Concluding Notes on 1 John 4

 CONCLUDING NOTES.

1. In verse 3 an important variant reading is found in the Vulgate and in many Latin fathers. Instead of "confesseth not Jesus" they have "separates Jesus," i. e., separates the divine from the human, or divides the one divine-human person. Some of the Latin manuscripts read "annulleth" for "confesseth not." See R. V. margin. For the following reasons we reject these two variant readings:

1. The name Jesus emphasizes the humanity of our Lord and it would not be used by John in a sense so comprehensive. He would have said "the Christ."
2. All the earliest Greek manuscripts read "confesseth not," and all the versions except the Latin, although one important Old Latin follows the earliest Greek manuscripts. Nearly all the Greek fathers who quote this text have the words "confesseth not." In view of these facts there can be no question as to the overwhelming weight of evidence in favor of the traditional reading, as found in both the A. V. and R. V.

2. Verse 8. For the most part St. John, like the other writers of the Bible, leaves the reader to form his conception of God from what is recorded of His action; but in three phrases be has laid down once for all the great outlines within which our thoughts on the Divine Nature must be confined, "God is Spirit," "God is light," and "God is love." 

"The first is metaphysical and describes God in Himself, in His being. The second is moral, and describes God in His character towards all created things. He is light. The third is personal, and describes God in His action towards self-conscious creatures. He is love. In this order they offer a progress of thought." (Westcott.)

3. Augustine declares that the name "Love" belongs very appropriately in the Holy Trinity to the Holy Spirit who communicates to us that common love which binds the Father and the Son together. Hence this epigrammatic sentence contains the quintessence of orthodox theology: "Ubi caritas, ibi Trinitas," where love is there is the Trinity. Love existing from eternity, before a creature existed, must have had the only begotten Son for its eternal object, while the messenger between them was the Personal Holy Spirit, equal in power and glory because he fathoms or searches the depths of both the Father and the Son. The unity of the Three is one substance, Love. Augustine insists that the divine "substance is not one thing and love another, but that the substance itself is love, and love itself is the substance, whether in the Father or in the Son." "Love," says Westcott, "involves a subject and an object, and that which unites both. We are taught, then, to conceive of God as having in Himself the perfect object of love and the perfect response of love, completely self-sufficing and self-complete. We thus gain, however imperfect language may be, the idea of a tri-personality in an Infinite Being as correlative to a sole-personality in a finite. In the unity of Him who is One we acknowledge the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, in the interaction of Whom we can see love fulfilled." To have no personal experience of love in its evangelical sense is to have no personal knowledge of God. The Gnostics knew much about God, but they had no real knowledge of God, because, instead of loving their illiterate brethren, they, in their intellectual pride, looked down upon them with an arrogant contempt.

4. Until the sunrise of the Incarnation no religion had grasped the truth that God in His very essence is love. The name which He set for Himself in the Old Testament was Jehovah, "I am that I am," but the name revealed in the New Testament is Love. In no book in the New Testament does "love," either as a noun or a verb, occur so often as in this Epistle and the gospel written by "the Apostle of Love." The love of God usually in this Epistle means our love to God, but in verse 9 and in iii. 16 it means His love to us.

5. Only begotten Son, verse 9.

The point which is emphasized by 'only begotten Son' here is evidently the absolute uniqueness of the Being of the Son. He stands to the Father in a relation wholly singular. He is the one only Son, the one to whom the title belongs in a sense completely unique and peculiar. The thought is centered in the Personal existence of the Son, and not in the generation of the Son. The true reading in John i. 18 is in all probability 'only begotten God' (R. V. margin and text of Westcott and Hort). This phrase occurs in some of the confessions of the fourth century. Christ is the only begotten Son in distinction from the many who have become sons by adoption. We must avoid the error of Dr. Adam Clarke and Prof. Moses Stuart that the Logos was not the Son until he was born of Mary. He was Son from eternity. See Watson's Institutes on "the eternal generation of the Son."

6. Perfect Love, verse 18.

We cannot agree with the Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges: "Though as certain as any physical law, the principle, that perfect love excludes all fear, is an ideal that has never been verified in fact. No believer's love has ever been so perfect as entirely to banish fear; but every believer experiences that as his love increases his fear diminishes." 

Our objection to this denial is, first, that it assumes that the writer has known the state of feeling of every martyr who has joyfully marched to the stake, and of every other Christian in all the past generations, which assumption is but little short of omniscience; and, secondly, it is a covert denial of the possibility of perfect love in the human soul under the dispensation of the Holy Spirit. The most that any man is competent to assert is that he has not himself reached that experience of love which banishes all fear that has torment. Our third objection is that it impeaches and discredits the testimonies of eminent saints in all the Christian ages. In the fourth place idealism, when employed to neutralize a divine precept, is a weapon which can be wielded against every commandment of God. He who interprets as ideal and impracticable the mandate, "Be ye therefore perfect, even a your Father which is in heaven is perfect," opens the way for the negation of all the other precepts in the Sermon on the Mount, a way in which many modern professors of the Christian faith are carelessly walking.

"To put the standard of Christian perfection too high," says Wesley "is to drive it out of the world." There is no doubt that what "the beloved disciple" says about perfect love and deliverance from all fear he says out of the experience of his own heart as a fact. St. Paul reasoned, but St. John uttered the intuitions of his own consciousness.