[B-Greek] PEIRASMOS in James 1:13: Follow-up

Jeffrey B. Gibson jgibson000 at comcast.net
Mon Aug 18 12:33:15 EDT 2003


Ron wrote:

>That seems exactly accurate.  The passage deals with temptation in a
>context of personal sinning, which God cannot do.  We sin because we are
>born sinners with a genetic predisposition (the old man, the sin nature)
>which produces sins just as sure as an apple tree produces apples.  Our
>sin nature here is personified as an illicit paramour that seduces us
>(using a sexual analogy), and when we give the green light to our sin
>nature and "fornicate" with it, we conceive sin, and the bastard progeny
>is the actual personal sin which we commit.  This leads to a state of
>temporal death (separation from God), which is restored upon confession
>of said sin.  IJn. 1:9
>
>The fact is that there are external things which may incite the sin
>nature, but we have to give the volitional OK to go ahead and pursue
>them..
>
>Is this not what the passage is saying?
>
Personally, I doubt it in as much as there's no indication that the 
author of James shares the anthropology and the ontology that you 
attribute to him  or see as the background to his thought or even that 
the (primarily individualistic) anthropology/ontology that you see as 
the background to the epistle's thought is really biblical.
It seems to me to be something that is really grounded in the 
reformation, not the Judaism which is the matrix of James.  And I find 
it highly suspect methodologically to read James through the spectacles 
of the Johannine Epistles, even should your understanding of what is 
being said in 1 Jn be correct.   But this borders on going beyond the 
scope of B-Greek.

Yours,

Jeffrey Gibson

-- 
Jeffrey B. Gibson
Chicago, Illinois
e-mail jgibson000 at comcast.net





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