G. Poverty and Wealth

Context of Thought and Theology

does display similarities to wisdom in subject matter and style. A larger role for wisdom in the letter can only be discovered by arguments from parallel language: what James says is similar to what some OT or Jewish texts say about wisdom; therefore, James must be thinking of wisdom. But rarely are these parallels so distinctive to wisdom contexts to justify such a conclusion.123

G. Poverty and Wealth

“There is hardly a single element of the OT/late Jewish tradition about poverty and piety that is not also encountered in the letter of James.”124 This being so, we can best appreciate James’s teaching on this matter if we first have a sense of the OT Jewish tradition. The subject is broad and somewhat controversial, but three elements of the tradition especially relevant to James may be noted.125

First, God has a particular concern for the poor, the downtrodden, the outcasts. God is “a father to the fatherless, a defender of widows” (Ps 68:5); “he defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing” (Deut 10:18). So also James claims that “God [has] chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith” (2:5). Second, God’s people must imitate God by showing a similar concern for the poor and disadvantaged. The Deuteronomy passage quoted above continues, “And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt” (10:19). The prophets regularly denounce Israel for failing to obey this aspect of God’s law (see, e.g., Amos 2:6–7). James likewise makes the care of orphans and widows one of the key elements of pure and faultless religion (1:27).

A third strand in the OT tradition, particularly visible in the Psalms, is the association of the “poor” (‘ānî) with the righteous (see, for instance, Pss 10; 37:8–17; 72:2, 4; Isa 29:19). The poor person, helpless and afflicted by the

123. See Johnson, 33–34. 124. Mußner, 80 (my translation). 125. A concern to bring NT teaching to bear on the horrendous contemporary problem of poverty has sparked significant discussion of James’s teaching on this issue. See, e.g., Tamez, Scandalous Message of James; D. H. Edgar, Has God Not Chosen the Poor? The Social Setting of the Epistle of James, JSNTSup 206 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2001); N. R. Morales, Poor and Rich in James: A Relevance Theory Approach to James’s Use of the Old Testament, BBRSup 20 (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2018). For a broader biblical perspective on the issue, see esp. C. L. Blomberg, Neither Poverty nor Riches: A Biblical Theology of Material Possessions, NSBT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999).

wealthy and powerful, calls out to God for deliverance. God, in turn, promises to rescue the poor from his or her distress and to judge the wicked oppressor. In these texts, and others like them, the OT writers appear to merge the economic category “poor” with the spiritual category “righteous.” And on the flip side, in a similar way, the “rich” are sometimes associated with the wicked. These verses reflect a specific social-economic-theological context, in which the vast majority of the true people of God are poor and oppressed. James seems to have been written in the same kind of context. In a probable allusion to Jesus’s beatitude “Blessed are you who are poor” (Luke 6:20), he notes how God has singled out for attention the poor (2:5). And Jesus’s corresponding word of judgment, “Woe to you who are rich” (Luke 6:24), is also taken up in James’s strong condemnation of the rich in 5:1–6. The strength of James’s language, along with his obvious dependence on Jesus’s teaching and the OT tradition, has made James one of the favorite biblical books among liberation theologians. James, they assert, draws clear lines between the poor and the righteous on the one hand and the rich and the wicked on the other. The poor are, in effect, God’s people, while the rich and powerful are destined for destruction. But the picture is not so simple. The OT tradition is not nearly as clear-cut as some interpreters have suggested. While the poor are often pictured as the objects of God’s concern and deliverance, they are not often simply identified with the righteous. And rarely, similarly, is the word “rich” a synonym for the wicked (see the notes on 1:10). And the situation in James is complicated by 1:10–11. Commentators are evenly split over the identity of the “rich person” in this passage: Is the person a believer or not? I very tentatively suggest that this person probably is a Christian; and if so, it shows that James does not identify wealth with wickedness nor confine God’s people only to the poor. Moving in the same direction is the way in which James justifies his condemnation of the rich in 5:1–6. Their doom comes because of specific sinful actions: hoarding money at the expense of the poor (vv. 2–3), senseless luxury (v. 5), defrauding workers (v. 4), persecuting the righteous (v. 6). So, using James to claim that poor people, in general, are righteous and rich people are wicked is not justified. Economic status and spiritual status do not exactly correlate.126

Nevertheless, in our appropriate concern to distance James from an extreme “liberation” perspective, we must be careful not to rob his denunciation of the rich of its power. The very possession of wealth when others are going without the basic necessities of life, suggests James, is sinful (see comments

126. See, e.g., Penner, Epistle of James, 270–73.