17.11 | Straw Epistle

James 2

‘What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him?’

James 2:14

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Martin Luther was a monk who changed the world.

He lived and worked and wrote into the stringent religiosity of 16th Century, institutionalised, Catholicism—which taught that entry to heaven could be purchased, earned through effort and buying religious merit. His life and work was devoted to restoring the Church of Jesus to the central theme that a believer is only made right with God only through having faith — as directly contrasted with every other religious movement, where some merit of salvation is attained through religious works. Most religion tells us, Do good, and you get to go to heaven when you die. Luther dived into the heart of Paul’s theology, and pulled out the essential idea that it is only faith that reconciles us to the Father, and leads us onto the heavenly road.¹

And yet, Luther didn’t like the letter of James. He called it a ‘straw epistle’, and only grudgingly accepted it as part of the New Testament.

And his main issue with James was found in today’s chapter. 

What good is it … if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him?

Luther didn’t like this. It went against the grain of what he was working to recapture.

And yet, when we come to the Scriptures, we do not get to build hierarchies of value, or pick and choose those parts we like. Not even Luther gets to do this. James is just as God-breathed as the letter to the Romans.

So how do we reconcile this faith and works division?

We begin by asking a better question.

Luther’s question was about how we get to heaven when we die. And yet, the deeper concern of the New Testament has to do with the present separation of heaven and earth. It has to do with humankind’s departure from the glorious authority and wisdom and purity for which we were made. It has to do with not merely awaiting the future reign of God, but seeing that reign made manifest in our world in this very moment, as well as into ages immeasurable to come.

The letter of James (and of Paul, for that matter) have this as the central concern, for the Kingdom of God is an inbreaking reality as well as a future one. The concern is not a transaction (of either works or faith) that gets us a backstage pass to heaven, but a rebirth into a mode of being that connects that world to this one, that age to this, and who we are then to who we are now. This way of being can only begin with faith—for faith sees and the reality of the unseen God and lives towards the reality of His as yet unseen world. You can’t live from it or towards it without belief. You can’t move an inch down the ways of the heavenly without trusting allegiance to the Jesus whose death opened the door to the heavenly life.

Luther’s correction was essential. It was better. It recaptured the entry point to life in the Kingdom and reoriented salvation into something simply received by the God of all grace. And yet the world Jesus invites us into is larger, for it initiates a movement into not just a future salvation, but a mode of being that restores the image of the divine in us now. 

And this, my friends, inescapably looks like works. For the faith that reconnects us to God prompts a new way of being—a faith that looks like obedience (as with Abraham) and a connection to a heavenly mode of life where the most downtrodden, despised and excluded take the seats of honour.

For Jesus died. And Jesus lives. And His Kingdom ways are breaking in in and through those who, by faith, are walking the paths of those being restored to, and restoring, glory.

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Reflect:

How does your faith in the inbreaking life of God change how you will live today?

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Pray:

Father in heaven,

How wonderfully you have rescued me;

How astounding your love;

How total your grace—

That I can stand before you whole and holy today,

Because Jesus came to die my death,

That I may live in His life.

Father, I believe.

And, Father, I see

That this mustard seed of belief in my soul

Sets me on a new pathway of being—

Where your love is greater than worldly hierarchies,

And your grace is greater than religious performance,

And your eternity is invading a world You would not let go.

Father, I walk today,

In faith that works,

That your life be in me

And your life break in through me

On the eternity road.

In Jesus’ Name,

Amen

Old Testament: 

For those also reading the Old Testament this year, your additional readings are here:

Ezekiel 33-35 | Psalm 130

1. His work, alongside other Reformers, initiated the wing of the Church we now call Protestantism, and triggered massive reforms in the Catholic tradition, now known as the Counter-Reformation.