John Against the Gnostics.

 SUPPLEMENTARY STUDIES IN THE FIRST EPISTLE OF JOHN - Part 1.

It is said in the Encyclopædia Britannica that the persons addressed in this Epistle are "the instructed," and that the author's aim is "a deepening of the spiritual life and a confirmation of faith." To contribute something to this worthy aim I have deemed it a fitting occupation for the sunset hour of my life to voice to the whole company of believers "the message" of St. John, the aged, respecting the reciprocal indwelling of God in the soul, and of the soul in God as a result of love made perfect. It is also appropriate to the purpose of this book to divest the message of those misinterpretations which make it discordant and self-contradictory, and to set in a clear light the testimony of the last surviving eyewitness of our Lord to the utmost extent of salvation from sin under the dispensation of the Holy Spirit. Hence should this series of exegetical studies be occasionally polemical, it will not be from choice, but from necessity in vindicating vital truth and banishing deadly error.

As writers, Paul and John widely differ in style, not in sentiment. Paul elaborates logically; John seizes by intuition.

Paul writes now in a storm of argument, then in a humble strain of self-forgetful, self-abasing expostulation and entreaty; now eloquently on high abstract truths, now in exquisite descriptions, then about the homeliest and simplest duties. St. John moves in a calm sphere of certainty among the very highest, grandest and largest of Christian truths, raising the general outlines of human life into the same atmosphere till they are illuminated and penetrated by the clear rays of light and love. All is simple, broad, clear, calm, sure. He writes at, once with the most commanding authority, and the most loving tenderness; the profoundest wisdom, and the most touching simplicity; the most searching knowledge of the human heart and its difficulties and failures, and the most elevating and bracing courage and confidence; the gentlest affection, and the sternest and most pitiless condemnation of wilful departure from truth in practice or opinion.

Paul begins his epistles with a statement of his apostolic authority; John begins with the announcement, in the very first sentence, of the truth that he purposes to set forth. In the Revelation it is the things which must shortly come to pass. In his Gospel it is the supreme Divinity of Jesus Christ. "The Logos was God." Hence we have one dogmatic Gospel. In his First Epistle it is the veritable humanity of Christ who dwelt among men in a real, material body attested by three of the five special senses, "which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the Logos of life." Hence the teaching of John in this Epistle turns upon the person of Christ. The occasion of this controversial Epistle was the denial of this fact which an erroneous philosophy, extant in the apostolic age in spirit, but not yet developed in form, could not harmonize with the sinlessness of the incarnate Son of God. 

This inchoate philosophy which began to trouble the church, even in Paul's lifetime, as he hints in the epistle to the Ephesians and Colossians, and in the Pastoral Epistles, and was more fully developed before the death of John, is by many asserted to be that doctrine of Gnosticism called dualism, the existence of two original principles, good and evil, the evil being inherent only in uncreated matter from which the Creator of man could not expel it when He fashioned it into an envelope for the human spirit. It contains several negations of Christian theology, among which are these two: First, the denial of Christ's sinlessness as an intelligence acting through a material organism; and secondly, the doctrine that since all evil is in matter, the soul is incapable of the touch of sin, since there is no point of contact between mind and matter in the human constitution. 

In order to avoid so repugnant a doctrine as sin in the person of Christ, and to harmonize His perfect holiness with their philosophy, its advocates denied the reality of His body, and taught that it was only a sham, a phantom, a seeming body. Of course this would overturn the foundations of the temple of Christian truth, reducing the atonement, the death and the resurrection of the God-man from substantial verities to empty shadows, mocking human hopes. When John, the aged, sits down to write this address to the churches, probably personally delivered (Bengel) —for it has neither the inscription nor the conclusion of an epistle — he looks this incipient false doctrine of dualism that was "in the air" squarely in the face, and with two strokes of his pen he smites it to the dust. The first stroke cites the testimony of three of the five senses to the reality of Christ's body; and the second stroke declares the self-deception of those who while indulging in sin had no sense of a need of an atonement, because their inner spirits were perfectly pure, all the sin which defiled them existing only in those irresponsible, yet very convenient, packhorses, human bodies composed of matter primordially, eternally and incurably evil, and hence no concern of theirs. The first chapter is short, but it is long enough to annihilate dualism, although the subject is alluded to in the rest of the Epistle in the emphasis laid upon believing in Christ, "come in the flesh," and in the insistence that sinners can have no fellowship with a holy God any more than darkness can be yoked with light.

Docetism, the doctrine that Christ's body was a phantom, shows its "most ancient trace," says Dorner, in I John iv. 2, in which, "the antichrists do not deny that Christ has come at all, but only that He has come in the flesh." This denial was made in order to remove the Son of God, the author of all good, from all contact with matter which they conceived to be evil and the source of all evil. Since several modem exegetes of good repute see no traces of this philosophic error in John's writings, especially in his First Epistle, and therefore go astray in their explanation of key texts, it may be well to cite such authorities as Jerome, Ignatius, Hagenbach, who quotes 1 John i. 1-3, iv. 2, 3, and 2 John vii. as probable instances of John's references to "the Seemers," or Docetists. Hammond's commentary finds in this philosophy the key to this Epistle, as do Sinclair's (edited by Ellicott), and Whedon's also. With these agree Townsend and other English scholars, and many German exegetes, such as Lücke, Schmidt, Bertholdt and Niemeyer, who insist that the main object of the Epistle is to oppose the errors of this science (gnosis), falsely so called.

Bishop Westcott says, the false teaching with which "John deals is Docetic," and he intimates that "modem Idealism is a new Docetism."

When we come to see how subversive it is of Christian morality, we will be convinced that the beloved disciple did not waste his energies in opposing a harmless theory. Its advocates asserted that "they themselves would be saved, not by practice, but because they are spiritual by nature" (not by grace), and that as gold, though mingled with mire, does not lose its beauty, so they themselves, though wallowing in the mire of carnal works, do not lose their own spiritual essence. And, therefore, though they eat things offered to idols, and are the first to resort to banquets which the heathen celebrate in honor of their false gods, and abstain from nothing that is foul in the eyes of God or man, they say they cannot contract any defilement from these impure abominations; and they scoff at us who fear God as silly dotards, and hugely exalt themselves, professing to be perfect, and the elect seed."

This philosophic error, antagonized by John, because of its baneful moral effect, bearing the fruit of the grossest sensuality, produced in some a different effect — not holiness, but asceticism, an attempt at sanctification on the plane of nature, through efforts of the will, and not on the plane of faith in Jesus Christ, the only conqueror of sin. The belief that all evil is centred in matter caused this class of Gnostics to abhor their bodies. They became ascetics, vegetarians, monks and nuns, contemning and vilifying marriage, and self-scourgers, maintaining that self-flagellation is a means of grace equal to baptism and the Lord's Supper. Both parties brought great discredit upon Christianity, the one by violating its pure ethics, and the other by ignoring or corrupting its saving doctrines. Any error that substitutes human works or sufferings for faith in the blood of Jesus Christ as the ground of justification and means of sanctification is deadly indeed. John intuitively saw the practical outcome of this importation of Oriental philosophy into the Christian Church, and he wrote this Epistle or discourse as the antidote. His method of controversy is peculiar. He does not assail error directly and by name, but indirectly, by stating basal truths repugnant to that special heresy, to the practical effect of which he directs the attention of the reader, and not to the theoretical error itself.

Respecting the first and largest class of these Gnostics, says Dr. Whedon:

"They taught that a man might be an outrageous violator of law, and yet a pure and holy saint. The Epistle is, therefore, a defense of Christian purity from sin against Gnostic purity in sin." 

The centre of purity from sin is Divine LOVE linking a perfectly pure God to the blood-washed soul — a union resulting in life eternal in the case of every persevering believer.

The poet Browning has quite truly indicated the occasion of this letter or tractate as the testimony of the last surviving eyewitness of the glorious reality of the incarnation now beginning to be denied.

"There was left on earth
No one alive who knew (consider this),
Saw with his eyes and handled with his hands,
That which was from the first, the Word of Life;
How will it be when none more saith, 'I saw'?"

The solitariness of this surviving witness gives a momentous importance to this apostolic testimony to the reality of the historical Christ against the destructive philosophy which would reduce Him to a phantom and subvert the very cornerstone of the Christian system. For even though Gnosticism was not yet fully developed, its baneful foreshadowings; were visible in such men as Simon Magus, the opponent of Peter, and Cerinthus, the antagonist of John. Hence, it may be concluded that what we see in the New Testament is exactly what we might expect — the early buds of Gnostic error appearing in the church and vigorous apostolic methods to destroy them. It is natural that the last surviving eyewitness should be the most emphatic.