Epistles of John - The Preterist Archive

RELATION OF THE EPISTLE TO THE GOSPEL. 15
xxi. 22) to remain until the Lord should come.
He was to outlive
the other Apostles ; he should live to behold the parousia,
—which he attained to, not indeed in external reality, but in
the visions in which the Lord came to him, Rev. i. 9, etc., and
gave him to see His coming to judgment, Rev. i. 7, xxii. 20.
Thus, the vocation of this Apostle had an essentially eschatological
character. When he came forth from his earlier comparative
retirement to play an active part upon the scene of the
history of the apostolical age, the perfected judgment upon
Jerusalem had abolished the ground of the previous controversy
between Jewish and Gentile Christianity,— the controversy
which had enlisted the energies of St Paul (and with which the
contest between the Papacy and the Reformation is analogous).
But, instead of this, other powers of seduction and perversion
had sought to force themselves into the doctrine of the Christian
Church, — powers in which both Jewish and heathen elements
of falsehood combined in wildly confused league against the
Truth, while bearing the guise of truth and wisdom (and with
which are analogous the powers of negative and destructive
wisdom which have come forth in our day since the Deists and
Encyclopaedists). Of the Jewish Christianity there remained
only that Nazarene element which still clung, in godless and
naked traditionalism, to the observance of the ceremonial law,
and the use of the national language, after the Lord had laid
low in destruction both temple and nation ; and which, as the
result of this spiritual obstinacy, was suffered to sink into the
lowest stage which was exhibited as Ebionitism, capable of
viewing Jesus only from the legal point of view, as a new lawgiver,
and therefore as no more than a mere man. It had not,
in the Apostle's days, reached that stage ; although that extreme
development, to which the then existing separation of the
Nazarenes from the organism of the Church must necessarily
lead, could not possibly be concealed from that prophetic glance
which was St John's special endowment.
Now, whether St John, in his so emphatic testimony to
the eternal Divine Sonship of Christ, had in view the Nazarene
element and its results, or not ; whether it was his conscious
design to interpose a barrier to one of the two fundamental
principles of all heresy, or not ; whether or not the strongly
asserted sayings of the Gospel, ch. i. 8, 20, with which 1 John