Moral Formation in the Letter of James

Abstract

This dissertation attempts to answer two questions. First, what is the social function of the letter of James? Second, how does James design the structure of the text to align with its communicative goal? This study presumes the letter of James as a member of ancient wisdom literature. Contrary to common (mis)understandings, ancient wisdom literature shows a general tendency in its composition. A legitimate sage collects and evokes old sayings and proverbs. Then, the wisdom is reinterpreted and contemporized for the current situation. Through this process, the sage helps his readers develop a sense of right and wrong, develop moral reasoning skills, and cultivate virtues. I will argue that this pattern, moral formation, is present in the unfolding of James’s letter to his diasporic readers. Regarding the structure of the letter of James, after Dibelius, many attempts have been made to present the letter as a cohesive text with a literary structure, which is unified by a single global theme. In this framework, most of what have been proposed as a structure of the letter is more or less topic (or theme)-based. Unfortunately, however, neither a rigorous definition of topic nor a method for determining it has been clearly stated. The limits of the topic-based approach become problematic when applied to the structure of James whereby diverse topics are scattered here and there throughout the text. Attempts to draw intricate lines between these units through topical or thematic similarities make the structure of James very complicated (e.g., inclusio or chiasm). This study attempts to break this methodological impasse by employing Ruqaiya Hasan’s genre theory developed in a systemic functional framework. James’s letter is delimited in terms of function, not topic or theme. In search for the function of each segment, I explore textual (semantic chain and cohesive harmony), ideational (transitivity, verbal aspect, and voice), and interpersonal meanings (grammatical person and speech functions).