The Paschal Gospel of John the Theologian
With the kind permission of Professor John Behr, below is the preface from his forthcoming book, John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
After I let it be known a few years ago that I was writing a book on John, I was often asked how my commentary is coming on. To avoid disappointment or confusion, I should make it clear up-front: this is not a commentary on John! It is rather an attempt to put into dialogue various readers of John, ancient and modern—Fathers, especially from the second and third centuries but also later figures, and modern scriptural scholars, theologians, and philosophers—with, ultimately, a theological goal: that of understanding what is meant by Incarnation and how it relates to the Passion, how this is conceived of as revelation and how we speak of it, that is, the relationship between scriptural exegesis and theological discourse.
The genesis of this volume lies primarily in the work in which I have been engaged over the past decades on the Fathers of the first centuries, especially Irenaeus and Origen. Having made my way in a series of publications through to the controversies of the sixth century, I realized that to go further meant returning backwards, to reconsider Origen’s On First Principles. During the preparation of a new edition of that work, I was also asked to write a new volume on Irenaeus, taking me back even earlier. This immersion in the literature of early Christianity persuaded me that they were not reading John, and especially the Prologue to his Gospel, in the way that we often presume today. That is, they did not read the Prologue as a narrative of a ‘pre-Incarnate Word’ (a phrase I have yet to encounter in the Fathers) who subsequently becomes incarnate by being born in the world to return later on through the Passion to the Father, such that ‘Incarnation’ is ‘an episode in the biography of the Word’, as Rowan Williams (negatively) characterized it. Indeed, so much is this not the case, that the classic work devoted to the topic, On the Incarnation by Athanasius, speaks of creation as having been effected by ‘our Lord Jesus Christ’ and barely even mentions the birth of Jesus!
Persuaded that something more is going on, I began reading through modern scriptural scholarship on John, and found that, even while such a picture is often presumed, fresh avenues of reflection have opened up in recent decades, especially with the work of John Ashton and those whom he has inspired, seeing the Gospel of John in terms of the apocalyptic literature of the late first century. At the same time, Russ Hittinger recommended that I read I Am the Truth by Michel Henry; fascinated by this work, I found myself going even further back, this time to my initial studies in continental philosophy, to retrace the path that led to Henry and his work. It is these threads that are brought together in this present volume. Its central argument is that Incarnation should be understood not as a past event, but as the ongoing embodiment of God in those who follow Christ.
The work begins with various methodological considerations in the Introduction, in particular Quentin Skinner’s caution regarding the ‘mythology of doctrines’ and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion of the ‘effective-history’ always at work in the process of understanding. It also considers briefly ways in which early Fathers understood the identity of Jesus as the Word of God other than as ‘an episode in a biography’, the notion of ‘pre-existence’ and ‘incarnation’ as analysed by Hebert McCabe, and concludes with a section on the readers we have invited to this theological symposium. Part I is devoted to the question of the identity of John and the particular character of his Gospel. It begins in Chapter 1, building upon the work of Richard Bauckham and Charles Hill, by considering the identity of John, as he is remembered in the second century, especially by those who trace their lineage to him. Of particular interest here is that they look back to him not only as the author of the Gospel (and the Apocalypse), but as the one whose observance of Pascha, Easter, they claim to follow, and indeed it seems that initially they were the only ones to keep this feast. Chapter 2 picks up Ashton’s suggestion that the Gospel should be understood as ‘an apocalypse—in reverse, upside down, inside out’ in the light of more recent work on the subject of apocalyptic literature and apocalypticism (‘the mother of all Christian theology’, as Ernst Käsemann put it), the relationship between the Apocalypse attributed to John and the Gospel, the particular character of his Gospel as a ‘Paschal Gospel’, and what is entailed by all this for the discipline of reading Scripure as Scripture. Part II turns to the Gospel of John, considering it under two different facets of embodiment that are ‘finished’ at the cross: the Temple and the living human being, the Son of Man, this last category being one of the more significant places (alongside the treatment of John 6) where insights from Irenaeus and others are brought to bear upon the texts from John. The final chapter of Part II suggests that if the Gospel can be considered as a Paschal Gospel, the Prologue is best understood as a ‘Paschal Hymn’, and offers a way of reading this text very different to those usually given today, despite all their variety. Part III explores Michel Henry’s reading of John, bringing the work so far developed into dialogue with his own phenomenological reading, giving further clarity to the life that the Word offers and the flesh that the Word becomes and in turn clarifying some aspects of Henry’s phenomenological presentation of Christianity. The Conclusion draws our findings together and offers some suggestions regarding the nature and task of theology. The three parts of this work are thus each engaged with a different body of scholarship—respectively: historical investigation, scriptural exegesis, philosophical reflection—though there is of course overlap, especially between the first two parts. These three different disciplines are brought together with, ultimately, a constructive theological purpose. As such, this work is understood as itself a prologue to theology.
It should be noted that I use the terms the ‘Passion’ and ‘Pascha’ (‘Easter’) to refer to the singular event embracing the Crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension and Pentecost. I do this for two reasons. First, because this is, as we will see, how the writers of the early centuries speak, and continue to do so even when, from the fourth century onwards, this singular feast of Pascha is refracted, as it were, into a spectrum of particular feasts. The ‘Passion’ does not refer, at least for these writers, to the suffering in Gesthemane and on the cross in distinction to the resurrection and the joy it brings: the cross is the sign of victory, the means of life, and the source of joy. The second reason is that even when refracted into different commemorations, the crucifixion and resurrection still hold together in the unity of the single event; they are, indeed, aspects of it. This is particularly important in regard to the question of that most notable theme coming from the Gospel of John, the Incarnation. It was many centuries before a feast of the Nativity was added to the liturgical calendar, and when it is, it is celebrated as seen through the prism of the Passion, as an aspect of Pascha. Skinner’s caution regarding the mythology of doctrines holds with regard to liturgy as well: now that we have a full cycle of liturgical celebrations from the Annunciation to Pentecost (and before and after this, for the Marian feasts), it is very hard to think otherwise than in terms of a series of discrete events leading from conception and birth (this being taken as the moment of ‘Incarnation’) to death and resurrection. Yet, as scriptural scholars have long pointed out, the Gospels are told from the perspective of the end. Likewise, the liturgical year opens out from Pascha, the first feast to be celebrated (in particular, if not uniquely, by those following John), extending both backwards and forwards. Pascha, both historically and theologically, this work argues, is the starting point and register in which to hear the Gospel of John and also its Prologue. It is only more recently that the Prologue has come to be read as the Christmas reading, reinforcing the idea that ‘Incarnation’ can be separated from the Passion: in the Western tradition, from around the thirteenth century, it was the reading, the ‘second gospel’, that concluded the celebration of the Mass, the Word becoming flesh in the bread of the eucharistic celebration and in the communicant; in the Eastern tradition (in which I stand), it is the Paschal reading, read at the midnight liturgy, the transition from darkness to light—a Paschal hymn and a prologue to theology.
After I let it be known a few years ago that I was writing a book on John, I was often asked how my commentary is coming on. To avoid disappointment or confusion, I should make it clear up-front: this is not a commentary on John! It is rather an attempt to put into dialogue various readers of John, ancient and modern—Fathers, especially from the second and third centuries but also later figures, and modern scriptural scholars, theologians, and philosophers—with, ultimately, a theological goal: that of understanding what is meant by Incarnation and how it relates to the Passion, how this is conceived of as revelation and how we speak of it, that is, the relationship between scriptural exegesis and theological discourse.
The genesis of this volume lies primarily in the work in which I have been engaged over the past decades on the Fathers of the first centuries, especially Irenaeus and Origen. Having made my way in a series of publications through to the controversies of the sixth century, I realized that to go further meant returning backwards, to reconsider Origen’s On First Principles. During the preparation of a new edition of that work, I was also asked to write a new volume on Irenaeus, taking me back even earlier. This immersion in the literature of early Christianity persuaded me that they were not reading John, and especially the Prologue to his Gospel, in the way that we often presume today. That is, they did not read the Prologue as a narrative of a ‘pre-Incarnate Word’ (a phrase I have yet to encounter in the Fathers) who subsequently becomes incarnate by being born in the world to return later on through the Passion to the Father, such that ‘Incarnation’ is ‘an episode in the biography of the Word’, as Rowan Williams (negatively) characterized it. Indeed, so much is this not the case, that the classic work devoted to the topic, On the Incarnation by Athanasius, speaks of creation as having been effected by ‘our Lord Jesus Christ’ and barely even mentions the birth of Jesus!
Persuaded that something more is going on, I began reading through modern scriptural scholarship on John, and found that, even while such a picture is often presumed, fresh avenues of reflection have opened up in recent decades, especially with the work of John Ashton and those whom he has inspired, seeing the Gospel of John in terms of the apocalyptic literature of the late first century. At the same time, Russ Hittinger recommended that I read I Am the Truth by Michel Henry; fascinated by this work, I found myself going even further back, this time to my initial studies in continental philosophy, to retrace the path that led to Henry and his work. It is these threads that are brought together in this present volume. Its central argument is that Incarnation should be understood not as a past event, but as the ongoing embodiment of God in those who follow Christ.
The work begins with various methodological considerations in the Introduction, in particular Quentin Skinner’s caution regarding the ‘mythology of doctrines’ and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion of the ‘effective-history’ always at work in the process of understanding. It also considers briefly ways in which early Fathers understood the identity of Jesus as the Word of God other than as ‘an episode in a biography’, the notion of ‘pre-existence’ and ‘incarnation’ as analysed by Hebert McCabe, and concludes with a section on the readers we have invited to this theological symposium. Part I is devoted to the question of the identity of John and the particular character of his Gospel. It begins in Chapter 1, building upon the work of Richard Bauckham and Charles Hill, by considering the identity of John, as he is remembered in the second century, especially by those who trace their lineage to him. Of particular interest here is that they look back to him not only as the author of the Gospel (and the Apocalypse), but as the one whose observance of Pascha, Easter, they claim to follow, and indeed it seems that initially they were the only ones to keep this feast. Chapter 2 picks up Ashton’s suggestion that the Gospel should be understood as ‘an apocalypse—in reverse, upside down, inside out’ in the light of more recent work on the subject of apocalyptic literature and apocalypticism (‘the mother of all Christian theology’, as Ernst Käsemann put it), the relationship between the Apocalypse attributed to John and the Gospel, the particular character of his Gospel as a ‘Paschal Gospel’, and what is entailed by all this for the discipline of reading Scripure as Scripture. Part II turns to the Gospel of John, considering it under two different facets of embodiment that are ‘finished’ at the cross: the Temple and the living human being, the Son of Man, this last category being one of the more significant places (alongside the treatment of John 6) where insights from Irenaeus and others are brought to bear upon the texts from John. The final chapter of Part II suggests that if the Gospel can be considered as a Paschal Gospel, the Prologue is best understood as a ‘Paschal Hymn’, and offers a way of reading this text very different to those usually given today, despite all their variety. Part III explores Michel Henry’s reading of John, bringing the work so far developed into dialogue with his own phenomenological reading, giving further clarity to the life that the Word offers and the flesh that the Word becomes and in turn clarifying some aspects of Henry’s phenomenological presentation of Christianity. The Conclusion draws our findings together and offers some suggestions regarding the nature and task of theology. The three parts of this work are thus each engaged with a different body of scholarship—respectively: historical investigation, scriptural exegesis, philosophical reflection—though there is of course overlap, especially between the first two parts. These three different disciplines are brought together with, ultimately, a constructive theological purpose. As such, this work is understood as itself a prologue to theology.
It should be noted that I use the terms the ‘Passion’ and ‘Pascha’ (‘Easter’) to refer to the singular event embracing the Crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension and Pentecost. I do this for two reasons. First, because this is, as we will see, how the writers of the early centuries speak, and continue to do so even when, from the fourth century onwards, this singular feast of Pascha is refracted, as it were, into a spectrum of particular feasts. The ‘Passion’ does not refer, at least for these writers, to the suffering in Gesthemane and on the cross in distinction to the resurrection and the joy it brings: the cross is the sign of victory, the means of life, and the source of joy. The second reason is that even when refracted into different commemorations, the crucifixion and resurrection still hold together in the unity of the single event; they are, indeed, aspects of it. This is particularly important in regard to the question of that most notable theme coming from the Gospel of John, the Incarnation. It was many centuries before a feast of the Nativity was added to the liturgical calendar, and when it is, it is celebrated as seen through the prism of the Passion, as an aspect of Pascha. Skinner’s caution regarding the mythology of doctrines holds with regard to liturgy as well: now that we have a full cycle of liturgical celebrations from the Annunciation to Pentecost (and before and after this, for the Marian feasts), it is very hard to think otherwise than in terms of a series of discrete events leading from conception and birth (this being taken as the moment of ‘Incarnation’) to death and resurrection. Yet, as scriptural scholars have long pointed out, the Gospels are told from the perspective of the end. Likewise, the liturgical year opens out from Pascha, the first feast to be celebrated (in particular, if not uniquely, by those following John), extending both backwards and forwards. Pascha, both historically and theologically, this work argues, is the starting point and register in which to hear the Gospel of John and also its Prologue. It is only more recently that the Prologue has come to be read as the Christmas reading, reinforcing the idea that ‘Incarnation’ can be separated from the Passion: in the Western tradition, from around the thirteenth century, it was the reading, the ‘second gospel’, that concluded the celebration of the Mass, the Word becoming flesh in the bread of the eucharistic celebration and in the communicant; in the Eastern tradition (in which I stand), it is the Paschal reading, read at the midnight liturgy, the transition from darkness to light—a Paschal hymn and a prologue to theology.
Comments
Post a Comment