To Know the Spirit of Abiding Love: Part I

I have come upon what I believe may be a common problem for graduates of master’s programs: what do I do with my thesis? After countless hours of research and writing, I crafted a respectable piece of scriptural interpretation…then fell asleep reading through the final draft. Sure, there was some fatigue involved, but that wasn’t all – what I’d written was boring.

Of course, the topic isn’t boring in the slightest. My thesis was supposed to be about the most exciting, life-giving, feather-ruffling force in existence: the Holy Spirit. But while I was honing my text-based argument – and using that as an excuse not to write for this blog – I seem to have strayed from the joyful awe that ought to accompany theology.

Yet, we worship a God of second, seventh, and seventy-times-seventh chances. I feel compelled to give my little thesis, which was indeed the object of significant hope and care, another chance, so that it might participate in the true work of theology – repeating the good news of God’s grace to the world.

To that end, I plan to write a series of posts using bits of that thesis, which is entitled, “‘By This We Know’: A Pneumatology of Abiding Love in 1 John and the Farewell Discourse.”

As mentioned above, my thesis is about the Holy Spirit. More specifically, it is about what two chunks of the New Testament tell us about the Holy Spirit – namely, John 13-17 and the epistle 1 John. I really didn’t mean for about a quarter of it to be dedicated to recounting scholarly debates about the authorship of those passages, but that’s exactly what happened. It was hard to avoid, since much ink has been spilled over the relationship of the Gospel to the similarly named epistle, particularly when it comes to the Farewell Discourse (John 13-17, in which Jesus gives a final set of teachings to the disciples before his death.)

To get this bit out of the way, I’ll simply say that most scholars believe different people within the same community or school of thought wrote them – the Gospel first, then the epistle following in its footsteps. Many believe that multiple authors and editors shaped the Gospel, and a few hypothesize that one of those authors or editors wrote 1 John.

If you’ve read 1 John, you’ll know that it reflects some type of schism within the community to which the author is writing. The author rails against the ideas and behavior of the group that broke away (whom Raymond Brown terms “the secessionists” in his highly influential book on the topic). These secessionists seem to claim their own spiritual authority over the nascent structure of the early church.

Well, here’s where it gets interesting. Some scholars think that the secessionists are simply enthusiastic readers of the Gospel. They took the spirit language in John – particularly that of the Farewell Discourse! – and ran with it, even to the point of forsaking (or at least greatly reinterpreting) the key teachings of the church. It is now rather in vogue to suggest that 1 John is actually a toning down, a circumscription, a reining in of the poetry of the Paraclete we find in John’s Farewell Discourse.

I respectfully disagree.

Yes, 1 John is very interested in discerning what spirits are from the Lord. You would be too, if part of your community had broken away claiming authority from spirits. In fact, those of us who believe that we can feel callings from God should all be quite concerned with how to tell what’s tugging on our heartstrings, whether it be our own desires, the demands of the world, or the voice of the Spirit.

1 John provides a profound and practical guide by reminding us “what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life” (1:1). In a world of many motivations, the letter reminds us not to compromise the call to love each other and worship Emmanuel, God with us.

But these exhortations are not an attempt to limit the Spirit, nor even to limit the free-flowing beauty of the Farewell Discourse. I believe that this letter actually intensifies certain aspects of the Discourse’s teaching. It gathers these themes around its mentions of the Spirit, suggesting a Spirit-theology of abiding love.

But more on that later. For now, I can only say that I hope you’ll bear with me as I attempt to invite a little life back into the dry bones of my own academic prose. Perhaps it will remain dry. Perhaps, though, it will convince you that 1 John is not as stodgy as some purport, and that nothing can make the Gospel boring.

I was advised in my thesis-writing process by Dr. J. Ross Wagner at Duke Divinity School. I owe Dr. Wagner a great debt of gratitude. He has nothing to do, however, with the boringness of the thesis – those who know me will attest that no one could have stopped me from writing a boring thesis if they tried.