# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1860_S90
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

90    From German Reviews.

then the salvation of souls would be built not on God and his imperishable, ever-new Word, but on dead men, on Jeremiah, Matthew, Eusebius, and their yellowed, worm-eaten parchments. Without becoming untrue to itself, without falling away from its one Lord and Master, the evangelical church may allow its canonical scriptures only an a posteriori authority; it may never let fall the reformational principle: "In this all upright, holy books agree, that they all together preach and urge Christ. This too is the right touchstone for judging all books, to see whether they urge Christ or not, since all Scripture testifies of Christ, and St. Paul will know nothing but Christ. What does not teach Christ is not yet apostolic, even if St. Peter or Paul taught it. Conversely, what preaches Christ would be apostolic, even if Judas, Annas, Pilate, and Herod did it." (Luther's preface to the Epistle of St. James.) Besides this, it is entirely unproven that the author of our epistle was an apostle or an apostolic man, and it will also remain forever unprovable: "ἐπεὶ πολλοὶ Ἰάκωβοι ἐκαλοῦντο" [since many were called James] (Hegesippus). Strange enough sounds Huther's assertion: "The author of the epistle designates himself in the salutation as Ἰάκωβος, θεοῦ καὶ κυρίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ δοῦλος [James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ], and thereby makes himself known, even if not as an apostle in the narrower sense of the word, yet as a man of apostolic standing." But "servant" and "apostle (of Jesus Christ)" plainly differ as genus and species (compare Rom. 1:1, Eph. 1:1, Titus 1:1, 2 Pet. 1:1) — a servant of Christ even Huther, and I, and indeed every baptized and believing person, may call himself without self-exaltation; for it means, after all, nothing more than "some good, pious man." Our James, too, cannot be taken for anything else, and Huther's attempt to make more of him is, at least to me, far too contrived and overly subtle. The excursus to chapter II as well (pp. 126–132) seems to me by far too weak to remove the opposition between James and Paul, which exists not merely "in wording." Huther places far too little weight on "the receding of the christological elements," which he regards merely "as a peculiarity of the epistle" (p. 18). On this point I think with Luther that he would be a strange apostle indeed who, wishing to teach Christian people, does not so much as mention, in such a lengthy teaching, the suffering, the resurrection, the Spirit of Christ. He names Christ a few times, but teaches nothing about him, and speaks instead of the common faith in God. For the office of a true apostle is that he preach of Christ's suffering and resurrection and office, and lay the very ground of that faith, as he himself says: "you shall be my witnesses." (Luther, loc. cit.) Over the sentence too, "As the body without the spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead," Huther passes far too lightly, although the thought that faith relates to works as the body does to the spirit is just as foreign to all the undoubted apostles