6

like Christ Himself, no longer in truth belong to the world (xvii. 14, 16). Because believers no more belong to it, those whose very nature is self-love cannot love them (xv. 19; comp. vii. 7), and, according to the contrast in principle, in which the world, as ruled by the devil, stands to the Church of the children of God, they must hate them; for there is no third thing for John (footnote 4). But the world threatens believers not only with its enmity, but ever more with its temptation (I. ii. 26, iii. 7; II. 7). Believers, too, must be warned to shun the idols the world worships (I. v. 21; comp. § 131, 6), and they are warned against love to the world (I. ii. 15, and therewith § 153, a, footnote 1), because love in that way very easily gets associated with the sinful lusts which are common in the world (ver. 16). But now even antichristian false prophecy also belongs to the world (comp. § 131, b), which in apostolic times threatened the Church (II. 7; I. iv. 1), and which found the world's approbation (ver. 5 : ἐκ τοῦ κόσμου εἰσίν . . . καὶ ὁ κόσμος αὐτῶν ἀκούει). These had no doubt gone out from the Church; but in their fall by a divine law, it had to be made manifest that its organs had never really belonged to the Church (L. ii. 19). In them it is shown that the devil, who was a murderer and a liar from the beginning, threatens the Church not only with the deadly enmity of the world, but also with its soul-destroying lies (ver. 22); yet the Church possesses in its faith the power to overcome the world (I. iv. 4, 5, v. 4, 5). But here, too, it is clear how in the nature of the world love finds its limits. We cannot show brotherly love to false teachers, without running the risk of making ourselves partakers in their sins (II. 10, 11).

* As they had hated Christ (xv. 18, 25), so must they, according to the predic tion of Jesus (xv. 19, 20, xvii. 14), hate and persecute His servants (xv. 20) for His name's sake (ver. 21) even to blood (xvi. 2). The apostle stands in the middle of this experience of the world's hatred of believers (I. iii. 13), the terrible outbreak of which forms the dark background of the Apocalypse (§ 113, a).

6 If, therefore, it is not permissible to the nature of love to exclude the persons of individual unbelievers from love (note b), yet love cannot unrestrainedly develop itself towards the world as the fellowship hostile to God, without being exposed to the danger, that godlike love to the world, as that which has to be delivered, may become an ungodlike love of the world, i.e. a love for the world in its position as opposing God.

(d) In spite of this sharp contrast between the world and the Church, the Spirit is ever seeking by means of believers as His organs to lead the world from its sin of unbelief, and to testify to it of Christ. Likewise by the self-sacrifice of the Church in her perfected unity is kept in view that final winning of the world (xvii. 21, 23; comp. Rev. iii. 9: va yvŵoi ŏti ¿yà nyáπŋoá oe, and especially § 132, a), which is to realize the universal saving purpose of God. But as even Christ's eλeysis in the world remained in whole and in part without result (iii. 19, 20), so when, in consequence of the exaltation of the Son of man, from which even Jesus looked for the principal result (viii. 28), there was won from the world for the Church all that was yet receptive in it, the apostle sees little more to hope for for the world. The selfsacrifice of the Church it does not understand, because it cannot know the children of God as such without the knowledge of God (I. iii. 1). It hears not the Spirit of Truth, because it hears the false prophecy of the false teachers, who are essentially allied to it (I. iv. 5, 6). Like the author of the Apocalypse (§ 130, c, footnote 5), the apostle seems to have no more expected any great result from missionary work. It was involved in his nature, which was not fitted for any outwardly influential work (§ 141, b), that to his view the Church was presented rather as a circle essentially complete in itself over against the world. It was implied also in his historical position, that the closer the end approached, the more was the gathering together of the children of God scattered throughout the world (xi. 52) regarded as concluded, and the world, in so far as it remained the world, appeared as a fellowship setting itself, on the whole, hostile to salvation." This of itself leads on to the eschatology of the apostle.

7 The apostle has certainly not taken any apocatastasis in view. In the passage xii. 32 it is only said that Christ extends His activity to all; but as little as the laxúur of the Father (vi. 44) does His lax attain its end in all. But the conquering of Satan in the end (§ 153, d) nowhere involves in the New Testament a conversion of all men, but only of such as will let themselves be converted, as even in Paul (§ 99, c). Moreover, even in the oldest tradition of Jesus' speeches the world as such remains unbelieving, and proportionably but a few from it will be saved (§ 33, c, footnote 5). It is also yet but a few, x. 16, whom Jesus calls even now His own in the Gentile world, if, even according to § 153, c, footnote 6, many who are now the children of the devil may be won from it.

$157. The Last Day.

According to John's Gospel, Jesus has also promised His near return, and the apostle thinks of it as immediately at hand (a). He recognises the approach of the last hour by the appearance of the pseudo-prophecy of the false teachers, in whom antichrist has already appeared (b). The day of the second coming, as the last day, brings the resurrection of the dead and the judgment of the world, which finally decides the fate of men (c). Believers then enter into the heavenly life, when through the perfect vision of God they are made perfectly like God (d).

(a) If Jesus promises after He has gone to His Father's abode (ie. to heaven; comp. Ps. xxxiii. 13, 14; Isa. lxiii. 15), in order there to prepare a place for His own, that He will come again to take them home (xiv. 2, 3), that can but be understood of His second coming promised throughout in the New Testament, and of the gathering together of the elect in Christ resulting from it, according to § 33, c.1 As in the oldest tradition (§ 33, a), Jesus speaks here, too, on the supposition that the disciples will survive to this second coming, and only the explicit addition, which He is said to have made to the beloved disciple in this connection (xxi. 22), after He had predicted a martyr's death for Peter (vv. 18, 19), is in the appendix to the Gospel, and that is established not by any change on the epxoμal, but by a reference to their hypothetical conception (èàv ... éλw) against a contingent coming of an apparent non-fulfilment (ver. 23). On the contrary, the apostle himself even in his old age hopes with his contemporaries to survive till the Parousia, and he exhorts them to abide in Christ, that none may recoil being ashamed at His coming (I. ii. 28), because he will not belong to those who will go home with Him. It is clear that in this way

1 The modern idea of a taking each individual soul home immediately after death (Köstlin, p. 280; Reuss, ii. p. 557 [E. T. ii. 499]), is excluded by the idea of a resurrection at an appointed day (note c), which is here held firm. The idea that in John's Gospel the visible second coming of Christ is changed into His second coming in the spirit (comp. yet Schenkel, p. 393), is supported by the current false interpretation of the promises of His second coming after death, and of His abiding gracious presence (§ 154, c).

the apostle himself has applied the promise of Jesus (xiv. 3) to the general apostolic hope of the Parousia.

(b) That the second coming of Christ is immediately at hand the apostle knows from this, that his present bears the marks of the last time (oxáтn pa), but we know the existence of the last time by the coming of antichrist (I. ii. 18). As Paul (§ 63, c) and the author of the Apocalypse, so, too, does the apostle proceed on the supposition that the second coming of Christ cannot come till the God-opposing and Christ-hating power has become potentialized and concentrated in the highest degree in a historical appearance. His readers have heard from him that antichrist comes (I. ii. 18, iv. 3). But if antichristianity appeared in the Apocalypse in the two forms of a God-hostile worldly power and of false prophecy, and was to win its personal concentration in the region of the former (§ 131), so here false prophecy is (I. iv. 1, 3) alone the antichrist (I. ii. 22; II. 7: ó πλávos kaì ô ȧvтíXploTos). If there false prophecy, at least preponderatingly, comes from heathenism, as with Paul it comes from Judaism, so here it springs up, as moreover it does partly even in the Apocalypse (comp. Rev. ii. 20, 24), from degenerate Christianity, which, according to § 156, c, also belongs to the God-hostile world. The fears with which the author of the Apocalypse regarded the coming of the third Flavian to the throne have not been fulfilled in this extent, and the whole ideal tendency of the apostle led him to direct his view away from the external dangers of the Church to her inner risk, by a false doctrine denying the fundamentals of the Christian faith, and to see in it the fulfilment of the prophecy of antichrist.3

2 As the natural day has twelve hours, so the day of each life has the number of its hours measured out by God (xi. 9; comp. ix. 4), and so also the day of the present world (é xócμes oùres: § 153, a, footnote 1).

3 There is implied no spiritualizing of the doctrine of antichrist (Reuss, ii. p. 562 [E. T. 503]) in the fact that antichrist appears as a multitude of false teachers (I. ii. 18; II. 7); for even in the Apocalypse false prophecy appears as a collective power. In the plurality of the false prophets (I. iv. 1) there works but the one spirit of antichrist (ver. 3), who, because he is not of God, can be only from the father of lies (viii. 44), as he there makes those inspired by him to be liars (I. ii. 22), and, according to I. iv. 4, the ruler of the world, i.e. the devil, is in them overcome. But as Judas, who made himself to be the devil's organ, is himself called a devil (vi. 70), so these false teachers as organs of VOL. II. 2 D

(c) With the second coming of Christ the last day of the present age of the world dawns (ý ¿oxáτn ýμépa). Jesus, even in our Gospel (vi. 39, 40, 44, 54), promises the Messianic resurrection of the dead on this day (xi. 24), and He designates Himself as the author of that resurrection (xi. 25).* But from these passages it is clear that here too, as with Paul (§ 99, b; comp. § 126, d, footnote 7), there is a resurrection in the special sense only for believers, who, according to John, have already received eternal life, and for whom therefore the bodily death which they have experienced must in the end be taken away, not only in the sense of § 146, a, but completely (xi. 25, 26).5 But with this decision comes also the final (Messianic) judgment, which the Father has given over to the Son, beyond what He has already executed even in His earthly life (v. 27), because, according to ver. 22, He has expressly assigned to Him the whole judgment. Believers, to be sure, do not now come into this judgment (iii. 18, v. 24), inasmuch as they have already received eternal life in faith, and therefore it cannot be decided for the first time regarding them, whether they are to receive it, and the world is even judged (iii. 18, xii. 31), because by their unbelief they have shut antichristianity, or of the devil in his conflict with Christ (§ 153, d), are themselves ȧvríxporo (I. ii. 18). On the contrary, the idea that these antichrists are but the forerunners of the personal antichrist is a pure prejudice, which entirely contradicts the terms of the Johannean passages.

♦ By this fact all attempts are wrecked to withdraw the Johannean eschatology from the general early apostolic basis, as the utterly abortive attempts of Reuss (ii. p. 558 [E. T. ii. 499]) and Baur (p. 405) evidently show; Scholten (pp. 124126) has even conceded that while he seeks by arbitrary false explanations of the words to help it, only by a resurrection can the soul (as the bearer of the earthly life) that has been given up be kept (as the bearer of the eternal life) (xii. 25). 5 Hence it is said, v. 28, 29, that the Messiah, when this hour comes, calls all from their graves, the one to the resurrection of life, the other to the resurrection of judgment. But we need not therefore change this passage into a moral sense (as Schenkel, pp. 392-396), or explain it as interpolated, with Scholten, p. 129 f. We have here rather the general resurrection of the dead, which we found, with the exception of Acts xxiv. 15, only in the Apocalypse (§ 132, b); but even here it is clear that only believers, who have the true life, and therefore are necessarily those rà ảyalà Tongares, rise to life only in the special sense, and therefore in the New Testament sense, while unbelievers only experience a resurrection so as to be placed before the judgment, which takes place on the last day (xii. 48).

6 Christ is here too, therefore, the judge of the world. There is throughout in this implied no rejection of the usual idea of judgment, when, according to xii. 48, His word is said to be the judicial rule (comp. Reuss, ii. p. 559 [E. T.