This is what James pleads for, not the divorce between creed and
conduct, which is alas only too prevalent even today. There should be an
indissoluble marriage between faith and works, a union as close as that
between spirit and body. “For as the body apart from the spirit is dead,
even so faith apart from works is dead.” By “spirit” here James means
simply the breath of life, without which the body is dead. “False faith
is virtually a corpse” (Hort).
By this striking paradox James attacks the root of the whole matter and
has his last word on the subject. Hort remarks that James by the use of
the phrase “justified by works” seems to be answering Paul in Romans 4:2
or a misuse of Paul’s “justified by faith” (Rom. 5:1), though he does
not see how James could have seen Paul. I have already expressed my own
conviction that James and Paul are not really answering one another.
They are discussing different aspects of the subject and touch only at
points and go off along other lines. In all probability each would agree
to the statements of the other if the language of each were put in the
proper perspective. Certainly they agreed when they were together in
Jerusalem (Acts 15; Gal. 2:1-10). But it is important for us that our
faith shall be real and vital, not hollow and dead.
VIII
The Tongues of Teachers
James carries on the discussion of “slow to speak” (1:19). He has just
been writing about idle faith in 2:14-26, and now he proceeds (Plummer)
to expound the peril of the idle word, “wrong speech after wrong action”
(Hort). Indeed, in 1:26 he has already mentioned the failure to bridle
the tongue as a sure sign of vain religion. Now he expands the matter in
a remarkable paragraph.
The transition is thus not so abrupt as at first seems to be the case,
and apparently from the first he planned this discussion of the tongue.
Probably it comes here (Plummer) because controversies about faith and
works were already rife. Here James speaks “against those who substitute
words for works” (Plummer), a rather large class. “In noble uprightness,
he values only the strict practice of concrete duties, and hates talk”
(Reuss), if it is _only_ talk. James has the gift of condensation. He
can write on talk without taking twenty volumes, like Carlyle, to prove
that if speech is silvern, silence is golden (Plummer). The
“overvaluation of theory as compared with practice” (Mayor) condemned in
chapter II is still present with James as he discusses the tongue.