Preparing for Temptation in a Culture of Mutual Ethical Responsibility

Susanne Luther focuses on one text in her study of the Letter of James, entitled “Preparing for Temptation in a Culture of Mutual Ethical Responsibility,” and she, too, sets the text within a larger diachronic context. Luther reads the Letter of James as presenting models of ethical conduct, thus preparing the reader to resist the power of temptations and at the same time stressing each person’s responsibility for the correct ethical conduct of others in the face of the impending eschatological judgement. Within this framework of James’s ethical instruction, the omnipresence of temptations becomes the keystone for an ethics of responsibility, motivated by the narrative Christ figure, the eschatological judge, as well as by allusion to stories of probation in the Jewish scriptures. Luther proposes that testing and temptation may be considered the gateway to James’s teaching on Christology and soteriology