Short shrift made once more

Theology Today, Oct 2000 by Black, C Clifton

In Memoriam Raymond E. Brown, S. S.

"Help us to find God," said the disciples to the elder. "No one can help you to do that," the elder replied. Astonished, the disciples asked, "Why not?" "For the same reason that no one can help fish find the ocean."

Grant those disciples at least this much: It was God they were looking for. Within the contemporary church and academyeven the environs of biblical scholarship-that intent is not always so clear. Thus, while writing commentary on the letters of John,2 I recently found myself scudding among learned lobsters seemingly forgetful of Scripture's pervasive milieu. To make my point, I must set back the clock almost fifty years and beg the reader's indulgence as I map a fairly late exegetical development. An interpretive debate of marginal interest to those outside the guild's hall of mirrors can splay, on closer inspection, into a theological enfilade with important implications for us all.

FROM LOGOS TO ECCLESIA

One of the twentieth century's landmark contributions to research in the Johannine epistles3 is also one of the briefest: an eight-page contribution to the second Festschrift for Rudolf Bultmann, originally published in 1954.4 This essay, penned by one of Bultmann's illustrious pupils, Hans Conzelmann, took as its title the opening words of 1 John: "What was from the beginning" ("Was von Anfang war").

We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life-the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and bear witness to it, and proclaim to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was made manifest to us-what we have seen and have heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us. Moreover, our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. And these things we are writing so that our joy may be fulfilled. (1 John 1: 1-4)

Conzelmann's thesis sprang from his interpretation of this prologue, viewed in the overall context of 1 John. He recognized in this passage the echo of the Fourth Gospel's better-known prologue, while pointing up an important difference between the two: According to John, "that which was in the beginning" is the preexistent logos, whereas 1 John seemingly refers to the origin of the tradition of the Johannine church. In the First Epistle, according to Conzelmann, "The church orients itself to its origin and understands this as an absolute date, against which no other ... is of any interest whatever. Its eschatological self-consciousness is transposed into a reflection on the historical essence of Christian society."5 In Conzelmann's view, this conceptual shift betokened a critical turn in Johannine Christianity's self-understanding: toward the church's interpretation of its own primal history as distinct, complete, and decisive, and of its tradition as foundational, authoritative, and normative for the community's ongoing life.6 Conzelmann concluded that 1 John could be properly characterized as "a Johannine pastoral epistle": that is, as an "emergent Catholic" adaptation of the Fourth Gospel's legacy for a new day, much as 1 Timothy appropriated the Pauline heritage in the second or third Christian generation.7

The staying power of Conzelmann's assessment of 1 John suggests that it is in touch with some important characteristics of that letter. Alongside C. H. Dodd,8 Conzelmann encouraged New Testament interpreters to pay attention, not only to the linguistic and conceptual similarities between John and I John, but also to their equally impressive differences in viewpoint. Like the Pastorals, the Johannine epistles are concerned with questions about valid teaching and right conduct: Christian orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Moreover, the Johannine letters imply a related issue on which the Pauline Pastorals offer more explicit counsel: namely, the locus of authority within the church and the relationship of that authority to such ecclesiastical matters as tradition, polity, and appropriate criteria by which the Spirit's authorization might be adjudicated. But Conzelmann's reading of 1 John fully flowered some twenty years later, in scholarship that was increasingly absorbed with the adversarial tenor of the Johannine epistles and the implications of that conflict for construing those letters' life setting.

FROM HETERODOXY TO ORTHODOXY

In Conzelmann's opinion, reflection on the church's tradition had become the means for distinguishing orthodoxy and heresy in a Johannine church that, by the time of 1 John, was schismatically at odds with itself. The evidence within the epistle for an intramural split is not hard to come by. Thus, 1 John 2:19, 22:

They went out from us, but they did not belong to us; for if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us. But by going out they made it plain that none of them belongs to us. . . . Who is the liar but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, the one who denies the Father and the Son.