God is Light III: The Situation

This is the third in a series of posts that will, at some point before Final Judgment, culminate in the exegesis of a selected section of 1 John. I will try to avoid the War and Peace effect this time but, my goodness, it is such fun to think about!

The bottom line is this: The community that had originally formed around the Beloved Disciple and the Fourth Gospel has now broken into at least two factions. The Elder writes to those who yet remain in his camp to confront and correct the errors of the schismatic group and to comfort them by assuring them that they have made the correct choice and are assured of eternal life. The cause of the break-up seems to be that while “both parties knew the proclamation of Christianity available to us through the Fourth Gospel…they interpreted it differently” (Brown, Community, 106).

HOW DO WE KNOW ANY OF THIS?

We know what we know about this conflict primarily from what 1 John tells us, so we have only the Elder’s word for the situation. There is no independent verification of the theological position taken by the Elder’s opponents, or of any of the ethical shortcomings that he attributes to them. It is quite likely that, if we had written evidence of their position, the Elder’s point of view would be declared just as profoundly inappropriate.

How, then, can we trust what he says? The best response to this question is to ask what might have been the consequences had the Elder misrepresented his opponents. It is clear enough that the breakup is quite recent, which implies that the Elder’s addressees knew from their own experience about his opponents. If his characterization were too far off, then his efforts to persuade and comfort would be rendered ineffective by this lack of authenticity. Personally, I think it more likely that we have an incomplete picture of the opponents rather than a very inaccurate one.

Finally, there is disagreement about whether or not the schism itself is the “main thrust” of the Elder’s remarks, or whether he has wider objectives including simply explaining what is an appropriate way to understand the Fourth Gospel. The folks who opt for the wider view are principally Pheme Perkins, Judith Lieu, and Ruth Edwards. My thought is that they have done us a service by calling attention back to the pastoral components of the text but I remain unconvinced of their larger position. You can get a synopsis of their thoughts and access to their works in any decent commentary. For my part, I will probably quote or allude to their thoughts at appropriate points rather than summarizing them now.

OK! HOW DOES THE ELDER DESCRIBE THE SITUATION?

Speaking to those who yet remain with him, the Elder describes the group that has “gone out” from his community with some pretty strong language (1 Jn 2:18-19):

18 Children, it is the last hour! As you have heard Antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. From this we know that it is the last hour. 19 They went out from us, but they did not belong to us; for if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us. But by going out they made it plain that none of them belongs to us.

Yep! He just called them “antichrists,” which is the strongest invective in the Christian lexicon. In contrast to a false Christ, an antichrist is someone who is against Christ. This suggests that the Elder believes that the errors of his opponents stem from theological shortcomings rather than mundane naughtiness, and that he does not anticipate any reconciliation. Finally, the Elder perceives his opponents as extremely dangerous to the welfare of his community because there is still some contact between the two groups. He invokes the dualism so fundamental to the Johannine world view to make it clear that although they were nominally once part of the community, the reality of the matter is that this was an appearance that is now shattered by their departure.

WHAT DID THE OPPONENTS BELIEVE?

There are two major facets to the Elder’s presentation of the opponents. First, he makes it quite clear that there are some significant ethical shortcomings. Second, he takes issue with their theology. In the end, it is their Christological deficiencies that lie behind their inappropriate behavior.

Ethical Issues

Rudolf Schnackenburg’s literary analysis of 1 John recognizes seven assertions that are the Elder’s presentation of the truth claims of his opponents. These are crafted into slogans introduced by quotation formulae:

1:6 If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true;

1:8 If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.

1:10 If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

2:4 Whoever says, “I have come to know him,” but does not obey his commandments, is a liar, and in such a person the truth does not exist

2:6 whoever says “I abide in him,” ought to walk just as he walked.

2:9 Whoever says, “I am in the light,” while hating a brother or sister, is still in the darkness.

4:20 Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.

So apparently the opponents claimed that they (1) had fellowship with God; (2) have no sin; (3) had not sinned; (4) know God; (5) abide in God; (6) walk in the light; and (7) love God. Is this true? Did they, in fact, accomplish all this? Notice that six of the seven are within the section that we will eventually read in great detail. For the moment, I want to point out that the Elder responds to each of these truth claims. Two he opposes outright:

1:8 If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.

1:10 If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

and the rest he qualifies in some fashion in the ensuing verses or provides a test whereby his readers can see what validates or falsifies the claim, as in 2:9:

2:9 Whoever says, “I am in the light,” while hating a brother or sister, is still in the darkness.

Recall that the section of 1 John that we are going to read in detail opens with the assertion that God is light. This verse, then, qualifies the claim for an intimate relationship with God by pointing out that such a relationship is impossible if your relationship with other folks is inappropriate.

Now you might look at all this and say “Geez, Mogget, the Synoptic Gospels are chock full of useful bits banning bonehead behavior among believers. Why doesn’t he just quote from the Sermon on the Mount and get it over with? ‘Do unto others’ and all that!” And you would be right about what is in the Synoptic Gospels. But it appears that the Johannine community has either never heard of the Synoptic Gospels or that these works are not authoritative for them. (I think the latter…)

This, then, is where sensitivity to the relationship between the Fourth Gospel and 1 John becomes critical to successfully reading 1 John. The Elder must teach and reassure his “little children” from within the theological world that he and they share with the opponents. This is also where you might begin to understand another of the reasons behind the Elder’s apparently weak responses. Because he must work within the shared tradition, he is not free to approach matters in ways that might reflect poorly on the Fourth Gospel. This situation becomes rather acute when the Elder must deal with the Christological claims of his opponents.

Christological Issues

Unfortunately, there is no summation of the Christological views of the opponents as there were for their ethical claims. Instead of knowing what they claimed, we know only that they denied what the Elder claimed. Here is an extra-spicy nugget from 2:22

22 Who is the liar but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, the one who denies the Father and the Son.

It looks much like the Fourth Gospel, as in, for example, John 20:31:

31 But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

Although both claim that Jesus is the Messiah/Christ, there is a difference that comes through when you read each work in context. As Raymond Brown puts it, “The Gospel stressed that Jesus is the Son of God; the Epistle stresses that Jesus is the Son of God” (Brown, Community 111).

Why did the Elder have to do this? Perhaps because his opponents denied “Jesus Christ come in the flesh” as he writes in 1 John 4:2-3:

2 This is how you can know the Spirit of God: every spirit that acknowledges Jesus Christ come in the flesh belongs to God, 3 and every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus does not belong to God.

To deny that “Jesus Christ come in the flesh” is to deny that the activities and behaviors of the human Jesus were a revelation of the divine life and love (Painter, John, 91-92). The opponents seem to have been reading passages from the Fourth Gospel such as 17:3 in a fashion that led them to conclude that eternal life came by means of Jesus’ revelation of God in a rather neutral fashion and particularly without recourse to his death:

17:3 Now this is eternal life, that they should know you, the only true God, and the one whom you sent, Jesus Christ.

The Elder makes it clear that God is revealed precisely in the high moral character of Jesus’ life and in his loving acceptance of his death. Hence, Jesus cannot be separated from the Christ and believers are obliged to respond to God’s love with love of their own (3:16):

We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us– and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.

The point of all this, then, is that the ethical shortcomings of the opponents, and in particular their disregard for their brothers, is grounded in their inadequate understanding of the revelation of God provided by Jesus in the Fourth Gospel. The departure of the schismatic brothers demonstrated that they never really had the promised fellowship with God because they never really understood the revelation of God in Jesus as the Beloved Disciple presented it.

Much more could be said about this but what I have written will suffice. In major commentaries the explanations of this situation can go on for fifty or more pages. I think that when we read John’s Gospel now, some 1,900 years after the disintegration of the Johannine community, it is almost impossible for us to read it in any other fashion than that made normative by the Elder. But if you read the Fourth Gospel closely, you will find that there are, in fact, some very “neutral” areas when it comes to the human life of Jesus. No author can ever control the reception of his or her work and here we see just how serious the consequences can be when the work in question is a Gospel.

NEXT UP: the translation and some text-critical work.