Religion
According to St John
Martin Sullivan
There has fallen into my hands the manuscript, in clear and legible form, of a paper delivered in Belfast in 1910 by my predecessor Dean Inge. He was then Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge, and the lecture was given a year before he was appointed to St Paul's. His subject was 'The Christ of history and of experience in the Fourth Gospel.' I have elected to summarise his findings in this column in order to show the workings of a profound and original mind, and also to observe how, more than half a century ago, he was in the van of biblical and theological thought.
He begins by suggesting that the Fourth Evangelist has done much the same for Christ as Plato did for Socrates. As Plato's main object was not to record biographical details about his master but to expound philosophical truths which he had learned from him, so the main object of St John's Gospel is to interpret the universal religious value and meaning of the Son of God. The author paints a portrait of Christ which gives us in the end a better likeness than a good photograph. He brings out what is essential and characteristic in the features and expression of his subject and is not concerned with every line and curve. Of course something is lost in the process. The other three Gospels show us a man engaged daily in his mission. They show him rubbing shoulders
OPeeTaT.01' September 7, 1974 with scribes, publicans, lepers, and demoniacs. We hear him teaching in parables, short pithy stories and aphorisms easily remembered. They reconstruct the manner of man Jesus was, as He was known to His disciples.
It is no part of St John's scheme to repeat these details. He has his own idea of the relation of the Christ of history to the Christ of experience, and he writes his Gospel in order to impress his view upon his readers, The synoptics leave us to form our own opinion as to the universal and eternal signifi-cance of the events they describe, but in the Fourth Gospel we are not left to speculate or form theories. It has all been done for us.
What is that interpretation? It is the culmination of a process taking definite shape in the New Testament, and is not an invention of the Fourth Evangelist. If we could re-arrange the books of the New Testament in chronological order beginning with Thessalonians and ending with the Johannine books we could see the development of Christian doctrine through the first century of the Church's life and its culmination in St John. Past and present are united as are the particular and the universal, the external unique event and the inward constantly repeated experience. The dominating idea in St John's Gospel is that of the Son as the complete revelation of the Father, and this revelation was made by the Incarnate life as a unitary whole. There are no stages in this unfolding, no humiliation to be followed by a vindication, no tragedy on the Aristotelian model. St Paul's doctrine of a 'Kenosis' has no place in the Johannine thought. The glory shone over the head of Christ from the beginning to the end and its full manifestation was seen, not at the Resurrection but at the Passion. "Now is the Son of Man glorified." This is a step forward, a fuller revelation than was granted to St Paul. Suffering is itself divine and the self-chosen death as well as the victory over the grave is part of that glory. Christ, according to St John, was active in the creation of the world, always in the spiritual life of the believer no less than in the past redemption and future lordship. Does this dehumanise Jesus? Does it turn Him from a Person to an idea? Is the man lost in the cosmic spirit? Not so certainly for St Paul, who finally arrived at these ideas himself, as has already been suggested. His teaching became more and more Christocentric and more and more detached from the apocalyptic dream of nationalist messianism. The life of Christ as St John teaches us can only be understood by those who have already risen with Christ into the eternal world which He never left while He sojourned among us and where He now dwells.
This brilliantly condensed essay opens the pages of the Fourth Gospel and helps the reader to interpret modern commentaries. Dean Inge was my predecessor but one. He delivered this paper in the year of my birth.
Martin Sullivan is Dean of St Paul's
Previous page
