Category Archives: Johannine Studies - Page 2

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.

Scarcely Recognizable Politics

Posted by on November 18, 2008 7 comments

David Rensberger’s Johannine Faith and Liberating Community is a real gem in terms of biblical scholarship. It weaves together acute social-historical analysis in its consideration of the text of John, and brings the vision(s) rendered there into conversation with the shape of Christian life today, allowing the Johannine vision to pose a real challenge to our theopolitical conceptions and constructions. Here’s an particularly good snippet:

“The Fourth Gospel, for all its sectarianism and inwardness, does not offer a mere retreat from political relationships, though the approach to them that it does offer is every bit as radical as its radical Christology. Indeed, it is just the Johannine alienation from the world that ought to make John’s refusal of allegiance to the world’s political orders somewhat less than surprising. It was an alienation of consciousness as much as an overtly social one, to be sure, yet precisely as such it could be expected to be realised ‘in the world’ as well. The politics of John may seem scarcely recognizable as politics to us. They may seem impractical or irresponsible in their stubborn devotion of all loyalty, political as well as spiritual to Jesus who had been ‘raised up’ as King of the Jews. But evidently for the Johannine Christians, who faced a complex and highly charged political situation, they were real politics and represented a real political option. The Fourth Gospel confronts the issue of Israel’s freedom in the late first-century Roman Empire with an alternative to both zealotry and collaboration, by calling for adherence to the king who is not of this world, whose servants do not need to fight but remain in the world bearing witness to the truth before the rulers of both synagogue and Empire.” (p. 99-100)

What Rensberger nails here is the oft-ignored fact that so many Western establishmentarians, be they liberal or conservative, fail to see. To read many theological accounts that tend towards “political realism” or the myriad of sensibilities that exist within that basic orbit, one would think that the perspectives of massive swaths of the New Testament, particularly the Gospels were dropped out of some ethereal realm aloof from the contingencies and realities of chance and change in the world. One forgets that none of the authors, compilers, or recipients of the New Testament books thought they were proclaiming a message of romantic detachment from “real” stuff in the world. The form of praxis presupposed and evoked by the writings of the New Testament was the way of life of the real, concrete, historical church. The idea that the “otherworldliness” of the Gospels mitigates any need for us to take them seriously as a possible course to which followers of Jesus are called in this world is nothing more than an elaborate way of begging the question — or more accurately, longing for a Christianity without discipleship. Those who find in the New Testament “unrealistic” ethical standards do so only through a form of self-induced ignorance, a compulsive urge to shut their eyes to the fact that these words, which so offend our modern sensibilities were the very form of life of the first Christians, which, they assummed would be the form of life for all who followed in their lineage.

Jesus the New Temple

Posted by on October 23, 2008 3 comments

One of the most interesting features of the gospel of John is its particularly anti-Temple posturing (note Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple at the beginning of the gospel rather than near the end). Moreover, John’s gospel stands out particularly  in the way in which it presents Jesus as the New Temple/Tabernacle. In the gospel of John there is a concerted emphasis on the locus of the divine presence which shifts from the physical building of the Temple to Jesus’ own person (2:20-22, 4:20-24). In John Jesus proclaims himself rather than the Temple as the true locus of God’s presence, God’s place of coming to dwell with his people. Mary Coloe’s book Dwelling the Household of God develops these themes in a fascinating way.

There are a number of interesting literary connections throughout John’s gospel that relate to this theme of Jesus as the New Temple/Tabernacle. One of the most interesting is the account of Mary’s anointing of Jesus’ feet in John 12:1-8. The whole affair is noted to take place “six days before the Passover” which places it on the evening of the Sabbath. The evening of the Sabbath included the Habdalah prayers which involved a transition from sacred time to ordinary time. In the Habdalah the sacred and the profane were distinguished through a ritual of anointing which set aside holy objects, persons, and spaces for God’s service.

This is also connected to the Mosaic regulations for the consecration of the Tabernacle and the priesthood in Exodus:

Then you shall take the anointing oil, and anoint the tabernacle and all that is in it, and consecrate it and all its furniture, so that it shall become holy.  You shall also anoint the altar of burnt offering and all its utensils, and consecrate the altar, so that the altar shall be most holy. You shall also anoint the basin with its stand, and consecrate it.  Then you shall bring Aaron and his sons to the entrance of the tent of meeting, and shall wash them with water, and put on Aaron the sacred vestments, and you shall anoint him and consecrate him, so that he may serve me as priest. (Exod 40:9-13)

Thus, in the context of John’s gospel Jesus is presented as the New Temple, consecrated as the locus of God’s divine presence among the people of God. This forms one of the key  images that characterizes Johannine Christology. In John’s gospel Jesus is the New Temple/Tabernacle, the overabundant, excessive fulfillment of God’s promises to dwell among his people (cf. Exod 25:8, 29:45-46). In the Johannine Jesus we see a sort of radical particularization of God’s eschatological covenant promises in which Jesus interrupts the reality of Israel even as God’s elect people, fullfilling their election even as he particularizes and “catholicizes” it in his own singular reality. In this singular event, it is Jesus, the New Temple/Tabernacle of God who lifts up Israel in a radically apocalyptic event of transfiguration and incorporation into the life of the Trinitarian God even as — in the very same act — Jesus actualizes reality of Israel’s election in a radically new mode, one which particularizes Jews and Gentiles together in and as one body, the body of the Crucified and Risen Messiah.

Toward Paleofundamentalism

Posted by on October 9, 2008 1 comment

In his provocative book, Jesus the Word According to John the Sectarian, Robert Gundry excoriates “contemporary evangelicalism, especially its elites in North America” for their attempts to engage culture in such a way as to gain influence, respect, and notoriety in the broader sphere. He styles himself as a “paleofundamentalist” and sees in the Johannine corpus a model of faithful sectarianism that insists on radical discipleship and separation from the world. Truly and odd, and interesting book.

He notes, among other things the captivity of evangelical Christianity to psychologizing messages and dumbed down concerns with “daily practicalities” for Christian living rather than substantive theological preaching or teaching. “Symptomatically,” he claims “the most influential evangelical is no longer and evangelist (Billy Graham), but a psychologist (James Dobson).”

What is funny is that Gundry has always been on the margins of evangelical theological scholarship, having been ousted from the Evangelical Theological Society many years back for his commentary on Matthew that they felt conceded too much to critical methods generally rejected by evangelicals. One thing that never ceases in evangelicalism is the game of “Who’s the Liberal?”

Gundry’s book, wittily and ironically suggests that it is his more “conservative” evangelical interlocutors that are today’s “modernists” and calls for a new kind of fundamentalism. Whatever one may think of it is sure is interesting to read someone gutsy enough to throw it in evangelicals faces for not betraying the “paleofundamentalist” vision of the gospel of John, a treasured mine of evangelism proof texts!

Stanley Hauerwas as Johannine Theologian

Posted by on September 26, 2008 4 comments

The Johannine corpus is centered on two key theological themes: radical adherence and allegiance to Christ and mutual love within the community of God’s followers (“And this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another” (1 John 3:23). For John radical Christocentrism and radical community are the two touchstones of fundamental Christian commitment and conviction. These convictions supersede and eclipse any other priority that might be placed upon the church by “the world.”

Interestingly enough, the marks of the Johannine corpus are good descriptors of the theological project of Stanley Hauerwas. Hauerwas’s whole project is centered on calling the church to radical allegiance to Christ over-against other loyalties and stimulating the church towards nurturing a vital common life as a community. As such, we could understand Hauerwas as a fundamentally Johannine theologian.

Against Ambiguity–In Praise of Binary Oppositions

Posted by on September 25, 2008 1 comment

The Johannine writings are distinctive among the writings of the New Testament in that they are so radically polarized in how the present the conflict between the church and the world. John’s whole thought world is one of binaries: life and death, love and hate, truth and lies, above and below, heaven and earth. This has been one of the reasons that the Johannine corpus has been subject to quite a bit of disdain. Clearly, it seems, John’s pure world of clear opposition between good and evil, church and world, must be an oversimplification, reflecting a sort of paleofundamentalism that must be qualified by other, more nuanced segments of the New Testament.

I would question this way of evaluating the Johannine writings. By contrast, I suggest that the very disambiguity of the Johnannine thought world is precisely what it has to offer the church. The problem with the church is generally not that it is too stark in how it views its life vis a vis the world, but that it is too nuanced. We are far more apt to strive for ambiguity, pluriformity, measure, and moderation in how we understand ourselves in relation to the pressing issues of our world. We crave ironic, tragic, and ambiguous ways of reading our world because it allows us to moderate any sort of ethical rigor that we might detect the gospel imposing on us. All too often our declarations about the ambiguities of being a disciple in a “complex” world are ways of simply making disobedience palatable and normal.

Bonhoeffer saw this perfectly in his book, Discipleship, which argued in no uncertain terms that we strive for ambiguity precisely to avoid questions of obedience. This is a message that continues to need to be heard. The Johannine word is always and ever relevant to a church that strives to have the demands of the Word against it eased into a sort of ambiguous tension–which is simply an elaborate way of dissolving any such tensions. We need to be told, not that there are countless “options” for our lives in Christ which may have their pros and cons, but that more often than not, our choices are between truth and lies, life and death. Our cravings for the comforts of ambiguity and complexity mask a perverse dodge that seeks to avoid asking the hard questions, presented so vividly in John’s gospel. What would it mean for us if we were willing to view the decisions we make about where to live, how to live, and who to live with as decisions either for life or for death? What if we permitted ourselves to embrace that kind of Johannine seriousness in attempting to morally navigate our Christian lives?

The Impossibility and Necessity of Love

Posted by on September 25, 2008 1 comment

The Johannine literature arguably has he most developed and sophisticated theological understanding of love in the entire Bible. For John, love and love alone is the test of all Christian reality. All of this is grounded in John’s theology proper–God is love, and as such love is the divine reality par excellence. Love is a divine, rather than a human possibility. Within “the world” love is simply impossible. For John our ability to love one another is solely grounded in the intrusion of God’s love into the world. “We love because he first loved us.”

For John, living in a community defined by mutual love is every bit as impossible as the dead being raised to life. However, if the God who is love, the God who raises the dead has indeed irrupted into the world, love is not only possible, it is the only true and real evidence of the gospel’s truth. For John, love is intimately tied up with the reality of the resurrection. Love is the the reality which raises the dead, and is the reality of the gospel in the world. Thus, “We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another. Whoever does not love abides in death.”

But what is the definition of Johannine love? It is precisely what we see in Christ–the willingness to expend oneself fully for the sake of others. There is nothing sentimental about Johannine love. Johannine love is the love that subjects itself to death for others and in doing so flourishes and lives in a way that defies any rational calculation. The reality of this love being embodied in the world is the only apologia for the Christian faith in Johannine perspective.

A New Otherworldliness

Posted by on September 24, 2008 3 comments

Robert Kysar, a noted Johannine scholar makes an interesting observation in his essay, “The Coming Hermeneutical Earthquake in Johannine Interpretation.” He predicts that twenty-first Christians, having lost their dominance over the mainstream culture in the West, will draw heavily on the Gospel of John, particularly as a resource “to understand themselves over against the world.” He predicts the coming of a “new other-worldliness” that is grounded in a sort of Johannine sectarianism.

While Kysar worries that this will be dangerous in some key ways, I find myself sitting right in the center of the faultline of this coming earthquake and loving it. As I’ve said before, I think the church needs to become more sectarian, not less. Only by doing so will we discover the forms of communal life which make for authentic culture and human flourishing.

At least in evangelical and mainline protestant cricles, there is far too much ink spilt today on how the church must become more “authentically worldly.” The church, we are told must move beyond simple preoccupation with “eternal” life and focus on the matters of real importance in the world, social justice, poverty, war, world hunger, etc.

However, this call to discover an authentic Christian worldliness comes, more often than not, at too great a price. For the sake of being timely and relevant, the church equivocates on the radicality of its message and its calling. The church cannot seek to “get involved” in the world, or become “wordly” in any way other than being precisely otherworldly. The reason for this is because the church itself is an “other world.”

The church’s true calling is in fact to be as otherworldly as possible because the message of the gospel is precisely that there is a whole new world into which our broken lives can be translated and transfigured. This does not mean that Christians seek to cut off contact with non-Christians, rather it means that the only real thing, the only truly radical thing that Christians have to offer those outside is the offer of a new world of reconciliation, actualized in Christ and made present to us by the sovereign work of the Holy Spirit.

Thus, the question the church should be asking is not, “How can we best enter into the struggles of the world?” Rather the church’s question must always by “What does it mean for us to live as the true world, the world of the gospel in the midst of this passing age of darkness?”

Apocalyptic Eschatology and the Ethics of Love: Some Johannine Observations

Posted by on September 23, 2008 4 comments

One of the most striking aspects of the Johannine writings is the way in which they view the world through the lens of apocalyptic. The Gospel and Epistles of John see the world as utterly rent by cosmic conflict. The church in the Johannine writings is an island of the order of God that has broken down into the cosmic anti-God system which is the “world.” Thus the church is the site of conflict between the forces of God and the forces of the Devil.

The Johannine writings understand the eschatological tension of the church in the world quite differently than the “already/not yet” of Paul and the Synoptics. In Paul especially the line between the old age and the age to come runs through the church and through each Christian (see esp. Rom. 7-8). For John by contrast, the church is the divine reality of God that has descended down to earth, invading, and interrupting the evil system of the world. Thus, the eschatological tension the church lives in is not within the church but between the church and the world. Thus the holiness of the church is vital in the Johannine writings. The church is the presence of the heavenly kingdom of God which is dynamically invading the world, translating people out of the world of death into the new world of life. (cf. 1 John 3:14)

Deriving from its apocalyptic orientation, the Johannine literature centers on calling Christians into a life of total love for one another. Love is the ultimate definition of who and what God is (1 John 4:7ff). Therefore, we are called to participate in, imitate, and abide in the form of love manifest in Christ, eschewing any other way of being in the world. Thus for John holiness is defined as an exclusive orientation towards mutual love as the Christian mode of action.

Moreover, this ethic of absolute love derives from John’s apocalyptic worldview. Loving one another is how we participate in God’s invasion of the world that began in Christ’s death and resurrection. Loving one another brings us into God’s own being, unites us with Christ, and grants us eternal life, which, for John simply is union with God in the perichoretic relations of the Godhead (John 17:21-23). Thus, the ecclesial reality of mutual love is the reality of life displacing death, it is the eschaton embodied in the world. The Johannine ethic of mutual love is ultimately an ethic which demands and implies a theological understanding of history. It calls us to incorporate any and all interruptions into our life through a thoroughgoing practice of love, believing this act to be the only mode of being that is in step with God’s eschatological action, which is bringing creation to its transfiguration and consumation.

Reclaiming Johannine Theology

Posted by on August 2, 2008 13 comments

Paul is all the rage among contemporary theologians these days, and indeed things have pretty much always been this way. In virtually every introduction to the New Testament that I have read, and even books as wonderful as Richard Hays’ The Moral Vision of the New Testament, certain non-Pauline segments of the NT get pretty short shrift. This is particularly true of the general epistles which are regularly left entirely out of standard NT introductions and theologies. This, I regard as a pretty big problem.

In particular this is problematic in light of the importance of the distinctive voice of the Johannine corpus in the witness of the NT as a whole. Lately I have been immersed in the Gospel and Epistles of John (First John is not an epistle however, but that’s another matter) and am becoming more and more convinced that these books of some of the most theologically intricate and subversive in the entire canon. The depth of Johannine sophistication, particularly in regard to issues of Christology, Trinitarian doctrine, and ecclesiology is consistently underestimated in the broad sweep of Christian theological reflection on the NT. Moreover, there is a fundamental and deeply theological and literary unity to the Johannine corpus (including Revelation) that is more intricate and intentional than perhaps any other discernible group of books in the NT.

Fortunately scholars like Raymond Brown, David Rensberger, and J. Louis Martyn have done a great job approaching the Johannine corpus from the point of view of sociological analysis, biblical theology, and exegesis. There is much to learn from these and other thinkers who have investigated deeply into Johannine theology, and the ecclesial roots of these writings in the “Johannine Community”, which, even if reconstructions such as Brown’s are a bit overconfident, do make clear a very different and very radical form of Christian community and life taking place alongside the Pauline and Petrine churches during the first and second century of the church’s existence.

My point in all this is merely to argue that just as theologians and philosophers are beginning to “rediscover” Paul as a significant source for theological reflection, a similar recovery of John promises to be equally insightful. The Johannine corpus is layered in a radically Christocentric cosmology, a distinctively Trinitarian aesthetic, and a vibrantly missional-communitarian ecclesiology. A recovery of the Johannine Gospel promises to be be as fruitful for confessional theology as the recent resurgence of theological interest in Pauline studies, perhaps even more so. I hope to help facilitate more discussion along this line with a lot more future writing and commentary of the Johannine corpus.

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