Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

1 John 2:3-6

Fellowship in the knowledge of God: obedience, love, and union, 1 John 2:3.

The best account that can be given of this section- more aphoristic than any other is that it lays down certain principles, and introduces certain terms, which become the keynotes of the remainder: each begins here, and returns again and again, while few are afterwards added.

1 John 2:3. The word fellowship now vanishes from the Epistle. The first substitute is knowledge; a term that is not without allusion to the Gnostic watchword, but soon passes beyond the transitory reference. It is the gnosis of the anti-Christian sect, which St. Paul, not renouncing the term, exalted into epignosis: St. John retrieves it, and stamps it with the same dignity that he impresses on the word love.

And hereby know we that we know him, if we keep his commandments. The knowing is a word which may be said to be in this Epistle sanctified entirely to God and the experience of Divine things: the knowing Him and the knowing that we know Him, or, in St. Paul's language, ‘knowing the proof' of Him. We cannot better explain the word to ourselves than by closely connecting it with the fellowship that precedes. All knowledge is the communion of the mind with its object: the object as it were and the knowing subject have in common the secret nature of the object. To ‘know Christ' is to enter into the ‘fellowship of His suffering and resurrection.' To know God is to have that which may be known of God made common to Him and to our minds: His holy nature, His truth, His love. Obviously this knowledge of God is its own evidence to ourselves; the very word says that. Yet the apostle adds, in a phrase quite unique in Scripture, ‘we know that we know Him:' we know our own knowledge; that is, the secret of our true knowledge, its effect, is common to our experiencing and our reflecting mind, to our consciousness as the union of the two. That secret as deliverance from sin has already been dwelt on: now the positive side is brought in; we are privy to our obedience as flowing from the nature of God in us, ‘if we keep His commandments.' These were given us by Christ; Christ is God and the ‘Him' of this passage in the unity of the Father.

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Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

1 John 2:3-6

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