What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? . . . Faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.
—James 2:14,17 (ESV)
One of the main emphases for those of us in the Reformed stream of the Christian faith is that salvation does not come by our own effort in any way, but is purely by faith, which itself is a gift from God. We know that we can’t earn our salvation, because we can’t live up to God’s standards; rather, we receive it as a free gift—what we cannot do, God did for us in Jesus Christ. This was a major theme of the Reformation, as Martin Luther and John Calvin challenged a Catholic Church that had grown corrupt, because it’s a major theme in the letters of Paul; it was a significant recovery for the church, for all the conflicts that came along with it.
Unfortunately, one of the divisions that arose, in the mind of Luther—and among Catholics as well—was between Paul and James. Luther saw James as contradicting Paul, and dismissed the book as “a right strawy epistle.” He didn’t quite go so far as to leave it out when he translated the Bible into German, but he’s said to have ripped it out of his personal Bible. His objection was based, however, on a misreading of the book.
It’s easy to see where that came from, as both Paul and James talk about faith and works and salvation; superficially, they sound very similar in their language, and seem to be addressing the same issues. If you read a little more closely, though, you see that though they use the same words, they aren’t talking about the same things. When Paul talks about faith versus works, he’s talking about “works of the law”—that’s his phrase; his point is that you can’t earn your salvation by keeping the law, because you can’t possibly keep it well enough to satisfy God. His focus is on the most basic level: how are we saved? How do we enter into the life of the kingdom of God?
James, by contrast, isn’t talking about “works of the law” at all—he never uses the phrase. Rather, he’s talking about works of faith. He’s not talking about how we get saved, about how we lay hold of the life of God—rather, he’s talking about what that life looks like, and about true faith versus false faith. Where Paul’s argument deals with what we can do, or can’t do, in order to be saved, James’ concern is with how our lives should look because we have been saved. Like the whole rest of the book, this is about what it means to live the Christian life—to live the life of God in this fallen world. All he’s really doing in chapter 2 is restating and expanding on a point he made in chapter 1: it’s not enough for us to hear the word of God, we need to submit our lives to its authority and do what it says, if we want to call ourselves Christians.
(Excerpted, edited, from “No Private Matter”)
Excellent clarification. Nicely done, Rob.
Thanks much.
Here you identify what I think is a huge, yawning blind spot in Reformed theology. I also think it had it's genesis in the original Reformers, and what I see as an over-correction, in hindsight; I think we have not swerved back to the middle even 500 years later. It is as if the only component of Christianity is justification, and it is something that has driven me crazy for a long time.
I don't know that it needed to have been an overcorrection, though, had the first generations to follow (such as Beza in Geneva) not acted to intensify distinctions among positions, and thus to solidify this as an overcorrection. It's worth noting, for instance, that this one was Luther's problem–Calvin didn't make this particular mistake; the problem is that Luther's complaint spread.
I should also note (now that I hit "publish," natch) that the overly narrow focus on justification is only a problem for part of the church in this country–and not, I think, all that big a part, really.