This essay was written for Dr. John Dow, professor of New Testament at Emmanuel College. Frye enrolled in New Testament 2, “The Religion and Theology of Paul,” during his second year (1934–35). At the end of the paper, Dow wrote, “v. interesting but suffers from the half truth of generalization.” His other marks are recorded in the notes. Frye received an “A-” for the paper, the typescript of which is in the NFF, 1991, box 37, file 9.
The vitality of apostolic literature is almost entirely owing to the impetus given by Paul to a synthesis of philosophy and tradition to sustain the preaching of the new gospel. Without Paul, it is hardly too much to say that the message of Jesus might have been distorted, or lost altogether, through the indifference of Christians expecting a Parousia. As it was, however, Christian literature takes a sudden upward sweep through the Epistles and the Gospels, culminating in the Gospel of John, to subside for a time in the tracts, homilies, and pious discourses of a Church by that time settled, respectable, and already a bit smug, a literature of which James is the finest example. (The question of the date of the Epistle is, thus, begged at the outset.)
We have, therefore, Paul and James at opposed ends of a curve, and we should expect to find them more or less antithetical. McNeile calls James the most completely non-Pauline book in the canon—this though he inclines to the apostolic authorship theory.1 The two writers are connected, as Christians, by the double qualification of Hellenistic and Jewish background. But there is a marked contrast between the societies they address. Paul is socially unconscious, wishing to preserve the status quo in the world, and regarding classes as abolished in the body of Christ. The majority of his adherents were poor people, but that fact is a social accident as far as he is concerned. But with James Christianity has spread over the entire community, rich and poor, and the extreme difficulty of being both rich and religious, noted by all the Hebrew prophets and by Jesus, is a living problem to him. Consequently, we are faced at once with the essential factor in the James-Paul opposition. Paul’s whole theory of salvation transcends the social order altogether: in other words it is individual. But James, whose Christianity is centred in a social milieu, bases his soteriology, of necessity, on the problem of the relationship of the worshipper to the community.
Hence, it will seem the less surprising to find James’s emphasis on “works” as the test of the Christian, opposed to Paul’s emphasis on “faith,” though for us, at any rate, the opposition supplements rather than contradicts. James takes what is literally a common-sense view— the sense of the community; a social approach and a worldly criterion of “results.” He points out that to a community of Christians, the test of moral conduct is bound to be pragmatic; if the Parousia, though eventually certain, may perhaps be a long way off as yet, then the only advantage of the Christian life over any other is the fact that it works better. From the world’s perspective, justification by faith is difficult to distinguish always from self-justification. If faith is valid, it will reveal itself: if my life is right, my belief cannot be wrong, and any faith that is not strong enough to permeate reality and social conduct is merely intellectual lumber. This socialist approach is initially, from the point of view of theology, agnostic; it suspends judgment on all creeds until it sees them in practice. James is very much the liberal fashionable preacher, full of graceful literary allusiveness, full of helpful advice and never at a loss for a platitude, but no man to insist on any of the great theological disciplines of the Church—the Incarnation and death of our Lord, his Resurrection, his presence among believers. He assumes all this on the part of his hearers, or would say he did if challenged. He has precisely the social conscience, the tendency to idealize the poor and inveigh against the rich, the armchair sympathy with the slave class,2 we should expect to find in such a man. The novelty of Christianity as an experience he does not understand. He is inherently a ritualist,3 for there is no more obvious way of “showing” one’s faith than to engage in church work and services. Prayer, instead of being a private communication with God, is a social obligation, and the cautions against swearing probably reflect a preoccupation with the spoken word and its influence.
To some extent this attitude of assumed acceptance of doctrine and emphasis on a central Church might be described as a Catholic attitude, where Paul’s tremendous upsurge of the individual soul through divine grace is Protestant. The words are used in a very general sense, of course; though the influence of James in moulding the Catholic sacraments, the confessional, and the Church disciplines is not irrelevant, any more than the Pauline impress on the thought of Luther and Calvin. In any case, Paul’s message can be best appreciated by a rare and exceptional specialist in religious experience, James’s by an ordinary man of affairs. It should be noted how antithetical were the religious backgrounds of the two great thinkers. James reflects the social conscience of Judaism, the Pharisaic sense of the majesty of ritual,4 the almost inhuman respect for law, and the complete subjugation of the individual to society’s superstitious belief in the cosmic effect of punctilious observance of routine. Paul was also a Jew, but the background of his religious experience was probably largely Greek. Now Greek religion— religious experience as distinct from convention—was as overwhelmingly and excessively individualistic as Judaism was the reverse. It was above everything else a mystery and an initiation into an esoteric cult. The visionary raptures of the Orphic votaries left their mark on Paul,5 who combined their influence with the social emphasis of his Jewish training by means of his Hellenistic sophistication and common sense. But the sense of the transcending, supernatural quality of religious emotion is fundamental to Paul’s thought.
This leads us at once to the opposition of Paul’s and James’s attitudes on the rhythmic adjustments to be made by the individual toward God. Where Paul’s adjustment is revolutionary, James’s is evolutionary; where Paul stresses the miraculous undeserved grace of the transcendent God the Father in leading the soul to Christ, James emphasizes the sustaining power of the immanent Holy Spirit6 to perform the same office. To James, a Christian born in an already Christian environment has the ethical ideal to start with. The process of the Christian life is, therefore, one of perfectibility, a constant struggle to reach the ideal, victory being the sign of salvation. But what is positive development to James is a negative purgation to Paul. The individual thrown back upon himself gains a terrible conviction of sin and a realization of his own helplessness. Society can do nothing for him: the only thing that will be able to transcend his own state is the voluntary help or divine grace of an infinite God.
It has been said, by those who like such epigrams, that Paul’s is a gospel of faith, Peter’s of hope, John’s of love, James’s of wisdom. Now faith is obviously the side of religious activity most directly concerned with God, and wisdom that most concerned with society. Love is intermediate, connecting both social and mystical impulses. That is roughly John’s general position, midway between7 Paul and James in point of development, synthesizing and reconciling the two approaches at times, emphasizing the cleavage at other times.
The transcendent experience of the Christian soul was not, we have seen, directly connected with its present life. It can be concerned chiefly, therefore, only with a future life; hence, Paul’s teaching on salvation is permeated with eschatology. John combines the mystical illumination of Paul with the self-conscious social awareness of James, emphasizing the transcendent nature of Christian experience in this life. His interest is predominantly in the illuminated life: in the Incarnation of God in the life of Jesus rather than the dying God which held Paul’s allegiance, and in the constant irradiation of earthly life by divine intervention in miracles. Paul stresses the necessity of illumination, James of example; John combines them: it is the love of man as revealed in the teachings and life of Christ, the teachings of the Logos and the atonement of Jesus’ death,8 which provides inspiration for the good life. Paul stressed self-surrender, James self-development: John takes a middle course again, showing that the latter comes from the former—knowledge and wisdom from a will to believe. Similarly, with Paul faith is trust, with James action: John regards it as an intellectual assent resulting in both. That is, belief for Paul is a prerequisite of salvation; in James it is merely assumed as a postulate, while with John it is taken for granted that belief will necessarily follow from salvation,9 again mediating between the opposition we have treated above. There is, consequently, a strongly dualistic, almost a Gnostic, tendency in John, to set the illuminated world inhabited by the elect of Paul’s theology over against the mundane world which is the background of James. We ascend from the latter to the former by a process of regeneration and rebirth, passing, as in birth, from darkness to light.
Perhaps we have limited Paul too much in our anxiety to differentiate him from James. James builds on the preceding work of Paul: Paul anticipates James. As stated above, they supplement rather than contradict; it is not disagreement or antithesis, but an opposition of context and environment, that we are dealing with. Still less do we imagine John to be a synthesis of James and Paul; though he is the ripest fruit of apostolic culture, a fruit containing the seeds of decadence. Biblical scholarship is concerned, neither with the reconciling of apparent divergence among inspired writers, nor with the rejection of some in favour of others, but with the progressive development of their thought from age to age.