The longer I'm a pastor, the more clearly I see that the Reformation is not over yet. The deep divisions between the One Holy Church and her rebellious offspring have never completely healed, and like all pain that is deferred it has become simmering resentment that is the black background to current doctrinal and theological debates, no one of which would normally cause such lingering vitriol. It's just like a bad marriage where every argument accesses a deep well of hot resentment, and subsequently escalates into World War III. Every hill worthy to die on; no issue is too small that there isn't space to plant a new flag.

So it is with the Church, and books of the bible like James show this more plainly than others. James is by all accounts a very challenging book; it leaves aside complex theology and engages the difficulties of Christian ethics, which formed very early in the history of God's people (within 15 years of the life of Christ). It brings up a topic which has been hotly contended since the Reformation: how does what we do figure into this thing? Before the Reformation works played prominently not just in our growth but in the fact of salvation itself. Certainly that latter theological/doctrinal move was not appropriate given the scriptural data we have available, but experience, tradition and reason seemed to deem it necessary. However, the Reformers' answer was to banish works to the barren wilderness of total irrelevance, resulting in doctrines which are a distortion of that same scriptural data (eternal security, for example).

Certainly that was, and is, an over reaction, a fact which the book of James makes very clear. What we do matters a great deal, not in terms of securing grace or even maintaining it (necessarily), but it terms of becoming the new human beings that God has intended since the Fall. God's grace is mediated to us by his love alone as an internal work, but the Kingdom of God is mediated to the world by virtue of what that grace impels us to do. In other words, though our eternal lives may not depend on what we do, the eternal lives of others certainly may.

Secondly, there have always been those religious people who carry all of the right identity markers; outwardly they clothe themselves lavishly in all the right values and when tested can articulate them all with ornate Christian vernacular. Outwardly they are pious and devout; inwardly they are a study in conflict, contradiction and competition that poison the headwaters of love and render useless whatever correct theology or doctrine they might engage.

These are the critical issues of the book of James, which challenges any attempt to detach belief from activity or vice verse. As our Lord makes clear in Matthew 22:37-40, each is evidence of the other. They are two sides of the same coin.