10 Things You Should Know About the Book of James

by: David Gibson

This article is part of the 10 Things You Should Know series.

1. James has one controlling theme that holds everything together.

It misreads James entirely to suggest there is no coherent vision linking the whole letter together. In fact, James has one grand preoccupation from start to finish: the undivided life of God’s people. He is so consumed with this theme that it runs like a golden thread through every section of his letter. James writes to show us what the person wholly devoted to God believes and to display how they think, live, speak, and pray. The key to James is not merely to look for certain linking words but to look for certain words fleshed out in story form. For example, “You adulterous people” (James 4:4) is a dramatic and powerful pictorial description of the letter’s key theme: the believer who is divided is two-timing God.

2. James’s key diagnosis is “double-mindedness.”

The Greek word for double-minded (James 1:8) is dipsychos—literally “two-souled”—and it appears to be James’s own coinage, a term he invented to name the precise malady he sees in the churches he is addressing. The double-minded person is not the ordinary Christian who wrestles with doubt or struggles to obey; it is the person who is fundamentally divided in their loves. One foot is planted with God, the other is still touching down in the world. They love Jesus on Sunday and the world’s way of thinking by Tuesday. Their speech, their treatment of the poor, their attitude toward money, their planning and their praying—all of it reveals a fractured self, a soul going in two directions at once. James wants to name this disease before he prescribes the cure.

3. James is much loved by ordinary believers but tends to be much avoided by preachers.James is hard-hitting and direct, clear-eyed and vivid, and therefore many of us love it for its straight-talking world of colorful images. It is not hard to hear the voice of God in such a black-and-white treatment of difficult topics. But expository preachers have sometimes struggled to find a coherent argument in James—it can feel like preaching from the book of Proverbs, where punchy sayings are followed immediately by something completely different. Martin Luther dismissed it as “a right strawy epistle,” accusing the author of “throwing things together chaotically.” Commentators have often treated James as a loosely assembled collection of moral instructions—practical, yes, but without the sustained theological logic we find in Paul. This says more about us as preachers than it does about James.

4. James is writing to churches in danger of dying.

We tend to read James as a bracing self-improvement manual—robust and direct, but essentially safe. In fact, James is writing to church fellowships on the edge of spiritual ruin. They are speaking angry words, drawing ugly social lines between rich and poor, and failing to back up their confessed faith with any visible compassion or good deeds. James moves through these symptoms—the unbridled tongue, the favoritism, the dead faith—not to give his readers a tidy to-do list, but to sound an alarm. The cadaver is on the slab, he says, and we need to look at what killed it before it happens to us too.

5. James does not contradict Paul on faith and works.

The apparent clash between “a person is justified by works and not by faith alone” (James 2:24) and Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith alone has long troubled readers. Luther thought James mangled Scripture. But the two apostles are answering different questions. Paul is addressing the anxious sinner, asking, How can I be accepted before a holy God? His answer: faith alone. James is addressing the complacent believer, asking, Does it matter whether my belief changes anything? His answer: a faith that produces no fruit is not saving faith at all. They are not contradicting each other; they are complementing each other. James is deeply consonant with the gospel of grace.

6. The word “perfect” in James does not mean sinless—it means whole.

“That you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing” (James 1:4). This opening goal of the letter sounds impossibly demanding until you understand what James means by the Greek word teleios. It does not mean moral flawlessness. It means undivided, mature, complete—the opposite of divided, fractured, double-minded. The word group appears seven times across the letter—surely no accident, given that seven is the number of completeness in the Jewish Scriptures. James is not asking his readers to achieve sinless perfection in this life; he is calling them to a singleness of heart, a gathered life lived wholly toward God and wholly toward others. The goal is not an impossible standard; it is an integrated self.

The undivided life is not a solo achievement. It is a shared mission.

 

7. James’s vision of trials is one of the most counterintuitive things in the New Testament.

“Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds” (James 1:2). James does not say feel it all joy. He says count it—reckon it, think it through with a clear mind. The logic is this: testing produces steadfastness, and steadfastness produces an undivided life. God uses the furnace of suffering not to destroy us but to refine us, to kill off the dividedness inside us, to press the two halves of our souls back into one. The road to wholeness is the path of pain. This is not a comfort that removes suffering; it is a framework that explains it. C. S. Lewis captured the grand scale of what God is doing in our pain—he is not renovating a cottage; he is building us into a palace.

8. James’s diagnosis of the tongue goes deeper than speech.

The vivid images of James 3—the bit in the horse’s mouth, the ship’s rudder, the forest fire from a single spark—might suggest that James’s answer is simply to speak more carefully. But that is exactly what James says we cannot do. “No human being can tame the tongue” (James 3:8). His point is not that we need to try harder with our words; his point is that the tongue is the heart’s publisher. What the mouth produces is in perfect harmony with what lies at the bottom of the well. Angry words, gossip, blessing mixed with cursing from the same mouth—these are symptoms, not the disease itself. You don’t fix the symptom; you change the source.

9. James presents a God who is scandalously eager to welcome back his wandering people.

At the heart of James 4 is one of the most startling divine responses in all of Scripture. James has just called his readers “adulterous people”—they have been unfaithful to God, in bed with the world, two-timing the one who loves them. Any jilted lover would respond with cold anger, withdrawal, rejection. Instead, God says: “Draw near to me, and I will draw near to you” (James 4:8). He woos the ones who have betrayed him. He calls back the ones who have gone elsewhere. The medicine he offers is grace: “he gives more grace” (James 4:6). This is what makes James not merely a letter of rebuke but a letter of extraordinary tenderness. The surgery is painful because the surgeon is so very good.

10. James ends where he begins: with the preciousness of God’s people to one another.

The final two verses might appear to be a throwaway addition, but they are in fact the emotional climax of the letter. “My brothers, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death” (James 5:19–20). After chapters of diagnosis and prescription, James finishes with this: we are worth so much to each other that we must go after one another when we wander. Part of what divides us is our conception of ourselves as islands. The undivided life is not a solo achievement. It is a shared mission. We are healed, in part, by the faithfulness of brothers and sisters who love us enough to come and find us when we are lost.

 ^eCount it all joy, my brothers,² when you meet trials ^fof various kinds, 3 for you know that ^gthe testing of your faith ^hproduces steadfastness. 4 And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be ⁱperfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

David Gibson is the author of The Undivided Life: A Guide to Wholehearted Faith from the Book of James.

 

Why We Shouldn’t Cancel the Supreme Court

Jonathan Turley

Author, Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution

 

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The following is adapted from a speech delivered on August 6, 2026, in Washington, D.C., at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship.

Nothing quite says popular justice like a good old-fashioned guillotine. Across the country, protesters have dragged around makeshift guillotines as they call for “radical” and “revolutionary” changes to our constitutional system. The symbol of the French Revolution remains a chilling reminder of how revolutions devour their own. What is even more unnerving than these prop guillotines is the increase in calls for radical and revolutionary changes—including the elimination or the packing of the Supreme Court, trashing the Electoral College, and doing away with the U.S. Senate—by establishment figures on the Left.

Today’s attacks on the American judiciary do indeed harken back to the rhetoric that raged before the advent of “The Terror” in revolutionary France—the rhetoric that gave rise to the kind of “mobocracy” that the Founders sought to avoid by designing our constitutional order as they did.

To help understand this, it is useful to recall the fundamental differences between the American Revolution, which led to the world’s oldest and most prosperous republic, and the French Revolution, which led to a short-lived, blood-soaked tyranny. Both revolutions were based on Enlightenment ideas. But America’s revolution was closely tied to the political philosophy of John Locke, who held that our rights come not from the government, but from God. The institutional arrangements of the Constitution, including the independent court system, were designed to protect these God-given individual rights.

Conversely, the French Revolution was inspired in the end not by Lockean principles but by the political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rosseau, which extolled the “general will” of the people and opposed institutions (including courts) that interfered with that will. This concept of a general or popular will served as a license for French revolutionaries like Robespierre—who declared that “Terror is only justice: prompt, severe and inflexible . . . a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy”—to unleash a torrent of executions that would eventually come to turn on the revolutionaries themselves.

There is a radical movement rising in the U.S. with chilling parallels to the French Revolution. Demands for the elimination or packing of the Supreme Court and other measures are ripped from the French revolutionary handbook. Most worrisome is the surrender of establishment figures, particularly in promising to make radical changes to the Supreme Court. Indeed, offering the Supreme Court up to this movement has become a litmus test for Democratic presidential candidates. Former Vice President Kamala Harris, former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, and U.S. Representative Ro Khanna have embraced it. Harris and California Governor Gavin Newsom have characterized reluctance to change the Court as “nostalgia” and have warned that “nostalgia is not working.” The platform of the increasingly influential Democratic Socialists of America calls both for dissolving the Supreme Court and for creating a unicameral legislature by eliminating the U.S. Senate.

Much of this is animated by undisguised power politics. Here’s former Attorney General Eric Holder arguing that packing the Supreme Court should be made a priority: “[We’re] talking about the acquisition and the use of power if there is a Democratic trifecta in 2028.” And Democratic strategist James Carville: “If the Democrats win the presidency and both houses of Congress, I think on day one, they should expand the Supreme Court to 13. . . . Eat our dust. Don’t run on it. Don’t talk about it. Just do it.” Harvard Law School Professor Michael Klarman has laid out an agenda by which the Democrats can guarantee that they will never lose another election but warns that “the Supreme Court could strike down everything [that agenda consists of].”

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has characterized the Court as illegitimate because it has rendered decisions against what she sees as “widely held public opinion.” Former U.S. Representative Eric Swalwell similarly objected that the Court “defies the will of the people.” U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is now leading in some Democratic presidential polls, asks why we even have a Supreme Court: “How much does the current structure benefit us? . . . I don’t think it does.”

The irony is that those calling to pack the Court say it will make the Court “less partisan.” Buttigieg has suggested not only expanding the Court from nine to 15 justices, but also having each party appoint five members, with those ten justices then selecting the remaining five. Such a court would then operate like the Federal Election Commission currently does, with party loyalists voting the party line.

***

This way of thinking runs completely counter to our nation’s founding principles. A non-partisan, independent judiciary serves two essential purposes: it plays a vital role in preserving the separation of powers, which prevents all government power from being concentrated in one place, and it stands as a bulwark in defense of minority rights against a majority faction. To ensure its ability to perform these essential roles without being threatened by the political branches—the Congress and the executive branch—the Constitution gives federal jurists life tenure and salary protections.

Despite these structural protections, early in our nation’s history there were few professional standards governing the American court system. Courts were openly biased, with Federalist judges becoming virtual grand inquisitors of Jeffersonians under the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts passed during the presidency of John Adams. Judges and justices routinely ran for political office and openly engaged in political commentary from the bench. But this would change. The first university-based law school in the U.S. was founded in 1779 at The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and America’s first independent law school was created in 1784 in Litchfield, Connecticut. Relatively quickly the partisanship that characterized the courts came to be tempered by professional standards that eschewed political associations and advocacy.

Even today, regardless of the charges hurled against the Supreme Court by both the Right and the Left, what critics call partisanship is actually deep and good-faith jurisprudential differences on both ends of the Court. This was also the case when, for a period of many decades, the Court had a liberal majority. And during that period—even during the years of the Warren Court in the 1950s and ’60s, when conservative precedents were overturned in large numbers and conservatives were often outraged—there were virtually no calls to pack or eliminate the Court.

During the confirmation hearings for Neil Gorsuch in 2017, I had an exchange with a Democratic senator who rattled off a series of 5–4 decisions to show that conservative justices were robotic partisans. I asked the senator if the four liberal justices showing the same consistency in dissent were also partisans. The reaction was disbelief. After all, the liberal justices were right in his eyes.

In reality, the attack on the Court as partisan is entirely disconnected from its actual voting record. It is a too-little-known fact that 44 percent of cases that come before the Supreme Court are decided unanimously. When you include nearly unanimous cases—those decided by 8–1 and 7–2 margins—that figure jumps to over 60 percent. It is also common for liberal and conservative justices to vote with colleagues on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum. In a case this year, for example, conservative Justices Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh joined liberal Justices Sotomayor and Jackson in the majority decision, while liberal Justice Kagan joined Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Barrett in the dissent.

Liberal justices from Stephen Breyer to Elena Kagan have refuted claims that today’s Court is a partisan institution. Justice Kagan, as reported in Politico, spoke recently on this topic and “reject[ed] claims that the high court’s conservative majority is in President Donald Trump’s corner.” The fact is that the ongoing enthusiasm for packing or eliminating the Supreme Court is based less on the voting records and views of the justices than on the idea, as Senator Warren put it, that the Court should follow what she perceives as “widely held public opinion.”

For those on both ends of the political spectrum, judicial restraints on their favored policies can be frustrating or even infuriating. And sometimes, as history shows, the Court can get things wrong. On the other hand, those restraints often represent a firewall for natural rights.

Consider the attacks on free speech that came to a head during the Biden administration, when a coalition of forces in government, academia, and corporations created the largest censorship system in the history of our country. Free speech as guaranteed in the First Amendment has been understood throughout our history, almost universally among Americans, as a bedrock principle essential to all our rights. Yet there was an aggressive campaign between 2020 and 2024 to curtail free speech on the Internet and elsewhere by labeling it “disinformation,” “misinformation,” “malinformation,” or “hate speech.” Those standing in defense of free speech were dismissed, in the words of one law professor’s book, as members of a “cult of the Constitution.” This campaign followed a trend in Europe, where speech is increasingly criminalized. But European laws never understood free speech as a natural right, and Europe’s courts have never aggressively protected it.

Here in the U.S., on the other hand, one of the greatest triumphs for free speech came in the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, which held that Lorie Smith, a Christian website designer, could refuse to provide services for a same-sex marriage. Justice Gorsuch, writing for the majority, argued that “the framers designed the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to protect the ‘freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think.’ . . . They did so because they saw the freedom of speech ‘both as an end and as a means’ . . . an end because the freedom to think and speak is among our inalienable human rights.”

Had 303 Creative been decided in a different way, states and cities could compel or curtail speech according to whatever their leaders viewed as discriminatory elements under public accommodations laws. Instead, the Court adopted a bright-line rule that business owners could decline to create expressive products from cakes to websites. The counter-majoritarian function of the Court worked in the 303 Creative decision to protect natural rights. Regardless of whether it reflected the will of the Colorado majority, it upheld the right of free speech.

***

We are living in a time of rage. It is not the first such time in our country. Indeed, America was born in rage. It was rage that fueled the Boston Tea Party. It was righteous rage, but rage all the same. It is especially during such periods that the judiciary must stand in defense of our individual natural rights. It is also especially during such times that we must stand as a people to prevent extremists of any ideological bent from politicizing or destroying our constitutional judicial system.

Ironically, those establishment figures trying to cancel the Court today are delusional in not foreseeing that they will be undermining their own freedom and security should they succeed. They might recall the answer of Abbé Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, often described as the Thomas Paine of the French Revolution, to the question of what he had done during the Revolution. “I survived,” he said.

The history of canceling courts is a history replete with unhappy endings. Courts are by necessity one of the first targets of revolutionaries. Following the October Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power in Russia, one of their first decrees was the “Abolition of Existing Legal Institutions.” Soon after came the establishment of the infamous People’s Courts. In revolution after revolution, newly-established courts carried out the purported will of the people with terrible consequences. In an age of rage, it is too often reason itself that is canceled.

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Origins and the "Created Kind" Concept

Trevor Major, MSC, MA

Doctrinal MattersInspiration of the BibleDifficult PassagesDifficult PassagesDifficult Passages

Q.

The Bible speaks of things reproducing “after their kind.” What does the biblical word “kind” indicate?

A.

Today, most creationists take the view that variation and speciation can occur only within created kinds. These kinds appeared for the first time in the creation week, and have since colonized the Earth. For land-dwelling animals, modern representatives would have to be the descendants of the kinds carried on the ark (Genesis 6:17; 8:17-19).

However, there is no consensus on the biological definition of kind, or the criteria for grouping animals within a kind. Some creationists equate the term with a particular taxonomic level higher than species, such as genus or family. Most, however, avoid such comparisons altogether. Byron Nelson wrote:

The “kinds” of Genesis refer not to the “systematic” species identified by men, but to those natural species of which the world is full, which have power to vary within themselves in such a way that the members of the species are not all exactly alike, but which, nevertheless, cannot go out of the bounds that the creator set (1967, p. 4).

In 1941, Frank Marsh coined the term “baramin”—a compound of the Hebrew words bara (“created”) and min (“kind”). He suggested that the nearest equivalent to the created kind would vary, depending on the greatest taxonomic level at which two organisms could interbreed (1976, p. 34). For example, while there are several species of cattle and bison, they probably belong to the same kind because they all can interbreed (Marsh, 1976, p. 31).

The differences of opinion, and the apparent flexibility in the idea, have given anticreationists cause for criticism. Joel Cracraft complained:

The “created kind” is the unit of creation event just as the species is the unit of evolutionary change. Consequently, if the concept of “created kind” cannot be defined so that it can be used to interpret and investigate nature, then it is of little or no importance for the growth of knowledge (1983, p. 169).

However, the same sort of criticisms leveled at kinds also can be turned on the species concept, which is neither well defined nor objective. First, the widely held biological species concept “holds that a species is a population of organisms that can at least potentially breed with one another but that do not breed with other populations” (Rennie, 1991). Unfortunately, two populations may not breed because they are isolated geographically. This may lead to taxonomic splitting, by which taxonomists give two different names to populations that could interbreed if given the chance. Practically speaking, very few species undergo extensive cross-breeding experiments before classification to test their reproductive isolation. Hybridization is another problem. Two seemingly distinct plant species may cross to produce fertile hybrids.

The potential for taxonomic splitting is especially acute in the fossil record, where it is impossible to apply the biological species concept. Instead, paleontologists tend to define species on their morphology alone. However, the soft parts of an organism rarely are preserved, and the identification must rest almost entirely on hard parts (e.g., bones, teeth, etc.). Any evolutionary relationships drawn from such studies are necessarily limited (Major, 1991).

Second, the species idea often takes on a definite evolutionary connotation. As we have already seen, Cracraft claims that the species is “the unit of evolutionary change” (1983, p. 169). He wants to replace the biological species concept with his own phylogenetic species concept, mainly because he is not satisfied with any definition that ignores alleged evolutionary relationships. Cracraft’s concept defines a species as “the smallest recognizable cluster of individuals that share a common pattern of ancestry” (Rennie, 1991).

The created kind concept can hold its own against these definitions. It proposes that a kind will consist of populations that can interbreed, while still allowing room for variation. If implemented systematically, the concept would reveal barriers or discontinuities between created kinds. “In order to make this evidence of creation available,” Kurt Wise has suggested, “there is a serious need for creation biologists to create, adopt, and employ a reproducible method of flagging identifiable phyletic discontinuities” (1990, 2:354). Creationists, like Wise, are continuing their work on kinds. In the meantime we face a taxonomic system encumbered with evolutionary presuppositions.

REFERENCES

Cracraft, Joel (1983), “Systematics, Comparative Biology, and the Case against Creationism,” Scientists Confront Creationism, ed. Laurie R. Godfrey (New York: W.W. Norton), pp. 163-191.

Major, Trevor (1991), “Problems in the Interpretation of Variation Within the Fossil Record,” Creation Research Society Quarterly, 28:52-53, September.

Marsh, Frank L. (1976), Variation and Fixity in Nature (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press).

Nelson, Byron (1967), After Its Kind (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany Fellowship).

Rennie, John (1991), “Are Species Specious?,” Scientific American, 265[5]:26, November.

Wise, Kurt P. (1990), “Baraminology: A Young-Earth Creation Biosystematic Method,” Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Creationism, July 30-August 4, 1990, ed. Robert E. Walsh (Pittsburgh, PA: Creation Science Fellowship), pp. 345-360.

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