This raises the question whether the two are in fact right
in what they agree upon, that John does understand Christ as having pre-existed
from all eternity as a divine person, who then assumed human nature. It may
indeed look to us as it this is what he is saying, but, as Dunn rightly insists
of Paul and the others, we must make the effort 'to understand their words as
they would have intended, to hear them as their first readers would have heard
them' (Christology in the Making, p.
9). And for all the critical acumen and masterly judgment of his study I am not
convinced that he has put his finger on the right place in identifying the difference
or describing the distinctiveness of John.
There is no doubt whatever that there is a decisively new
situation introduced with Jesus. As Dunn puts it elsewhere, with him the
boundary is crossed between inspiration and incarnation: Jesus is 'the man
Wisdom became-not merely inspired, but became' (p. 212). But this is said-and
very well said-of Paul and Hebrews. Similarly he recognizes the decisive step
introduced at John 1.14 as the transition 'from impersonal personification to
actual person' (p. 243), for which only the language of incarnation is
appropriate. In Jesus the Logos is ‘identified
with a particular person'. This is the great new thing. But is it the great new
thing of Christianity or of John?
I suggest it is the former-and that it is precisely what
Paul is saying, e.g., in Col. 1.19, that 'in him the complete being of God, by
God's own choice, came to dwell'. The subject in each case is the
self-expressive activity and being of God. Dunn recognizes that up to John 1.
14 there is nothing in the Prologue that would be strange to a Hellenistic Jew.
The Word is 'the utterance of God personified' and it is merely incidental that
in Greek logos is masculine, rather than feminine like wisdom or neuter like
spirit (p. 243)—rhema might have
established itself, as in Acts 10.37. But in verse 14 the Logos be- comes
personalized and not just personified, comes into being as a particular person:
'The Word of God is identified with a particular historical person'; but he
goes on, 'whose pre-existence as a person with God is asserted throughout' (p,
250). It is this latter clause that I would question, of John as much as of any
other New Testament writer.
On the contrary I would say that John's position is
essentially contained in statements Dunn makes on p. 262:
Initially at least Christ was not
thought of as a divine being who had pre-existed with God but as the climactic embodiment of God's power and
purpose…God's clearest self-expression, God's last word. The Christ-event
defined God more clearly than anything else had ever done.
'Incarnation' means initially that God's love and power had
been experienced in fullest measure in, through and as this man Jesus, that
Christ had been experienced as God's self-expression (italics his).
This I believe is exactly what John sums up in 1.18 when he
says that Jesus Christ as Son of God has given an exegesis of the Father.
Where I would differ from Dunn is in my conviction that John
gives us the richest and most mature interpretation of this 'initial' doctrine
of incarnation, not that he changes it into something else which, Dunn claims,
can for the first time properly be described as a 'myth', that of a heavenly
divine figure who becomes man. Yet the personification of Wisdom as God's
companion and agent in creation is surely just as 'mythical': it is merely a
different myth.
What I contend John is saying is that the Word, which was theos, God in his self-revelation and
expression, sarx egeneto (1.14), was
embodied totally in and as a human being, became a person, was personalized not
just personified. But that the Logos came into existence or expression as a
person does not mean that he was a person before. In terms of the later classic
distinction, it was not the Logos which was hypostatic (a person or hypostasis)
who then assumed human nature as well as his own, but that the Logos was
anhypostatic until the Word of God finally came to its full expression not
merely in nature and in a people but in an individual historical person, and
thus became hypostatic (so Piet Schoonenberg, The Christ) pp. 54-66, 80-9 1).
This distinction, I believe, is vital in order to guard
John's Christology, and our own, from the charge of docetism, to which it has
so often been subjected (supremely of late by Kasemann), namely, that Jesus was
a heavenly being, a divine person, living as a human, passing through this
earth on the path of a parabola yet always a few inches off the ground. For
John, I am convinced, as for all the other New Testament writers, Jesus is
genuinely and utterly a man (he uses anthropos of him more often than all the
other Gospels together) who so completely incarnates God that whoever has seen
him has seen the Father. This is precisely what John Bowker seems to be saying
in the restatement in modern terms, considerably less pellucid than John's,
which Dunn commends (on p. 352, n. 7), of Jesus as 'the wholly God-informed
person'. 'It is possible on this basis', concludes Bowker, 'to talk about a
wholly human figure, without loss or compromise, and to talk also of a wholly
real presence of God so far as that nature . . . can be mediated to and through
the process' of a human life. This quotation occurs in a footnote to Dunn's
statement (p. 265) that 'we honour [John] most highly when we follow his
example and mold the language and conceptualizations in transition today into
a gospel which conveys the divine, revelatory and saving significance of Christ
to our day as effectively as he did to his'. For prior to this (p. 264) Dunn
shows himself uneasily conscious that the way John put it (as he interprets it)
cannot really be ours today, and indeed that he was perhaps being taken for a
bit of a ride by the 'cultural evolution' of the late first century.
It could be said that the Fourth Evangelist was as a much a
prisoner of his language as its creator ... That is to say, perhaps we see in
the Fourth Gospel what started as an elaboration of the Logos-Son imagery
applied to Jesus, inevitably in the transition of conceptualizations coming to
express a conception of Christ's personal pre-existence which early Gnosticism
found more congenial than early orthodoxy.
I agree that this happened, but I believe it happened to
John rather than in john, and that he was 'taken over' by the gnosticizers. In
evidence I ·would cite the Johannine-Epistles, which are saying in effect: 'If
that's what you think I meant, that I was teaching a docetic-type Christology,
denying Christ come in the flesh and trying to have the Father without the Son,
then this is very Antichrist'. Kasernann and others like him, as E. Schweizer
pointed out, ignore the Johannine Epistles and the vehement repudiation they
contain.
Yet John is so near as well as so far. It is entirely
explicable that he should have been taken in this way. For the 'retrojective
process' was probably inevitable, which Geoffrey Lampe so well described in his
God as Spirit, of reading back the revelation of the Logos as 'a son', that is,
as a human being who perfectly imaged God, like an only son his father, on to
the revelation of 'the Son', a heavenly being, later the second person of the
Trinity, who took on a human nature. The content of the Christian revelation of
God in and as an individual human person was combined with the cultural
transition ~n late first-century Judaism and Gnosticism to the notion of fully
hypostasized pre-existent heavenly figures to produce this result.
Now the parable 'as in a son', to use Theodore of
Mopsuestia's language and indeed John's too (for in 1.14 there are no articles:
he employs a simile from human life-'glory, or reflection, as of an only son of
his father'), is already allegorized as 'the Son' in relation to 'the Father'
not only in John (we can watch the process in the 'hidden parable', as Dodd
called it, of 5.19) but in Mark (13.32) and Q (Matt. 11.27 = Luke 10.22). Yet,
as Dunn rightly argues, that does not imply the personal pre-existence of a
heavenly being in the theology of the Synoptists, let alone in the
consciousness of Jesus. But when he comes to .John he contends that the
combination of the Wisdom-Logos Christology of the Prologue hymn (which he
thinks, I believe improbably, is pre-Johannine, but agrees does not itself
speak of a pre-existent Person) with John's dominant Son of God Christology
produces an entirely different situation. And in fact it is this latter Son of
God language rather than the Logos language as such which compels him to this
conclusion.
Yet is John really so divergent at this point from the rest
of the New Testament? Dunn fully accepts that initially this language 'had no
overtones of pre-existence' (p. 244), and even when Paul speaks of God 'sending
his own Son' (Gal. 4.4) or of 'the second man from heaven' (1 Cor. 15.47) this
does not necessarily imply personal pre-existence. I would agree with him.
Moreover I have long interpreted Phil. 2 along the same lines as he does, as
telling not of a divine being who became man but of a man whose entire being
was shaped by God (en morpheii) theoui, perfectly reflecting his nature and
glory, who yet chose to live the poverty-stricken, humiliating form of
existence common to all other men. The deepest veriest significance of Jesus
Christ, what at bottom he really was (hyparchon), is phrased not so much in
terms of pre-existence as of true existence. So it is with the Johannine Son of
Man whose whole life, as the authentic man, has its source, centre and goal in
God. This true existence is of course given expression in terms of eternal
existence, primacy in terms of priority, of the above rather than the below,
the heavenly rather than the earthly. Thus there are constantly two stories,
two answers to where Jesus comes from-out of the Father as well as out of
Nazareth or Galilee. He is sent from God, but that does not mean for John any
more than for Paul that he is not also born of woman, a genuine product of the
natural process. And the same language which .John uses about Jesus being 'from
God' or 'sent into the world' he uses also of other men (for the details I
would refer to my Human Face of God,
pp. 172-5). As son of God and as children of God (for Jesus alone truly
embodies the role of, son') Jesus and believers are not born of fleshly birth;
but that does not mean that as human beings they are not so born. Jesus is the
son because he is always in the Father's house, listening to what he says,
doing what he does, totally 'at one' with him, saying nothing 'of himself, but
transparent always to the Father's will. Everything the Father has is his
because everything he has is the Father's. Heaven is where he 'belongs', in the
bosom of the Father, and he alone can thus share and communicate to others, his
glory, his 'name'. But he does this completely as a man, the uniquely normal
man, the son that all are called but fail to be. Hence his claim to be 'son of
God' (again with no articles) is no blasphemy: it could be refuted only if the
moral correspondence could be shown to be lacking (10.36f.).
The trouble starts when the two sets of language are mixed
up, as they are by Nicodemus, and the eternal Word he embodies is confused with
the ego of the human Jesus and the utterances of the one crossed with the
utterances of the other. This happens when the words of Christ in this Gospel
are judged by the criterion of psychological verisimilitude rather than of
theological verity. For the ego of the human Jesus is no more pre-existent than
that of any other human being, and to suggest that he is reminiscing at that
level about a state which he enjoyed with the Father before the world began is
clearly to throw in doubt the genuineness of his humanity. But at the level of
theological verity the voice with which he speaks and the authority with which
he acts and claims allegiance are those of the Word which transcends time and
space.
There are two ways in which Jesus' lalia is misunderstood and his word therefore cannot be 'heard'
(8.43) which are reflected in the Fourth Gospel and in its subsequent
interpretation. The first is to takejesus' talk at the level of the ego of
western empiricism, the second as usurping the divine name and thus speaking
blasphemy, as the Jews assert (10.33) and as, for instance, Stauffer in Jesus
and His Story understands the 'I am' of this Gospel. Neither interpretation is,
I believe, true to it. On the contrary, the 'I' of this Gospel is the totality
of the human self, such as Jung speaks of in contrast with the ego, the 'I' of
the mystics, of Meister Eckhardt and the Angelus Silesius, of the Sufis or the
Upanishads, where atman and Brahman are completely united as in John 10.30: 'I
and the Father are one thing.' But it is Buber the Jew-shall we say the
Israelite without guile ?-who perhaps gets nearest to what John means:
How powerful, even to being overpowering, and how
legitimate, even to being self-evident, is the saying of I by Jesus! For it is the I
of unconditional relation in which the man calls his Thou Father in such a way
that he is simply Son, and nothing else but Son. Whenever he says I he can only mean the I of the holy primary word that has been
raised for him into unconditional being (I
and Thou, tr. R. Gregor Smith, pp. 66f.).
There is nothing there that is not utterly and 'superly'
human, as well as being totally transparent of God. To have seen the one is to
have seen the other, without either being dissolved in the other.
What John is doing here as elsewhere is, I believe, drawing
out what is already implicit in the rest of the Christian tradition-not making
up, but taking up the things of Jesus and truly seeing them in the most deeply
penetrating .light of the Spirit. For the 'I' of this Gospel is already in
principle that of the tradition behind Matthew and Luke, of the Son who lives
in the relation of perfect mutual knowledge with the Father, who in the name of
the divine Wisdom speaks the invitation of God and sends his messengers, the
'I' of the Sermon on the Mount who goes behind what was said not merely by but
to them of old time and who in Mark as the Son of Man on earth forgives sins,
quells the powers of demons and of nature, and exercises before the time the
prerogatives of the last judgment. In John this is portrayed and projected,
backwards and forwards, in terms of the pre-existence and post-existence of a
heavenly person. But that is the language of myth, picturing the other side, as
Bultmann would put it, in terms of this side. It is pushing back the truth of
the sonship that Jesus embodied to the very beginning of God's purpose-as well
as, in the Synoptists, to its end. For John, as for the writer to the Hebrews,
it is through the Son and on account of the Son and the bringing of many sons
to glory that all things are done that are done. But this is but bringing to
recognition the full cosmic significance of what was disclosed in the glory of
this utterly human life.
John, I believe, differs simply in the maturity with which
he draws out the 'initial' understanding of incarnation, common in principle to
all the New Testament writers. He has not, I think, as Dunn suggests (even if
only in the form of a question expecting the answer 'yes'), 'left behind the
earlier idea of God acting in and through the Christ-event' by presenting
'Christ...conceived as a heavenly being distinct from God' (p. 263).
When writing of Paul, Dunn says perceptively on p. 255:
Did he think of Christ as a man, a
created being, chosen by God for this purpose, perhaps even appointed to this
cosmic role as from his resurrection? or alternatively, as a heavenly being who
had pre-existed with God from the beginning? Texts in 'Paul could readily be
interpreted either way. The more plausible interpretation however is that such
alternatives had· not yet occurred to him: his overwhelming conviction was that
God himself had acted in and through Christ, that what happened in the whole
Christ-event was God himself opening the way for man for righteousness and
redemption, and that this had been the same power and purpose through which and
for which God had created the world.
I believe that with little modification of phraseology the
same statement could be made about John. The alternative he poses is, I
suggest, a false one for both of them. Each has statements which, as he says,
could be pushed in either direction, and I am persuaded that he sets up a
polarization between John and the rest of the New Testament by taking the
statements of Paul and Hebrews and the Synoptists one way and those of John the
other. The issue is not for either camp a choice between a 'mere man' Christology
and a 'divine being' Christology. Paul, Hebrews and John are I believe much
closer than he allows in presenting a real, and not merely what he calls an
'ideal', pre-existence and a genuinely incarnational theology, though not of a
heavenly being who came to earth in the form of a man but of a man shaping and
embodying in its fullness the self-expressive activity of God from the
beginning.
John Robinson was Dean of Trinity College Cambridge.
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