# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1855_S118
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

118 James's Teaching on Justifying Faith.

...is not active through love is useless, useless in particular for salvation — a presentation that proceeded in the following three main propositions:

1) Faith that is not active through love is ineffectual, dead — like the words "warm yourselves, be filled" spoken to those who are freezing and hungry, without giving them what the body needs, warmth and bread: verses 15–17.

2) He who boasts of faith without proving it through works will in vain reject the reproach that he has no faith at all, while the Christian who is diligent in good works proves his faith precisely thereby: verse 18.

3) And if the inactive Christian appeals to the fact that he does after all hold the Christian faith — for example, that God is one — then his faith is simply that mere holding-to-be-true which the devils also have, and which arouses not salvation but rather trembling: verse 19.

Now, when after this presentation James begins verse 20, he takes up again the assertion of verses 15–17, that faith without works is dead, in order to prove it clearly and irrefutably to the lazy Christian. A glance at the following words teaches that this proof is to be drawn from the example of Abraham and Rahab, that is, from the opposite case. The lazy Christian stands there on the one side — he must, as it were, place himself there; he boasts of his faith, but he is a vain, an empty man, as James calls him, empty namely of the fruits of righteousness: Philippians 1:11. Opposite him, on the other side, Abraham is set — he who believed and was filled with the fruits of righteousness. Abraham's faith the empty Christian could call nothing other than living, yet he was also compelled to acknowledge its active manifestation in good works; thereby he had to recognize that his own faith, which was not active in love, was dead. The proof would already have been complete with this.

In this manner James does indeed argue. Yet with a swift, indeed surprising turn, he directs his attack not merely against the empty or lazy Christian's boasting of faith, but especially against that same man's claim that he is justified by faith. This turn could be given to the proof, for —

1) to show that a certain faith does not justify is also to show that it is dead, since whatever justifies must indeed be something living. And —

2) whoever thinks of Abraham's faith thinks not merely of its noble fruit, obedience, but also of the fact that it was reckoned to him for righteousness. Abraham's example thus gave James the occasion to demonstrate not only that living faith always bears the fruit of good works, but especially to emphasize thereby that this very faith is the justifying faith.

But that he emphasized this, and indeed in the particular manner of speech which