meaning with certainty. Some of the many explanations are as follews : Such sin as God punishes with deadly sickness or sud- den death. All those sins punished with excommunication (so the older Catholic theologians). An unrepented sin. Envy. A sinful state or condition. The sin by which the Christian falls back from Christian life into death. The anti-Christian denial that Jesus is the Christ.
The phrase XaBetv ayaptiay Javnropdpov to incur a death- bearing sin (A. V., bear sin and die), occurs Num. xviii, 22, Sept., and the distinction between sins unto death and sins not unto death is common in Rabbinic writings. However John’s expression may have been suggested by these, it cannot be assumed that they determine the sense in which he uses it.
Life and death in the passage must correspond. Bodily death and spiritual life cannot be meant. The passage must be interpreted in the light of Jolin’s utterances elsewhere con- cerning life and death. In ver. 12, he says: He that hath the Son hath life, and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life. In iii, 14, 15, he says that he that loveth not abideth in death: that he that hateth his brother ts a manslayer, and that no manslayer hath eternal life abiding in him. These canons of interpretation point to the explanation, in which some of the best authorities agree, that the sin unto death does not refer to a specific act, but to a class or species of sins, the tendency of which is to cut the bond of fellowship with Christ. Hence the passage is in the key-note of fellowship which pervades the Epistle. Whatever breaks the fellowship between the soul and Christ, and, by consequence, between the individual and the body of believers, is wnto death, for there is no life apart from Christ. It is indeed true that this tendency inheres in aJ/ sin. Sin is essentially death. But a distinction is to be made, as | Canon Westcott observes, between sins which flow from human | imperfection and infirmity, and sins which are open manifesta- | tions of a character alien from God. “Add unrighteousness is ( sin, and there is a sin not unto death.” It must be carefully borne in mind in the study of the passage, that John is speak- ing of sinful acts as revelations of character, and not simply in themselves. So Huther: “Such sinning as is characterized,