was of the family of David and Mary, who was truly born, both ate and drank, was truly persecuted under Pontius Pilate, was truly crucified and died . . . who also was truly raised from the dead . . . But if, as some affirm, who are without God – that is, who are unbelievers – his suffering was only a semblance . . . why am I a prisoner?’ (Ignatius, To the Trallians, 9–10). To the Christians at Smyrna, he wrote: ‘For he suffered all these things for us that we might attain salvation, and he truly suffered even as he also truly raised himself, not as some unbelievers say that his passion was merely in semblance’ (To the Smyrnaeans, 2). Polycarp, writing to the Philippians, used John’s very words: ‘For everyone who does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is an anti-Christ’ (To the Philippians, 7:1).
This teaching of Cerinthus is also rebuked in 1 John. John writes of Jesus: ‘This is the one who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water only but with the water and the blood’ (1 John 5:6). The point of that verse is that the Gnostic teachers would have agreed that the divine Christ came by water, that is, at the baptism of Jesus; but they would have denied that he came by blood, that is, by the cross, for they insisted that the divine Christ left the human Jesus before his crucifixion.
The great danger of this heresy is that it comes from what can only be called a mistaken reverence. It is afraid to ascribe to Jesus full humanity. It regards it as irreverent to think that he had a truly physical body. It is a heresy which is by no means dead but is still held today, usually quite unconsciously, by many devout Christians. But it must be remembered, as John so clearly saw, that our salvation was dependent on the full identification of Jesus Christ with us. As one of the great early Church fathers unforgettably put it, ‘He became what we are to make us what he is.’
This Gnostic belief had certain practical consequences in the lives of those who held it.
(1) The Gnostic attitude to matter and to all created things produced a certain attitude to the body and the things to do with the body. That attitude might take any one of three different forms.
(a) It might take the form of self-denial, with fasting and celibacy and rigid control, even deliberate ill-treatment, of the body. The view that celibacy is better than marriage and that sex is sinful goes back to Gnostic influence and belief – and this is a view which still lingers on in certain quarters. There is no trace of that view in this letter.
(b) It might take the form of an assertion that the body did not matter and that, therefore, its appetites might be satisfied without restraint. Since the body was in any event evil, it made no difference what was done with it. There are echoes of this in this letter. John condemns as liars all who say that they know God and yet do not keep God’s commandments; those who say that they abide in Christ ought to walk as Christ walked (1 John 1:6, 2:4–6). There were clearly Gnostics in these communities who claimed special knowledge of God but whose conduct was a long way from the demands of the Christian ethic.
In certain quarters, this Gnostic belief went even further. Gnostics were people who had gnōsis, knowledge. Some held that real Gnostics must, therefore, know the best as well as the worst and must enter into every experience of life at its highest or at its deepest level, as the case may be. It might almost be said that such people held that it was an obligation to sin. There is a reference to this kind of belief in the letter to Thyatira in the book of Revelation, where the risen Christ refers to those who have known ‘the deep things of Satan’ (Revelation 2:24). And it may well be that John is referring to these people when he insists that ‘God is light and in him there is no darkness at all’ (1 John 1:5). These particular Gnostics would have held that there was in God not only blazing light but also deep darkness – and that an individual must penetrate both. It is easy to see the disastrous consequences of such a belief.
(c) There was a third kind of Gnostic belief. True Gnostics regarded themselves as spiritual people in every sense, as having shed all the material things of life and released their spirits from the bondage of matter. Such Gnostics held that they were so spiritual that they were above and beyond sin and had reached spiritual perfection. It is to them that John refers when he speaks of those who deceive themselves by saying that they have no sin (1 John 1:8–10).
Whichever of these three forms Gnostic belief took, its ethical consequences were perilous in the extreme; and it is clear that the last two forms were to be found in the society to which John wrote.
(2) Further, this Gnosticism resulted in an attitude to men and women which inevitably destroyed Christian fellowship. We have seen that Gnostics aimed at the release of the spirit from the prison house of the evil body by means of an elaborate and mysterious knowledge. Clearly, such a knowledge was not for everyone. Ordinary people were too involved in the everyday life and work of the world ever to have time for the study and discipline necessary; and, even if they had had the time, many were intellectually incapable of grasping the involved speculations of Gnostic theosophy and so-called philosophy.
This produced an inevitable result. It divided people into two classes – those who were capable of a really spiritual life, and those who were not. In the ancient world, every individual was thought of as consisting of three parts. There was the sōma, the body, the physical part. There was the psuchē, which is often translated as soul; but we must be careful, because it does not mean what we mean by soul. To the Greeks, the psuchē was the principle of physical life. Everything which had physical life had psuchē. Psuchē was the life principle which human beings shared with all living creatures. Finally, there was the pneuma, the spirit; and it was the spirit which was possessed only by human beings and which made them kin to God.
The aim of Gnosticism was the release of the pneuma from the sōma; but that release could be won only by long and arduous study which only the intellectuals who had time on their hands could ever undertake. The Gnostics, therefore, divided people into two classes – the psuchikoi, who could never advance beyond the principle of physical life and never attain to anything else than what was to all intents and purposes animal living; and the pneumatikoi, who were truly spiritual and truly akin to God.
The result was clear. The Gnostics produced a spiritual aristocracy who looked with contempt and even hatred on lesser mortals. The pneumatikoi regarded the psuchikoi as contemptible, earthbound creatures who could never know what real religion was. The consequence was obviously the annihilation of Christian fellowship. That is why John insists throughout his letter that the true test of Christianity is love for one another. If we really are walking in the light, we have fellowship with one another (1:7). Whoever claims to be in the light and hates a fellow Christian is in fact in darkness (2:9–11). The proof that we have passed from dark to light is that we love each other (3:14–17). The marks of Christianity are belief in Christ and love for one another (3:23). God is love, and whoever does not love does not know God at all (4:7–8). Because God loved us, we ought to love each other; it is when we love each other that God dwells in us (4:10–12). The commandment is that those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also, and those who say they love God and at the same time hate their brothers and sisters are branded as liars (4:20–1). The Gnostics, to put it bluntly, would have said that the mark of true religion is contempt for ordinary men and women; John insists in every chapter that the mark of true religion is love for everyone.
Here, then, is a picture of these Gnostic heretics. They talked of being born of God, of walking in the light, of having no sin, of dwelling in God, of knowing God. These were their catchphrases. They had no intention of destroying the Church and the faith; by their way of thinking, they were going to cleanse the Church of dead wood and make Christianity an intellectually respectable philosophy, fit to stand beside the great systems of the day. But the effect of their teaching was to deny the incarnation, to eliminate the Christian ethic and to make fellowship within the Church impossible. It is little wonder that John seeks, with such fervent pastoral devotion, to defend the churches he loved from such an insidious
