James Writes about Grace

In James’s letter to the early followers of Jesus, written around 50 AD, he writes that God “gives generously to all without reproach.” James is using the concept called ‘grace’ - the concept of unearned, unmerited, freely-given gifts.

God is in the habit of giving people something better than what they deserve. George Stulac writes:

By instructing his readers to ask for wisdom, James is pointed them to God’s grace. This is one example of what underlies the whole epistle - James’s confidence in the grace of God and his intense desire for his readers to place their own reliance there.

To be human means to be flawed and imperfect. It means even to be sinful and corrupt. Human beings are born into a bad situation, a situation out of which they cannot get themselves.

The abstract concept of grace take a specific and concrete form in the person of Jesus. The core of His message is to tell people that they can’t earn their way into heaven, and should stop trying to do so.

Jesus presents Himself as offering, freely and equally to all, admission into heaven. That which we can’t earn for ourselves, He gives as a gift. George Stulac continues:

James then leads his readers into God’s grace by calling attention to four facets. As they come in the Greek word order, first God is the one who “is giving.” The word is didontos, a present active participle; it is God’s constant nature to be gracious and giving. Second, God gives to all (pasin). The call to live by faith is extended to everyone, and no one is left without an invitation to trust in God. Third, God gives generously (haplos), emphasizing that God gives freely and without reserve. Fourth, God gives without finding fault, or without reproaching.

The ability to display grace - to be gracious - is not only ethically good, but is also a display of power. Only a powerful being can give gifts which are so good and so many.

Thus we see that Jesus is not only generous, but is in control. The title ‘Lord’ indicates that Jesus is powerful as well as graceful. Ed Potoczak writes:

Our Lord’s nature is entirely about forgiveness. He loved us and forgave us before we even knew him. He even died for us before we were born. We can be brave and strong, but we are also called as knights of the King’s court to forgive those we live with, work with, and meet on a daily basis. By relying on Jesus and his strength and peace we can work out our differences and if the other party will not reconcile with us, we can forgive him or her as a follower of Christ and move on. The God of mercy expects his knights to be sincerely merciful.

Grace, then, is not a product of weakness, but rather flows from strength. God’s omnipotence is the source of His grace.

The ability to give many and great gifts belongs only to a most powerful Being. The vassal can be gracious, but the king much more so, and the vassal's graciousness is empower by the king’s.

James Describes God's Character

The letter written by James to early followers of Jesus, around 50 AD, contains, among other things, a sketch of God’s character. Who is God? What does He do all day long? What is His personality like?

Early in the text, James tells the reader that God “gives generously to all without reproach.”

Parsing this phrase, we note that God “gives,” i.e., He does not ‘pay,’ and it is not a quid pro quo, but rather an unearned, unmerited, freely-given gift or present. This is the meaning of the word grace.

God gives “generously,” giving more than is necessary or usual or expected. This is kindness. If God gave us merely our physical bodies and enough sustenance to keep us alive, that would already be a gift. But He gives more than that.

He gives “to all,” emphasizing that God cares for each person. Every human being is the object of God’s affection. George Stulac writes that, as James formulated his letter, one

fact of God’s character was his grace. He gives good gifts. We imitate God in this trait by graciously giving good gifts to others - even to those who are causing the trials in our lives, for we will give “generously to all without finding fault” (1:5). When we are treated unjustly and hurtfully, we will take our stand here: to rely on God to provide good gifts for us while we persevere in loving our enemies, doing good to those who hate us, blessing those who curse us and praying for those who mistreat us (Lk 6:27-28).

James continues by saying that “every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.” Not only is a God a generous giver, but everything which is given or received finds its original and ultimate source in Him.

Not only does grace characterize God, but He is the unique initiator of grace in the universe. God is gracious, but He is also merciful. Ed Potoczak offers a familiar formula for defining ‘mercy’:

Justice is when someone receives what he or she deserves. Mercy is when they do not get what they deserve, but instead, they receive forgiveness.

Because all humans are imperfect, we all need forgiveness; God shows mercy to all. One aspect of God’s character, as described by James, is that He is a wellspring of both grace and mercy.

Dust, Breath, Soul

Jesus presented, among other ideas, a conception of what it means to be a human. After 2,000 years, that idea continues to stand in tension with competing conceptions, notably, with versions of Platonism and Neoplatonism.

The Hebraic worldview refuses to fit neatly into either a Cartesian dualism or some type of monism. In Deuteronomy, we see heart, soul, and might listed as different aspects of a human being. We must not, however, picture these as separate components which are capable of isolated examination:

You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

The human being is more than the sum of her or his parts. The Semitic thought of Holy Scripture rejects the Cartesian view of the human who is a mind and has a body. Instead, the Hebraic conceptual framework offers a human who is the intersection, or union, of soul and body.

The Greek text of the New Testament adds a fourth noun to the total, substituting ‘mind’ and ‘strength’ for ‘might’:

And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.

Perhaps it is best not to regard these substantives as clearly distinguished modules of a human being, but rather to conceive of them as varying aspects or facets of single indivisible entity. These four traits are therefore perhaps not completely separable from each other.

Like the proverbial two sides of a coin, a human can’t be disassembled into parts. Author Wendell Berry offers his analysis:

The formula given in Genesis 2:7 is not man = body + soul; the formula is soul = dust + breath. According to this verse, God did not make a body and put a soul into it, like a letter into an envelope.

To be sure, it is operating at a disadvantage to discuss these matters in English. A study of Hebrew and Greek are indispensable. The name ‘Adam’ is simply a linguistic variation of the word for dirt. The text tells us that with the breath of God, Adam ‘became a living soul,’ which begs the question, what exactly is a non-living soul?

We must note, in passing, that Wendell Berry is not a trained philosopher or theologian, although his engagement with spiritual matters seems to be informed and sincere. His analysis of what it means to be human continues:

The dust, formed as man and made to live, did not embody a soul; it became a soul. “Soul” here refers to the whole creature.

There might lurk, however, a danger in the honorable attempt to do justice to the Hebraic anthropology. In trying to do justice to the text and its Semitic vision of human nature, and in trying to avoid Neoplatonism, it is possible to veer too far in the opposite direction, and lapse into something akin to materialism, which could unwittingly deny the immortality of the soul.

There is a paradox in the fact that soul and body are not simply detachable from one another, and yet eternal life is possible even when the body has returned to the state of scattered dust.

Paradoxes are, however, exactly what we should expect when trying to understand a design produced by the mind of God, who says

For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.

On the one hand, we wish to reject a Platonic view that an immaterial soul and a physical body are essentially separate and distinct, and merely happen to coincide for a segment of time. But on the other hand, we must be careful not to identify the human being too closely with the physical body, because that body does eventually end up as dust.

Among some followers of Jesus, the Cartesian formula, “I am a mind and I have a body” has become too influential and nudged them away from the ontology of the text. The Hebraic metaphysic of Scripture might be closer to something like “a human being is a mind and a body.”

A document written by the CTCR correctly moves away from Neoplatonic dualism, but does it, in citing Wendell Berry, embrace too materialistic a worldview? If, as Berry writes, “body + breath = soul / living creature,” then what becomes of the person when the breath stops and the body disintegrates? Has Berry gotten rid of Plato at the expense of eternal life?

Platonism has often been associated with the immortality of the soul, while materialism has been associated with a concept of personhood which ends at death. How do we conceptualize an eternal soul which is somehow inherently bound to a material body? The CTCR writes:

Not only did God form us from the ground but He made us “nephesh.” Nephesh has often been translated in the past as “soul,” but it is often more accurate to render it as “living creature.” Again, we start with Genesis 2:7, “Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature [nephesh].” This is an important text for it describes our nature as human beings. Wendell Berry rightly observes that this text does not support a dichotomous view of the human creature that consists of two discrete parts glued together. He notes that the formula is not: body + soul = human creature. Instead, the formula is body + breath = soul / living creature. “He [God] formed man of dust; then, by breathing His breath into it, He made the dust come alive ... Humanity is thus presented to us, in Adam, not as a creature of two discrete parts temporarily glued together but as a single mystery.” The theme continues. “When his breath departs, he returns to the earth” (Ps 146:4; Ps 104:29).

By embracing Berry’s formulation, does the CTCR somehow open the door to an interpretation which has no room for life beyond the death of my current physical body?

The challenge of articulating the Semitic worldview of Scripture is compounded by the fact that Scripture itself seems, at some points, to drift toward some type of dualism. Consider the book of Ecclesiastes:

The dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.

One starting point for this investigation would be a word study of ‘body’ and ‘bodies’ - and their Greek equivalents - in the New Testament. The human being seems to be intrinsically linked to the notion of having a material body. This would do away with the Platonic image of heaven as an afterlife of disembodied souls.

But while the human being seems necessarily to have a body, it may not necessarily need any one particular body. Hence the New Testament’s image of souls receiving new bodies (II Corinthians 5).