02.01.04. 1John 2:18-29 The antichrists . . .
§ 4. 1 John 2:18-29 THE ANTICHRISTS
It is obvious throughout the Epistle that Christianity is a life — a corporate life — in St. John’s estimation, and not a philosophy.
None the less, it now appears that it is a life based upon or involving a revelation of truth such as the human mind must apprehend, accept, and insist upon in the form of intellectual propositions, or what we call a dogmatic creed. And resistance to intellectual error is as clear a duty as resistance to wickedness. Thus in the Revelation, side by side with the ten-homed and seven-headed “beast” who represents the world-power which violently persecutes the Church, is “another beast’’ who uses the faculties of intellect to “deceive” the world, in the interests of the world-power, and who is elsewhere called “the false prophet.” And so similarly here we hear both of “the world" which “hates" the Church on account of its moral claim and principles, and which “lieth in the evil one” and also, in the passage we are just going to consider, of the “antichrists ’’ who are seceders or apostates from the Church, who preach a lie, who are deceivers and false prophets, and who belong to the world and are welcomed by the world.” The point is that St. John feels himself compelled to emphasize the necessity of orthodoxy in the same imperative terms as the necessity for love, and to demand as uncompromising opposition to intellectual as to moral error. This will appear repeatedly as we continue our study. But we must pause at this point to collect from the Epistle the indications of the particular form of false teaching which St. John is thinking of and to endeavour to interpret them. The false teaching, it appears, is the denial that “Jesus is the Christ,” or (what seems to be regarded as the same thing) that “Jesus is the Son of God,” or that “Jesus Christ is come in the flesh,” or that He “cometh [i.e. is still to be expected at His “appearing”] in the flesh.” The indications taken together point to a new type of hostile thought, such as had arisen not from the Jewish people, but from apostate Christian leaders. It is “Gnostics,*’ not Jews, who are now the enemy. Their Christ (conceived more or less on the lines of the late Jewish apocalypse, the Book of Enoch) is a heavenly, semi-divine being, who is also perhaps called the Son of God, and the point of opposition is to the idea of an incarnation — to the idea that the heavenly or divine being oan [sic], actually have become man in the person of Jesus, or can actually and permanently have taken flesh. The heavenly being, they would have contended, must have remained a separate person with a separate destiny, not to be identified with the human person, Jesus of Nazareth. In this connection a very early reading of 1 John 4:3 is also to be noted. Instead of “Every spirit which confesseth not Jesus,” the reading runs, “Every spirit which dissolveth Jesus” , I have, in the course of this exposition, given my reasons for thinking that this reading is probably original, and that (in accordance with the plainer indications in the Epistle) it would naturally be interpreted of any doctrine which “dissolves” Christ’s person, and instead of acknowledging one person, the Son of God made flesh, postulates two persons or beings — a higher divine being called the Son or the Christ, and an ordinary human being called Jesus. Such teaching would accordingly involve the denial that the man Jesus was or is, in His own person, either the Son or the divine Christ, or, to put it otherwise, would deny the verity of the incarnation — that truly and really the eternal Son was “made flesh.” Then, finally, in 1 John 5:6 it is implied that the false teaching acknowledges that the Christ (or the Son) “came by water,” i.e. presumably at the baptism of Jesus, but denies that He came “by blood” i.e. denies to Him any participation in the passion. This much I think we could gather by way of probable conjecture from the Epistle itself, in the light of what we know of the early forms of Gnosticism. But all these hints or indications as to the doctrine which. St. John was so strenuously opposing are precisely in accordance with the account which Irenaeus gives us of the false teaching of Cerinthus, the traditional opponent of St. John. This Saint Irenaeus is found as an influential presbyter in the Church of Lyons in a.d. 177, and was there made bishop in succession to St. Pothinus, the martyr in the persecution under Marcus Aurelius, and continued as bishop till about the end of the century. There was no one in the whole Christian world held in higher esteem than he. And his early home had been in Asia Minor. There, in his early youth, he had been a disciple of the famous Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, later the martyr; and he tells us (in a letter to a certain Florinus, who had been with him there at the same period probably in the imperial service) how vividly he remembers all about Polycarp, his look, his character, his habit, and his teaching — how he used to narrate his intercourse with John and with the others who had seen the Lord: for Polycarp had been appointed bishop in Smyrna by the surviving apostles. Irenaeus’s life, in Asia, in Rome (for he was more than once in Home), and in Gaul, coincided with the activity of the ’’ Gnostics/’ and it is mainly against them that he wrote his great work in defense of orthodox Christianity {The Conviction and Overturning of the Knowledge [Gnosis] falsely so-called). The Gnostics, who were so named because, like modem theosophists, they laid stress upon their superior knowledge (gnosis) and enlightenment, and despised the simple faith of the Church, belonged to various schools and followed various leaders who combined in different amalgamations Jewish and Christian ideas and terms with ideas and terms derived from Oriental and Greek speculation. But the central motive of all these movements or schools of thought was the refusal to bring the supreme God, the highest and the holiest, into any immediate contact with matter. This contempt for matter or the material world was common in different degrees to Greek philosophy and to Oriental speculation, and it was, as I have said, the soul of all the movements grouped together as Gnostic, which have remarkable affinities with modern theosophy and indeed with other kinds of modem idealism. In accordance with this fundamental characteristic they all had to find some creator for this lower, material world other than the Supreme God, who could not be made responsible for it, and also some way of deliverance for the souls of men, or the fragments of the spiritual principle suffering bondage in material bodies, other than the incarnation of any properly divine being. The very idea of the incarnation of God in a material body was intolerable to them. Their way of bridging over the gulf between the Supreme God and the lower world was by postulating “emanations” from God in a gradually descending scale. And some of these schools of Gnostics took up the idea or name of the Christ, represented as a heavenly being, almost divine in character, and they gave the name of “ Christ “ to one of their semi-divine “emanations” who belonged to the spiritual and not the material world. With this much by way of explanation we shall be able to understand Irenaeus’s quite careful and credible account of Cerinthus, first of all taking note that Irenaeus tells us, on the authority of a statement made by Polycarp to persons at Rome, that St. John had such a horror of Cerinthus that, perceiving him in a bathing establishment whither he had gone to take a bath, he withdrew in all haste with the exclamation, “Let us escape, lest the roof fall in, because Cerinthus is there, the enemy of the truth.” We can imagine St. John, half playfully, but with a very great seriousness under the playfulness, so behaving. At any rate, it fairly represents his profound horror of any teaching which seemed to him fundamentally anti-Christian.
What, then, was Cerinthus’s doctrine, according to Irenaeus? It had the two fundamental Gnostic characteristics: (1) that the creator of the world had been a “power very far separate from the Supreme God and ignorant of Him’’; and (2) that Jesus was a man born in normal human fashion of Joseph and Mary — simply a pre-eminently good and wise man — upon whom, after his baptism, a divine being, the Christ, descended from ’’the Supreme Authority” in the figure of a dove, announced to Him the unknown Father, and worked miracles; but that at the last the Christ “flew back again” from Jesus, and Jesus alone suffered and rose again while the Christ remained impassible, being a spiritual being, If we suppose that Cerinthus, like other Gnostics, spoke also of a Son of God, whether as identified with the Christ or as another divine or semi-divine being from the spiritual world, the account of Cerinthus’s teaching satisfies all the requirements which our Epistle suggests for St. John’s opponents, Irenaeus, we must add, would have us believe that St. John had Cerinthus specially in mind in writing his Gospel, but he makes no allusion to the motive of the Epistles, where opposition to Cerinthus is much more apparent.
Thus it is that St. John has reason to denounce those who “dissolve” Jesus; who make of Jesus and Christ, or Jesus and the Son of God, two separate beings; who deny that the Son of God has Himself come in our flesh and is still 80 to come again; and who, while they acknowledge the participation of the divine being in the baptism (the water), refuse to acknowledge His participation in the passion (the blood). With this amount of explanation we can go on to consider the next section of the Epistle.
Explanatory Analysis. — We are living in a last hour of the world’s day. That is to say, the Day of the Lord — the day of the coming of Christ in His glory — is at hand. But a last hour is an hour of strenuous conflict, in which the forces that resist Christ gather for their last effort.
You have heard about the coming of Antichrist. But if you look around you see that many antichrists have arisen. That is the sign of a last hour. These antichrists did not spring up in the heathen world. They are apostate Christians. But though they formally belonged to our company, they did not really belong to us or they would have remained with us. To show their true character — to warn us that all Christians are not real Christians — they left us. Now they are striving to lead you astray with an alien doctrine — a lie incompatible with the truth. And you, because you have received the anointing of the Spirit of truth, have all of you the power to know the truth and to distinguish between the truth and the falsehood.
What is the falsehood? It is the denial of the Incarnation — the denial that Jesus, who lived and died in human flesh, is the very Christ and Son of God. And to deny that Jesus is the Son is to deny the Father. There is no belief in the Father possible except by belief in Jesus Christ as the Son. That is the original message which you received when you became Christians and to which you must abide faithful. The eternal life, the life of fellowship with the Son and the Father, is promised to those only who so believe in Jesus.
I have written this to warn you against those who would lead you astray. But it is no external warnings that you need. You have received as a permanent endowment of your nature the unction of the Spirit of truth. He is an infallible guide and teacher, and you have nothing to do but cling closely to His original teaching. Holding to the Spirit, you will be ready for Christ, whenever He is manifested in His glory. That day of His coming is what we have to expect, and our effort must be to be so loyal to Him as that His coming may bring us no failure of heart and no danger of being shamed away horn Him. And the mark of true Sonship, as derived from Him, is this only — it is likeness of character, a righteousness like His.
Little children, it is the last hour: and as ye heard that antichrist cometh, even now have there arisen many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest how that they all are not of us. And ye have an anointing from the Holy One, and ye all know. I have not written unto you because ye know not the truth, but because ye know it, and because no lie is of the truth. Who is the liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, even he that denieth the Father and the Son. Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father: he that confesseth the Son hath the Father also. As for you, let that abide in you which ye heard from the beginning. If that which ye heard from the beginning abide in you, ye also shall abide in the Son, and in the Father. And this is the promise which he promised us, even the life eternal. These things have I written unto you concerning them that would lead you astray. And as for you, the anointing which ye received of him abideth in you, and ye need not that any one teach you; but as My anointing teacheth you concerning all things, and is true, and is no lie, and even as it taught you, ye abide in him. And now, my little children, abide in him; that, if he shall be manifested, we may have boldness, and not be ashamed before him at his coming. If ye know that he is righteous, ye know that every one also that doeth righteousness is begotten of him. The “last day,” that is, the “manifestation” of Christ, His final “coming’’ in glory (1 John 2:28), is the background of this whole paragraph. If St, John is the author of the Apocalypse which closes our Bible, no doubt his mind was full of this subject. But in his Gospel and Epistles he only alludes to it or assumes it (see in the Gospel, John 5:28; John 6:39-40; etc, John 11:24; John 12:48; John 21:22, and in the Epistle 1 John 2:28 and 1 John 3:2). Probably he thought that in the existing Gospels and in the current traditions of the Church stress enough was laid on the future coming, and that his task was to supply what was lacking — to strengthen the tradition of the Church in the matter of Christ’s own witness to Himself, as He had borne it in the world by word and sign, and of His “coming’’ by the Spirit in the Church to perpetuate His life here and now among men, that is “the eternal life,” which is St. John’s name for the Kingdom of God. Nevertheless, none can doubt that St. John also looked forward eagerly to the coming of Christ in glory — His final manifestation. And as there is a good deal of perplexity upon the subject something must be said about it.
1. The prophets of Israel constantly proclaimed “the day of the Lord” — the day of judgment upon all rebellious persons and institutions — the day when God shall come into His own in the world that He has made. And must we not say that such a belief is hardly separable from belief in God? If God exists and is Lord, He must at last vindicate His sovereignty. But this final, acknowledged reign of God might come about by a gradual evolution, a gradual and progressive advance of good over evil. Not so, however, did the prophets, and especially not so did the later apocalyptic teachers of Israel, expect God to vindicate Himself at last, but by an abrupt catastrophe. The powers of evil, the powers which ignore and resist God, would go on in their pride and insolence, and continually seem too strong for the people of God. Then suddenly and finally God would act, to overthrow the adversaries and establish His reign and the triumph of His faithful ones. And the instrument of this final judgment and triumph was to be the promised Christ: so, at least, the belief of the Jews had tended to fix itself when our Lord came into the world, though no doubt with much variation and uncertainty in detail. Now, in several ways our Lord profoundly corrected in the minds of His disciples this current belief, as by His teaching of the suffering Messiah, and of the judgment on Israel itself, and of the kingdom of God as a thing now present and secretly working among men, and of the Mission of the Spirit, and His own return by the Spirit to establish the kingdom of God in the Church. In all these ways He turned men’s minds in another direction and towards ideals quite different from those of Jewish Apocalypse.
Nevertheless, it is quite certain that He maintained the belief in the minds of His disciples that this age of the world would have an end, and that the end would be His coming to judge the world and to establish the divine kingdom in all its fulness of glory. This is what our Lord in St. John’s Gospel frequently calls “the last day.’’ This is, therefore, the faith of the Church as it is recited in the Creeds. And I ask again, is faith in God really separable from belief in His final triumph, or faith in Christ, as manifested God, separable from the belief that His coming in glory will close the vista of history? Every Christian heart should cry out “Even so come. Lord Jesus”; and it is because we do not heartily and all together so cry out that we are not allowed to see even “one of the days of the Son of Man.”
2, The Antichrist. — But granted this belief in “the last day,” how is it to be expected? By a gradual and progressive improvement of the world till the lordship of Christ is everywhere recognized? That progress is the intention of God, and that the Church, which represents His mind, is intended to expand, and thereby also the whole force of good in the world to be manifested to its utmost limits, is certain and has been matter of experience. It is irreligious to doubt the divine purpose of progressive good and idle to deny its reality. Nevertheless, it is always progress by conflict. The embodiments of evil change their shape, but evil shows no signs of disappearing or even weakening. Thus, prophets and our Lord lend no countenance to the idea of a gradual disappearance of evil. Bather they lead us to anticipate the fiercest conflict at the end. This is the implication of our Lord’s question, “When the Son of Man Cometh, shall He find the faith on the earth?” The strain on faith, it seems, is to be intensest at the end. So the early Church, perhaps learning it from the Jews, anticipated at the end a sort of incarnation of the forces of evil and lawlessness in an Antichrist. St. John does not appear to encourage such a belief; but he points to the “ many antichrists ’’ who were plain to see in the experience of the Church; and amongst them he signalizes as antichrists and deceivers one particular class of teachers who opposed the belief in the incarnation, and he would stimulate the Christian Church to a firm and deliberate resistance to their doctrine.
Certainly we cannot to-day look around us and doubt that for us also there are many antichrists. Those, for instance, who are most keenly democratic to-day, who believe that democracy represents the divine purpose, are rendered thereby the more conscious that democracy has many perils — that it needs Christ if it is not to fail and disappoint us; and that it is the anti-Christian forces which are the real enemies of democracy. Certainly there are many antichrists. But it is false doctrine that St. John has specially in view. He most deliberately and solemnly warns us that Christianity is a religion which involves a specific intellectual position — the belief, in particular, that the eternal Word or Son of God, Himself God, was made flesh; that is, was personally incarnate in Jesus Christ: and that the denial of this is antichrist. We are so loath to-day positively to reject any doctrine — we are so anxious “to hear what can be said on both sides’’ — that any real intellectual decision is very difficult for us. We need, then, seriously to consider the deliberate but decisive judgments of St. John, as indeed of St. Paul and of the Church, on fundamental questions. There are certain questions on which the Church cannot be neutral, for its life is at stake. It must pronounce sentence. It must say deliberately, ’’ This is antichrist.’’
3. But what is the meaning of “a last hour “? The presence of these antichrists, St. John says, is the sign of a “ last hour.” (He does not write “the last hour,” but “a last hour.” This can hardly be unintentional.) This expresses the belief already alluded to that “the day of the Lord” — that is, the day of the victory of good and of God, would be preceded by a period of specially hot conflict. This would be “the last hour’’ of the world preceding the dawning of the new “day.” And every day of judgment on a corrupt civilization, every “day of the Son of Man,” would in like manner be preceded by a “last hour’’ of intense conflict.
Thus there may be many “days of the Son of Man” and many “last hours,’’ and it is quite possible that this is definitely in St. John’s mind, and that he does not mean to insist that the end of the world is close at hand; though he, probably with the rest of the apostolic Church, had so believed in earlier days, through a misunderstanding (as I think) of our Lord’s meaning. It is very difficult to deal with a subject of much controversy in a few words. But I think the truth is this. Our Lord quite deliberately and solemnly pronounced judgment on Jerusalem, and he did this in the manner of the ancient prophets, who threw their prophecies of judgment against the world-powers upon the background of physical convulsions. So our Lord threw the judgment over Jerusalem on the background of physical convulsions. All His words in the apocalyptic discourse about darkened luminaries, and falling stars, and quaking nature (Mark 13:24-26) are quotations from the ancient prophets. Now I believe that all our Lord’s assertions of the end, as coming within the generation which heard His words, had a definite reference to the judgment on Jerusalem, though they were partly misunderstood. I believe also that our Lord did truly (as represented in other utterances in the Gospels) warn the disciples against imagining that they could know the times and the seasons of the divine judgments, and used language about the universal preaching of the Gospel and the gradual diffusion of His teaching and of God’s kingdom which was inconsistent with any rapid end of the world: and that He solemnly confessed that He, though He was the Son, did not (in His mortal state) know the day or the hour — i.e. did not have the map of the future spread before His human mind. Thus I believe that He neither deceived His disciples nor spread the future before them; but (1) definitely foretold one “day of the Son of Man,’’ one “day of judgment’’ within their own generation—that is, the judgment on Jerusalem, and threw this on the background of final physical catastrophe, a background which is no doubt symbolical and traditional but represents a reality; (2) led them to expect a similar day of judgment — ’’one of the days of the Son of Man” — wherever they should see an evil institution or corrupt civilization showing its signs of rottenness: “’ Wherever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together”; (3) maintained in their minds the belief in a last great day, which shall be the end of this present world and the coming of the new heaven and the new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.
It appears to be of the essence of the teaching about the end which we can ascribe to divine inspiration to be both symbolical and vague in outhne. We are not meant to learn the future beforehand, except in its moral principles.
Thus the disciples mistook our Lord’s meaning, and thought themselves justified in anticipating His almost immediate return and the end of the world. But this was never more than an expectation. It was never part of their faith.
Thus when Jerusalem fell and the end did not come, they suffered, apparently, no great shock. When John saw the vision of the Apocalypse, the day of judgment on the new adversary, the persecuting empire of Rome, was shown him as being both certain and speedy, and again this act of divine judgment was thrown upon the tremendous background of the end of the world. Yet if St. John had lived long enough to see the judgment on Rome, but to find a new age dawning and the end of the world still seemingly as far off as ever, I believe he would have suffered no shock, but would still have bidden us expect and call for the judgments of God on every form of organized wickedness, and still prepare for bitter conflict (“ a last hour’’) before the end comes, and still be prepared for a new lifetime of the present world. Certainly we live to-day in the midst of the signs of judgment on a false industrial civilization and a false nationalism. Certainly it is a “last hour” of conflict. But it need not be the end of the world. It may be the dawning of a new and better age.
4. The purpose of schisms or heresies is declared by St. Paul (1 Corinthians 11:19) to be the sifting out in the face of day of the true from the false Christians. So here St. John sees the significance of the Gnostic schisms in the proof it affords that all who are Christians formally are not Christians really (1 John 2:19). What St. Augustine calls “the true body of Christ’’ consists of those who belong both to the body of the Church and to its spirit. And it is only by a sifting probation that it becomes evident who they are.
5. The Unction from the Holy One is the Holy Spirit. So St. Paul had already called the gift of the Spirit as given in the Church (2 Corinthians 1:21). It means that we share with “Christ,” the Anointed One, in the same gift. At the same time, St. John tells us, Christ is for us the source of the gift. He is “the Holy One” by whom the gift is bestowed (cf. John 6:69, Revelation 3:7, and John 16:7). And just as in the Gospel the Paraclete is especially viewed as “the Spirit of truth,” who guides into all the truth and reveals Christ as He truly is and recalls His words, so it is here in the Epistle, The result of His coming into their hearts is that they ’’all know’’ (rather than “they know all things”), and all can and must test and discriminate by an inward criterion true teaching from false, and hold fast with a personal conviction to the original Gospel, as being the truth. This is very strongly affirmed in this passage.
Certainly St. John would not tolerate the Romanist division of the Church into “the teaching Church" — i.e. the priesthood — and “the Church which learns” — i.e. the laity which simply receives from its teachers what it is to believe.
“Ye need not,” he says, “that any one teach You.” Ye have within yourselves a better teacher. We must acknowledge at the same time that St. John, while he says this, is at the very moment giving very markedly dogmatic instruction. If we are to interpret him reasonably we shall recognize the teaching function of the Church and its officers, but recognize also that the truth is committed to the whole body and to every member of it who receives the Spirit of truth; and the power of testing what is currently taught belongs, or should belong, to every adult Christian. This freedom of inquiry, which is the spirit of the claim for an “ open Bible,*’ makes the “ teaching office “ of the Church or the official priesthood a very different thing from what it becomes if it is unregulated by the free inquiry and criticism of the whole body of the faithful. The “anointing’’ of Christians is described by St. John as something which “they received” on a certain occasion. The reference is, I think there is no doubt, to what we call Confirmation or “the laying on of hands.”
St. John, we remember, was in the earliest days of the Church “sent down’’ with St. Peter by the Church at Jerusalem to “confirm’’ the newly converted and baptized Samaritans; and, as far as we know, the gift of the Spirit which gives to each member of the body his full franchise-both his full spiritual endowment and his share in the kingship and priesthood of God which belongs to the Church — has been from the first sacramentally conceived; that is to say, it has been regarded as normally conveyed through the outward ceremony of the laying on of hands. Early in the Church’s life, partly in consequence of St. John’s words, anointing with oil was added to the laying on of hands and became part of the ceremony of Christian initiation. But it is not probable that it was in use in St. John’s day. I may quote Tertullian’s words about the ceremony as it was in his day, a.d- 200: “ When we come out of the font we are anointed with the blessed unction which comes from the discipline of the old covenant under which they used to be anointed with oil to the priesthood... Afterwards the hand is laid upon us by benediction invoking and inviting the Holy Spirit.”
6. “If he shall be manifested” Both here and in 1 John 3:2 St. John uses this rather curious expression, which cannot be understood to express any doubt about the second coming, but only an uncertainly as to the time of its occurrence — “ if (at any moment) “; cf. John 14:3, “If I go away and prepare a place for you.” The “if” in these cases is hardly distinguishable from “whenever.”