That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched – this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete. (1 John 1:1-4)

The passage is sometimes used to support an empirical epistemology. Although I have refuted it elsewhere, a reminder is useful since this error entails an assault on the very nature of deity in order to preserve a false philosophical position.

The nature of God, or divinity itself, is spiritual and invisible and without form, and not subject to detection by the physical senses. God is unlike the heathen idols. He can indeed produce a tangible manifestation of his power and presence; however, John does not refer to knowledge of a manifestation, but to knowledge of what it was that was manifested. The Gospels teach us that the disciples recognized who Jesus was not by man’s testimony or by flesh and blood, but by revelation from the Father. Likewise, when we come to the faith, it is because of the Father’s testimony to our spirits that Jesus is the Christ, our savior and our sacrifice.

To claim that this text supports empiricism, that knowledge can come from sensation, is to say that the disciples recognized who Jesus was, even the divine Word, by their seeing and hearing and touching, that divinity itself was directly detected or necessarily inferred from the sensible aspects (or their sensations of the sensible aspects) of Jesus, namely, his human body. This constitutes a denial of the nature of God as spiritual and invisible and without form, and it is blasphemy by implication. Instead of winning an argument for empiricism, the person who so uses the passage endangers his own soul.

Once the theological implication has been made clear to him, if he refuses to recant in utter terror for his offense, the church should place him on trial as a heretic, lest his false doctrine infects the rest of the people. We must not represent the essence of divinity as something that can be examined and handled like an idol. This denial of God’s spiritual and transcendent nature results in the destruction of all sound theology, including the doctrines of the incarnation and atonement, and thus salvation itself. Ironically, those who reject empiricism in favor of God’s revelation and his direct action on the mind to impart understanding are the ones who are often regarded as false teachers.

The passage is not about epistemology, but Jesus Christ. John is telling us what it was that he saw and heard and touched. He does not mean that he found out what it was that he saw and heard and touched by seeing and hearing and touching. He saw and heard and touched the body of Christ, and he found out – not at all by seeing and hearing and touching – that this body belonged to the Word, or the Son of God. Jesus Christ, who appeared to us as a man, and who indeed possessed a true human nature, was the incarnation of deity.

So it was the Word that appeared, and what appeared was the Word. We must stress both sides of this, or what we have would not be the doctrine of the incarnation. If we say that Jesus was a genuine man, but only a man, then he was not the incarnation of anything. If we say that Jesus was God, but that he did not appear in a genuine human body, then again there was no incarnation. And if there was no incarnation, there was no substitution and no sacrifice for our sins. But since Jesus was indeed deity, and since as he indeed came to us and lived among us as a true man, and since he died for our sins and was raised from the dead, and since he even now continues to live as this same Jesus, we have life and hope in him.

John wishes to emphasize the incarnation very likely because his readers are encountering false teachers who in some way denies or distorts the doctrine. He writes, “Dear children, this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us….Who is the liar? It is the man who denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a man is the antichrist – he denies the Father and the Son” (2:18-19, 22).

Thus he is referring to not only a general teaching or a potential danger, but an existing situation. And this involves the threat of a false doctrine that denies the incarnation: “Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world” (4:1-3).

The apostles testified and left a permanent record concerning Jesus Christ, as to who he was, what he did, what happened to him, and also where he is and what he is doing now. It is often thought that we who are not apostles are at a disadvantage, but this is not Christ’s own view; instead, he said that blessed are those who have never seen, but who still believe. He does not regard those who have not seen him to be at a disadvantage, because truth and faith have never been dependent on physical sensations in the first place. Even the apostles did not believe because of their sensations, but because of the testimony of the Father by the Holy Spirit. This is the same Spirit that we have received in Christ. Therefore, our faith is essentially the same as the faith of the apostles. The foundation of our confidence is identical to theirs.

What is this testimony? What is this that the apostles proclaim? It is the message that Jesus Christ is the Word, the Son of God, who had been with God the Father since the beginning, even before the creation of the world. It is he who appeared as a man and lived for a time on the earth. This is the doctrine of the incarnation, and it embodies both the divinity and the humanity of Christ. In him is eternal life. It is necessary to grasp the whole of this message and all that the incarnation means, because John will go on to say that some have denied it, and because of this they can have no fellowship with us.

To have fellowship does not mean to have social interaction; rather, if there is going to be any meaningful social interaction, it should be because there is fellowship. And where there is fellowship, it remains even when there is no socializing. Fellowship refers to partnership, or to have something in common. In the biblical context it would denote a deep bond and unity because of faith in Jesus Christ. In Jesus Christ, we are joined to the Father and to the Son, and also to one another.

It is harmful to reduce fellowship to socializing, because then the idea of true fellowship is lost. And then salvation is also lost, because this fellowship is inseparably tied to eternal life in Christ, and this is in turn tied to the testimony of the apostles. A church barbecue is not fellowship, but where this is a common faith, there is fellowship even if there is never a church barbecue. Fellowship is the bond that we have with the Godhead and with one another as we affirm the doctrines regarding the nature, life, and work of Jesus Christ.