More Than an Epistle of Straw

This essay first appeared in Issue 27 of The Mockingbird magazine.

Martin Luther had many opponents in his lifetime. Whether they were princes, kings, clergy, professors, the pope, or former friends, he debated anyone he believed to have abandoned the gospel. These were powerful men who wielded more than mere words, but none of these adversaries loomed as large as James — not the man, but the Epistle. If Luther quoted Paul, his rivals would quote James.

When an elderly Luther looked back on his years of quarreling over scripture, he remarked,

That epistle of James gives us much trouble, for the papists embrace it alone and leave out all the rest … Accordingly, if they will not admit my interpretations [of James], then I shall make rubble also of it. I almost feel like throwing Jimmy into the stove. (Luther’s Works, 34:317)

The nature of the dispute was this: Paul and Luther believed one was justified by faith; James believed one was justified by faith and works. James was the thorn in Luther’s side, or as he deemed in his introduction to the New Testament, “an epistle of straw” (35:362) — so much so that his German translation of the New Testament omitted James out of the canon. In Luther’s hometown of Wittenburg, Bibles relegated the epistle to an apocryphal status. Rather than following Hebrews (as it usually does), James was appended after the New Testament, alongside Jude, Hebrews, and Revelation, credited not to a “St.,” like the 23 canonical books, but simply to “James.”

Stuart Hawkins, Picket Fence, 2010. C-print, 46 × 52 in.

Still, its influence upon Luther was inescapable. James’s canonical status created a context within which Christians read Paul’s letters differently than they were by their original recipients. After James, Paul’s arguments about the Law and faith are understood by terms set by James — for Luther, too.

To get a sense of how James influenced Luther, we need to look at both Paul and James in their original contexts, before the canonization of the New Testament. As will become clear, they both have specific definitions of “Law” which, once put in conversation with one another, will inform Luther’s distinction.

Paul, Before the New Testament

In the strictest sense of the word, Paul was an anti-nomian. Not in the sense that Paul’s message enabled and condoned ethical licentiousness — he had a great deal to say about ethical conduct of believers. Paul very much did believe, for example, that fornication with Roman temple prostitutes severs one from Christ (1 Cor 6:12–16). But the principal foundation of Paul’s ethics was not the Law. According to his “salvation-historical framework,” the Law had been given to Moses to serve as a provisional guide for the people of Israel until the coming of the foretold Messiah (Gal 3:23–26). Those in Christ are no longer under the Law (4:1–7). Why return to servitude when one has been freed (5:1)? Either one follows the Law or one follows Christ (6:2), and an intermixing of the two spoils the whole (5:9). As Paul would later write to the Church in Rome, “You are not under Law, you are under grace” (Rom 6:14).

What Paul means by Law in these and many other contexts is the legal code at Sinai. The rationale for abandoning these commandments arises from Paul’s reading of the Old Testament in light of the revelation of Jesus. Citing Genesis 15:6, Paul argued that Abraham was declared righteous by his faith, 430 years before the Law even existed. Though the Law promised that those who keep its commands will obtain life (Lev 18:5), life, Paul finds, is given to those who are righteous by faith (Hab 2:4).

At face value, one could imagine it possible to follow the Law as a believing Christian. Other Christians in Paul’s day certainly thought so. But Paul saw there was more at stake than the moral ordering of one’s life.(1) Law and faith represented two alternate social “patterns of religion”(2) with distinct and irreconcilable internal consistencies.

For Paul, the announcement of the good news of Jesus’ life-giving death and resurrection generates within the believer a new life that is patterned after that very good news. In this way, there is a symmetry between the indicative (what God has done) and the imperative (what we do). Not only is there no further need for the Law, but the reintroduction of the Law severs the believer from the very source of their life (Gal 5:4). The blueprint for life is not the law, but Jesus. Paul believed that the grace of Jesus (through the resurrection and gift of the Spirit) generated ethical action entirely independent of the Law’s instruction.(3) The contents of the Christian ethics arise simultaneously with the desire to do them, without the need for further instruction from the Law.(4)

James, Before the New Testament

Since the Reformation, Paul and James’ divergent views on justification have been coordinated or harmonized to fit the various theological traditions of that era. The privileging of James over Paul on justification echoes Luther’s Catholic opponents just as the reverse tactic repeats Luther. Both strategies are legitimate attempts at canonical readings of scripture, or understanding the component parts of scripture in light of one another. I would argue, however, the differences between James and Paul on justification are symptomatic of a more fundamental divide over the role of the Law.

If Paul seems to have no need of the Law, James’s epistle responds to Paul’s letters and attempts to rebalance the scales. To James, the Law is neither slavery nor an instrument of death, but “the perfect law, the law of liberty” (1:25), the “word of truth” that produces the first fruits of God’s creation (1:18). If Paul emphasized the righteousness of those who hear the gospel and confess in faith (Rom 10:14–15), James warns against those “hearers who forget” and extolls “doers who act” because “they will be blessed in their doing” (1:25). Where Paul believed that love fulfilled the entirety of the Law, James turns this formulation on its head: one who transgresses a single point of the Law is guilty of the whole Law (2:10). For James, faith coincides with doing the Law, and it would be unimaginable to him that one could speak of faith apart from law-abiding conduct.(5)

In James’s use of the Abraham narrative, it is clear that he is responding to Paul using terms set out for him by Paul. James cites verbatim Paul’s quotation of Genesis 15:6 alongside Genesis 22 to posit that Abraham was actually justified by works. And finally, where Paul believed the judgment on the last day to be “according to my gospel through Jesus Christ” (Rom 2:16) — rather than the Law — James maintained that “there is one Law-giver and judge who is able to save and destroy” (Jam 4:12). For James, the Law maintains its status as normative for the Christian. The doing of the Law is the path of liberty that leads to salvation.

The New Testament’s Law-Gospel Tension

What now? The preservation of disparate voices within the New Testament canon exerts interpretive pressure on both sides of the divide to both generate new readings and forestall others. For James, the canon guarantees the Law’s validity for Christian ethics and practice, but his endorsement of “the whole Law” is reinterpreted to refer only to the Law’s ethical content, having nothing to do with ritual purity, circumcision, or animal sacrifice. The epistle’s brief references to divine mercy, perplexingly vague Christology, and passing mentions of eschatological judgment are then filled in by the canonical context to conform to a more Pauline viewpoint. Placed alongside Paul, the letter becomes a guide for Christian living that contends for a continuity between the Hebrew and Christian scriptures.

For Paul, placed alongside James, the consequences of canonization are perhaps more pronounced. The canon ensures that Pauline interpretation safely proceeds within accepted bounds of Christian orthodoxy.(6)

Many readers of Paul in the second century were inclined to extend Paul’s Law and faith antithesis into a sharp divide between Christianity and Judaism. As Tertullian famously proclaimed toward the beginning of the third century, Paul was “apostle of the heretics,” some of which viewed the God of the New Testament to be different from the God of the Old Testament (Adversus Marcionem, 3.5). To counter these heretics’ use of Paul, Tertullian repeatedly insisted that Paul actually agreed with the other apostles. In this way, James served as a counter-voice in early Christianity to interpretations of Paul that threatened the unity of the emerging Christian writings and Jewish scriptures. Indeed, the very first reference to James comes from the early third-century Alexandrian theologian Origen, who repeatedly utilized the letter against this precise heresy.(7) A hundred years later Cyril echoed this context by citing James in support of a moral perfection according to the Law of Moses.(8) At the same time, Augustine believed James was “deliberately aimed” to combat a “treacherous” misreading of Paul (Fathers of the Church, 27:246–48). From its very beginning, James safeguarded against readings of Paul that push his Law and faith dichotomy into a total abandonment of the Jewish scriptures.

Under the pressure of James, Paul’s salvation-historical arguments for the Law’s end become transposed into a different register. The strictly ethical scope of James’ Law, which arises from its placement next to Paul, becomes transferred to Paul’s own discussion of the Law. Because the Christian is always subject to the eternal Law (by way of James), Paul’s Law and faith antithesis assumes a universal, timeless validity for the Christian. To not be “under the Law” now means more narrowly to not be under its condemnation of sin. Yet the voice of the Law is never entirely put away on this side of eternity and it continues to reveal sin and guilt. Paul’s alternate social patterns of religion, that of Law and faith, are now understood as alternating words to the individual — not just at one’s conversion to Christianity, but throughout one’s entire life as a penitential journey from the judgment of the Law to the grace of Jesus.

The presence of James and Paul together in the same canon both creates and preserves an ongoing tension, or dialectic, between Law and gospel. Constructive readings of James and Paul are thereby prevented from resolving this dialectic in either direction, whether through devotion to the Law as a means of salvation or the abandonment of the Law entirely. Out of this fundamental dialectic grows innumerable debates on the proper definition of the Law, its various distinctions, its two or threefold uses, and the limits of the Law claims relative to the gospel.

Though the tension between Law and gospel arises from the canon, it nevertheless coheres with human experience. The Christian life is not a simple story of before and after faith. For many it is marked by ongoing vacillations between uncertainty and assurance, unbelief and faith, guilt and relief. More significantly, it mirrors Paul’s own tension between the resurrection life of the believer and the ongoing persistence of sin.

In this way, the contours of Paul’s significance within the church have been shaped by an ongoing dialogue with James, and for the better. While Luther relegated James to an apocryphal status, his understanding of Law and gospel was defined at least in part by James — it emerged within a framework determined by the canon.

When Luther was confronted by a real-life antinomian, Johann Agricola, he insisted on the eternality of the law: “For never will the law be removed in eternity, but it will remain, either as to be fulfilled in those damned, or as fulfilled in those blessed” (“The Second Disputation Against the Antinomians”). Though he wouldn’t have dared to cite James’s epistle in support of his argument, James would have whole-heartedly agreed. Perhaps there was more to this “epistle of straw” than Luther let on.

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