Alistair Beggs and Sinclair B. Ferguson: Name Above All Names. Wheaton: Crossways, 2013.

 

This is a devotional tract, not a scholarly tome, one animated by the desire “to think long and lovingly about the Lord Jesus.” It is, however, far from lacking in scholarship, as the authors criticize Christian churches today for preferring “action” or good works to “meditation.” The authors invite Christians to rebalance pious works with thoughtful faith, urging them to begin by considering the several names by which Jesus is called in the Bible, “begin[ning] in Genesis and end[ing] in Revelation.”  The Apostle Paul tells his fellow Christians at Philippi “to live is Christ.” Who is the Christ in whom Christians seek to live? His names provide the best means of approach to His regime.

The first name of, the first title for, Jesus is “the Seed of Woman.” Beginning, then, in the Book of Genesis: God tells the Serpent that He will put enmity between the Serpent and the woman, between the Serpent’s “seed” or offspring and hers. In arguing with the Serpent, Eve “assessed the significance” of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil “through her eyes rather than through her ears”; that is, “instead of listening to what God said about it, she thought about it only in terms of what she could see on it,” and concluded that its fruit looked good. “She had not grasped the divine principle: believers ‘see’ with their ears, not with their eyes, by listening to God’s Word” and obeying it. God punishes both Serpent and Woman, allowing the Serpent to crush the heel of the woman’s seed and ordaining that the seed of the Woman will crush the head of the Serpent. The seed of the Woman will turn out to be Jesus, harrower of the Serpent’s regime and eventual destroyer of it. The Bible “is a library of books that traces an ages-long cosmic conflict between the two ‘seeds.'” One might add that the conflict may be ‘cosmic’ insofar as it takes place in the cosmos created by God but it is political insofar as it addresses the question, ‘Who rules?’

The final book of the Bible reveals the end of this conflict. “John sees a great red dragon that devours humanity. This is the ‘ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world.'” But the dragon is itself defeated and Christ comes to rule a new Heaven and a new Earth—a new cosmos under a renewed divine regime. Prior to this, readers see similar conflicts, such as that between Cain and Abel, wherein “jealousy and murder result as the seed of the Serpent (Cain) seeks to destroy the seed of the woman (Abel),” or in the conflict of what the authors carelessly call “the Jews” and Jesus, leading to His crucifixion. (This is a dangerous formulation and an inaccurate one, inasmuch as it was rather the rabbis of Jerusalem who called for Jesus’ death on the basis of alleged blasphemy, not Jews generally—some of whom were the first followers of Jesus, Himself born of a Jewish woman.) 

The authors show the link between the Genesis story and the life of Jesus by calling attention to the fact that Jesus never addresses his mother as ‘Mother.’ At the wedding in Cana he calls her “Woman,” and near the end of His life “he says to her, “Woman, behold, your son!” “Eve” means “Woman”; Jesus is identifying her as a ‘type’ of Eve, Himself as the seed Who will crush the head of the Serpent. “Jesus, the last Adam, had to conquer in the context of the chaos the first Adam’s sin had brought into the world,” including the “onslaught of demonic activity in the Nazareth synagogue” and a series of temptations offered by Satan himself. “The reason there is so much demon possession in the time period recorded by the Gospels is not—as is sometimes assumed—that demon possession was commonplace then,” that it was a feature of a particular ‘historical epoch.’ “In fact it was not. Rather, the land then was demon-invaded because the Savior was marching to the victory promised in Genesis 3:15,” and “all hell was let loose in order to withstand him.” This new Adam differed from the old Adam in one crucial respect: “Where Adam conceded victory to Satan, Jesus resisted him. Total obedience to his Father marked the whole course of his life.” Adam disobeyed when it would have been easy to obey; Jesus obeyed an infinitely harder command, the command to go to the Cross.

More, “when the second Man was brought to the Calvary tree, he faced a reversed mirror image of the first man’s temptation: “an accursed tree” with “repulsive fruit.” “Jesus had NOT to want to eat the fruit of the tree with his whole being, and yet be willing to eat.” In so willing and doing, He “unmasked Satan’s lie” to Eve, that the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was harmless, even good. Satan had insinuated that God did not want the good for His creatures, that He wanted to deny them a good thing, despising not loving His creatures. On the contrary, God so loved His world and especially the human beings He made and gave life to in that world that he “sent his only Son to die on the cross in our place and for our sins.” “It is the cross alone that ultimately proves the love of God to us—not the providential circumstances of our lives.” Human beings are not clever rats in a maze seeking a reward at the end; they do seek rewards, not only on earth but in Heaven, but they receive the highest rewards through obedient love for and gratitude to God, rewards they cannot obtain through their own natural capacities.

All of this was God’s response to the regime change or revolution Satan and his rhetoric effected. “God wanted Adam to exercise his dominion by expanding the garden,” to “‘garden’ the whole earth, for the glory of the heavenly Father.” In failing, Adam, “created to make the dust fruitful…himself became part of the dust.” Upon His resurrection, Mary Magdalene sees him but doesn’t recognize him, “supposing him to be the gardener.” She mistook his identity but not his purpose. “He is the second man, the last Adam, who is now beginning to restore the garden,” re-founding God’s just regime on earth. “In the closing scenes of the Book of Revelation, John saw the new earth coming down from heaven. What did it look like? A garden in which the tree of life stands.”

As the author of the Book of Revelation, John stands as the Bible’s final prophet. He is not the Bible’s preeminent prophet, however. “Prophet” is another of Jesus’ names or titles, numbering among the three modes in which Jesus is “anointed” or granted full authority by God the Father (the other modes are priest and king). The necessity of anointing Jesus as prophet consists, first, in the fact that “our fallen condition requires us to have Jesus as our prophet,” given the intellectual and spiritual confusion resulting from sin. “Man’s heart and mind are now skewed in the wrong direction,” leading to the ignorance rebuked in the famous phrase, “The fool says in his heart, there is no God.” Absent revelation from ‘outside’ himself, man “turn[s] in upon himself,” producing idols out of his own imagination to worship, or by worshipping nature in the form of pantheism.  “This is why we need a prophet who is able to dethrone our ignorance.” To dispel some of man’s “internal darkness,” man receives enlightenment in the form of revelation by God’s chosen prophets, among whom Jesus is preeminent; that is, “it is only by God’s grace that [man] discovers eventually that there is no intellectual road to God,” by which the authors mean a natural road. Proofs of God’s existence demonstrate probabilities; they are not apodictic. For truthful certainty, only the intervention of the Holy Spirit will produce the needed noēsis.

The necessity of anointing Jesus as prophet also entails the need to recognize Him as such. “Jesus is not only the revealer,” as other prophets are; “he is the revelation.” None of the other prophets claimed to be the culmination of all previous prophets. All claimed to show the way, the truth, and the light but none claimed to be the way, the truth, and the light. This being so, how shall Jesus’ office both as prophet and prophecy be realized? The authors cite John Calvin: “He received anointing,” Calvin writes, “not only for himself that he might carry out the office of teaching, but for his whole body that the power of the Spirit might be present in the continued preaching of the gospel.” God’s “body” is now His Church or assembly of the faithful. “There is a vast difference between simply conveying information to people, which can be cold and ineffectual, and true preaching and witness”—a “personal, passionate plea” as the Christian scholar John Murray termed it. The passion of Christian speech has nothing to do with libido dominandi or any other human desire; it is rather compassion or agapic love, “genuine empathy.” 

The letter to the Hebrews explains Jesus’ office as “the Great High Priest.” Christian Hebrews had been disinherited and excommunicated. “No longer did they catch sight of the high priest—the only man who, once a year, on the Day of Atonement, was allowed to enter the sacred room [in the Temple] to seek God’s forgiveness for the people.” Nor could they receive the priest’s blessing, when he emerged from the inner sanctum to assure them of God’s forgiveness. The letter to the Hebrews argues that Christian Hebrews still have a High Priest, greater than any other because He has delivered Christians both from their bondage to Satan and from the wrath of God. Like a priest, He offered an acceptable sacrifice to God, but in this case the sacrifice was Himself, and forgiveness is comprehensive, as “for believers death is no longer the wages of sin but has become the entrance into everlasting life.” Only now, now that “we are delivered from that great fear—the fear of death and judgment—will other fears become trivial.” God’s just anger with His human creatures makes death a thing to be feared because it is the prelude to God’s just punishment for human sin. “By nature”—that is, by human nature as corrupted by sin—we “are under his wrath” and “deserve to be.” Only with Jesus’ self-sacrifice—whereby “the Lord Jesus, as our high priest, went into the holy place, the very presence of the holy God, and there experienced the awful unleashing of divine judgment”—can human beings be spared the just wrath of the Father. Jesus’ agony on the Cross wasn’t only physically torturous but spiritually so. Only “when the resurrected Jesus revealed himself to his disciples” could he address them with the word Shalom, proclaiming, “Now at last you may have peace with God.” 

This freed Jesus for the unfinished portion of His priestly work, living in spirit among His people, His assembly, continuing to minister to them as their priest. “You don’t come to believe in Jesus Christ until you have heard him. Until then he is simply a character in a book.” As a Christian, you listen to the Word of God in the sense not only of understanding it but of heeding it. With his Word, Jesus “begins a dialogue with the soul” of the faithful. In doing so, he educates His people in the root meaning of the word, leading His people closer to God the Father.

Jesus’ third and final office is King of kings, Lord of lords. The Kingdom of God “is a central theme in his message.” God’s regime is a monarchy—a good monarchy or kingship, not a bad monarchy or tyranny, to put it in Aristotle’s terms. While a tyrant rules his subjects for his own ‘good,’ at least as he (mis)conceives it, a king rules his subjects for the sake of their own good, rightly understood. Like all regimes, the Kingdom of God has not only a personal, ruling element but a way of life—what the authors, appropriating contemporary lingo, call a “lifestyle.” To learn about their Ruler and the way of life He prescribes for his consenting subjects, a Christian should begin with wonder, asking himself what he can learn from the portion of the Word he is reading. Only then will he open his mind to the Spirit of God, conveyed by God’s Word, deepening his consent to Jesus’ legitimate, just, kingly rule.

Some of the kings who ruled the Israelites were true kings. Some were tyrants. “But none of the kings fulfill[ed] their expectations; none of them [was] able to bring real salvation.” Hence the Israelites’ yearning for a Messiah. When Jesus entered Jerusalem, “the jurisdictions of Annas and Caiphas the Jewish high priests, and of the Jewish ruling council, and of Pontius Pilate the governor who represented all the might of the Roman Empire,” Jesus did not deny the accusation that He claimed to be King of the Jews. Working in tandem, the high priests and the governor supposed that they had disproved this claim, bringing his ministry to “an ignominious end.” They failed to understand that ignominy in their eyes might be triumph in the eyes of God. His kingship did not put an end to their rule in Jerusalem; it overthrew the far greater tyranny of Satan, Prince of the World, which the Father had allowed as an instrument of punishment for all human sinners—that is, all human beings. In the words of the letter to the Colossians, Jesus “is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth,” including all rulers and their dominions. Moreover, “he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” “The universe was made by Him, is providentially sustained by Him and is utterly dependent on Him.” This is what such writers as Dante mean to say when they describe agapic love as the bond of the universe. It is why Enlightenment philosophes took Newton’s elucidation of the force of gravity to refute Scripture, although Newton, a firm Christian, thought no such thing. 

To say, then, that Jesus is Lord isn’t to make “a statement about my attitude to Jesus; it is a statement about who Jesus is.” The Apostle Paul calls him the Kurios, which is the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew Tetragrammaton, YHVH. And “since Jesus is Lord and God, King and Savior, this impacts all of life,” leaving human beings with “no right to develop convictions or practice a lifestyle contrary to my King’s words,” inventing “new views of marriage” or “reengineer[ing] human sexuality.” Human beings are entitled to rule nature, but only on the terms set down by the ruling Creator of nature. 

Such offices as prophet, priest, and king bring out Jesus’ authority over human beings and indeed all of creation. But God is also a Son, indeed “the Son of Man,” and even a suffering Servant. Jesus rules but also serves. How is this possible?

The authors begin their explanation of the title, Son of Man, with the Book of Daniel, where the prophet says “there came one like a son of man: and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him,” then given the one kingdom that shall not be destroyed. In the Gospels, the phrase “Son of Man” is used “fifty or so” times, and only by Jesus.

There are three elements in Daniel’s prophecy. First, there is “a prophecy of the coming reign of God” following a final war between the Kingdom of God and “the powers of darkness.” “The kingdom of God will overwhelm all other kingdoms” and “endure forevermore.” Second, Daniel prophesies “the coming judgment of evil.” Third, “given this background in Daniel 7, there is more to Jesus’ use of the title ‘Son of Man’ than a simple stress on his humanity in distinction from his deity.” The authors observe that this title appears most often in the Book of Ezekial, “in the context of God personally addressing the prophet.” His sonship reflects his subordination. But he isn’t just any subordinate; “he is a faithful man, a real man,” as distinguished from any man called a “son of destruction.” To destroy typically implies insubordination, contradiction of the maker’s design. With respect to Jesus, “the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing.” To be a Son of Man, then, “means to be made in God’s image and to fulfill the divine destiny that would lead to a world ordered and completed as God’s garden, extending to the ends of the earth.”

Jesus refers to Himself as the Son of Man in three ways: as the founder of the Kingdom of God; as a sufferer; and as reconqueror of the earth, reestablishing His Kingdom. As founder, He undergoes baptism, indicating that he joins in “fellowship with sinners” in order to redeem them as subjects of the Kingdom; as founder, He undergoes Satan’s temptation to rule the world without suffering crucifixion, becoming the first man to reject one of Satan’s offers, in contrast to Adam; as founder, He proclaimed His Kingdom, calling His people to repentance prior to their entry into that regime; as founder, He showed his ruling power by performing miracles, signs of “the final regeneration and resurrection of the cosmos; and finally, as founder, He teaches His people the way of life that they will undertake as subjects of his regime. As He takes these founding actions, He consistently shows interest in the consent of His people to His rule, his reputation among them, asking Peter, “What are people saying about the Son of Man?”

To become the Founder by the Father’s authority, the Son of Man must suffer as if He were a sinner. As the prophet Isaiah says of the Messiah, before he is exalted he must endure torture, his face “marred beyond human semblance” (Isaiah 52:14). As Jesus “is covered in our sin, God no longer sees his own reflection in his Son.” To “repair” human sin, the authors write, Jesus “needs to experience this terrible sense of disintegration—to be treated as sin, to bear the curse, to become ‘a worm, and not a man’ in order to bring about a new integration and a new humanity.” Jesus was innocent of the charge of blasphemy brought against Him by the Sanhedrin, innocent of the charge of treason brought against Him by the Romans. “What is the underlying meaning of all this? It is very simple. The crimes are not his.” Human beings are the ones who “have blasphemed against God by making ourselves the center of our world and the lord of our own life. We have committed treason against God’s rightful authority by refusing his will.” Jesus took the punishment for us.

As the Son of Man, Jesus will reconquer the earth and bring His founding to completion. Having proclaimed the new regime, having suffered for the sake of His subjects, Jesus “has been exalted at the right hand of God and has asked his Father to fulfill his promise.” As Son of man, Jesus “will take the kingdom he has purchased.” “Incarnate in our humanity, he is our representative, mediator, substitute, savior, and king. He leads us to God’s throne in worship.”

Despite the Gospel emphasis on the humanity, and especially the bodily form of Jesus, it “contains no physical description of Jesus.” The portrait of Him at Gethsemane instead reveals His inner life, “the depths of his humanity in a way we otherwise would never see.” He “expresses himself in ‘loud cries and tears,'”; or, as Thomas More famously remarked, in the whole account of his life He wept several times but never laughed even once, at any time. The description of Jesus as the Man of Sorrows not of laughter points to His task of what theologians (including the authors) call his “substitutionary atonement.” Without understanding that, we will make “the New Testament’s teaching of Christ” “entirely incomprehensible,” at best “a tragedy of misguided heroism.”

“Somehow in the vastness of the economy of God in eternity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit entered into a covenant” whereby “the Father would plan salvation, the Son would come to procure it, and the Spirit would be sent to supply it.” Merely to descend from Heaven and live on earth with spiritually deformed human beings was a substantial sacrifice. But knowing what He had come to do, “Jesus [was] almost beside himself with horror.” At the Cross, “the symbolism of his water baptism at Jordan into his people’s sins [would be] fulfilled in the reality of his baptism in blood at Calvary.” If He had not asked the Father to spare Him this torture, “he would have been less than truly human.” Who has not experienced punishment meted out when he has done nothing to deserve it? Jesus, innocent not only of the crimes of which He was accused but of all sin, must taste “the Father’s wrath falling on his holy soul.” Human parents tell children whom they have punished mistakenly, ‘That’s for all the times you disobeyed and got away with it.’ As Son of Man and of God, Jesus never disobeyed at all, and His Father knows it. Nevertheless, both Son and Father go ahead, for the sake of all their other children.

The authors emphasize this character of Jesus as the sorrowing Son of Man because the Church or assembly inclines to waver “between diminishing the divinity of Jesus and diminishing his humanity.” Since the Enlightenment, “liberalism has diminished Christ’s divinity, and orthodoxy, partly in reaction, has run the risk of diminishing his humanity.” Speaking to the orthodox, they urge that “in our insistence that Jesus is Lord, that he is the divine king—which we unreservedly affirm—we must never fall into the error of having a less than human, or more than human, Christ.” On the contrary, “he is a real man in this real garden among real friends who fail him just when he is facing this real onslaught.” He is about to sacrifice himself for the sake of human beings, but in doing so He is utterly deserted by men; the only one to minister to him is an angel “commissioned from heaven”—a being for whose sake He is not suffering. “It was partly in the light of this intense passion of the Savior that Martin Luther developed his deep concern about the state of the church in his day. It had become materially strong and was awash with its own sense of power, glory, and triumphalism. It had what Luther called a theologia gloriae—a theology of glory, its own glory. What it needed was a theologia crucis—a theology of the cross.” The feel-good Church of today, in the West, amounts to a democratized and lax version of the monarchic theologia gloriae Luther deplored. “Our smiles of superficial triumph repel rather than attract those who are wrestlers” with human troubles. Yes, Christians triumph, “but the prize is waiting on the other side of suffering.” “We all want a Jesus who does all the suffering, don’t we?”

This is why Jesus’ final title is the Lamb of God. In the Book of Revelation, John sees that the Lion of Judah “conquered by becoming the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” The fierce, wrathful God triumphs by making himself into a gentle, self-sacrificing God, shedding His own blood not the blood of others—becoming a ‘Lamb King’ not a ‘Lion King.’ Whereas Jacob had prophesied that “a lion-like figure” would “come through the line of his son Judah” and reign over Israel, the Book of Exodus records a deliverance that “came through the sacrificed Passover Lamb.” The Lamb of God has seven horns and seven eyes: “The horns speak of power and majesty; the eyes remind us that Christ has sent his Holy Spirit into the World, with all of his omniscience, perfect understanding, and wonderful discernment. And the fact that there are seven horns, eyes, and spirits simply expresses numerically the idea of fullness and perfection.” The symbolic numerology continues in Revelation 10, where readers learn that 144,000 will be saved. “There are 144,000 because that is the square of twelve”—twelve symbolizes the twelve tribes of Israel—multiplied by the cube of ten. “It is a kind of ‘perfect number’ of enormous proportions,” signifying that God’s subjects in His Kingdom encompass what John calls “a great multitude that no one could number.” As with all regimes, God’s Kingdom has a purpose: “They shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore,” and “God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”  

 

 

 

John the Apostle: The First Epistle

 

This letter exemplifies the Apostle’s pastoral care. He writes out of a concern about false teachers, offering not a formal rebuttal of their doctrines but nonetheless intending to protect Christians from their teachings—encouraging them to live according to orthodoxy, right opinion. John evidently writes to no specific church (as Paul usually does); this is rather a circular letter, one intended to be copied and ‘sent around’ to a number of Christian congregations. 

Commentators often write that the specific unorthodox, wrong opinion that concerns John is Docetism, which claimed that Jesus only appeared to have taken physical shape, that he remained a pure spirit who gave his witnesses the illusion of bodily life. This would make sense of John’s initial insistence on the physical reality of Jesus: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life” (I.i)—that is, God incarnate, whom we heard, saw, felt—this is the Person John invokes. “From the beginning” refers to the opening words of John’s Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God and the Word was with God.” With Jesus Christ, that Word has “become flesh,” living among the Apostles; “the life was manifested” (I.ii).

Because the Word of life has been manifested in the living Person of Jesus, “we have seen it, and bear witness, and show unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father” (I.ii). “We,” John, serve as the living witness of the living Word, that which has existed from the beginning, the Archē, the origin that gave form to the heavens and the earth. It is significant that John associates two of the three ways in which he has known God with his own physical organs, but not the first way. He saw Jesus with his eyes; he felt Jesus with his hands. He does not mention that he heard Jesus with his ears, only that he heard Him. He not only heard God but he believed the Word that he spoke, which is an operation of the mind. It is the mind, which apprehends and believes that Word; the mind is more important than any sense perception. ‘Seeing is believing’ but what you see isn’t always what you get; you may be looking at a mirage. What you feel is solid, physically real, but it (pace Machiavelli) it tells you nothing. Only words can convey the Word.

This leads to a problem, however. What of the believers who never heard, saw, or felt God? How are they to believe?

“That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that you also may have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ (I.iii.).” What I, John, have witnessed, I now witness, declare, testify to you. As Jesus passed the Word to me, so I pass it on to you. I do so in order that you may have fellowship with me, be like-minded, alike in spirit, as I had fellowship with Him, Father and Son. “And these things write we unto you, that your joy may be full” (I.iv.). His written words bring assurance of the spoken Word, itself written down by the apostles who heard Him. The telos or purpose of writing these words expressing that Word is to bring your joy to fulfillment, your joy in salvation.

What is the substance of that Word? And why should it bring you joy—that is, what is He saving you from? “This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (I.v). The message of the Word transmitted now to you, in writing, comes first in a metaphor, in “light,” as indeed in the beginning there was not only the Word of God, as the Gospel of John says, but the light, as the Book of Genesis says. “If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth” (I.vi). Without light you cannot see where you are walking, cannot follow the true way which the light illuminates for us. As the culmination of the acts of creation which began with the words, “Let there be light,” the good of the human being, which alone brings him joy, must follow that way of life, that regime of God, or else it will stumble and fall into misery. False words, lies, darken the mind; they contradict the words which convey the Word, which rightly guides our actions. “If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin” (I.vii). The life-blood of God is the only kind of blood that cleanses; all other kinds of blood leave a stain. But a sacrifice aims at cleansing, and that was the effect of the sacrifice Jesus made on the Cross, for those who attend to His words and walk in the way they map out for human beings, for their good and their joy in attaining it.

However, “if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (I.viii). If our own words, our own testimony before one another and before God, claims sinlessness for ourselves, we lack self-knowledge. The truth is not in us. But sin is. By so speaking, remaining in the sin we refuse to admit in words, we sever the bonds of true fellowship with God and with each other. We don’t ‘enlighten’ ourselves, when it comes to our sins; only God can do that, although we can turn our backs on Him and walk some other way, exile ourselves from His regime. The truth that the light illuminates is that when we deny that we sin we ‘have’ sin, whether we say we do or not. We testify against ourselves. Speech is the bond of all communities. Speak falsely and you break the bond, dissolve the community, by ruining the trust truthful words establish.

Nevertheless, “if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (I.ix). That is, if we do have the truth in us, if the light that is God does illuminate our minds and hearts, and if we confess, speak out, use words to speak the truth about ourselves, to say that we have sins, God will cleanse us of them. He does this because, first of all, His actions never contradict His words; he is faithful to His covenants with His people, including his guarantee to save those souls who put their trust in Him with respect to their salvation. He is also just, a fair-dealer, not one to betray the trust souls who trust Him. When it comes to wrong acts, justice can inflict punishment but it can also seek the rehabilitation of the criminal. God is just in both ways. His fidelity and His justice lead him to forgive our sins; not only has He said He would do so, He knows us to be incapable of cleansing ourselves from our sins, needing His grace, His sacrifice, on our behalf to make us worthy of fellowship with Himself and with one another. Is there a difference between “sins,” which we have, and “unrighteousness,” which can be removed? There might be, in the sense that ever-sinful human beings might still follow the light along the right way, within the regime, the Kingdom, of God. It will be the written words of God, and the fellowship with other members of God’s regime—here, one of the Apostles—that we may become more mindful of that way, winning our consent to return to it when we walk off its boundaries. 

If, rather, “we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us” (I.x). By denying that we commit sins we accuse God, pretending that He violates His own commandment against false testimony. This reverses the right relationship of judge and those judged. We then commit injustice; we then commit infidelity to God, to one another, and to ourselves as individuals. We have lost our self-knowledge as creatures of God, rightly ruled by Him by the light that is His Word, as conveyed by His words and those Spirit-guided writers who have set it down for us to read, long after their bodies, and Jesus’ body, departed from the earth, where we can no longer hear, see, our touch them.

John calls his addressees “my little children” (II.i), recalling the theme of transmitting the Word, this time not through space but through time. He is their father inasmuch as he brings the words of the Son who followed His Father to the apostles. In commanding them “that ye sin not” (II.i), John exercises paternal authority, paternal wisdom, and paternal care. Knowing that human beings will commit sins despite the divine commands, he reminds them of divine grace; “if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous” (II.i), a defense attorney in the divine court. As members of God’s regime, before its court, the unrighteous have a righteous defender, one on whom we can rely, one who won’t betray us even when we unrighteously betray the Father.

More than an advocate, Jesus Christ is “the propitiation for our sins”—the appeaser of the Father’s anger at us, the unrighteous. He took the penalty of God’s wrath upon Himself for us, an act by which the Father showed us His own graciousness, having sent His Son for that purpose. And not for the sins of the members of the Father’s regime, the sons in the Father’s family, did Jesus become the Christ; he did this “also for the sins of the whole world” (II.ii). All human beings are invited to become members of God’s regime and family.

“And hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments” (II.iii). That is, we have self-knowledge but also knowledge of our fellows as members of God’s regime, His family, by obeying our acknowledged Ruler, by ‘being ruled’ in accordance with His commands. We know Him by knowing His mind, His stated intentions; to be laws, commands must not only be thought but promulgated. “He who saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him” (II.iv); saying must not only match doing, doing must match saying. “But whoso keepeth his word, in him verily”—truly and verifiably—is “the love of God perfected: hereby know we that we are in him” (II.v). 

As the saying goes, What’s love got to do with it? God issued His laws out of love, as a parent does in commanding a child ‘for your own good.’ God’s love is perfected when those He loves do what is best for them. In obeying God’s commands we prove not to Him (who knows us already) but to ourselves (prone to self-deception at least as much as deception of others) that we are “in” Him; even more firmly and intimately than as consenting subjects of a regime or obedient children in a family, we are members of His body. And like members of a body, we move with that body. “He that saith he abideth in him ought himself also so to walk, even as he walked” (II.vi). Jesus walked in the way of His Father, the way of life set down by the Father’s commands, including His laws, part of the righteous order of His regime, His family. 

John then addresses not “little children” but “brethren”—fellow Christians in their status as more nearly equal to himself, not as persons obligated to obey commands but as persons receiving commands. “I write no new commandment unto you,” he assures them, “but an old commandment which ye had from the beginning,” “the word which ye have heard from the beginning” (II.vii). God commands have always prohibited sinful acts. In this sense, we are under no new regime, with no new purpose, issuing no new commands. The Son faithfully obeys the laws of the Father, and so commands us to do.

However, it is also “a new commandment I write you, which thing is true in him and in you: because the darkness is past, and the true light now shineth” (II.viii). The Word is new in the sense of a renewal. Israel has been the light unto the nations—outside them, beckoning them. Now, the regime and family of God have been extended to the nations; it is now in them, insofar as some among ‘the Gentiles’ have consented to God’s rule and therefore to the true ‘way.’ Love rules from ‘inside’.

As the ‘spirit’ of God’s lawful commands, agapic love animates not only the relationship of God and man but the relationships among men themselves. “He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in darkness until now. He that loveth his brother abideth in the light, and there is none occasion of stumbling in him. But he that hateth his brother is in darkness, and walketh in darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because that darkness hath blinded his eyes.” (II.ix-xi). Light permits knowledge; agapic love enable the mind to direct our ‘steps’ rightly along the ‘way’ of God’s regime, whereas hatred of fellow citizens blocks the light, prevents the hater from knowing not only the way but the destination the way leads, God’s purpose in setting down His way.

John now discloses his own purpose in writing this letter. Insofar as he writes to them as “little children,” he wants them to know that their “sins are forgiven you for his name’s sake”—one’s “name” being one’s reputation, and Jesus’ name being the Christ, the Savior (II.xii). The Father forgives your sins, your violations of the laws of His regime, in faithfully upholding the purpose for which He sent the Son, a purpose announced in his “name,” his title within the Father’s regime, his reputation. Rulers depend upon their reputation, and the Father upholds his son’s reputation just as Jesus upheld the reputation of His Father. As “little children” they have “known the Father” (II.xiv), understood his intention in sending His Son to take the acts that have enabled the Father to forgive them, thanks especially to the Son’s words on the Cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

John writes to his correspondents as “fathers” or his equals insofar as they too have “known [God] from the beginning” (II.xiii). Some commentators identify the “little children” as new believers, particularly new Christians, and the “fathers” as the mature believers and/or perhaps as Jewish believers as distinct from Gentile converts.

Finally, he writes to “young men,” who have “overcome the wicked one,” the ‘Satan’ or ‘enemy’ of God, His regime, His commands (II.xiv). Young men have strength. Insofar as they have shown strength in overcoming the one who would subvert God’s rule, the strength to resist sin, John’s addressees deserve their own good reputation, good standing in the regime of righteousness founded by God.

In their strength or ‘youth’ the citizens need encouragement and continued right direction. “Love not the world,” John tells them, “neither the things that are in the world” (II.xv). “If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (II.xv). Why not? Because “all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world” (II.xvi). Lust is love misdirected, love directed away from the Father, the Creator of the world, toward the world He created. It is love unworthy of a human being, whom God made capable—alone among the creatures of the earth—of loving the true Ruler of the world. “The world passeth away; and the lust thereof; but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever” (II.xvii). The Creator-God is eternal, unlike the world He created. Love of the eternal, being godly or God-given, is also eternal, unlike the love of flesh, love of the visible, love that comes through the eyes and not through the ears. Although the apostles saw and touched Jesus, they loved Him as the Word of God, loved Him insofar as He told them things lastingly meaningful to their ‘hearts’—that is, their minds and their sentiments as perceivers of the invisible, the things that can only be heard, not seen or touched like bodies which, for all their beauty, are dumb.

Addressing his correspondents again as “little children”—as knowers of God, as sinning members of His regime who understand nonetheless that their sins are forgiven—John reminds them of something else “ye have heard,” something about the wicked one, the enemy, whom they have overcome in their capacity as “young men.” “Ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now there are many antichrists,” many enemies of God and His regime (II.xviii). By this, “we know that it is the last time” (II.xviii). 

The antichrists “went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us” (II.xix.). That is, although they behaved like ‘missionaries,’ the antichrists had the opposite intention: subtracting from instead of adding to God’s family or regime. They are ‘expatriates’ and, worse than that traitors, pretended citizens and brethren who were never truly such. They did not partake of the spirit of God’s ecclesia or assembly. Whereas Jesus made manifest the Word of God, the antichrists make manifest the wrong word, the wrong teaching, the anti-Christian word. To put it in terms of the American regime, it is as if a legal citizen of the United States were to renounce the principles of the Declaration of Independence, maintaining that all men are not created equal with respect to their unalienable rights.

By contrast, the remaining true Christians “have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things” (II.xx). “Unction” means authorization; specifically, it refers to the anointing of the new monarch’s head with an oil that symbolically confers supreme authority. For Christians, this authorization by the Holy Spirit confers knowledge of “all things,” meaning all things needed for salvation from the many other ‘regimes’ that enforce anti-Christian principles. Therefore, “I have not written unto you because you know not the truth, but because you know it, and that no lie is of the truth” (II.xxi). If Jesus embodies the Logos and if the Holy Spirit enters into the souls of Christians, conveying that Logos and anointing them with its authority, then logos or reason, thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction, rules out lies, any ‘word’ that contradicts the truth of God.

“Who is a liar but he that denies that Jesus is the Christ?” (II.xxii). This is the premise of John’s logical argument, founded on the Logos and on logos, that he who denies the Christhood of Jesus denies the truth, contradicts the truth. “He is antichrist”—against the true claim that Jesus is the Christ—who “denies the Father and the Son” (II.xxiii). And therefore “whoever denies the Son, the same has not the Father: but he that acknowledges the Son has the Father” (II.xxiii). Father and Son constitute a family; logically, there can be no father without a son (or daughter) and no son (or daughter) without a father. To deny the Son-hood, the Christhood, of Jesus is to deny his true title to rule, effectively denying the Father whose intention it was to send His Son to embody His supremely authoritative commands, His Word, to human beings.

The Holy Spirit, conveying the Word or commands of God to those who became Christians, following the Word that Jesus as Christ embodied “abides” within the souls of Christians. John commands Christians to keep “that which you have heard from the beginning,” God’s Word, the founding declaration of God’s family and regime, within themselves, within their minds and hearts (II.xxiv). Let that authoritative and authorizing Word “remain in you”; if you do, “you also shall continue in the Son, and in the Father” (II.xxiv). You will have within yourselves the Holy Spirit, the mind and heart, of God as Father, God as Son.

Why should I want the Holy Spirit within me? Because God’s commands include His covenant with us, and that covenant entails “the promise he has promised us, even eternal life” (II.xxv). All other covenants are ‘worldly,’ temporary. They can be tempting to ‘sign on’ to, but, John says, “I have written unto you concerning [these things] that seduce you,” deceive you (II.xxvi)—perhaps more precisely, things that would deceive you if you had not the Holy Spirit to remind you of the truth. “The anointing which you have received of Him abides in you, and you need not that any man teach you: but as the same anointing teaches you of all things, and is truth, and is no lie, and even as it has taught you, you shall abide in Him” (II.xxvii). The authority-granting anointing also granted the knowledge that authorizes right rule, since it was an anointing by the Holy Spirit, who knows all that is needful for salvation, for eternal life in the best regime.

Since the Holy Spirit ‘enrolls’ members of God’s family and regime invisibly, how are we to know who is a brother, who is a fellow-citizen? Partly by the words they speak but mostly by their actions: “If you know that [God] is righteous, you know that every one that does righteousness is born of him” (II.29).

In the third chapter of his letter John discusses more precisely the character of that enrollment. We know God initially through hearing His Word. With this, we begin also to “behold”—to see—the “manner of love the Father has bestowed upon us,” the way of that love (III.i). Seeing is the use of the light of knowledge to know the way. We behold the way, the kind of love the Father’s love is, the love that makes us “sons of God” (III.i). This love is not erotic/desirous but agapic/graceful, an expression not of God’s need (He obviously has none) but of His care, His benevolence. He ‘adopts’ us into His family. As a consequence, “the world knows us not because it knew Him not” (III.i). The world did not recognize Jesus as the Christ, and therefore does not know Christians as sons of God, members of the ruling family.

“Beloved, now we are the sons of God, and it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He is” (III.ii). In this “last” time Jesus will appear, or reappear, this time “as He is”—knowable not only in hearing but in sight (III.ii). His transformation will cause a transformation in Christians, too; we shall, like God, “be what we shall be,” beholders of Christ as He is. A new sight, a new form of knowledge, transforms the seer, the knower. This will enable us to become more like Him, to increase our ‘family resemblance’ to Him. In the meantime, “Every man that has this hope in Him purifies himself, even as He is pure” (III.iii). 

A Christian purifies himself, just as any obedient son or law-abiding citizen makes himself ‘more like’ the other members of the family or the regime by steadily acting according to the rules of the family or regime. Steady acting brings habituation, ‘habits of mind and of heart’ that accord with the prescribed way of life. “Whosoever commits sin transgresses also the law; for in sin is the transgressing of the laws” (III.iv). ”Commitment’ here means ‘habituation,’ steadiness of action. Such a person habituates himself to the way, the path, of some other family, some other regime. 

All human beings sin, just as all members of families and countries disobey the commands of the rulers, including their rules or laws. This doesn’t mean that they are no longer members of the family or the country but it does mean something must be done about them if the family or country is to survive. Christians “know that He was manifested to take away our sins, and in Him there is no sin” (III.v). By that visible act, the sinless Ruler demonstrated Himself ready to redeem or forgive the sins of the ruled, forgive transgressions of the commands He issued to them. He will not forgive the transgressions of those who have renounced His regime altogether. 

Insofar as Christians “abide in Him” they “sin not”; those who sin—sin habitually—show by their actions that they “have not seen Him, neither known Him” (III.vi). In the Gospel of John XV.iv Jesus tells His disciples, “Abide in Me and I will abide in you.” Abiding means staying; “in” suggests a very close, intimate bond between Ruler and ruled. It is a condition that points from being a family member by adoption toward being a family member by birth, being ‘born again.” 

Hence John commands, “Little children, let no man deceive you: he that does righteousness is righteous, even as He is righteous” (III.vii). The deceiver will induce you to go in the wrong direction, along the wrong path or way. “He that commits sin is of the devil; for the devil sinneth from the beginning” (III.viii); the devil rebelled against God’s regime and has sought to add to the body of those ruled by him. Because this happened, God “manifested” His Son, “that he might destroy the works of the devil,” redeem those caught in the devil’s regime. Here the metaphor of birth appears: “Whosoever is born of God does not commit sin; for [God’s] seed remains in him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of God”; there is no sin in his ‘DNA,’ as it were (III.ix). The human being who abides in God and in whom God abides may think or behave in contradiction to this nature but it is still his nature. This is the strongest family bond of all, analogous to biological inheritance in being ineradicable so long as the human being exists. According to God’s covenant, that life will be eternal.

Visually perceptible acts of righteousness express invisible agapic love. “For this was the message that you heard from the beginning, that we should love one another” (III.xi) as children of God and therefore brothers in Christ. Cain remains the example of brother-murder. As one who abided “in the wicked one,” Cain murdered Abel because “his own works were evil, and his brother’s righteous” (III.xii). Brothers in blood, they were enemies in spirit, members of rival spiritual families. It is then no wonder that the world hates Christians, just as Cain hated Abel. “Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer; and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him,” having opposed the regime of eternal life, just as the member of God’s family wants life for his brother. Far from killing his brother, the Christian will imitate Christ, “who laid down his life for us” (III.xvi). Those who shut themselves off from agapic love for a brother in need cannot be said to have “the love of God” abiding, dwelling, in him (III.xvii).

The physical reality of Jesus and of His physical act of self-sacrifice are, then, decisive for knowledge of Him and of Christian conduct. “My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue, but in deed and in truth” (III.xviii). That is how “we know we are of the truth, and shall assure our hearts before Him” (III.xix). Shifting back to the regime metaphor from the family metaphor, John envisions a court in which God judges us. “For if [or “whenever”] our heart condemns us” God “is greater than our heart, and knows all things” (III.xx). By overruling our just apparently self-condemnation, God exercises His superior knowledge not only of ourselves but of the spiritual order within which we exist. Given the agapic love manifested in this judicial act, we are rightly humbled and accepting of God’s rule. Further, “if our heart condemns us not, then we have confidence toward God. And whatsoever we ask, we receive of Him, because we keep His commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in his sight.” (III.xxi-xxii). As Christians, our hearts have the Holy Spirit abiding in them, aiding our self-knowledge and self-judgment. If what we intend and do pleases God, the Holy Spirit will so advise us. Sight being the way to perceive actions, God will see the right things we do, consistent with the promptings of His Spirit and the Word of His Son.

What does God want us to do? “This is His commandment,” first, “that we should believe on the name of His Son Jesus Christ” and, second, that we should “love one another” (III.xxiii). “And he that keeps His commandments dwells in Him, and He in him. And hereby we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit which he has given us.” (III.xxiv). This teaching may be compared and contrasted with Aristotle’s definition of politics, which he finds first of all in the relationship of a husband and a wife. Husbands and wives rule and are ruled, in turn. This reciprocity in ruling is the model of the political life, in contrast with kingship (rule for the good of the ruled) and tyranny (rule for the good of the ruler). John understands God’s rule as a kingship, rule for the good of the ruled, but it is a kingship whose bond is remarkably ‘tight’ or intimate, inasmuch as God’s subject abide in Him, and He in them; more, God’s agapic rule secures the good of the ruled by knowing the defects, the sinfulness, of the ruled and by forgiving them, so long as they abide in Him, within His regime, unlike the ‘apostates’ or ‘traitors’ who reject God’s regime and enroll in the regime of the devil.

At the beginning of the fourth section of his letter, John addresses a problem crucial to his argument, the problem of how to distinguish Christians from “antichrists.” After all, those who separate themselves from God’s assembly often claim that the assembly has gone wrong, that they are the true Church. We are leaving, come with us. “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world” (IV.1). But how are we to test persons animated by a spirit that is invisible and, even if it were visible, hidden within their minds and hearts? The Signers of the American Declaration of Independence acknowledged that only God can judge “the rectitude of our intentions,” yet in some proximate sense human beings must ‘judge’ or assess the motives of those we encounter.

Here, John writes, is how to “know…the Spirit of God” (IV.2). First, “every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God,” while those who deny this are animated by “the spirit of antichrist,” which “even now already is…in the world” (IV.3). You will know them by their words. Knowing them, you overcome them, you are not deceived by them, because Spirit of God is “greater” than “he that is in the world” (IV.4). The more you hear from them, they easier they are to recognize. “They are of the world: therefore speak they of the world, and the world hears them” (IV.5). The world wants to hear about itself, about its concerns, and the antichrists want the world to hear them. Christians, however “are of God: he that knows God hears us; he that is not of God hears not us” (IV.6). We can distinguish “the spirit of truth” from “the spirit of error” not only by the substance of the words we hear but by their effect, by noticing who it is that listens to what we say and who it is that listens to what they say.

Beyond words, Christians can tell fellow Christians from antichrists by observing actions. “Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God; and every one that loves is born and God, and knows God” (IV.7). Conversely, “he that loves not knows not God; for God is love” (IV.8). To know God is to know that He is love (which is not to say that love is God). A child shares the nature of his father; Christians are children of God; Christians share (some) of the nature of God (in modern terms, they will have love in their ‘DNA’). Such love is manifest to the Christian by looking within himself but, when considering others, into whose souls we cannot see, we see love or the lack of love in actions. This supreme example of this is God Himself, into whose mind and heart no one can see, but whose love “toward us” was “manifested,” made visible, “because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him” (IV.9). “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (IV.10). What kind of God do those who renounce the Church uphold?

Logical arguments concerning practice or action typically contain ‘if/then’ clauses. If x, then y: y follows logically, necessarily, from x; there is no contradiction. “Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another” (IV.11). Since “no man has seen God at any time” insofar has he abides or dwells within us, our acts of love toward one another give evidence of that abiding, that indwelling (IV.12). Further “his love is perfected in us” (IV.12); that is, it reaches its telos, its purpose and culmination. Loving one another, and doing so increasingly, manifests by action the intentions of Christians, against which the intentions of antichrists can be measured. This is how we “know” and not merely guess that “we dwell in Him, and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit” (IV.13). 

Although we cannot see the work of God’s Spirit within anyone other than ourselves as individuals, but can only listen for it in their words and look for it in their intentions as these manifest themselves in loving actions, John himself has in fact “seen and do[es] testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the world” (IV.14), as stated in v. 9. In the face of that world, which doesn’t know it wants to be saved and consequently does not listen to Christians, “whosoever shall confess”—say out loud and act in a manner that follows logically from what we say—that “Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him, and he in God” (IV.15). This saying expresses what is inside us, that “we have known and believed the love that God has to us,” that the God who is love dwells or abides in us (IV.16). 

It is that abiding or indwelling that perfects “our love,” so that “we may have boldness in the day of judgment; because as He is, so are we in this world” (IV.17). Human nature has its telos, the perfection of its natural powers of body and soul, and especially of its reason, which distinguishes our nature from that of other living species or ‘kinds’. Adam could be ‘tasked’ with naming the other species in Eden precisely because he could recognize differences among those ‘kinds,’ through his capacity to think according to the principle of non-contradiction, of reason. This capacity doesn’t save us from sinning, however, and therefore does not save us from the consequences of sin. For that, Jesus Christ’s sacrifice and the Holy Spirit’s indwelling alone suffice. Only through that sacrifice and that Spirit can we achieve our true telos, which is living with God under His regime in his ‘state’ or kingdom, which is Heaven.

Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. We rightly fear God for the punishments He can inflict upon us if we depart from His regime, His way. But fear is not the end, the purpose, the telos, the perfection of wisdom. “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear: because fear has torment. He that fears is not made perfect in love.” (IV.18). We did not initiate this love; He did. Christians have only responded to that love, with ours, but ‘only’ is nonetheless all-important when it comes to salvation from the punishments we would otherwise rightly fear. 

Returning then to the problem of testing, “If a man say, I love God, and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he that loves not his brother whom he has seen how can he love God whom he has not seen?” (IV.20). The test of genuine fidelity to God, the visible and audible test, is love of brother, love of neighbor. That is the part of agapic love Christians can witness in others, as distinct from the part of agapic love they can witness in themselves and witness or confess to others. Loving one’s brother—the audible, visible, touchable human being in front of me—is the command that follows, and logically follows from, the command to love God. “And this commandment have we from Him, that he who loves God love his brother also” (IV.21). God speaks to us in order to say what we must do, and God’s words themselves are also actions, as seen in the act of Creation, speaking the world into existence, and the act of Crucifixion, saving that part of the world that sees and listens to Jesus Christ from the ruin inherent in the regime of God’s enemy and that enemy’s allies, the antichrists.

That is how can I can test others. How can I test myself? In that, I have a resource unavailable when I consider others: introspection. “Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God: and every one that loveth him that begat loveth him also that is begotten by him” (V.1); if you love the Father, you love His Son. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that “the great writers of antiquity,” being “part of an aristocracy of masters,” had difficulty conceiving of human equality. “It was necessary that Jesus Christ come to earth to make it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal.” [1] Christianity makes the idea of human beings’ equality before God ‘thinkable.’

The consequence of this is to extend our love of the Son of God to all the sons of God. “By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and keep his commandments” (V.ii). Christians believe Jesus is the Christ, born of God; that belief is the foundation of their knowledge of our love of neighbor, a love commanded (as we know from His words) by Jesus as the Christ and the Son of God. The command we know, obeying because we believe the One who commanded it is who and what He said He is, is “not grievous” or heavy (V.3); we therefore have no excuse to disobey it. We find obedience to the command to be a light burden because whoever “is born of God overcometh the world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, our faith” (V.4). The world, unloving and unfaithful, finds obedience to Jesus’ commands to love God and neighbor to be unbearable; strengthened by Holy Spirit, Christians do not find it so. “Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?” (V.5). 

Jesus overcame the world for whomever believes in his Savior as the Son of God. “This is he that came by water and blood, Jesus Christ; not by water only, but by water and blood” (V.6). Commentators dispute the meaning of “water,” many associating it with baptism and recalling that water and blood both flowed from Jesus side when a centurion pierced it with a spear as He hung on the Cross. Jesus also “came” by water when He walked on it, and he proved His mastery over water by calming the storm on the Sea of Galilee. These images recall water as the condition of the cosmos before God ordered it—fluid, chaotic. If blood symbolizes life, the giving of blood sacrificing life, water may mean the setting-apart of the one who is baptized with it, citizenship in God’s kingdom as holy or separate from the kingdoms of this world; insofar as water also symbolizes chaos, rule over it symbolizes the triumph of the Son of God, and through His grace the children of His household and kingdom, over the worldly kingdoms. John the Baptist was entitled to perform the ceremony of separation but only the Christ can both separate His children from the world and sacrifice His life in order to save their lives.

Baptism and sacrifice are acts. How can we know what they signify? Only by the mind, the capacity for understanding both deeds and words. But human minds can err. What guarantees the truth of their interpretation? A  superior mind: “It is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is truth” (V.6). A body can baptize; a body can bleed; only a mind can witness. “There are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one” (V.7). The Word is Jesus, the Logos made flesh. In a court of law, it is better to have three witnesses to testify to the truth of actions than it is to have only one. The Trinity, the three ‘persons’ or personae of God, are three in one: God as Father/Lawgiver; God as Son/Savior (from the stern verdict based upon the Law); God as Holy “Ghost” or Spirit, as the One who enters the minds of Christians and guides them respecting the substance of their belief. The Spirit is the link between heaven and earth. “There are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one” (V.8). That is, baptism and sacrifice are outward evidences of Christian belief, whereas the Holy Spirit witnesses the minds of Christians, leading them to those right actions of separation from the world and sacrifice for the sake of ‘worldlings’ or subjects to the worldly regimes. In denying that Jesus came in the form of a physical body, Docetists could affirm baptism but denied the blood, the sacrifice, the Cross.

Other men will see what we do, hear what we say, but “if we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater” (V.9); indeed, “he that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself,” in the form of the Holy Spirit (V.10). To deny that witness is to make God “a liar,” inasmuch as God gave us his Word, the “record” of “his Son” (V.10). That record clearly states that God’s Son’s sacrifice of His life on earth gave us “eternal life” so far as we trust in Him at his word—Himself embodying as well as speaking that Word, a Word of God the Father and from God the Father. “He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life” (V.12). 

In conclusion, John tells his correspondents that he has written to them as fellow Christians to reaffirm the knowledge of their salvation, knowledge founded on their belief “the name of the Son of God” (V.13). The name of the Son of God is Jesus, meaning ‘deliverer’ or ‘rescuer.’ To believe in His name is to believe that He is what His name indicates that He is. “This is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask any thing according to his will, he heareth us” (V.14). Hearing us, He will heed our requests, but especially our requests to “deliver us from evil,” as the Psalmist writes. For example, “If any man see his brother,” his fellow Christian, “sin a sin which is not unto death, he [the petitioning Christian] shall ask, and he [Jesus, the Christ] shall give him life” (V.16). Not so, the one who commits “a sin unto death: I do not say that he [the petitioning Christian] shall pray for it” (V.16]. If “all unrighteousness is sin,” what is the specific form of unrighteousness that is a sin unto death, a deadly sin? (V.16). There are, famously, seven deadly sins, but all who commit them may be redeemed. It may be that the sin unto death simply means a sin that a sinning brother Christian continues to commit until death; or John might be saying, even more simply, that prayers to redeem a sinner will not avail after his death. 

Or is the sin unto death idolatry, disbelief in God? John lists three things Christians know, based on our belief in Jesus as Son of God and as the Christ. “We know that whosoever is born of God sinneth not” at least insofar as he remains cognizant of the water and the blood of his rescuer; the “wicked one,” Satan, “toucheth him not,” cannot claim him for his regime of ‘the world, the flesh, and the devil’ (V.18). We also “know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness” (V.19). In actions, then, and also in ‘family’ or in ‘regime’ Christians are distinct from and opposed to the ‘family’ or ‘regime’ of Satan. They are safe, ‘saved,’ because Jesus overcame, conquered ‘the world’ by the water and the blood of the Cross. Finally, “we know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we may know him that is true, and we are in him that is true, in his Son Jesus Christ” (V.20). This third thing Christians know is itself threefold: we know the Messiah, the Rescuer has come; we know He has given us “an understanding”—not only a set of facts but the meaning of those facts—and we are “in him,” within His Spirit, a spirit who is true in the sense of being real and true in the sense of being trustworthy. “This is the true God, and eternal life” (V.20). Therefore, “little children, keep yourself from idols,” from the untrue—gods who are false and untrustworthy, agents of the evil one whose name means ‘enemy.’ 

 

Note

1. Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America. II.i.3.

 

 

William V. Frame: The Dialogue of Faith and Reason: The Speeches and Papers of William V. Frame. Minneapolis: Lutheran University Press, 2006.

 

Note: William V. Frame was my academic adviser during my time at Kenyon College, 1969-1973. He taught comparative politics and introduced me to the study of Charles de Gaulle. He eventually chaired the Kenyon Political Science Department before going on to a career in corporate banking. These two paths served him well when he became president of Augsburg College, a Lutheran liberal arts college from 1997 to 2006. His book consists of a carefully arranged sequence of (mostly) speeches to audiences at the College, reflections on the character of Christian liberal education in contemporary America.

 

Frame situates his talks carefully within the College he governed as its chief executive officer. “Each was intended to draw into view a defining aspect of the college. It was this intention that led me back time and again to the foundings of the college, and then forward to contemplation of its modern mission”— and, it might be added, ‘above’ to its Christian character. With respect to the founding principles of the College’s regime, “during the nine years of my tenure, I became increasingly fascinated with the Reformation itself and the two giants who formed its traditions in Theology and Education—Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon. The Reformation, he learned, was “modern but alternative to the Enlightenment; Christian but calling us into the world in service; rejecting works righteousness but discovering in unwarranted grace the motive power of our good works; faith-based but intellectually demanding and respectful of human reason.” Such “has been Augsburg’s great gift to me”—most immediately, Augsburg College, more remotely but decisively, Augsburg, Prussia, where Melanchthon wrote the Augsburg Confession in 1530, a document later integrated into the Peace of Augsburg, “the first formal truce in the dispute between the [Roman Catholic] Church and the Protestants.”

He introduces his book with a speech given near the beginning of his presidency, at the College’s convocation ceremony in September 1997. On that occasion he pointed to the distinctive character of the place: “We have chosen—you and I—the one college in this part of the world”—he means Minneapolis, and he is almost unquestionably right—that “is dedicated to the provision of an education that is both practical and profound; that simultaneously supplies knowledge of the world and self-knowledge; that seeks liberation of the soul from cant of all kinds, both ancient and modern, and cultivates the capacity for obedience to the enduring principles revealed by both reason and faith; that silences our noisy prattle so that we may hear our calling, and returns us the new and literate voice of reflection so that our vocations—all of which will be pursued under the ascendant influence of urban, global and technological forces—are not only gifts to ourselves but serviceable to others and to God as well.” That distinctive character derives from the conjunction of two things: the founding of the College by “people self-consciously free of moral guidance by public opinion or governmental edict who wanted nevertheless to live rightly”; and the founding of the United States of America “by people anxious to give greater—not lesser—sway to the moral and ethical requirements of various faiths” precisely by establishing what Abraham Lincoln called “a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty than any of which the history of former times tells us.” That is, Augsburg College could be founded and perpetuated within the American regime because that regime afforded political liberty, along with the political means of defending it, to any set of people—in this case, a set of Lutherans from Norway—who consented to rule and to be ruled under the United States Constitution, which instantiated in civil form the laws of Nature and of nature’s God, understood to consist of the unalienable natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Without the institutions of the Roman Catholic Church, what would take its place? Luther said, “The fine liberal arts invented and brought to light by learned and outstanding people—even when those people were heathen are serviceable and useful to people in this life.” By “serviceable” Luther mean not ‘pre-professional’ and surely not something conducive to “self-expression or personal success,” but vocational in the Christian sense, attending the ‘calling’ of God in the midst of the world and following it throughout life. “The capacity for reverence is the bedrock of our honor of God and of our respect for human excellence.” “Only a college that puts faith into the crucible with reason and cultivates the capacity for reverence as the foundation stone of humility, can effectively provide the setting in which free men and women can fill the vacuum left by the withdrawal or ejection of officially authorized moral regimen—a vacuum too often filled in our time by the various progeny of nihilism and value-relativism—with a voluntary embrace of the good.”

In Part One, Frame gets right into the heart of the fundamental question facing any educator in a Christian liberal arts college. Do “the elements of Faith” in his college’s foundations “allow adequate room for Reason” and, complementarily, do “the disciplines of reason demanded by this mission” tolerate faith? Although “I have not and never will succeed,” “I would like to draw every member of the faculty away from partisan commitment either to faith or to reason and toward acknowledgment that the presence of each enhances the reliability of the other.” As Luther and the American Founders both acknowledged, reason and faith differ but they intersect. Luther called them the Kingdom of the Left and the Kingdom of the Right, neither meaningful without the other; the American Founders called them the laws of nature’s God, that is, laws stated in God’s revealed Word but also discoverable by means of human reason—for example, the unalienable rights upheld in the Declaration of Independence. To clarify this, Frame remarks the ‘Socratic turn’. The ’empiricists’ and ‘realists’ of Socrates’ Athens held, with Thrasymachus, that justice is the will of the stronger. They took their bearings from ‘natural philosophy,’ which had discovered a cosmos consisting of matter in motion. In such a cosmos, insofar as beings in it can speak, power is indeed the ultimate reality and ‘justice’ is what the most powerful say it is. Yet one of those powers, the powers of speech, leads the mind that exercises it beyond the empirical, toward the realm of ideas. The existence of varying opinions among speakers brings their opinions into conflict, inasmuch as those opinions contradict one another. In that collision of opposites, that dialectic, the ‘weaker’ argument—the one not propounded by the physically stronger—may overthrow the ‘stronger’ argument. 

At the same time, Platonic dialogues show Socrates and his interlocutors at times reaching an impasse. There is often a “point at which speech reaches its limit and can go no farther.” “It is at this point that the instructed student can look up and just for a moment glance at the formal notion of beauty or at the formal notion of justice.” This moment of noēsis or insight amounts to little more than a glance, and should therefore implant due modesty in the one who glimpses it. At the same time, that “glimpse leaves an ineradicable mark on the soul, and the possessor of that soul, down through the ages, will burn and reach for confirmation of the truth which it senses beneath the articulate level of knowing.” There may be times, as Luther would be the first to insist, that the Spirit of God amplifies and corrects what dialectical reasoning reckons, and this is where pagans differ from Christians. But the Spirit of God, too, speaks, conveys Logos, respects the principle of non-contradiction which is the core of rational thought. No one can believe a self-contradictory speech, once he perceives the self-contradiction, because such a speech has no meaning in the first place. The Apostle Paul “is responsible for the conclusion that you can’t get faith from reason,” that “faith is a gift, not an achievement.” But that doesn’t make faith logically incoherent, somehow absolving it from the need to meet the criterion of rational truth. In “describ[ing] the Gospel as ‘foolishness’ from the point of view of Reason,” Paul means to say that you can’t reason your way to “the Good News of the Cross,” not that reason is foolishness in the eyes of God. Reason rather needs to understand its limits, as it should when it proceeds dialectically not dogmatically. 

From his early childhood on an Appalachian farm to adolescence in a small town, to college (where he “led the fraternity chorus, had my own dance band,” and drove a cool car, Frame stumbled into graduate school, where “I encountered for the first time a form of learning that illuminated life,” the life he’d been living thoughtlessly. “I read a Platonic dialogue line by line with a small group of friends—voluntarily, no credit.” He then discovered philosophy as the love of wisdom, an inquiry into “the business of living: Who around us is living the best life? What distinguishes the good life from its alternatives? What is the nature of the noble and the beautiful, and why should we embrace these instead of such attractive alternatives as the powerful, the advantageous, or the pleasant?” He found that “the whole starting point of that great classical inquiry was an act of faith—a conviction, confirmed time and again by the testimony of thoughtful, open-minded, decent people but without demonstrable ‘facts’ or ‘hard’ data—that the universe, nature, made sense.” It was “composed by means of principles which people could grasp, and that those principles were implicit in ideas and ‘values’ as well as material.” What Christianity adds to this is the teaching of Revelation, of the God-given, ‘by-grace’ glimpses of the Person who created nature granted to human beings by that Person, through that Revelation. What Martin Luther “taught me” was that “faith is a form of knowing; that each of us relies on a conviction about the moral structure of life that cannot be vindicated by the facts and data that modern academe in its flight from conclusive recommendation of moral principles, or particular ways of life, depends upon. That Christian faith, as I learned it from Martin Luther, freed me from living rightly at the behest of duty” by seeing that the grace of a loving God absolves us from fulfilling the counsels of perfection that are true but humanly unattainable.

But what about those who hide not behind moral relativism but behind a moral absolutism that insists on fulfillment in this world, indeed, and very ambitiously, by the whole world? “Each student comes into the college with a whole raft of opinions about the admirable and the objectionable. At the very least, we must ask them to answer a fundamental question: Where does this bunch of opinions come from?” For the most part, they come not from Plato’s Socrates, Aristotle, or Cicero—from the ‘ancients.’ They come from the ‘moderns’ (even when those moderns call themselves ‘post-moderns’). For Machiavelli and Bacon, logic is less a matter of speech, less what Frame calls a “bridge-builder” between the human mind and the nature of which it is a part, as a tool for controlling nature. “‘We are going to know the truth about nature,’ Bacon seems to say, ‘not be communicating with it but by “vexing” it. “We shall poke it with a stick and watch it react.'” The modern mind in principle alienates itself from nature, makes itself foreign from it. “Ultimately, alienation is a phenomenon inside the soul of an individual. As a college in the city, we have a challenge in that we are inviting our students into the midst of modern distraction. If we don’t run this college, so as to break the tyranny of that distraction and open up other realms of thought, we are remiss in our obligations as a college.” Accordingly, “we have declared the city the new field for our mission activity, replacing Madagascar and China and Japan.” The near should replace the far, with “joint and collaborative work” not “directed by a central bureaucracy.”

Within that uncivil, because modern, city, civility can be made to stand as a Christian virtue. “There are those who believe that our religion is a ‘private’ matter, and that it has nothing to do with politics or economics—except to teach us, perhaps, that the two elements of this world that are truly corrupting—position and wealth—are the hallmarks of politics and economics, respectively.” Indeed, “many of see the act of voting as the key political act, just as we see ‘belief’ as they key element in our religious lives,” as “private in the secretive sense,” nobody’s business but our own. “But we Lutherans are called into the world in service”; Lutherans “have been given a little sliver of the Cross,” a burden, an obligation. To discharge that obligation will require the Christian to disagree with, to contradict, many regnant opinions. “Whoever reaches for a universal ipso facto reaches beyond the political and instantly comes into tension with it,” as Socrates knew before he tried and illustrated thereafter. The language of civility” enables one to do that, without destroying the indispensable bonds of fellowship among citizens in a country that recognizes speech and religion as free by their very nature, stunted if suppressed. “The speech of the city,” civility, “aims at agreement and ‘equity,’ not Truth or God or Perfect Justice. The participant in civil conversation is the citizens, not the philosopher, or the Preacher, or the true Believer.” “Plato knows that the order supplied by the city is the vital condition of the philosophic enterprise.” That enterprise must therefore proceed civilly. So it is with Christianity. “Christian Theology doesn’t appeal to the citizen but to the human being; not to the law but to the Gospel; not to peace but to the Peace that passes all understanding.” In making that appeal, the philosopher and the Christian both necessarily inflect the way of life of the city. The American Founders understood that they could do so in ways that would do well in the city, and for it, but only if neither withdrew from the city nor addressed it uncivilly, with contempt. Civility forms the basis for something even better than itself, friendship, “the human relationship that was crucial to the successful operation of the dialectic for both Socrates himself and for Plato’s Socrates,” along with the fellowship of the religious congregation. 

What then of the office-holder within a civil society—specifically, the vocation of a president governing a Lutheran liberal arts college?  “There may be other jobs like this, but I’ve never had one of them.” He sought guidance, therefore, not among his contemporaries but among his predecessors. “I, for one, will look for the future of this college among the principles of its founding,” he announced, upon assuming office in October 1997. Those principles “suppose that the human condition is superficially relieved—not fundamentally changed—by the modern techno-mastery of nature or the replacement of national by global societies.” That, it might be noted, will depend upon how far modern techno-mastery of nature goes toward altering human nature, and whether Lutheranism can thrive in “global societies” (whatever they may be) without the protection of the nation-state, upon which it depended for protection from the global (that is to say) Catholic society with which it was surrounded in the sixteenth century.

For his part, within the circumstances of modern life, Frame worked to strengthen citizenship within Augsburg College itself by “transform[ing] employees into engaged citizens of that polity” and by “deriv[ing] leadership authority entirely from understanding of and commitment to the institutional self-definition” set down by its founders. This definition of the principles of the College’s regime then must be adapted to the immediate and like future circumstances of the College, crystallized in the form of what amounts to a social contract among the several “constituents” of the College, including not only employees but students and alumni, accomplished in a series of committee meetings. Initially, the president can serve as the arbiter among the several constituencies, but crucial to his task is to “a structure of institutional governance,” a “home for lasting leadership.” By these acts he intended to re-connect the people within the College to its original founding principles, after some forty years of responding to such practical necessities as financial solvency and the renovation of its buildings. “Academic leadership is possible only when the academy is founded as a polity, leadership in it is understood as a form of statesmanship, and institutional rehabilitation as an undertaking of citizenship,” citizenship aiming at the Madisonian end of seeking the permanent and aggregate interests of the community rather than the interests of the several groups within it. “The effort to make a polity out of a college is inspired by the Aristotelian (and teleological) proposition that, “Whereas the comes into existence for the sake of mere life, it continues for the sake of the good life.”

A college requires collegiality, that is, “the key element of social capital—trust.” By this Frame did not mean ‘Trust me’ but ‘I trust you.’ “Here, senior administrators are empowered to act outside the presence and blessing of the CEO”; “they are, after all, employees of the [College] vision not of the CEO, and so they are encouraged to establish their own reputations as leaders. This they cannot do except through the freedom to design the strategies for their particular jurisdictions through which the vision is realized.” As for the president, he “must take them as peers, reserving only two exclusive responsibilities—to relieve them of duty if they dissipate social capital and to maintain the official version of the mission and its reconciliation” with the overall goals of the College in its immediate circumstances. In this way, the way of limited but institutionally well-designed and responsible government, Augsburg College could become a civil association “that Tocqueville thought could restrain the growing epidemic of individualism,” by which he meant the ‘privatization’ of human life under conditions of social egalitarianism. Whereas Luther “intended vocation, especially for the lay professions, to reconnect the individual with society through work,” a Lutheran college in the modern world, now in many respects severed from the “ancient civil ideas at the dawning of the modern moment,” must itself work harder to teach its students but also its faculty and administrators, some of those ideas.

Here Frame sharply departs from the principles of the American founding. Given the “three critical axioms” supplied by Luther—”that we can do nothing of value by ourselves,” that is, without God’s assistance; “that our redemption by Grace does not erase the limitations of our humanity and so in this world, even Christians remain in need of law and the thrall of reason”; and “that the service we give the world through work in gratitude for our redemption is corrective and is therefore offered in both love and hope for the world”—is, he asserts, “challenged” by “the idea of natural right.” In his estimation, natural right “strained the relationship between citizen and society” by holding that “the individual is shaped by certain natal forces that are prior to and beyond the salutary reach of civil society.” This “leaves us alienated and individualized.” Lutheran vocation specifically and Christian vocation generally “survived the victory of the natural right position largely because that victory was never consolidated,” thanks to the soberer ‘moderns’ (Rousseau, with his critique of Enlightenment rationalism, and the prudent institutionalism of such thinkers as Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and Madison) and also to “the political history of the United Kingdom,” guided as it has mostly been by blunt common sense. Since all of the thinkers he mentions considered political institutions as means of securing natural rights, Frame may mean that the Enlightenment conception of natural right tended toward French-Revolutionary-like dissolution of institutions, the ambition to re-make human societies even as modern science invites us to master nature, by poking it with a stick and watching it react. He may also mean that “nations and communities” “derive their legitimacy, their very identities, from history,” by which he means not the movements of Hegel’s Absolute Spirit but traditions, myths, legends. However this may be, Frame again inclines to overlook the political thing Luther never took for granted, and needed, the thing that stands between the civil association and “global societies”: the nation-state. Given his background in comparative politics, this may strike the reader as especially odd. 

He himself supplies a corrective for such mis-thinking by considering the tragic story of King Oedipus. “His hubris was the condition of both his intellectual brilliance (he won the presidency by solving the Riddle of the Sphinx) and his radical lack of self-knowing.” From this monitory example he takes three lessons. First, self-knowledge “is not private even though it is exclusive to its owner”; one really does need to listen to the voices in the Chorus, even if determined not to obey them slavishly. Second, self-knowledge, especially in the soul of a king or president, “is constituted in part of learning, and about things that are profoundly public, it is acquired social, not in isolation.” Finally, in its quest for self-knowledge, by that quest, the soul (as it were) emerges as it engages in its vocation. For example, “the vocational president” will need “to be both serious and careful about his or her use of the rhetorical arts; he or she must do as did Churchill—labor incessantly over his impromptu speeches.” A college president is a sort of miner. His work consists of digging into the college over which he presides—not only by learning its founding principles but by studying how it has applied, misapplied, or even at times forgotten or knowingly rejected those principles, failed to live up to them even as it has believed itself to have been surpassing them. Only then can he refine his own vocation.

What is this talk of vocation, this “life of service”? In Part Three Frame addresses this question, which he regards as “the greatest contribution of the Reformation,” offering “the Faithful a life fully engaged in civil society and yet theologically legitimate,” even as “the individualizing and anti-political propensities of the Enlightenment were beginning their ascendancy.” “Now that the a-social human habits rationalized by the Enlightenment have proven unsatisfying, the idea of vocation is coming into its own,” he hopes.

Frame found these habits not mitigated but reinforced during his first job in liberal education at Kenyon College, which he doesn’t name but accurately describes as “a ‘highly selective’ liberal arts college in the countryside of the Midwest,” “purposely set well away from the city” by its founder, the marvelously-named Philander Chase, Ohio’s Episcopal Bishop, in 1824. Although Kenyon “introduced me to two of the critical axioms of the teaching vocation: great teachers begin and remain as serious student—of themselves as well as of the world—and learning improves life,” these “did not jell with the outgoing and service-oriented aspects of vocation.” At Kenyon, “most of us on the faculty preferred theoretical or classroom wisdom far above experiential learning.” “we diagnosed in those days; we did not propound therapies to advance civility or improve society,” whereas a city (he next worked at the Newberry Library in Chicago), “compels its aficionados to construct a coherent interactive public life.” 

In his next career, at the Bank of Chicago, what Frame “wanted most was knowledge of how the commercial republic, so long the subject of my teaching and writing, actually worked.” To his surprise, he found corporate life “far more humane—more candid and encouraging,” than academia and also, “shockingly, full of better-educated people.” “The international division that I joined after banking boot camp had six or seven Ph.D.’s, not counting those in the country-risk and economic-analysis units. More musicians and artists were on my floor than at the entire college. Perhaps most surprising, there was more hunger for serious conversation than among my faculty colleagues.” And more trust. “Contrary to the academic arguments about the role of self-interest in financial transactions, I learned that the only deals that hold together and lead to new interchanges are mutually satisfactory ones. In the corporate world, a trusted colleagues’ word is better than a signature on a legal document.” Such as “the radically social character of [commercial]-corporate life,” where “no transaction was completed” unless “it could be publicly described as meeting the interest [each party to the transaction] held in common.” It was this experience in modern corporate life that prepared his mind for Lutheranism. Trust is a form of faith, and trust implies knowledge of the person trusted. Con artists will be ‘outed.’ His corporate experience “facilitated my fruitful contact with Luther” for Christianity as a faithful vocation, by “forc[ing] me to deny my original academic view that the private realm is the exclusive venue for personal growth.”

This helps to explain both the strength and the principal weakness in Frame’s analysis. Corporate life has spread itself throughout the world. Far more than socialism, which has repeatedly fallen back on nationalism when crises erupt, it has proved a vehicle for internationalism or ‘globalism.’ At the same time, corporate life is indeed very much like socialism, when seen within the corporate body itself. Its ‘foreign policy’ may be competitive/’capitalistic,’ but its ethos is socialist. It is therefore disappointing but understandable that Frame can write, “One of the needs of society in our time is help in transitioning from national and regional parameters to global ones.” Like many corporate capitalists, he envisions ‘one world’ ruled by—well, he doesn’t come out and say it, but—corporate capitalists. Nation-states will go away. Christian vocation will aim “at the needs, not the preferences, of the world,” eliciting “the whole range of our gifts.” It transpires that both Christians and corporate bankers know better what’s best for us than we do. In Christianity, Jesus understands knowledge in a particular way. His sheep hear his voice because “I know them, and they follow me.” Now, “the distinctive characteristic of a sheepfold is that each of the sheep who constitute it is known. They don’t know; they are known.” Divine knowledge of the sheep “forms the sheep into a Sheepfold,” into the ecclesia, the Church, God’s assembly or regime. This way of rule makes sense in a liberal arts college—its students still young, even if adults. And Christianity of course insists upon the consent of the governed; like the college admissions process, it’s a two-way street. It isn’t clear that corporate bosses will much concern themselves with that. Evidently willing to take this risk, perhaps hoping to mitigate it, Frame set Augsburg College firmly along the path of the ‘internationalists’ mantra, ‘Think globally, act locally,’ with Minneapolis as its locale. There he stood, and he would do not other—at least as long as his presidency would last. This was his vocation, and the vocation he set for his colleagues and students.

To understand the path of Christian vocation as it relates both to the liberal arts college and the world into which its graduates will venture, Frame points wisely and emphatically to Philip Melanchthon. Melanchthon will help in the task of “get[ting] hold of both the promise and problem of vocation.” As the newly-hired Professor of Greek at Wittenberg University in 1518, just after Luther posted his 95 Theses, Melanchthon taught many courses, including history, medicine political theory, rhetoric, “lov[ing] most of all to move among them at the gathering point, which he called Philosophy—the love of wisdom.” This included theology. His joy in learning and teaching, and his formidable capacity for both, finally earned him the title, Praeceptor of the Germans. His early book, Loci Communes, became “Lutherdom’s bestseller,” second only to Luther’s translation of the Bible into German.

Melanchthon “blamed the political and moral collapse of Europe, but also the waywardness of the Church, on the decline of the ancient learning.” The Church had misunderstood antiquity, making of it a form of logic-chopping, of sophistry. By reading ancients in the original languages, Melanchthon could “leap over the dark valley of Scholasticism and get directly into conversation with the ancients, and with Aristotle in particular.” The greatest among the ancients, he discovered, did not direct their energies toward verbal deceit; on the contrary, they exemplified “the highest pre-Christian form of vocation.” They suffered two defects. The lived “these model lives of service in the narrow, cohesive, self-sufficient communities which had been stricken by empire, and then by chaos,” namely, the ancient poleis. And they overlooked original sin, “accomplish[ing] their work by means of a high regard for the human potential that was unacceptable to Luther’s and Melanchthon’s notion of fallen humanity,” a regard caused by their “conviction that reason and virtue were natural allies.” In refusing to believe that, Machiavelli was right. Unlike Machiavelli, however, Melanchthon never rejected Christianity on the supposition that it is too unworldly to engage in civil life. He “set out to extract and isolate” the “vaccine” of civility “through scholarship and then infuse it into Christian society through the medium of his students.” “Without civility, vocation would flounder on the selfish propensities of fallen humanity.” Although this by no means diminishes the indispensable character of divine grace, love of one’s neighbor needs the supplement civility provides, simply because the work of the Holy Spirit within us “is regularly frustrated by our egocentrism and our individualism.” This “idea of vocation was the principal contribution of the Reformation to the capacity and willingness of the Christian to love the neighbor as the self,” and the idea “had to be made at home in civil society.” “This is true whether or not the particular civil society in question was overwhelmingly Christian.” Without the “forms and images of virtues,” Melanchthon wrote, “which we follow in all decisions and in our judgments on all matters,” without the “humanity” which “shows the way to live properly and as a citizen,” men “are not very different from beasts.” With Aristotle, Melanchthon affirmed that man is a political animal.  Political philosophy, he wrote, can teach “the precepts for civil life [that] are necessary” for peaceful life with one another in a political community. In Frame’s words, “neither Christ nor the Gospel provide these to us” (Machiavelli’s complaint), but that wasn’t His, or their, purpose. Christ “expounded something else, about the will of god and trust in God, which human reason could not understand.” Aristotle, and behind him Homer, pointed the way to something else, “the sociality that is the bedrock condition of civility.”

The central chapter of the book describes Melanchthonian civility as “the reconciliation of faith and learning.” Frame’s occasion for writing it was a speech describing the College’s projected Center for Faith and Learning, an institution whose mission it was “to establish a mutually advantageous relationship of faith and learning for application in every discipline in our curriculum and for infusion into our recruiting of students, solicitation of donors, and management of the extra and co-curricular life of the college,” a task which will require the “very development and cultivation of civility in the learning community itself and in the relationship of the college with its neighborhoods, its industry, and its global relations with Church and society.” Just as Melanchthon and Luther together created in the crucible from which the Reformation actually emerged a new political science”—one distinct from the new political science of Machiavelli and Bacon—and “a new theology which widened the availability of the Gospel as a blessing for human life on this side of the grave and for believers as well as strangers,” so too, one infers, the Center was intended to develop a still newer political science, and perhaps a new theology, designed crucially to inflect the emerging “global” society and the corporations likely to guide it. If this came to pass, would Lutheranism do a better job at influencing a world government than it did in influencing the Prussian, and eventually the German state? One can only pray that it would.

Under the Dark Ages and then Scholasticism, “the disciplined study of literature reduced the quality of Theology,” rather as (one infers) certain late-modern philosophers and ideologues have reduced the quality of theology in the past two centuries or so. The Luther-Melanchthon “reform of both church and education, took form in the heat of the moment—in their joint effort to save and restore the Church and to recover learning from the only civilization that had so far as they knew, properly cultivated Philosophy—the ancients, particularly the Greeks.” Especially (again) political philosophy: from the civic life of the ancients he took what he called the “first law” of any “governing assembly, whether in the state or in the church,” namely, “freedom for those who speak and patience for those who listen.” Melanchthon continued, “How our century is afflicted more than anything else by the fact that the mighty cannot hear free speech, and not even any thought of freedom.” This is where learning intersects with civic life, and with the civil life inside God’s assembly. “Learning is accomplished only in community, by way of what he called ‘disputation’—not in an isolated carrel in a library, but in the classroom and ultimately in the town square.” The “eloquent deliberation” Melanchthon esteemed in the ancients “adds coherence to community be deepening its knowledge of itself.”

Melanchthon of course sees the danger in such well-turned rhetoric as clearly as the philosophers he studied did. “The liberation of thoughtfulness, armed by high literacy and powerful rhetoric, opens the possibility that the greatest rhetor, rather than the wisest, will wind the day. This danger explains Melanchthon’s very heavy emphasis on moderation.” In his understanding, moderation is a virtue cultivated not only by careful moral habituation of the young but by the intellectual character of dialectics within a Christian framework. That is, if nature, “the essence of creation,” is “a work of mind,” the mind of God, and “therefore accessible to reason,” the capacity to make logical distinctions, then the practice of deliberation in an assembly and the dialectic employed therein must moderate, limit, the power of rhetorical flourishes. In the assembly you get to answer back, not just sit back. To take the most malign ‘German’ example, what Hitler told you was unanswerable, on pain of death. By contrast, “dialectics, and the collateral rhetorical skills on which it depended were, for Melanchthon, instruments designed to keep the ‘fallen’ human mind attentive to nature rather than itself, to keep the disputation focused on the truth rather than on a particular expression of it or on the reputation of the expresser, and to make of the truths so discovered additions to the coherent substance of the community, rather than the exclusive secrets of an elite”—this last phrase a jab at the ‘Straussian’ political scientists who were his colleagues at Kenyon. (He does, however, laud Strauss for his recovery of political philosophy, the philosophizing of Socrates as depicted in the Platonic dialogues and as practiced by Aristotle.)

In this, Luther remained Melanchthon’s beau ideal of a statesman. The Great Reformer, he wrote, “adorned and defended civic life as it has never been adorned and defended by anyone else’s writings.” Luther “both knew the state and accurately perceived the frame of mind and wishes of all those with whom he lived,” understanding the Christian Church itself as a polity, having “read most avidly ancient and recent ecclesiastical writings and all works of history, relating their examples to the present business with outstanding dexterity.” Contrary to Machiavelli’s complaint about Churchmen, Luther, “said Melanchthon in the funeral oration, did not allow his piety to blind him to human reality.” The result, as Frame puts it, was that “the University, in which Theology and Philosophy meet and mingle, is the training ground of the response to the call, which the reformers named as vocational life.” Machiavelli and the ancients agreed on one thing, that civil life could not be made “dependent on an active, regularly intervening God, and not to forces that were perfected in heaven or some place other than right here.” What Machiavelli rejected, and what the ancients didn’t know, what Luther did know, is that “two kingdoms are better than one.” 

Why? “What Luther and Melanchthon saw in the contemporary landscape of early sixteenth century Europe was a Church that had ascended from literally nothing to so mighty a position that it had absorbed political as well as religious authority” under the rulership of priests. Their majesty, mystery, and authority simultaneously denatured politics and corrupted religion by reserving political rule to an elite against which there could be no earthly appeal, no ‘back-talk’ or public deliberation, and by polluting the sacred, removing from it the innocence of doves and leaving it only with the prudence of serpents. In opposition to this, Luther and Melanchthon wanted to know what those who receive and keep faith in the Christian God “will do when we get the faith.” They urge that we “feel such gratitude for the unwarranted act of grace which has freed us from the embarrassment of our human limitations that we give up our lives to the service of our neighbor,” to “move forward in faith and into congregation, parish, party and polity.” In this way, both the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Man “hold sway, simultaneously, among us.” To argue, as Machiavelli does, that this shared rule fatally bifurcates the human soul, makes it incapable of surviving in this world, the Kingdom of Man, overlooks or despises the fundamental trust upon which all human regimes depend.

As Providence (or Fortuna?) have it, the state of Minnesota during Frame’s presidency at Augsburg “possessed one the nation’s highest levels of ‘social capital'” or trust. Minnesotans could and did ‘bond’ with one another as a society of “similar or similarly situated people,” presumably a middle-class population with no shortage of ethnic Norwegians. To thrive in an increasingly ‘globalized’ world, in which “the ethnic and socio-economic diversity” of the Minnesota population was set to “expand dramatically,” Minnesotans would also need to enhance their capacity for “bridging,” for “reach[ing] across the boundaries of age, gender and socio-economic status and cultural and religious identity, then to find a joint and public purpose that pulls us together for social action.” To aid in this, the College could admit “emigrés from central Africa,” who are “among the most highly educated representatives of their societies” and ones “quickly absorbed into their new world despite their cultural and religious diversity.” What is more, the College should aim at “reconcil[ing] diversity (understood to include age, experience, cognitive capabilities, gender, sexual orientation”—what might Luther and Melanchthon say to that?—along with “religion, culture, and ethnicity).” Perhaps most immediately, “we need to run this business as a college!” That is, since “the corporate and academic worlds in the United States presently stand in desperate need of each other but remain isolated by a profound mutual distrust,” Augsburg should lead the way in their reconciliation.

With respect to ‘diversity,’ academe’s much-valorized goal, forever receding, for about half a century now, “I regularly rejected the pluralist approach,” “whereby the community is literally constructed of the differences it includes.” As he learned from Plato, “the unity of a diverse community is created by its ‘one-ness’ rather than its diversity.” That is, “the diverse elements which originally constitute a society issue in a new kind of person, largely by means of a process of interaction with a founding vision or constitutional act,” as in the founding of the United States. (On the basis of natural right, it should be added, contra Frame’s earlier remarks at least as they might be interpreted.) This vision seeks to “narrow the existing gap at Augsburg” between the liberal arts and professional knowledge or ‘expertise,’ between “experiential and theoretic wisdom,” between knowledge gained through action and knowledge gained by observation, and between reason and faith, Athens and Jerusalem—all without denying the distinctions between the elements of those pairings. To bring discrete dimensions of human life closer together is neither to succumb to pluralism or moral relativism, the way of incoherence and ultimately of civil war, nor to mush them together in a Hegelian or Marxist synthesis, the way of modern tyranny or ‘totalitarianism.’

Neither Hegel nor Marx but Jeremiah serves as a better guide. “As part of his call to the Jews in exile to sop dreaming idly of a return to Jerusalem and start constructing a decent life for themselves among their captors, he forecasts a new Covenant.” Christians see that new Covenant in Jesus’ call “to close the gap that all laws suffer to one degree or another—the gap between behavioral and heartfelt compliance.” In so doing, He “liberated us from our sin” by means of His graceful offer of forgiveness. Our acceptance of that offer does not “extinguish our sin” (“if that were done, we would become gods ourselves, and leave behind our defining humanity”), does what Abraham Lincoln would later imitate in his 1838 Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield: maintain that law-abidingness finds indispensable support in the spirit of lawfulness against the “towering genius”/tyrant (Lincoln is likely thinking of Napoleon, then dead only 23 years). Just as Lincoln called that spirit, that “reverence for the laws,” the “political religion” of the American nation, so did Jesus demand that reverence for God’s laws, founded in reverence for God, animate the new polity, the new assembly or ‘church,’ the new regime consisting of reverent Jews and Gentiles alike. Does Lincoln “not illustrate by the clarity of his effort, the direction to which we are called by the Reformation?” A direction taken “in the name of a profound freedom accomplished not alone by the order sanctified by Washington and the Patriots of `76, but by that more complete freedom provided by the Gospel.” 

Both the Declaration of Independence according to the Spirit of `76 and the Gospels place equality into the forefront of human deliberation, of human politics. Tocqueville saw this clearly, recognizing the importance of both the Christian equality of human souls before God and the natural equality of human souls as members of the same species, not to be separated by racial or class distinctions that treated any person as subhuman. But neither for Jesus nor for the American Founders, Lincoln, or Tocqueville did equality mean similarity. Indeed, “to the degree that equality amounts to similarity it is not satisfying,” failing as it does to give play to human excellence. Augsburg College, “for example, doesn’t want to be or feel equal” in that sense; it intends “to be outstanding, and to be recognized as such in the world.” How else could it participate in any degree to guiding the world? “All of us have been given but one Christ. But each of us has been given that Christ!” Such equality “does not bring God to our side, but more precisely it brings Him to each of us,” freeing us “to do and be our best,” opening “for our individualism a way to do God’s work” in the Kingdom of Man, which after all belongs to Him as much as the Kingdom of Heaven. And to do that work “in an outstanding way.”

It is hard to resist the conclusion that William V. Frame did his work at Augsburg College in an outstanding way. His concessions to some elements of the regnant niaiseries of ‘diversity’ might well have been intended as politic accommodations carried to an impolitic extent. His eagerness to partner with international business corporations hoping to bring about some sort of ‘globalism’ or world government was likely ill-judged. But it is hard to doubt that his own governance of the College was anything but a blessing to it, an elevation and enrichment of it.