NOTES for Jo1 2:18-29
Whom does the apostle mean when he speaks of ‘antichrists’? Today's usage associates the figure of the antichrist with something infernal; to us, an antichrist is necessarily a creature of hell. John, however, evidently uses the word in its original sense: an antichrist is someone who opposes Christ, the Messiah. An opponent of the Messiah. And the apostle offers what seems to be one of the earliest Christian creeds in the history of the Church, consisting of a single statement: whoever does not accept Jesus as the Christ, as the Messiah, is not a Christian. In refusing this confession, a person also loses the Father, and communion with God itself becomes impossible for them. Such a statement may seem too harsh.
It also seems to contradict the experience of spiritual life: today, there can hardly be any doubt that communion with God is possible in traditions other than Christianity. But John makes one important qualification. He says that the antichrists he mentions ‘went out from us’, from the Christian community, from the Church. In doing so, they proved that they ‘had never been of us’. Evidently, he is speaking not simply of non-Christians, but of Christians who have fallen away. Of those who had already entered the Church and then, of their own free will, left it.
Not of those who are seeking their spiritual path or have found it outside the Church, but of those who have turned aside from their path or abandoned it altogether. Such a renunciation always carries the risk of serious spiritual consequences, even the loss of the possibility of conscious communion with God. This concerns not only Christians, although Christians naturally bear a particular responsibility. Any abandonment of one's spiritual path, whatever that path may be, leads to similar consequences. Simply because every step along a spiritual path changes a person, objectively and irreversibly.
On leaving the Church, a person does not return to the state they were in before conversion and baptism. After baptism, returning to that state is impossible. One may become an unbeliever and cease to belong to the Church, but one cannot become ‘unbaptised again’. A spiritual life not lived through to the end is an unpleasant thing: it always takes its revenge. The possibilities given to a person may destroy their life if they refuse to use them. And this is more true of spiritual possibilities than of any others.