NOVELTY. INNOVATION. THINKING outside the box. These are often good things. We enjoy so many technological advances because someone dared to imagine new possibilities. For example, as I look around my kitchen now, thinking back to the appliances of my childhood, I see both old and new, continuity and change. The technologies behind our toaster and blender, for example, haven’t changed much. The air fryer? It’s a relatively new idea — but it’s mostly old technology recombined in a new way and gussied up with an electronic control panel.

But the microwave oven? The technology existed when I was a kid, but microwave ovens were too bulky and expensive for an average household. Now they’re everywhere, in homes, offices, and schools. Ditto for other advances that are so ubiquitous as to be taken for granted. Today’s portable computers have more power than those which once took up an entire room. We put phones in our pockets and take them with us; sometimes, we even use them as phones (what a concept!). And now our TVs are thin enough to hang on the wall like pictures. With the old technology, TVs had to be as deep as they were wide; a 65″ TV would have been bigger than a love seat.

So yes, some things have come a long way. But does every innovation count as progress? The Internet, for example, opens a world of useful information to us — but also disinformation and deception. Social media apps help people stay connected, but also empower the spread of anonymous hatred.

And as it goes with technology, so too with the world of ideas. Progress needs people who can imaginatively think outside the box. But new ideas aren’t necessarily true ideas, and even the ones that are legitimate can be misappropriated and misapplied. It’s a good thing, for example, that the lingering effects of childhood trauma are now widely recognized. The word “trauma,” however, has so captured the popular imagination that it’s passed into the vernacular. We need to be careful not to overuse the term so much that we begin labeling every difficult experience as traumatic. Doing so will make it harder to take seriously the very real ways a life can be devastated by abusive relationships and overwhelming events.

Imagination is a gift. New ideas are necessary. But it’s possible to go too far. And as we can see in 2 John, it’s possible to become enamored of ideas that are new but untrue.

IT BEARS REPEATING: when we hear the word “church,” most of us are likely to picture something quite different from the early gatherings of believers in John’s day. My wife and I, for example, drive roughly five miles to our suburban congregation every Sunday. Because I teach an adult Bible class there, we see a fairly consistent group of people there each week. In between Sundays, however, we mostly go our separate ways. People will show up, of course, when there’s a need or for a social event. But for the most part each household moves in its own sphere of family, neighborhood, school, and work.

This would have been foreign to John. Believers then were more likely to do life together, to be a surrogate family. They didn’t drive to a distant place called a “church”; they gathered in nearby homes. Nor did they have the resources we take for granted. They didn’t have Bibles or Bible apps. Copies of the Hebrew Scriptures existed, but few if any would have owned or had direct access to them. And there was no such thing as the New Testament as we know it.

What they did have in the early days, however, was access to an ever-dwindling number of eyewitnesses and apostles, whether through face-to-face conversation or correspondence. When someone in the community floated some new but troubling idea about Jesus, people went to the apostles with their questions and concerns.

Note that this is not quite the same thing as people today going to their pastors to get their opinion. Today, Scripture is the church’s primary authority, and the pastor’s opinion is secondary. But John bore the authority of an eyewitness — one of the few who remained! — who was also one of Jesus’ inner circle of disciples. He was a full-fledged apostle, and his words carried the weight that today we give to the Bible. Indeed, his words would become Scripture, as would the letters of other apostles. That’s why he can write with the kind of boldness that to modern ears may sound overly imperious. In 2 John, for example, he again points to the secessionists, with their innovative but false ideas about Jesus, and calls them “deceivers” and “antichrists,” warning his readers to beware of their teaching. He then says this:

Anyone who runs ahead and does not continue in the teaching of Christ does not have God; whoever continues in the teaching has both the Father and the Son. (2 John 9, NIV)

The verb translated here as “runs ahead” literally means “to lead before” and can be used in different ways, including in the straightforward sense of one person physically going ahead of another. In Matthew 26, for example, Jesus tells the disciples that they are all about to abandon him, but then adds that after he has risen, he will “go ahead” of them into Galilee (vs. 31-32). The disciples are probably so shocked that they don’t hear that last point about Galilee. That may be why, later, the women who returned from the empty tomb were instructed twice to remind the disciples that Jesus would meet them there (Matt 28:5-10).

But John seems to use the verb metaphorically; it’s the only time he uses it in any of his writings. And though the New International Version translates the word as “runs ahead,” translations as different from each other as the Common English Bible and the New American Standard both render it as someone “going too far.”

As I’ve said before, it’s impossible to know what the secessionists believed and taught. It had something to do with denying that Jesus had come as the Son of God in the flesh. Here, John says that they were not abiding in the “teaching of Jesus,” which may mean both the true and apostolic teaching about Jesus and the truth Jesus himself taught. Because of this, they do not have God.

Reading between the lines of John’s letters, I imagine the secessionists as professing to be Christians, but believing themselves to have some kind of superior insight. They did not see themselves as John saw them: people who were too worldly in their ideas and priorities to recognize that their innovative teachings had crossed a line. Theologically, they had gone too far.

And as we’ll see, in order to protect the fledgling church, John has to draw a firm line himself.