The Gospel According to St. John and the Christian Mission

The Gospel According to St. John and the Christian Mission

by F. N. Davey

85The Gospel according to John has played a decisive part on many occasions when the Church’s conception of its mission was in doubt, in recent as well as former times. More than any other book of the Bible, it caused Christian theologians of the West to return to the study of Christian sociology, and to insist that Christian social action must be governed by the Christian revelation of God. During the critical years of “the new theology” and the apparent triumph of liberalism, when everyone was questing for the “Jesus of history,” it protested by its presence in the New Testament against the identification of “history” and “theology,” and affirmed that theology must exist in its own right. As the subject of several notable commentaries, it has helped to show how theology may answer the questions which history leaves unanswered, and has inevitably come more and more into the center of New Testament study as that study has recovered its authentic preoccupation with theology. The result of putting it into the hands of learned students, whether of the great religions of Asia or of Judaism, has not seldom been their conversion to the faith of Christ. It has spoken authoritatively alike to those drawn to mysticism and to those schooled in philosophy. It is not surprising that at the Tambaram Conference in 1938 it was claimed that “the all-embracing activity of Jesus Christ, as well before as after his incarnation, found in the 86Gospel of St. John, is of the greatest importance with regard to world mission work.”

Yet, is it right to speak of “the Johannine approach to the world mission of the Church,” as though this Gospel had a conception of Christ, or a conception of man, or a conception of the Holy Spirit, altogether different from those found in the rest of the New Testament; or as though this Gospel alone defines and justifies a particular missionary assumption and technique? The question must be examined, not so much in order to assess the relation of the Fourth Gospel to the rest of the New Testament as it is understood today, a quarter of a century after the Tambaram Conference, as to define once again (as the Church must continually try to do) the ways in which the Christian Gospel may be shown to be relevant to the thinking of those still without Christ in the world.

Twenty-five years ago the Fourth Gospel was commonly studied in contrast to the three “Synoptic Gospels.” These were held to share a common point of view, precisely in distinction to that of the Fourth Gospel. At that time, their “authors” or “redactors”—those responsible for their final shape—were regarded as the least important factor in their composition. Even though it was becoming accepted that nowhere in the Synoptic Gospels could the student identify history that was not already selected and recounted under the influence of prior “interpretation,” this “interpretation” was held to represent—particularly if recognizable in more than one of the supposedly separable strands of Synoptic tradition—the common mind of the Church in very early (indeed, in apostolic) times. Here, it was maintained, was sufficient basis for the study of the mind of Christ; sufficient basis, therefore, for presenting Christ to the world today. The Fourth Gospel, it was conceded, might also contain material of similar significance; but in practice it was left on one side, as representing the mind of only part of the Church, in an age almost entirely removed from direct apostolic influence.

Since those days a very considerable reassessment has taken place. Dr. C. H. Dodd has taught that the Fourth Gospel follows Mark in many respects more directly than do Matthew and Luke, and has “a close affinity with the apostolic preaching.” Hoskyns has affirmed that the Fourth Gospel is the first and best commentary on Mark. On the other hand, the first three Gospels have increasingly come to be studied for their individuality—not so much for 87the sources that appear to lie behind them as for their author’s or redactor’s patent intention and purpose. The common idea that the first three Gospels preserve (no doubt in fragments and disorder) what might be described as “photographs” of the Jesus of history, whereas the fourth is a “portrait,” has given way to the recognition that all four Gospels are best regarded as portraits. No doubt there are differences of form—the first three Gospels, for instance, share an episodic style conspicuously different from the allusive continuity of the fourth. But a difference that matters more is the difference in the deliberate intention of the author. Professor C. K. Barrett has summed it up as follows:

Each of the evangelists begins his work by tracing back the activity of Jesus to its origin Mark to the work of the Baptist and the baptism of Jesus, with the descent of the Spirit and the divine pronouncement, Thou art my Son; Matthew and Luke to the birth of Jesus from a virgin; John to the creation, and beyond it. Each intends to prepare his readers for understanding the ensuing narrative; Jesus can be understood only as Messiah, as Son of God, and as Logos. John alone, however, gives the narrative about Jesus an absolute theological framework.

This difference must be borne in mind even when the fundamental unity of the New Testament is being emphasized—as has also become common during recent years. The fundamental unity of all four Gospels consists in their common preoccupation with the self-revelation and redemptive achievement of God, with the good news of His unique and ultimate act of salvation, with which—and this too is equally true of all of them—the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus are essentially and inextricably connected. Their portraits of Jesus may be said to differ inasmuch as each wrote in a particular situation in the history of the Church, and to the best of his ability and understanding presented Jesus so as to show how, in him and by him, and through his death and resurrection, God’s mercy and truth offered all men all that they needed in that particular situation. To men with the burden of Old Testament prophecy ringing in their ears, with an intense expectation of the promised Messiah of God, with their eyes looking for the first sign of God’s kingdom come on earth; to men crying out for the vindication of God’s justice, for the unleashing of His compassion, the Marcan introduction should have been enough. For those 88familiar with Jewish-Christian controversy, or who, while knowing the Old Testament, were far removed from the atmosphere of Messianic expectation, Matthew and Luke open with the account of the birth of Jesus. Wise men worship the Holy One of God, to shepherds the wonder of his birth is revealed—scenes anticipating, perhaps, the scenes with which both these Gospels end, when the disciples worship the risen Christ. The theological understanding of Jesus implied for the readers of Mark by messianic allusions is not heightened in Matthew and Luke—that would be impossible—it is safeguarded by a more obviously theological definition of his person. The potential misunderstanding, that he became Messiah “by adoption” at the Baptism (no doubt unthinkable to the author of Mark) is at the same time precluded. It remained for the Fourth Evangelist to make the theological definition of Jesus unmistakable in a world so vague and various in its conceptions of divinity that even the fact of virgin birth might not seem to constitute an absolute claim to Godhead. In Professor Barrett’s words: “The only perspective in which the work of Jesus, and his relation to the Father, could be truly seen and estimated was that of eternity.” Jesus is therefore presented as “the Word who was in the beginning with God, who himself was God.”

Although St. Paul did not name Jesus the Word of God, he reached a similar Christology by what seems to have been a similar process. In his Epistle to the Colossians he has moved away—not from the historical Gospel delivered by Christ to the apostles—but from the presentation of that Gospel in such terms as might have seemed relevant only to Jews nourished on the Old Testament Scriptures. It is perhaps possible to show how St. Paul learned by experience to begin where his readers or hearers were; to start from their intellectual apprehension—true or false—of the revelation of God. However this may be, when writing to the Colossians he appears to be fully aware that, owing to the conception of the universe they shared with much of the hellenistic world, they were doubtful whether Christ could have power to save except in the lowest of the spheres by which men believed the earth to be surrounded. Surely there were higher powers intervening between man and the ultimate Godhead. St. Paul takes cognizance of their conception of the universe, their cosmogony, only in order to insist on the ultimate authority of Christ. To accept him as possessing restricted authority is to misunderstand him altogether. Rather, he alone is

89the truth to which even men’s false and shadowy conceptions point, for he alone is the truth of God.

St. Paul and the Fourth Evangelist agree, but not because they were speculative theologians who naturally used the language of contemporary syncretistic philosophy. They were anything but speculative theologians. They agree because they were consciously concerned to show the absolute implications of the Christian faith that Jesus is the Gospel and that the Gospel is Jesus, to men familiar with the jargon of religion and philosophy that was popular for many years throughout much of the Roman Empire. When the Gospel is offered to men, it is Christ himself who is offered to them, and received by them. But, to be confronted by Christ is to be confronted by God, nothing less. Jesus, then, is the beginning and the end; the first creator and the final judge; the ultimate truth both of God and of humanity. Truly man as well as truly God, he mediates between God and man, offering us true knowledge of God, salvation from sin and death, eternal life in union with God. It follows that there is no genuine insight or authentic experience of man of which Jesus Christ is not the true meaning and the ultimate fulfillment. And it follows also that even where man is groping after a half-truth, or is imprisoned in a false interpretation of life and the world he lives in, Christ is still the truth to which it should be possible to direct his eyes, if not by analogy, yet at least by contrast; if not by arguing directly from men’s actual conceptions, yet at least by repudiating them so as to bear witness to the truth.

Dr. Dodd has suggested that the Fourth Gospel was not written for Christians but for intelligent, educated people in the Greco-Roman world, conversant with contempory syncretisms of Jewish religion and Greek thought, men of respectable morality and humane idealism, in an attempt to lead them on from what they already accepted, to correct their ideas and finally redefine them in terms of the Gospel of Christ crucified and risen. Others prefer to think that the Fourth Gospel was written for Christians acquainted with the tradition represented for us in the three Synoptic Gospels, but in danger of misunderstanding it, in an attempt to make them see the full implications of what they were ignoring or limiting through overfamiliarity and superficiality. Both these approaches to the Fourth Gospel are relevant to the Church’s missionary task. But, whatever readers the Fourth Evangelist had consciously in mind, and whatever assumptions of his may have conditioned his 90method, what is even more relevant is his apprehension that Jesus reveals and makes accessible the truth and grace of God to men, in the world they live in, so as to make sense both of that world and of their own lives in it. When everything possible has been done to discover the background of such great Johannine terms as “word, life, light, truth, way”; when we have found, or failed to find, parallels to the Evangelist’s references to birth, water, wind, eating, drinking, meat, darkness, death; the fact remains that in each case it is the fundamental human experience connected with the imagery that provides the most illuminating clue to the Evangelist’s purpose. The vocabulary in which the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel speaks about himself and about God is furnished by the essential pattern, by the raw material, of ordinary human life.

This does not mean that mere consideration of the context and conditions of human life in the world leads automatically to the contemplation of the truth of God. Perhaps it should mean that, and would mean that in an unfallen world. But men as this Gospel knows them are in the darkness which does not apprehend the truth. Even such a man as Nicodemus, for instance, has no inkling of the meaning of Christ’s conversation about birth, water, and wind. To be in darkness is to interpret such things as having meaning only in themselves, in their actuality. A religious man can show himself to be in darkness by his attitude to material things. On the other hand, Jesus reveals the truth of God by showing in himself the true meaning of such things—and this always involves, implicitly if not explicitly, his life, death, and resurrection. A supreme example of this, in this Gospel, may be found in its theme of life. True life—to which all life should bear witness—is new life from above: life originating from and located in God. Such is Jesus’ own life. But even his own life can be misapprehended as though it were something originating in time and space, something existing—though temporarily only—in its own right and strength.

Through death then must the origin and nature and locus of his life be laid bare, and the true origin, the true nature, the true locus of all life be revealed. At that point, reached historically because the clash between his life-giving ministry, summed up in his raising of Lazarus, and the blindness of the Jews is ultimate, his words, “I am the resurrection and the life” begin to be fully apprehensible to those with faith. Apprehension remains the gift of God. It can be described only as the achievement of the Holy Spirit bestowed upon 91his disciples through Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection. But—and this is most striking—this apprehension illuminates the whole life which Christian men and women have to live in the world while yet being not of the world. In their living of this life in faith, the Holy Spirit reveals to them the meaning both of Christ’s life and of their own. It is not simply that through Christ’s death they have seen human life pointing beyond itself to eternal life with God. In seeing it thus pointing beyond itself they have seen (though only by faith) human life established and revealed in its full meaning; its truly amazing meaning; its glory.

According to the Fourth Gospel, the raw material of human life furnishes the essential Christian vocabulary because, through his life, death, and resurrection, Christ rules out the worldly, materialist, or exclusively humanist interpretation of life—not in the interests of some dualism, as though reality is to be found in the realm of ideas or through spiritual ecstasy, but in the interests of a true understanding—better, of an authentic living—of life as it is. Life in this world is therefore the more fully understood the more fully it is interpreted by reference to Christ crucified and risen. To put this the other way round, Christ crucified and risen is the key to all life, and through the Holy Spirit we see all life marked with his cross and consummated in his resurrection. It is usually assumed that when the author of the Fourth Gospel wrote:

he was already thinking of the historical advent and rejection of Jesus. Of course he could not help thinking of it—it was the source of his whole understanding of the Gospel. But he also had in mind the eternal “advent” of Christ, in his creation and government of the world, as well as his particular “advent” to “his own” people through the prophets and seers and all those to whom a true insight had been given. God confronts man, through Christ, first in the pattern of creation and history, secondly in the calling and history of Israel, thirdly, in his coming in flesh and blood. But it is this third “coming” which enables the author of the Fourth Gospel—and which should enable us—to discern in his other two 92“comings” the absolute truth, the unique grace, of God in Christ.

For some people some words of the Prologue of the Fourth Gospel justify what has been called the particular Johannine approach to missionary work: “The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world.” Can this be rightly interpreted in terms of hellenistic religion and the Logos be thought of in a Stoic manner, so that there may be seen in this verse “a reference to a general illumination of all men by the divine reason, which was subsequently deepened by the more complete manifestation of the Logos in the incarnation”? Professor Barrett raises this question only to reject it. To “lighten” can indeed mean “to illuminate inwardly,” but it is more in keeping with the rest of the Gospel to render it “to shed light upon,” “to bring to light” and so to expose to judgment. St. John deserves careful consideration. To build upon some supposed hellenistic reference a theory that the Word of God is to be encountered particularly, albeit dimly, in the various religious systems of mankind, seems precarious. The “life” is “the light of men” because it brings to judgment: because it exposes the disastrous, humanocentric, materialistic, “darkness” which imprisons men by nature, and strikes at its very roots wherever it may be found—not only in paganism, in Islam, Buddhism, or Hinduism, but in Israel—even in the Church of God! But this exposure to judgment is not destructive either in motive or (through Jesus Christ) in effect. The Word of God judges only that he may save: he lays bare only that he may clothe; he kills only that he may make alive.

It remains to sum up some of the points that seem to arise from this brief glance at what in the Fourth Gospel seems relevant to the mission of the Church.

1. The opposition with which the Fourth Gospel (in common with the rest of the Bible) is concerned is the opposition between the truth of God and the darkness in which sinful men are in bondage. That darkness may manifest itself in false religions, but that is symptomatic only of a more universal, a more fundamental, darkness, rooted in man’s inability to see in relation to God the world, his existence in the world, and the whole pattern and material of life. The fundamental opposition is between the truth and grace of God, and the darkness as a result of which sinful man everywhere enthrones himself in the place of God.

2. On the other hand, the truth and grace of God in Christ are 93apprehensible everywhere by faith; for by faith life and the things and events of life are seen by men in their true relation to God. Because Christ made and governs the world, any true discernment, anywhere, of the meaning of life is a triumph of the Holy Spirit of God, whether Christ himself is or is not acknowledged by name.

3. Men’s eyes may be opened in discernment of the truth anywhere in human life; and, since religion is part of life, some men may find true discernment in a particular religion, however primitive, however crude. Indeed, because some religions at least consciously attempt to see life related to God, the opportunity for true discernment may perhaps be greatest when man is trying to be religious. Yet there too the possibility of self-deception also appears to be most prevalent, and most fatal.

4. The Christian Church, in preaching the Gospel, must start where men are. In trying to preach Christ to those of other faiths it will no doubt be well to try to build by analogy and by contrast upon such discernments of the truth as they seem to find in their religion. Yet it will be better still to try to present Christ as the meaning of the whole of their life; to show how any real grasp or understanding of God’s world cries out for judgment—for the devastating interpretation and the merciful fulfillment which only the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ can supply.

5. The Fourth Evangelist knew of no approach to the world essentially different from that of St. Paul, or indeed of the New Testament writers in general. Like them, he preached Christ and him crucified. But he clarified the apostolic approach in at least one respect. He showed that there is no situation of man, no experience of man, no authentic part of human life, which, when truly understood, does not point beyond itself toward Christ, and which, when so apprehended, does not, through the death and resurrection of Christ, become a great occasion of hope, a precious means of rejoicing in the glory of God. The Christian missionary task is to communicate such an understanding as that. Once communicated it is irresistible, for it is the earnest of the Holy Spirit of God.

Tip: use the ← and → keys to move between chapters; press Ctrl K to search. Share any printed page with index.html?p=<page>.

↑ Back to top ⬇ Download the scanned PDF