing on that today. It is enough to say that the clarion statement found in the epistle has reverberated throughout the centuries. “Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.” Sola fide (only by faith) has no meaning if there are no works. Or, as Saint James so pithily explained faith without works, “You believe that there is one God. You do well. Even the demons believe—and tremble!”
What most modern believers miss is the context in which those verses are found. Faith without works is in the middle of a set of arguments that have to do with mercy, the tongue, and–most important for this blog post–the rich and the handling of their money and influence. Let me tell you that I have heard many sermons on the tongue and on acts of mercy. I have heard even more sermons on why it is faith alone and that works cannot earn you your salvation. That is actually true, but in the context of James, it is a clear misuse of the Scripture. Yet, to this day, I have heard almost no conservative sermons on the rich and the handling of their money and influence, and none that I can easily remember.
Indeed the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out; and the cries of the reapers have reached the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. You have lived on the earth in pleasure and luxury; you have fattened your hearts as in a day of slaughter. You have condemned, you have murdered the just; he does not resist you.
James, chapter 5
In the context of James 2, in which he first takes on the faith-less rich, he makes the interesting comment about those who come with gold rings being shown to special seats, while the poor are ignored. It is worth noting that our American Founding Fathers sold space for box pews in their churches so that the rich might have preferred and private seating while the less well off and the poor were crammed into the rear of the church. Thus, from the beginning of this country, the Epistle of James and its advice to the rich was indeed treated as an epistle of straw. Note: the Free Methodists’ name comes from the fact that their pews were to be free and not to be sold, and because they were for freeing the slaves. As late as the 1800s, pews were for sale in the USA.
But, that brings us to the quote above from chapter 5. You see, another thing happens in chapter 2, and that is that the word murder is brought up in the context of saying that you may not be guilty of murder, but if you are guilty of adultery, you are guilty of the entire law. Here in chapter 5, he accuses the rich of murder. Not physical murder, but murder by inappropriately low wages then using the profits gleaned by fraud [Saint James’ word, not mine, read the quote again] to live an inappropriately luxurious life. He says that they are being fattened for the slaughter. Another way to put it is that their faith is dead, regardless of how much they may otherwise support the Church. For, if you are guilty of one, you are guilty of all.
What the inability to pay appropriate wages shows is the utter blindness of the owners/employers who were paying the wages. Their inability to perceive the suffering of those under their control because of the wages they paid them showed that they had no real understanding of the concept of mercy and grace. For them the faith could be little more than fire insurance to keep them safe, a mere intellectual assent with no practical outcome.
We are in the midst of an economic debate in this country, and have been for nearly three decades. It is a debate that has slowly made it almost impossible for the head of a household to support their family on one 40-hour full-time job. The lowest paid jobs in our society no longer support a living wage. That is, in many areas of the country, it is impossible for someone working a lower-paid job to even make enough money to rent a reasonable apartment or house for their family, with money to feed and clothe their children.
At the same time, rather than the ephemeral and false “trickle-down” that was supposed to have happened, the money gushed upwards, so that fewer and fewer people now hold more and more of the money of this country. Those who proposed that theory in the 1980s expected a certain reciprocity on the part of the rich. Instead the greed of capitalism is what controlled, as we went more and more in a laissez-faire direction. And so, Saint James has been shown to be true in his warnings.
One would think that as a supposedly Christian country there would be sermons, and examples by rich Christians of higher wages. But, no, instead we have received speeches on how minimum wage at a fast-food restaurant was never meant to apply to working adults, but was to encourage the young to learn responsibility. Frankly, that is an even worse argument. You are deliberately underpaying the young because you can get away with it on the grounds that it teaches them responsibility???
We have, in fact, received many speeches from Christians. And, the silence from conservative churches on the issue of the wages that cry out to the Lord of Sabaoth is deafening. Instead, the word “taker” has entered our vocabulary, so that helping the poor, as Saint James counseled in chapter 2, is seen not as mercy but as encouraging bad habits. Takers are those that have the nerve to say they deserve to be paid more. Takers are those who have contracted severe medical bills but have no adequate insurance and no riches to support them. More and more, takers are actually those whose care Saint James commended to us.
Many Christians pray “If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.” But, we do not turn from our wicked ways. Conveniently, too many Christians have labeled wicked ways as that which others do. Conservative churches do not approve of abortion or of LGBT+ marriages or euthanasia, etc. Therefore, it is rather easy to be against those. It is harder to repent of one’s own wicked ways. And, it is very hard to repent when money is involved. It is no wonder that the love of money is the root of all evil.
It is that corrupted love that keeps the rich owner from raising the basement-level wages of the poorest workers. In order to raise the wage, the owner has to lower his or her wage. In order to raise the wage, the corporate board has to stand up to the shareholders and say that their profits will not be as large this year. But, it is easier to love the money, to keep the power, to let the wages of the worker cry out to the Lord of Sabaoth, to have faith without works.
If Christians really want God to hear from heaven, then Christians must turn from our own wicked ways, which includes dealing with the issues raised by Saint James in chapters 2 and 5.
thank you for this challenging post
I’ve gotten a sense that the epistle of James is more a problem for Lutherans in particular than for some of the other schools of thought that developed from the reformers. Protestant though I am I have never struggled to appreciate the epistle of James all that much (not compared to the narrative literature such as Judges or Chronicles). I don’t have an issue with teaching that Lutherans describe as “third use of the law”.
One of the more interesting things for me has been to consider that there’s something conservative Anglo-American Christians seem really, really reconciled to, the idea of basing an economic culture around lending money at interest. How we got to a point where Christians argue that economic systems based on lending money at interest might be worth a few dozen books.
It’s part of studying scripture to recognize that some books offer necessary correctives to misuses of statements made in other books. We should read Proverbs but Ecclesiastes provides a necessary warning, by way of pitting proverbs against proverbs in observing the world, that proverbs have limits. The scholar Martin Shields has proposed that most of Ecclesiastes presents unorthodox ideas that are given a corrective gloss by its epilogue and can be thought of as a kind of “Pentagon papers” of the Hebrew wisdom traditions. Job, of course, warns us that righteous people can suffer for reasons that have nothing to do with some needed punishment for sin.