“And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us (1Jo 3:23).”
For Christmas this year a friend of mine gave me a book of funny quotes. I read quite a bit before I realized that the party had moved to another part of the room and that I was no longer a participant. I politely closed the book, set it down, and got up from where I was sitting and rejoined the party. But before I did, I found a quote from E.E. Cummings, “unbeingdead isn’t being alive.” It struck me as potentially profound but not that funny. At least not funny in the way that many of the other quotes were.
What did E.E. Cummings mean by “unbeingdead?” It comes from a poem he had written in 1962 for The Pen Review entitled, POEM (or “the divine right of majorities,
that illegitimate offspring of the divine right of kings” Homer Lea). In it, Cummings identifies “five simple facts no subhuman superstate ever knew” with the fifth one being that “unbeingdead isn’t being alive.” The poem was not helpful in clarifying what Cummings meant. That’s the trouble with poems. They can sound brilliant without being helpful at all.
Recently, I was in John’s First Epistle. While it is not known who John was writing to specifically, it is known that he was writing to a group of Christians who had run into some trouble with some false teachers (Walvoord and Zuck 2004, 880). John referred to these false teachers as antichrists (1Jo 2:18-26). Not only do we not know the particular recipients of John’s letter, but he also fails to identify the particular false teachers. Some argue that they were the Gnostics who had some peculiar views about the difference between spiritual and material (Walvoord and Zuck 2004, 880). Some argue that that they were Docetists who held that Jesus only appeared to be human and only appeared to have a body (Walvoord and Zuck 2004, 880). Still others argued that Jesus was a man on whom the divine Christ descended when he was baptized but was abandoned by the divine Christ before the Crucifixion (Walvoord and Zuck 2004, 880). In each of these cases the teachers were teaching a false doctrine and could be considered antichrists. They may have even been the antichrists John was writing about.
But the specific passage that stuck out for me reads, “and this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us (1Jo 3:23).” What struck me was that this commandment has two parts separated by an and. According to Oxford and is, “used to connect words of the same part of speech, clauses, or sentences, that are to be taken jointly.” You can not take one part of the commandment without taking the other.
Today, everyone wants to remind us that we are to love one another (Joh 13:34), even our enemies (Mat 5:43-44 and Luk 6:27), and that God is love (1Jo 4:8 and 16). This is pretty consistent throughout the New Testament (Rom. 13:8; Col. 3:14; 1 Thess. 4:9; 1 Tim. 1:5; 1 Pet. 1:22) and can even be found in The Law and the Old Testament (Lev 19:18, Job 31:29, Psa 7:4). This is so commonly understood in our culture that it would be hard to determine if it is innately known or if we know it because we come from a Judeo/Christian background. We also know that if we don’t have love, we are noisy and clanging cymbals, who are nothing, and have gained nothing (1Co 13:1-3). Far be it from me to argue against any of this but what if this is all we have or more specifically profess to be all we need. What if we profess love but deny God’s Son, Jesus Christ? Is love really enough?
On one occasion a crowd asked Jesus, “What must we do, to be doing the works of God (Joh 6:28)?” How would you expect that to be answered today? To love your enemies, to help the poor and the oppressed, to give to orphans and widows…? Jesus answered them in his day differently, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he sent (Joh 6:29).”
D.A. Carson comments that, “The work of God—i.e. what God requires—is faith… Faith, faith with proper Christological object, is what God requires, not ‘works’ in any modern sense of the term (Carson 1991, 285).” Edwin Blum noted that the crowd, “could not please God by doing good works. There is only one work of God, that is, one thing God requires. They need to put their trust in the One the Father has sent (Walvoord and Zuck 2004, 295).” i.e. Faith in Jesus the Christ.
I guess what I have been thinking about as a result of this quote from my friend’s gift is whether or not a person who loves apart from a faith in God is truly alive. We read that apart from the work of Christ we are already dead in our trespasses (Eph 2:1 and Col 2:13). Is love apart from Christ “unbeingdead” or apart from Christ are you “all dead?” The answer according to scripture is clear. No work apart from faith in Christ can save you from your trespasses. And yet today, many “Christians” would argue that God’s good news isn’t about your sins, the ontological fall, or original sin but rather it is “about God’s will being done on earth… through solidarity with all humanity in our suffering, oppression, and evil (Childers 2020, 30).” The good news is that you can do good works in this life.
John, in his epistle we know as First John, uses the word love around forty-six times because the Christians of his day were being deceived by false teachers into not loving one another. Today Christians are being deceived by an emphasis on a human understanding of love that draws them away from Jesus the Christ of the New Testament.
This is today’s deception. One part, faith in Christ, separate from the other part, love for one another leads to the deception of “unbeingdead” the appearance or feeling of being alive. However, the mere appearance of life is not enough for real life. Jesus came that we might have life more abundantly (Joh 10:10). Faith in His act of love on our behalf not only leads to eternal life it leads to a life of love hear and now. But beware a life of love apart from Christ. “Unbeingdead isn’t being alive.”
Hey everyone, thanks for reading today’s blog. If you want to know some more of my thoughts on the interaction between Faith, Hope, and Love check out my blog on that very topic. I would like to thank my regular readers for their patience. I didn’t write much this holiday season as it is Sarah and my first Christmas, New Years, and birthday celebration with our daughter and I didn’t want to miss any of it. Last year was a good year and I couldn’t have increased my readership over the previous year without you so thanks again. I am looking forward to 2022!
Photo by Sergey Nikolaev on Unsplash
Carson, D. A. The Gospel according to John. Grand Rapids, MI: Inter-Varsity Press, 1991.
Childers, Alisa. Another Gospel? A Lifelong Christian Seeks Truth in Reposne to Progressive Christianity. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale Momentum, 2020.
Walvoord, John F., and Roy B. Zuck. The Bible Knowledge Commentary. Dallas: Cook Communications Ministries, 2004.