Category Archives: Johannine Studies

Theological Commentary: 1 John 2:3-6

Posted by on June 3, 2010 1 comment

Now by this we may be sure that we know him, if we obey his commandments. As the Elder makes clear throughout his treatise, one of the main goals of his writing is to give true and reliable modes of discernment to the church as to where they stand in relation to the God of Jesus Christ (cf. 5:13). In a situation similar to that of Paul in Galatians, the Elder is dealing with a new teaching, indeed a new (and thus false) gospel being proclaimed by a faction in the church (cf. 2:19, 22-24). It is precisely in response to the disturbance created by the presence of these teachers that the Elder writes, to instruct those who follow Christ in how to be confident in the reality of the new life that they have been given in the Spirit (cf. 3:24).

However, at this point the Elder does not point to a doctrinal formula or codify a set of dogma from which the church might be assured of its orthodoxy and rightness (though, as we will see, truthful Christological confession is of the utmost importance to him). Rather he moves straight to the issue of obedience to Christ’s commandments. As 1 John takes great pains to lay out repeatedly, “his commandments” always and only means belief and confession of Jesus as the Son of the Father, and loving one another just as Christ has loved us (cf. 3:23).

It is love that is the commandment of Christ. Love one another just as Christ, in his death and resurrection, loved us (cf. John 13:34). For the Elder it is precisely in being given over to love one another with cruciform, self-expending, death-embracing love that we know that we belong to God. It is in the action of loving, of giving yourself away for your sister or brother that we know that we are God’s children. This is the one and only assurance that the Elder offers to the doubting minds of his flock: that in their loving one another, even unto death, they will know that they belong to God.

Whoever says, “I have come to know him,” but does not obey his commandments, is a liar, and in such a person the truth does not exist; The Elder now moves on to state the inverse of his previous assertion, in a move directly levied against the teachers he writes against. Any of those who claim knowledge of God but who refuse to give themselves over to Christ’s own mode of love, are liars. Truth and action cannot be separated for the Elder. Regardless of the content of their teachings, for 1 John there simply is no truth in those who place themselves outside of Jesus’s own concrete call to love one another unto death. In such persons there simply is no truth. For, in Johannine perspective, Christ, in all his historical singularity, is the truth (cf. John 14:6). In 1 John the utter and indissoluble unity between truth and action lies at the center. There is, definitively no orthodoxy that is not simultaneously orthopraxis, both of which are utterly defined by the cruciform identity and teaching of Jesus Christ.

but whoever obeys his word, truly in this person the love of God has reached perfection. We do well at this point to remember these verse’s proximity to 2:1, which holds the reality and possibility of sin ever before the believing community. By virtue of Christ and the Spirit we indeed “may not sin”, but even in that hopeful statement of the newness that is opened up in Christ we are thrown back upon Christ’s own act on our behalf as that alone on which we can ultimately depend.

Thus, when the Elder speaks of the love of God reaching perfection (or completion) in the act of faithful obedience we must always remember that this is not statement about a level of spiritual achievement or formation into perfection. Rather it is to say that in the very act of obedience to Christ’s way, that is, in the act of self-expending love for the sister or brother, in that moment, we abide fully, truly, and perfectly in the love of the triune God. “Perfection” for the Elder is not a state which we attain or into which we enter in any static sense. Rather it is always and only the event of finding ourselves given over to one another in self-expending love, the love of Jesus himself.

By this we may be sure that we are in him: whoever says, “I abide in him,” ought to walk just as he walked. Finally, the Elder moves on to restate again what he first articulated in 2:3, namely how we may know that we truly dwell in God. Again the answer, though worded differently is the same: we must walk as Christ himself walked. For the Elder our confidence in our participation in the life of God is grounded always in living toward one another in cruciformity.

And this encapsulates the unique dynamic in 1 John of tying together inextricably the reality of participation in the triune life of God, and the concrete, fleshly, material, particular history of Jesus of Nazareth. It is precisely by walking in the steps of the Jew from Nazareth that we are caught up into the very life of the trinitarian God. The fullness of our deification, our participation in God’s own life is always and only explicable in terms of being united to Christ’s own particular historical life of self-divesting, kenotic love. Only in him, in his complete and utter singularity of love do we find ourselves caught up in God’s life. Any other articulation of union with God, in Johannine eyes, can only be a lie of the antichrist.

Revolutionary Christianity

Posted by on May 25, 2010 5 comments

David Rensberger, in his helpful article, “Conflict and Community in the Johannine Letters” points out the deeply revolutionary and apocalyptic nature of the Joahnnine message, especially in relation to Christology and the ethics of agape:

The author of the Letters defends incarnational Christology not just because it is “what you heard from the beginning” (1 John 2:24), though that is part of his appeal, but because it rightly expresses the nature of the God who is love.What is at stake, in this author’s view, is not the authority of tradition but the most fundamental theological insight of Johannine Christianity: that God, out of love, entered fully into the human condition, risking and suffering death itself in order to bring life to human beings.

This is not an essentially conservative theological position. It radically challenged the established religious cultures of its time, both Jewish and Greco-Roman, by insisting on the freedom of God to act in a way utterly unanticipated by tradition, a way that upset not only commonplace theological and philosophical assumptions but hierarchical social structures as well. What is happening in 1 and 2 John is not so much a struggle against revolutionaries as a struggle within a revolution. Neither side questions that the way of God is contrary to the way of the world (though the author tries to associate the opponents with the world in 1 John 4:3-6). The battle is over how the revolution is to be conceived: in its original terms as radical divine intervention in the world, or in a new way as radical divine opposition to the world. In a sense, it is a struggle over how to maintain the purity of the radical Johannine way, whether by preserving the pure teaching “heard from the beginning” or by purifying it still further from contamination by the flesh. The Elder is trying to prevent, not the success of a revolution, but the diversion of a revolution onto a path that he fears may cause it to fail.

It never ceases to amaze me how deeply the Johannine corpus delves into the most fundamental issues of Christian faithfulness, never disentangling but always bringing to the fore the inextricable connection between Christological confession of Jesus as the fullness of God, come in the flesh, and the ethic of radical, self-giving love. All of this is predicated on God’s own descent into the world in Jesus, this radical divine intervention that can only, to my mind, be described as apocalyptic.

In Jesus God’s Trinitarian agape has invaded “the world” (i.e. the system of powers and principalities whose dominion over creation is predicated on the power of death) and created a rupture within it, a rupture of self-abandoning love that goes to the cross for others. And in the sending of the Spirit this Christic rupture of love continues to break into history, giving men and women to one another in this same pattern, rhythm of cruciform love, the love that seeks not its own but willingly lays itself down for the other. The church is the sign and sacrament of this rupture within the rule of the fallen powers, this rupture of agape, of self-abandonment into love. It is only by this radical gift of God’s Trinitarian love, the love that breaks through the powers of death, that we are given to one another, to live together within this Christic agape. And thus it is only in a common life of constant prayer and doxology by which we continually offer up our own our bodies (Rom 12:1-3) to God’s agape that we can live and embody the gospel, the gospel of self-abandoning love.

And it is precisely in this self-offering, this abandoning of ourselves in love for one another that we stand, fully in the utter fleshliness of the Jesus’s revolution. There is nothing more concrete, nothing more fleshly, nothing more earthly, than this love, the love of Jesus Christ, and him Crucified. Which for us always must mean “Love one another, just as I have loved you.”

Throw Yourself Away in Love: An Easter Season Sermon

Posted by on May 3, 2010 7 comments

When he had gone out, Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:31-35)

“Love one another as I have loved you.” As far as I’m concerned this has to be what we would take as the “hardest” commandment ever given in the history of all of God’s dealings with Israel and the church. And it is, decidedly, a commandment. This is God in the flesh, laying down his law. Jesus, after washing the feet of his disciples, welcoming them into the Father’s household, tells them what they must do. Here comes the requirement: You must love one another just as I have loved you.

Now, the text is clear that what Jesus was talking about was something the disciples could not understand until later (John 13:7). “Love one another as I have loved you” is not something that they ever could have understood apart from the cross and the resurrection. Indeed, “Love one another as I have loved you” simply means, “Live my cross and resurrection toward each other.” To love one another as Jesus has loved us means to do the very thing that Jesus did: to abandon oneself wholly to the loving service and nourishing of others. And if we do this, Jesus claims that “though we die, we will live” (John 11:25).

But how? How can we even countenance loving one another as Jesus has loved us? That is a word too deep to bear – and I mean that literally. We, being who we are, as human beings bound in slavery quite simply cannot bear the word that Jesus lays on is. It is too much. It takes us beyond the bounds of what a people, born into slavery and deeply comfortable there, can stand. Like Israel, when we are called into the wilderness of loving one another just as Christ has loved us we find ourselves crying out for the fleshpots of Egypt:

“They said to Moses, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt? Is this not the very thing we told you in Egypt, ‘Let us alone and let us serve the Egyptians’? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.” (Exodus 14:11-12)

And so also, when we hear Jesus’s new commandment, “Love one another just as I have loved you” we respond with cries of desperation and despair. This is just too much! This is a wilderness of death and toil! We cannot abide Jesus’s call to uncalculated, unconstrained, unhesitating love. We just can’t. After all, look at what Jesus’s loving looks like in this very passage. Jesus humiliates himself for those he loves, and those he loves aren’t exactly the easiest bunch to love. The feet Jesus washes are the feet of Judas the betrayer and Peter the denier.

This is a point that must not go unnoticed when we read the gospel and letters of John with their constant call to love “one another.” Don’t for a second think that this is somehow the easy version of “love your enemies.” The “one another” that Jesus loves is the company of betrayers and backstabbers, of cowards and utterly irritating simpletons who utterly and completely don’t get it.  It is a crowd of sleazy corrupt bureaucrats and guerrilla revolutionaries. This is the “one another” that Jesus loves and which he calls into sharing that same love, the love that washes feet, the goes to the cross and the grave.

No matter what, whenever we read Jesus’s call to love one another just has he has loved us we all have a sense of its radical hardness. And even if we believe it is possible, we know its not very likely. However, if we avoid lifting these discourses of Jesus out of their narrative context, things get more interesting. They get interesting in that Jesus seemed to think the very opposite in regard to the message he was preaching: “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10).

In Jesus’s view, the call to abandon ourselves in cruciform love that he was preaching was not something hard and burdensome, but rather a call to leave such burdens behind. Jesus seems to think that this self-abandoning is easy, and that by contrast it is restless striving of the Gentiles and the burdensome commands of the priestly elite that is hard (cf. Matt 6:32; Luke 11:46; 12:30). In other words, Jesus viewed his call to love one another in a way that is exactly opposite from how we view it when we encounter it. What is to us an impossible demand that must have some other explanation is for Jesus liberation, resurrection, indeed the very life of God the Father. What we cannot bear is the depth to which this love will liberate us from the dominating forces of slavery and death.

Because after all, we are used to living in a world run by control and calculation. This is the logic of all existence under sin. This the logic that says “Hey, this guy is raising the dead. We gotta kill him” (cf. John 11:47ff). But most of the time the logic of control, calculation, and management doesn’t seem so insidious. We figure out what we can handle, what we need to limit, the boundaries we need to draw to do right by ourselves, or maybe our families, possibly even some friends. We learn how to be reasonable, to manage, to get by with what we have and acquire what we need. Is this so wrong?

Yes. A thousand times yes. Or rather, this is slavery. This is the life that accepts death and the final outcome of all things. Death is the limit, the boundary for all our doings. All the resources we have, all the things we can do, all the methods and calculations we can employ are ultimately a dance with the inevitable: death. Where death is the ultimate boundary there can finally be no truly new possibilities, no complete and utter transformation, and certainly no loving one another “just as I have loved you.” If death is the boundary that finally rules, then yeah, it sure would be better to be a slave in Egypt than to die in the wilderness!

And this is why the resurrection of the crucified is our only hope. Indeed only if Christ is raised is there any such thing as hope. If Christ has been raised, then death, which hovers at the boundary, defining our lives of calculation and control, has no power to shut things down anymore. If resurrection, new creation. If resurrection, new possibilities. If resurrection, love one another even as I have loved you.

The word of self-abandoning, cruciform love is indeed a word that we cannot bear. It is so unbearable that we must undergo a complete death to everything that we are. Our whole identity of possession and calculation and qualification must wither away and die on the cross with Christ so that we may be raised to new life with the Risen Jesus. We cannot bear to love one another, but the unbounded word of the gospel is that we have been born by Christ, by the one who lived his life wholly for others, giving himself away in love to the fullest, to the point of death. And this One, this man, who recklessly threw himself away in love, the gospel proclaims that he lives. And if this true, if he really does live, then everything is made new. Nothing whatsoever is the same anymore. The old world—the world run by death at the boundary—that world has been crucified with Christ! Your old life, the life ruled by calculation, by control, by management—that life has been crucified with Christ!

The word to abandon yourself in love for one another—and remember who the “one another” is—is simply the word of the resurrection written into our lives. It is a commandment that is a non-commandment, a law that is non-law. What we see here is not a demand for self-improvement, moral effort, or righteous action; those are the province of the old world, the world ruled by the law of death. No one I know of has said this better than Robert Jenson:

The gospel’s specific morality is a matter of opened opportunities, of what we may reasonably do because Jesus lives, that otherwise would have been foolish. The normal morality is a matter of imposed constraints, of what we must do, that otherwise we would have liked not to. [. . .] the gospel’s specific morality is a morality of freedom. Insofar as the gospel moves us, we do what we do because we may, not because we ought. And a good act is one which finds the way to love, to the affirmation of the brother’s freedom.

We hear the from the gospel what we may do, when the gospel affirmatively interprets the hopes and fears that move our lives. The gospel makes our hopes possibilities by making them hopes for the love that is indeed coming. When the gospel is spoken to a [person] or a community, it speaks to the particular inhibitions that keep that [person] or community from [. . .] their own humanity. The gospel dismisses those inhibitions. It’s pattern is: “You may . . . because, if Jesus is risen, there is no need to fear . . .” [. . .]

Thus the specific morality of the gospel is not a mater of “laws.” The gospel’s moral discourse does not say “Do this and do that because you ought/must/would be best advised/will be rewarded.” It does not have the “if . . . then . . .” form. It imposes no conditions whatever, on anything at all. It does not say “Do . . . , because otherwise you won’t get into heaven.” It does not say—with a bit more religious sophistication: “Do . . . , because, although of course God will accept you anyway, that is what good Christians do.” It does not even say: “Do . . . , because virtue is its own reward.” The moral discourse of the gospel says only: “You may do . . . , because Jesus lives” (Robert Jenson, Story and Promise, 81, 82).

The gospel’s commandment, to love one another just as Jesus has loved is precisely the proclamation of liberation, of freedom into God’s resurrecting life. You may love one another fully, to the end, without reserve, because Jesus lives and therefore there is no need to fear. The reason we need not fear is that Jesus, the man who existed wholly as love, as self-abandoning agape, is risen. Death has no dominion over him. And if death has no final dominion over love, then we can joyfully throw ourselves away into love. To again quote from Robert Jenson’s beautiful articulation of this truth:

[. . .] Jesus was a lover who went to death rather than qualify his self-giving to others; the love which was the plot of his life is an unconditional love. Of this person it is said that he nevertheless lives, that he is risen [. . .] for love means an unconditional self-giving and an acceptance of death, and a successful love would be an acceptance of death which nevertheless did not result in the lover’s absence from the beloved, but in his presence. Love must finally mean death and resurrection. For this particular man, resurrection, if it happened, was therefore but the proper outcome of his life.

And if this lover’s resurrection happened, then there also now lives an unconditional liver with death—the limit of love—behind him, so that his love must finally triumph altogether, must embrace all people and all circumstances of their lives. If he is risen, the human enterprise has a conclusion: a human communion constituted in its commonality by one man’s unconditional self-dedication to his fellows, and so embracing each individual and communal freedom established in the history so fulfilled.

Thus, if Jesus is risen his personal love will be the last Outcome of the human enterprise. If he died, his self-definition has been written to its end, as each of ours will be, but if he also nevertheless lives, [. . . then his life] is not thereby a dead item of the past but an item of living, surprising time, an item of the future and indeed, of the last future. (Robert Jenson, The Triune Identity, 22-23)

And this is precisely why Jesus’s call to us to love one anther as he has loved us, to throw ourselves away in love is paired this Sunday with the most holy vision of John the Revelator of the new heavens and new earth:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.” Then he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.” (Revelation 21:1-6)

This vision simply expresses the truth of the gospel that the outcome of everything is the victory of Christ’s radical, self-abandoning love. Just as Christ threw himself away in becoming flesh, walking among us, healing us, feeding us, teaching us, weeping with us, dying for us, and rising for us, so also the fullness of God will finally throw itself away on us. The infinity of God’s unbounded radical love will descend and it will consummate and manifest what has already been achieved in Christ’s resurrection.

Because of this God, this self-abandoning God who throws himself away on us, we can love one another in the same way. Because this God’s self-abandoning life will be the outcome of all things—down to the most minute, petty, precious slaveries we still cling to—because of this we are freed into self-abandonment. We can throw ourselves away on each other without fear. For, as Paul proclaims, we “did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him” (Rom 8:14-17).

The word of the gospel is that we are freed into loving one another just as Christ has loved us, that we can do this without fear because God throws himself away on us, and that reckless act of self-giving is power that sustains all creation. We can love one another because Jesus is risen, because God is the God of Jesus Christ. In Jesus we see God as God truly is, as God will be in the outcome of all things. In Jesus’s abandonment of himself we get to see what true human life is, and we get invited into that life of joyful self-abandonment. Herbert McCabe speaks to this in a way worth recalling:

In Jesus [. . .] we can watch God understanding himself. God’s understanding of himself is that he throws himself away in love, that he keeps nothing back for himself. God’s understanding of God is that he is a love that unconditionally accepts, that always lets others be, even if what they want is to be his murderers. God’s understanding of God is that he is not a special person with a special kind of message, with a special way of living to which he wants people to conform. God’s understanding of God could not appear to us as someone who wants to found a new and better religion, or recommend a special new discipline or way of life—a religious code laid upon us for all time because it is from God. God’s understanding of God is that he just says: “Yes, be; be human, but be really human; be human if it kills you—and it will.” The Law of God is a non-law; it has no special regulation. The Word just says: “I accept you as human beings; what a pity you have such difficulty in doing this yourselves. What a pity you can only like yourselves if you pretend to be super-humans or gods.” God could never understand himself as one of the gods; only as one of the human race.

[. . .] To be able, through faith to share in Christ, in God’s understanding of himself, to be in Christ, is to be filled ourselves also with this joy, this Holy Spirit. It is a joy so vast that we can only faintly sometimes experience it as our elation and joy—just as our sharing in God’s self-understanding hardly at all seems to us an understanding, a being enlightened. We have a life in us, an understanding and a joy in us, that is too great for us to comprehend. Quite often it has to show itself as what seems its opposite, as darkness and suffering. The Word of God is Christ crucified. But it is God’s way and the truth of God and the life and joy of God. And this is in us because we have faith. We have been prepared to go into the dark with Christ, to die with Christ. And we know that this means that we live in Christ. And that life, the divine understanding and joy that is in us, will one day soon show itself in us for what it truly is. And we shall live with the Father, through the [. . .] the Word made flesh, in the joy which is the Holy Spirit for eternity. (Herbert McCabe, God Still Matters, 104-6)

Life, resurrection life, is coming and is now here. When Jesus commands us to love one another as he has loved us he tells us to do nothing more than give ourselves over to his love, throwing the consequences to the wind. This is abject and utter foolishness. A stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks. But Christ has been raised. And therefore this is the power and wisdom of God. This is God’s own self-understanding that will finally triumph over every authority and ruler and power.

The love that Jesus commands will ultimately have its way. It will be victorious. Our infantile dreams of calculation, control, and qualification are doomed, one way or the other. Lay them down. Give yourself over, in all the concreteness, contingency, and hardship of your life to the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep. He has come that we may have life and have it abundantly. Everything else, every other word steals, kills, and destroys.

Because Christ is risen, you are free to love one another. You are free to throw yourselves away in love. You are free to waste yourself on the worthless, on the trivial, on the stuff that no reasonable person should put up with or care about. You are free. Death no longer has dominion over you. You are no longer enslaved to fear, to calculation, to qualification, to self-protection. You are free to just throw yourself away, to lavish yourself in all your imperfection on one another in love and on God in worship. And this is life. This is the life of the gospel. The life of the crucified and risen Lord. The life that death cannot touch. The life of the world to come. Amen.

In place of purity (more on wine & Jesus)

Posted by on January 20, 2010 47 comments

In John 2, the story of turning of the water into wine, there’s an interesting detail that I’ve never seen commented on at length before. John 2:6 describes the vats of water that Jesus turned into wine: “Now standing there were six stone water-jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons.”

These aren’t just random water-jars, they are holy water. Water for the rites of purification given in the Torah. Jesus however turns out to be the enemy of purity. Instead of water for ceremonial purification, he leaves us with wine—120-180 gallons of it!

There’s a deeply transgressive quality to Jesus’s actions. In the place of a system of boundaries and morals, clean and unclean, Jesus gives people enough wine to get all of Dublin hammered. Jesus’s actions are, in a sense, shockingly amoral. Or rather, they transgress and overcome the binary structures that define “religious” morality.

Jesus doesn’t come to offer a new way for the unclean to be made clean, the profane made sacred. He comes to obviate the whole notion and throw a party instead. And this is his glory (2:11).

Jesus and Baptism

Posted by on January 13, 2010 5 comments

John 4 marks the beginning of Jesus’s ministry with his disciples. Picking up in the train of John the Baptizer, Jesus is reported to be “making and baptizing more disciples that John” (4:2). But then it gets interesting. The next verse claims that “it was not Jesus himself but his disciples who baptized” (4:3).

Why this little detail? Why did Jesus, in contradistinction to John refrain from baptizing anyone himself? Jesus in John does not come as a baptizer (in fact John’s Gospel omits even the mention of Jesus’s own baptism), but rather as the Word of God. Likewise throughout the Gospel of John there is a constant theme of hearing Jesus’s voice as the voice of God. In John Jesus is not a baptizer, but the speaker of the words of God. It is his disciples, those who hear and follow him who become the baptizers.

In John baptism lies always in the realm of human response, of obedience to the Word that precedes it. The disciples baptize and receive baptism in obedient submission to the one who “has the words of eternal life” (6:68b). In John baptism is not something that Christ does to us, but rather what we cannot but do after hearing the Word made flesh. Thus, baptism is not an act of moral accomplishment, but of a certain sort of apocalyptic resignation to the truth of Christ’s reality: “Lord, to whom can we go?” (6:68b)

Wine and Glory

Posted by on January 13, 2010 3 comments

In the story of the wedding at Cana where Jesus turns water into “the best wine” (2:10), the story ends interstingly. Verse 11 reads “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.”

What I find interesting is the mention of glory here. Obviously this is a huge theme in John’s gospel, and how John messes with the meaning of “glory” throughout the book is very important. And he’s messing with it here as well.

What is it about this sign that reveals Jesus’s glory? Certainly I don’t think its the mere fact that Jesus is the worlds best alchemist. What makes this glorious is not simply that Jesus can change one substance into another, it is that Jesus’s power takes the form of generating festivity, conviviality, partying. Jesus’s glory is revealed because he makes this wedding party off the hook.

Jesus’s glory is manifest in celebration, in festivity, in, well, drinking.

Doing Theology with/as Caiaphas

Posted by on October 8, 2009 76 comments

Its hard to find a more scandalizing bunch of people than theologians, and not in the good way. One would think that among a guild of professionals dedicated to getting to know God as well as possible you’d see less infidelity, churlishness, affluence, and apathy towards injustice than in other professions. However this hardly seems to be the case. As I look at my own shelves of favorite theologians, I see at least a few adulterers, more than a couple of which were rather predatory towards the women they pursued. Likewise I’m hard pressed to find very many theologians who took the intentional practice of the Christian faith with much seriousness. Indeed, even going to church seems too much to ask from many theologians. Here a story comes to mind about how Jürgen Moltmann lies in a hammock every Sunday and thinks about ecclesiology — I don’t know if its true or not, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

I won’t even touch the degree to which most theologians do everything they can to avoid contact with, exposure to, or even having to see the poor.

Anyways, the question sometimes comes up — and Dan has pressed this question very well — as to how we can take this sorry lot seriously when they try to tell us about God. Somehow, pondering this question led me back to this particular story from the gospel of John which details the beginnings of the Jewish clerisy’s plot against Jesus:

So the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the council, and said, “What are we to do? This man is performing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.”  But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing at all! You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.” He did not say this on his own, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus was about to die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but to gather into one the dispersed children of God. So from that day on they planned to put him to death. (John 11:47-53)

It would be hard to imagine a person more opposed to the gospel of Jesus than Caiaphas and those plotting to put him to death. But what we see here is a sort of ironic twist in that the speech of Caiaphas ends up bearing witness to some aspect of the truth of Jesus’s mission.

This, I think, is what happens all the time in the work of theologians. Rebellious, untruthful, flawed, and even malicious people are seized by the Spirit in ways that bear witness to the truth of who God is. Certainly we should not resign ourselves to this state of affairs, but at the very least we may benefit from such a hermeneutic for reading theological works. Like Caiaphas, many theologians, including ourselves, often end up “not speaking on our own” when we say something true about God.

Another biblical account that seems to illustrate this may be the story of Baalam and his ass.

Theological Commentary: 1 John 2:1-2

Posted by on March 21, 2009 2 comments

My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. In one of many statements that the Elder makes as to his reason for writing, he claims that one of his purposes is sanctifactory. He writes to aid the congregation to refrain from sin. The liberating implication of this is clearly that sin can, in fact, be avoided. It is possible to walk in the light and not in the darkness. Liberation is a reality that can be experienced and practiced. As the rest of the treatise goes on to make clear, what is central in the Elder’s definition of sin is a failure to love one another and make truthful confession regarding Christ. Thus, one of the key purposes of the treatise is to drive its readers into a life fully suffused by the Love that flows from the triune God. Indeed, despite its heavy concentration of “sin” language, there is nothing whatsoever that is moralistic about 1 John. For the Elder sin is the refusal of love. In the thought of the Elder all moralizations of sin are undone. There are simply two options: to refuse participation in the Love that God is, or to accept it with joy and thanksgiving.

And this all coalesces in one overriding theological point: not sinning is not a moral accomplishment. Rather is it simply a life of fullness, a life that participates in the plenitude of God’s Love. As such, it is important to say that on one level, not sinning is easy–to not sin simply names the posture and practice of saying Yes to God’s infinite Love.

But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. The Elder is not naive, of course. He knows how deep the human “No” to God runs. Our slavery to sin, our perverse and irrational necrophilia is endemic. Living into Christ’s defeat of death, while liberating, joyful, and infinitely delightful, is difficult for us precisely because it is so utterly and apocalyptically new. The adjustment of our eyes to the fullnes of the God who is light and in whom there is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5) is not simplistically achieved. The vestiges of the old age that is passing away still vie for our allegiance. 

But in full knowledge of the reality of the depths of the human “No” to God, the Elder reminds his readers of the infinitely greater depths of God’s “Yes” to us in Christ. Even in the fullness of our rejection of the Love that is God, Love goes further. Christ, the man for others is our advocate with the Father. This should not be understood as Christ interceding with an angry God on our behalf. Christ is not rescuing us from God, but from our own darkness. The emphasis in the Elder’s statement is not the Christ is holding God back from angrily dealing with us, rather the emphasis is that our advocate, the one who stands for us is with the Father. The one who loves us is in the very presence of the fullness of God’s transcendent mystery. His closeness to the Father, to the source and goal of all things is our hope. No other power can be higher than the power that is with the Father. There is no sovereignty that extends beyond or above this. 

And he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world. Not only is Jesus our advocate, according the the Elder he is also the sacrifice for out sins. What this means is, of course, a very complex thing to search out, as many have done in different and conflicting ways. Jesus is a hilasmos according to this verse; the meaning of this phrase is not clear. It likely has some connection with the Jewish day of atonement (cf. Heb 2:17; 9:5). The point, however, is that whatever else Jesus is, he is the one who solves the problem of our sin, our refusal of love, or alienation from the Love that is God. Also what is crucial to note about this verse is that it claims that Jesus is the hilasmos for our sins, just as he is the parakletos with the Father. Christ’s sacrifice, however we construe the matter is not something that just happened “then”; it is something that “is.” Christ’s reality towards us as “sacrifice” is a present reality, not simply a past event. Christ is our sacrifice. What might this mean?

In one of his most fruitful suggestions, Colin Gunton argues that we ought to construe God’s own trinitarian life in terms of sacrifice. The triune God embodies an economy of mutual sacrifice in which sacrifice is construed as gift. Here sacrifice is not to be understood as the diminution of one for the sake of the other, at least not as if that dynamic were a zero sum game. Rather the very economy of God’s being is one of total and complete self-giving, a life of absolute, ek-static gift. As such, to say that Christ is our “atoning sacrifice” is to say that in Christ the infinite life of God’s mutual self-gift is opened to us in all its fullness. We are invited into the “sacrificial” economy of God’s own trinitarian life of joy and rejoicing. This is also why the Scriptures speak at length of our call to offer ourselves to God as a living sacrifice of praise (e.g. Rom 12:1-3). Praise, doxology, is the appropriate response to our graced participation in God life of infinite excessive gift. Because Christ is our sacrifice, the sacrifical opening out of the triune God to embrace the world, we are freed into a life of sacrifice–a doxological life centered on loving one another (as the Elder emphasizes) and worshipful confession of the lordship of Jesus.

It is precisely the ek-static trinitarian understanding of sacrifice that lends intelligibility to the Elder’s further statement that Christ is the sacrifice, not for our sins only, but for those of the whole world. The trinitarian life of sacrificial gift is so excessive in its vitality that it cannot be concerned with less than the entire world. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it (John 1:5). Rather the light overcomes all darkness. The excessiveness of light, the superabundance of Love that is the triune God cannot be terminated, even by the human “No” to God’s liberating Word of life. Christ is the sacrifice for the whole world. They excessiveness of God’s trinitarian agape could not allow him to be anything less.

More on 1 John and Abiding

Posted by on March 6, 2009 1 comment

Another interesting point about 1 John. Unlike the Gospel of John, the epistle does not use “word of God” as a reference to Jesus, rather it is always a reference to the message of about Jesus that the congregation has heard “from the beginning.” However, the language of “word of God” in 1 John is clearly meant to evoke and reference the passages from the prologue of the Gospel that identify Jesus with the Word. What are we to make of this?

Judith Lieu makes a helpful observation, “In 1 John the ‘word of God’ is not a christological title; it is that which one keeps or has heard, just as it is the commandment (2:5-7); it is that which abides in believers (1:10; 2:14). If that which was from the beginning abides in them, then so will they abide in the Son and the Father (2:24). The strong ‘realised’ or present religious experience of 1 John is rooted in the believers’ fidelity to, and participation in, the tradition and life of the community.”

What is interesting here is that this Johannine notion of participation in God is actualized in one’s “abiding” in the narrative of Jesus. By remaining faithful to and grounded in the historical narrative of the Gospel believers come to inhabit the life of God. Thus, participation in God takes the form of faithfulness to and continuance in the story of Jesus. Union with God, in 1 John means participation in the history of Jesus.

The Lord of the Rings, Judaism, and Supercessionism

Posted by on March 6, 2009 1 comment

Ken draws some interesting connections in a couple posts between Tolkien’s epic tale in The Return of the King and the Gospel of John’s perspective on Jesus’s messiahship in relation to the institutions of Judaism. Some good analysis here that’s worth a read. Check it out.

Abiding in 1 John

Posted by on March 5, 2009 1 comment

The word “abide” (Grk: meno) occurs 18 times in the first epistle of John. The only other New Testament book where it occurs more often is in the gospel of John in which it occurs 33 times. Consistently in the Johannine writings the idea conveyed in one of continuity, of continuing on, of remaining. In the first epistle of John one of the central ways that this term is deployed is in relation to the original proclamation of the gospel that the Johannine Christians have heard. Consistently reference is made to “that which you have heard from the beginning” (1 John 1:1; 2:7; 2:24; 3:11; 2 John 6). The fundamental admonition being that the readers should continue to remain faithful to the message of the gospel that they have had since it was first preached to them.

However, the theological twist on this lies in the Johannine concept of the relationship between continuing on in faithfulness to the gospel and living the koinonial life of the Father and Son. “Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, then you will abide in the Son and in the Father” (1 John 2:24). And similarly, “God abides in those who confess that Jesus in the son of God and they abide in God” (1 John 3:15).

So, in first John there is an intricate pattern of lingering indwelling, of ongoing abiding that characterizes the life of discipleship and faithfulness. In remaining faithful to the message of the gospel, we in fact are indwelt by and indwell the life of the Father and Son. First John can in fact be taken as an elaborate reiteration of the dynamics of divine grace. We are liberated into the very life of God in hearing and remaining bound to the Word which has been spoken to us, the gospel of Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection. Thus, for the elder, we participate in the Trinitarian life of love itself insofar as we abide within the proclamation of the gospel, insofar as we indwell the story of Jesus.

Theological Commentary: 1 John 1:5-10

Posted by on February 17, 2009 6 comments

“This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.” Following the introductory declaration, the elder gets straight to the point of the treatise: God. At the center of everything in First John is the reality of God and who God is. There are two things to note about the elder’s description of God in this verse. First, this message about the identity of God is what “we have heard” from Christ himself. Christ and Christ alone is the soured of the elder’s knowledge about God that he is seeking to impress on the church (cf. John 1:18; 2 John 9). Second, the message about God that we have learned from Christ is that God is light; there is no darkness in God. There is no ambiguity in God according to the elder. God has no inner dark side, no secret agenda; God is simply light, the fullness of purity and goodness.

“If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true;” Herein lies one of the major linchpins of First John, namely that we cannot participate in God’s life while living in sin. The elder is not esoteric; he proclaims no mysticism that could be separated from ethics. Union with God through Christ is ethical through and through. We cannot become a partaker of the divine nature (cf. 2 Pet 1:4) except under the form of discipleship; our participation in God can only take the form of a cruciform life, a life devoted to embodying in our own practices the singular love that God has revealed to us in Christ. For the elder our union with God, our communion with the fullness of divinity is utterly and completely earthly—it is nothing more or less than a call to live in the self-abandoning love of Jesus, walking in that love, and practicing it in all things. Deification means discipleship.

Moreover, what is ultimately at stake in our call to truly have fellowship with God is the issue of truth. Any claim to being union with God while living a life not shaped by Christ’s agape is a life under the bondage of the lie. Truth, for the elder is the reality of God and what God has accomplished. We “do” the truth in being conformed to God’s love. Any claim to union with God outside of this conformity to love is to live in futility and bondage to falsehood.

“but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.” Here the elder states the antithesis of the life bound over to falsehood: the life of mutual fellowship among the forgiven. For the elder here, the opposite of lying and failing to “do what is true” is to live a life of fellowship with one another. The opposite of falsehood is the community of the forgiven. Truth is inseparable from our life together as the forgiven ones of Christ.

The life lived in the light is a life to be walked, it is a road, a pilgrimage of discipleship. And the first thing to be said about this path is that to walk it is to be bound up with one another. The elder mentions first that we have fellowship with one another, and only then goes on to mention that the blood of Christ cleanses us from all sin. The experience of forgiveness and sanctification cannot be described except in light of mutual fellowship.

Note also that the passage here does not say that the blood of Christ cleanses us from “our sins”, but from “all sin” (cf. John 1:9). Though this certainly includes any sins we have committed, as verse 9 below makes quite clear, the communal note on which this verse opens seems to be the focus here. We are cleansed, not simply of our own guilt, but of all the ways in which the powers of sin and death have marked and debilitated our lives. The point of the elder is that all the power of sin is broken and that in following after Christ we are freed from the tyranny of its powers. To be sure this includes the erasure of our guilt, but that is but a sliver of the fullness of liberation that the elder is trying to communicate. We are freed from all sin, from the control of all powers, from the debilitation of all ideologies, from the reign of death itself (cf. 1 John 3:14). For the community of the forgiven, the power of sin itself is broken, and this reality of liberation is precisely what grounds the Johannine call to mutual love, the practice of which is the very reality of life itself, life in God.

“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” In further elaboration of the nature of salvation, the elder goes on here to make clear that our salvation cannot consist in any sort of self-deceived notion of our own righteousness. The vision of salvation articulated here is centered in truthfulness. The only way for us to have fellowship with God, to participate in the divine life is through the truthful acknowledgment of our condition. The great enemy of salvation is self-deception. Participation in God only comes through the agony of truth; only in facing the reality of our shattered and sinful lives do we find liberation and union with God.

“If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Confession. Confession is the key to life, the key to living within the reality of salvation. The essence of confession of sin is truthfulness. Confession is not public humiliation, or even personal acts of confiding in another. Rather confession is the truthful naming of ourselves and our action. Confession is how we are called to speak ourselves truthfully. It is the supremely painful and horrifyingly personal act of saying our ugliness, of proclaiming our corruption, and doing so without any qualifying remarks. Confession is our practice of truthing ourselves.

The supreme theological point though, is that for the Christian, confession can be borne. The truth can be faced. The truth can be acknowledged without fear. It can be so because the truth is Christ himself (cf. John 14:6). Christ who is at once our judge and our redeemer, from him we can bear the truth about ourselves. The truth about us, and our sinfulness consigns us to death. The reality of our fallenness and our brokenness is beyond fixing. Outside of Christ the truth about ourselves must be avoided at all costs, for the only end of it is death. In Christ however, the fear of death lies broken. In Christ alone full truthfulness is finally possible without despair unto death. Or rather, despair unto death can be borne in light of the resurrection. The one who is faithful and righteous forgives, cleanses, and resurrects us in Christ. And for this reason, and only this reason, we are able to bear the truth, and indeed to find the true and only freedom therein. In Christ, confession is the very life of freedom itself.

“If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.” The lie above all lies, that we have not sinned. Indeed, the denial of sin is the very opposite of confession, and it has the opposite effect. Confession breaks through the bonds of slavery and self-deception, freeing us into the life of the community of the forgiven. Denial of sin however boxes us into ourselves and closes us forever off from the Word of life. Denial of sin is the absolute insistence on our own capacity, our own ability, our own integrity. Denial of sin, the declaration of innocence, like the declaration of accomplishment is utter and total slavery. To deny our sin is the see the truth about ourselves and refuse to believe that it can be borne in Christ. It is the only alterative to the freedom of confession; it is the visceral insistence that we cannot be false, therefore everyone else must be. Even God must be made a liar so that we can insist on our own truthfulness. The declaration of innocence is thus the ultimate slavery. The call of the elder is that we abandon such false and contrived innocences and be drawn into the true and only freedom, the life of agonizing, liberating truthfulness. The life of confession and forgiveness, of death and resurrection.

First John 1:1-4: Theological Commentary

Posted by on February 4, 2009 3 comments

“We declare to you what was from the beginning” The treatise opens by hearkening back to the first proclamations of the Johannine Gospel (cf. John 1:1-4). That which “was from the beginning” echoes the first statement of the Johannine Gospel, that “in the beginning was the Word.” Here, however there is perhaps more of a double entendre at work. Throughout the treatise there is recurring emphasis on the “message” which the recipients of the letter have had “from the beginning” (cf. 1 John 2:7, 24, 3:11; also 2 John 5-6). So, the elder here may be referring, not simply to Jesus, the eternal Word made flesh, but the truthful proclamation regarding the Word that the community has had and received from the beginning of their existence (but, see also 1 John 2:13, 14b). However, it is clear that both ideas are difficult to disentangle in Johnnaine theology. He who is from the beginning is disclosed in and through the true teaching, the tradition that has been handed on to the church from their own beginning. The point, however remains the same regardless. At the outset of the letter, the elder is making a declaration, a theological manifesto that he is presenting to the congregation regarding the truth about the Jesus Christ. What we have in 1 John is an act of proclamation par excellence. At the heart of the treatise is is the centrality of proclaiming the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Word who came in the flesh.

“What we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life–this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us” Having introduced his treatise with the declaration of the his intent to proclaim that gospel, the true teaching about Christ, the elder moves on by filling out the nature of Christ’s being-revealed, and the nature of his own witness to Christ’s revelation. What is clear in the description here is the fullness of the reality of Christ’s own self-disclosure. Christ has not just been heard, but seen, looked at, and touched. In short, Christ has a fundamentally historical, or even empirical reality to his person. Moreover, Christ’s concrete, earthly reality is connected here precisely with his role as the giver and possessor of life. It is precisely in and as the historical, tangible, and fleshly person of Jesus that the divine Word of life enters and saves the world. The life of the Father is embodied in the seen, heard, and touched flesh of Jesus the Son. This is the reality that is proclaimed.

This fixation on the fleshly tangibility and historicity of Christ is central throughout Johannine theology, and is the distinctive emphasis of 1 John. Indeed it proves to be one of the two central issues of contention in the rest of the treatise. Above all it is important to the elder that the congregation rightly understand the relationship between Jesus’ fleshly, historical reality and the fullness of salvation and deification. There is no union with God, no transformation other than participation in the singular reality of Christ’s flesh, his history, his worldedness.

“We declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us” Now the elder begins to give the rational for his proclamation of Jesus up to this point. The point of his proclamation of the Gospel of Christ is fellowship, communion. Within this claim lies the corollary that outside of the this proclamation and its acknowledgement there is no fellowship between the elder and the congregation. Their unity, their fraternal bond is to be found nowhere else than in their mutual confession of the truth of the Gospel (cf. 2 John 4).

“And truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ” Moreover, the elder is concerned, not simply with communal bonds between himself and the congregation, as if they were ends in themselves or independent goods. Rather, his concern for mutual fellowship is grounded in the fact that he and those who share in the true confession of the Gospel of Christ are united in fellowship with the Father. It is unity in confession of the truth of the Gospel that is the prerequisite and assumption of communion with the triune God. And indeed, as the rest of the treatise will make clear, it is impossible to have communion with the Father outside of the the true confession of Jesus’s lordship, which as we shall see is intimately concerned with the assertion of his historical, tangible humanity.

“We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete” Finally the elder makes clear the ultimate cause of his proclamation: the completion of his joy. True life, communion with the triune God, communal harmony, indeed all good gifts are to be found only in the proclaimed reality of Christ who has come in the flesh. As such, the apostolic heart of the elder is restless until all those whom he knows and loves find rest in Christ. And this is the outcome of all those who strive to proclaim the Gospel: the joy of common participation in the life of the Trinity. The outcome of truthful confession, of exhortation, of intercession for the Gospel is the fullness of joy that is only accomplished through God’s gracious giving of Godself in Jesus, in the Word made flesh. This desire, for the common union of the congregation with God though Christ is the underlying end, the supreme desire and goal of the elder’s heart. All the he writes throughout this letter is animated by this impassioned longing, for communion with the triune God, not without, but only with his brothers and sisters.

Theological Interpretation of the Gospel of John

Posted by on January 31, 2009 7 comments

In my ongoing studies in the gospel of John and my attempts to devote some time to theological interpretation, I have run across a few superb theological engagements with John’s Gospel. The most recent, and perhaps most accessible work on the topic that I’ve seen is Craig Koester’s new book, The Word of Life: A Theology of John’s Gospel. This is one of the most comprehensive and synthetic theological readings of John’s Gospel I’ve yet to come across. In fact, the next time I teach on the Gospel of John I may very well use it as my textbook.

On the doctrine of God in John there are two recent works that are particularly helpful, the first is Marianne Meye Thompson’s God in the Gospel of John which is perhaps the most comprehensive and helpful book on the topic. Central to her argument is that readings of John’s Gospel that merely taut it as “Christocentric” are missing the book’s overarchingly theocentric nature, and the fact that the point of John is not simply to articulate a Christology, but rather a doctrine of God that is determined by the person of Jesus Christ.

Andreas Köstenberger and Scott Swain also examine the doctrine of God, but take a more overtly theological perspective in their attempt to explore what, if anything, John’s Gospel may have to say about the Trinity. Their book, Father, Son, and Spirit: The Trinity in John’s Gospel is perhaps the best book examining the nascent trinitarianism of the Fourth Gospel that has been written. It engages thoroughly with the question of Jewish monotheism of the second temple period, and offers a trinitarian reading of John which is neither anachronistic nor minimalistic. 

The last book I would mention is the recent collection edited by Richard Bauckham and Carl Mosser, The Gospel of John and Christian Theology. This book contains some of the best theological essays dealing with all aspects of the Fourth Gospel that I have encountered. All of these books serve as helpful examples of theological exegesis and offer great vistas on the study of John’s Gospel.

John and Christocentrism

Posted by on January 6, 2009 7 comments

Marianne Meye Thompson’s God in the Gospel of John provides one of the best treatments of the Johannine doctrine of God ever written. In her introduction she poses some interesting questions about the allegedly Christocentric nature of John’s gospel. She argues that readers of John’s gospel have largely failed to focus on John’s doctrine of God in their attempt to observe John’s fixation on a “high Christology.” The problem she claims with this move is that “the designation ‘Christocentric’. . .points beyond itself.” In other words, “If the Christ, the Messiah, is the one anointed and sent by God to carry out God’s work, it follows that Christology makes sense particularly as it gives expression to theology.”

This raises the important question about what the term “Christocentric” even means in theological discussion, particularly in light of the fact that the accusation that someone is not “Christocentric enough” often serves as a rhetorical slam dunk to tilt virtually any theological argument.

Clearly if “Christocentrism” is to have any meaning at all it must be understood within a biblical, and thus a trintarian context. The centrality of Christ has everything to do with Christ’s role in the apocalyptic economy of the world’s salvation. In his missional existence, Christ’s “centricity” is defined by the way in which he unleashes the “more” of God in to the world through revealing the Father and breathing forth the Spirit. There is a sense within John’s gospel in particular (as Royce Gruneler observes in his book on the Trinity in the Gospel of John) that the persons of the Trinity manifest relations of “disposability” toward one another — a mode of relationship that places them at the service of the other’s ends and glorification. Christ makes himself disposable to the Father, he makes himself a means and the Father the end. And yet Christ cannot be a mere means to an end, for Christ is fully divine. A proper Christcentricity must find a way of affirming that Christ points away from himself to the Father, and yet not in such a way that Christ is reduced to a mere bridge or channel. He is the way, but also the truth and the life himself.

If anything, what reflection on the “Christocentrism” of John shows us is that our understanding of Christocentricity in our articulation of theology must find a mode that preserves Christ’s own exocentricity while refusing to make Christ instrumental. All of this points to the need for care and specificity in talking about what “Christocentrism” means. Lack of concreteness and biblical fullness on this point will surely yield a defective and imbalanced attempt to preserve a properly Christological doctrine of God.

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