1 John is a short but tricky epistle to pin down. The Greek isn’t the problem—here’s where first-year seminary students start their translation careers, however short lived! John’s style, structure, and substance, however, are a problem.
Style
John’s style is marked by parallelism, antithesis, repetition, inclusio, anaphora, pleonasm, and word association. Rudolf Schanckenburg notes that together these “act as a drag on the movement of thought, making it circular and for our taste somewhat boring and old-fashioned, though in those days it had appropriate solemnity.”1
If I were to rewrite the first sentence of this post, imitating John’s style, it might sound like this:
Truly, beloved, this letter is short and indeed it is tricky to pin down. Not long is the letter, nor simple. My little children, to pin it down is the reason I am writing to you and some would have it not pinned down. Writing to you is not tricky but short. And now, this is the shortness that is not tricky that we have from him, and the one who has what is short, does not have what is tricky. These things I have written to you so that you may not be either short nor tricky.
Despite the grammatical simplicity—third-grade English, for the most part—its hypnotic repetitions can lull even the most attentive reader. DB Hart imagines John as “some late first-century precursor of Gertrude Stein”2 (see a sample of one of her more baffling works below). The result is a kind of linguistic cubism: a layered, facet-like composition that attempts to view a single image simultaneously from multiple sides. Its fractured planes are emotionally charged—advancing, retreating, interpenetrating, hovering.
Structure
In terms of the epistle’s structure as a whole, it is hard to know how best to divide it. Outlines vary widely, though many link up at the obvious seams and transition points. The structure replicates on a larger scale some of John’s stylistic features. This results in a sort of meandering progression that circles around a few basic themes. Read without annotations or path-marking section headers, one has the feeling of being pulled along by a current in a protean sea, rising and falling with the wash of the waves. Still, a clever outline—artificial though it may be—is better, in my view, than an interminable textual maze. Utility is always a good second behind perfect intelligibility. Schnackenburg, again, thinks that outlines of First John tend to go in two ways—they either “overemphasiz[e] the formal and aesthetic aspects, or they are at the mercy of dogmatic considerations.”3 Unlike a house or kingdom, however, a text divided stands quite well.
To see how one interpretive tradition handles this structure, we turn to the Recovery Version’s (RcV) outline:
Clearly, the RcV outline leans toward the latter two of Schnackenburg’s categories: it is dogmatically determined and aesthetically tidy. One might wish for a bit more structural transparency around the false teachers in 2:18–23 (or possibly through v. 27) and 4:1–6. Still, the explanatory notes in these sections provide ample commentary and rightly emphasize the material and thematic parallels between them. In this sense, the epistle works like an ellipse: it is defined by two focal points—each dealing with false teachers—but the shape of the ellipse itself is something more. These focal points give form to the letter’s polemical anchoring,4—even while, as in an actual ellipse, remaining invisible—but they do not exhaust its content and they certainly don’t constitute the focus. The focus and substance of the epistle lies elsewhere—the fellowship of the divine life. And this, ultimately, is what the RcV outline highlights: not merely the shape, but the substance of 1 John.
I imagine the three parts of the epistle working in a cycle something like this:
As a whole, the RcV outline provides a crisp and memorable overview that highlights the ellipse of the letter: the fellowship of the divine life.
Substance
What makes 1 John both difficult and dazzling is not its style or structure but its substance, for the letter’s leitmotif is human fellowship in and with the Divine Trinity.
This mysterious fellowship of the eternal life should be considered the subject of this Epistle. –RcV, 1 John 1:3, note 3
Schnackenburg agrees with this assessment:
Fellowship with God is the “basic chord which echoes again and again throughout the document and places the whole under a dominant theme”5
The profundity of this claim is easy to miss, especially for casual readers, because John delivers some of the most profound theological truths in sentences that are simpler than the New England Primer: “God is light,” “God is love,” “abide in God,” “our fellowship is with the Father,” and so on. We are, all of us, little children to Saint John the Theologian.
But this is not the fellowship Adam and Eve had in Eden—strolling with God through the garden and discussing its flora and fauna. Fellowship in 1 John is something far more radical: deifying incorporation into the life of the Triune God, a perichoretic existence that maps onto the world in concrete acts of love and justice. It results in nothing less than the reproduction of Christ.
This is precisely what the epistle signals with its occasional use of καθώς (“even as”)—not mere comparison, but participatory likeness. While the final stage of deification is still to come—“when He is manifested, we will be like Him, because we will see Him even as He is” (3:2)—John insists that this transformation is already underway: “even as He is, so also are we in this world” (4:17). Fellowship is not just the fruit of salvation; it is the process and pattern of salvation itself. It is the ongoing reproduction of divine life in human form—in a word, deification.
What is fellowship?
Schnackenburg identifies six characteristics of fellowship in 1 John.6 I love how he puts it, because his account preserves the full strangeness and depth of what John is getting at with the word fellowship. This isn’t just spiritual intimacy or communal potlucks. His description captures the sheer density of a word like fellowship when it appears in this epistle.
- The Christians’ fellowship with God is an intimate mutual relationship (cf. the reciprocal formulas). It is not solely a relationship of protection on God’s side or of participation on the human side.
- It may be represented as a mutual interpenetration and has more than a merely moral quality. The terms used for the “abiding” of the divine Being and life in the human are much too real for that.
- The personality of God and of the human are never compromised: “God” is often represented as “the Father” or “the Son” or both at once (1:3).
- The way to fellowship with the Father is exclusively through the Son (2:23; cf. 5:12, 20). This is a basic christological principle.
- Fellowship with God is never a momentary thing. It is an experience that is not limited in time, as in mysticism or ecstasy, but is in its very nature a permanent possession (“to abide”; “to have God”), a gift of salvation, and is related to “eternal life.”
- There are important conditions (“if …”) and criteria (“by this we know”) for fellowship with God.
In the end, what makes 1 John so difficult to intuit is precisely what makes it so essential to inhabit. Its elliptical structure circles around a singular mystery: that human beings are drawn into a life of mutual indwelling with God, through the Son and in the Spirit. The letter’s surface may seem simple, even repetitive, but its substance is nothing less than the shared life of God discerned in truth and reproduced in virtue. It narrates the expansion of the Triune fellowship and instructs the community in how to preserve its integrity.
The Recovery Version is right to identify this fellowship as the subject of the epistle. As Schnackenburg notes, it is the basic chord that resounds through the compressed symphony of God’s economy—in the recurring movements of abiding, discerning, and becoming. And so the apostolic voice returns again and again—not as a broken record or the distracted ramblings of old age, but as the steady refrain of God’s own nature echoing outward as light and love.
- Rudolf Schnackenburg, The Johannine Epistles: Introduction and Commentary (Crossroad, 1992), 7. ↩︎
- David Bentley Hart, “Introduction,” The New Testament: A Translation (Yale University Press, 2017), xxi. ↩︎
- Schnackenburg, Johannine Epistles, 12. ↩︎
- See Witness Lee, Life-study of First John (LSM, 1984), 14: “In his writings the apostle John was polemical, not against the law, circumcision, or Judaism, but against the heresies of the Gnostics, Cerinthians, and Docetists.” Lee characterizes John’s writings as “not only polemical but also unveiling.” See CWWL 1982, 2:74 ↩︎
- Schnackenburg, Johannine Epistles, 62. ↩︎
- Schnackenburg, Johannine Epistles, 64. ↩︎
conversant faith 