Atonement and Ethics in 1 John

A Peacemaking Hermeneutic

Christopher Armitage

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780567700780
• eBook ISBN: 9780567700773
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Christopher Armitage considers previous theological perception of 1 John as a text advocating that God abhors violence, contrasted with biblical scholarship analysis that focuses upon the text's birth from hostile theological conflict between 'insiders' and 'outsiders', with immensely hostile rhetoric directed towards 'antichrists' and those who have left the community. Armitage argues that a peace-oriented reading of 1 John is still viable, but questions if the commandment that the community loves each other is intended to include their opponents, and whether the text can be of hermeneutic use to advocate non-violence and love of one's neighbour. This book examines five key words from 1 John, hilasmos, sfazo, anthropoktonos, agape and adelphos, looking at their background and use in the Old Testament in both Hebrew and the LXX, arguing that these central themes presuppose a God whose engagement with the world is not assuaging divine anger, nor ferocious defence of truth at the expense of love, but rather peace and avoidance of hatred that inevitably leads to violence and death. Armitage concludes that a peacemaking hermeneutic is not only viable, but integral to reading the epistle.

Introduction – Some Peacemaking Hermeneutical Approaches to 1 John

Genesis of This Study

First John, on the face of it, is a text riven with underlying conflict with opponents, displaying hostile rhetoric against them. Εἰρήνη ὑμῖν, the dominical, Johannine formula, “peace be with you” (John 20:19, 20:21, 20:26),¹ nicely taken up in the early church’s liturgical Greeting of Peace, is not found in 1 John. Nor are the other uses of εἰρήνη in John’s Gospel (John 14:27 [twice], 16:33). We find εἰρήνη in 2 John 3 and 3 John 15 in greetings, but it appears nowhere in 1 John. First John might seem the very last text on which to build a theology of peacemaking or non-violence.

Yet peace-oriented or non-violent hermeneutical approaches to 1 John are not uncommon in recent peacemaking theological and NT ethical studies. This poses the question whether such approaches are exegetically, or even hermeneutically, legitimate in light of the background and purpose of 1 John and indeed in light of the way it approaches the problem of dissension over theological differences in the community to which it is addressed. This study addresses that question. First, it examines the background and purpose of 1 John. Then it examines key ideas in 1 John, represented by certain Greek keywords in 1 John against the background of their use in the Septuagint (LXX) and in some intertestamental pseudepigrapha and Jewish historical texts written reasonably contemporaneously with 1 John. Finally, deploying its findings in earlier chapters, it presents an original peacemaking hermeneutical approach to 1 John.

This introduction presents a survey, which will be anything but exhaustive, of recent use of 1 John by those writing peacemaking theology. Some writers whose work is examined are theologians, and others are biblical scholars, but their work is written more from a theological perspective. Some other writers’ work is presented, although they do not appeal to 1 John, in order to ask whether their argument may be supported by 1 John. Some writers would not identify themselves as peacemaking theologians, and some indeed oppose some of the ideas of that school, but they are included because their ideas harmonise in some areas with peacemaking theology.

Here “peacemaking theology” refers to the work of writers in the Christian tradition who enjoin abstaining from violence and warfare and attaining peaceful reconciliation among families, communities and nations. The term “hermeneutic” is employed in the more modern sense of seeking to derive from the text theological principles which may be supported by a particular interpretation of the text itself.² What is not intended by the term “hermeneutic” in this study is a philosophical grid whereby an a priori hermeneutical principle is applied to a text, which is then made to fit that principle. Any hermeneutical enterprise encounters the problem of the “hermeneutical circle”, whereby we bring to a text all kinds of predetermined understandings, used by us to shape our questions of the text, which then suggest the answers we derive from it.³ Ricoeur seeks to avoid this by interpreting the outside world through the lens of the text: “For us, the world is an ensemble of references opened up by the texts.”⁴ An instructive example of this technique is Ricoeur’s essay on the sixth Decalogue commandment, “thou shalt not kill”, where he sets it against Genesis 22, in which the Lord’s command to Abraham to kill his firstborn, Isaac, occurs: here Ricoeur shows that the ideal of “loving obedience” underlies God’s relationship with humanity.⁵ Following Ricoeur, may we exercise some leverage against the literal text of 1 John to derive an overarching ethic from it?

It is an age-old practice to ask of a text whether an overarching a posteriori hermeneutical principle can be derived from it. A good example is Augustine’s standpoint that the love of God and of others is the proper perspective of a Christian in reading scripture, so that when adjudicating on competing interpretations of it, one must ask which is favoured by the hermeneutical rule of charity.⁶ This study’s methodology is similar: it asks whether various uses of 1 John in peacemaking theology to promote mutual love and oppose violence can be founded on its text, having regard to the theological aims and historical situation emerging from it.

Barth’s well-known warning on this subject needs heeding here:

The irremediable danger of consulting Holy scripture apart from the centre, and in such a way that the question of Jesus Christ ceases to be the controlling and comprehensive question and simply becomes one amongst others, consists primarily in the fact that (even supposing a strict and exclusive scripture principle) scripture is thought of and used as though the message of revelation and the Word of God could be extracted from it in the same way as the message of other truth or reality can be extracted from other sources of knowledge, at any rate where it is not presumably speaking of Jesus Christ.⁷

Barth is speaking here of a “transition from biblical to biblicist thought” by the development in the “older Protestant orthodoxy” of the doctrine of the verbal inspiration of scripture, which, he said, was no doubt developed as a bulwark against rationalism, but which in fact was a product, not of “an over-developed faith of revelation”, but of “rationalistic thinking – the attempt to replace faith and indirect knowledge with direct knowledge”.⁸ This study does not advocate an approach which reifies Holy scripture, which holds that scripture itself is not only its best, but its sole interpreter, any more than does Barth. Such an approach puts aside any solid attempt to employ the tools of sociological and even historical enquiry, which have cast so much light recently on the situation in which scripture was produced and on the communities from which it arose. It also deprives us of the opportunity to seek an overarching hermeneutic from a scriptural text which is anchored in it.

There is a corresponding danger in peacemaking theology of reading references to peace and mutual love in scripture literally, without attending to the genre of the text, the historical situation in which it was written, and its overall theological aims. In the case of 1 John, such a literalistic approach fails to give weight to the Christology of the letter, underlying the stigmatising of the opponents, thus missing the “question of Jesus Christ” which Barth holds to be central to any hermeneutical question asked of the NT in any field, including ethics, as in this study.

Obviously, the whole NT needs to be examined to see whether it provides support for a peacemaking hermeneutic, before one may claim to have developed a truly NT theology of peacemaking. That is beyond the scope of this study. But in such an endeavour the “difficult” NT texts need examination as well. First John may be one of these, because of its hostile rhetoric. The contribution this study aims to make is to examine some keywords, ἱλασμός, σφάξw, ἀνθρωποκτόνος, ἀγαπάω and ἀδελφὸϛ, often used in 1 John, which appear to stand for key ideas in the epistle, against the Jewish background against which it was written, and more particularly some of their uses in the LXX, to see if some recent peacemaking hermeneutical approaches to 1 John are supported by its text.

Peacemaking theology has often found support in the synoptic gospels, especially in Matthew and Luke. As but one example, Richard Hays, a NT biblical scholar and ethicist, has sought to show, in a careful exegesis of Matthew 5:38-48, that it teaches non-violent love of enemies as normative.⁹ Similar uses of 1 John have been less common, but there are still many, as we shall see. So the present study asks whether a peacemaking or non-violent hermeneutic built on citations of 1 John has sure foundations. The textual context, from which citations from 1 John are taken to support such theology, may or may not be consistent with their hermeneutical use.

Some uses of 1 John to support a peacemaking hermeneutic, particularly by theologians rather than biblical scholars, tend to avoid the more painful aspects of the letter – particularly the hostility the author shows to his secessionist opponents, and their ideas. In a theological work, where the main object is to engage with scripture to provide apt illustrations of themes which the author has developed in his or her cultural context, this is understandable. Other writers, often themselves biblical scholars, have used 1 John in a similar way. By the nature of their discipline, their examination of the text of 1 John is closer.

In biblical scholarship, however, the question still needs to be asked: are these uses of 1 John entirely appropriate in light of what we know, almost entirely from the text itself, about the conflict which engulfed the Johannine community, its causes and the antidote offered by its author to it? Before attempting an answer to this question in the chapters which follow, we must first examine how 1 John has been used in peacemaking theological and NT ethical studies, and the extent to which such uses may have passed over the difficulty of applying a hermeneutic of non-violence to a text replete with hostility, stemming from theological conflict. The purpose of this chapter is to identify some peacemaking hermeneutical approaches to 1 John. The question asked by it is whether 1 John supports or opposes such approaches.

Perhaps the most notable example of use of 1 John to support a theology of non-violence or peacemaking is René Girard’s work, which will be examined first. After that, the work of some Girardian interpreters, including James Alison, Raymund Schwager and Willard Swartley,^10...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction – Some Peacemaking Hermeneutical Approaches to 1 John
• 1 The Background, Purpose, Literary Structure and Reception of 1 John
• 2 Ίλασμός and Its Cognates in the Septuagint, the Intertestamental Literature and the Dead Sea Scrolls
• 3 Ίλασμός in 1 John
• 4 Σφάξω and ἀνθρωποκτόνος in 1 John
• 5 Άγαπάω and ἀδελφός in 1 John
• 6 Peacemaking in 1 John
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Index of References
• Imprint