What We Cannot Have Without War

¹³ Who is wise and understandable among you? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom. ¹⁴ But if you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not be arrogant and lie about the truth. ¹⁵ This is not wisdom that comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish. ¹⁶ For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind. ¹⁷ But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. ¹⁸ And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace. 4 ¹ Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? ² You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. ³ You ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures. … ⁷ Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. ⁸ Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.

James 3:13 – 4:3, 7-8a (NRSVue)

“We all want peace. But we also want what we cannot have without war.”

I encountered these words when I was a graduate student working in the archives of the 20^th-century theologian Joseph Sittler. Sittler himself was unsure of the quote’s origins (that is, who said it first, since he was quoting it from memory), but it has stayed with me partly because I think it names a conundrum that haunts both ethics and politics: what does it mean when the structures of desire that we inhabit collectively outweigh or undermine our individual desires to act out of step with those structures? Reinhold Niebuhr, of course, would outline a version of this dilemma in Moral Man and Immoral Society. I suggest that the book of James gives us similar occasion for contemplation.

James, of course, has been a hermeneutical football for centuries among Christians seeking to find biblical warrant for their answers to a problem that emerges mainly in the late medieval West: how does faith in Jesus Christ correlate with the role of “works” in the Christian life? Martin Luther famously expressed the desire (upon which he did not act) to excise James from the canon, referring to it as an “epistle of straw.” Meanwhile, his Roman Catholic interlocutors, as well as a number of later so-called “radical reformers,” saw in James a pre-emptive corrective to libertine ethics and political quietism.

Luther, in his early treatise The Freedom of a Christian, provides a hermeneutical key for understanding James. He did so within the horizon of a theory of justification that insisted that justification is “by grace through faith apart from works,” and the hermeneutical key that Luther built on this assertion relies on the efficacy of affect: in other words, being justified is supposed to make us feel a certain way. And feeling should lead to action.  For Luther, Christians who fully understand that their salvation has been granted by God in Christ apart from any works of their own would be so inspired and grateful by this “good news” (gospel) that they would be irresistibly compelled by this gratitude to carry out good works for their neighbors. In fact, their works would be all the more good since at that point the rationale would be to seek the neighbor’s welfare alone, not one’s own salvation through the merits of good works. In short, the justified sinner will inevitably be grateful, and that gratitude will be expressed in good works; absence of good works is evidence that the gospel has not fully been heard. Faith and works will be reconciled rightly if the Christian feels the gospel rightly.

Luther understood that, for James, ethics are tied to emotions, and emotions are tied to desires. What does it mean to desire? How can desires be channeled towards justice for the poor, rather than religious backing for the status quo? What does it mean to feel one’s way into a genuinely Christian political ethic? And what can sober reflection on politics teach us about how malformed our feelings are?

Consistently throughout the letter, James links misdirected desire to communal conflict.Thus James 4:1-3: “Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.” The direct target of James’ ire here seems to be the gluttony of the rich at the expense of the poor. But it is not just that the rich exploit the poor and the latter suffer as a result; it is that the retention of desires for wealth, status, and security amongst rich Christians divides the community and undercuts any chance that the church has to be a counter-witness to those hierarchies. 

It has been trendy for several decades now for Christian theologians, cued by Augustinian and Thomistic traditions, to focus on the right ordering of desires as the core of a properly Christian political ethic. Moreover, many of these theologians (I have here in mind especially D. Steven Long and James K.A. Smith) have argued that the church is a distinct “counter-public” to the institutionalized disorder of desires characteristic of most ruling regimes, and therefore is the best hope we have. In other words, the church is seen as the entity that teaches us to want the right things in the right way, as opposed to a social order that forms us either to want the wrong things or to want the right things the wrong way (e.g., in excess, at the expense of others). 

There is much to recommend this perspective; certainly, the poor and the marginalized have a stake in Christian community, and if the community is healthy then all the better.  However, I would argue that the letter also resonates with Sittler’s admonition to avoid becoming too sanguine about Christian communities’ ability to subvert rather than baptize these cultural dynamics. In short, we should not overestimate how easy this is for Christian communities. After all, Christians are not outside of culture, and if Sittler and James are right, it is very difficult to shake the formation in desire that many of us have received. The intertwining of desire and violence runs deep within us. With a few notable exceptions, the history of Christian communities has not been particularly encouraging when it comes to shaping our desires the right way – paraphrasing Sittler, to not want “what we cannot have without violence” –  political, economic, or otherwise.

Returning to Luther, he felt that books such as James could be useful in part because, according to him, they serve that function of “law” that holds a mirror up to the reader’s own shortcomings and proves the need for grace. In other words, the ethical ideal teaches Christians (ironically) that we cannot be as good as we think we ought to be. Some find that view overly pessimistic (me, for one); however, there is something right about the tough-minded humility that such a mode of reading is meant to foster. Even if we want to believe that God does hold us to the good and gives us efficacy to achieve it (collectively if not individually), we should be realistic about how difficult it is to escape the ways in which violence pervades desire. It is hard to want the good without wanting violence. Another way of putting it is that wanting the good is not enough; the reform of desire towards peace must be more thoroughgoing, and our institutions (political, ecclesial, and otherwise) are not always helpful along those lines.That doesn’t mean we should abandon them, but we should be clear-eyed about their limits. Again, formation (and mal-formation towards violence) runs deep. 

James is hard to preach, not least because the letter invites those of us who serve Christian communities into difficult questions. Those readers who see the letter’s vision as an impossible ideal are right to stress the difficulty, especially given how tightly James ties Christian virtue to deprogramming ourselves from desires that lead to (or depend upon) violence. That said, those who value the letter as an invitation to think in bold terms about the possibilities for Christian community are themselves right to stress that the letter itself is unsparing in its insistence that this sort of hard work is what Christian community requires. Impossible does not mean optional. 

Taking the letter of James as a whole, with its class analysis and linking of conflict to misdirected desire, it seems that what James invites us towards is a tough-minded, thoroughgoing inventory of affect that takes seriously structural fallenness: both in the sense of the sinfulness of structures themselves and our individual complicity within them. It is one thing for me to want no one to have to die for my children’s security, or the security of all who have the power to wage war; it’s another thing entirely to be formed away from wanting security itself if security cannot be won without unjust violence. To undertake the reformation of desires is a calling, with no guarantees of success, but some promise of God’s grace along the way. James’ rhetoric suggests that the author invites us into the full scandal of that calling; whether we preachers exhibit similar clear-eyed courage is on us.