There follows yet another description of the same men, taking up that in Jude 1:16, and generalizing it in harmony with what is suggested by the apostolic prediction. In three bold strokes it gives a representation of them which is at once the sharpest and the broadest of all.
This final description, too, at last lays bare the root of their hopeless corruption. These be they who separate themselves, sensual, having not the Spirit. The pronoun "themselves" cannot be retained in face of the weight of documentary evidence against it.
The verb (which is one of very rare occurrence) is held to be capable of more than one sense—seceding, causing divisions, creating factions, making definitions or distinctions. The most natural meaning seems to be that adopted by the Revised Version, they who make separations.
So Tyndale; Cranmer and the Genevan have "these are makers of sects," and Luther gives "makers of factions.'' It may be that they caused divisions by setting themselves up as the only enlightened Christians, and, on the ground of that enlightenment, claiming to be superior to the moral laws which bound others.
The term translated "sensual" has unfortunately no proper representative in English. It is "psychical," being formed from the noun psyche, which is rendered "life" or "soul." This psyche is intermediate between "body" and "spirit."
It is in the first instance simply the bond or principle of the animal life, and in the second instance it is embodied life. Thus it is that in man which he has in common with the brute creation beneath him, But it becomes also more than this, expressing that in man which renders him capable of connection with God.
For in the third instance it denotes the seat of feeling, desire, affection, and emotion; the center of the personal life—the self in man. The adjective itself occurs in the New Testament only in a few passages of marked importance—1 Corinthians 2:14; 1 Corinthians 15:44, 1 Corinthians 15:46; James 3:15; and the present verse.
Here it designates the men as men who live only for the natural self—men who make the sensuous nature, with its appetites and passions, the law of their life; natural or animal men, as the Revised Version gives it in the margin.
Wickliffe renders it "beastly;" Tyndale, Cranmer, and the Genevan, "fleshly;" the Rhemish, "sensual." The third clause admits of being rendered either "having not the spirit" (in which the Authorized is supported by Wickliffe, Tyndale, and Cranmer), or "having not the Spirit" (so the Revised Version, following the Genevan and the Rhemish).
For it is in many passages difficult to decide whether the word "spirit" means the Holy Spirit of God or man's own spirit—that in him in virtue of which he can have fellowship with the Divine, and on which God specially acts; "that highest and noblest part of man," as Luther puts it, "which qualifies him to lay hold of incomprehensible, invisible things, eternal things; in short … the house where faith and God's Word are at home."
The rendering of the Revised Version is favoured by the occurrence of the term in the following verse. The Spirit of God was not in the lives or the thoughts of these men, and hence they were creators of division, and sensual.
Their pretension was that they were the eminently spiritual. But in refusing the Divine Spirit they had sunk to the level of an animal life, immoral in itself, and productive of confusion to the Church.