The Criticism of the Fourth Gospel / Eight Lectures on the Morse Foundation, Delivered in the Union Seminary, New York in October and November 1904

by W. Sanday

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.