The Point of It All
What's the purpose of truth?
Photo by Mike Erskine on Unsplash
(A seven-minute read)
One of my favorite passages of Scripture over the last few years has been the opening lines of John’s first epistle. It’s packed with so much power and dynamite that I could wax eloquent about it for hours.
Essentially, in the opening three verses, John testifies to his readers of the things he and his fellow disciples had experienced in their journey with Christ. “That which was from the beginning,” he thus explains, “which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life . . . ” In other words, John is talking about the full-bodied experience of encountering God in the living Christ.
In so doing, he affirms the incarnation—affirms the goodness of creation and the fact that God inhabited it; affirms that the Jesus-journey is one of experiencing life in the flesh, that Christianity is not a religion that tries to escape the material world but one that celebrates and affirms it, and that journeying with Jesus is an embodied experience.
He then continues, “[T]he life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare to you that eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested to us—that which we have seen and heard we declare to you . . . ” In these words he pivots to his missional task: he “bears witness” and “declares” to his readers this astounding news. He wants them to hear it and receive it.
But then the next line is what captivates my imagination the most. The next word is a simple word and yet loaded with meaning. “That,” he explains. This word in Greek is the word hina and it’s a giant flag to the reader that a significant transition is taking place. It means “so that” or “in order that.” In other words, it denotes purpose. He’s about to explain the reason for which he “bears witness” or “declares” the gospel-story to his readers, the goal he has in mind for them if they receive and embrace the gospel. And it’s big.
“So that,” he explains, “you also may have fellowship with us.”
I love it! Don’t miss it. At the center of John’s missional task is a communal agenda. The goal for which he strives in his “witnessing” is that people would be brought into fellowship, brought into community, with the family of God.
I’m equally intrigued by what he doesn’t say is his goal. He doesn’t say he shares the gospel so that someday his readers can go to heaven when Jesus returns—though that will certainly be true. He doesn’t say he shares the gospel so that his readers will accept “truth” and check off doctrinal boxes, though that’s all, to be sure, involved. That is not John’s ultimate goal. His ultimate goal is for his readers to share fellowship, community, koinonia (in Greek), communion with the family of God.
Yet it’s more than that. Not only does he hope to draw people into fellowship “with us,” as he says, he goes on to explain in the next clause that “truly our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ.”
This is astounding! This, to me, fully and robustly explains the whole purpose for which we were created. The fancy theological and philosophical word is telos. It’s the whole purpose for which something is created, the end toward which it moves—its ultimate destiny and reason for existence. According to this passage, and I’d say the whole narrative of Scripture, the telos of humanity is relationship with one another and relationship with the triune God.
This idea may sound overly-simplistic and even trite, almost too familiar to strike us as profound. But from my experience, failure to keep this telos firmly planted in my heart and mind leads me to easily get off course and chasing other rabbits. So often this especially manifests itself, both in my own experience and in the life of my faith community, in making theology and doctrine ends in themselves. That is, when I don’t remember that relational community is the ultimate goal for humanity, I get to thinking that getting people to check off doctrinal boxes is the missional finish line. In other words, getting people to agree to a set of propositional ideas, or getting them to act a certain way as individuals, is what I’m after—that is the goal in the whole project.
It also leads me to give people a lot shorter leash if I perceive they’re not on board with my propositional agenda, prioritizing orthodoxy—as though that was of prime importance—over orthopathy.
Similarly, this also sometimes subtly manifests in what some Christians call “friendship evangelism.” At the risk of gross reductionism, essentially, in this model, relationship and community serve as the vehicle to get people to eventually accept propositional ideas about Christ. We thus put the cart before the horse and turn the ends into the means. Instead of relationship being the goal of evangelism, we turn it into the means of evangelism, thinking that doctrinal conformity is the goal.
But that’s not what John says in this passage. The truth about Christ—which does entail propositional content—is the means to another end: namely, relationship with the triune God and relationship with God’s family. Theology, doctrine, propositional ideas are important only insofar as they draw us into relational fellowship with God and with God’s people. And they continue to be important to the degree that they help us live within that community in safe and mutually-edifying ways. Doctrine and theology have no useful purpose apart from these functions (though, again, I don’t want to draw a false dichotomy at all, since our relationship with God cannot be devoid of theological and propositional content, as though we simply relate to him in some sort of content-less and wholly-mystical union).
This has especially struck me as particularly relevant as I’ve been doing some reading for my doctoral research lately. I read a number of contemporary works that argued for the importance of the ancient creeds and Reformation confessions. The thread woven throughout many of the books was the need for the people of God to protect “sound doctrine” even if that means we must dogmatically exclude people if they don’t agree with that “sound doctrine.”
Don’t misunderstand me: I am all for good teaching and think the truth about God sets people free. I wholeheartedly applaud the desire to promote orthodoxy—and I’m not categorically opposed to the fact that some people will exclude themselves from Christian community because they refuse to get on board with certain key and nonnegotiable ideas.
But it just strikes me as odd that so many times writers speak about guarding orthodoxy almost in a way that ascribes personhood to that orthodoxy, even seemingly ascribing more personhood to that orthodoxy than the actual people they are excluding from fellowship because of their refusal to embrace that (impersonal) orthodoxy. In other words, we sometimes exert more energy guarding abstract and impersonal ideas than guarding actual people, prioritizing fellowship with dogma over fellowship with people.
I’m not sure I know what the answer is—how we strike the balance—especially since I am a huge advocate for good and sound theology. I just know that we must go the extra mile in remembering what the ultimate goal is, the telos, the reason for the whole project, the purpose for which we have theology and “sound doctrine” and good teaching at all: fellowship with God and fellowship with God’s people.
Ironically, that idea comes directly from the very first lines of an ancient document that many of these writers so strongly advocate protecting. In the Westminster Shorter Catechism, written in the seventeenth century, the first question asks:
“What is the chief end of man?”
And its answer: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”
If we could just remember that our “chief end” is to “enjoy” God forever—and, John might add, “enjoy” our fellow creatures forever—perhaps we could keep a lot of things straight.
Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil student at the University of Oxford (what they call a PhD), focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram and Twitter, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.