I. τά, The marked reserve which is observable in St. James’

Epistle as to matters of doctrine, combined with his emphatic allusions to the social duties attaching to property and to class distinctions, have been taken to imply that this Epistle repre- sents what is assumed by some theories of development to have been the earliest form of Christianity. The earliest Christians are sometimes referred to, as having been, both in their Christ- ology and in their sociological doctrines, Ebionites. But St. James’ Epistle is so far from belonging to the teaching of the earliest apostolical age, that it presupposes nothing less than a very widespread and indirect effect of the distinctive teaching of St. Paul. St. Paul’s emphatic teaching respecting faith as the receptive cause of justification must have been promulgated long enough and widely enough to have been perverted into a parti- cular gnosis of an immoral Antinomian type. With that gnosis St. James enters into earnest conflict. Baur indeed maintains a] St. James is engaged in a vehement onslaught upon the Vi
286 His Epistle belongs to the later A postolical age.
actual teaching, upon the tpsissima verba, of St. Paul himselfi, Now even if you should adopt that paradox, you would still obviously be debarred from saying that St. James’ Epistle is a sample of the earliest Christianity, of the Christianity of the pre- Pauline age of the Churchij, But in point of fact, as Bishop Bull and others have long since shewn, St. James is attacking an evil which, although it presupposes and is based upon St. Paul’s teaching, is as foreign to the mind of St. Paul as to his own. The justification by faith without works which is denounced by St. James is a corruption and a caricature of that sublime truth which is taught us by the author of the Epistles to the Romans and the Galatians. Correspondent to the general temper of mind which, in the later apostolical age, began to regard the truths of faith and morals only as an addition to the intellectual stock of human thinkers, there arose a conception of faith itself which de- graded it to the level of mere barren consent on the part of the speculative faculty. This ‘faith’ had no necessary relations to holiness and moral growth, to sanctification of the affections, and subdual of the will. Thus, for the moment, error had imposed
1 Baur, Vorlesungen, ἄρον N. T. Theologie, p. 277: ‘In dem Brief Jacobi dagegen begegnet uns nun eine auf den Mittelpunkt der paulinischen Lehre losgehende Oppostion. Dem paulinischen Hauptsatz Rom. iii. 28: δικαιοῦσθαι πίστει ἀνθρώπον, χωρὶς ἔργων νόμου wird nun hier der Satz entge- gengestellt, Jac. li. 24: ὅτι ἐξ ἔργων δικαιοῦται ἄνθρωπος, καὶ οὐκ ἐκ πίστεως μόνον. Alle Versuche, die man gemacht hat, um der Anerkennung der Thatsache zu entgehen, dass ein directer Widerspruch zwischen diesen beiden Lehrbegriffen stattfinde und der Verfasser des Jacobusbriefs die paulinische Lehre zum unmittelbaren Gegenstand seiner Polemik mache, sind vollig vergeblich.’ In his Christenthum (p.122) Baur speaks in a somewhat less peremptory sense. St. James ‘bekiimpft eine einseitige, a ἊΝ praktische Christenthum nachtheilige Auffassung der paulinischen
e.
j Baur, Christenthum, p.122: ‘Der Brief des Jacobus, wie unméglich verkannt werden kann, die paulinische Rechtfertigungslehre voraussetzt, so kann er auch nur eine antipaulinische, wenn auch nicht unmittelbar gegen den Apostel selbst gerichtete Tendenz haben.’
k Messmer, Erkl. des Jacobus-briefes, p. 38: ‘Der glaube ist bei Jacobus nichts anders als die Annahme, der Besitz oder auch das leere Bekenntniss der christlichen Wahrheiten (sowohl der Glaubens-als-Sitten-wahrheiten, ) Resultat des blossen Hiérens und eigentlich bloss in der Erkenntniss liegend. .... Ein solcher Glaube kann fiir sich, wie ein unfruchtbarer Keim, villig wirkungslos fiir das Leben in Menschen liegen, oder auch in leeren Gefiihlen bestehen; er ist nichts als Namen-und-Scheinchristenthum, das keine Heiligkeit hervorbringt..... Das, was diesem Glauben erst die Seele einhaucht, ist die gittliche Liebe, durch welche der Wille und alle _ des Menschen zum Dienste des Glaubens gefangen genommen werden,
[ LECT.
St. Fames presupposes St. Paul's Christology. 287
upon the sacred name of faith a sense which emptied it utterly of its religious value, and which St. Paul would have disavowed as vehemently as St. James. St. James denies that this mere con- sent of the intellect to a speculative position, carrying with it no necessary demands upon the heart and upon the will, can justify a man before God. But when St. Paul speaks of justifying faith, he means an act of the soul, simple indeed at the moment and in the process of its living action, but complex in its real nature. and profound and far-reaching in its moral effect. The eye of the soul is opened upon the Redeemer: it believes. But in this act of living belief, not the intellect alone, but in reality, although imperceptibly, the whole soul, with all its powers of love and resolution, goes forth to meet its Saviour. This is St. Paul’s meaning when he insists upon justifying faith as being πίστις δι’ ἀγάπης ἐνεργουμένη!. Faith, according to St. Paul, when once it lives in the soul, is all Christian practice in the germ. ‘The living apprehension of the Crucified One, whereby the soul attains light and liberty, may be separable in idea, but in fact it is inseparable from a Christian life. If the apprehension of revealed truth does not carry within itself the secret will to yield the whole being to God’s quickening grace and guidance, it is spiritually worthless, according to St. Paul. St. Paul goes so far as to tell the Corinthians, that even a faith which was gifted with the power of performing stupendous miracles, if it had not charity, would profit nothing™. Thus between St. Paul and St. James there is no real opposition. When St. James speaks of a faith that cannot justify, he means a barren intellectual consent to certain religious truths, a philo- sophizing temper, cold, thin, heartless, soulless, morally impo- tent, divorced from the spirit as from the fruits of charity. When St. Paul proclaims that we are justified by faith in Jesus Christ, he means a faith which only realizes its life by love, and which, if it did not love, would cease to live. When St. James contends that ‘by works a man is justified, and not by faith only,’ he implies that faith is the animating motive which gives to works their justifying power, or rather that works only
1 Gal. v. 6.
τὰ 1 Cor. xiii. 2: ἐὰν ἔχω πᾶσαν τὴν πίστιν, ὥστε ὄρη μεθιστάνειν, ἀγάπην δὲ μὴ ἔχω, οὐδέν εἰμι. The γνῶσις of 1 Cor. viii. 1 seems to be substantially identical with the bare πίστις denounced by St. James, although the former was probably of a more purely scientific and intellectual character. The apa of 1 Cor, viii. 1 is really the πίστις δι ἀγάπης ἐνεργουμένη of Gal. v
vi]
288 St. James presupposes St. Paul’s Christology.
justify as being the expression of a living faith. When St. Paul argues that a man is justified neither by the works of the Jewish law, nor by the works of natural morality, his argument shews that by a ‘work’ he means a mere material result or product, a soulless act, unenlivened by the presence of that one supernatural motive which, springing from the grace of Christ, can be indeed acceptable to a perfectly holy God. But if on the question of justification St. James’ position is in substance identical with that of St. Paul, yet St. James’ position, viewed historically, does undoubtedly presuppose not merely a wide reception of St. Paul’s teaching, but a perverse development of one particular side of it. In order to do justice to St. James, we have to contemplate first, the fruitless ‘faith’ of the Antinomian, with which the Apostle is immediately in conflict, and which he is denouncing ; next, the living faith of the Christian believer, as insisted upon by St. Paul, and subsequently caricatured by the Antinomian per- version ; lastly, the Object of the believer’s living faith, Whose Person and work are so prominent in St. Paul's teaching. It is not too much to say that all this is in the mind of St. James. But there was no necessity for his insisting upon what was well understood ; he says only so much as is necessary for his imme- diate purpose. His Epistle is related to the Pauline Epistles in the general scheme of the New Testament, as an explanatory codicil might be to a will. The codicil does not the less repre- sent the mind of the testator because it is not drawn up by the same lawyer as the will itself. The codicil is rendered necessary by some particular liability to misconstruction, which has be- come patent since the time at which the will was drawn up. Accordingly the codicil defines the real intention of the testator ; it guards that intention against the threatened misconstruction. But it does not repeat in detail all the provisions of the will, in order to protect the true sense of a single clause. Still less does it revoke any one of those provisions; it takes for granted the entire document to which it is appended.
The elementary character of parts of the moral teaching of St. James is sometimes too easily assumed to imply that that Apostle must be held to represent the earliest stage of the sup- posed developments of apostolical Christianity. But is it not possible that in apostolical as well as in later times, ‘advanced’ Christians may have occasionally incurred the danger of forget- ting some important precepts even of natural morality, or of supposing that their devotion to particular. truths or forms of thought, or that their experience of particular states of Tee
LECT.
Moral truth the basis of dogmatic faith. 289
constituted a religious warrant for such forgetfulness®? If this was indeed the case, St. James’ Epistle is placed in its true light when we see in it a healthful appeal to that primal morality, which can never be ignored or slighted without the most certain risk to those revealed truths, such as our Lord’s plenary Satis- faction for sin, in which the enlightened conscience finds its final relief from the burden and misery of recognized guilt. If the sensitiveness of conscience be dulled or impaired, the doctrines which relieve the anguish of conscience will soon lose their power. St. Paul himself is perpetually insisting upon the nature and claims of Christian virtue, and on the misery and certain consequences of wilful sin. St. James, as the master both of natural and of Christian ethics, is in truth reinforcing St. Paul, the herald and exponent of the doctrines of redemption and justification. Thus St. James’ moral teaching generally, not less than his special polemical discussion of the question of justifica- tion, appears to presuppose St. Paul. It presupposes St. Paul as we know him now in his glorious Epistles, enjoining the purest and loftiest Christian sanctity along with the most per- fect acceptance by faith of the Person and work of the Divine Redeemer. But it also presupposes St. Paul, as Gnostics who preceded Marcion had already misrepresented him, as the idealized sophist of the earliest Antinomian fancies, the sophist who had proclaimed a practical or avowed divorce between the sanctions of morality and the honour of Christ. There is at times a flavour of irony in St. James’ language, such as might force a passage for the voice of truth and love through the dense tangle of Antinomian self-delusions. ®t. James urges that to listen to Christian teaching without reducing it to practice is but the moral counterpart of a momentary listless glance in a polished mirror®; and that genuine devotion is to be really tested by such practical results as works of mercy done to the
» After making reference to Luther’s designation of this Epistle as an ‘Epistle of straw,’ a modern French Protestant writer proceeds as follows: ‘Nous-mémes, nous ne pouvons considérer la doctrine de Jacques ni comme bien logique, ni comme suffisante; nous y voyons la grande pensée de Jésus rétrécie et appauvrie par le principe légal du mosaisme. Le christianisme de Jacques n’était qu’a demi émancipé des entraves de la lui; c’était un degré inférieur du Christianisme, et qui ne contenait pas en germe tous les développements futurs de la vérité chrétienne. Il est douteux que cette Epitre ait jamais converti personne,’ Premitres Transformations du Chris- tianisme, par A. Coquerel fils. Paris, 1866. (p. 65.)
ο St. James i. 23: εἴ τις ἀκροατὴς λόγου ἐστὶ καὶ οὐ ποιητὴς, οὗτος ἔοικεν ἀνδρὶ κατανοοῦντι τὸ πρόσωπον τῆς γενέσεως αὐτοῦ ἐν ἐσόπτρῳ: κατενόησε γὰρ ἑαυτὸν, καὶ ἀπελήλυθε, καὶ εὐθέως ἐπελάθετο ὁποῖος ἦν.
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290 Christianity considered as the New Law.
afflicted and the poor, and by conscientious efforts to secure the inward purity of an unworldly life P.
2. In his earnest opposition to the Antinomian principle St. James insists upon the continuity of the New dispensation with the Old. Those indeed who do not believe the representa- tions of the great Apostles given us in the Acts to have been a romance of the second century, composed with a view to recon- ciling the imagined dissensions of the sub-apostolical Church, will not fail to note the significance of St. James’ attitude at the Council of Jerusalem. After referring to the prophecy of Amos as confirmatory of St. Peter’s teaching respecting the call of the Gentiles, St. James advises that no attempt should be made to impose the Jewish law generally upon the Gentile converts 4. Four points of observance were to be insisted on, for reasons of very various kinds'; but the general tenor of the speech proves how radically the Apostle had broken with Judaism as a living system. Yet in his Epistle the real continuity of the Law and the Gospel is undeniably prominent. Considering Christianity as a rule of life based upon a revealed creed, St. James terms it also a Law. But the Christian Law is no mere reproduction of the Sinaitic. The New Law of Christendom is distinguished by epithets which define its essential superiority to the law of the synagogue, and which moreover indirectly suggest the true dignity of its Founder. The Christian law is the law of liberty —vopos τῆς ἐλευθερίας, To be really obeyed it must be obeyed in freedom. A slave cannot obey the Christian law, because it demands not merely the production of certain outward acts, but the living energy of inward motives, whose soul and essence is love. Only a son whom Christ has freed from slavery, and whose heart would rejoice, if so it might be, to anticipate or to go beyond his Father’s Will, can offer that free service which is exacted by the law of liberty. That service secures to all his
P St. James i. 27: θρησκεία καθαρὰ καὶ ἀμίαντος παρὰ τῷ Θεῷ καὶ Πατρὶ αὕτη ἐστὶν, ἐπισκέπτεσθαι ὀρφανοὺς καὶ χήρας ἐν τῇ θλίψει αὐτῶν, ἄσπιλον ἑαυτὸν τηρεῖν ἀπὸ τοῦ κόσμου.
4 Acts xv. 14-19. τ Thid. ver. 20.
® St. James i, 2 5: ὁ δὲ παρακύψας εἰς νόμον τέλειον τὸν τῆς ἐλευθερίας, καὶ παραμείνας, οὗτος οὐκ ἀκροατὴς ἐπιλησμονῆς γενόμενος, ἀλλὰ ποιητὴς ἔργου, οὗτος μακάριος ἐν τῇ ποιήσει αὐτοῦ ἔσται. Ibid. ii, 12: οὕτω λαλεῖτε καὶ οὕτω ποιεῖτε, ὡς διὰ νόμου ἐλευθερίας μέλλοντες κρίνεσθαι. Messmer in loc.: ‘Gesetz der Freiheit, weil es nicht mehr ein bloss aiisserliches knechtendes Gebot ist, wie das alte Gesetz, sondern mit dem innerlich umgewandelten Willen uebereinstimmt, wir also nicht mehr aus Zwang, sondern mit freier Liebe dasselbe erfiillen,’
[ LECT.
ἡ ὶ 2 Η 4 i ἢ
Christianity both a Law and a Doctrine. 291
faculties their highest play and exercise ; the Christian is most conscious of the buoyant sense of freedom when he is most eager to do the Will of his Heavenly Parent. The Christian law, which is the law of love, is further described as the royal law— νόμος βασιλικός, Not merely because the law of love is specifi- cally the first of laws, higher than and inclusive of all other laws"; but because Christ, the King of Christians, prescribes this law to Christian love. To obey is to own Christ’s legislative supremacy. Once more, the Christian law is the perfect law— νόμος τέλειος Χ, It is above human criticism. It will not, like the Mosaic law, be completed by another revelation. It can admit of no possible improvement. It exhibits the whole Will of the unerring Legislator respecting man in his earthly state. It guarantees to man absolute correspondence with the true idea of his life, in other words, his perfection ; if only he will obey it. In a like spirit St. James speaks of Christian doctrine as the word of truth—adyos ἀληθείας ¥. Christian doctrine is the abso- lute truth; and it has an effective regenerating force in the spiritual world, which corresponds to that of God’s creative word in the region of physical nature. But Christian doctrine is also the engrafted word—adyos ἔμφυτος 26, It is capable of being
t St. James ii, 8: εἰ μέντοι νόμον τελεῖτε βασιλικὸν, κατὰ τὴν γραφὴν, ᾿Αγαπήσεις τὸν πλησίον σου ὡς σεαυτὸν, καλῶς ποιεῖτε. This compendium of the Christian’s whole duty towards his neighbour, as enjoined by our Blessed Lord (St. Matt. xxii. 39; St. Mark xii. 31), is not a mere republication of the Mosaic precept (Lev. xix. 18). In the latter the ‘neighbour’ is appa- rently ‘one of the children of thy people ;’ in the former it includes any member of the human family, since it embraced even those against whom the Jew had the strongest religious prepossessions. (St. Luke x. 29, sqq.) This injunction of a love of man as man, according to the measure of each man’s love of self, is the law of the true King of humanity, Jesus Christ our Lord,
« Rom. xiii. 9.
= St. James i. 25.
y Ibid. ver. 18: βουληθεὶς ἀπεκύησεν ἡμᾶς λόγῳ ἀληθείας, εἰς TH εἶναι ἡμᾶς ἀπαρχήν τινα τῶν αὐτοῦ κτισμάτων. ἀποκύειν is elsewhere used of the female parent. Hence it indicates the tenderness of the Divine love, as shewn in the new birth of souls; just as βουληθείς points to the freedom of the grace which regenerates them, and ἀπαρχήν τινα τῶν κτισμάτων to the end and purpose of their regeneration. Compare St. John i, 12, 13: ὅσοι δὲ ἔλαβον αὐτὸν... ἐκ Θεοῦ ἐγεννήθησαν.
= St. James i. 21: ἐν πρᾳὕτητι δέξασθε τὸν ἔμφυτον λόγον, τὸν δυνάμενον σῶσαι τὰς ψυχὰς ὑμῶν. Messmer in loc.: ‘Die Offenbarung heisst hier das eingepflanzte, eingewachsene Wort; nimlich bei der Wiedergeburt durch die christliche Lehre eingepflanzt. Wenn nun von einem Aufnehmen der eingepflanzten Lehre die Rede ist, so ist das natiirlich nicht die erste Ἐν lige sondern vielmehr das immer innigere Insichhineinnehmen und VI U2
292 St. Fames direct references to our Blessed Lord.
taken up into, and livingly united with, the life of human souls. It will thus bud forth into moral foliage and fruits which, without it, human souls are utterly incapable of yielding. This λόγος is clearly not the mere texture of the language in which the faith is taught. It is not the bare thought of the believer moulded into conformity with the ideas suggested by the lan- guage. It is the very substance and core of the doctrine; it is He in Whom the doctrine centres; it is the Person of Jesus Christ Himself, Whose Humanity is the Sprout, Shoot, or Branch of Judah, engrafted by His Incarnation upon the old stock of humanity, and sacramentally engrafted upon all living Christian souls. Is not St. James here in fundamental agree- ment not merely with St. Paul, but with St. John? St. James’ picture of the new law of Christendom harmonizes with St. Paul’s teaching, that the old law of Judaism without the grace of Christ does but rouse a sense of sin which it cannot satisfy, and that therefore the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made Christians free from the law of sin and death®. St. James’ doctrine of the Engrafted Word is a compendium of the first, third, and sixth chapters of St. John’s Gospel; the word written or preached does but unveil to the soul the Word Incarnate, the Word Who can give a new life to human nature, because He is Himself the Source of Life.
It is in correspondence with these currents of doctrine that St. James, although our Lord’s own first cousin, opens his Epistle by representing himself as standing in the same relation to Jesus Christ as to God. He is the slave of God and of our Lord Jesus Christ¢*. In like manner, throughout his Epistle, he appears to apply the word Κύριος to the God of the Old Testament and to Jesus Christ, quite indifferently. Especially
Aneignen derselben und das Sichhineinleben in dieselbe.’ See too Dean Alford in loc.: ‘The Word whose attribute and ἀρετή it is to be ἔμφυτος, and which is ἔμφυτος, awaiting your reception of it, to spring up and take up your being into it and make you new plants.’
® Baur admits that ‘dem Verfasser des Briefs auch die paulinische © Verinnerlichung des Gesetzes nicht fremd, indem er nicht blos das Gebot der Liebe als kénigliches Gesetz bezeichnet, sondern auch von einem Gesetze der Freiheit spricht, zu welchem ihm das Gesetz nur dadurch geworden sein kann, dass er, der Aeusserlichkeit des Gesetzes gegeniiber sich inner- lich ebenso frei von ihm wusste, wie der Apostel Paulus von seinem Standpunkt aus.’ Christenthum, p. 122.
> Comp. St. Matt. xxvii. 56, St. Mark xv. 40, with St. John xix. 25. See Pearson on Creed, Art. iii.; Mill on Myth. Int. p. 226; Bp. Ellicott, Huls. Lect. pp.97, 354-
¢ St. James i. 1: Ἰάκωβος Θεοῦ καὶ Κυρίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ eae,
LECT.
Reverential reserve of St. F ames. 293
noteworthy is his assertion that the Lord Jesus Christ, the Judge of men, is not the delegated representative of an absent Majesty, but is Himself the Legislator enforcing His own laws. The Lawgiver, he says, is One Being with the Judge Who can save and can destroy4; the Son of man, coming in the clouds of heaven, has enacted the law which He thus administers. With a reverence which is as practical as his teaching is suggestive, St. James in this one short Epistle reproduces more of the words spoken by Jesus Christ our Lord than are to be found in all the otner Epistles of the New Testament taken together 8. He hints that all social barriers between man and man are as nothing when we place mere human eminence in the light of Christ’s majestic Person ; and when he names the faith of Jesus Christ, he terms it with solemn emphasis the ‘faith of the Lord of Glory,’ thus adopting one of the most magnificent of St. Paul’s expressions‘, and attributing to our Lord a Majesty altogether above this human worlds. In short, St. James’ recognition of the doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity is just what we might expect it to be if we take into account the mainly practical scope of his Epistle. Οὐχ Lord’s Divinity is never once formally proposed as a doctrine of the faith; but it is largely, although indirectly, implied. It is implied in language which would be exaggerated and overstrained on any other supposition. It is implied in a reserve which may be felt to mean at least as much as the most demonstrative protestations. A few passing expressions of the lowliest reverence disclose the great doctrine of the Church
4 St. James iv. 12: εἷς ἐστιν ὃ νομοθέτης καὶ κριτὴς ὃ δυνάμενος σῶσαι καὶ ἀπολέσαι. (καὶ κριτής is omitted by text recept., inserted by A. B. x.) So De Wette: ‘Hiner ist der Gesetzgeber und Richter, der da vermag zu retten und zu verderben.’ Cf. Alford in loc., who quotes this.
© The following are his references to the Sermon on the Mount. St. James i. 2; St. Matt. v. 10-12. St. Jamesi. 4; St. Matt. v. 48. St. Jamesi. 5; St. Matt. vii. 7. St. Jamesi.g; St. Matt. v. 3. St. Jamesi. 20; St. Matt. v. 22. St. James ii. 13; St. Matt. vi. 14, 15, v. 7. St. James ii. 14 sqq.; St. Matt. vii. 21 sqq. St. Jamesiii. 17,18; St. Matt.v.g. St. James iv. 4; St. Matt. vi. 24. St. James iv. 10; St. Matt. v. 3, 4. St. James iv. 11; St. Matt. vii. 1 sqq. St. James v. 2; St. Matt. vi. 19. St. James v. 10; St. Matt. v.12. St. James v.12; St. Matt. v. 33 sqq. And for other dis- courses of our Lord: St. James i. 14; St. Matt. xv. 19. St. James iv. 12; St. Matt. x. 28. Again, St. James v. 1-6; St. Luke vi. 24 sqq. See reff. ; and Alford, vol. iv. p. 107, note. {1 Cor. ii. 8.
& St. James ii. 1: ἀδελφοί μου, μὴ ἐν προσωποληψίαις ἔχετε τὴν πίστιν τοῦ Κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ τῆς δόξης. Here τῆς δόξης is best explained as a second genitive governed by Κυρίου. Dean Alford suggests that it may be an epithetal genitive, such as constantly follows the mention of the Divine Name. 2 v1 |
294 Missionary Sermons of St. Peter.
respecting the Person of her Lord, throned in the background of the Apostle’s thought. And if the immediate interests of his ministry oblige St. James to confine himself to considerations which do not lead him more fully to exhibit the doctrine, we are not allowed, as we read him, to forget the love and awe which
veil and treasure it, so tenderly and so reverently, in the inmost
sanctuary of his illuminated soul.