3.19 - Trial Of The Spirits
Chapter 19 Trial Of The Spirits
False Spirits Abroad in the World—A Critical Epoch—Spurious Inspiration—Some Popular Prophets—The Criteria of True and False Christianity—The Doctrinal Test: the Person of Christ—St Paul’s Confessional Watchword, and St John’s—The Practical Test: the Consensus of Believers—The Historical Test: the Authority of the Apostles—Papal Claims versus the New Testament—Modernism on its Trial.
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Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God;
Because many false prophets have gone out into the world.
Herein discern the Spirit of God:
Every spirit which confesseth Jesus Christ as come in flesh, is of God;
And every spirit which doth not confess Jesus, is not of God.
And this is the spirit of Antichrist,
Of which you have heard that it is coming, and it is now in the world already.
You are of God, little children, and have overcome them;
Because He that is in you, is greater than he that is in the world.
They are of the world;
Therefore speak they from the world, and the world heareth them.
We are of God:
He that knoweth God, heareth us;
He that is not of God, heareth us not.
From this we discern the Spirit of truth, and the spirit of error.
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ST JOHN has just laid down, in 1 John 3:23, the basis of a true sonship to God and the ultimate ground of a Christian man’s assurance, as consisting in two things—faith in Jesus Christ the Son of God, and mutual love such as He enjoined. 1 John 4:1-6 serve to set forth and guard the first of these foundation principles, and 1 John 3:7-21 to enforce the second. In the last sentence of chapter 3 the faith and love which make a Christian were traced to “the Spirit which” God “gave us.”89 From this reference the paragraph before us takes its start: “I have said, beloved, that we are assured of our sonship towards God through the Spirit He has given us. But you are not to believe every spirit. There are false as well as true spirits—spirits from above and from beneath; put them all to proof.” To identify the supernatural and the Divine is a perilous mistake. It seems that in this world there is no truth without its counterfeit, nor good wheat of God unmixed with tares. Christ is mimicked by Antichrist; the Spirit of God is mocked by lying spirits, and the prophets of truth are counter-worked by “many false prophets” which “have gone out into the world.” Indeed, the more active is religious thought at any given period, so much the more numerous and plausible are likely to be the forms of heretical error. We are tempted to think that in our own days amid the storm of conflicting voices, when every principle of revealed religion is challenged, the difficulties of faith are unprecedented, and that religious certainty is hardly consistent with an open-minded intelligence. But we are under much the same conditions with believers of the early times. In vain we should sigh for “the ages of faith,” for the time when the dogma of a Church Council or the letter of a Bible text was enough to silence controversy. The fact is that we have great illusions about those halcyon days; the differences amongst Christians in former centuries were often deeper, and the contentions far more bitter, than those of the present, except indeed when freedom of thought was stifled by arbitrary power. But for that stifling, many questions which vex us still might have been fought out and disposed of long ago. Already in St John’s time and before the Apostolic age had passed, “many false prophets” had arisen in the Church, and Christian faith was distracted by a swarm of troublesome speculations. The writer returns in this paragraph to the subject of 1 John 2:18-27, which formed a chief motive of his letter, viz. the rise of false prophecy, the spread of religious delusions affecting Christian people. This phenomenon was viewed in 1 John 2:1-29 as evidence of the coming of a crisis—possibly a final crisis—in the progress of God’s kingdom, in the age-long warfare between “the darkness” and “the light”; the advent of Antichrist in this shape signalized the long-predicted “last hour.”90 Here the question is approached from the more practical side, and treated in a more personal sense (compare p. 231); the warring spirits are severally described. St John regards the struggle as an inevitable development of the antagonism between God and the world; it is the reaction arising within the Church of the worldly mind and temper against the spirit of Jesus. The two sections are closely parallel: in both paragraphs the conflict is represented as a test of the genuine and the pretended Christianity, resulting in the expulsion of the latter element; in both the safeguard of the Church is found in the indwelling “Spirit of truth,” whose “anointing” received “from the Holy One” gives an insight that pierces the mask of falsehood; in both passages the person of Christ supplies the decisive touchstone.
St Paul had met with an opposition at Corinth of a nature approaching to that here implied, and attended by prophetical manifestations contradictory to Apostolic teaching. With reference to this he speaks, in 1 Corinthians 12:10, of the “discerning,” or “dijudication, of spirits”—the power to distinguish the real from the unreal inspiration—as a supernatural grace bestowed upon certain members of the Church. On the same point he wrote to the Thessalonians earlier (1 Thessalonians 5:19-20): “Quench not the Spirit, despise not prophesyings; but test everything.” From this carefully balanced warning we gather that the false fire mingled with the true caused the more skeptical minds in the Pauline Churches to distrust prophetic gifts, while the ardent and credulous fell into the opposite mistake,—the uncritical acceptance of anything that looked like prophecy. Our Lord foretold the coming of “false Christs and false prophets,” specious enough to deceive “the elect,” at the time of the approaching judgement (Matthew 24:11, Matthew 24:24). His predictions St John had seen fulfilled in the last days of Jerusalem; now he witnesses a further accomplishment of them at the close of the Apostolic era. “The false prophet” figures side by side with “the wild beast” in the visions of the Apocalypse, representing, as it would seem, religious imposture abetting a cruel and persecuting world-power. Elymas, the Jewish sorcerer at Paphos, was a specimen of this kind of trader in the supernatural (Acts 13:6-8). In the later Old Testament times such upstarts had been numerous—men claiming to speak in Jehovah’s name (in some cases, doubtless, believing themselves inspired), who brought a more popular message than the true prophets and flattered rulers and people to their ruin. This last feature reappears in St John’s false prophets: “they are of the world”—animated by its spirit and tastes; “therefore speak they from the world”—uttering what it prompts and reflecting its notions and imaginings; “and the world listens to them.” For, as Jesus said, the world loves its own—the world described in 1 John 2:16 as governed by “the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the vainglory of life.” It appears from this that the Antichristian teachers who “had gone out from” the Johannine Churches (1 John 2:19; compare 1 John 4:4), were enjoying much popularity. They were winning probably, for the time, more converts from heathenism than the orthodox Church; their doctrine, accommodated as it was to the philosophical taste of the age and blending Pagan with Christian ideas, supplied an agreeable substitute for the simple and severe Apostolic faith.
Along with their worldly and self-seeking temper, it was false doctrine, rather than spurious miracles or lying predictions, that furnished the chief mark of the class of men denounced by our Apostle. Their errors sprang from, or ran up into, an erroneous conception of Jesus Christ. For He is central to His religion; the view that men take of Him, and the attitude they assume towards Him, determine the trend of their faith and life. The question that our Lord put to the Jewish Rabbis, “What think ye of the Christ?” He has been propounding to every school of religious thought from that day forwards; by his response each answerer gives judgement on himself. So the Person of Christ becomes the “stone of stumbling and rock of offence,” or the “sure foundation-stone,” to one generation after another. As the tenor of this Epistle shows —particularly the language of 1 John 2:18-27 (compare p. 219)—the pivot of the controversy then shaking the Churches of Asia Minor and which was to disturb them for a hundred years to come, was found in the nature of Jesus Christ—in His relationship to God and His place in the order of being, in the compatibility of His bodily life with His birth from God, and in the mode of His redemption as determined by His nature. The authoritative answer to these questions the Apostle John is able to give, partly through his conversance with the Lord in the days of His flesh (1 John 1:1-3), but partly also through the illumination of the Spirit of God, in which all those participate who have received the Apostolic message concerning Him (1 John 1:3; 1 John 2:20-21, 1 John 2:27, 1 John 3:21, 1 John 4:6, 1 John 4:13, 1 John 5:6). Whatever contradicts “the Spirit of truth” operating in this testimony, the Apostle ascribes to “the spirit of Antichrist” (1 John 4:3).
St John deals in a simple, plain-spoken way with these profound problems (compare p. 52). Subterfuge and compromise are alien from his nature: His intercourse with Christ, and his observation of the working of Christ’s Spirit amongst men, have given him positive facts and definite experiences to stand upon; and he will not have these great actualities dissolved in the mists of Gnostical theory. To him “the Spirit of truth” and “the spirit of error” stand out sharply opposed as day and night. Christ and Antichrist, “He who is in” the Church of God and “He who is in the world,” form oppugnant forces which admit of no mixture or middle term; white and black must not be allowed to shade off into each other and melt into a neutral tint. Christ—the whole, undivided Christ of the united Apostolic confession—or nothing, is St John’s alternative.
1. The crucial test of Christian belief lies, then, in the true confession of Christ Himself. “By this” the Apostle bids his readers “know91 the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesseth Jesus Christ come in flesh, is of God and every spirit which confesseth not92 Jesus, is not of God.”
Examining the content of this terse confession, we observe, first, that the participle “come” stands in the Greek perfect (ἐληλυθότα), signifying determinate position or character: “confesseth . . . as One who came in flesh and who is what He is in virtue of His so coming.” The phrase conveys the notion of a decisive, constitutive advent—a coming that marks an era and a settled order of things. In the second place, the predicate “come in flesh” speaks of One who has entered man’s life from elsewhere, who arrives from a spiritual sphere outside of “flesh” to participate in physical experience (compare Galatians 4:4), One who—to use His own words as given in John 16:28 (compare John 3:13; John 6:33, etc.)—“came down from the Father, and is come into the world.” Other men do not “come in flesh,” they are “begotten of flesh” (John 3:6), and are, therefore, “of earth, earthy,” while He is “from heaven” (1 Corinthians 15:47).
But further, the participial clause of this testing declaration does not supply its whole predicate, and “Jesus” stands alone as the subject of confession in the complementary negative clause. To say that “Jesus Christ is come in flesh,” merging the title in the proper name, would be to designate the Lord as “Jesus Christ” before His coming93—a theological anachronism which St John would not have committed; rather, He is “Jesus Christ” now that He has come and because He has come. Our Lord’s official designation had not by this date so far coalesced with His personal name, that it would be natural to read the two as a single subject of definition; it was still matter of controversy whether, and in what sense, “Jesus” is “Christ.” The words “Jesus Christ,” as here collocated, form a condensed confession by themselves—no longer in the primary sense of John 9:22 (where “confessing Him as Christ” meant acknowledging the Jewish Messiahship of Jesus), but in the deeper signification now attaching to “Christ,” upon which the Gnostic controversies turned, as a term connoting Divine status or relationship synonymous with “the Word” and “the Son of God.” Accordingly, to confess or deny “that Jesus is the Christ,” or is “Christ come in flesh,” was tantamount, for St John and his opponents, to confessing or denying that Jesus is “the Son,” “the Son of God (for the equivalence, compare with this passage 1 John 2:18 and 1 John 2:22-23, also 1 John 5:5). “Jesus,” as we take it, is the grammatical subject of the formula of confession, “Christ” and “ come in flesh “being its successive appositional predicates: each word must be read with its distinct accent and emphasis—“Every spirit that confesses Jesus Christ come in flesh”—that acknowledges the Divine origin and rights of Jesus, and His advent in this capacity into human bodily life—“is of God.” In the negative counter-statement (1 John 4:3), the entire creed is reduced to the word “Jesus” (compare Romans 3:26, R.V.)—i.e. according to the best reading, “the Jesus” who has just been described.
The gloss put upon 1 John 4:3 by second-century readers —“dissolves” for “confesses not” (p. 316)—was a just paraphrase of St John’s dictum as against the Gnostic χωρίζοντες (dividers), who parted “Jesus Christ” into two beings—the earthly son of Mary and the heavenly essence joined to Him for a while, which, as many supposed, came upon Jesus spiritually at His baptism to quit Him on the cross. But “the Jesus” whom St John had known, was one from first to last—the Son of God born into the human state, who returned to the Father and lives forever as the Lord Jesus Christ, the same yesterday and to-day.
St Paul’s confessional watchword—κύριοςἸησοῦς, Jesus is Lord (see 1 Corinthians 12:3)—belonged to the primary stage of conflict with the original Jewish unbelief. As the Nazarene was proclaimed God’s Messiah, the spirit of evil cried out—and St Paul was often thus interrupted when preaching in the Synagogue—“Jesus is anathema,—He is accursed of God, and was justly crucified; He is the abhorred, and not the elect of Israel!” This was to repeat the fearful shout of Calvary, “Away with Him!” It was a more developed and subtle kind of error, partly bred within the Church, that St John stigmatizes. In his Ephesian circle the Messianic attributes of Jesus are hardly in question; He would readily be acknowledged as the heir of prophecy and the king of Israel;94 but His relations to the Godhead and His rank in the spiritual realm are in dispute. “Jesus” and “Christ” were being separated anew, by metaphysical analysis instead of historical distinction. The prophets of Antichrist recoiled not from a crucified Messiah, but from a humanized God. St John’s touchstone applies specifically to the current misbelief of his own sphere—to the spirit of Gnostical speculation—as St Paul’s criterion was addressed to the spirit of Jewish contumacy.
In both cases, Jesus Christ is the storm-centre; the battle sways this way and that about the person of the King. Now at one point, now at another, “the spirit of error” assails His many-sided being. Every kind of antipathy that Christianity excites, in the modern as in the ancient world, impinges on our Lord’s name and person; its shafts strike on the great shield of theCaptain of Salvation, from whatever quarter they are aimed. Behind other problems of life and religion, since Christ has stepped into the arena, there always emerges this: “Whom do men say that I, the Son of man, am?” “Dost thou believe on the Son of God?” This is our Lord’s accost to the world, and to each soul He meets; He gives this challenge distinctly to the age in which we live. It is a question that searches the inmost of the mind, and probes each man to the quick. As one thinks of Jesus Christ and feels towards Him, so in his very self he is.
“Herein,” says St John, “you may know the Spirit of God.” Sound knowledge in matters of this kind is based upon spiritual facts and acquired by a spiritual perception. One may repeat the creed with reasoned assent, and yet come short of “confessing Jesus Christ.” The apprehension of a person, not the acknowledgement of a dogma, is in requisition. To reach and lay hold of Christ in His living personality, requires an aid above intellect and nature. “No man can say Jesus is Lord,” declared the other theological Apostle, “except in the Holy Ghost” (1 Corinthians 12:3). “Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jonah,” exclaimed Jesus to His first confessor; “flesh and blood did not reveal it unto thee, but my Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 16:17). The adoring, self-surrendering faith in Jesus Christ, which cries out in His presence, “My Lord and my God!” is an inspiration, never a mere attainment; it is the gift of God, meeting the soul’s effort and yearning toward its Redeemer. To this confession the individual witness, along with the whole living Body of Christ, is enabled and compelled by the Spirit “which we have from God.” That Spirit is in fact the Supreme Confessor; and the proof of the Saviourship and Godhead of Jesus rests essentially upon the testimony of the Holy Ghost to the consciousness of the Church, and through the Church to the world at its successive epochs. “He shall testify of me,” said our Lord concerning the coming Paraclete, “and you also shall testify” (John 15:26-27).
2. There are two further and supplementary tests applied by St John in his trial of the spirits. The first of these—a criterion arising immediately from the witness of the Holy Spirit—is found in the generalconsent of Christian believers. The teaching the Apostle denounces was repudiated by the Church, while it found large acceptance outside—“the world heareth them” (the false prophets). The seductions of the spirit of Antichrist are “overcome” by the Apostle’s “little children,” children though they be, because they are born “of God”; in them resides a Spirit “greater than” that which “is in the world.” Plausible as the new doctrine was, and powerful through its accord with the currents of the time, the readers of this letter, as a body, have already rejected it (compare p. 223). They felt that it could not be true. They had broken through the network of error cast about them, and had flung it aside. The stronger spirit in themselves is proof against its strong delusions. They had received an “anointing from the Holy One,” in virtue of which they “know the truth”; and they detect as by an instinctive sense the “lie” that counterfeits it (1 John 2:20). This test, one must admit, is difficult to apply. The orthodoxy dominant in a particular Church, or at a given moment, may be something widely removed from the orthodoxy of the Holy Ghost. One must survey a sufficiently large area to get the consensus of Christian faith; and one must limit the Apostle’s maxim to the central and primary truths of the Gospel, to the sort of principles that he had in view; it is illegitimate to extend it to questions such as that of “the three orders” in Church government or the refinements of the Quinquarticular controversy. As regards St John’s particular criterion, it is remarkable that the catholic doctrine of the Redeemer’s Person shaped itself from the earliest times into authoritative form, and has been accepted by the Church in its several branches with overwhelming unanimity ever since. Here, above all, the concert of Christian testimony is clear and full; each succeeding generation has made its acknowledgement of God in Christ; and we can anticipate the acclamation which the Seer of the Apocalypse heard arising from all created things,—“Unto Him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb, Be the blessing and the honour, and the glory and the dominion, For ever and ever!”
3. 1 John 4:6 adds to the two previous tests of the true and the false spirits a third, in which they are combined, viz. that of agreement with the Apostolic testimony. “You are of God,” St John asserted about his readers in 1 John 4:4, while “they are of the world” (1 John 4:5); now he continues, speaking for himself and his brother witnesses, who had “seen and handled the word of life” (1 John 1:1-3), “We are of God, and men are shown to be of God or not of God by the fact of their hearing or refusing us.” This was an immense assumption to make—a piece of boundless arrogance, if it were not simple truth. Lofty as it is, the assumption has now the endorsement of eighteen centuries behind it. Men could hardly say less for themselves to whom the Son of God had testified, “He that receiveth you receiveth me, and he that receiveth me receiveth Him that sent me.” The claim which John the Apostle makes in 1 John 4:6, has been appropriated by the Roman Pope, who asserts himself the successor of the Apostles as being the occupier of St Peter’s Chair. Of its pronouncements, therefore, the Papacy dares to say, “He that is of God, heareth us; he that is not of God, heareth us not, By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error.” The history of the Roman decrees and anathemas, and the comparison of them with the word of God in Scripture, sufficiently expose this enormous pretension. The collection of the Bulls of the Bishops of Rome, along with some noble passages, furnishes a melancholy exhibition of human ignorance, pride, and passion. Others beside the Romanists wrest to the attestation of their distinctive creeds this canon, which belongs only to the Apostolic word, and thus narrow the Church of Christ to the limit of their party-walls. Pointing to Conciliar decrees and patristic texts, or to the historical Confessions, they say, “Hereby know we the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error!” In guarding against such intolerance in others, one needs to beware lest the schismatic and anti-catholic temper be provoked in himself. Men have denounced bigotry with equal bigotry and matched shibboleth against shibboleth, till Christ has been pitifully divided and His seamless robe torn into shreds to serve for the ensigns of contending sects.
“He that knows God,” in the language of 1 John 4:6 (ὁγινώσκωντὸνθεόν), is strictly “He who is getting to know God”—the learner about God, the true disciple. Is it not to the teaching of the New Testament that such men, all the world over, are irresistibly drawn, when it comes within their knowledge? They follow its sound, they listen to the Gospels and the Epistles, as the eye follows the dawning light and the intent ear the breaking of sweet music and the famished appetite the scent of wholesome food. The soul that seeks God, from whatever distance, knows, when it hears the word of this salvation, that its quest is not in vain; it is getting what it wants! The self-styled “Vicar of Jesus Christ” calls Christ’s flock to obedience, deeming himself the universal bishop, of souls, and men “flee from him” on all hands as freedom and intelligence advance; his Allocutions sound as “the voice of a stranger,” without the shepherd’s accent. But they will hear the voice of the Good Shepherd, and of those in whom the Spirit of His love and wisdom speaks. Peter and John and Paul may still say, to this modern age of vastly increased knowledge and keen research, “He that is of God heareth us!” We have found out nothing truer or deeper about God than that which these men have taught us; still “no other name is given amongst men, whereby we must be saved,” than the Name which they preached to mankind. Reverence for Jesus Christ’s Apostles is to-day the common badge of earnest and religious souls.
“From this,” then, “we know,”—starting from this test; for the other criteria are reduced and traced up to this. Here is found their historical spring and practical resort. The Church’s confession of her Lord, and the faith that carries this confession to victory within the heart and intellect of the individual believer, both of them originate from the witness given to their fellows by the chosen disciples of Jesus Christ, which has been set down for all time in the record of Scripture. We believe on Him, as Jesus said, through their word (John 17:20). The spiritual consciousness of the Church is inseparable from its historical ground in the New Testament. The spirit of the present age is vaunting and overweening in its judgements; it has high qualities, and is charged with mighty influences gathered from the past But it is mutable and fleeting, like the spirit of every age before it; there are things superior to its verdict, and that will not wither under its adverse breath. The Eternal Spirit spoke in the words of Jesus and His witnesses; the time-spirits, one after another, receive sentence from His mouth to whom all judgement is committed. The history of human thought is, in effect, a continued “trying of the spirits” as to “whether they are of God.” The Gnosticism of St John’s day, which attempted to weigh the Gospel and Christ and the Apostolic doctrine in its critical scales and to give the law to our Lord’s Person, was in due time judged at His bar and passed into oblivion. Every subsequent encounter between the Spirit of Christ and of Anti-christ has had the like issue. Our Lord’s incarnate Godhead is the test of every creed and system. His word is the stone of foundation on which “whoso falleth shall be broken to pieces,” and that which is built standeth fast forever.