Canter Bridge

By the time the writer gets to his exquisitely synthetic declaration, the Johannine tradition has already provided a reference point in the shadow of which mean dualisms fade:

Beloved, do not imitate what is evil but imitate what is good. Whoever does good is from God; whoever does evil has not seen God.

The ‘Johannine community’ is a hypothetical entity that serves a deliciously heuristic role in the interpretation of the corresponding literature, even in those moments when nobody is quite sure what it is. One need not be skeptical about speculation so long as it knows its own mood. Probing for the legacy of John in a historical human community is no idle task and was carried out with particular élan by, say, the late Raymond Brown, S.S. (more…)

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Only rarely does human language capture such a rich swath of reality in a short declaration as here:

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.

Human experience could almost be considered a fleshing out of this fundamental dogma. (more…)

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The Johannine letters obsess over a matter that seems a point of detail to readers intoxicated with the idea that action rather than ideas are the important thing. Jesus’ ‘coming in the flesh’ is stated over and over as a deadly serious litmus test by which true believers may be discerned over against those who traffic in lies. (more…)

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Among the strongest claims that the New Testament makes bold to present is the idea of our divine parentage and, therefore, our family likeness to Jesus. Awash in the notion of love as the foundational component of Christian life, the first Johannine letter discerns divine initiative at the root of this familial inclusion. Paul would have called it ‘adoption’. The Johannine tradition captures the same objective while avoiding that distinctive Pauline vocabulary:

See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.

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