I don’t suggest an immediate parallel with “faith” here. (Many parties might have animosity. Probably one party is seen as believing here.) But I do think this brings out something that was argued by the early analytic philosophers. Logical grammar does not ALWAYS match linguistic grammar. When someone says “The whale is the largest of mammals,” a simplistic glance at the definite article might lead some to think that only one whale is in view.

All this to say that once I saw a metaphor in a sentence, I would slow down. The very helpful rules for how these elements of the sentence work might be made more complicated in application than first appears. I don’t think any errors were made in the post in this arena, but it seems like a good time to mention how this is the kind of place an error can easily be made.

Photius (9th century) gives a nifty statement of what Paul meant by “sharers with me in grace” in Phil 1:7 that points to this more developed understanding of faith as a grace energized by the Spirit. (It needs to be born in mind that the Greek Fathers at the same time had a robust concept of “free will” that was not understood as contradicting, but co-operating with grace.) Phil 1:7
φησί, εἰσιν· ἢ τῆς διὰ πίστεως ἐπιχορηγουμένης αὐτοῖς πνευματικῆς δωρεᾶς ποικίλως αὐτοῖς ἐνεργουμένης τότε, ἢ ἁπλῶς χάριτος τῆς διὰ τοῦ βαπτίσματος παλιγγενεσίας καὶ υἱοθεσίας. (Photius, Frag. On Philippians, from the Cataena).
“‘who share with me in grace’ means: The faith then supplied to them being energized/made operative in many ways by spiritual gifts, is the faith singularly operative from the grace given through baptism, regeneration, and adoption.”
Here, of course, Photius does not distinguish between faith as a gift for spiritual gifts and conversion faith, but that is beside the point.

I can’t help wondering if energoumene was early Christian jargon, a bit like “anointed” is jargon at least among Pentecostal and charismatic Christians. I can imagine Paul saying that faith should be “anointed” and James saying that prayer should be “anointed”, meaning that God was working through them. Of course someone trying to understand “anointed” in contemporary Christian literature wouldn’t get very far by examining how the word is used in secular literature, as the few examples which could be found, e.g. of oil being smeared on kings at their coronation, would not be very helpful.

May your faith and mine be energized and made fruitful by the Spirit and the love of God so that we can exhibit Christ’s faith and love to the glory of God the Father!
Yancy

“But in some languages, abstract nouns are not common. In Sabaot we often had to change a noun to a verb,” — Iver

“You [Peter] base this on statistical study… Context is far better…. My take … is also tied up with a Gestalt reading of the entire epistle and the entire Pauline corpus.” — John

“Grammatical analysis and discourse decoding can only go so far …. At some point one has to have recourse to unexpressed assumptions and conceptual analysis. That involves theology and understanding unexpressed cultural assumptions.” — Yancy

The very important thing that you introduce in your post, Peter, is that here’s an anomaly not only in a very limited corpus of the Greek texts (i.e. if including all extant NT but also LXX variant mss) but also in our entire extant corpus of pre-NT texts. The writers Paul and James in fairly distinct contexts each uniquely use the same unique word(form) ἐνεργουμένη. Why? How do we find (or even “make”) meanings of neologisms and coinages? I appreciate your using linguistic analogies to start to get to semantics here. Your helping us begin to think about how phrases such as Lewis Carroll’s “the slithy toves” might work for English readers for more than a century now. But for Paul and for James to write such a unique form gets at something even more rhetorical, perhaps, akin to Michael Young’s 1958 coinage of “meritocracy.” Immediately, the word had (or was ostensibly to have) a negative connotation, but was not longer after appropriated by those who wanted to promote whatever “meritocracy” had become. I’m bringing up a political-rhetorical example because — especially for Paul — PISTIS is a huge word. In the context of Greek rhetoric, which Paul seems facile in, the word has distinctly non-Christian and even proto-religious meanings. (See James L. Kinneavy’s Greek Rhetorical Origins of Christian Faith: An Inquiry). I don’t know if we can be as certain as Yancy wants us to be that Paul may have intentionally understood a problem, assumed a few things with his audience, and set out to solve it. We might also conjecture that Paul (and James) wrote things unconsciously, were unaware of the effect that their neologism might have on readers and in which direction(s) the immediate and later readers would appropriate or “make” meanings. What I’m trying to say is that a word coinage is salient. A word coinage is wordplay in the senses that there is not only playfulness, not only hermeneutic wiggle room and evolution, but there is also performance (as in a play). If there were blogging among Paul’s and James’s first readers, then I imagine they’d have been as vigorous in their discussions about this new Greek phrase as we are twenty centuries later. The original authors would either have the choice to “correct” the readers or to be interested in what Kenneth Pike used to call “radical relativism within rigid restraints.” The linguistic observer, semantically, has choice between “particle,” “wave,” and “field.” This works in L1 and, in translation decisions, in L2 as well. Translators do violence when they decide all and only what a neologism in L1 must mean. Doesn’t mean we translators shouldn’t attempt that. It just means we tempt ourselves with a naive or intentional arrogance when we assume that we can — retrospectively — determine meaning. I really like this post, and what you’ve only got us started with here — with your refreshing humility I must add!