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ART. V. THE TEACHING OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. We do not here propose to discuss the successive and progressive thoughts which fashioned the surprising drama of the Logos made flesh as it presented itself to the mind of John, but instead to classify the teaching of the fourth gospel under the headings and groups of thought which sum up for us an outline of Christian theology. Fundamental distinctions are traceable between the style and vocabulary of John and of the Johannine Christ; but it is more than probable that John's own style was framed by the influence which his communion with the Lord had exerted upon him. There can be no doubt that the thoughts of Jesus interpenetrated him. He was saturated with them, and they gave a character to all his own meditations on the outcome and meaning of the Lord's life. The prologue is the generalization of all the teaching of our Lord, and is based line by line, thought by thought, upon the teaching of Jesus, and the special activities that he records. The teaching of John may be deduced, therefore, from every part of the Johannine writings. The concrete presentation in the Old Testament of "the One," "the only God," the free creation of all things by the Word or Spirit of his own eternal essence, is the basis of the Johannine teaching. The unlikenable "One" of Isaiah-God invisible not merely to the eyes of flesh, but even to the faculties of human intellect, which cannot find God by searching-God dwelling (as St. Paul says) in the inaccessible light-was a fundamental idea with the apostle. "No one hath seen God at any time" (i, 18) is a saying avouched or implied in our Lord's words (v, 37). This reduces the theophanies of the Old Testament to something less than they were supposed to establish. They are along the line of divine manifestations, but Christ himself was a witness of far more than patriarch or prophet ever beheld. The representation, however, is perfectly different from the philosophic conception of "the abyss" or "the absolute "from the dream of the Gnostic or the impassive and impersonal abstraction of the Hindu. The personality and individuality of the very essence of Deity is affirmed by every reference to the activity and characteristics of God. One of the most funda

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mental utterances is, that God is (a) Spirit (iv, 24), a statement which makes the spiritual nature of man the surest guide to human conceptions of his invisible essence. Man's inmost ego,

his self-conscious intelligence, the center of his mental processes, gives the direction to all our approximations to the essence of God. He is the "veritable God" (xvii, 3), answering as no heathen deity has ever done to that august reality. Two other commanding and comprehensive terms lie at the heart of the Johannine conception. "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all." 1 John i, 5. This is suggestive of the absolute perfection of the Divine Spirit, the illumination which proceeds from him, by which all other things can be perceived, as well as of the unsullied purity of all his character. We learn that God is (not luminous, but) Light itself. The Lord addresses him as "Righteous" (xvii, 25), justifying all his ways, and vindicating all his providence.

The other supreme definition of the essence of the Godhead is "God is Love," and "Love is of God." 1 John iv, 8. The most fundamental and comprehensive idea of God is that he loves, that he lavishes, bestows himself upon the objects which he has made. The God of whom Jesus speaks "loved the world" (iii, 16), and evermore contemplates the world which he has made with supreme satisfaction. He is "in the beginning" (i, 1), and therefore "before all things," and his "bosom" (i, 18) is spoken of as the dwelling-place of infinite blessedness. But the most instructive term which is frequently on the lips of the evangelist is "the Father."

The idea is not an original one fashioned by this writer or set down alone by him, but it is the dominant and all-pervading one. God was described by the prophets as the Father of the theocratic people. Deut. xxxii, 6; Isa. lxiii, 16; lxiv, 8; Jer. xxxi, 9, 20; Hos. xi, 1. Israel is spoken of in some of these passages as his "sons and daughters." Isa. i, 2, 4; lxiii, 8; Deut. xiv, 1. A spiritual relationship between God and his people, based on fundamental qualities, and counting for far more than the creatorship or the makership involved in the Homeric Ζεὺς πατὴρ ἀνδρῶν τε θεῶν τε [Jupiter the father of both men and gods]. Our Lord is reported by the Synoptists to have called God "my Father" (Matt. xi, 27), and in many places to have spoken of "your Father." Matt. vi, 4, 6, 8, 15; 5-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. III.

xxiii, 9; Luke vi, 36. The term is expanded in many ways by the addition" in heaven," or "heavenly." Matt. v, 16, 45; vi, 1, 9, 14, 26, 32; vii, 11. God is not the father of inanimate or irrational beings, showing that those who can call God their "Father" possess a nature akin to his own. But the Fatherhood of God suggests a special form of moral and spiritual relationship which may have been forfeited, and which by divine love is re-established.

The gospel of John represents our Lord as continually speaking of God as "the Father," "my Father," and as "your Father" (xx, 17). He is the "living Father," who has "life in himself" (v, 26), who seeks for spiritual worshipers (iv, 23), who loves the Son (v, 19, x, 17, xvii, 24, 26) with a supreme affection which yet passes over and through the Son to those who have entered into living harmony with himself (xvi, 27; xvii, 26). The connection between God as Father and God as Spirit is strenuously preserved (iv, 22-24), the later term expounding the method in which the Fatherhood energizes and reveals itself in its fullness of power. The Father is Almighty, and this is especially enforced in his power to quicken the dead (v, 21). He is greater than all (x, 29)-greater than the Son (xiv, 28). He is eternal (xvii, 5, 24), holy (xvii, 11), and righteous (xvii, 25).

This writer builds his entire conception on this as its fundamental basis. It differs profoundly from that of the Alexandrine or Oriental metaphysic, and though abundant preparation had been made for it in the Old Testament, and though all its essential features are found in the Synoptists, it is the distinguishing element of the teaching of Christ in the fourth gospel, and had verily saturated the mind of the author of the gospel and epistles. In a sense, and to a degree never before realized on earth or expressed in literature, do we come face to face with One whose God-consciousness was veritably expressed by the epithet "the Father"-"iny Father." Christ is not merely the expression of the ineffable One, and "the image of the invisible God" (Col. i, 15), but the Son of the Father. The relation of Logos to Theos is warmed into and expounded by the relation of a Son to a Father. The idea is not peculiar to John, for St. Paul declared that "it pleased the Father that in him should all fullness dwell," and that "through

Christ we have access to the Father." The writer to the Hebrews had laid it down in words suggested by the author of "Wisdom of Solomon " that Christ the Son was the effluence of the Father's glory, the express image of his substance or essence. That essence was a Father's heart, that effluence was the Son of the Blessed.

The Fatherhood of God does not exhaust the concept which St. John formed of the Godhead, for within the bosom of the Father, in his essential divinity, insphered in his eternal glory "before the world was," "with him," and yet "one with him " "the Son." -was The Fatherhood was essential to God, and therefore the Sonship was before all worlds. The gracious selfcommunication, the infinite benevolence of God, appertains to his Eternal Essence. From before all time, and independently of time and place and earthly service, the evangelist saw love in infinite activity, streaming forth in boundless, inexhaustible fullness, and adequately responded to. This conception of God goes down to the depths of thought, and forms the basis of all the moral perfections of Deity. It also is discriminated from the impersonal abstractions and characterless quiescence and inaccessibility of the supreme monad of the Platonic schools.

The Johannine conception starts with the use of certain expressions which had arisen in the schools of Jewish thought, and confers upon them a meaning and application from which those schools would have shrunk. The Osós [God], whose most fundamental name and whose essential being is set forth as "the Father," is first of all described as before the creation of the world, or of every thing and every force which has come into being, standing in intimate immanent relations with the λóyos [Word] (the expression of his own thought and will), who is, while "with God," also God himself. Distinction from God is twice overcovered by the explicit assertion "the Word was God," and the same idea is subsequently expressed in the prologue (i, 18) by the terms of "Father" and "only-begotten Son." The μovoyεvýs [only begotten] is in the bosom of the Father, and therefore alone competent to reveal him. Equality of essence is predicated alike Father and Son-Theos and Logos —and yet distinction of hypostasis is also asserted. The Godhead therefore involves an internal and reciprocally immanent relation. Reuss strongly maintains that the evangelist simply

leads us back to the beginning of time, and says nothing of an eternal relation. Any such assertion is, according to this criticism, an inference from the text, and not contained in it. We may concede that the earliest creeds, culminating in those of Nicæa, Chalcedon, and the so-called Athanasian, do draw this inference, but it is one which logically and immediately flows out of the text. The converse of the inference, or the Arian. assertion, "that there was [time or period] when he was not," and "before he was begotten," does immediately predicate an infinite difference between the Father and Son-a statement entirely incompatible with the equality of nature and essence, and with the true monotheism of the entire biblical revelation. But so far as the self-consciousness of this Son is represented in the consciousness of Jesus, we frankly concede that there is in the divine order a superiority, primacy, and solity ascribed to the Father. He who has independently life in himself gave the like self-dependence to the .Son (v, 27). The Father sent the Son. The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do (v, 19). The Father and Son are one, but the Father sanctified and sent the Son into the world (x, 31-37). The Father created all things "through (dia)" the Logos. "The Father is greater than I," said Christ (xiv, 28). "I live," said he (dià тòv паTÉρa, vi, 57), "on account of the Father." "The Father gave the Spirit to the Son" (iii, 34). This headship of the Father does not contradict the eternal filiation, but both ideas are necessary to interpret the fullness of meaning which St. John gives to the concept of the "only veritable God."

of man.

The characteristics of the λóyoç before his manifestation in the humanity of Christ are, that he is the divine Agent in the creation, the Source of life, and the Light of the world, because both the Life and Light of God. He was evermore coming like light into the darkness of humanity, like life into the soul He came in many ways to his own. He gave power (¿žovoía) [possessory right] to those who believed on his name to become sons of God. Although the Father sent him, having commissioned the Son for these lofty purposes, yet it was as "beams" proceed from "light," as "Word" followed "Spirit." He dwells like Wisdom in the midst of the throne and in the bosom of the Almighty. He is one with the

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