Given that Rick Warren is on record as saying that he is in favor of 'wealth creation' instead of 'wealth redistribution,' I think a paper I recently wrote brings James "the brother of the Lord" into the picture as a dialog partner, and has some explanatory power as to what is going through Rick's head.
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The Letter of James has had
something of a checkered past, and probably ranks as one of the most forgotten,
dismissed, or attacked books in the Western canon of scripture. In terms of abuse, famous is Luther’s
characterization of the letter as “an epistle of straw.” The Letter of James
also took much abuse in the late nineteenth century, such as being regarded as
the “least Christian book in the New Testament.” [1] Some interpreters went so far as to say that
the text is actually Jewish with references to Jesus added later in its
development.[2] One can imagine that, in a more anti-Semitic
age in Europe, such a judgment of the letter would be used to marginalize its
place in the canon. More recently, Elsa
Tamez—a Methodist Latin-American feminist theologian—speaks of the Letter of James as a letter that would
be ‘intercepted’ by national security agencies in certain countries and branded
as subversive, due in part to its denunciation of exploitation by wealthy
landowners.[3]
But the notion that the letter
would be considered too hazardous for some to read is an alien concept to
me. When I entered debates about the
importance of ‘works’ in the life of faith—the purview of ‘James versus Paul’—I
was still situated in a context that favored abstract discussions of the method
of eternal salvation, which was the context in which I was raised. The life of faith in my former Southern
Baptist context was occupied with correct belief and the avoidance of sin. Those who were kind and generous are/were
admired, but the conscious understanding of works as being an active component
of faith was not present because “works” were thought of in caricature—as a way
for humans to try to tip the salvific balance in one’s favor. The debate never tipped into considering the
experience of oppression. Indeed
individualism reigned as the frame of reference. The Letter of James was rarely consulted in
the Southern Baptist context in which I moved.
The oversight now strikes me as egregious.
So, my goal is to suggest the possibility of the Letter of James
being ‘intercepted’ shows that the primarily theological debate between faith
and works is not the most important legacy of the letter. The letter is a prophetic call to care for
the poor, for which James 2:14-28 serves as a theological underpinning. I also wish to suggest that the way James
speaks of the rich and the poor, and the favoritism showed to the former, are
immediately applicable in the context of issues of class in the United States. As such, James challenges American churches. This post will proceed as follows. I will offer a critique of some of the
intentional and unintentional ‘interceptions’—by which I mean the
marginalization of the letter as a whole— of the Letter of James in scholarship
and ecclesial settings. I will then move
to consider what the Letter of James can offer in terms of understanding first
century class distinctions (the difference between the destitute, the ‘working
poor,” and the wealthy), which can also
speak to—and challenge— twenty-first
century Americans.
One unintentional interception
is the preoccupation with debating modes of salvation and how we read James as
being a debate partner of Paul. Luke
Timothy Johnson notes that there is a pervasive fallacy in Biblical studies to
assume that Paul “has to figure in the equation somewhere.”[4] While James 2:14-28 has been historically
read as a contradicting Paul (while in actuality Paul and James are in some
agreement), Johnson is rather rightly annoyed that “scholars continue to read
whatever is different from Paul with reference to Paul, rather than allow it to
stand as simply different.”[5] For better or worse, I would say my own
approach to the letter fell into the fallacy Johnson wrote about: my preoccupation was to read James in light
of Paul because what I was raised to consider important were the mechanisms of
eternal salvation. Given that much of
scholarship of the letter has revolved around this theological debate, I would
say my preoccupation with just James 2:14-28 is part and parcel of a Western privileging
of abstract thought. Johnson posits that
the preoccupation with the theology of Justification by works and/or faith is
the result of the historical-critical paradigm and the “purportedly
“scientific” study of the Bible.”[6] I would argue that this paradigm is a
‘Western’ invention and while it is an important conversation, debating faith
and works interferes with the call to care for those who are oppressed. [7]
Moving into the Episcopal Church
in my early twenties meant coming into a denomination in which there was a
stereotype (and a waning reality) of wealthy congregations. But my move also brought me into the orbit of
liberation theologies, which have brought me further into the other issues in
the letter of James. Liberative theological work, such as that of Tamez,
rightfully points us to the fact that there is more to James’ letter than a
refutation of Paul. James has an agenda
of his own. But moving into certain
churches does not guarantee one will hear James proclaimed in worship. Other forms of interception occur. Tamez notes that the reasonableness of faith
is valued more than the practice of faith, and so it is not unusual that “as
least in [many] Protestant churches…Paul is read and quoted more than the Gospels
which speak of the life of Jesus.[8]
She charges Western society with a
preference for what is said about Jesus (the building of a theological concept
of Christ) as opposed to what Jesus said (presumably the active component
stemming from belief in Jesus as Lord).
This was certainly the experience of my childhood.
Further, Tamez notes that the
letter’s “radical critique of the rich” has made its proclamation rare.[9] She writes that she:
“knows of churches where the
letter is skipped over in the liturgies because there are many rich members in
the congregation, and it is very uncomfortable to speak against them when they
are sitting in the front seats. Certain
parts of James, especially chapter 5, are very concrete and very difficult to
spiritualize.”[10]
Indeed, if a church is following the Revised Common
Lectionary, James 5:1-6—the warning to rich oppressors—is skipped over; though
one will hear that they are to remain patient in suffering (James 5:7-10).[11] Unlike the terms of debate over faith and
works, which garners those who contest the means of salvation and so maintain a
focus on that particular issue, the selection of the lectionary is an
intentional ‘interception’ in which churches and committees choose which texts
are worthy to be proclaimed, or which texts need to be skipped for reasons of
comfort or political maneuvering.
The final method of interference
I’d like to mention could be used by both academicians and church
authorities. Tamez notes that Martin
Dibelius, who wrote one of the touchstone modern commentaries on the Letter of
James, wrote extensively on the paraenetic character of the letter.[12] He also wrote that a document of moral
exhortations is relevant for a certain period of time and place, but the
exhortations may no longer have bearing outside of that context.[13]
One may hear something similar in other
matters in which debates of ethics and the Bible arise. However, like Tamez, if we take James’
central message to be the defense of, solidarity with, and care of the
oppressed, then we should ask when
there has never been a group oppressed.
Since it is historically unlikely that there has been such a utopian
society, the Letter of James may have something to say to us. One thread which can be pulled from Jame’s
liberative stance is the solidarity of the poor in opposition to the oppression
of the rich.
One trouble that James was
addressing was the issue of identification with—and favoritism toward—the rich
(2:1-13). It is this problem that sets
the context for the theological instruction in James 2:14-28 on the matter of
faith and works. James mentions two
different classes of ‘the poor’ in the letter.
The first is the ptochos,
which most often refers to a penniless alms beggar, and is the term James uses
in 2:2 when speaking of a poor person in dirty clothes.[14] The other class is the penes—those who had a job but did not own property.[15] Although the word penes does not appear in the letter, these are who James means
when, in 5:4, he speaks of laborers and harvesters whose wages the rich hoard
by fraud. These were laborers who were a
day’s wage away from becoming the ptochos.[16]
It is both of these classes of the poor whom James seeks to protect.
What James seems to know about
wealth is that it can garner considerable respect from those who do not have
wealth. James knows that the regard of
the identifiers of worldly status and wealth can lead communities to forget
that there is to be a preferential option for the poor, and so the rich are
treated with respect and the best of the community while the poor are forgotten
and further marginalized (‘Sit at my feet’ (2:3)) in the very community of the
God who made them “heirs of the Kingdom (2:5).”
In order to countermand this tendency to respect the rich over the poor,
James reminds them that the “royal law” is no defense: “You do well if you really fulfill the royal
law according to the scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ But
if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors
(2:8-9).”[17]
It is this community issue which
sets the stage for James’ reminder of who is actually important within the
community. One may have faith, and one
may seek to follow the perfect law of liberty (1:25), but one is to not simply
be a hearer of the word. One is to be a
doer (1:22-25). And what seems to James
to be so disturbing is that one will show favoritism to the rich while allowing
the poor to continue to suffer:
“If a brother or sister is naked
and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and
eat your fill’, and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good
of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead (2:15-16).”
Indeed, “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God,
the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to
keep oneself unstained by the world (1:27).”
And given the surrounding context of the letter, one may imagine that
James is attempting to keep communities “unstained by the world” by reminding
them of their responsibility to the poor as opposed to their favoritism of the
rich.
James further seeks to draw a
wide line between the rich and the poor by reminding those he addresses “…You
have dishonored the poor. Is it not the
rich who oppress you? Is it not they who
blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you (2:6-7)?” This seems to signal that the community, in
James’ mind, is comprised most properly of the poor, both ptochos and penes, and yet they forget that they are to stand in solidarity.
In essence James may see himself as reminding the poor in the Christian
community that there is indeed a divide, and they should not be blinded by the
riches of the world, or be tempted to chase them (see 4:1-3 and 4:13-17) for
fear of losing sight of God and becoming one who oppresses the Godly. Indeed according to James, the rich (plousioi) are characterized by their
elegant dress (2:2), their use of courts against the poor (2:6), insatiable
accumulation of wealth (4:13 and 5:3), their unjust dealing with workers (5:4), luxurious devotion to pleasure (5:5),
and their murder of the innocent (5:6).[18] As Tamez points out, “these are the
characteristics of the rich, familiar to the prophets and to Jesus. It is no wonder James has been called the
Amos of the New Covenant.”[19]
So, James was trying to bolster
the solidarity of the poor among Christians of varying wealth; in fact, in the
letter he assumes varying degrees of wealth even as he tried to create
solidarity among the poor over the rich.
He considered most egregious that possibility that the community did not
give up the quest for excessive worldly
wealth and showed favoritism to the rich while denigrating their poorer brother
and sisters. It is reasonable to assume
that the penes in the congregation
would be living barely above subsistence, yet were quite happy to say that at
least they weren’t the ptochos. James also assumes that he had to remind the
congregations of their responsibility to do something tangible for the ptochos, and not just wish them well
(2:15-16).
What does this have to do with
the church today? Something very similar
to the situation James confronted has been studied in sociological readings of
American society, particularly the national mass media’s portrayal of class in
American society.
In an essay on the media’s
portrayal of class in American, Gregory Mantsios notes that while American
society is one of the most highly stratified societies in the industrialized
world, with class distinctions bearing significant weight upon the living of
one’s life, the nation is able to maintain an illusion of an egalitarian
society by the dismissal of class through and in the media.[20] Ownership and control of national media is
concentrated in a few companies representing corporate interests; and media exercise
the ability to define overarching cultural tastes, tell the history of the
people, establish our identity, and shape our perceptions about each other and
the nature of our society.[21]
As the media represents the interests of the affluent in society and help to
create the illusion of solidarity between the affluent and the middle class
(constructed as a universal ideal), a wedge is driven in between the middle
class and the working poor, or simply ‘the poor.’ But the middle class and the affluent class
are portrayed as victims of the poor, who threaten the middle class and the
affluent’s hard-won prosperity through bad decisions and government
redistribution (“welfare”). The poor are
to be feared, and/or cut-off. In actuality,
this construction of the universal middle class and their identification with
the affluent does not need to be tied one one’s incomes, “what matters is that
most of “us” share an intellectual and moral superiority over the
disadvantaged. As Time magazine once concluded, “Middle America is a state of mind.”[22]
Simply put, American Christians
live in a context in which the working poor are primed to identify themselves
as the upwardly-aspiring middle class seeking to pull themselves up by their
bootstraps; the poor who cannot do so are demonized or rendered invisible.
In the twenty-first century, as
in the first century, affluence beckons people toward attainment of wealth and
the lionization of the rich is still a habit of human nature, while the poor
are castigated and ignored. American churches
are no exception to this trend. James,
then, poses a challenge and a question to Christians in all churches, but
particularly in American churches. With
whom will we identify: the rich who seek
to exploit others or those among us who are oppressed? What shall we chase after: wealth or God (in this way James mirrors
Jesus, we can only serve one master)? If
we have wealth, shall we use it to relive the plight of the oppressed? These are the questions an ‘intercepted’
letter of James asks of Christian communities.
The hope of a liberative reading of James is that the community will
learn that faith is less something to be “understood,” but enacted.
[1]
Luke Timothy Johnson, The letter of James: a new translation with
introduction and commentary, Anchor Bible Series (New York: Doubleday,
1995), 150-151.
[2]
Ibid.
[3]
Elsa Tamez, The Scandalous
Message of James: Faith without Works is Dead (New York: Crossroad, 1990),
1.
[4] Luke Timothy Johnson, Brother of Jesus, friend of
God: Studies in the letter of James (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans
Pub., 2004), 115-116.
[5]
Johnson, 116. Johnson here is referring
specifically to the faith v. works dynamic present in Paul’s work and Jas.
2:14-28, but the general principle of the fallacy stands.
[6]
Luke Timothy Johnson, The letter of James: a new translation with
introduction and commentary, Anchor Bible Series (New York: Doubleday,
1995), 156.
[7]
By ‘Western,’ I mean Western European and North
American spheres of influence.
[8]
Tamez, 5.
[9]
Tamez, 6.
[10]
Tamez, 6.
[11]
"James." The Text This Week - Revised Common Lectionary, http://www.textweek.com/james.htm (accessed
March 31, 2012). Interestingly, the
Episcopal Church’s lectionary did
include James 5:1-6, until the denomination switched to the RCL.
[12]
Tamez, 4, quoting Martin Dibelius, James,
rev. Heinrich Greeven (Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1976), 54.
[13]
Tamez, 4.
[14]
Pedrito U.. Maynard-Reid, Poverty and
wealth in James (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1987), 108n.3.
[15]
Meynard-Reid, 108n.3 and Tamez, 24-25.
[16]
Tamez, 24-25.
[17]
Meynard-Reid (66) believes this to be the case.
[18]
Tamez, 28-30.
[19]
Tamez, 30.
[20] Gregory Mantsios, "Media Magic: Making Class
Invisible" in The social construction of difference and inequality:
race, class, gender, and sexuality, 2nd ed., edited by Tracy E. Ore
(Boston, Mass.: McGraw-Hill, 2003), 82.
[21]
Mantsios, 82.
[22]
Mantsios, 86-87.
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