The Gospel of John has played a hugely important role in the formation of classical Christian trinitarian doctrine and in continued reflection on the Trinity, including critical discussion. Sometimes (especially in the case of the trinitarian relationships within the immanent Trinity) it has been pressed to yield more than it can reasonably give, but in many ways the broad shape of trinitarian doctrine in Christian tradition corresponds well to what this Gospel has to say about the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. It is important, however, for Christian theology not merely to acknowledge its Johannine roots but also continually to return to them. Important as the classical statements of trinitarian doctrine are, they are no more than summaries of the rich reflections offered by the Gospel itself. Fresh readings of these – for example, in the light of the shape of Jewish monotheism in the Gospel’s original context, or with close attention to their pervasive soteriological significance – have much to offer. They can contribute to a revitalization of what may otherwise become merely the lifeless repetition of orthodox formulae. Like the God of the whole Bible, the God of the Gospel of John is above all the living God and the loving God, who gives life and love to creation from the infinite resources of his own being. In what the Gospel says about the Father, the Son and the Spirit, we are invited to contemplate the irreducibly relational nature of the life and the love that God is, both in himself and with us. We can do no better than start where John starts – with the relationality of God as it was already ‘in the beginning’: ‘the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ (1:1)1.
Before beginning to tell the story of Jesus from its traditional starting point, the ministry of John the Baptist, the evangelist John provides a prologue that tells his readers who Jesus is and what he came to do. Essentially it fulfils the same function as Mark’s very short prologue (Mark 1:1), which may have given John the idea for his much more elaborate prologue. In both cases readers are equipped from the start with the knowledge of Jesus’ identity that it takes characters in the story the whole length of the story fully to realize.2 Thus in John’s case it is not until after the resurrection that Thomas recognizes that Jesus is ‘God’ (20:28), but the prologue already calls Jesus ‘God’ emphatically and with necessary explanation (1:1–2, 18). By comparison with Mark’s very brief prologue John’s is a quasi-poetic piece of highly concentrated theology, and whereas Mark signals merely ‘the beginning’ of the gospel, John’s begins at ‘the beginning’ of everything, the beginning at which Genesis and the whole biblical story began. To let his readers into the secret of who Jesus really is, John thinks it necessary to begin at the earliest possible beginning, when God the Creator was on the brink of bringing the whole cosmos into being. For anyone who knew Genesis, the identity between the opening words of Genesis and those of John’s Gospel (‘In the beginning’) would be obvious and would provide the key to the meaning of the way the prologue continues.3
The first part of the prologue (1:1–5) is set in what we might call primordial time, the time of Genesis 1, while the second part (1:6–18), which begins in the style of Old Testament historical narrative (1:6), is set in historical time and, by featuring John the Baptist (1:6–8, 15), connects with the opening section of the gospel story (1:19–34). The first part of the prologue takes the form of a retelling of Genesis 1:1–5,4 comparable in some ways with other Jewish retellings of the Genesis creation narrative in Second Temple period literature.5 The allusions to Genesis are clear and must determine what John means by ‘the Word’ (ho logos). In Genesis 1 God creates by speaking words. The noun ‘word’ does not occur there, but it does in the short summary of the story of creation in Psalm 33:6–9,6 and Jewish retellings of the Genesis account frequently state that God created by his word.7 Sometimes they refer to this creative word of God simply as ‘the word’, as John does.8
The Greek word logos has other meanings besides ‘word’, including ‘reason’, but the allusion to Genesis requires that in John’s prologue the primary meaning must be ‘word’ and there is no strong reason for positing any further meaning, such as a philosophical (Stoic or Platonic) notion of a cosmic reason,9 appealing though such a meaning was to later readers. Most recent commentators on John have thought that the figure of divine Wisdom, which features in some Jewish literature in connection with creation, has influenced the prologue. It is possible that John identified God’s Word with God’s Wisdom, especially in view of the connection between Genesis 1:1 and Proverbs 8:22 (both refer to ‘the beginning’), but Jewish narratives of creation refer to the word of God considerably more often than they do to the wisdom of God,10 while the two are sometimes distinguished and given different roles (God’s wisdom devised the plan and his word executed it).11 What John says of the Word in 1:1–4 is quite sufficiently explained on the basis of Jewish references to the role of God’s word in creation,12 while other alleged similarities to Wisdom ideas in the rest of the prologue are possible but not compelling.13 We should certainly not make interpretation of the prologue depend upon detecting Wisdom somewhere behind it.
The first three verses of the prologue are an expression of Jewish creational monotheism. The simplest and clearest way in which Jewish writers maintained the uniqueness of their God was to assert that the one and only God was the creator of all things.14 Everything except God was created by God. Sometimes it was emphasized that no one assisted God in creation; it was all his own work.15 But this uniqueness of God did not prevent certain distinctions being made between God and aspects or attributes of his: God and his Wisdom, God and his Word, God and his Spirit. Such distinctions were no threat to the uniqueness of the one God because such aspects or attributes belonged to his own identity. They were not some divine entity in addition to God himself, but precisely his Wisdom, his Word, his Spirit.16
The prologue therefore begins by stating, in a way that is not only poetic but also very precise, the relationship between God and his Word before creation, when the Word through which God would express himself in creating the world already belonged to God’s identity:
In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God [ho logos ēn pros ton theon],17
and the Word was God [theos ēn ho logos].
He18 was in the beginning with God [pros ton theon].
The effect of the repetition is to highlight the two different relationships in which the Word stands to God: he was ‘with God’ and he ‘was God’, and both were simultaneously true. He is distinguishable from God and yet shares the same divine identity. In the repeated statement that the Word ‘was with God’, the word ‘God’ has the article (‘the God’), but in the statement that the Word ‘was God’, the word ‘God’ is anarthrous (i.e. it lacks the article). This may be a grammatical necessity (to distinguish the subject of the sentence [ho logos] from the predicate [theos]).19 It certainly does not mean that the Word ‘was a god’ or ‘was divine’ in some lesser sense than the full deity of God himself, for the function of the statement is precisely to negate the possibility that the preceding statement (‘the Word was with God’) refers to some independent entity alongside or subordinate to God. Here, in the beginning, before creation, there is no room for any beings other than the one God.
The meaning of ‘the Word was God’ is often discussed without reference to the rest of the prologue. But the word ‘God’ (theos) occurs eight times in the prologue (including the disputed reading theos in 1:18b), and with the exception of the two occurrences in the phrase ‘the Word was with God’ (1:1a, 2), all other occurrences are anarthrous (1:1, 6, 12, 13, 18a, 18b). Of these six occurrences, the first and last refer to the Word, but the intervening four all refer to God as such, not the Word. This high percentage of the anarthrous theos in the prologue is out of line with usage in the rest of the Gospel and would seem therefore to be intentional and significant.20 When John in the prologue wishes to distinguish between God and the Word, he uses ho theos for God, but otherwise uses the anarthrous theos equally for God and the Word, indicating that he means the identity of the Word with God as seriously as he means the distinction between them.
That John is thinking in terms of Jewish creational monotheism becomes especially clear in verse 3:
All things came into being through him,
and without him not one thing has come into being
that has come into being.21
We should recall that the often repeated affirmation of the uniqueness of the one God was that he alone ‘created all things’. The prologue’s words reflect another common statement about creation: that God created ‘by his word’. This, as we have seen, is quite consistent with the claim that God alone created. The apparently laboured repetition in verse 3 of the prologue, where the positive statement is reinforced by the equivalent negative statement, is explicable as a monotheistic insistence that the creative role of the Word is included in the creative act of God. In the distinction between Creator and creation there should be no doubt that the Word belongs to God’s side of the distinction. The Word himself is not among the things that have ‘come into being’. This is not to say that the prologue refers to the Word’s role in creation solely to make this monotheistic point. As verse 10 makes clear, it is also important that the one who came into the world to make eternal life available to creatures was the one who had created all things in the beginning. But the emphatic repetition in verse 3 functions to underline that the Word belongs to the identity of the unique creator of all.
The Gospel of John depicts two principal aspects of the saving work of Jesus: he reveals the Father and he gives eternal life. The prologue introduces both these soteriological themes, rooting them both in its reading of the Genesis creation narrative (light and life). What the Word was in primordial time he is also when he comes into the world in historical time: the Light who gives light to the world (vv. 8–9) and the Creator who gives life to the world (vv. 10–13). But in the climactic section of the prologue (vv. 13–18), which begins with the first use of the term ‘the Word’ since verse 1, a use that turns out also to be the last use of this term (in this sense) in the whole Gospel, the theme of revelation is dominant, along with the terms ‘only Son’ (monogenēs) and ‘Father’. These two terms occur for the first time in verse 14 and occur again at the end of the prologue (v. 18), forming an inclusio around this discrete part of the prologue.
For our present purposes we must confine our attention to the two references to Jesus Christ as ‘only Son’ (monogenēs). Outside the prologue the term occurs again only at 3:16, 18, where, unlike in the prologue, it is combined with the word ‘son’ (huios). There is now a consensus that the word monogenēs does not mean ‘only-begotten’ but ‘one of a kind’, ‘one and only’, ‘unique’.22 However, it was frequently used for an only child, and, especially in these verses of the prologue where reference is also made to a ‘father’, it stands adequately on its own as meaning ‘only son’. (The addition of huios in 3:16, 18 is understandable since God is not there called ‘Father’.) This is one reason why the reading monogenēs theos in verse 18 should probably be preferred to the alternative reading ho monogenēs huios, and why it should be translated as ‘God the only Son’.23
When the Word became flesh, the eyewitnesses (those who saw with both eyes and insight)24 saw ‘his glory, glory as of an only son from a father’25 (v. 14). The terminology of ‘only son’ and ‘father’ is introduced here by way of a simile, but is applied directly when it recurs in verse 18: ‘No one has ever seen God; God the only Son, who is on the breast of the Father, he has made him known’ (my tr.). The references to the only Son and the Father here form an inclusio with verse 14. But furthermore the whole phrase ‘God the only Son, who is on the breast of the Father’ forms an inclusio with the beginning of the prologue, where the Word was with God and was God. The statement that ‘the Word was with God’ is now unpacked in the more vividly personal language ‘the only Son, who is on the breast of the Father’. Additionally (if we accept the reading monogenēs theos in v. 18), the word theos is applied in both cases to the Word or only Son, anticipating at both ends of the prologue the climax of the Gospel story in Thomas’s confession at 20:28.
In this final section of the prologue (vv. 13–18) it has become clear that ‘the Word’ was only a preliminary designation of the one who is revealed in the incarnation to be the only Son.26 This is why ‘the Word’ never appears in the Gospel (in this sense) after 1:14, which makes a transition from ‘the Word’ to ‘the only Son’ of the Father.27 The implication of this transition is that not only is the Word now revealed to be the only Son, but also God is now revealed to be the Father. The Hebrew Bible and later Jewish literature speak of God as the Father of his people Israel, but in John’s Gospel the term Father always refers to God as the Father of Jesus his Son (with the single significant exception of 20:17).28 By being in his humanity the divine Son, Jesus reveals both the Father as his Father and his relationship with the Father as an eternal relationship within the divine identity.
I have said that in incarnation the Word was revealed to be the only Son of the Father. This would mean that the Word had always been the only Son of the Father, eternally ‘on the breast of the Father’, but that only in incarnation was this revealed. John will have used the term ‘Word’ in verses 1–14 because this was the usage of the Hebrew Bible, switching to ‘only Son’ in verses 14–18 because this is who the Word has been revealed to be in incarnation. But a few scholars argue that, according to the prologue, the Word became the Son at the incarnation. John A. T. Robinson argued that the Word, that is, God’s self-expression and self-revelation, came, in Jesus, to be ‘embodied totally in and as a human being, became a person’.29 Making use of patristic terminology, Robinson follows Piet Schoonenberg’s suggestion that, rather than thinking of the anhypostatic human nature of Jesus becoming hypostatic (‘a person or hypostasis’) when assumed by the Logos, as the Fathers and the tradition did, we should think of the Logos as anhypostatic ‘until the Word of God finally came to self-expression not merely in nature and in a people, but in an individual historical person, and thus became hypostatic’.30
Robinson understands Jesus’ ‘sonship’ to be the ideal human form of relationship to God, which Jesus instantiates perfectly, thereby revealing God his Father. He admits that John represents Jesus as speaking in the first person of his own pre-existence and post-existence as ‘a heavenly person’, but understands this to be ‘the language of myth . . . pushing the truth of the sonship that Jesus embodied back to the very beginning of God’s purpose’.31 Jesus, according to John, ‘is not a divine being who came to earth . . . in the form of a man, but the uniquely normal human being in whom the Logos or self-expressive activity of God was totally embodied’.32
More recently, Keith Ward, arguing for a ‘reformulation’ of the doctrine of the Trinity, takes ‘the Word’ in John’s prologue to be ‘the self-expressive thought of God’, ‘the eternally expressed thought of God. It is the Thought which is monogenēs theos (John I, 18), the uniquely generated aspect of God. Then God’s Thought is made real and particular in material form in Jesus.’ There is only one personal ‘subject’ in Jesus, the human subject, ‘but that subject perfectly expresses the divine Ideal or self-communicative expression of God’.33 Ward does not explicitly discuss what John means by calling Jesus ‘the Son’, but it seems clear that, like Robinson, he thinks the term can properly apply only to Jesus the human being.34 As a constructive theologian, Ward is concerned, like Robinson, to maintain the integrity of the humanity of Jesus, which requires a fully human subject, but also to oppose the notion of a ‘social trinity’ that posits intersubjective relationships in God’s eternal trinitarian being.
I will limit my argument here to the contention that John’s Gospel does not present the ‘sonship’ of Jesus as appertaining only to his human relationship with God. One might still argue, theologically, that the idea of Jesus’ personal pre-existence, whether the New Testament writers meant it metaphysically or only figuratively, is a ‘mythological’ way of saying that he was the climax of God’s eternal purpose for humanity.35 But it will still be important to establish just how the Gospel presents it.
The most decisive evidence that the Son, as Son, pre-existed the incarnation is to be found in the prayer of Jesus in chapter 17, which in some respects is a counterpart to the prologue.36 Only in chapter 17 does the perspective of the Gospel turn back to ‘the beginning’ with which it began (17:5, 24). Here, on the brink of completing the work the Father has given him to do (17:4), Jesus looks back to the glory he had with the Father ‘before the world existed’ (17:5). He looks back in order to look forward to the imminent moment when he will return to the Father and receive once again that primordial glory from the Father. His prayer is, ‘So now, Father, glorify me in your presence [para seautō] with the glory I had in your presence [para soi] before the world existed’ (17:5, my tr.). Here ‘in your presence’ (more literally, ‘close to you’)37 is equivalent to ‘with God’, said of the Word in 1:1–2, and even more to ‘on the breast of the Father’, said of ‘God the only Son’ in 1:18. Moreover, the reference to ‘glory’ picks up the phrase in 1:14, ‘we have seen his glory, glory as of an only son from a father’. The glory the eyewitnesses saw (1:14) must therefore be the earthly manifestation of the glory the Son had with the Father before the world existed (17:5). If it could be called, in its incarnate form, ‘glory as of an only son from a father’, then it must have been ‘glory as of a father’s only son’ already in eternity.
Jesus returns to this theme towards the end of the prayer, when he prays that those who believe in him may in the future ‘be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world’ (17:24). This is the last occurrence in the Gospel of the key word ‘glory’ and it matches the first occurrence: ‘we have seen his glory’ (1:14). Those who have seen his glory in its earthly form will in the future see his glory in its heavenly form. Here the glory is linked to the Father’s eternal love for the Son. It is the glory the Father gave him because he loved him ‘before the foundation of the world’. It cannot be doubted that the Gospel here speaks of an intersubjective relationship of love between the Father and the Son in eternity.38 Just as, at the end of the prologue, the relationship of the Word to God is restated as the only Son’s (implicitly loving) intimacy with his Father, so Jesus himself, communing with his Father at the conclusion of his work, sees it as the enjoyment of his Father’s love in his intimate presence. Moreover, here in chapter 17 there is no question that the reference is to the same pre-mundane eternity of which the beginning of the prologue speaks. What the prologue said of God and the Word at the beginning was no more than a preliminary indication of the relationship that chapter 17 more adequately depicts as that between the Father and his Son.
In using the term ‘binitarian’ here I am not intending to exclude the Spirit from John’s understanding of monotheism, but simply to focus for the time being on the relationship between Jesus and God. We need to give full weight to two aspects of the way John speaks of this:
These two aspects are already stressed in the opening verses of the prologue (the Word was ‘with God’39 and ‘was God’), which should warn us against collapsing either into the other. A signal example of aspect 1 is in Jesus’ words to the Father ‘that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent’ (17:3). Here the terminology of Jewish monotheism (‘the only true God’) is applied to the Father, from whom Jesus the Son is distinguished (cf. also 5:44). But, on the other hand, in an equally signal facet of aspect 2, Jesus claims that ‘the Father and I are one’ (10:30). ‘The Jews’ perceive this claim as blasphemous, as ‘making yourself God’ (10:31, 33), probably because it echoes the terminology of the Shema (‘the Lord, the Lord your God is one’),40 and so includes Jesus in the unique identity of the God of Israel, as Paul’s version of the Shema in 1 Corinthians 8:6 also does.41 (Contrast ‘the Jews’’ own version of the Shema: ‘We have one Father, God’ [8:41].)
In the Jewish definition of the one God’s exclusive divinity, as well as being sole creator of all things (as in the prologue to John), God was also understood as the sole sovereign ruler of all things. A key aspect of this was his sovereignty over life and death (Deut. 32:39). God is the only living one, that is, the only one to whom life belongs eternally and intrinsically. All other life derives from him, is given by him and taken back by him. Another key aspect was his prerogative of judgment, the implementation of justice. Such divine prerogatives have to be understood, not as mere functions that God may delegate to others, but as intrinsic to the divine identity. Ruling over all, giving life to all, exercising judgment on all – these belong integrally to the Jewish understanding of who God is.
These divine prerogatives, intrinsic to divinity as such, are the focus of the first major passage in the Gospel in which Jesus speaks about his own identity in discussion with the Jewish leaders: chapter 5. Here Jesus defends his act of healing on the Sabbath by claiming God’s unique prerogative of working on the Sabbath: ‘My Father is still working [i.e. his work did not cease with his creation of all things but continues in his sovereign rule over all things], and I also am working’ (5:17). (Since people are born and die on Sabbaths, it is clear that God exercises his sovereignty over life and death and his prerogative of judgment on the Sabbath as on other days. Jesus claims to do the same.) The Jewish leaders take this to mean that Jesus ‘was making himself equal to God’ (5:18), and the discourse of Jesus that follows implies that in one sense they are right but in another, wrong. In all that he does Jesus is wholly dependent on his Father and in no way sets himself up as a rival to him. He is not equal to God in the sense the Jewish leaders intend, but is equal to God in the sense that what the Father gives him to do are the uniquely divine prerogatives. He does not simply act as God’s agent in implementing some aspects of God’s sovereignty. He exercises the full divine sovereignty (‘whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise’ [5:19])42 as given him by his Father but as also fully his own: ‘just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life to whomever he wishes’ (5:21); ‘the Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son’ (5:22); ‘just as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself’ (5:26). Jesus thus shares in the divine identity as the only living one, the only giver of life, the only judge of all.
In sayings such as these we see how the two aspects of the binitarian shape of monotheism are closely related. As the plenipotentiary agent of his Father, Jesus is distinguished from God but uniquely associated with him. At the same time, as plenipotentiary agent he alone exercises uniquely divine prerogatives, which belong to the unique identity of the one God. This must mean that the unique divine identity includes the specific relationship of dependence and divine authority that Jesus the Son has with God his Father. In that sense he is identified with God. That this is a correct understanding of the Johannine passage is confirmed by the words ‘The Father . . . has given all judgment to the Son, so that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father’ (5:22–23). In the Jewish tradition worship was intimately connected with monotheism. The only true God must be worshipped and he is the only one who may be worshipped. This is because worship is precisely the recognition of the unique divine identity. In Jewish religious practice it was worship that distinguished the one God from all other beings who, however exalted, are his creatures and subject to his sovereign rule.
The Gospel contains two series of sayings of Jesus including the words ‘I am’ (Greek egō eimi, where the pronoun egō, which is not always necessary in Greek, is used for emphasis along with the verb). There are seven sayings in each series. One series is easily recognized by readers of the Gospel in English translation.43 These are the ‘I am’ sayings with predicates, in which the ‘I am’ is followed by a noun. They are metaphorical sayings in which Jesus describes himself in some way as the one who gives salvation (e.g. the bread of life, the light of the world, the true vine). Our present concern is with the other series, known as the absolute ‘I am’ sayings, in which the words ‘I am’ (Greek egō eimi) stand by themselves without a predicate.44 These are less easy to identify in English translations, because the translators adopt a variety of translation strategies in order to make intelligible English of them in context.45 Sometimes the phrase is rendered ‘I am he’, sometimes ‘It is I’ and at least once ‘I am’ (8:58).
In three cases the phrase appears at first sight to have a quite ordinary meaning, for example 4:26 (‘I . . . am he’; i.e. Jesus identifies himself as the Messiah just mentioned); 6:20 (‘It is I’; i.e. Jesus identifies himself to the disciples); 18:5, 6, 8 (when the soldiers say they are looking for Jesus, he replies, ‘I am he’). But in four cases no such ordinary meaning is available and the phrase ‘I am’ is as strangely incomplete in the Greek as it is in literal English translation. Three of these appear in close succession in the second half of chapter 8: ‘You will die in your sins unless you believe that I am’ (8:28 nrsv margin); ‘When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will realise that I am’ (8:38 nrsv margin); ‘Before Abraham was, I am’ (8:58). In 8:24 and 8:28 Jesus is evidently making some kind of remarkable claim that is obscure to his hearers. In the case of 8:58 the reaction of the Jewish leaders is to try to stone Jesus for blasphemy (8:59). The reaction shows that Jesus is understood to be claiming not merely to have pre-existed Abraham, but some kind of divine identity. The fourth case in which ‘I am’ cannot be given an ordinary meaning is in 13:19: ‘I tell you this now, before it occurs, so that when it does occur you may believe that I am.’
In view of these four cases where a special meaning is indicated it is best to take all seven sayings as a set, while understanding those in which an ordinary meaning is possible as instances of double entendre (a frequent literary device in John). In these cases the more obvious meaning is not wrong, but a more profound meaning is hidden beneath it. This can be seen most clearly in the seventh of these absolute ‘I am’ sayings, which forms an emphatic climax to the set by means of threefold repetition (18:5, 6, 8). Here the ordinary meaning, a reply to the soldiers’ question, fails to account for the soldiers’ reaction. They fall prostrate on the ground, suggesting, as in 8:58–59, that Jesus has made some kind of divine claim.
But how do the words ‘I am’ express such a claim? One suggestion, often made specifically with reference to 8:58, is that ‘I am’ is a form of the divine Name, the Tetragrammaton (YHWH).46 In Exodus 3:14, when God reveals his Name to Moses, he interprets it as meaning ‘I am who I am’ (this is one of several possible translations of the Hebrew), and then uses a short version of this as a form of the Name: ‘Thus shall you say to the Israelites, “I AM has sent me to you.”’ One difficulty with this suggestion is that no Greek version of Exodus 3:14 uses the translation egō eimi, the Greek phrase in John. A more serious obstacle is that nowhere in Jewish literature outside Exodus 3:14 is the phrase ‘I am’ used as a version of the divine Name.
A more adequate explanation of these sayings in John is that they reflect the divine self-declaration ‘I am he.’47 The lxx Greek uses the phrase egō eimi in Deuteronomy 32:39 and on several occasions in Isaiah 40 – 55 (41:4; 43:10; 46:4) to translate the Hebrew phrase ’ănî hû’, which is usually translated in English as ‘I am he.’ In the two cases (43:25; 51:2) where the Hebrew has the more emphatic form of the same phrase, ’ānōkî ’ānōkî hû’, the lxx has the double expression egō eimi egō eimi. This phrase ‘I am he’ is an extraordinarily significant one. It is a divine self-declaration, encapsulating YHWH’s claim to unique and exclusive divinity. In the Hebrew Bible it occurs first in what are almost the last words God himself speaks in the Torah, where it is an emphatically monotheistic assertion: ‘Behold, I, even I am he; there is no god besides me’ (Deut. 32:39, my tr.). In the prophecies of Isaiah 40 – 55 this form of divine self-declaration (in Hebrew: Isa. 41:4; 43:10, 13, 25; 46:4; 48:12; 51:12; 52:6) expresses emphatically the absolute uniqueness of the God of Israel, who in these chapters constantly asserts his unique deity in contrast with the idols of the nations, and defines his uniqueness as that of the eternal creator of all things and the unique sovereign ruler of all history. His great act of eschatological salvation will demonstrate him to be the one and only God in the sight of all the nations, revealing his glory so that all the ends of earth will acknowledge him as God and turn to him for salvation.
The ‘I am he’ declarations are among the most emphatically monotheistic assertions of the Hebrew Bible, and if Jesus in John’s Gospel repeats them he is unambiguously identifying himself with the one and only God, YHWH, the God of Israel. It does not do justice to these sayings to see them, as some scholars do, merely as an expression of an ‘agent’ Christology, according to which Jesus is the plenipotentiary agent of God.48 This undoubtedly is an important aspect of the understanding of Jesus in John (where Jesus is frequently said to have been ‘sent’ by the Father). But in the total context of the Gospel, including the absolute ‘I am’ sayings, it is clear that God does not send someone else to act as his agent in salvation. As we saw in the last section, what this agent does is not something God can delegate to someone other than God, since it belongs to the uniquely divine prerogatives of the one God. Only one who truly shares the unique divine identity can give eternal life and reveal God’s glory in the world. Jesus’ absolute ‘I am’ sayings express his unique and exclusive participation in God’s unique and exclusive deity. Just as ‘I am he’ in the Hebrew Bible sums up what it is to be truly God, so in John it identifies Jesus as truly God in the fullest sense.
The relationship of God the Father to Jesus the Son is at the centre of the theology of this Gospel. It is the climax of the prologue (1:18), the subject of much of Jesus’ discourse about himself and his mission, the wellspring of the narrative that takes Jesus to the cross in obedience to the Father (10:17–18; 18:11), and disclosed in Jesus’ prayers, especially chapter 17. More than any other New Testament writer, John emphasizes the uniqueness of Jesus’ sonship. Not content to characterize him as the ‘only Son’ (monogenēs; 1:14, 18; 3:16, 18), John even confines the term ‘son’ (huios) to Jesus. Those whom he enables to be ‘born from God’ are not ‘sons’ but ‘children’ (tekna) (1:12; 11:52; cf. 13:33). Unlike them, the Son is never said to have been born, which could imply temporal origin. Uniquely, the Son was with God eternally (17:5). He alone has seen God (6:46) and thereby can reveal him (1:18; 12:45; 14:9). They enjoy mutual knowledge (10:15) and everything in common (17:10). Thus Jesus’ sonship is more than just the perfect instantiation of human being, though his earthly life does model what it means to be truly human in unimpeded relationship with God.
What I have said about Jesus as plenipotentiary agency of God exercising the uniquely divine prerogatives belongs within this larger category of Father–Son relationship.49 He exercises all these prerogatives not as a mere agent of an absent sender but as the Son to whom his Father is always present.50 Yet he does not exercise them in the way the Father does, but in his own filial manner. On the one hand, the Father gives him the exercise of these prerogatives, but, on the other hand, the Father gives them for him to have ‘in himself’ (5:26).51 Thompson comments:
Precisely in holding together the affirmations [sic] that the Son has ‘life in himself’ [5:26] with the affirmation that he has ‘been given’ such life by the Father [6:57], we find the uniquely Johannine characterization of the relationship of the Father and the Son.52
We could say that this combination of dependence and possession – or possession as intrinsically given – constitutes the Son’s own way of being God.53 Within the unique divine identity that the Son shares with the Father there is a differentiated relationship of Father and Son.
Again and again the Gospel stresses the absolute and continuous dependence of the Son on the Father for everything he says and does (5:19, 30; 7:16, 28; 11:41–42; 12:49–50; 17:7–8; 18:11), for the divine Name (17:11–12), for glory (8:54; 17:22) and for all who believe in him (6:37; 10:29; 17:6, 9, 24). He is given literally everything (3:35; 13:3; 17:2) and everything he has is given. The Father is the unique source of everything, the Son the one who uniquely receives everything from the Father, so that he can give to others. But in doing the work his Father has given him to do, in sharing with others what the Father has given him, the Son also gives to the Father: love (14:31), honour and glory (7:18; 8:49; 17:1, 4).
One aspect of Jesus’ absolute dependence on the Father is his obedience to the Father’s command (10:18; 12:49; 14:31), expressed also as, ‘I always do what is pleasing to him’ (8:29). This, of course, is what was expected of a son. However, this relationship of authority and obedience should not be overstressed, given that the Father also gives the Son authority over everything (3:35; 13:3; 17:2). In the Father–Son relationship the asymmetrical relationship of giving (the Father gives the Son everything) is greater than and encompasses that of command and obedience. In the much-debated statement ‘the Father is greater than I’ (14:28) the reference is probably to the Son’s dependence on the Father’s giving, not to the Son’s obedience to the Father, which is not relevant to the context. The use of the term ‘subordination’, which implies a hierarchy of rank, may therefore not be very helpful.54 The Johannine account implies not that the Son ranks below the Father, but that the Son owes everything to the Father. Since everything is given, there is both asymmetry (14:28) and complete commonality (16:15; 17:10). The Son has an equality with the Father that the Father has given him (5:17–29).55
It is important to realize that John’s account of the relationship of the Father and the Son always has in view their ‘work’, the work that the Father has given the Son to accomplish on earth. In terms of classical trinitarian doctrine this is the ‘economic’ Trinity. What I have called ‘the Son’s way of being God’ is actually the incarnate Son’s way of being God, his way of being God as the man Jesus. We should therefore be cautious about attributing to the Son in the ‘immanent’ Trinity every aspect of his relationship to the Father that the Gospel attributes to the incarnate Son (such as obedience).56 But we may surely suppose that the Son’s eternal relationship to the Father was such that a genuinely human version of it was possible. If the eternal Son’s way of being God was in absolute dependence on the Father, then it was a way of being God that could be lived out in the human form of the life, death and exaltation of Jesus. This is how this Gospel’s version of the story of Jesus is able to stress the unreserved involvement of God in it, yet without Docetism, without compromising the genuine humanity of Jesus.
There is one respect in which the Gospel is quite clear about (to use the classical theological conceptuality) the correspondence between the economic and the immanent Trinity. This concerns the Father’s love for the Son. As the prologue already declares, what is revealed by the incarnation is the intimate relationship between the Father and the Son (1:18). It is surely no accident that the Gospel’s series of references to the Father’s love for the Son (3:35; 5:20; 15:9–10; 10:17; 17:23, 24, 26)58 climax in an emphatic cluster of three at the end of Jesus’ prayer to the Father in chapter 17, which, as we have noticed, to some extent corresponds to the prologue by reprising and extending its themes. The Son’s participation in the uniquely divine prerogatives is grounded in the Father’s love for him (3:35; 5:20), as is his heavenly glory (17:24). It is the most profound reality, not only of his earthly life, but also of his pre-existence in eternity (17:24). Moreover, looking back from the vantage point of the conclusion of Jesus’ prayer, we could say that the whole story of salvation that the Gospel tells stems from the love between the Father and the Son and has as its goal the inclusion of humans within this loving relationship (‘that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them’, 17:26). The love between the Father and the Son is the deepest dimension not only of the Gospel’s understanding of God, but also of the Gospel’s soteriology.
Another way in which the Gospel portrays the intimacy of Father and Son is by means of the formula ‘the Father is in the Son and the Son is in the Father’ (10:38; 14:10–11; 17:21; cf. 14:20). It is significant that this uniquely Johannine formulation occurs first in 10:38, following the remarkable version of the Shema in 10:30 (‘I and the Father are one’). Jesus’ self-defence against the charge of blasphemy that this provokes culminates in the equally audacious claim, also perceived as blasphemy, ‘the Father is in me and I am in the Father’ (10:38). This seems to function as equivalent to or a further explication of the first claim. The inner reality of the unity of the Father and the Son, the way in which together they comprise the one God of Jewish faith, is their intimate personal communion. This shows that their oneness, according to 10:30, is not simply their common purpose, as commentators sometimes suppose. There is, within the identity of the one God, a personal relationship that is the ground and source of the unity of purpose and action between the Father and the Son.
This distinctive ‘in one another’ language seems to have been coined by John to express the personal coinherence that mutual love involves.59 Coinherence, a kind of overlapping of identity, is a feature of human mutual love to an extent,60 but only to a limited extent. The love of the Father and the Son, given by the Father (17:24) and reciprocated by the Son (14:31), is a relationship of complete self-giving to each other, such that, while remaining distinct in the way of being God that is proper to each, they also comprise one God. It is true that the Gospel uses the ‘in one another’ language not only of the relationship of the Father and the Son, but also of the relationship between the individual believer and Jesus (6:56; cf. 15:5) and the relationship between believers as a group and Jesus (14:20; cf. 15:4, 7). In his prayer to the Father Jesus mixes these relationships: ‘As you, Father, are in me and I in you, may they also be in us’ (17:21); ‘that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me’ (17:22–23; cf. 11); ‘so that the love with which you loved me may be in them, and I in them’ (17:26). The comparison between the unity of the Father and the Son and the unity of believers (17:22–23) does not mean that they are alike in every respect, but that there is an analogy.61 It is notable that believers are not said to be one through being ‘in one another’, but through the presence in them of Jesus, and the Father’s presence in him. The highly compressed language of this climactic passage of the prayer surely means that the love of the Father for the Son, which makes them one, overflows, through the Son,62 to unite believers with both the Son and the Father.
Important though the Spirit is in the Gospel of John, there is much less to be said about the place of the Spirit in the Johannine understanding of God than there is about the Son. We should begin by recognizing that the Spirit appears in this Gospel in two different roles. Outside the farewell discourse (chapters 13–16) the Spirit is associated largely with life and probably to some extent with power.63 (The only passage that does not obviously fit these categories is 4:23–24, which is perhaps closer to the Paraclete passages.) In the farewell discourses, on the other hand, the Spirit appears in the special role of the Paraclete or ‘the Spirit of truth’. The use of the term ‘Holy Spirit’ (which seems to have become popular in Second Temple period Judaism and the New Testament as a way of distinguishing the Spirit of God from other uses of the term, e.g. for angels or human spirits) in 14:26, as well as 1:33 and 20:22, makes it clear that it is the same divine Spirit who appears in these different roles. The roles correlate roughly with the two main strands of Johannine soteriology: the gift of eternal life from God and the revelation of God.
The association of the divine Spirit with life and power derives originally from the usage of the Hebrew Bible,64 as does the imagery of breath (20:22), wind (3:8) and water (1:33; 7:38),65 but in the Gospel the reference is to eternal life, the divine life that Jesus came to share with humans, the life that makes them ‘children of God’.66 Jesus receives the Spirit ‘without measure’ in order to bestow him onto others (1:32–33; 3:34; 20:22; cf. 7:37–39). He gives him from within himself (symbolized as water and breath coming from within him: 7:37–39; 19:34; 20:22),67 in accordance with his claim that the Father ‘has granted the Son also to have life in himself’ (5:26).68 Since giving life is the prerogative of the Father, in which the Son also shares (1:4; 5:26–29; 1:25–26), there can be no doubt that the Spirit is integral to the divine identity. But really this is something John can take for granted, simply because in the tradition of the Hebrew Bible the Spirit is God’s Spirit, just as the Word is God’s Word. The unity of God and his Spirit does not have to be extensively explicated in the way the unity of the Father and the Son does.
In most of these passages the language used does not attribute to the Spirit ‘his’ own agency, and in the two cases where the Spirit is the subject of an active verb (1:33; 3:8) the language can hardly be pressed to show that the Spirit actually is an agent distinguishable from the Father and the Son. However, the passages about the Paraclete or Spirit of truth in the farewell discourse make a very different impression. Whatever the precise meaning of paraklētos,69 it is undoubtedly a human personal image. Evidently Jesus himself is a paraklētos, and the Spirit, in this role, another such (14:16). The Paraclete teaches, reminds, testifies, convicts, guides, speaks, declares (14:26; 15:26; 16:8, 13–15). (Merely listing these activities illustrates well why he is called ‘the Spirit of truth’; 14:17; 15:26; 16:13.)70
While these activities put the Paraclete in the role of a successor to Jesus in relation to the disciples and the world, taking over from Jesus when Jesus goes to be with the Father (16:7), sent by the Father at Jesus’ request (14:16, 26) or, in an alternative formulation, sent by Jesus from the Father (15:26; 16:7), there is one suggestion of a closer and less easily conceptualized relationship between the Paraclete, on the one hand, and the Father and the Son, on the other. This is implied by the statement that the Paraclete ‘abides [menei] with you [the disciples], and he will be in you’ (14:17), which resembles Jesus’ promise that he will abide in the disciples and they in him (15:4–5). However, the parallel is not exact, since 14:17 notably lacks the reciprocal language of personal coinherence that characterizes relationships between the Father, the Son and the disciples. Perhaps more significantly, 14:17 is followed in 14:23 by the distinctive promise that Jesus and the Father ‘will come to them and make our home [monēn] with them’ (14:23). It is hard to be sure of the connections of thought in this passage,71 but many commentators have concluded that here the ‘Spirit is the mediator of the presence of Jesus and God to believers’.72
Some of the ways in which the Gospel relates the Paraclete to the Father and the Son parallel relationships between the Father and the Son. The Paraclete is sent by the Father, just as the Son is (and as the disciples are by Jesus), and comes from the Father (15:26), as Jesus does. He ‘will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears’ Jesus say (16:13), just as Jesus spoke only what he heard from the Father. He will glorify the Son (16:14), as the Son glorified the Father and the Father the Son. (But it is surely reading too much into 16:14–15 to say that ‘the Spirit holds all things in common with the Father and the Son’ and thus ‘shares . . . the unique divine identity’ with them.)73 These parallels between the Son–Paraclete relationship and the Father–Son relationship go some way to integrate the Paraclete into a pattern of trinitarian relationship, but they are limited. Centrally important aspects of the Father–Son relationship – notably love, personal coinherence and ‘oneness’ – have no parallel involving the Paraclete. To put the same point differently, there is no mutuality between the Paraclete and either the Father or the Son.74 Whereas in the love between the Father and the Son we see something of their eternal relationship, the Spirit, as portrayed both in the Paraclete passages and elsewhere in the Gospel, functions solely to relate God to the world (especially believers). As David Crump puts it, ‘While the Father and the Son embrace each other in perichoretic communion, the Spirit engages the world head-on and does not look back.’75
It may be that, in the Johannine understanding of God’s relation to the world in Jesus Christ, a glimpse of the eternal relationship of the Father and the Son is required, since it is this relationship that took human form in incarnation, but that there is no such need to reflect on the Spirit in God’s eternity. The Gospel therefore presents us with the two different roles of the Spirit in the world: as the divine life that flows from the Father and the Son to be the abundant life of creation united with God, and as the divine agent who makes the revelation of the Father in Jesus known after Jesus’ exaltation. It also leaves us with impersonal and personal representations of the Spirit, each appropriate to one of these two roles. Thus the Spirit is God in ways different from the Father’s way of being God and the Son’s way of being God, but belongs no less integrally to the identity of the one God.
© Richard Bauckham, 2016