James 1:15
Then his lust having conceived gives birth to sin: and when sin is full grown it brings forth death.
James 1:15 reminds Adamson of Thomas à Kempis’s analysis of temptation (the phrase, à Kempis, indicates his home town of Kempen, Germany. His name is Thomas Hemerken ). Adamson believes James 1:15 and the other verses in this section inspired Hemerken’s analysis.
At first it is a mere thought confronting the mind; then imagination paints it in stronger colours; only after that do we take pleasure in it, and the will makes a false move, and we give our assent..1 (Note 101a, p. 72)
Adamson Demonstrates the Theology and Psychology of the Process
- Stage One: I see something in a shop. I say to myself: “I should love to have that–but I can’t afford it.” That is the first stage. I am feeling the pull and lure of the bait, but I have suffered no more harm as yet.
- Stage Two: “I know! I will steal it!” That is, lust, impregnated by the devil, “conceives” the notion and “gives birth’ to the act of theft. Adamson says we should not read too much into the twin image of conception and birth. The grammar behind “having conceived gives birth” is similar to the Hebrew construction rendered “she conceived and bore” (Genesis 4:1, etc.), the participle and finite verb in this instance bringing “thought and act together as a single stage between the temptations on the one hand and death on the other”(Hort)2. “Lust” produces “sin.” James expresses this single idea by the metaphorical parallel of motherhood, signified by the two chief steps–the first and the last–of that single process. “Conceives and bears” are not two separate points.
- Stage 3: That sin , unless (however late, like the penitent thief) I properly repent before my physical death, will, “being fully grown,” cause my damnation and my spiritual “death” at the Day of Judgment. This agrees with Ropes and supplements him. The “consummation” and the death are in the “next world,” not in our earthly existence.
The Analogy of a Human Infant Growing to Full Manhood
James is picturing the growth of sin from birth onward in the analogy of a human infant growing to full manhood. In other words, in the context of a human conception, birth, and growth to maturity.
“Sin, when full grown, when it becomes a fixed habit…brings forth death.”
The immediate cause of death is sin, and sin, when full-grown, is in its very nature self-destructive, containing seeds of death in its womb and nurturing its unborn chid until the time of delivery. (Adamson,pp. 73-74)
- The Imitation of Christ, tr. Ronald A. Knox and Michael Oakley [1959], p. 32. ↩︎
- F. J. A. Hort, The Epistle of St. James, i.1-iv.7 (1909). ↩︎