WE LIVE IN AN AGE in which discernment has never been more important: Christian discernment; theological discernment; discernment based on biblical standards; discernment that will show us the narrow way between excess and stinginess, license and legalism, innovation and sterility. In the face of a culture bombarding us with the pop wisdom that the difference between true and false is an outdated remnant of Western dualism, Christians must never relinquish the need to proclaim the difference between right and wrong. The Johannine letters teach just such discernment.
As Professor Burge shows in this commentary, the Johannine community was struggling with internal theological threats that can only be called heretical. “Threats that were once external”—believers in secret esoteric wisdom, incorrect views of Jesus, immoral behavior—“were now found within the ranks of the fellowship itself.” John, the author of these letters, demands that the Christians reading these words realize that they have a responsibility to discern between the true and the false, between Christian behavior and un-Christian behavior. The Johannine letters are a clear call to stand firm in the historic revelation of Jesus Christ and the Incarnation.
We need discernment every bit as much as did the first readers of 1 John, 2 John, and 3 John, but the need takes a different form these days. We are living in a time between worldviews, a vacant, interim period between a consensual, orthodox championing of a single theological system and an as yet unknown approach to truth that will come to grips with (and finally defeat) that powerful conviction that there is no single gospel truth. Into this vacuum have rushed a flood of theological experiments, each attempting to reconcile the eternal, unchanging nature of God with the constantly shifting focus of everyday life.
Make no mistake. This vacuum is real. It is a vacuum that will produce a new, gospel-honoring approach to theology, a theology that will reflect unchanging scriptural truth. But in the meantime a thousand theologies will bloom and have their day in the sun. Like wildflowers dotting today’s theological wilderness, they will each display a raw if temporary beauty. We must judge which will last.
Each of these wildflower theologies has some value. They are like the short-term flora and fauna that spring up in ecological systems ravaged by disasters like forest fires. They hold the ground in place until the larger, more stable plants get a chance to grow back. When a building is bulldozed to an empty lot, weeds and wildflowers spring up before the return of more lasting species. Wildflower theology can serve a similar purpose, but in the end their true nature as opportunistic mistakes emerges, and they drift away.
They wither away, that is, if we as the true church are doing our job, the job of theological discernment, a job that in its essence has not changed from John’s day. John taught that the measuring sticks of true discernment will never change: the truth revealed in the historical coming of Jesus Christ and everything which that glorious event revealed, and in the powerful theological traditions that have grown up around that event. Those are our measuring sticks, too.
In the end a theology will prevail, a theology that picks up the threat of truth that goes back to creation itself. But that theology will not come without hard work and some risk. Gary M. Burge shows us how the Johannine letters can play a crucial role in the task of discerning truth.
Terry C. Muck