The letters of 1 and 2 John address the issue of what to do when leaders become heretical, 3 John addresses the problem of leaders who become bullies, and Jude teaches the church how to respond when leaders become immoral. Nick Crawley explores how we might interpret them and communicate their truth.
Tucked away at the end of the New Testament nestling in the shadow of the extraordinary visions of Revelation are four letters describing three challenges that the early church faced in the ‘sub-apostolic’ age – the period when the church’s leadership was passing from the apostles to their successors. In this article we shall look at the three Johannine letters.
Immediately we open and read the phrases of 1 John we encounter strange, rather unexpected, phraseology. Strong statements, strong affirmations – lots of them, strong contrasts, life/death, light/ darkness, love/hate. The author appears to jump from subject to subject, like a surfer twisting across the waves, now this way, then that, then back to where we were before, then on forward and now back again.
Jesus as human
What is happening is that the author is navigating the shock of the aftermath of a deep and traumatic church schism! ‘They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us’ (1 John 2:19). This is the only specific contextual reference in the three letters but it nails this trilogy of letters into the brutal reality of church life.
