rich and poor in James: Implications for institutionalizes partiality, The

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Jun 2000 by Warden, Duane

Foreign Text Omitted per; Bell & Howell: Information & Learning

After a hiatus in the early part of the twentieth century, evangelicals have rediscovered that living in a democratic society calls on believers to contribute a constructive, informed, and Christian voice to public social, economic, and political policies. l The interrelating of public policy with religious faith is an unsavory, uncomfortable task for some believers. By its nature, religious faith rests on uncompromising pronouncements that are founded on God's being and the necessary order of the world he has created; by its nature, public policy rests on compromise. Thus politics and religion tend to sully one another when they meet.

While faith must tread cautiously into the political arena, it is unthinkable for Christian reflection on public policy and Christian reflection on faith to be drawn into airtight compartments. As Bauckham observes, ". . . fundamental New Testament principles for life in the Christian community extend in principle to life in human community as such, and therefore have political relevance."2 Uneasiness arises from the suspicion that Christian viewpoints tend to be informed by a mixture of sources drawn from inherited traditions, economic status, and fear of change rather than Biblical revelation.3 That suspicion is the driving force behind this paper. Its purpose is to appeal to a voice from Scripture, namely, the book of James, for help in the construction of a Biblically informed, Christian perspective on matters of public policy relating to labor, poverty, wealth, and the power that flows from wealth.

The study will proceed as follows: (1) It will offer a brief analysis of the book of James with attention to passages that deal with the rich and the poor. (2) It will explore the message of James for its consistency with teaching found elsewhere in the Bible. (3) It will examine the implications of these statements for the way Christians ought to speak and act when confronted with wealth, status, and power on the one hand, or poverty, ignorance, and helplessness on the other.

I. THE RICH AND THE POOR IN JAMES

An assessment of the literary character of James has a bearing on the conclusions one draws from the author's allusions to the rich and poor. The genre of James has been the subject of a great deal of discussion. Dibelius has maintained that the document lacks continuity. He explains, "There is not only a lack of continuity in thought between individual sayings and other small units, but also between larger treatises."4 For Dibelius, James is no letter at all. There was no particular social setting it addressed and no acquaintance with a social need that called forth the document. He concludes that James is paraenesis, i.e. "a text that strings together admonitions of general ethical content."5

If Dibelius is correct, the form of James, uis-a-vis other documents from antiquity, suggests that it merely transmits the popular, contemporary culture. It reflects neither the viewpoints of a particular individual nor community of readers. This and other considerations advanced by Dibelius argue that the words "rich" and "poor" in James have religious, not socio-economic implications. The poor were the pious. To be a Christian is to be among the poor, hence among those who are favored when God brings the world to its apocalyptic conclusions

Sophie Laws, Peter Davids, and James Adamson, among others, have taken exception to Dibelius's analysis of the document. Adamson, following Forbes, finds a finely developed unity of structure and style in James.? Laws argues that the author's selection of material from the Jewish and Hellenistic world reflects his own interests and the character of the community he addressed.8 While Davids concedes that the Sitz im Leben of James is that of its author and not its hypothetical first readers, he nevertheless maintains that the letter reflects a real socio-historical setting. Further, he maintains that James is a carefully constructed work, not a collection of random exhortations. "Scholarship," Davids says, "must move beyond Dibelius's formcritical view of James, valuable as that is, and discover the redactional level."9

The genre of James is particularly important when one draws on the document for its contribution to socio-historical questions. If the author is primarily a collector of moral maxims and ethical truisms drawn from his contemporary world, the document lacks the urgency that springs from the suffering and conflict of real people. The corrections to the analysis of Dibelius offered by Davids, Laws, and others are important. 10 Granted that the community reflected in James has more to do with its place of origin than with its first readers, still the document deserves to be called a letter. It reflects a world known to the author where believers are coming to terms with the impact of the Christian message on behavior.11

The recognition of a needed correction hardly means that we should abandon the analysis of Dibelius altogether. He is correct when he observes that the document has little continuity. The movement from subject to subject of ten seems random, held together by mere catch-words. The lack of a sustained theme, however, does not require the conclusion that the author shows no concern for a specific social situation. The social and ethical struggles of James and his Christian community are reflected in themes that recur in the document. Prominent among them are (1) the wisdom motif, particularly as it is developed around the use of the tongue; (2) the relationship of faith to behavior; and (3) the oppression of the poor by the great men of the world. It is in the latter theme that James offers some of his most useful instruction for the believer who wants to raise an informed Christian voice in the public arena.