Detached Note to Chapter X

The following is extracted from the Commentary on this Epistle in "The Cambridge Bible" (p. 261).

"[What shall we say to] the verbal discrepancy between St Paul's explicit teaching that 'a man is justified by faith without works,' and St James' equally explicit teaching that 'by works a man is justified, and not by faith only'? With only the New Testament before us, it is hard not to assume that the one Apostle has in view some distortion of the doctrine of the other. But the fact (see Lightfoot's Galatians, detached note to ch. iii.) that Abraham's faith was a staple Rabbinic text alters the case, by making it perfectly possible that St James (writing to members of the Jewish Dispersion) had not Apostolic but Rabbinic teaching in view. And the line such teaching took is indicated by Jas. ii. 19, where an example is given of the faith in question; and that example is concerned wholly with the grand point of strictly Jewish orthodoxy—God is One.... The persons addressed [were thus those whose] idea of faith was not trustful acceptance, a belief of the heart, but orthodox adherence, a belief of the head. And St James [took] these persons strictly on their own ground, and assumed, for his argument, their own very faulty account of faith to be correct.

"He would thus be proving the point, equally dear to St Paul, that mere theoretic orthodoxy, apart from effects on the will, is valueless. He would not, in the remotest degree, be disputing the Pauline doctrine that the guilty soul is put into a position of acceptance with the Father only by vital connexion with the Son, and that this connexion is effectuated, absolutely and alone, not by personal merit, but by trustful acceptance of the Propitiation and its all-sufficient vicarious merit. From such trustful acceptance 'works' (in the profoundest sense) will inevitably follow; not as antecedents but as consequents of justification. And thus ... 'it is faith alone which justifies; but the faith which justifies can never be alone.'"