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position that has become a second nature, he can find in the truth not a single point on which to rest, because there is no truth in him. Owing to his predominant tendency to falsehood he wants the organ requisite to admit and to appropriate the revelation of truth.

Where a created spirit yields itself wholly and purely to the revealed God, or the Logos, there is truth. Wherever he dissevers himself from this connexion, and lives, thinks, and acts in this state of selfish separation, there is falsehood. As the truth, according to John, proceeds from the tendency of the whole life towards God, the true and the good are in his view one, as on the other hand, sin and falsehood. When the spirit withdraws itself from the revelation of eternal truth, and suppresses its original consciousness of truth, selfdeception follows, and the deception of others. Hence Satan is represented as a liar, and the father of lies. And thus the universal contrast is formed. Those who are in a state of vital communion with God, who have received a divine life, are born of God, and hence are called the children of God; and those who live in communion with that spirit from whom at first proceeded all the tendencies of sin and falsehood, or who are of the world, belong to the world; understanding by the world not the objective world as such, the creation of God, which, as founded in the Logos and as a revelation of God, is in itself something good, but the world in a subjective reference as far as the heart of man is fixed upon it, and is separated from its relation to God, so that the world is treated as a supreme object of regard, while the knowledge of God is entirely lost sight of.

Since, according to John, participation in the divine life. depends entirely on faith in the Redeemer, this forms a new era of development in opposition to the former prevailing principle, and that state of estrangement from God, and of moral corruption from which believers are extricated. Though we find in John no such ample representation of human nature to be the only one by which the idea of a Satan can harmonize with the strictly theistical conception which evidently lies at the basis of John's theology, if nothing can be proved contradictory to this supposition, as certainly nothing of this kind can be proved in it. But such a Dualism as is founded in Heracleon's idea of Satan, we cannot presuppose without hesitation in that of John, but it will be necessary to produce distinct expressions which afford positive evidence of such a conception.

in its estrangement from God, as is delineated in Paul's writings, (which may be explained from the pec :liarity of his doctrinal method, and the peculiar style of his writings,) still it may be easily perceived that his views were essentially the same, and in perfect harmony with the essence of Christianity. We find here the same contrast between what human nature is, and is able to produce in the state of estrangement from God, and that higher stand-point to which it is raised by the transforming influence of a divine principle of life communicated to it, or, in other words, the σαρκικὸν and the πνευματικὸν. When John, in the introduction to his Gospel (i. 12), describes the children of God as those who owed this distinction, not to their descent from any particular race of men, and in general not to anything which lies within the compass of human nature;—when Christ says to Nicodemus, that what is born of the flesh is flesh; such language is, in the first place, opposed to the Jewish notion that outward descent from the theocratic nation gave an indisputable right to participation in the kingdom of God and in the dignity of his children; but this particular application is deduced from a truth expressed in the most general terms, namely, the general position, that the natural man by his disposition is estranged from the kingdom of God, and must receive a new divine life, in order to become a member of it. Hence in John, as well as in Paul, the same conditions and preparations are required for partaking in the blessing Christ is ready to bestow on mankind, the consciousness of bondage in the God-related nature of man,—the consciousness of personal sinfulness—a sense of the need of help and redemption, a longing after a new divine life, which alone can satisfy all the wants of the higher nature of man. We may here adduce the allusion to the brazen serpent (iii. 14), where the Jews, who in believing confidence expected by looking at it to be healed of their wounds, represent those who, under a sense of the destruction that threatens them from their spiritual maladies, look to the Redeemer with confidence for spiritual healing; and all those parables in John's Gospel, in which Christ speaks of thirst for that water of life, and hunger for that bread of life, which he is willing to bestow. Accordingly John, in his first Epistle, says that whoever believes himself to be free from sin, is

destitute of uprightness, and deceives himself; that such a man makes God a liar, since he acts as if all which the earlier divine revelations have asserted respecting human sinfulness, and which is implied in God's sending a Redeemer to the human race, were false; 1 John i. 9.

But in order that men may attain to faith in the Redeemer, and avail themselves of his aid, the outward revelation of the divine, with all the attestations that accompanied it in the external world, are not sufficient. Without the inward sense for the divine which is outwardly manifested in the person of the Saviour, they can give it no admission into their hearts. The outward power of the divine can exert no compulsive influence, but requires the mind to be already in a susceptible state, in order to produce its right effect. Without this, all external revelations and appeals are in vain; the unsusceptible "have eyes but they see not;" John xii. 40. Hence the attainment of faith depends on a preparative operation of the Holy Spirit on men's minds, by which a sense of the divine is awakened within them, and a consciousness of their higher wants. Thus a susceptibility for what will give real satisfaction is developed, so that faith naturally results from the conjunction of this inward susceptibility with the external divine revelation. To this Christ refers when he says to the Jews, (to whom, on account of the enthralment of their minds in earthly things, his words were necessarily unintelligible and strange,) in order to draw their attention to the grounds of their being offended with him (John vi. 44, 45), that they could not believe, that they could not come to him, that is, attain to faith in him, owing to this tendency of their disposition. No one (he declared) could come unto him who was not drawn to him by the Father who sent him; who had not heard the awakening voice of the heavenly Father in his inmost soul, and followed it. These words have indeed been misunderstood by the advocates of the Augustinian system, as if a divine excitement, independent of all human selfdetermination, were intended as producing that susceptibility for the divine; but this would be to impose a sense foreign

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1 In contrast to their bodily coming to him, which was only on account of their bodily necessities, for which they thus sought to obtain relief, the true spiritual coming to him must proceed from a feeling of their real spiritual necessities.

VOL. II.

to the connexion and the design of the discourse; and greater importance has been attached to a single netaphorical expression than it can have in such a connexion. Certainly the ervine impulse must be here contrasted with what is merely sensible and human; and the figurative expressions denote the power with which the divine impulse, when it is once felt, operates on the soul,-the power with which the divine manifests itself to the self-consciousness; but it is by no means said that this divine impulse of an operation of God to arouse the suppressed knowledge of God acts alone, and that man, by his free self-determination, does nothing to promote it. This supposition would be inconsistent with the design of all the passages of this kind, since, taken in their connexion, the words are intended to awake men to a sense of their criminal unsusceptibility as the cause of their unbelief. It would also contradict John's declaration of the condemnation that accompanied the appearance of the Redeemer and the publication of the gospel; for this condemnation implies the fact, that in the different reception given by men to the gospel, their different susceptibility or unsusceptibility for believing is manifested, and thus the difference of their entire disposition and character.

According to the doctrinal views of John, a twofold meaning is attached to the phrases, εἶναι ἐκ θεοῦ, and εἶναι ἐκ τῆς áλnoɛías. They either indicate, in the highest sense of the words, the inspiration first proceeding from faith through the divine spirit of life, which is the spirit of truth; or in a subordinate sense, the general connexion of the human mind with God, the capacity for the true and the divine, that inward susceptibility founded on the developed knowledge of God, which is the preparative for faith. In reference to the latter it is said, in John viii. 47, "He that is of God, heareth God's words;" and xviii. 37, "Every one that is of the truth, heareth my voice." Hence, though John presents in diametric opposition the idea of the natural man estranged from God, and the man who is born of God, yet according to his doctrine, various steps and transitions must be admitted between the first stand-point and the second, according as the original knowledge of truth and of God which has been suppressed by the sinful bias of the will, more or less prevents men from hearing the voice of God, and following

the drawings of their heavenly Father. The slumbering sense of God may indeed be awakened by the immediate impression of the glory manifested in the appearance of Christ; but it may also happen that a man, by following the drawing of his heavenly Father antecedent to the revela tion of Christ, uprightly strives after the divine and the good, and such a one is led through the divine to the divine. The confused partial revelation of God which had hitherto illuminated the darkness of his soul, and conducted him in life, leads him to the revelation of the divine original in human form, and he rejoices actually to behold the archetype in its effulgence which had hitherto shone upon him with only a dim and distant lustre; John iii. 21.

With respect to John's idea of the work of redemption, that appears most prominent which he had received from the immediate observation of the life of Christ, and its immediate impression on his religious self-consciousness. The life of Christ as the humanization of the divine, of which the design was to give a divine elevation to man, is the selfrevelation of the divine Logos (as the revealing principle for the mysterious essence of God) in the form of humanity, appropriated by him in order to communicate divine life to human nature, and to transform it into a revelation of the divine life. John's remarkable words, "The Logos became man, and we have beheld his glory as it was revealed in humanity," describe the nature of Christ's appearance, and what mankind are to become through him who is the central point of Christian faith and life. The same sentiments are expressed in his first epistle, "We announce to you as eyewitnesses, the manifestation of the eternal fountain of life, which was with the Father, in order that you may enter into fellowship with it." He states as the essential marks of this manifestation of the divine glory in human form, that he appeared full of grace and truth; grace, which means the communicative love of God, God as love; and truth, according to John's conceptions of it, as we have already remarked, is not anything speculative and abstract, but proceeds from the life, and embraces the whole unity of the life, and hence is one with goodness and holiness. Truth is

1 The darkness which cannot admit the divine light that shines upon it.

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