The Gospel of John and Christian Theology

By Richard Bauckham and Carl Mosser

In recent years, the disciplines of biblical studies and systematic theology have grown apart and largely lost the means of effective communication with one another. Unfortunately, this relational disconnect affects more than just these particular fields of study; it impacts the life of the church as a whole. The first St. Andrews Conference on Scripture and Theology brought leading biblical scholars and systematic theologians together in conversation, seeking to bridge the gap between them.

Due to its profound influence on the development of Christian theology, John's Gospel is an ideal base for rekindling fruitful dialogue. The essays here -- taken from the inaugural conference -- consider this Gospel from many angles, addressing a number of key issues that arise from a theological discussion of this text: John's dualism in our pluralist context, historicity and testimony, the treatment of Judaism, Christology, and more.

“This is the beginning of a conversation that can only be enriched by variety and experimentation. . . . It is a signpost . . . pointing towards a not-too-distant future when interdisciplinary conversation and collaboration between these two natural partners will become, no longer occasional and surprising, but a normal and essential element in the flourishing of both.”
-- Richard Bauckham (from the introduction)

Contributors:

Paul N. Anderson
Stephen C. Barton
Richard Bauckham
D. Jeffrey Bingham
C. Stephen Evans
Terry Griffith
Martin Hengel
Kasper Bro Larsen
Tord Larsson
Judith Lieu
Andrew T. Lincoln
Jürgen Moltmann
Carl Mosser
Stephen Motyer
Murray Rae
Anastasia Scrutton
Marianne Meye Thompson
Sigve K. Tonstad
Alan J. Torrance
Miroslav Volf
Rowan Williams

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Feb 25, 2008
• ISBN: 9781467424233

Book preview

Introduction

Richard Bauckham

The essays collected in this volume were first presented in 2003 as papers at the first St. Andrews Conference on Scripture and Theology held at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. The topic of the conference was the title of this volume: The Gospel of John and Christian Theology. The aim was to bring biblical scholars and systematic theologians together in conversation about a biblical text that has played a formative role in Christian theology through the centuries. This does not often happen. In the modern period, but especially in the last few decades, the disciplines of biblical studies and systematic theology have grown so far apart as to seem hardly within shouting distance of each other. The two disciplines are natural partners who have lost the means of effective communication with each other, so absorbed have they become in their own issues. Oddly, while they have been withdrawing from interdisciplinary relationships with each other, in the last few decades both biblical studies and theology have been notable for the way they have interacted across boundaries with disciplines such as literary studies, the social sciences, and philosophy. The reasons for this are various, but there is growing concern about it among many in both disciplines. The interest this conference generated is one indication of that concern. Some of us who teach in these fields may have noticed that students are often keen to relate their work in biblical studies to their work in theology and vice versa, while the way they are taught often discourages this. Anyone concerned with the way these two academic disciplines can serve the life of the church will surely also lament the lack of conversation between them.

The conference provided a rare opportunity for biblical scholars and systematic theologians to work together toward bridging the gap by entering a conversation fruitful to both. The essays in this volume are the most tangible results, though much that happened around the papers, including the lively interaction of many other scholars and students who attended the conference was also important. All the main papers and a small selection of the many offered short papers are included here. In several cases two scholars from differing disciplines were invited to address the same topic and the resulting pairs of papers are placed together in this volume (Barton and Volf, Evans and Bauckham, Motyer and Lieu, Rae and Anderson). In some cases they have been revised in the light of the discussion between the two speakers.

The plan of the conference was to address a number of the key issues that arise when Christian theologians read the Gospel of John today. The ways in which these essays seek to relate biblical studies and theology are themselves notably varied. It would be hard to find a common methodology for that task at work in all the essays, though there are many points of convergence. Some essays, like some of the topics, go further in an interdisciplinary direction than others. But this is the beginning of a conversation that can only be enriched by variety and experimentation.

John and Our Pluralist Context

The two essays in the first section of the volume confront one of the difficulties many readers of John in our contemporary context have with the Gospel. As Stephen Barton puts it, given the dualism of the Gospel of John, how may this Gospel be appropriated in a theologically responsible way in the context of the cultural pluralism characteristic of (late- or post-) modernity? We live in a context in which the diversity of religions, cultures, and lifestyles is or at least (many feel) should be celebrated and in which it seems imperative for the good of our societies that approaches to life different from our own be assessed positively. In this context are not the stark oppositions in John between light and darkness, God and the world, believers and unbelievers, the particularism and exclusivism of this Gospel’s soteriology, actually harmful in today’s world? Are they not precisely the attitudes that stir the kinds of conflict and violence that it is currently popular to blame on religion as such?

The term Johannine dualism in the topic assigned to our two authors evokes not only the terminology of much Johannine scholarship but also the strong impression which much writing about this Gospel leaves with the reader. In contemporary discussion dualism is usually something to be deplored. Stephen Barton and Miroslav Volf both challenge the appropriateness of the term in this case, distinguishing carefully among different kinds of dualism, and preferring to speak of certain carefully specified conceptual dualities in the Gospel of John. Both insist that to understand these dualities properly they must be contextualized — whether in the narrative of the Gospel, in the Gospel’s original historical context, or in the tradition of the church’s reception of the Gospel, as well as in the pluralistic context of contemporary readers. They move us away from sweeping generalizations to more nuanced appreciation of John’s conceptual dualities. But both authors also subject the concept of pluralism to analysis and critique. They challenge the often unexamined assumption that the ideology (rather than just the fact) of pluralism is some kind of rational or ethical norm against which it is necessary to measure the Gospel and to critique it. Could it be that careful observation and reflection on the nature and function of the dualities in John will show that they, are, in Volf’s word, actually salutary?

While having much to say that it is distinctive, these two authors, one a biblical scholar with a strong concern for thinking theologically, the other a theologian with a strong concern for studying the scriptural sources of theology, converge very significantly in their overall arguments. They model one (though not the only) way in which exegetes and theologians may come together in the task of understanding scripture theologically. The differing perspectives of exegetes and theologians are not doomed inevitably to clash.

Those Who Have Read John before Us

An important aspect of theological interpretation of this Gospel is the history of its interpretation. John’s Gospel has been close to the center of many theological developments and controversies, and has nourished the thought of many key theologians in the whole of the Christian tradition. We do not yet have anything like a full Wirkungsgeschichte, though there are good treatments of various parts of it. In this section of the present volume, three essays take soundings in the rich and complex history of understanding this Gospel.

Jeffrey Bingham shows how the Gospel supported and shaped a key element of Irenaeus’s doctrine of God: the divine aseity or self-sufficiency. This was vital in Irenaeus’s controversy with the Gnostics, and he also made it part of the Rule of Faith. Whereas the Gnostic demiurge was a needy being, the true Creator of the world, the one and only God, is self-contained fullness. John 1:3, with its stress on the creation of all things by God and his Word, helped to form Irenaeus’s trinitarian understanding of God and his two hands, the Word and the Spirit, who are the sole agents of God in all things and themselves intrinsic to God. This God needed no help in creation and needs nothing from creation, whereas creatures are in need of God. Thus, according to Bingham, a classical theological commonplace makes its transition into orthodoxy by means of John and with its distinctive emphases shaped by John.

Rowan Williams’s essay finds a continuity of theological interpretation in the century of Anglican interpretation of John that runs from bishop B. F. Westcott’s English commentary (1882) to bishop John Robinson’s The Priority of John (1984), passing through the commentaries of Edwyn Hoskyns and archbishop William Temple. Without reducing their differences, Rowan identifies in these four an Anglican consensus of theological concern for the concrete particularity of Jesus’ history as the historical mediation of our knowledge of God. None of them takes the narrative to be a simple record of matter-of-fact occurrences, but all of them find interpretation of actual events. In Robinson’s idiom, events are seen from the inside out rather than from the outside in, but they are not seen simply on the inside, as though the narrative were a mere symbol of mystical experience. As Hoskyns puts it, the visible, historical Jesus is the place in history where it is demanded that men should believe, whereas Temple insists that the incarnation is the only way in which divine truth can be expressed. Thus the relatively conservative understanding of historicity in John that is characteristic of this Anglican tradition of interpreting John is not mere conservatism. It is integral to incarnational theology. As Williams himself puts it: The tough paradox of Johannine faith is that, for the purposes of our growth into life, the transcendent reality which does not and cannot occupy a shared space with us is only accessible and functional as another portion of the world, a fleshly human life.

Todd Larsson’s essay, drawing on his larger study of the history of interpretation in his God in the Fourth Gospel,¹ highlights the disagreement between modern Johannine scholars as to whether the revelation of the divine glory in Jesus’ exaltation takes place in spite of his human death or actually by way of his humiliating suffering and death. By showing that both interpretations can be found in the Reformation period and, indeed, as early as the Fathers, Larsson points out the hazard of presenting one’s scholarly efforts as pioneering and the importance of historical awareness in our exegetical work.

History and Testimony in John

It is widely agreed that, owing to the differences between John and the Synoptic Gospels, the issue of the historical reliability of the Gospels takes a special or different form in the case of John. It is usually assumed that, since John is, so to speak, the odd Gospel out among the four, the differences count against the historical reliability of John more probably than against the historical reliability of the Synoptics. Defending the historicity of John — to whatever extent — requires a kind of argument that explains the differences as consistent with the historicity of John.

Does this matter for Christian faith? In other words, can the Gospel of John still function for Christian believers much as it has usually done even if it is judged to have no or little historical value for knowledge of the historical Jesus? Or, if the historical reliability of this Gospel matters for Christian faith, must the ordinary believer submit to the judgment of the majority of biblical scholars? Stephen Evans’s essay engages these issues from the perspective of a philosopher who, he says, is a layperson so far as New Testament scholarship is concerned.

One important question Evans considers is what kind of historical reliability is important for a Christian reader of John. His general answer is that the Gospel is historically reliable if someone who reads the narrative and believes it is all historically true gets an accurate view about the kinds of things Jesus said and did, and true beliefs about Jesus’ death and resurrection … [Such a] person correctly grasps the kind of person Jesus was, how Jesus lived, and that and how Jesus died and rose again. Evans finds this consistent with quite a lot of alleged historical error (even the non-historicity of the raising of Lazarus) in John that would not affect the reader’s general view of Jesus, but he thinks that, for the Gospel to have the kind of historical reliability he requires, Jesus must have said the kinds of things John represents him as saying about himself. This poses therefore the most acute issue with regard to the differences between John and the Synoptics.

Biblical scholars will probably be more surprised by another aspect of Evans’s argument: his discussion of evidentialist and non-evidentialist perspectives on the historical reliability of John. While he considers what the issues would be like from an evidentialist perspective, his own preference is for a non-evidentialist position. This is the view that a belief in John’s historical reliability might be basic and not grounded in evidence at all. The issue turns on the epistemological status of testimony. Evans follows Thomas Reid and many others in regarding testimony to be one of the properly basic sources of human knowledge, like perception and memory. Many things that we know, we believe on the testimony of others, not on the basis of evidence, and it is entirely reasonable to do so. This does not exempt us from the responsibility of considering evidence alleged against what we have accepted on the basis of testimony, but we need only establish that it is at least plausible to think the alleged case mistaken. It is from this point of view that Evans engages with Maurice Casey’s strongly argued case against the historicity of John.

Evans points out that the Gospel of John actually presents itself as testimony, the testimony of the Beloved Disciple, and it is for this reason that the idea of testimony forms a point of contact between Evans’s essay and Richard Bauckham’s. The latter proposes that the category of testimony is … the key to the way in which history and theology relate and cohere in the narrative of this Gospel and to the way in which historical belief and confessional faith should relate and cohere in Christian reading of this Gospel. This proposal entails arguing that the Beloved Disciple’s testimony (which encompasses that of all the other witnesses in the Gospel by reporting and interpreting them in the Gospel) is both a historiographical category, referring to eyewitness historical report, and a theological category, referring to theological perception of the meaning of the events.

The latter can be seen especially in the way that the Beloved Disciple’s testimony forms part of the broad metaphorical complex of a cosmic trial of the truth, which the Gospel portrays on the model of Deutero-Isaiah’s prophecy. Andrew Lincoln, who has recently expounded this theme at length, contends that the Beloved Disciple’s testimony refers only to his theological perception, and that where the Gospel appears to represent him as engaged in eyewitness observation and reporting, this is no more than a literary device for conveying his recognition of theological meaning. From this perspective it seems that the Gospel’s claim to a basis in eyewitness testimony does not require that anything distinctive to this Gospel need be taken as claiming historical veracity.

Bauckham argues, on the contrary, that the category of testimony in John’s Gospel combines a real element of historical reporting of the past. When the Gospel refers to eyewitnesses seeing, empirical observation (such as unbelieving contemporaries of Jesus shared) is not all that is implied but neither is it excluded. Only those who, during the time of Jesus’ earthly presence, recognized his divine glory in his empirically observable physical presence are qualified to bear testimony. In this respect, John’s concept of testimony, integral as it is to the Isaianic metaphorical framework of his narrative, also makes significant contact with that of the eyewitness testimony that ancient historians considered essential to historiography. Such testimony was expected to combine reliable empirical observation with the kind of interpretation of events that only involved participants in them could supply. In the case of John’s Gospel, such participants, including the Beloved Disciple himself, give testimony in which empirical reporting is inextricable from their recognition of the disclosure of God in the events. Bauckham concludes: The concurrence of historiographical and theological concepts of witness in John’s Gospel is wholly appropriate to the historical uniqueness of the subject matter, which as historical requires historiographical rendering but in its disclosure of God also demands that the witnesses to it speak of God. In this Gospel we have the idiosyncratic testimony of a disciple whose relationship to the events, to Jesus, was distinctive and different.

John and the Jews

It is impossible to read far in contemporary Johannine scholarship without encountering the issue of this Gospel’s anti-Judaism. In the world after the Holocaust and in the light of the history of Christian anti-Semitism, the Gospel’s frequent use of the term the Jews (hoi Ioudaioi) with mostly negative connotations cannot but rouse the suspicion that not only has it been used against Jews but must take its share of responsibility for Christian anti-Judaism. A number of reading strategies have been proposed for avoiding this conclusion and taking the Gospel’s negative references to the Jews in a more acceptable sense (see the second paragraph of Motyer’s essay). Such discussions reveal how puzzling the Johannine use of this term remains.

The essays by Stephen Motyer and Judith Lieu represent a discussion that began with their respective papers at the conference. In their present form Lieu explicitly takes issue with Motyer’s proposals, but both essays are too complex and subtle, as the topic requires, for one to simply sum them up as opposing positions. However, Motyer’s argument proposes a reading of the Gospel in its first-century context that goes further than clearing it of anti-Judaism, offering in fact a substantial answer to the question asked in the title of the essay: how might the Fourth Gospel help us to cope with the legacy of Christianity’s exclusive claim over against Judaism? Lieu, on the other hand, concludes that we cannot find in an always tentative original setting a palliative for the uses to which the Gospel was later put.

Motyer engages with the vexed question of the appropriate translation of hoi Ioudaioi in its Johannine use. In light of his proposal that the dominant (though not exclusive) use is to refer to Jews who were passionate about thorough Torah observance, he gives examples of appropriate translations in particular cases. The effect is to limit the reference to specific groups of Jews and to resist the generalizing effect of the simple the Jews in English. In this part of his argument he champions the right of the text to speak its own voice in its own first-century accent. The second part of his argument treats the strategy of the text in relation to its implied readers. Here he takes up the understanding of the Gospel’s narrative as a trial of the truth in which readers are the jurors before whom the argument for and against Jesus are presented. He draws attention to the way in which the Gospel includes the arguments of Jesus’ opponents as well as Jesus’ responses to them and the fact that it attributes these arguments to Jesus’ disciples as well as to the Jews. The disciples, too, are outsiders in the narrative. The Gospel does not presuppose a Johannine community anterior to itself but looks for a community that it will constitute as readers respond to its message. Motyer thus places both the polemic against the Jews and the Gospel’s exclusive truth claims in a dialogical context in which the issues are laid out for debate. The Gospel does not seek the exclusion of the other but community with the other.

Judith Lieu raises important questions about Motyer’s proposals. She points out the hypothetical character of all attempts to reconstruct an original context for the Gospel, and the consequent problem in giving such a reconstruction hermeneutical priority for our reading of the Gospel. In the constructive part of her paper, Lieu discusses the way in which the Jews function within other ways of reading the Gospel. One of these is the two-level drama — not in the sense of the drama of Jesus in his time and that of the Johannine community in the Gospel’s time, but in the sense of the earthly story of Jesus and the cosmological drama of the heavenly Son sent into the world by the Father. The question of how the Jews, who clearly belong to the former level, relate to the latter drama entails the issue of their relationship to the world. In this debate Lieu concludes that the particularity of the Jesus story resists attempts to draw the sting of anti-Judaism by treating the Jews as mere symbols of the world. The second approach to the Gospel focuses on the Johannine dualism, often seen as reflecting the sectarian situation of the community in relation to its Jewish neighbors, while the third is the Gospel’s retellings of scriptural narratives, in which, for example, the Jews are aligned with Cain. Lieu’s discussion shows how the problem of the Gospel’s use of the Jews cannot be abstracted from other aspects of the Gospel’s theology with which it is closely connected.

Terry Griffith’s essay focuses on a particularly puzzling and debated reference to the Jews: the Jews who had believed in Jesus (John 8:31). Griffith argues cogently that these are not the Jews who, according to 8:30, had just come to faith in Jesus, but rather those former disciples who had previously believed in Jesus but had abandoned their faith in him (6:66-72). It is to these apostates, not to the Jews in general, that Jesus directs the shocking accusation that they are children of the devil (8:39-47).

Sigve Tonstad’s essay has been included in this group of essays, not because it focuses on the Jews, but rather because, by going to the heart of Johannine dualism, it casts the Jews not in the role of Jesus’ principal opponent, but in a subordinate and peripheral role. Rejecting the many interpretative attempts to play down the role of personal supernatural evil in the Gospel, Tonstad argues that in the modified cosmic dualism of the Gospel the father of lies and ruler of this world is identified as the source of all other evil. This argument coheres with a renewed emphasis on the suffering and death of Jesus as the center of the Gospel’s narrative of salvation. It is by revealing the true character and purpose of God that the cross exposes the lies of the devil and so deprives him of his power.

Perspectives on the Raising of Lazarus

One session of the conference brought together papers that approached the account of the raising of Lazarus in John 11 from a variety of methodological and interpretative perspectives: literary, theological, social scientific, and philosophical approaches as well as studies of the history of interpretation and of the portrayal of the story in the visual arts. Three of these papers are included in the present volume.²

The story of the raising of Lazarus is one of the highlights of this Gospel’s narrative genius. In a discussion that is perceptive in both literary and theological terms, Andrew Lincoln attends to literary features of the narrative — motifs, plot, and especially characterization — and relates them to the rhetorical intent of the passage, which is to bring readers to belief that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and through faith in him to life (20:31). He shows how the characterization of Jesus entails the paradoxical aspects that show him to be both divine and human. The two sisters are characterized in such a way as to serve as representative figures with whom readers can identify, each sister complementing the representative role of the other. Lincoln concludes that not only because of its plot and themes but also, and especially, because of its persuasive purpose made explicit in the characterization, the Lazarus story deserves to be called the Fourth Gospel in miniature.

Marianne Meye Thompson gives a theological interpretation, prefacing it with a succinct account of how theological interpretation differs from any purely historical approach to the text, even one that describes the theology of the text: Theological readings are … constructive, endeavoring to relate the matters of the text to the extra-textual reality spoken of by the text. Theological readings are interested in the conversations that texts generate in the present, and not simply in the conversations that generated the texts. She undertakes a reading that takes the three articles of the creed as a framework for interpretation, and shows how John 11 provides connections between the first and second articles of the creed, and between the second and third. That is to say, John 11 connects God’s creation of the world with God’s salvation of the world through his Son, Jesus Christ, and further connects both with the eschatological promises of the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. An example of the way in which a theological framework of this kind can enhance understanding of the text while the text itself enriches our understanding of the doctrine is Thompson’s treatment of Jesus’ grief at the tomb of Lazarus, in which she sees the truly human face of the true God.

No responsible consideration of the Lazarus narrative can for too long avoid the historical question: did it happen? Probably no other event in the Gospel narratives of the ministry of Jesus has been regarded with such skepticism by scholars committed to an historical-critical approach to the biblical texts. This is due, not merely to the nature of the historical evidence, but also to the nature of the event, which is scarcely conceivable as anything other than a miraculous act of God (which is how, of course, the Gospel portrays it). Judgments about its historical probability therefore involve not just assessments of the historical evidence, but also, crucially, the kind of epistemic base on which we make our judgments of probability. It is from this angle that Alan Torrance’s essay engages with the issue theologically and philosophically.

Torrance has no truck with the assumption, too often made by New Testament scholars, that historical work must proceed on a naturalistic or social-constructionist epistemic base. (Here his essay converges with that of Stephen Evans.) Torrance points out that such approaches entail faith commitments just as much as a theistic or Christian approach. But a Christian epistemic base, proceeding from the God-given recognition of God’s involvement in the events of the history of Jesus, will radically affect all judgments of probability in the case of an event such as the raising of Lazarus.

Torrance also makes another important point about judgments of probability in historical arguments. He points out that serial probability — a series of judgments of probability each proceeding from the previous — does not have the effect of increasing, but of diminishing the probability of the judgments later in the series. Historical work in biblical studies does not always distinguish carefully between serial probability and cumulative probability (in which a number of independent considerations converge on the same conclusion and thus increase its probability). Torrance shows how easily this mistake can be made in arguments about the raising of Lazarus, resulting in a radically distorted impression of the probabilities of the matter.

Fundamental to Torrance’s whole argument is the distinction between God-talk and talk-about-God-talk. Only the former can support properly theological judgments, i.e., judgments based on the God-given recognition of God’s presence in Christ, as distinct from mere constructions of the human mind. Theological conclusions cannot be based on historical argumentation that assumes a different epistemic base from that of Christian faith. Torrance is careful to note that this approach does not license uncritical acceptance of the historicity of the Lazarus narrative, but it does require a quite different approach to historical probability.

Christology

One of the highlights of the conference was Martin Hengel’s theological exposition of the Prologue to John’s Gospel. He reads the Prologue as a sequential poetic narrative of the revelation of God through his Word, culminating in the incarnation of the Word as Jesus Christ. As for Paul, so also for John, the eternal God himself comes as a human being to lost human beings who have turned away from him — the difference from Paul being that John narrates this as a story. Hengel sees the Prologue’s climactic v. 14 (the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we saw his glory, glory as of the Only-begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth) as a summary of the whole Gospel: In order to interpret this one sentence the evangelist could not continue the synoptic tradition; he had to write a different Gospel which sets out to inculcate in readers the truth of this one sentence. What is distinctive of this Gospel is the centrality of its upward gaze to the unity-in-distinction of the Son with the Father and the Son’s being sent by the Father into the world for human salvation. Since Hengel has elsewhere written at length on the key significance of Psalm 110:1 for the development of early Christology,³ it is interesting that here he explains why, alone among the major writings of the New Testament, the Johannine writings do not allude to this text. It is because John has gone beyond the image of the Father and the Son sharing the divine throne to the image of the unique unity of Father and Son in a relationship of love (the Only-begotten who is in the bosom of the Father).

While calling the story of the Word in the Prologue revelation history, Hengel makes no separation between revelation and salvation. By understanding flesh in v. 14 as a strongly negative term for humanity in, not only its creatureliness, but also its sinfulness and subjection to death, Hengel finds the theologia crucis of this Gospel already implicit in the Prologue. On Hengel’s reading John’s is very far from being the docetic Gospel once condemned by Ernst Käsemann as a heretical work that the early church should not have admitted to the canon. Quite the contrary, Hengel repeatedly finds that the Prologue anticipates the Nicene Creed — in its soteriological thrust, its portrayal of the incarnate Word as truly God, truly human, and its understanding of the Word as the eternal Son who, while being wholly one with the Father in his divine being, is yet not identical with him as a person.

Murray Rae also stresses that the Prologue anticipates the central theme of the whole Gospel, but his focus is rather different from Hengel’s. It is the theme of creation and the Word’s agency in creation that Rae finds extended throughout the Gospel as Jesus by his works continues the divine work of creation, restoring and fulfilling the creation, bestowing the abundant life in intimacy with God that constitutes the new creation. Thus the themes of light and life, associated with the Word’s work of creation in the Prologue, recur throughout the Gospel with reference to his transformative action in creation, including several of the miracles. Rae finds the materiality of Jesus’ works significant in this context, suggesting the transformation of this created world, with its mundane life, through the bestowal of eternal, abundant life by Jesus. By reading the passion of Christ in relation to the theme of new creation, Rae suggests that it can be seen as the travail of the new creation, the labor pains that bring forth new life.

Paul Anderson’s essay, like much of his important work on the Gospel of John, displays a characteristic concern to integrate diachronic and synchronic aspects of the text. In a packed and nuanced discussion, he considers the christological and theological tensions in John, such as those between the human and divine aspects of Jesus, the Son’s equality with and subordination to the Father, present and future eschatology, and universalism and particularity. Scholars since Bultmann have often sought to account for such tensions by means of source- and redaction-criticism, attributing them to different authors with varying theologies. It is somewhat ironic that Bultmann, a dialectical theologian himself, could not allow John to be a dialectical thinker. Anderson, on the other hand, argues that the tensions are meant to be there, and should be understood, in part at least, as the Gospel author’s conjunctive approach to truth exploration in which opposites are not eliminated but are held together in tension. They are tensions, but not exclusive alternatives. As well as this both-and rather than either-or style of thinking, Anderson identifies three other epistemological origins of the tensions in John: (a) the Mosaic agency schema that shapes much of the Gospel’s Christology; (b) the history of the Johannine situation (a term that Anderson uses in preference to the usual talk of a Johannine community); and (c) the literary devices that serve to engage the reader in an imaginary dialogue with Jesus.

In a concluding section Anderson speaks of the likelihood that the spiritual character of John’s dialectical reflection upon the incarnation suggests not removed distance from the ministry of Jesus, but radical proximity to it. The Gospel displays a first-order engagement with living christological content … rather than a second-order learning of the ‘right answers’ theologically. The ecumenical councils and the creeds of the patristic period maintained the tensions in the dialectical Christology of this Gospel, which was recurrently in danger of being eliminated by concentration on one or the other pole. The orthodoxy of the creeds, however, needs to be constantly informed by the living faith that inspires the Gospel’s own dialectical Christology.

Kasper Bro Larsen takes up again the issue raised by Ernst Käsemann when he described the Christology of John’s Gospel as naïve docetism, but approaches it in a quite fresh way by means of Greimasian narratology. Distinguishing the two dimensions of narrative as pragmatic and cognitive, Larsen argues that this Gospel so accentuates the cognitive aspect that the pragmatic dimension becomes no more than a stage on which the cognitive activities take place. This suppression of the pragmatic results especially from the fact that John’s Jesus is an omniscient cognitive actor, sharing, within the story-world, the same degree of omniscience as the narrator. This rules out the usual dynamics of narrative, isolating Jesus, as the free master of every situation, from the rest of the narrative world, and lends a degree of unreality to it. Thus, in place of Käsemann’s naïve docetism, Larsen suggests the term narrative docetism. Although he stresses that this is a literary judgment, not a history-of-religions or theological judgment, it may be that the theological judgments we make about Johannine Christology are not adequately based unless we take into account this kind of literary analysis of the Gospel’s narrative.

Using John in the Theological Task Today

All of the essays in this volume have implications for constructive Christian theology, but the two essays in this concluding section have been chosen as examples of theological reflection that is rooted in major themes of the Gospel of John and goes on to develop them as starting points for theological construction for today.

Anastasia Scrutton’s concern is with Johannine soteriology as a precedent for a soteriology of salvation as revelation. She distinguishes such a view from exemplarism (Christ provides merely a moral example for us to imitate) and defines it thus: Christ’s saving work lies in the revelation of divine love for humanity, in the concomitant infusion of love, and in the consequential transformation and liberation of the individual. Following Terence Forestell, she sees salvation in John as primarily about revelation, which occurs in the incarnation, cross, and resurrection of Jesus, viewed as a single event. Sin is not so much wicked actions but, more profoundly, an attitude of rejection of God, which is overcome when revelation enables fellowship with God. On this basis, she recommends that contemporary theology put more emphasis on the incarnation as a whole, rather than the cross in isolation, and adopt a more personal, less forensic, understanding of sin and salvation.

Jürgen Moltmann begins his paper by reflecting on the fact that his early theology made no reference to the Gospel of John, but that from 1980 onward he found himself increasingly referencing it. The theological development to which this corresponds was from Eschatology to Ecology. It was a move from the concept of Time in the progress of human history to the concept of Space in the life-giving organism of the earth. It was a journey that led from a paradigm shift from the order of domination and obedience … to the new and democratic order of community, freedom, and friendship. Above all, it was a way leading me with the God of Hope to the indwelling and inhabitable God. The last sentence shows that the reader would be mistaken if she or he thought Moltmann were describing a movement that left time, history, and hope behind. Rather Moltmann describes here an enriching of his theology with the new concepts of space and indwelling. The integration of these new features with the eschatological orientation that his theology has never lost makes possible the fact that his essay ends with an account of Trinitarian eschatology that revolves around the notion of mutual indwelling.

The essay is marked by a constant association of the personal with the spatial. The biblical sources of this lie in the Old Testament concept of God’s dwelling among his people and especially in the Gospel of John, which highlights the notion of mutual indwelling (you in me, I in you). The Greek Fathers, whom Moltmann follows here, called this mutual indwelling perichoresis. It is an unmixed and undivided community of the one and the other … a community without uniformity and a personhood without individualism. Moltmann uses the concept, first, to explicate the community of the three divine Persons, each of whom is both a person who indwells the others and a space open for the indwelling of the others. They reciprocally offer each other the inviting, open room for movements to develop their eternal livingness. There can be no personal freedom without free spaces in social life.

The same rich image of personal relationships taking place in the space each person opens up for others to inhabit Moltmann applies also, secondly, to the relationship between the trinitarian Persons and the world, making reference here especially to John 17:21. The perichoretic unity of the divine Persons and Spaces is so wide-open that the whole world can find room and rest and the fullness of eternal life within it. All creatures can enter into God to find their freedom and living-space and their home in the Trinity. This is a mutual indwelling of God and creation, which will be perfected in the eschatological perichoresis of God and the world. Thirdly, Moltmann characterizes the church as perichoretic community corresponding to and included in the Trinity (John 17:21 again).

Finally, Moltmann expounds the main features of a trinitarian eschatology characterized by these ideas of Person and Living-Space. As an example of the way mature theological reflection within the context of a broad theological vision can draw out the rich potential for meaning in some key texts of the Gospel of John, this essay forms a fitting conclusion to the collection.

The Ongoing Conversation

Biblical scholars and theologians often belong to different professional organizations and attend different professional conferences. Even when they attend the same conference (e.g., SBL/AAR), rarely do they attend the same sessions. Speakers and attendees alike described the first St. Andrews Conference on Scripture and Theology as one of the most enjoyable and fruitful academic conferences they had attended. Evidence that the conference accomplished its goal could be observed as biblical scholars, theologians, and the occasional philosopher vigorously discussed the issues raised by the papers in this volume after each session, over meals, and late into the night. A second St. Andrews Conference on Scripture and Theology was held in 2006 with similar success. The topic was the Epistle to the Hebrews and Christian Theology and the papers will comprise a second volume in this series. A further conference is in the early planning stages. The St. Andrews conferences have been successful because biblical scholars and theologians were given opportunity and reason to converse with one another about topics of mutual interest and concern. The ardent nature of those conversations suggests that the conversation between our disciplines is long overdue. It is also a signpost, among others, pointing toward a not too distant future when interdisciplinary conversation and collaboration between these two natural partners will become, no longer occasional and surprising, but a normal and essential element in the flourishing of both.

1. Todd Larsson, God in the Fourth Gospel: A Hermeneutical Study of the History of Interpretation (CB[NT] 35; Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 2001).

2. Philip F. Esler and Ronald A. Piper subsequently expanded their paper on a social scientific approach to John 11 and published it as Lazarus, Mary and Martha: Social-Scientific Approaches to the Gospel of John (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006).

3. See especially Martin Hengel, ‘Sit at My Right Hand!’ in Martin Hengel, Studies in Early Christology (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1995), pp. 119-225.

JOHN AND OUR PLURALIST CONTEXT

Johannine Dualism and Contemporary Pluralism

Stephen C. Barton

I take it that the title Johannine Dualism and Contemporary Pluralism implies a problem — or a complex of problems — in search of a solution. The problem may be put thus: given the dualism of the Gospel of John, how may this Gospel be appropriated in a theologically responsible way in the context of the cultural pluralism characteristic of (late- or post-) modernity? More generally: can we still hear a text whose particularities of language, form, and content — all deeply moulded by the historical circumstances in which it took shape — seem to place the text at such a distance from the ideas and values of the contemporary world? Clearly, we are in the realm of discourse and practice that has become known as theological hermeneutics.

Illustrating the Hermeneutical Problem

The problem is posed sharply by Johannine scholar R. Alan Culpepper in his 1996 essay, The Gospel of John as a Document of Faith in a Pluralistic Culture.¹ Culpepper asks this question: "As the culture [of North America] in which we live becomes increasingly pluralistic, religious communities are beginning to confront issues posed by the beliefs, experiences, values, and religious traditions of individuals from widely different social, ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds. To put it in other words, does using the Gospel of John as a document of faith lead to a faith stance that is adequate to the challenges a pluralistic culture poses for believers?"²

By way of response, Culpepper begins by briefly tracing challenges to John as a document of faith in times past: first, the second-century controversy over the Gospel’s theological orthodoxy, given its arguably Gnostic tendencies and its popularity among the Gnostics; and second, the nineteenth-century challenge by the likes of Karl Gottlieb Bretschneider and David Friedrich Strauss to the historical reliability of the Gospel, given the marked differences between John and the Synoptics and the characteristically Johannine idiom of the discourses.³ Culpepper then suggests that the challenges facing John’s Gospel as a document of faith today are different. No longer is the challenge that of John’s theological orthodoxy, nor is it John’s historical reliability. The main challenge is ethical. He says: In place of the theological and historical challenges of earlier eras, a series of new concerns has arisen. These concerns are not primarily theological or historical but ethical: (1) Is the Gospel of John anti-Jewish? (2) Does the Gospel have anything to say to the marginalized and the oppressed? And (3) How should we interpret the theological exclusivism of the Gospel in a pluralistic culture?⁴

Culpepper proceeds to consider each of these three questions in turn. On the first, he emphasizes the contribution to Christian anti-Semitism of the Gospel’s hostility to the Jews, and calls for the repudiation of John’s anti-Judaism and the questioning of the Gospel’s theological exclusivism. On the second, he calls for a hermeneutic of suspicion toward standard interpretations of John by biblical scholars who are almost exclusively white, male, Europeans and Euro-Americans, the effect of which is both to conceal the interpretative interests at work in the scholarly guild and to marginalize readings of John from other social locations. On the third question — to do with the interpretation of John’s theological exclusivism in a pluralistic culture — Culpepper seeks to mitigate the force of Johannine exclusivism by empahsizing the universalistic implications of John’s cosmic, Wisdom/Logos christology as exemplified in John 1:9 ("The true light which enlightens everyone was coming into the world.). According to Culpepper, John’s Logos Christology allows Christians to affirm that adherents of other religious traditions may come to know God through the work of the Cosmic Christ."⁵ In his conclusion, Culpepper reiterates his main contention: the challenge to John as a document of faith today is the ethical one — and what is needed in a context of cultural and religious pluralism is a hermeneutics of ethical accountability.⁶

I have drawn attention to Culpepper’s recent essay, partly because it shows with passion and lucidity that our concern is a current one, but mainly because its argument is unconvincing or seriously undeveloped at critical points. Identifying some of these points will prepare the way for the main substance of the essay to follow.

Take, first, that final invitation, the call to a hermeneutics of ethical accountability. The obvious question is: accountability to whom? In a pluralistic society, who is to arbitrate? Is a genuine plurality best served by Kantian universal moral absolutes established according to the lights of human reason unfettered by Scripture and tradition? What is at stake, furthermore, in prescinding on questions of theology and history (as questions of yesterday) in favor of questions of ethics? This privileging of ethics in a way that separates the moral questions from the theological and historical is an increasingly common strategy in interpretation. But its pitfall is what we have come to recognize to be characteristic of theological modernism. However unintended, its ultimate effect is to reduce theology to anthropology, to seriously circumscribe how the text speaks by sanitizing the text of those parts regarded as offensive, and to cut the text off from Scripture-bearing communities for whom the Gospel of John remains revelatory of the divine. In the end, we are left with the question, why bother at all with such a problematic text if the danger is always that of being led astray from the path of moral probity, a path discerned independently of the text, in any case?

Related to the problems associated with Culpepper’s uncritical turn to the ethical is his naïve embrace of cultural and religious pluralism as the determining context for responsible interpretation. There are several issues here. One has to do with the nature of pluralism — in particular its function as an ideology of the project of modernity, an ideology which operates (ironically) to suppress genuine differences between peoples and cultures. It does this in the name of individualism, itself a kind of cultural lowest common denominator buttressed massively by consumer capitalism. Thus, instead of a genuine plurality of cultures, each with its historic particularity, ethos, and worldview, we have an ideology of pluralism. Here, universal ethics becomes a way of managing competing truth claims and policing genuine difference — which is a natural corollary of the relativization of truth in a context of ideological pluralism. What becomes important are questions of procedure. Questions of truth are politely circumvented by being relegated to the realm of personal choice and private preference.

If universal ethics and ideological pluralism do not serve theologically responsible interpretation well, the question of a more appropriate context has to be considered. The irony of Culpepper’s approach is that, in the totalizing expectation it brings to the text of John — that is, in the demand it places on the text to speak directly and comprehensively to the present in ways that are relevant to the needs and experience of the reader — it represents, at least in some ways, the flip-side of fundamentalist interpretation. What is lacking in both a modernist and fundamentalist interpretation is a richer and more complex notion of context. Each and every text in John requires for its interpretation contextualization in the Gospel as a whole (itself shaped by the Jewish scriptures). The Gospel itself requires contextualization both in its originating linguistic, socio-historical, and cultural context and in its context in canonical and subsequent Christian tradition and history. This includes, of course, how it is heard in Christian faith communities today. The manner of Culpepper’s approach is to short-cut this process. In consequence, the demands and expectations of the modern (North-American) reader he represents are allowed to become too insistent, and the necessary tension and complex mediations of time and space between text and reader are seriously compromised.

Johannine Dualism

Having just spoken of the need to take theology and history seriously, and the need for a proper contextualization of John which includes its originating linguistic, socio-historical, and cultural context, I turn now to the question of Johannine dualism. A cursory survey of scholarship shows that dualism is widely held to be a significant and characteristic feature of the Gospel of John. Rudolf Bultmann’s classic Theology of the New Testament has a full chapter on Johannine dualism in his account of Johannine theology;⁷ James H. Charlesworth has a widely cited study comparing the dualisms of John and the Qumran Scrolls;⁸ C. K. Barrett’s Essays on John has a nicely nuanced essay on Paradox and Dualism ranging widely over New Testament texts generally but focusing on John in particular;⁹ and, most recently, John Ashton’s magisterial Understanding the Fourth Gospel has a major discussion of dualism also.¹⁰ These studies and others raise a number of issues that are worth our attention with a view to a more adequately contextualized and theologically suggestive interpretation of John.

Defining Dualism

We may begin with the question of definition. Historian of religion and Gnosticism specialist, Ugo Bianchi, is helpful here: As a category within the history and phenomenology of religion, dualism may be defined as a doctrine that posits the existence of two fundamental causal principles underlying the existence … of the world. In addition, dualistic doctrines, worldviews, or myths represent the basic components of the world or of man as participating in the ontological opposition and disparity of value that characterize their dual principles.¹¹ An important corollary is the need to distinguish dualism proper from simple dualities or pairs of opposites, such as male/female, right/left, light/darkness, life/death, good/bad, spirit/matter, sacred/profane, and so on. According to Bianchi, Not every duality or polarity is dualistic, but only those that involve the duality or polarity of causal principles.… This means that a concept of mere ethical dualism, stressing the moral opposition between good and evil and their respective protagonists (as in the Christian concepts of God and the Devil), is not properly dualistic in the religio-historical and phenomenological sense unless good and evil are also connected with opposite ontological principles, as in Zoroastrianism and in Manichaeism. The simple contrasting of good and evil, life and death, light and darkness, and so on is in fact coextensive with religion itself and cannot be equated with the much more specific phenomenon of dualism.¹²

In more systematic mode, Bianchi also offers a typology of the basic forms of dualism. He distinguishes three pairs: radical versus moderate, dialectical versus eschatological, and cosmic versus anticosmic. In radical dualism, the two principles are coequal and coeternal; in moderate dualism, one principle is primordial and the other is derivative. In dialectical dualism, the two principles — often conceived of as good and evil — function eternally; in eschatological dualism the belief is that the evil principle will be overcome at the end of history. In cosmic dualism, creation is fundamentally good and is threatened by evil coming from outside; anticosmic dualism holds that evil is intrinsic to the world, and is present, for example, in matter, the body, or the inferior soul.¹³

The relevance of Bianchi’s definition and typology for the present study needs to be considered. First, it is clear from his account that the genealogy of dualism as an analytic category is the history of religions and the phenomenology of religion, and that its native soil is in the study of Zoroastrianism in particular. This raises complex theological-hermeneutical questions. In particular, how appropriate is dualism — an analytic category drawn from the scientific study of Zoroastrian religion — as a tool for the interpretation of texts like the Gospel of John that stand within the fundamentally monistic and monotheistic framework of biblical faith and Early Judaism? Will the category dualism allow us to understand the text more profoundly against its originating historical context — which it may well do — or will it have the effect of flattening out the text as presenting just one more variation of a particular phenomenon we know of already as a feature of certain kinds of religion? Now that Nicholas Lash and others have made us more aware of the nature of religion and its scientific study as an ideological construct of modernity and the Enlightenment,¹⁴ we need to be conscious of the load our categories carry — their potential for illumination, but also their potential for distortion.

Second, Bianchi’s differentiation between dualism and duality is pertinent.¹⁵ Arguably, there is in John no polarity