Temptation

Blessed are those who endure trial, for when they have stood the test they will receive the crown of life which God has promised to those who love God. Let no one say when they are tempted, "I am tempted by God"; for God cannot be tempted with evil and God tempts no one; but all people are tempted when they are lured and enticed by their own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin; and sin when it is full-grown brings forth death.
- James 1:12-15

Temptation has a visceral sound.

To speak the word summons images of lust and gluttony, pride and dissipation, self-aggrandizement and vulnerability, that which is at once seductive but forbidden. In ordinary life surrender to temptation connotes moral turpitude or, at least, malfeasance, while the resistance to temptation seems to prove virtue or, anyway, a resolute willpower....

In the gospel temptation refers to the original and ingenious assaults of the power of death against human life, and, in James, particularly, to the aggressions of death against those professing fidelity to the event of the Word of God in history - all those, practically speaking, who call themselves Christians.

Temptation and Indulgence

In the context of James, there is a distinction between temptation in its theological significance and temptation in its mundane and moralistic meaning. The former may be, in some circumstances, coincident with moral temptation, but the two are never mere equivalents. Faith does not embrace pietism as a synonym, though a pietistic practice may be, in a given instance, an act of faith. Temptation in its theological sense may take the guise of ordinary moral temptation, but every conventional temptation does not necessarily conceal theological temptation:

It is this ambiguity of temptation understood in two different ways that helps to clarify some passages in James that seem to issue pietistic counsel while at the same time the letter so emphatically extols the integrity of God's grace
(James 1:21, 2:8-13). The Bible is not free of nuance.

Insensitivity to such nuance has often caused scandal to the gospel in what is preached, taught, and practiced in the churches. I have in mind pietism, which still flourishes in so many quarters in American Christendom: the "Bible belt" Baptist who regards dancing as consorting with the devil, the Methodist who condemns smoking categorically as sin, ...some Presbyterians who regard abstinence in the use of liquor as a virtue, and a host of others from most any of the sects and denominations who think that some* thing that human beings find pleasurable is lust and must be shunned lest the faithful be contaminated.

Pietism of this sort has legions of counterparts, though often it is not as readily recognized as when associated with sex, alcohol, tobacco, or the latest dance. Recently, for instance, I came across some study material prepared for adult use in congregations of one of the big, wealthy, predominantly white, Protestant denominations located chiefly in northern states. It purported to be instruction in the meaning of the Ten Commandments and in the relevance of the commandments to contemporary life. It succeeded in emasculating the commandments by interpreting each of them as divine ordinances embodying certain secular ethics,

For example, the commandment "Thou shalt not steal" in this version became a law of God concerning the "sanctity of private property." Overlooked utterly was the historic fact that the idea of private ownership of property is of comparatively recent novelty as well as the existential truth that the acquisition of property is always related to the dispossession of others. The latter is the case whether one is speaking of the ancient institutions of slavery in Israel's exile, or the subjection of the Greeks to the Romans,...or the apartheid regime in South Africa, or the more subtle deprivations wrought by de facto segregation and the increase of ghetto areas in modern American society.

This startling interpretation of the eighth commandment not only disregards . history and the common experience of human beings, but it ruthlessly ignores the biblical context of the gift of the Decalogue as the revelation of the fullness of the Word of God; moreover, it blithely omits mention of St. Paul's admonition that no one at any time is innocent of any of the commandments, and, evidently, the authors of this manual have never even heard of the letter of James (James 2:10).

IF SUCH TAMPERING with the Word of God, as evidenced by this material, is taken, as it obviously is intended to be, as gospel by the laity to whom it is addressed, it authorizes them to oppose civil rights for black citizens, denounce free access to hotels and restaurants, refuse to sell or rent real estate on the basis of race, discriminate in hiring, firing, lending, merchandising, contracting, and advertising, advocate suffrage conditioned on property ownership, sabotage the war on poverty, seek the abolition of public welfare assistance, and argue against the graduated income tax on the grounds that all of these policies are not only against their self-interests as propertied people, but actually alien to the will of God.

Within the churches, this is a kind of pietism no less corrupting than any pietism preoccupied with dancing or drinking or such. Significantly the former frequently accompanies the latter as the concrete religious commitment of a particular person or class of people in American Christendom.

Vulgar pietism, fascinated with the obviously (though never merely) visceral functions, together with more esoteric pietism, like that which distorts a commandment to enhance a pagan property ethic, do not exhaust the roster of indulgences to which Christians in America are vulnerable and to which they so often succumb....

In other words, though it be easy enough to ridicule the vulgar pietists for their fascination with what they behold as lust, there are many other kinds of pietism equally contemptible, just as superficial and, probably, much more popularized. Virtually all church people in America have been reared as pietists of one sort or another: that is one reason why they are sometimes so ill-equipped in witness.

Yet, as there must be no pride in apostasy or heresy, there must be none where church people treat the gospel frivolously - as all pietists do. After all, the earliest experiences of the church encompassed all of these things....

For Paul, the bondage to pietism is equivocation toward God's grace. For him, all pietism is "indulgence in the flesh," whether it be in the form of gluttony or "positive thinking," drunkenness or compulsive abstinence, sexual wantonness or the intellectual dissipation of pedantic theologizing, larceny or the contradiction of a commandment in order to rationalize greed, common vice, or superstitious ritualism. For Paul, all these, and any of their counterparts, are abuses of grace, all are indulgences in the flesh, all are futile and pathetic desires that end in death.

The letter of James does not quarrel with St. Paul in this respect (James 1:14-15). Indulgence in the flesh means the aggrandizement of human wants, ideas, pursuits, and enterprises despite the incapacity of any of them to substitute for the work of Christ for all people, including all who vainly strive in these ways. Indulgence in the flesh, in any of its pietistic forms, though they be legion, always constitutes the ultimate human frivolity because it represents the worship of death.

The Temptations of Christ

Specific temptations of all sorts - visceral, intellectual, psychical - only mask the singular and ultimate temptation in which the power of death poses as God....That the only temptation at all, for any person, at any time, is to succumb to the idolatry of death is disclosed and enacted decisively in the episode of Jesus in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1-11; Mark 1:2-13; Luke 4:1-13)....

The wilderness experience, first of all, evidences Jesus' remarkable identification with the generic ministry and mission of Israel, recalling and recreating Israel's sojourn in the wilderness in intercession for all humankind.

Moreover, the wilderness interlude sums up the aggressiveness with which death pursues Jesus from his conception and anticipates death's relentlessness toward him during his entire earthly ministry - in his exercise of authority over the demonic in healing, in his transcendence of time by renouncing the political ambitions that his disciples covet for him, in his rejection at the hands of his own people, in his confounding of the ecclesiastical and imperial rulers when they seize him and scourge him, in his submission to the last vengeance of death on the cross, and in his victory over that humiliation....

It is written that Jesus in the wilderness had fasted for some time and was hungry; in the first assault of death upon him is the challenge to turn stones into bread. The response of Jesus is that people live by the utterance of the Word of God, not only bread. (Though, let it be remembered, they do need bread.) The temptation is not so much an exploitation of a vulnerable circumstance - hunger - or even to demonstrate extraordinary powers - as it is the temptation to ridicule the Word of God as the source and substance of life itself and to renounce the Word of God not only in God's own name but for all human beings and for the whole world (Matthew 4:1-4).

The power of death is not quickly daunted, and next is Jesus tempted to cast himself from the pinnacle of the temple to prove his identity in the Word of God. His answer is to admonish the devil not to tempt God. It seems, on the part of Jesus, an act of radical compassion to so disarm the assault of death by confessing his integrity in the Word of God and to thereby foretell the intercession for all people of God in him on the cross (Matthew 4:5-7).

By now, it appears, chagrined, the devil volunteers his own dominion to Jesus Christ - the kingdoms of this world - if only Jesus will acknowledge death as god. And in reply Jesus banishes the power of death and so heralds the resurrection (Matthew 4:8-11).

In every instance in the wilderness episode, the confrontation is between the devil and Jesus; in each it is exposed that the issue lies between the power of death and the Word of God which means life in the sense of humankind and God reconciled and, hence, the reconciliation of people within themselves, among one another, and to all things.

Christ's Intercessions for the Tempted

The wilderness encounter does not exhaust death's genius in temptation. Just as the power of death pursues Christ from the instant of his birth - when Herod sought to locate the infant Jesus in order to assassinate him - so death besieges Christ throughout his ministry unto the tomb. In truth, it is as if Easter is not some abrupt, startling, out-of-place occurrence, but quite the contrary, simply the consummation and epitomization of the drama of death and resurrection: of the agressions of death defeated, of the extraordinary power of death but the even 'more awesome overpowering of death, of the versatile guises of death and of the ubiquity of God exposing each and all of them, of the assaults of death at once turned back and transcended on behalf of humanity.

The marvel of Easter, the glory of this day and event beyond that of any other in all history, is not that it is a unique, disjunctive, miraculous, incredible, or spooky happening, but, rather, that it is definitively historic, wholly credible, typical, and predictable, what is or should have been expected exactly, as the fulfillment and fruition of Christ's historical existence and his reiterated victorious confrontations with the power of death. That is why Easter has veracity as the authentic cosmic event.

Consider, for example, the intercession of Christ for humanity in the first utterance of the Lord's Prayer. Matthew 6 precedes the prayer with a recitation of Jesus' caution against the emptiness of the public display of pietism (Matthew 6:1-9; Luke 18:9-14). In the instruction and example of the Lord's Prayer, prayer has no intrinsic efficacy attaching to its performance, nor does it have to do with the desires of people; prayer has to do with the actual needs of persons, and the efficacy of prayer attaches to how God addresses those needs.

Thus, Jesus admonishes, do not be religious, like those who "think that they will be heard for their many words...for your Father knows what you need before you ask him" (Matthew 6:7b-8). That is Jesus' own introit to the Lord's Prayer. The summation of the prayer is "lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil," that is "from the evil one," which is the power of death (Matthew 6:13). Evil does not, in the context of the Lord's Prayer, mean moral evil in its conventional definition and usage but refers to that which is evil for every person and for the whole of creation and that which is in fact secreted in every thought or deed or wish or word called evil: the power of death or, if one renders the proper name, the devil....

[Christ's intercession] is verified by the further witness of the valor and consistency of Jesus' own endurance of premonitions, preliminary attacks, and other temptations upon his person, and by the power of death in his prayer for his bewildered disciples at Gethsemane. "I do not pray that thou shouldst take them out of the world, but that thou shouldst keep them from the evil one" (John 17:15).

The work of Christ, exemplified in the very prayers of which he is author, and for which he is authority, and as it is embodied in the cross and the emancipation of Christ from the tomb, is an intervention by God in this history for all people in their particular suffering of the feigned, but ruthless, sovereignty of death over life.

Temptation, Sin, and Death

The intercessions of Christ for the tempted represent the inexhaustible fidelity of God to people living under the threat of the power of death in this world. St. Paul comprehended this and proclaimed this assurance in his ministry as an apostle (2 Thessalonians 3:3). It is the same confidence in the demonstration of God's faithfulness in Christ that authorizes James to say, "Let no one say when they are tempted, 'I am tempted by God'; for God cannot be tempted with evil and God tempts no one; but all people are tempted when they are lured and enticed by their own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin; and sin when it is full-grown brings forth death" (James 1:13-15)....

The crude language of James suits the practice of naming the power of death the devil, for the image the letter invokes is of the conception of sin in the confrontation of people with death in their temptations. In the metaphor implied in the letter, the profound distortion of life, the alienation from the Word of God, the radical estrangement of persons from themselves and one another and all things, which is sin, is born in the seduction and rape of people by the. power of death - by the devil.

Temptation is, thus, nothing so mundane or transient or simplistic as choosing "wrong" instead of "right," or surrendering to pleasure or pride, or being enticed by the ethics of self-interest: temptation refers rather, to the incitement people suffer to repudiate the gift of life by succumbing to the idolatry of death.

And sin, hence, does not mean that people are bad, or that they have a proclivity for wickedness, or that they are proud and selfish, but, instead, sin is the possession of people by the power of death, the bondage and servitude of people to death, the usurpation of God's office by the arrogance of death. Sin does not mean that people are pernicious, it means that they are nihilists.

It is upon such a scene that God's faithfulness to humanity is manifested as not only the gift which it is in itself - a gift unearned by any merit or discretion, a gift without contingency or condition - but also as a gift that is justifying, a gift, as James gladly affirms, that surpasses and pre-empts each and all of death's temptations and substitutes and compensates for the eager affections of people for death (James 1:16, 17).

Temptation and Justification

Death has countless forms and faces. Death is hidden in everything that happens. The devil is a genius of disguise. The power of death insinuates itself into every circumstance. Death commands legions of acolytes, many willful in their allegiance, but many, also, who are witless or unwary and who do not recognize death when actually confronting it.

Hence there are those who actually do not discern when they are being tempted by death and succumb to death's temptations for, so to speak, the most idealistic or earnest motives. In American Christendom, in the precincts of the familiar churches here, for all their divisions, competitions and other corruptions, it is typically this way. All varieties of pietism - moralistic, ritualistic, and dogmatic - such as those mentioned earlier are evidences of the obtuseness of professed Christians to the versatility, subtlety, and ubiquity of death's temptations.

The pietists intend to say or think or do what is "right" for the sake of pleasing or appeasing or otherwise proving themselves before God. Pietists consistently have the purest intentions, but motives never determine or control the moral character of that which is committed in word or thought or deed. Pietism always consigns to God a merely collaborative role in the drama of salvation; pietism beholds God as dependent and passive rather than free and active; pietism of all sorts seeks to make God a debtor of humans; pietism discounts and, indeed, displaces God's unique prerogative as judge of all things; pietism suffers the exceptional arrogance of professing to anticipate how God will judge each and every action and omission of individuals and nations....

Concretely, in the contemporary churches, pietism, in any of its forms, represents a profound anxiety for success, for results, for reputation, for tribute to the conduct, practices, or beliefs of churchgoers. And though, characteristically, it is put to church people that they must behave, perform, or believe in this way or that fashion for the approval or the pleasure of God, it is the world's recognition and applause that is coveted, while it remains the case, in fact, that all that is attained by such self-seeking is the contempt of the world for the church's conformity to the world's bondage to death.

Pietism - to succumb to the temptation to pursue justification as if God had not already accomplished humans' justification on God's own initiative and in God's own way - is pleasing only to the power of death.

The Joy of Trials

The absolution from pietism is that there is no way at all to please God, no way to strike a bargain with God, no necessity to meet God halfway, no way to detract from God's sole office as judge of all, no way in which God's sovereignty can be diluted in dependency upon human enterprise. The futility of pietism, ending as it does in honoring death in the name of fidelity to God, is that God has triumphed over death already, in the here and now of this life.

What is given to humanity, in that triumph, is not to add to God's achievement, since it is decisive, and it is not to complete God's work, since God is not negligent, and much less is it to ridicule God's passion for this world by resort to moralistic legalism, mechanistic ritualism, doctrinaire meanness, or any similar religious exercises. All that is given to people is to live now in God's triumph over death. What is given to people is to become and be, in the midst of all the wiles and temptations of the devil, the immediate beneficiary of the resurrection.

What God has bestowed upon humanity is, indeed, as James puts it, "the crown of life" (James 1:12). That crown of life - that maturity of personhood in Christ - that fulfillment of life which is accredited exclusively to God's virtue - is not some far-off destination, not some remote prize, not a reward for good talk or good works or good thoughts, but is a goal already reached, a victory long since won, a gift freely offered.

The vocation of humanity is to enjoy its emancipation from the power of death wrought by God's vitality in this world. The crown of life is the freedom to live now, for all the strife and ambiguity and travail, in the imminent transcendence of death, and all of death's threats and temptations. That is the gift of God to humanity in Christ's resurrection.

People of this vocation count all trials as joys, for, though every trial be an assault of the power of death, in every trial is God's defeat of death verified and manifested.

William Stringfellow (1928-85) was a theologian, lawyer, and Sojourners contributing editor when this article appeared. Excerpted from Count It All Joy by William Stringfellow. Copyright ® 1967 Eerdmans Publishing Co. Reprinted with permission.