4. The Christology of the Fourth Gospel:
4.
The Christology of the Fourth Gospel: History and Interpretation
THE WAY THE IMAGE of Jesus is depicted in the fourth gospel continues to arouse discussion. There is often talk of the "riddle" of the fourth gospel — the totally unique witness of this book to the person and the work of Jesus Christ in his life on earth, a witness that seems quite removed from the historical Jesus-image of the synoptics. In other words, it is the relation between the historical reality of Jesus' life and John's interpretation of this reality — which can be called (for better or worse) his Christology — which is continually under consideration in biblical and dogmatic theology. Some recent developments in this discussion bring to the fore what in my opinion is essential for understanding the fourth gospel and solving its so-called riddle.
Some scholars feel that the fourth gospel bears the character of a theological interpretation to such an extent that they deny the author any historical intention at all. This does not mean that he could not have been a good historian, but rather that he has consciously and purposely portrayed the image of Jesus in a mystical or symbolic way. His purpose was not to recount history, but to express his ideas about the divine person and message of Jesus in historical images. Although these idealistic and mystical interpretations of the gospel (for instance, that of F. C. Baur, father of the Tubingen school, and that of A. Loisy, the French priest noted for his part in the so-called "modernist controversy") do not receive much support nowadays, radical historical criticism of the fourth gospel is still alive. For Bultmann, in his well-known commentary, the gospel has hardly any historical value. What counts for him is John's interpretation. The characteristic of this book, according to Bultmann, is that the works of Jesus as the Revelator are described in the language of mythology, specifically in what he calls the gnostic myth of the Redeemer, a supernatural being who descends from heaven, brings people real knowledge, and then returns to God. On the gnostic conception of reality, however, the glory (doxa) of the Redeemer is a hidden glory, visible only to those who are able to discern this glory with the eyes of faith, to people who are spiritually sighted, not blind. According to this underlying gnostic conception the key-word in the gospel, "The word became flesh" (John 1:14), is to be understood in terms of the complete hiddenness of the revelation, which is designated by the word "flesh." This saying means: the word became man and nothing else but a man. This is the great paradox, the skandalon in the revelation of Jesus Christ. He came to reveal the glory of God, but there was in him nothing glorious or divine that could be seen and recognized other than by faith. The Christology of the fourth gospel as Bultmann explains it therefore appears to be of a kenotic nature.
To be sure, Bultmann is aware that the fourth gospel also contains a number of tremendous miracles, in which the glory of the Redeemer seems to reveal itself in all clarity for the eyes of all persons. But Bultmann does not consider that the miracles in the fourth gospel had this significance for the author. In relating the miracles in their spectacular form, he was merely joining the tradition. For him miracles had only symbolic significance; they meant nothing in themselves. They are just another sort of kerygma and can mean something only for those who understand their deeper, symbolic reality. The whole gospel is therefore nothing but a mythological expression of the kerygma that in the encounter with Jesus Christ one is confronted with the word of God. Not the knowledge of the "historical Jesus," but the existentialistic decision (Ent-scheidung) with which he confronts us, is important.
Remarkable is the criticism of Bultmann by the well-known scholar Ernst Kasemann. On the one hand, as a pupil of Bultmann, coming out of the same radical tradition, he approaches the historical reliability of the gospel no less critically than does Bultmann. According to Kasemann, the fourth gospel, measured by our concept of reality, is more fantastic than any other book of the New Testament. He, too, believes that the book originated in heretical circles of a gnostic character and that the evangelist has described the historical Jesus on the basis of a gnostic concept of reality. That is why he could work with the historical tradition so freely and imaginatively, because historicity in itself does not have much value for the gnostic. On the other hand, Kasemann's conception of the Christology of the fourth gospel is precisely the opposite of Bultmann's interpretation. While Bultmann argues that the glory of Jesus in the fourth gospel is a totally hidden one and the Redeemer became man and no more than man, Kasemann says that the fourth gospel is surely meant to give a description of the abundant glory of Jesus in the flesh. His is a completely different — and, in my opinion, much better — explanation of John 1:14. Of course it reads "the Word became flesh," but then follows "and dwelt among us . . . and we have beheld his glory." The incarnation was not a means of concealing the glory, but in fact of revealing it. It is the glory of the divine Logos of God, which has revealed itself in overwhelming majesty in the flesh, which has empowered him to perform the greatest miracles, which enabled him to dispute with his opponents with unlimited superiority, which resulted in his going into death as the triumphant one. That is why one cannot by means of demythologizing the gospel remove the divinity of Jesus without destroying the core of the gospel. The image of Christ in John is not that of a man and nothing but a man, but rather of God walking on the earth. And according to Kasemann, this is how it is intended. The gospel is not simply concerned with the kerygma, in the existential-istic sense of that word, but especially with the person of Jesus. The witness of the divinity of Jesus is really the content of the message of John — in sharp antithesis to what Bultmann says.
Kasemann's explanation of the intention of the fourth gospel strikes me as far nearer the truth than Bultmann's. With Bultmann all things center on the existentialistic message of the decision the individual has to take against the visible world, against what is available for us and what we can dominate ourselves, and in favor of the invisible world, which is not within our reach. This is the only way a person can really become human. And it is, in Bultmann's view, the "christologi-cal" message of the fourth gospel that it brings us to this confrontation, to this paradoxical decision, as the only way of freedom and salvation. The big issue in the fourth gospel is therefore not Christology as such but anthropology; not the nature of Christ but the nature of salvation.
It is exactly in this respect that Kasemann differs from Bultmann. The dogma of the fourth gospel is not that of Bultmann's demythologizing and existentialistic interpretation, but is the dogma of the revelation of Jesus Christ in his divine glory as the Son of God. This christological dogma in the real sense of the word is the very core and heart of the message that confronts us in the fourth gospel. That is why, Kasemann says, the church has accepted this gospel in spite of its possibly heretical origins and that is why the church even today cannot evade a confrontation with this message without thereby setting aside the real meaning and purpose of the gospel of John.
In this respect Kasemann's criticism is on target. Soteriology depends on Christology, and you cannot change this order. But the consequence of this position, it seems to me, is that the question of historicity comes back with its full force. According to Kasemann the Christology of the fourth gospel has a naive, docetic character, originating in its gnostic background, revealing itself in its free and sometimes fantastic treatment of the historical tradition. But how then can we possibly accept the real message of this gospel, as Kasemann has pointed it out so consistently, without falling back into a new (or old!) idealistic Christology, in which at decisive moments a spiritualistic ideology has to replace the failing historical revelation? This is the Achilles' heel of Kasemann's attempt to combine an unbiased interpretation of John's message with radical historical criticism.
More and more students of the fourth gospel are becoming convinced that an ahistorical approach to it is untenable, whether in the idealistic manner of F. C. Baur or the exis-tentialistic manner of Rudolf Bultmann. It cannot be denied that John wanted to write history. The gospel as a whole, with all its historical, chronological, and topographical details, is proof of this. Therefore one can observe a turn in the tide of opinion, in the judgment also of many whom one cannot reproach with undue conservatism or fundamentalism. C. H. Dodd, for instance, argues that the gospel of John undoubtedly is more a theological than a historical work, but he strongly maintains its historical basis and value.
There are recent indications which point emphatically to Palestine for the historical background of the gospel and, indeed, to a time before the fall of Jerusalem. The accuracy of various topographical references in the gospel has been established by such experts in Palestinian archaeology as W. F. Albright and Joachim Jeremias. Since the excavation of Bethesda and its colonnades it can no longer be maintained that the five arcades mentioned in John 5 were only symbols of the five books of Moses, as some people used to do. It is no less important that the Qumran writings have opened up a rich source of comparable material proving at least that for the explanation of various Johannine ideas and motives it is not necessary to look so far afield as has often been supposed.
One cannot maintain that to the evangelist of the fourth gospel only the kerygma and not history is important. What he — like the other gospel writers but in his own way — tried to make clear was that Jesus' life was filled with the glory of God. He recorded everything so that his readers would believe that this Jesus of history, who dwelt among us, is the Christ, the Son of God (20:31). The story of this Jesus must bring forth faith; faith has not brought forth the story, much less the history. This is no less fundamental for understanding the fourth gospel than for the other three.
Nevertheless, there is interpretation of history, too, in all four gospels. But in the gospel of John the element of interpretation is extremely important and, I think, manifest. This is perhaps why the historical meaning and character of the gospel have been doubted, misunderstood, and rejected again and again.
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This element of the interpretation of history is dominant in the gospel from its very beginning. Everything told about Jesus stands in the supra-earthly glory of the prologue, the glory of the Logos who was with God, in whom was God. This is the glory (doxa) which dominates the whole gospel. In John this glory is not only the projection of the later glory of the resurrection of Christ, but is the glory of the pre-existent Son of God, the glory from the beginning. It is perfectly clear that the evangelist, by placing the whole story of Jesus in the light of this prologue, intends to give a very special interpretation to the story of Jesus of Nazareth.
Other evangelists give their interpretations of this history, too. But there are real differences between John and the synoptics. The gospel of Matthew, for instance, also has an all-dominating prologue — the genealogy of Jesus of Nazareth, which is traced back to Abraham. But it makes a difference whether the interpretation of the history of Jesus has its starting point in Abraham or in the eternal Logos who was in the beginning. The question may arise whether the glory is not overexposed in John. Can the abundant glory in which John places the history of Jesus be harmonized with the humanity of Jesus and not conflict with the reservation which was typical in Jesus' self-revelation — not only in the synoptics, but also in John's gospel itself? In his farewell discourse (recorded in John 14-17), Jesus himself says: "I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth. ... He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you" (John 16:12ff.). And yet, time and again in the gospel it is as if the veil has been removed already and Jesus speaks without this reservation, for example, when he says of himself "before Abraham was, I am" (8:58), or when he speaks of the glory he had with the Father before the world was (17:5,24), or when he says that the disciples will see the Son of Man ascend to "where he was before" (6:62).
There are indications that in his description John is already removing the veil lying over the revelation of the earthly Jesus. Indeed, we sometimes do not know for sure who has the word in this gospel, the earthly Jesus or the gospel writer who witnesses about him. This is especially true of those curious parts in John 3 — verses 12-21 and 31-46 — where, as in the prologue, Jesus is spoken of in the third person: not "whoever believes in me," but "whoever believes in him." But also in passages where Jesus is introduced in the first person, he sometimes speaks in an undisguised fashion about his pre-existent glory, and then it seems as if all boundaries between his eternal and earthly existence disappear.
At this point we have to take into consideration again what Jesus said to his disciples in the last discourses about their future witness to him. Among other things, he said that when he himself was no longer with them, the Holy Spirit would teach them everything and remind them of all he had said to them (14:26). Exactly the same thing is said in 15:26: "he will be a witness to me; and you also are witnesses, because you have been with me from the beginning." There is thus a close connection between those who were with Jesus from the beginning as ear- and eye-witnesses and the witness of the Spirit. The operation of the Spirit will be more than merely sharpening the memory of the apostles concerning the exact words of Jesus; it will also be teaching them, expounding all that Jesus had taught.
It may rightly be asked whether we are here given an indication, a clear hint, that the evangelist is himself aware that he is giving the words of Jesus in a new interpretative and creative form. This might explain the words of 16:25 that Jesus has up to now spoken in figures (paroimiais), but that the hour is coming when he will speak plainly of the Father. May we assume that that hour comes in the gospel itself when (in our judgment) the veil is already removed and Jesus seems to speak freely of his Father? In other words, here in the testimony of the evangelist to the readers of the gospel the Spirit, who explicates everything, is already jointly having the word. Through the Spirit as his witness Jesus is speaking plainly of the Father, also in the words of the gospel. That is why there is this sort of duality: on the one hand the tradition and the memory of John as eyewitness, on the other the teaching by the Spirit, as a result of which there comes about the removal of the veil which had been laid over the self-revelation of the glory of Jesus.
Perhaps we can say that the historical image gets, as a result, a surplus value, because it is seen now in the light not only of the later exaltation of Jesus, but before all things in the light of the Logos, who was from the beginning. This image of the historical Jesus is not only drawn with the help of memory and tradition, but also with the aid of the Spirit. The Spirit taught them who Jesus really was and what was the secret of his glory. And John himself refers for this image to what Jesus had promised him and the other apostles in his last discourses with them.
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As a result of this does the image of Jesus given by John become less historical, even docetic? Is the fourth gospel (as some have said) the gospel of a God wandering over the earth, no longer the gospel of the man Jesus of Nazareth? I think it can scarcely be questioned that John himself regards Jesus as a real man. You can even quote the fourth gospel especially to prove that Jesus was a man of flesh and blood. It is the gospel of John which lays stress on the fact that water and blood came out of the side of the dead Jesus; that, in his life, he showed human needs, became tired and thirsty, wept at the grave of his friend, was deeply moved by the prospect of his own impending death (19:34; 6:7; 11:35; 12:27). In addition the gospel constantly mentions Jesus' obedience to the will of his Father, to which he had to submit himself, even when this would lead him into deep humiliation. All this can scarcely be contested.
But the question remains whether it is not true that all these human traits and features are deeply overshadowed by Jesus' divine glory and his unity with his Father, so that his humanity is totally absorbed by his deity and his incarnation (1:14) is nothing but a temporary medium through which God's glory in him was revealed to the people. According to Kasemann, who styles the Christology of the fourth gospel as naive and docetic, this docetism is especially evident in the way John speaks about the death of Jesus. In the fourth gospel, according to Kasemann, the glory of Jesus so controls the total development that fitting in the passion becomes a problem. It comes into the picture only at the end, as a sort of appendix. Naturally the gospel-writer could not bypass Jesus' death. He finally solves the problem by describing the passion as a sort of glorification. The cross is no longer the accursed tree but the proof of his divine love and his glorified return out of the exile to the Father. That is why, with a peculiar word-play, the fourth gospel sometimes speaks about the cross as the exaltation of Jesus (3:14; 8:28; 12:32, 34) and other times as his glorification (7:39; 12:16,23; 13:31; 17:1,5).
Still, with this not everything has been said about John's interpretation of Jesus' death. Even though on his way to the cross Jesus showed himself to be the mightiest (the officers and soldiers arresting him in Gethsemane fell down; 18:6), John describes his suffering from other viewpoints as well — for instance, from the viewpoint of humiliation and self-surrender as the bitter cup his Father gives him to drink (18:11); and as "hating of his life" (12:25). Also it becomes abundantly clear that John sees the death and self-humiliation of Jesus as necessary for those who belong to him. Only when the grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies does it bear fruit (12:24). Jesus is, according to the word of the high priest, the one who dies for the people (11:50,51). For their sake he sanctifies himself; that means he consecrates himself to death (17:19) and only if he washes their feet in humiliation do they have a part with him. Thus John the Baptist, at the very beginning of this gospel, can call Jesus the Lamb of God who took away the sins of the world. In all this we have not even spoken of the so-called sacramental discourses (John 6), in which Jesus speaks of the eating of his flesh and the drinking of his blood as the meat and drink for eternal life. No matter how much in the fourth gospel's description of the death of Jesus his glorification receives strong emphasis, it is not yet the case that his death is nothing but a return, a passage, an exaltation. The writer of the fourth gospel not only presupposes the Christian tradition with regard to the meaning of Jesus' death (cf. also 1 John 2:2), but he also brings it to expression, though partially and incidentally. This also means that the flesh was not only the medium of the revelation of his glory, but also the way he had to sacrifice himself for his people (10:11), bearing their sins.
All these features can hardly be reconciled with a docetic Christology. Quite properly others have pointed out that it would be more correct — on their grounds — to call the Christology of the fourth gospel anti-docetic. They also appeal for this opinion to the first letter of John, which clearly and purposely rejects docetism: "Every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God. This is the spirit of antichrist" (1 John 4:2,3).
Still, the more firmly this is maintained, the more the question comes to the fore of how it all can be harmonized with the mighty, actually blinding light that floods through the whole of the fourth gospel from the prologue in chapter 1. Can one really speak of incarnation and of being man when the subject of the incarnation is the Logos, who has been with God and has been God before the world was? The question comes up anew when Jesus testifies of himself "before Abraham was, I am" and when he prays in chapter 17 that God will glorify him with the glory he had with God before the world was. Is the humanity not inevitably absorbed in the divinity, the vere homo sacrificed to the veredeus? Is such a Christology "from above" not automatically docetic, and can there be a starting point for a genuinely non-docetic Christology other than the revelation of the historical Jesus — which means a Christology "from below"?
I am not here asking how we can fathom the mystery of the incarnation of the Son of God. Nor is it my intention to go into the dogmatic formulations the church has used in its efforts to bring to expression the mystery in human words (pre-eminently at Chalcedon, but also afterwards). All those questions and definitions are coming up again in the present theological discussion, especially the formula of the un-personal human nature of Christ. I am not suggesting that I can answer all these questions. All I mean to discuss here is the question of exegesis and biblical theology: How could the author of the fourth gospel, who spoke (as we have seen) so massively about the humanity of Christ (even after his resurrection; cf. 20:20,27; 21:13) and did not shrink from the tremendous harshness of the expression that the Logos "became flesh," at the same time make in his prologue the divine Logos the subject of his whole gospel? This question is related to another old problem: How did our author come to know and understand the Logos itself?
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To start with the last question, there is a tendency to think that the gospel-writer had previously had a certain dogmatic or philosophical knowledge of the figure of the Logos and that in the light of that knowledge he wanted to acquaint his readers with the person of Jesus. This is the presupposition of all interpretations which say that John derived the figure of the Logos from the religious philosophy of that time — from Philo or the Hermetic writings (as C.H. Dodd suggests) or from gnosis (Bultmann's view) — to introduce Jesus in this way to his hellenistic contemporaries. This is indeed a Christology "from above," from a transcendent a priori — in this case the philosophical abstraction of a Logos, no matter from whatever syncretistic origin it comes.
It seems to me that there are insurmountable objections to this interpretation. First of all, the idea of such an abstract, philosophical, more or less personified Logos, who would have stood as a kind of intermediate principle or being between God and man is apparently not the motive for the author of the fourth gospel to start his prologue with the opening words of the Torah. Furthermore, in the following chapters of the gospel any hint that the name Logos would point to such a philosophical background is lacking. There is in other words nothing in the fourth gospel even to favor such an interpretation of the name Logos, much less to warrant speaking in terms of proof for it.
The question is thus justified the more: How can anyone imagine that the evangelist would have taken as the all-dominating starting point of his message such a philosophical abstraction? His whole gospel, as a matter of fact, consists of a witness to the total uniqueness of Christ. How could he then have reduced this witness to the lowest common denominator and made it dependent on a figure out of the syncretistic religiosity or philosophy of his time?
The real key to understanding John's speaking of the Logos must be sought in the identity of the opening of the prologue and that of Genesis 1:1 — "in the beginning." This is confirmed by the opening of the first epistle of John: the Logos of which the evangelist is speaking is the dynamic, creating word of God which called the world into being. To be sure Genesis 1 does not speak of the Logos in the personal sense of John 1. Some have explained this "personalization" with reference to parallels in the wisdom-literature, where Wisdom is also introduced as speaking from the beginning. Likewise the Torah is sometimes described as being from the beginning with God. By analogy, John is said to have spoken of the Logos as the personified word of God. But still the difference is essential. The Logos in the prologue of John is not just a personification but a Person, and, at the same time, a person of whom it is said that he was with God and that he was God — an idea that has no analogy whatever within the framework of traditional Jewish thinking but would have been judged there as totally unacceptable if not blasphemous.
Therefore, John's concept of the Logos cannot be classified with contemporary pagan and Jewish speculations or personifications, without thereby infringing on its unique character. What must come to the fore here is not John's indebtedness to contemporary religious or philosophical ideas about creation, but the overwhelming revelation of the historical Jesus himself. When the evangelist wants to express the glory of him whose witness he is, he cannot speak of this glory in any other way but in divine categories, because this glory exceeds everything that preceded him in history, even the glory of Moses. That is why the evangelist falls back on the dynamic creating word in the beginning of all God's ways, the word that called forth light out of darkness and created life: the Logos of life that was from the beginning. "The life was made manifest and we saw it, and testify to it, and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us" (1 John 1:2).
What is new is that in the prologue to the gospel and in the opening of John's first letter this word and light and life are introduced as a person, albeit that the person and his salva-tory significance are spoken of alternately. We might better say that Logos has not yet become the standard title of the pre-existent Son of God. What is said of the Logos can be said of the Light, too: that it has been with the Father from the beginning. It is not just the name of the Logos that counts, it is he himself, who was in the beginning, who also can be named Life and Light, who has been revealed now. For what is said is that God's creative speaking from the beginning, his light- and life-bringing word, has become flesh and blood in Jesus Christ and has dwelt among us. And so from now on this word, this life, this light can be spoken of in the personal categories of "he was" and "I am." What brought the evangelist from the divine deeds to the person is not the philosophical material from another religious world, but the beholding of God's glory in Christ about which he speaks in John 1:14.
The reflection on this and the giving of the name in the concrete sense of John 1:1 were certainly matters of time, or better, matters of the witness of those who have been with Jesus from the beginning. We may point out here that in the Old Testament and later Judaism when expression had to be given to the divine character, whether of the Messiah or the law or wisdom, it was often referred back to the glory of God in the beginning. One could say that lines had been drawn into which reflection could move itself. But what a prophet or a pious Jew was never able to say John said, because the proper explanation of this speaking about Christ as the Logos lies in the way the glory of God revealed itself in the person of Jesus. "He who was from the beginning" is not just a personification or idealization of how the divine glory functioned in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, as the wisdom and the law can be glorified in pre-existent personifications. It was the oneness of his person and his work, of what he did and who he was, it was the revealing of his unity with the Father, not only in love and obedience but also in will and authority, which empowered the evangelist to speak about Jesus Christ as he did in the prologue.
Therefore, the point of departure of the prologue does not lie genetically in the eternal Logos but in the historical Jesus. John does not speak about Jesus on the basis of a certain pre-knowledge of the Logos; he can speak as he does about the Logos only because he had come to know Jesus. That is why it is not strange that the name of the Logos is not mentioned any further in the gospel. Jesus Christ is the great subject of the gospel and on the basis of his revelation, it is possible to speak of the Logos as is done in 1:1-4. This does not mean that the Logos has become an attribute of or a fancy name for the early Jesus. No, in order to know who Jesus is one has to go back to the beginning. Without knowing how wide and high and deep the work of God has been at the beginning, one cannot understand the dimensions of the glory, of the grace, and of the truth of Jesus Christ. But the converse is also true: to be able to speak in this way, one must have seen the glory of Jesus Christ. Nobody has ever seen God, and nobody will ever know him as he is, unless that person has seen the glory of him who dwelt among us. And that is the story of Jesus of Nazareth. John is a gospel-writer, not "after all" but from the very beginning of his book. Like his predecessor, he testifies and witnesses about Jesus as he was when he walked and dwelt among us.
If we may understand the "Christology" of the fourth gospel in this way (and that is, even in its most profound and divine pronouncements, an approach "from below"), then the humanity of Jesus cannot be regarded as docetic. Without the revelation in the flesh — that is, without his entry into history and into the depth of human existence — the glory of the Son of God would not have been revealed. Without this humanity there could not possibly have been talk of the divine person in this distinctiveness. This does not solve all the problems concerning the person of Jesus Christ. In the gospel of John the human character of his feelings, his deliberations, his decisions cannot be doubted for a moment (cf., for example, 12:27ff.; 19:26). At the same time there is, especially in the "I am" sayings, a consciousness of power, authority, and oneness with God, which appears to transcend the human ego. Thus we should avoid on the one hand a onesidedness which, fully recognizing the divine image of Jesus in the fourth gospel, does not find sufficient place for its humanness and ends up in a docetic Christology; and on the other hand the conception that the true human nature and ego of Jesus Christ can only be maintained if the pre-existence of Christ as the Son of God, the Logos who was with God and who was God, is understood as a theological postulate, an ideal glorification of God's revelation in the man of Nazareth. For the way the glory of God in the fourth gospel reveals itself personally in the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ supposes a pre-existence by nature, not just in idea alone.
It is another question whether we can do more than avoid onesidedness in either direction, whether we can subsume under one formula what the author of the fourth gospel testified about the glory of God in the flesh of Jesus. My aim in this essay has been no more than to understand this Christology, not on the basis of an abstract conception of the Logos nor a theological presupposition about the nature of the Son of God, but on the basis of the historical revelation of God in Christ.