“An archetypical straw man”

By Rev. Michael Stonhouse

Meditation – Tuesday, September 5, 2023

James 2:14-26 (Forward, p. 38) CEV p. 1274

Far too often in theological debates one side or the other sets up what is called a straw man. One source describes it this way, “A straw man fallacy occurs when someone takes another person’s argument or point, distorts it or exaggerates it in some kind of extreme way, and then attacks the extreme distortion, as if that is really the claim the first person is making.”

While I don’t know all the nuances of the argument nor the exact circumstances, it seems to me that this is what happened with the Reformation debate over works verses faith. Martin Luther, for instance, was quite convinced that the church of his day, denied that faith, being an active trust in God, was necessary or essential—and perhaps there were some people who veered that way. In his reading of the situation, they were saying that all you needed was to do the right things, and that would be sufficient. Those ‘works’ would be sufficient to save them. And, because he thought that today’s passage from the Epistle of James promoted that view, he hated this passage with a passion.

But is this really what it says? I think not. It merely says that faith, a trust or dependence in God, needs to be demonstrated in real life—it needs to be expressed in some tangible way. In other words, if one merely says that he or she believes, or has that belief as some abstract mental concept, what in the world does it mean? In other words, trust—or belief--has to be lived out: that is, put into practice. That is all that James is saying.

On the other hand, there well can be a real problem here, but not the one that James is talking about. Many people over the years have thought that they could ‘earn’ their salvation, merit it by their own deeds or works. Most religions and philosophies of the world ascribe to some version of this, and even many Christians hold on to something like this. I call it ‘goodism’ and often hear this when someone has died: ‘He was a good person and so that will be good enough.’ To be honest, this particular comment says absolutely nothing about faith and is totally a different story or picture from what James was referring to. But maybe Martin Luther saw all sorts of ‘goodism’ in his particular world situation and so that is what he was up in

arms against. Poor James just got caught up in the backlash, a kind of Reformation straw man. We don’t have to do the same: we can have both faith and works, with the works living out--and giving evidence--of that active faith and trust in the Lord Jesus. Thanks be to God for this balance that we can achieve, albeit with His grace and help. Amen.

Forward notes: “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you?” (verse 14).

“Faith is a body thing.

“As an adolescent, I thought faith was about getting bodies out of the way so that inner selves could be in relationship with God. I thought God only cared about the state of my soul and viewed my body as an unruly, needy, sin-inclined obstacle to a good spiritual life. I learned to pray with my eyes closed to shut out the world. And I learned to minimize my body’s space, feelings, and signals.

“But the faith that God invites us into is not disembodied. God has made faith a body thing, not just when God became a human body, but from the moment God pronounced goodness over full-bodied creation. God knows our bodies. God loves our bodies.

“James 2:14-26 issues a call to practice what we preach through faithful ‘works.’ But deeper than that, I hear a call into a life with God of welcoming and caring for bodies, our own and our neighbours.’”

Moving Forward: “How can caring for your body be an act of faith?”

A concluding note: My present translation, the Contemporary English Version, seems, to me at least, to render verse 14 is a way that is more in keeping with James’ argument that the above translation: “My friends, what good is it to say you have faith, when you don’t do anything to show that you really do have faith? Can that kind of faith save you?” To me, this says that a faith that is not practiced in some tangible way is a distortion of faith and isn’t really faith at all.