Writer of Fancy: The Playful Piety of Jane Austen

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Bible - NT - 1 John: Wedding Sermon

1 John 4:7-8: Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.  The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.

Let us Pray

Heavenly Father, You have eternally loved Your Son with the love of the Spirit, and You have revealed that love by sending Your Son to be a covering for our sin.  Pour out that love on Jon and Lindsey, we pray, that their life together may be a continual manifestation of the eternal love that You are.  Through Jesus Christ, Your Son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with You in the eternal communion of the Holy Spirit, ever one God, unto ages of ages.  Amen.

More than any other passage in the New Testament, 1 John 4 surveys the whole spectrum of love.  John exhorts us to love one another, but he doesn’t merely exhort. 

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Bible - NT - 1 John: John and Idols

Griffith suggests that John writes a pastoral rather than a polemical letter, one designed to shore up the identity of his church and prevent further apostasy.  John achieves this by insisting on faithfulness in the confession of Jesus as Messiah, by an exhortation to communal love, and by a warning to avoid idols.  Like many ancient letters, John ends with a summary of his main themes, including the exhortation to avoid idols.

For Jews and early Christians, Griffith says, “idolatry” had to do with service, what one does, and particularly what one does with respect to wood and stone images.  Jews charged that pagans really did worship the figures they bowed to.  An idol, for Griffith, is “a physical representation of a deity, usually used as an object of worship.”  This is based in part on the evidence of the LXX, which uses eidolon to translate 15 different Hebrew words, but always uses the Greek word (against other Greek usage) to refer to pagan gods and images of those gods.  He finds the same usage throughout the NT: Apart from Ephesians 5:5 and Colossians 3:5, which edge toward a metaphorical use, the eidolon group refers to “activities  associated with cultic images.”

Bible - NT - 1 John: Idols

Terry Griffith argues in his Keep Yourselves from Idols that the odd closing exhortation of 1 John  (”little children, guard yourselves from idols”) holds the key to the book as a whole.   He also argues that the “Jewish matrix of Johannine tradition has been significantly underplayed.”  For the last couple of centuries, 1 John has been read as a response to doceticizing or gnosticizing movements within the early, with the specifics of the debate being filled out by reference to 2d-century evidence.  Griffith’s book attempts to show that “1 John is the product of a continuing debate between Jews and Jewish-Christians over whether Jesus was the Messiah, at a time when some Jewish-Christian belonging to Johannine Christianity had reverted to Judaism.”

Bible - NT - 1 John: Structure of 1 John, again

Malcolm Coombes (http://www.bct.edu.au/Arche/Coombes.pdf) notes that John clusters words together, often in threes, throughout his first epistle. “Teach,” for instance, occurs only three times in the letter, all in 1 John 2:26-27. John uses “devil” “only four times: three times in the subunit 3:7–8 and once in the adjacent subunit 3:9–10. Similarly the adjective [alethinos] (’true’) is used only four times in 1 John, three of which are used repetitively in subunit 5:20–21. The use of three forms of [gennao] (’bear’) in the subunit 5:1 illustrates a deliberate play on words, especially as the author could have written such a sentence differently.” Grammatical structures are also repeated, often in threes as well. 1:6-7 uses en to with darkness, then light, then darkness again. And “if we say” is used three times in 1:6-10, interspersed with other conditional clauses.

Coombes also notes John’s use of “hook” words that conclude a unit and anticipate the next: “In almost every subunit there is a word which connects with the next subunit i.e. it is repeated in the next subunit. Sometimes this link word (or words) is used as the key of the next unit.” 2:7–8 ends with “light,” which becomes the theme of the following verses.

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Bible - NT - 1 John: Structure of 1 John

In a 1956 JBL article on John’s gospel, one Pierson Parker makes the intriguing statement that 1 John makes almost as much sense read backward as it does read forward.  This is evidence that the letter’s contents are “disconnected” and that the letter reads like “an old man’s anxious exhortations to his flock.”  Perhaps it’s evidence of something else, not an old man’s anxiety, but his cunning, his deliberate construction of a letter that reads forwards, backwards, and from the middle.  Certainly, as John Breck has shown, some sentences of 1 John can be read in multiple ways, each coherent, each bringing out some fresh aspect of John’s message.  Why not the whole letter?

Bible - NT - 1 John: John’s opponents, ad nauseum

Another argument against Wurm’s thesis is that from John’s testimony, John’s opponents claim to be a superior enlightened class that has a higher knowledge of God than ordinary Christians can attain.  But how is this an argument against Wurm’s idea that the opponents are Jews?  Wouldn’t they claim to have a superior knowledge of God than Gentile Christians?

Bible - NT - 1 John: John’s Opponents, yet again

The 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica mentions Wurm’s thesis that John’s opponents were Jewish Christians, but concludes that “the antithesis of John and Cerinthus, unlike that of Paul and Cerinthus (Epiph. Haer. xxviii.), is too well based in the tradition of the early Church to be dismissed as a later dogmatic reflection, and the internal evidence of this manifesto corroborates it clearly.”

But that assumes that Cerinthus was not Jewish, an assumption contradicted by the very source that the Encyclopedia cites - Number 28 from Epiphanius’s “medicine chest” of heresies, which describes Cerinthus as a Jewish heretic who advocated circumcision.

Bible - NT - 1 John: John’s Opponents, again

In his commentary on the Johannine epistles, I. Howard Marshall notes A. Wurm’s thesis that John’s opponents were Jews.  John’s opponents claim to know the Father, but deny Jesus is the Christ, a position that is certainly compatible with Judaism.  Marshall dismisses Wurm’s thesis because John treats his opponents as people who had been members of the Christian community (citing 2:19), and therefore cannot be non-Christian Jews.

Which makes sense, perhaps (though Marshall’s treatment of 2:19 is open to question).  But that doesn’t really finish the argument, since, as Brown acknowledges, one might then argue that the opponents were Jews who had been Christians and lapsed.

Bible - NT - 1 John: Gospel and Epistle

Brown suggests that the structure of John’s gospel sets the pattern for the first epistle.  His outline of the gospel is:

A. Prologue, 1:1-18.

B. Book of Signs, 1:19-12:50.

C. Book of Glory, 13:1-20:29.

D. Epilogue, ch. 21.

And the first epistle:

A. Prologue, 1:1-4.

B. Part 1, 1:5-3:10 (God is light, and we must walk in light).

C. Part 2, 3:11-5:12 (We must love one another as God loved us).

D. Conclusion, 5:13-21.

On the epistle, he notes that both parts begin with a statement concerning the “gospel” (Brown’s rendering of aggelia, 1:5, 3:11).

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Bible - NT - 1 John: John’s Adversaries

Raymond Brown notes that a number of scholars have identified the adversaries of 1 John as “Jews who denied that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of God.”  He finds this implausible since it’s hard to see how Jews could be “looked on as people who placed little emphasis on avoiding sin, keeping the commandments, and acting justly.”  Even if these descriptions could be applied to Jews, it is hard to explain why John doesn’t engage his opponents with Scripture, as Jesus does in John’s gospel.

One way to avoid these problems is to say that “the adversaries were Jews who had converted to Christianity but had lapsed either totally or partially.”  But Brown doesn’t find this convincing either.  Citing John 8:31-59 and 12:42-43, he asks “why there is no appear in 1 John to that polemic,” and why John never addresses his opponents (as the gospel does) as “Jews.”  Finally, he suggests that Christians would not need John to tell them to avoid “lapsed Jews,” since “if these works were written after the expulsion from the synagogue . . . the recipients would have been suspicious of Jews without any help from the author.”

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Bible - NT - 1 John: Good news

The NT uses the Greek word aggelia twice, both in 1 John (1:5; 3:11). The noun comes from the same root as euaggelion, good news, and Raymond Brown suggests that aggelia is the Johannine equivalent - meaning “good news” or “gospel.

If this is true, 1 John’s two uses are intriguing. 1:5 announces the good news that God is light, without shadow or darkness. That is genuinely good news. But 3:11 says that the “good news” takes the form of an exhortation: “that we should love one another,” a message that John elsewhere describes as a “commandment” (2:7-11).

For John, the good news is about God; but the good news also comes with a demand that we walk as He walks.

Bible - NT - 1 John: Gnostic judaism

I suggested at the end of the last post that judaizing and gnosticizing heresies may not be so different. This opinion is supported by JB Lightfoot’s analysis of the letters of Ignatius, which condemn both docetic heretics and judaizing ones, and do so in a way that suggests Ignatius saw them as two sides of the same heresy.

Lightfoot specifically analyzes the passages in the letters to the Magnesians and Philadelphians where Ignatius attacks the Jews.

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Bible - NT - 1 John: Cerinthus

1 John has sometimes been interpreted as a polemic against a Cerinthian heresy. This rests partly on patristic stories about John’s near-encounter with Cerinthus at a bathhouse, and it implies that the opponents in 1 John are proto-gnostics who teach a semidocetic christology.

But patristic critics didn’t only accuse Cerinthus of gnostic teaching. Some described him as a judaizing heretic.

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Bible - NT - 1 John: Receiving brothers

Within two verses, John accuses Diotrephes of refusing to “receive us” and refusing to “receive the brethren” (3 John 9-10). The first refers to an acknowledgement of authority; receiving “us,” the elder and his co-workers, would mean listening and obeying. The second refers to hospitality; receiving the brothers means welcoming and providing for them.

Is John perhaps hinting at some inherent connection between submission to authority and hospitality? Do these two forms of receiving something from outside somehow require each other?

Bible - NT - 1 John: In manner of God

John commends Gaius not only for receiving traveling brothers but for sending them on their way “in a manner worthy of God” (3 John 6). What does this mean? Stott is certainly right to say that they are to be treated as servants of God.

But John’s language is more richly ambiguous. Who, after all, is doing something “in a manner worthy of God”? Is that a description of the way that the traveling brothers go, or is it a description of the way Gaius outfits them for their journey? Are the brothers traveling as God travels, or is Gaius equipping as God equips? Raymond Brown is right to suggest that John means both.

The equipping of missionaries (assuming that’s who the traveling brothers are) and the mode of travel are both to be God-like. Those who equip missionaries should do so with the same generosity and reckless abundance as God equips us. Missionaries should go out in the way that God goes out, endowed with all they need to carry out the humble service that is God’s glory.

In every mission-sending and in every missionary-sent, we ought to see a picture of the gospel, of the sending Father and the sent Son. The missions of God in Incarnation and Pentecost, Augustine said, display the internal processions of God. And the missions of God ought to be visible in the way the church engages in her mission.

Bible - NT - 1 John: Brother strangers

In his third epistle, John commends Gaius for his hospitality to “brothers,” particularly for his hospitality to brothers who are “strangers.” This simple commendation marks a social revolution in ancient history.

The revolution is not John’s commendation of hospitality per se. Many ancients commended philoxenia, hospitable love of strangers. The Phaeacians received Odysseus, bathed him, fed him, and entertained him even before they knew his name, and Baucis and Philemon entertained Zeus and Hermes unawares.

Yet, when ancient peoples entertained strangers, they did so with clear recognition of the boundaries between “inside” and “outside,” between brother and stranger. In what Greeks could only see as verbal and conceptual confusion, John speaks of brothers who are strangers, strangers who are brothers, and in that “confusion” we begin to see fissures in the walls of ancient civilization.

To say “brother-stranger” is to confess a unity in the human race that the ancient world dreamed of but never achieved. To say “stranger-brother” is to declare not only the fulfillment of the Abrahamic promise but the fulfillment of all the best hopes of paganism.

Bible - NT - 1 John: Sermon Notes, First Sunday of Lent

INTRODUCTION
John is a true apostolic pastor. His letters address the universal church (1 John), a particular congregation, the “chosen Lady” (2 John), and an individual Christian, Gaius (3 John). 3 John is full of names: Gaius (v. 1), Diotrephes (v. 9), Demetrius (v. 12). John is not content with speaking to crowds, but also encourages, rebukes, and exhorts individuals. He addresses the church as a whole as “beloved” (1 John 2:7; 4:1, 7), professes his love for the chosen Lady (2 John 1), and also addresses the individual Gaius as “beloved” (3 John 1). His love for the church is general, but it is also very personal and specific.

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Bible - NT - 1 John: The typology of 2 John

John, the elder, addresses a “chosen Lady,” warning her and her children about “deceivers” who might try to win them over. John especially wants to draw the line at table fellowship: Don’t eat with the deceiver, John tells the Lady.

Sound familiar?

It’s Eden, but not quite Eden. After all, John presents himself more as “father” than “husband,” there are children, and this Eve has a sister (2 John 13). The most notorious sisters in the Bible are Jerusalem and Samaria in Ezekiel 23, the story of the older sister setting a bad example for the younger. The chosen sisters of 2 John are instead encouraging one another in faithfulness.

Bible - NT - 1 John: Fourfold truth

John uses the word “truth” four times in the opening three verses of 2 John. Truth is fourfold, stretching out to the four corners of the earth. It also seems possible to take “truth” here, at least at a secondary level, as a reference to Christ - especially in the phrase “in truth,” “knowing truth,” and “for the sake of the truth” (vv. 1-2). Christ, the Way, Truth, and Life, also stretches to the four corners of the earth.

And with the Truth goes the commandment of God: John uses the word “commandment” four times in verses 5-6. The commandment is what the church is to proclaim to all nations, so that the Great Commission will be fulfilled as Gentiles come to the “obedience of faith.”

Bible - NT - 1 John: Doubts regarding Parousia?

The heretics that John attacks in his epistles are said to deny that Jesus came in the flesh. The coming is past in 1 John 4:2, but the tense is different in 2 John 7. Stott comments, “In strict grammar this should refer to a future coming, and some have wondered if a reference to the parousia, mentioned twice specifically in the first letter (2:28; 3:2), is intended.”

Stott goes on to argue that John is referring to the incarnation, and that may be right. But the notion that John is referring to heretics who doubt the parousia is suggestive. Though Stott says that there’s no evidence of any groups that denied the parousia, 2 Peter certainly gives evidence that some were becoming restive about it as the apostolic generation drew to a close. And, as Brown points out, a reference to the parousia in verse 7 sets up for the reference to rewards and loss in verse 8.

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