Lecture 14.docx

This is the first of a three volume set written by Ben Wetherington III in the University of Durham in England. The professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary in Woodmore, Kentucky. Now when you say the professor it makes it sound like there's just one professor there. Why do I feel l...

This is the first of a three volume set written by Ben Wetherington III in the University of Durham in England. The professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary in Woodmore, Kentucky. Now when you say the professor it makes it sound like there's just one professor there. Why do I feel like I've said this before? A professor of New Testament. He is a frequent contributor to BelieveNet.com and has appeared in numerous TV news programs such as 8 Line, 60 Minutes, 20 20, and the Peter Jennings ABC special, Jesus and Paul, The Word and the Witness. He has also authored many books including Women and the Genesis of Christianity, Jesus the Sage, Jesus the Seer, The Jesus Quest, and The Fall Quest. In regards to his socio-rhetorical commentaries, the grouping of books for each volume is based on a socio-religious group to which these letters or homilies were written or based on the socio-religious and regional contexts that the receiving Christian congregation were part of. For example, this volume addresses the similar audiences of the Pastors and the Johannin Epistles. This commentary is presented with a clear idea of what it will accomplish in the study of the Johannin Epistles, namely an examination of the social context. We find your presentation boring so we're trying to make it a little background. Namely, an examination of the social context and rhetorical devices involved in the letters or homilies of the New Testament. In this particular section, a first and third John of this first volume, Wilmington, accomplishes that task. He addresses the areas of authorship, social context, rhetoric, rhetorical structure, and the relationship between the Johannin Epistles. Wilmington provides an introduction to the Johannin Epistles which includes history, the issues of authorship, social context, and date and provenance. What is unique to this commentary is the examination of rhetorical issues included in the introductory material. This examines the type of literature we're dealing with and how it affects the intended audience. Following this is also a section on resources, commentaries, monographs, and resources involving rhetorical criticism that would be helpful for further study. After the short introduction to the Johannin Epistles, he delves deeper into each particular letter with discussion of the chapter, their literary status, relationship, and rhetoric of each book. Wilmington does a thorough job of examining these rhetorical issues from all angles before proceeding to the actual text of the letter. Then he proceeds to provide a commentary for each verse in each letter, carefully expanding upon a seemingly simple language while perusing the dense theological truths that were presented to the original audience. He acknowledges the usage of rhetorical devices and emphasizes theological truths, but also ventures into various explanations for the structure of the text. Particular with 1 John, the rhetorical structure of the text is vitally important when it comes to categorizing the audience and their understanding of what was being read to them. Wilmington makes a strong case for the usefulness of socio-rhetorical commentaries with his volume. He does a great introduction to a unique type of commentary and he does a thorough job of explaining the necessity for such examinations of the biblical text. A couple of key positive traits of this commentary are its readability and the thoughtfulness of Wilmington's position. Especially with a non-traditional commentary, the clarity and readability or understandability of the text has to be strong and he accomplishes that. Ideas are well articulated and reading this commentary became a breath of fresh air in comparison to traditional exegetical or expositional commentary. See, you are a hero. I caught what you were talking about there. I hadn't read Jerusalem by this time. Another helpful trait of the book was the obvious thoughtfulness of Wilmington's in considering every option for the text before establishing an opinion. He is diligent in examining every angle and making sure that everything is well explained. For example, with his treatment of the cessationists, in 1 John, who have gone out from us, he issues three preliminary thoughts before even dealing with the particulars of the topic. He acknowledges that those who went out from the community were probably Jewish prophetic figures who had an inadequate or deficient Christology. They denied the salvific death of Jesus and they therefore were not genuinely part of the community of believers. With the cessationists, he emphasized that the author's intent was not doctrinal but personal and one should not read too much between the lines. This is, after all, a pastoral homily, so he says, not a theological treatise. Issues like these are brought to greater clarity with the careful consideration that Wilmington provides for the major ideas of the text. Understandably, though, Wilmington spends much of this section on 1 John, leaving 2 and 3 John with sparse commentary and comparisons, most likely due to their length. Because much of the analysis of the two latter letters is intermixed with that of 1 John, there is little introductory material for these letters. Even so, he is clear and concise with commentary regarding each verse in 2 and 3 John and is thorough in his treatment of structure and rhetoric while maintaining a balanced approach on the social perspectives. One inevitable drawback to this commentary is the lack of syntax analysis and grammatical exercise. Most, if not all, of the analysis is based on structure and rhetoric while he relies heavily on other commentaries to provide snippets of explanation for syntax and grammar. Because of the emphasis on social rhetorical aspects of the text, it can seem confusing to follow the verse by verse commentary. The references to verses are more like location markers than addressing the specific verse. Also, the biblical text has to be taken in larger chunks in order to accommodate its rhetorical and structural nature. Therefore, the reader might have to take some time to familiarize themselves with the format and structure of this commentary. All things considered, Wilmington's book is a valuable contribution to the corpus of commentaries on the Johannian epistles. The unique nature of the subject matter is itself a beneficial look at the world of the early church and it raises more in-depth thoughts about the society that surrounds the written work. It is recommended for students of the work who wish to better understand the rules surrounding the text and how it influences society's different religious letters for religion. Any questions? You can just leave it there. Any questions? Maybe especially by others who read the commentary? So, yes? Just in general, I'm not super familiar with exactly what rhetorical criticism is. I mean, I have a general idea of the context and how it works, but I always get the sense that sometimes rhetorical criticism can be a bad thing and sometimes it can be helpful. And so, I'm always uncertain about how exactly I should feel about rhetorical criticism. So, you'd like some therapy? Do you have an answer for that? I think he talked mostly about how the author, and he doesn't believe it's John, but how the author, what the author intended to do through his writing, like the persuasion of the audience or, you know, he refers to John as a pastoral homily. So, he's not really looking at the doctrinal issue. What is this person trying to accomplish through this literature? I think I don't know if that answers. Well, I think that's certainly true. You know, in New Testament studies, if you go back into roughly the 1970s, there were people that began to, I mean, there were people always looking for new angles, you know, for analysis of biblical texts. And people started to talk about reading the Bible in the light of the rhetorical schools of antiquity. And we have some manuals. For example, Quintillion was a rhetorician. You know, people, rhetoric was a major field of study in the universities of the time or the academies of the time. So, Augustine, that's what he did for a living, was teach basically persuasive verbal communication. And when you sent your son usually to university, you know, they were taught how to persuade people, how to give different kinds of presentations. In other words, they were trained in verbal eloquence. And there were all kinds of rules. You know, they broke it down. They analyzed that they had all kinds of different names for attitudes and genres and situations and strategies. And as a former review this week noted, the terms themselves were quite complicated. And so, Witherington and others have sort of led a charge of kind of going through the New Testament and rereading it according to these rhetorical categories. The New Testament commentary that has probably done this to the greatest critical acclaim is by Hans Betz, B-E-T-Z, and it's his Hermannia Commentary on Galatians. And Galatians does, as much as any book, lend itself to these categories of rhetorical analysis. So it's Betz. Now, where things have kind of broken down is, number one, most people will admit that there's no evidence that any New Testament writer trained in a rhetorical academy. Also, there's no New Testament book that shows evidence of the writer not only being trained but of self-consciously following rhetorical rules as they were taught in the Gentile, you know, Latin or Greek rhetorical academies. And the fact is that often what the rhetorical masters were doing was that they were just giving names and labels to human communicative phenomena. When humans communicate, they reason in certain ways, and this is cross-culture and cross-language, like from greater to lesser or from lesser to greater. And that's not something that you have to go to Quintilian to find. It was in the rabbis. And they also had rhetorical rules and rules of interpretation, hermeneutical principles. And some of them overlap. So I think you would find among New Testament scholars some people that are very skeptical about rhetorical criticism. They would say it really in the end doesn't get us that far. Others are big on it because they spent many years, you know, reading Quintilian and learning about it, and by golly, they're going to get some mileage out of all this work they put into it. And as I've said before, even if our methodology and our presuppositions are flawed, if we're bright and we work hard and we go to the New Testament and analyze it, we're probably going to see things that others haven't seen, maybe because we're wrong, but it's going to shed new light on the text. And I would say that for Wutherington, probably most of what he says, you don't need rhetorical criticism to see it in the text. It's more of a dress, it's a dressing, or it's his own rhetorical situating of his exposition. So he uses that nomenclature as a way of kind of bridging what he sees going on there to his explanation of it to us. But you can read Wutherington, and you know, maybe you lose a lot if you don't understand every term, but you really don't have to understand first century rhetoric to read Wutherington with profit, especially if you like his theological angle. Now if you could just scroll up, because you already, hang on, hang on. Yeah, right here. One should not read too much between the lines. This is, after all, a pastoral homily, not a theological treatise. Is it really true that 1 John is not a theological treatise? I mean, first of all, I mean, as we've been reading it this week, we've been using a theological reading. So if he's right, I've been misleading you by encouraging you, you know, more or less to read theology off the text. But as far as the first part, okay, John's pastoral, and I mean, I think it's an epistle. I don't see the big problem. I mean, I side with the ancients. The ancients all thought it was an epistle. And if they thought it was, even though it doesn't say John, Apostle of Jesus Christ, to the, you know, that's a standard genre, but it's not necessary for every letter. But whatever it is, let's just say it's a homily. Is it inspired by God or not? I mean, is it so much a pastoral homily that we've got to be careful that we don't read it as a theological essay? It's just some pastor writing, you know, it's not even a sermon, it's a homily. You go to an Episcopal church, you go to a Catholic church, you get a homily. You know, it's eight minutes, it's ten minutes. You know, it's not a bunch of heavy exegesis and stuff like that. That's what homily means. So he's not even saying it's a sermon. It's just a homily. And it's just pastoral. It's not theological. I wouldn't want to give people, I mean, you're reading my commentary. I hope I don't give the impression in my commentary that this is just a pastoral homily. It's pastoral. It's sermonic. But it's not just a pastoral homily. This is John, the disciple of Jesus, and on and on and on. So both by virtue of the writer and by virtue of what we've been seeing in it, you know, which is supernal in its excellence. And also by virtue of what we believe about Scripture. We believe Scripture, it comes about through the concursus of certain called and gifted people and the work of the Spirit of God. So even if it is a pastoral homily, it's not just a pastoral homily. There's nothing in the Bible that's just. It's cultural, historical manifestation. It's been lifted up into a transcendent sphere because it partakes of a transcendent sphere in its very authorship. It's always, Scripture is always both fully human and fully divine. And those two things condition each other, but they certainly don't allow us just to view it as a pastoral homily and not a theological treatise. But if I believed it was just a pastoral homily, I would say very different things when I gave an exposition of it. There'd be a lot of things I wouldn't necessarily say take this to the bank. Because I mean, this is just some guy. And we've got lots of pastors here. And I mean, I've served my share of time as a pastor. I mean, the pastors, they come and go and they're right and wrong. And there's a lot to say for them and there's a lot to say against them. And sometimes I look at my sermon, I think, well maybe I should, I don't think I've ever repreached a sermon. Because I can't stand it. You know, one and done. I want to go do that again. You know, that's my pastoral homilies. I'm not even writing a homily. I'm really trying to write a sermon. But it seems like I never get it very right. Because I've got to redo it. But these, you know, you don't need to redo 1 John. I don't think you can improve on it. So that's maybe a liability perhaps of a method. And it's hard to know which comes first, the chicken or the egg. You know, the results of the method or the assumptions that fund and inform the method that you set up to begin with. But while it's rhetorical, historical criticism itself doesn't have to be anything negative. There's something to be said for bringing the rules of first century rhetoric in the Greco-Roman world to bear on the language of the New Testament. We just don't want to overdo it. And I think it is flirting with overdoing it when we say this is a pastoral homily. And, you know, it's rhetoric. And he says these things not necessarily because he knows them or because they're true. And, you know, you remind us it's not John. He doesn't say we're not. He says it's not. So this eyewitness stuff at best is Lazarus. But I don't trust Lazarus like I trust John. Because I don't think Lazarus was an apostle. I don't think he was there when Jesus was baptized. And I don't know if he's a witness of the resurrection. And I don't think he paid the dues that John the son of Zebedee did. And I don't think he passed it in Jerusalem. I don't know anything. I don't know Zilch. Except the stuff, the few things in the mid part of the Gospel of John about Lazarus. Plus then where's John in the Gospel of John? If he's not the beloved disciple, he totally disappears. Because you know it, when you read the Gospel of John, John is never mentioned in the Gospel of John. We think if he's the beloved disciple, now suddenly, okay, now we see him in John 13, and we see him in John 21. He's the witness at the foot of the cross. He receives Jesus' mother, the care of Mary. But if that's all Lazarus, then the status of this book is very, very different. You had a hand. I also read the same commentary. I think the danger of the rhetorical criticism is that often he would rely on that to back up his assumptions instead of other texts. He hardly ever referenced any text outside of the Gospel of John or the letters. So there's no cross referencing, particularly with theology, the theological assumptions to back himself up. He would often say, this fits with what Aristotle had said or the way Quintilian taught, and would use sources like that to sort of move you towards his position. So it allows for less interaction, I think, with the whole Bible. You get a different reading. Yep. Does that help a little bit? Very helpful. Thank you. Well, thank you very much for your essay. Thank you. Cross reference. I didn't actually quote the verse here. Good. Just commenting on it. Good. Hang on just a minute. Does somebody read John 847 to us real quick? Read that last part again. You say that Jesus said they are not of God because they do not hear the words. But doesn't it say the opposite? What was the verse again? John 847. Didn't he say they don't hear them? The Jews he's talking to don't hear the words of God? He says you don't hear them because you are not of God. And you've got, they are not of God because they do not hear the words. So what you're saying is the opposite of what John 847 says. Read the last part of the verse again. Okay, you do not hear the words. Why? They are not of God because they don't hear the words again. But you just flipped it backwards. Jesus says the reason you don't hear the words is because you are not of God. And you're saying they are not of God because they do not hear the words. So what you're saying is the opposite of what Jesus says in 847. Jesus says to the Jews that they do not hear the words of God because they are not of God. In fact that's what this says. Because of this you do not hear. Because you are not of God. So that's just Reformed theology basically. I have to think about that. Honestly right now I don't follow. I don't know if that's something with me being in bed for the last few days. I still have to think about that. Okay, that's fine. Just to throw in, remember John 8, this is the passage over, the conflict over parentage. And he's accusing them of being the sons of the devil. And they're accusing him of about the same thing. And he just says the reason you don't hear my words is because you're of the devil. So it's one of the primary passages in a dispute between a Narmian reading and a Reformed reading. Because Jesus seems to be saying that the reason they don't hear the words is simply because of their father the devil. They're not from God. Anyway, one of those two truths is the background for this verse. So go ahead with your interaction. Although there were many great false prophets, John encouraged the Christians in their victory over them. Meaning their victory over them? But they conquered them. Here I think he is saying that we're talking about the false prophets from the previous verses. Verse 1 where he mentions the false prophets, verse 2. And then Luke, within verses 4-6 here, they, that is the false prophets from verse 1, are defeated before being identified. This expresses the idea that the victory over the false prophets is a foregone conclusion. So here she's talking about, because verse 4 here says you are from God, and then verse, the next verse, they are from the world. She sees the point, she makes the point that because the people who are victorious are introduced before the people who are defeated, the false prophets. She says that speaks of a foregone conclusion that they are being defeated. It's significant that John talks about you are from God before he says they are from the world. It seems to be your point. Okay. Or what that point is for. I don't know. Final translation. You are from God and little children and have conquered them because greater is the one in you than the one in the world. John, an insight. The Christian has the victory over and protection from even the greatest of false prophets, not only because he hears the words of God, but because he is involved by God himself. Okay. And, you know, by now it's getting late in the week and you've heard all my harangs and so I don't have to harangue again. I can just remind you that, you know, this is what we might call a more individualistic reading. And it relates it to the individual Christian. And I've reminded you that the wording there, en whom in, that also can have an ecclesial sense. So the one who is among you, not just the one who is in you personally, but the one who makes the body of Christ what it is, certainly is in us. But he's not just in me. I'm not, as I said, somebody in the brain. I am not the church of one. There's no church of one. The spirit unites us to the, he baptizes into the body of Christ by one spirit. You were all baptized with one baptism and you were placed into the body of Christ. And I know that's Pauline, but I just want to remind us that we have to wrestle with the en whom in dimension here because he could have said en soi, right? He could have said in you, soi. Never happens. It's always in y'all if you're from the South. And I think there's an important difference there. Yes? Just wondering, a lot of the English translations, they translate it as the first, you know, pause, you are from God. Given that it seems impractical, why wouldn't you translate it in you yourselves instead? Because people notice how many humases are used in 1 John and they're not necessarily emphatic. And you get the you and them just with you and have conquered them. So they would just say, if you keep on putting yourselves, pretty soon that's not going to be emphatic anymore. So they're probably saving it for the biggest places where it might come in. I just noticed that the este obviously gives that plural idea in that first clause, which means it's not individualistic, but you walk. And so with this rendering, you're kind of mystic. But you yourselves, you catch something there. And that's a function of a non-inflected language like English because when we read you and we're reading devotionally, we read 1 John, it's me. You are from God. I am from God. So right there, you, that's me. But of course, it doesn't say, su. If it said, you know, if we were Greek speakers, we wouldn't be so inclined to think moi, to think moi. Or ego, ego. It's about ego. No, it's about himes. It's about us. So that's why we study Greek. Yes. I think the plural properties of earth, sorry, the plural pronoun to refer to like a local church, universal church, obviously universal church is made up of local churches. But do you see John writing specifically to local churches? Or does it not make a difference? No, I think he's writing to local churches. Not in the universal church. Well, I think that would take it, it would take it out of the historical setting that we know it was in. We may not know as much as we would like to know about the historical setting. Although, again, I think that Revelation 1 through 3 is an excellent place to sort of think about the kinds of churches and situations that this might have addressed. But I think that this is very much a particular person who we do know some things about, writing to particular congregations. So in that sense, it's not a theological treatise as if somebody in a university setting just wrote an essay. Or like Barthes Church Dogmatics. That's a theological treatise. It's not addressed to an individual church. It's just basically for theological publication and debate. This is not that. Now, having said that, because of the lordship of Christ overall, and because of the solidarity of humans in Adam and Eve, and the fact that the message of Christ makes us one in the body of Christ, there's a very strong universal aspect to a book like 1 John, wherever you go in the world, where people are reading the word of God and have embraced the gospel and are trying to live out Christ as a congregation. So in that sense, it has a universal application. But the work of the universal church, I mean, God breaks it down and he redeems sinners and husbands and wives and households. And then households together make up the household of God. And then maybe households of God make up denominations or allegiances or federations or something. And so on. And then eventually you have maybe the worldwide church today, a very abstract concept. But it goes down to the individual soul level and builds up from there. So it's very, very local. And I think it's the local that we have to start with. Especially because if it's not being lived out personally, if it's not being lived out, and this is really the stress in Jesus' teaching, it's the stress in the apostolic teaching, it's the stress of the Old Testament. If you're not living God out personally as a man, as a woman, as a husband, as a father, as a friend, that's the difference between Christianity and academic theology. Academic theology is a head trip. And it's about theories and it's about maybe truths that you believe in fervently, but then it's Miller time. You close the book and you live your life and then you go back to haggling over the great truths. The revelation of God is meant to transform our daily lives from the ground up. It's meant to change our bedrooms and our living rooms and our kitchens and everything that goes on there and redeem it. And from there to create redeemed communities that are impacting their world. So there is a very strong imperative on the local and on the personal and the individual. And that's the good side of stressing indwelt by God himself because there's a great truth to that. That God's got to work at the personal level. And many people have found themselves in family situations and in church situations where it was them against the world. They weren't going to get any ecclesial support. They weren't going to get help from their parents or their siblings who may have been in the church. They felt a call from God or suddenly their eyes were open to their sin and the truth of the Bible. And they felt called to go to seminary and everybody said, you're a nut. Or this will drive you nuts. Or it is driving you nuts. Or it has driven you nuts. So I don't want to take away the necessity of the individual relationship with God. And sometimes you are all alone in that. And you look around and you look back and you say, you know, really I was really the only one who came under the powerful conviction of the Holy Spirit. I was being indwelt in a very painful way. But thank God, he convicted me and beamed me out of that. So I do believe in individual indwelling. But having said that, as soon as he indwells and redeems you, then you're incorporated into something. Now we're with the whomase. You or the hamas, the us. Okay, next verse. I'm obviously wrecking the schedule today, but I blame you. You first with your hand. And then others. I'm going to write a note to the dean about the students in this class. Disrupting. Go ahead. Three, nine, one, two, five. Nine, three, nine, one, two, five, ten, one, two, three, five. Cross reference, John 3.31. John the Baptist is contrasting his ministry with the ministry of Jesus in John 3.31. John the Baptist is not able to speak as Jesus does because he belongs to the earth. He that as John speaks about Christ and the people do not believe. John 3.32. Why? 1 John 4.5 seems to answer saying that the world will only listen to worldly speech. Commentary interaction from Stott. Verses five and six are antithetical. Here the day are the false teachers and in verse six, the next verse, the we are the apostles. Both groups are distinguished by who listens to them. And then from Lou. The day, that is the false prophets are speaking. They are not sitting idly by. Rather they are proclaiming a message alongside the apostles. My final translation is they are from the world because they speak from the world. The world listens to them. Is there a reason why you don't have an and here? They are from the world, comma, because they speak from the world. Yeah, there is a chi there. Is there a reason why you left it out? No. Because if you leave it out, it makes it sound different. They are from the world, comma. It almost makes it sound like you are starting a new sentence here. Because they speak from the world, comma, the world listens to them. Yeah, it is interesting that I put a comma there because I usually always follow the punctuation in the Greek. And there is a comma there. I don't know why I did that. Do you want to put an and in? In my preliminary translation, I have the world and the world listens to them. I think I want to put an and there and get rid of the comma. Because they speak from the world and the world listens to them. Okay, so there is an and. Ground and insight. The world can only hear itself. Therefore, if the world has accepted a prophet or a teacher or a leader, it is simply because he or she is of the world. The Christian should therefore be very cautious of any spiritual teacher who is accepted by the world. We won't give any names just now. Alright, next verse. That will be your third verse, right? Verse six. Numbers. John 14, 17. Jesus calls the helper, that is the only spirit, the spirit of truth. Moreover, Jesus says that the world cannot receive the spirit because it neither sees him nor knows him. And then, 1 Timothy 4, 1. Timothy says that the spirit has said that in latter times false teachers will devote themselves to, quoting 1 Timothy, deceitful spirits and teachings of demons. Commentary interactions. Todd says, I'm not quoting here, but John can say that whoever does not listen to him and the other apostles does not hear God because he is a chosen apostle. Furthermore, whether or not a person that is a false prophet listens to the apostles determines his credibility. And then from Lou. John's language is more forceful here as he makes the point that the choice between the false prophets and the apostles is a choice between truth and error. Final translation. Let's just look at that for a second. We are from God. Whoever knows God hears us. We ran at this a time or two this week already. The ha genoscon, technically, is the one who knows. We are from God. So it's not whoever knows. It's the one who knows. Slight difference, but there's no on there. And so there's no reason to get the whoever there. Whoever knows God hears us. Haas. The one who is not as from God, the one who is not from God does not hear us. So you got two whomevers and those those there's really no justification for for having the ever in there. The one who knows God, he who is not from God. That's the difference. The one who knows he who is not. By this, we know. The spirit of truth and the spirit of error. I'm just reflecting in my mind here. I mean, where else would I reflect? But if this is a community. And it's not really, John. But wouldn't you be kind of ticked? Whoever knows God hears us. Whoever is not from God does not hear. I mean, that's like delusional. Apostles can say they're from God. Paul says it all the time. Paul, an apostle from God. May not believe it, but I mean, that's that's that's what an apostle is an apostle is somebody sent from God. Through Jesus. But for people that aren't apostles to be saying, hey, I'm sent from God. If you listen to me, you're listening to God. That's weird. I mean, the ancient world wasn't that screwed up that they would have thought, you know, that's really weird. And repugnant, really. So that's a downside with some theories of authorship, I think. Go ahead here. Insight. Here on an insight, there is no gray area for John. This person, specifically a prophet or a teacher, either comes in the spirit of truth or in the spirit of error. Yeah, I think that's true. I do think this is the apostolic we, as maybe I was just implying. I think this is the we that echoes the we that starts out the epistle. And, you know, it does encompass all of his readers to the extent that they buy into what John's been teaching them. By now, he said what he has had to say to them over and over again, many times. And if they're tracking with them, they can all they can all say we're from God. But they can say that derivatively. They are not from God in the way John's from God. And of course, John's not from God in the way that Jesus was from God. He's an apostle of the Son of God. He's not a son of God like Jesus was. So, you know, we've got some extensions going on here. But I would want to preserve both the apostolic specificity here. Not so much because of the office of apostle, although that's critical. But the office of apostle is based on language almost identical with this in John's gospel that's repeated by Jesus about himself. He says repeatedly different places, different ways that he's been sent from God. And he does not speak his own words, but whatever he hears from God, that he speaks. So there is this personal and you could say epistemological privilege that Jesus claims for himself that despite the appearance that he's just this guy from Galilee yacking and preaching, that the words they hear are not his words. They're the words that are from God. And of course, in their minds he lost that debate because they crucified him. They didn't think that those were God's words. But he rose and he confirmed his choice of some to represent him to the world. I mean he'd already chosen him and trained him and everything, but then they had to reset. They had to reset after the resurrection. And he resets with the Great Commission and different versions of that and different gospels. But this is why this is possible for John. It's not even just because he was a great apostle. It's because it was true of Jesus. Jesus embodied this. And then he passed it on and he chose certain people and they were anointed by Christ, so to speak, to speak these words and to give these teachings. And so yes, this is a theological treatise. If we define theology as God talk, this really is God talk because God talked. And John is one of the people that was talked to by God. And if you think it's scary to be making presentations up here not knowing what I might say to you, what if you're an apostle and you're going to be representing what the Son of God said to you? You know something? You're going to be quick to hear, slow to speak. And in fact, one guy commented on the New Testament epistles and this will certainly apply to John. And this week we've seen the adjective lapidary. Remember that adjective, lapidary? Look it up. It means concise and cut just to the right shape to get the job done. No excess. Strip down. Very efficient. The prose of the New Testament epistles, this person said, is the language of men who have spent a great deal of time in prayer. There's not a lot of wasted verbiage in the New Testament letters. And John, he even strips out the connectives. There's just a lot of chies. There isn't a lot of subordinate. He writes very simply. I think part of it is his literary style. Part of it also I think is you don't want to go beyond what he's authorized to say. It's one thing he keeps saying it over and over again. He just needs to repeat it, but there's just nothing else to say. It's enough. So this is just amazing. Somebody would say we're from God. It's just amazing to me. If you've ever studied epistemology and know anything about Western epistemology and just what a ridiculous statement this is. Kant denied the knowledge of God. And Kant said that even if God spoke to a person, the person couldn't be sure it was from God. And Kantian thought is at the foundation of the Western humanities and beyond. And if you went to university, you got schooled in Kantian thinking. For example, the idea in our society that religion is all subjective and has nothing to do with truth. That's just Kant. And Christ killed idealism. Kant is just a version of Plato. And the doctrine of creation in the Bible kills Hellenistic idealism. Because it says ultimate reality is not an ideal or an idea. Ultimate reality is creation and the God who stands behind it and sanctifies it and makes it into more than just creation. Fallen as it is, it's redeemable. And it's going to redound to God's glory in the age to come because he's going to change it all. He's going to redo it. And it's going on right now. And God really has entered into this dimension of things and he has taken on flesh. He's become part of the space, time, and matter that Kant said transcendence cannot knowably inhabit. He denied knowledge of the transcendent. For all practical purposes, the transcendent doesn't exist. And that's at the core of modern theology, of liberal theology, which basically bans the knowledge of the transcendent God. They talk about God, but it's all human. It's all imminent categories. If God exists, he's sort of in the pores and between the seams of sociology. He's at work in us. Not because we believe in Christ, but because we don't believe in a transcendent God and we're all there is. All there is is the cosmos. All there is is people. All there is is society. All there is is culture. That's all we got. We don't have any words from God. That would privilege somebody besides us. I'm not going to listen to some other person telling me they're from God. I've got my own rights, my own epistemological responsibility. I'm just kind of speaking in the spirit of a Kantian here. And a few of you are shaking your heads, yes, like we've known you were crazy all week. And this is just confirming it. No, this is the, you could say, the Copernican Revolution that happens to a modern person. And not only to a modern person, a lot of traditional societies privilege things that are diabolical. They privilege ancestry. They privilege tribal tradition. They privilege, I mean, Hinduism. They don't believe something like this. Buddhists don't believe something like this. Islam believes something like this, except there's only one person who speaks for God, and it's Muhammad. And then everybody who enforces him now. You know, there are a lot of Muhammad enforcers in the world, you know, the people that kill because of their belief that Muhammad's the only prophet. At least that might be why they say they do it. And in many cases it is. So from all quarters of the world, when we take seriously this one line, we are from God. That is, Jesus is the son of God and those whom he has appointed. That right there is enough to destroy the cosmos. To destroy the world order that's bent in its opposition against God. So that's one reason it takes us so long to get through 1 John. Because almost in every clause, you know, you find contained some insight that when you think about it, it just brings to the fore the supremacy of God. In the inevitability that God is, there's a day of reckoning for all the things that we face around us and on all the things that John is warning about. You have conquered those things. Because Christ has come and done what he's done and we're representing him and whoever knows God hears us. And there's so much to hear. And for our redemption, we need to hear the truth. And for our ministries, we have to be aware of the error. Number one, it affects us too. But number two, we're rescuing people from their bondage to it. And helping them get deprogrammed from it if they're parishioners in our church.