282 MARIAM J. KAMELL their speech and their deeds (2,12-13; 4,12; 5,9). These warnings of judg- ment are stern counterparts to the grace of God’s giving and choosing, but the warnings are so stern because the audience has already experienced God’s grace and continues to do so — but fails, to live accordingly. II. Responsibility The second call to guard against self-deception relates to those who be- lieve that they can receive the redemptive word without obeying it. In 1,22 James warns his audience: “Be doers of the word and not hearers only, who deceive themselves”. Here the deception is explicitly self-deception, and it again has soteriological significance as the book will make clear. The cru- cial information that James emphasizes is that the reception of the “im- planted word” from 1,21 occurs through obedience. To pretend that one has received the word but not to obey it serves only to reveal the pretence. What are those commands of which people are called to be “doers”? They can most clearly be seen in the definition of religion in 1,26-27, which is summarized as three interrelated areas of ethics, each of which has been granted full-length studies elsewhere: speech ethics 28, social justice 29, and moral purity 30. All three are of central importance in the epistle, all three are intimately intertwined, and all three are rooted in the imitatio Dei 31, with the third perhaps driving the others by means of internal transfor- mation by which the character of the person takes on the character of God. First, in terms of speech ethics, 1,26 warns, “If any think they are reli- gious, and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their reli- See esp. W. BAKER, Personal Speech-Ethics in the Epistle of James 28 (WUNT II/68; Tübingen 1995), L.T. JOHNSON, “Taciturnity and True Reli- gion : James 1:26-27”, Brother of Jesus, Friend of God (ed. Idem.) (Grand Rapids, MI 2004), 155-67; J.L.P. WOLMARANS, “The Tongue Guiding the Body : The Anthropological Presuppositions of James 3:1-12”, Neot 26 (1992) 523-530. See esp. E. TAMEZ, The Scandalous Message of James. Faith Without 29 Works is Dead (New York 2002); P.U. MAYNARD-REID, Poverty and Wealth in James (Eugene, OR 2004); WACHOB, Voice of Jesus. See esp. LOCKETT, Purity and Worldview; J.H. ELLIOTT, “The Epistle 30 of James in Rhetorical and Social Scientific Perspective: Holiness-Wholeness and Patterns of Replication”, BTB 23 (1993) 71-81. LAWS, James, 30, observes: “It is tempting to associate these two simi- 31 lar themes, of the singleness and consistency of God, and the doubleness and inconsistency of man, and to suggest that underlying James’s condem- nation of the latter and his exhortation to singleness is the idea of ethics as the imitation of God”.