Henry Krabbendam - James - World Evangelical Alliance

2. FAITH AS THE DYNAMICS OF HOLINESS (2:14-26)
a. Faith and Works (2:14-19)
(14) What does it profit, my brothers, if someone claims to have
faith, but does not have deeds? Can such faith save him? (15) If a
brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacks food for the day, (16)
and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, keep warm and eat
your fill,” but does not give him his bodily needs, what good is it?
(17) So also faith, if it has no deeds, is dead being by itself. (18)
But someone will say, “You have faith and I have deeds.” Show
me your faith apart from your deeds, and I will demonstrate to
you my faith by my deeds. (19) You believe that God is one? Well
and good, even the demons believe this, and they shudder!
(1) Issue of Dead Faith (2:14)
James starts out by asking a simple rhetorical (Dibelius, 151) question, 241 that
is nevertheless “provocative,” and must have sent “shockwaves of disbelief”
241 Brosend, 84-85, that this rhetorical question is part of a larger rhetorical package. While
generically James does not constitute a diatribe, we still encounter in James 2 a number of
features that characterize diatribal literature and procedures, such as objections and false conclusions
of an interlocutor (2:18a, 19), series of questions and answers to the interlocutor
(2:20-23), material posed in the form of an interlocution that subsequently is rejected (2:20),
harsh censure of the auditors for their behavior (2:2-6, 8-13, 14-17, 18-20), illustration of
vices (2:15-16), censorious rhetorical questions (2:20), maxims of poets (2:8, 10, 11, 23), examples,
comparisons and antitheses (2:2-4, 8-9, 15-16, 21-23, 25), irony and sarcasm (2:18-
20), personification (2:13, 17, 26), and moral topics like word versus deed (2:1-26). I frankly
question whether James follows the diatribal format consciously. But I appreciate Brosend’s
conclusions based on the features he identifies, whether diatribal or not. He encourages
preachers “not to blast the congregation,” but to be “dynamic, dialogical, and inductive, inviting
the audience/reader to participate, reach conclusions, and make decisions actively,” and
asks them point blank, “Should (your) sermon based on a dynamic text (such as James 2) settle
for less?” In this Brosend is right on. Preachers should follow in the footsteps of James
with propositions in the form of questions (2:14), examples from the life of the community
that uses humor and sarcasm (2:15-16), restatements of propositions as declarations (2:17),
objections by imagined interlocutors restated as impossible hypotheticals (2:18), ironic affirmations
of faith claims (2:19), restatements of propositions as a challenge (2:20), proofs
from Scripture (2:22-25), and concluding statements in the form of an analogy (2:26). I define
all this as “graphic imaging,” which is rooted in the recognition that the substance of a concept
goes deeper than the concept itself. In graphic imagining the preacher demonstrates that
he is not satisfied with simply storing concepts away in the refrigeration system of one’s
mind, but seeks to drive their substance home into the heart and lives of his audience. Finally,
Brosend recommends that the preacher should let the chips fall, where they may or should
fall. If a sermon needs to be “disquieting” or even “radically disrupting,” let it be, because it
must be!
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