A Necessary Detour

I spent a lot of time this weekend thinking about what John is writing and why he goes to some length to make the points he makes in the opening of this letter. I was a bit surprised to find the problem he was addressing to be as contemporary as it it. It has a different name or no name at all but the beliefs are the same. Here are my thoughts. Having in the past read several volumes on Gnosticism, I trust these summary thoughts on its basic tenets do it sufficient justice for an understanding of John.

The biblical rule is that everything is established by the testimony of two or three witnesses. (II Corinthian 13:1) John is alluding to the witness of the disciples, 12 of them. That certainly meets the biblical rule and far exceeds the rule by which we are convinced of most things. But why does he dwell on the claim that these witnesses saw, heard and touched? If such was really required for a us to believe the claims and teachings of a religion, there would remain, I think, only one religion on earth. One need only think of the many religions that are based on nothing more than the religious experience of a single man or the claim of a single witness that an angel appeared to him with a message to say nothing of the millions who are misled by modern day pseudo-prophets and their claims that God spoke to them extra-biblically. And given that he is writing to the church, to those who have already believed, one wonders why then he is at such lengths to make a point of the fact that the testimony of the witness is based on the objective experience of the witnesses?

It is held by most that John is writing this letter to the churches to counter the influence of Gnosticism. I could easily get lost in this, as there is much to understand about Gnosticism. But I think recalling as much as possible of Gnosticism will help me better understand John. (It has been some twenty years since studying Gnosticism and more than forty years since studying the Platonism and Pythagoreanism from which it borrows). Some understanding of the tenets of Gnosticism will certainly help us better understand the lambasting John is about to give to the notion of ‘perfectionism’.

Gnostics did/do hold a biblical view of evil; i.e., that evil is sin or rebellion against God. Their view is that evil is essentially ontological in nature rather than ethical in nature. That notion leads inevitably to the notion that whatever “evil” we commit is not something for which we bear the guilt. We simply cannot avoid being evil and thus God holds us guiltless. He holds us guiltless because although we do evil things, we are, in fact, guiltless. This obviously requires some explanation.

Gnostics held that God is pure being. Not pure being in the sense we would normally think; i.e. ethically pure but pure being as opposed to pure non-being which is necessarily “evil” simply due to the fact that it is the opposite of pure being. This all gets a bit confusing but here is the thing – and it will no doubt make it all the more confusing – non-being is not the same as non-existing. It is rather that which is always becoming but never achieving being. The god of non-being is the demiurge who created all things or namely matter, the stuff of which the world as we know it is made. I am massively abbreviating to avoid venturing into the whole Gnostic cosmology. The point is this: matter is evil because it is non-being and thus the contradiction of God who is Being; consequently, I will argue, ultimately evil then is necessarily is thus ontological rather than ethical. In that case, guilt cannot be ascribed for c’est la vie.

Just how is that so? In the gnostic view, the soul, man qua man or the essence of man if you will, while different from God, is nonetheless pure being, individual and different from God to be sure; yet a chip off the old block, a spark of the divine and thus without sin. Perhaps it would be more correct to say Gnostics held man qua man to be without flaws or want of being. The problem comes when the soul is conjoined with matter to form the walking talking individuals we know as mankind. Matter, you remember, is inherently “evil”; i.e., non-being or that which is always becoming, and that is the contradiction of pure being. The Gnostics do not deny that men as we know them are evil things. Rather they hold that the soul, man in his essential being, is not accountable for the evil done by the body, the matter it inhabits. So we get back to the Platonic notion of the body being the prison house of the soul and the Christian Gnostic notion of perfection. The perfection John is countering is not the notion that they never did evil, or never sinned again as some think is the issue. The perfectionism he is opposing is the notion that they are guiltless because, in fact, as the Gnostics held they themselves never were evil. It is only this matter into to which they have been entrapped that is evil. Sin is rather something foisted upon man by his having been conjoined with matter in his creation. It is this that John is opposing when he says “if we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves.

Well, that was a bit longer detour than anticipated. I think, however, given the pervasiveness today that somehow man fundamentally good, not really finally guilty of the evil he does and God welcomes all back into Himself, this needed to be said. Gnostic doctrine, while not named, is much more pervasive than we might think.

Whether one agrees with him or not John is saying that man himself, man qua man, the soul, is in ethical rebellion against God and bears that guilt except – and this is his ultimate point – except a man has believed in the Christ who bears that guilt for him – a believing strives to follow after him. That Christ is and that he sacrificed Himself to bear man’s guilt even the devils believe, but they refuse to be being conformed to his image.