Once more we fall back upon our main position. The Evangelist is writing
a spiritual Gospel, and his whole procedure is dominated by that one
fact. His object is to set forth Christ as Divine, not only as Messiah
but as Son of God, as an object of faith which brings life to the
believer.
It follows that all criticism which does not take account of this—and
how large a part of the strictures upon the Gospel does not take account
of it!—is really wide of the mark. M. Loisy, for instance, brings a long
indictment against the Gospel for not containing things that it never
professed to contain. It never professed to be a complete picture of the
Life of the Lord. It never professed to show Him in a variety of human
relationships. It never professed to give specimens of His ethical
teaching simply as such. It did not profess to illustrate, and it does
not illustrate, even the lower side of those activities that might be
called specially divine, as (e. g.) the casting out of demons.
The Gospel is written upon the highest plane throughout. It seeks to
answer the question _who_ it was that appeared upon earth, and suffered
on Calvary, and rose from the dead and left disciples who revered and
adored Him. And this Evangelist takes a flight beyond his fellows
inasmuch as he asks the question who Christ was in His essential nature:
What was the meaning—not merely the local but the cosmical meaning—of
this great theophany?
It is not surprising if in the pursuit of this object the Evangelist has
laid himself open to the charge of being partial or onesided. Those who
use such terms are really, as we have seen, judging by the standard of
the modern biography, which is out of place. The Gospel is, admittedly
and deliberately, not an attempt to set forth the whole of a life, but
just a selection of scenes, a selection made with a view to a limited
and sharply-defined purpose. The complaint is made that it is
monotonous, and the complaint is not without reason. The monotony was
involved, we might say, from the outset in the concentration of aim
which the writer himself acknowledges. And in addition to this it is
characteristic of the writer that his thought is of the type which
revolves more than it progresses. The picture has not that lifelike
effect which is given by the setting of a single figure in a variety of
circumstances. The variety of circumstance was included among those
bodily or external aspects (τὰ σωματικά) which the writer considered to
have been sufficiently treated by his predecessors. He described for
himself a narrower circle. And it was because he kept within that
circle, because he goes on striking the same chord, that we receive the
impression of repetition and monotony. Perhaps the intensity of the
effect makes up for its want of extension. But at any rate the
Evangelist was within his rights in choosing his own programme, and we
must not blame him for doing what he undertook to do.
We may blame him, however, if within his self-chosen limits the picture
that he has drawn for us is misleading. That is the central point which
we must now go on to test. The object of the Gospel would be called in
modern technical language to exhibit a Christology. Is that Christology
true? Does it satisfy the tests that we are able to apply to it? Can we
find a suitable place for it in the total conception that we form of the
Apostolic Age? Does it belong to the Apostolic Age at all; or must we,
to understand it, come down below the time of the Apostles? To answer
these questions we must compare the Christology of the Fourth Gospel
with that of the other Apostolic writings, and more particularly with
that of the Synoptic Gospels, of St. Paul, and of the Epistle to the
Hebrews.
It does not take us long to see that the Christology of the Fourth
Gospel has the closest affinity with this group of Epistles—we may say,
with the leading Epistles of St. Paul and with that other interesting
Epistle of which we know, perhaps, or partly know, the readers but do
not know the author. It is worth while to bring in this because the
unmistakable quotation from it in Clement of Rome proves it to belong to
the Apostolic Age.
2. The Christology of St. John compared with that of St. Paul and of the
Epistle to the Hebrews.
The meeting-point of all the authorities just mentioned—indeed we might
say the focus and centre of the whole New Testament—is the title ‘Son of
God.’ But whereas the Synoptic Gospels work up to this title, St. John
with St. Paul and the Epistle to the Hebrews work downwards or onwards
from it. What I mean is this. The Synoptic Gospels show us how, through
the conception of the Messiah and the titles equivalent to it, by
degrees a point was reached at which the faith of the disciples found
its most adequate expression in the name ‘Son of God.’ The culminating
point is of course St. Peter’s confession represented at its fullest in
the form adopted by St. Matthew, ‘Thou art the Christ, the Son of the
living God’ (Matt. xvi. 16). In the Synoptic Gospels, and we may say
also in the historic order of events, this confession is a climax,
gradually reached; and we are allowed to see the process by which it was
reached. ‘Son of God’ is the highest of all the equivalents for
‘Messiah.’ And in the Synoptic Gospels we have unrolled before us,
wonderfully preserved by a remarkable and we may say truly providential
accuracy of reproduction with hardly the consciousness of a guiding
idea, the historic evolution, spread over the whole of the public
ministry, by which at its end the little knot of disciples settled upon
this term as the best and amplest expression of its belief in its
Master. We have seen that the Fourth Gospel is by no means wanting in
traces of this evolution. But these too are traces, preserved
incidentally and almost accidentally, without any deliberate purpose on
the part of the author: they are the product of his historical sense, as
distinct from the special object and the large idea that he had before
his mind in writing his Gospel. This special object and large idea
presuppose the title as it were full-blown. It was not to be expected
that an evangelist sitting down to write towards the end of the first
century should unwind the threads of the skein which, some fifty or
sixty years before, had brought his consciousness to the point where it
was. To him looking back, the evolutionary process was foreshortened;
and we have seen that as a consequence he allowed the language that he
used about the beginning of the ministry to be somewhat more definite
than on strictly historical principles it should have been. That he
should do so was natural and inevitable—indeed from the point of view of
the standards of his time there was no reason why he should be on his
guard against such anticipations. If we distinguish between the gradual
unfolding of the narrative and the total conception present to the mind
of the writer throughout from the beginning, we should say that this
conception assumes for Christ the fullest significance of Divine
Sonship.
More than this: we see, when we come to study the Gospel in detail, that
the writer not only assumes the full idea of Sonship but has also dwelt
upon it and thought about it and followed it out through all the logic
of its contents. We may say that it is not only he that has done so but
practically all the thinking portion of the Church of his time. We may
see this from the comparison of St. Paul and the Epistle to the Hebrews,
not to speak of other New Testament writers. The Synoptists hardly come
under the head of thinkers. They are content to set down facts and
impressions without analysis and without reflection. But long before St.
John sat down to write, those who really were thinkers had evidently
asked themselves what was the meaning and what was the origin of that
title ‘Son of God’ by which the Church was agreed to designate its
Master. The more active minds had evidently pressed the inquiry far
home. They did not stop short at the Baptism; they did not stop short at
the Birth: they saw that the Divine Sonship of Christ stretched back far
beyond these recent events; they saw that it was rooted in the deepest
depths of Godhead. It is true both of St. Paul and of the Epistle to the
Hebrews—that is, assuming that the Epistle to the Colossians is St.
Paul’s—that they have not only the doctrine of the Son but the doctrine
of the Logos, all but the name.
Now I know that there are many who will not agree with me; I know also
that the position is not easy to prove, though, as we shall see, I
believe that there are a number of definite facts that at least suggest
it. But for myself I suspect so strongly as to be practically sure that
in these processes of thought the apostolic theologians, as we may call
them, were not altogether original. They were not without a precursor;
they did not invent their ideas for the first time. I believe that we
shall most reasonably account for the whole set of phenomena if we
suppose that there had been intimations, hints, _Anhaltspunkte_, in the
discourses of our Lord Jesus Christ Himself. We have as a matter of fact
such hints or intimations in the Fourth Gospel. The Evangelist may have
expanded and accentuated them a little—he may have dotted the i’s and
crossed the t’s—but I believe that it is reasonable to hold that they
had been really there. The Founding of Christianity is in any case a
very great phenomenon; and it seems to me simpler and easier, and in all
ways more probable, to refer the features which constitute its greatness
to a single source, to the one source which is really the fountain-head
of all. Without that one source the others would never have been what
they were.
The fact that St. Paul and the Epistle to the Hebrews had substantially
arrived at a Logos doctrine before any extant writing has mentioned the
name, seems to throw light on the order of thought by which the Fourth
Evangelist himself arrived at his doctrine of the Logos. It is the
coping-stone of the whole edifice, not the foundation-stone. It is a
comprehensive synthesis which unites under one head a number of
scattered ideas. From this point of view it would be more probable that
the Prologue to the Fourth Gospel was a true preface, written after the
rest of the work to sum up and bind together in one mighty paragraph the
ideas that are really leading ideas, though scattered up and down the
Gospel. Whether it was actually written last does not matter. What I
mean is that the philosophic synthesis of the events recorded in the
Gospel came to the Evangelist last in the order of his thought; the
order was, history first and then philosophic synthesis of the history.
No doubt the synthesis was really complete before the Apostle began to
write his Gospel; the writing of the Prologue may or may not have
followed the order of his thought. It may have been, as Harnack thinks,
a sort of commendatory letter sent out with the Gospel; or it may be
that the Gospel was written out in one piece upon a plan present from
the first to the writer’s mind. The order of genesis and the order of
production do not always coincide; and it is really a very secondary
consideration whether in any particular instance they did or not.
We do not know exactly at what stage in his career the Evangelist
grasped the idea of the Logos. We should be inclined to think
comparatively late, from the fact that it has not been allowed to
intrude into the historical portion of the Gospel. The various ideas
which are summed up under the conception of the Logos appear there
independently and in other connexions. As we have just seen, in St. Paul
also and in the Epistle to the Hebrews the arch is fully formed before
the key-stone is dropped into it.
Whatever we may think about this, there is a close parallelism between
the whole theology, including the Christology, of St. Paul and St. John.
Both start from the thought of an Incarnation (John i. 14; Rom. viii. 3;
Gal. iv. 4; Phil. ii. 7, 8; Col. i. 15; and with the latter part of the
same verse, cp. Col. i. 19; ii. 9). In both St. John and St. Paul the
union of the Son with the Father is not only moral but a union of
essential nature (cp. John i. 1, 2, 14; x. 30, 38; xiv. 10, 11, 20;
xvii. 21, 23 with 2 Cor. v. 19; Col. i. 13, 15, 19; ii. 9). Between the
Son and the Father there is the bond of mutual love, of a love supreme
and unique (that is the real meaning of μονογενής in John i. 14, 18; cp.
xvii. 23, 24, 26 and Rom. viii. 3, 32; Eph. i. 6; Col. i. 13). As a
consequence of this relation between the Son and the Father, which has
its roots in the eternal past (John i. 1, 2; xvii. 5, 24), there was
also complete union of will in the work of the Son upon earth (John v.
30; vi. 38; xiv. 31; xvii. 16: cp. Phil. ii. 8; Heb. v. 7, 8). Thus the
acts of the Son are really the acts of the Father, the natural
expression of that perfect intimacy in which they stand to each other
(v. 19, 20; viii. 29; x. 25, 37, 38). The reciprocity between them is
absolute, it is seen in the perfection of their mutual knowledge (vii.
29; viii. 19; x. 15; xvii. 25); so that the teaching of the Son is
really the teaching of the Father (vii. 16; viii. 26, 28, 38; xii. 49,
50; xiv. 10, 24; xv. 15). What the Son is, the Father also is. Hence the
life and character and words of the Son, taken as a whole, constitute a
revelation of the Father such as had never been given before (vi. 46;
xiv. 7-10: cp. i. 14, 18)[64].
Thus we are brought to another central idea of the Fourth Gospel, the
function of the Son as revealing the Father. For this, again, we have a
parallel in an impassioned passage of St. Paul:
‘The god of this world hath blinded the minds of the unbelieving,
that the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the
image of God, should not dawn upon them. For we preach not
ourselves, but Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your servants
for Jesus’ sake. Seeing it is God, that said, Light shall shine out
of darkness, who shined in our hearts, to give the light of the
knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’ (2 Cor.
iv. 4-6).
It may be true that this idea, though central with St. John, is
subordinate with St. Paul; but it is distinctly recognized—just as,
conversely, the doctrine of the Atonement, though clearly implied, is
less prominent with St. John than with St. Paul.
The close resemblance between the teaching of St. John and St. Paul does
not end with the exposition of the character and mission of the
incarnate Son; it is exhibited no less in what is said about the Holy
Spirit. The teaching of the Fourth Gospel on the subject of the Spirit
repeats in a remarkable way certain leading features in its teaching
about the Son. The Father is in the Son (as we have seen), and the Son
is one with the Father; and yet the Son is distinct (in the language of
later theology, a distinct Person) from the Father; and in like manner
the Paraclete is ‘another’ than the Son (xiv. 16), and is sent by the
Son (xv. 26; xvi. 7); and yet in the coming of the Spirit the Son
Himself returns to His people (xiv. 18; cf. iii. 28).
Here again the parallel is quite remarkable between St. Paul and St.
John. If we take a passage like Rom. viii. 9-11 we see that, in this
same connexion of the work of the indwelling Spirit among the faithful,
He is described at one moment as the Spirit of God, at another as the
Spirit of Christ, and almost in the same breath we have the phrase, ‘If
Christ is in you’ as an equivalent for ‘If the Spirit of Christ is in
you.’ The latter phrase is fuller and more exact, but with St. Paul, as
well as with St. John, it is Christ Himself who comes to His own in His
Spirit.
No writer that I know has worked out the whole of this relation with
more philosophical and theological fulness and accuracy than Dr. Moberly
in his _Atonement and Personality_. And I am tempted to quote one short
passage of his (where I should like to quote many), because it seems to
me to sum up in few words the fundamental teaching of St. Paul and St.
John.
‘Christ in you, or the Spirit of Christ in you; these are not
different realities; but the one is the method of the other. It is
in the Person of Christ that the Eternal God is revealed in manhood
to man. It is in the Person of His Spirit that the Incarnate Christ
is Personally present within the spirit of each several man. The
Holy Ghost is mainly revealed to us as the Spirit _of the
Incarnate_[65].’
It is to the language of St. Paul and St. John that we go for proof that
the Holy Spirit is a Person; but it is also from their language that we
learn how intimately He is associated with the other Divine Persons.
We are led up to what is in later theological language called the
doctrine of the Holy Trinity. It is well known that some of the most
important data for this doctrine are derived from the Fourth Gospel,
especially from the last discourse. And whatever is found in St. John
may be paralleled in substance from St. Paul.