The Christological Test

Today's Reading

Read 1 John 4:1-6 again, slowly. Then read 1 John 4:13-15: "By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit... whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God."

Read John 1:14: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth."

Read Colossians 2:9: "For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily."

And read 1 Corinthians 12:3: "Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking in the Spirit of God ever says 'Jesus is accursed!' and no one can say 'Jesus is Lord' except in the Holy Spirit."

Reflection

Yesterday we noticed that John refuses to evaluate spirits by intensity. Today we notice what he does evaluate them by — and it is startling. The test is not ethical at first glance. It is not even practical. It is doctrinal, and very specifically Christological. Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God.

Most modern Christians, asked how to tell whether a movement is of God, would answer with some combination of "by its love" or "by its converts" or "by its fruit." Those are not wrong answers; they are New Testament answers; we will get to all of them. But they are not John's first answer. His first answer is: what does this spirit say about Jesus? And not Jesus in the abstract — Jesus come in the flesh. Incarnate. Embodied. The Jesus of Bethlehem and Nazareth and Galilee and the cross and the empty tomb. The actual man. The Word made flesh.

Why does John lead with this? Because in his own moment a movement had emerged that loved spiritual experience and despised the body. The proto-Gnostics in 1 John's vicinity were happy to talk about "the Christ" as a heavenly spirit, an emanation, an idea, a presence. What they could not stomach was that this Christ was a Galilean carpenter who had bled and died in Roman-occupied Judea. They wanted spirituality without scandal. They wanted, in modern language, the vibe without the man. And John says: that spirit is not from God. No matter how powerful it feels. No matter how illuminating its visions. The minute the spirit begins to detach Christ from Jesus, you are dealing with another spirit.

This is the deep logic of Paul's seemingly strange line in 1 Corinthians 12:3. He has a charismatic congregation that loves spiritual gifts. He starts his teaching on those gifts not with the gifts themselves but with this benchmark: no one speaking in the Spirit of God ever says "Jesus is accursed," and no one can say "Jesus is Lord" except in the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of God always lands the conversation on the lordship of the historical Jesus. Always. That is one of the inescapable signatures of his presence.

J.I. Packer captured this in a striking image. The Spirit, he wrote in Keep In Step With the Spirit, has a "floodlight ministry" — his work is to illumine Jesus Christ, to make the Son visible and beautiful and authoritative to us. A floodlight at a stadium is not the point; the field is the point. You know a floodlight is doing its job not by looking at it but by how clearly you see what it lights. Likewise, you know the Holy Spirit is doing his work not by how vivid the spiritual experience itself is but by how clearly Jesus comes into focus through it.

Apply this test to your own context, gently but honestly. There are charismatic ministries that pass it superbly — that pray for healing, expect prophetic words, and yet land relentlessly on the cross-and-resurrection Jesus of the Gospels. There are charismatic ministries that fail it — where "the anointing" or "the presence" or "the move of the Spirit" has become its own object, and the Jesus content is thin. There are cessationist churches that pass the test — where Christ is preached weekly with such depth that the Spirit's floodlight ministry is plainly at work even when no one would dare claim it. There are cessationist churches that fail it — where the sermon is theologically correct but the actual person of Jesus has become a system about Jesus, and no one in the pew is moved by him. Both sides can pass. Both sides can fail. The test is the same.

Calvin pressed this point in a way that is worth recovering. He insisted, against both the medieval mystics on one side and the radical reformers on the other, that the Spirit cannot be separated from the Word. "The Word is the instrument by which the Lord dispenses the illumination of his Spirit to believers," he wrote in the Institutes. He went further: "Take away the Word, and no faith will then remain." For Calvin, any spirit that runs ahead of, around, or apart from the Scriptures is suspect on its face — not because the Spirit cannot move beyond what is written, but because the Spirit refuses to move against what is written, and refuses to bypass the Christ who is only known through what is written.

Notice what this means for how we test our own experiences. A song that swells in worship can be the Spirit landing the truth of the gospel on your heart, or it can be a chord progression doing what chord progressions do. A sense of presence in prayer can be the Spirit drawing you closer to the Son, or it can be the same neurochemistry that produces the feeling of presence in any meditative practice. A prophetic word that names something true about your life can be the Spirit speaking, or it can be cold reading. The test is not the intensity of the experience; the test is whether the experience deepens your grip on the actual Jesus of the Gospels — his incarnation, his cross, his resurrection, his lordship.

This is also how to read the modern movements that fail the Christological test. Some of them are obvious. A "spiritual" Christ-figure who speaks through a medium and offers therapeutic affirmation while never mentioning the cross is not the Christ of the Apostles. A "Jesus" who is largely a symbol of progressive politics or conservative grievance, with the historical particulars filed off, is not him either. A teacher who claims fresh revelation that downgrades or supplements the Gospels' Jesus is, by John's test, not speaking in the Spirit of God — whatever else he may be doing.

But some of the failures are subtler. There is a perennial Christian temptation, even inside orthodox churches, to prefer the Christ of our preferences to the Christ of the Gospels. A more comfortable Jesus. A less embodied Jesus. A Jesus whose cross is metaphorical, whose resurrection is poetic, whose lordship is optional. That Christ is the easy one. The actual one — the Word made flesh, who ate fish after rising, whose hands still bear the marks — is harder. He is also the only one whose Spirit John recognizes.

So today's discernment is interior as much as exterior. Before you turn the Christological test on the latest viral preacher or the conference your friend is excited about, turn it on your own spirituality. Is the Jesus you have been worshipping the Jesus of the four Gospels — the one with sweat and tears and a real death? Or is he a Jesus you have edited? The Holy Spirit will keep returning you, again and again, to the embodied, crucified, risen Lord. Anything in you that pulls away from that man is, in John's bracing language, not from God.

Going Deeper

Open one of the Gospels — Mark, perhaps, since it is the shortest and the most embodied — and read a single chapter today as if for the first time. Notice how physical it is: dust, spit, bread, blood, weeping, sleep. Then ask: is the Jesus I usually pray to this Jesus, or have I quietly substituted a smoother version? The Spirit's chief work is to keep landing your faith back on the man Mark describes. Let him.