Gelpi The Firstborn of Many Doctrinal and Practical Christology Marquette Studies in Theology 20

Donald L. Gelpi, S.J.
The
Firstborn
of
Many
A Christology for
Converting Christians
Volume 3
DOCTRINAL AND PRACTICAL
CHRISTOLOGY
Marquette Studies in Theology
No. 22
Andrew Tallon, Series Editor
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gelpi, Donald L., 1934-

The firstborn of many : a christology for converting Christians / Donald
L. Gelpi.
p. cm. — (Marquette studies in theology ; no. 20, 21, 22) Includes
bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-87462-644-7 (pbk. : alk. paper), Volume 1: To hope in Jesus
Christ; ISBN 0-87462-645-5 (pbk. : alk. paper), Volume 2: Synoptic
narrative Christology; ISBN 0-87462-646-3 (pbk. : alk. paper). Volume
3: Doctrinal and practical Christology.
1. Jesus Christ—Person and offices. 2. Conversion—Christianity.
3. Catholic Church—Doctrines. I. Title. II. Marquette studies in the-
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BT205 .G37 2001
232—dc21 00-012328
Cover image compliments of St. Isaac of Syria Skete.
We gratefully acknowledge the generous support of The New Orleans

Province of the Society of Jesus, also known as The Southern Province,
in making possible the publication of these three volumes.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

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For My Mother, Alice,
Who Died As She Lived
with Great Hope, Faith, Love, Courage,
and Dignity
Volume 3
Table of Contents
Preface to Volume 3 ............................................................................ 7
Part 1: The Transition to Doctrines:

Johannine Narrative Christology ..................................................... 9
Chapter 1: The Beloved Disciple: His Community, His Prologue ...... 9

Chapter 2: John’s Positive Dramatic Linkages ................................... 25
Chapter 3: Negative Dramatic Linkages in John ............................. 101
Chapter 4: Ambiguous Dramatic Linkages in John ......................... 148
Chapter 5: Thematic and Allusive Linkages in John ....................... 192
Part 2: Doctrinal Christology ......................................................... 224
Chapter 6: Issues in Post-Chalcedonian Christology ....................... 225

Chapter 7: Authenticating Chalcedon ............................................ 272
Chapter 8: Reformulating Chalcedon ............................................. 296
Chapter 9: Coordinating Chalcedonian and Trinitarian Doctrine... 332
Chapter 10: How Jesus Saves: Issues in Atonement Christology ..... 355
Chapter 11: Jesus the Savior ........................................................... 382
Chapter 12: Jesus the Prophet ......................................................... 415
Chapter 13: Jesus the Priest ............................................................ 428
Chapter 14: Jesus, Messiah And Judge ............................................ 469
Part 3: Practical Christology ........................................................... 488
Chapter 15: To Love As Jesus Loved ............................................... 488

Chapter 16: To Serve As Jesus Served.............................................. 514
Afterword ....................................................................................... 552

Glossary .......................................................................................... 557
Indices ............................................................................................ 580
Preface to Volume 3
This three-volume study responds to a significant crisis in contemporary
Christology: a plethora of so-called “low” Christologies has started an
identifiable drift into a form of neo-Arianism. Many “low” Christologies
so focus on the humanity of Jesus that they fail to give an adequate ac-
count of His divinity. They call Jesus a “human person,” but fail to alert
the reader to the fact that a human person cannot qualify as a divine
person. They call for a contemporary endorsement of “adoptionism” and
portray Jesus as a graced human being rather than as the personal human
incarnation of God. This study argues that one should replace the term
“low Christology” thus interpreted with “bad Christology.”
In these three volumes, I respond to the contemporary Christological
crisis by laying systematic theological foundations for Christological faith
in Lonergan’s sense of foundational. Lonergan’s method suggests that a
strictly normative theology of conversion provides the criteria needed to
distinguish between true and false theological doctrines. Volumes one
and two have explored the kinds of religious experiences on which doc-
trinal Christology reflects. In this third and final volume I shall test whether
a Christology which examines the kinds of realities encountered within a
Christian experience of conversion does in fact allow one to distinguish
sound from unsound Christological doctrines.
Because this foundational Christology reflects normatively on Chris-
tian conversion, it targets the restored catechumenate. I presuppose, how-
ever, that a Christology which addresses the faith needs of adult converts
will simultaneously address the faith needs of fully initiated Christians
who face the life-long process of ongoing conversion. A foundational
Christology asks the question: How ought an integrally converted Chris-
tian to relate experientially to Jesus Christ?
Laying foundations for a catechesis which addresses the needs of cat-
echumens and of adult Christians differs from formulating such a
catechesis. Instead of constructing a catechetical program for specific con-
verts, a foundational Christology thinks through systematically the kinds
of Christological issues on which a sound catechesis has to build. Those
who supervise the restored catechumenate will, then, need to adapt the
results of these foundational reflections to the needs of specific catechu-
mens. By the same token, adult Christians will need to ponder prayer-
fully the relevance of a Christology of conversion to their personal lives
and communities.
This study also ambitions an inculturated North American Christo-
logy. Inculturated religion actualizes a particular religious faith in a spe-
8 Part 1: The Transition to Doctrines: Johannine Narrative Christology
cific cultural context. Inculturated theology serves the needs of that actu-
alization.
Ordinarily, the process of religious inculturation takes generations, even
centuries. It begins with an attempt to translate an unfamiliar religion,
which derives from one culture, into terms which people living in an-
other culture can understand. Initial translation ordinarily gives rise to a
second stage of inculturation, namely, the assimilation of the new reli-
gion in some depth. Finally, in the third and last phase of inculturation,
the assimilated religion finds itself socially well placed to enter into a
transformative dialogue with the host culture. The resulting transforma-
tion ordinarily affects both the religion and the culture. All three stages
of inculturation can and often do overlap or run simultaneously in differ-
ent persons and situations.
The Christology developed in this study addresses culture in the United
States. From a methodological standpoint, it responds to three interre-
lated challenges. 1) This Christology seeks to speak with a Yankee idiom.
It invokes a metaphysics of experience systematically derived from the
North American philosophical tradition. 2) This study also challenges
the sinfulness of United States culture. As we shall see, practical Christo-
logy deals especially with relevant moral and social issues. 3) In a con-
temporary context, inculturated theological thinking needs also to take
into account the internationalization of culture. Accordingly, the Christo-
logy developed in these pages seeks to advance the dialogue between the
North American church and the world Church. It therefore takes into
account both the official pastoral magisterium and the state of Christo-
logical thinking in other parts of the world.
I owe a considerable debt of gratitude to Joseph Tetlow, S.J., Frank
Oppenheim, S.J., Simon Hendry, S.J., Robert Lassalle-Klein, Alejandro
Garcia-Ribera, William Spohn, Jay Johnson, and the other members of
the John Courtney Murray Group for their many suggestions for im-
proving this volume. I also need to express my gratitude to David Beckman
for reading the final chapter and for making very helpful suggestions for
improving it.
Donald L. Gelpi, S.J.

The Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley
Chapter 1: The Beloved Disciple: His Community, His Prologue 9
Part 1
The Transition to Doctrines:
Johannine Narrative Christology
Chapter 1
The Beloved Disciple:
His Community, His Prologue
This chapter begins a linkage analysis of the fourth gospel. Linkage analysis
examines the literary devices employed by an evangelist in order to stitch
together his largely anecdotal account of Jesus into a more or less unified
literary whole. As we saw in volume two, the linkage analysis here em-
ployed understands a gospel as a narrative whole by examining its dra-
matic, thematic, and allusive linkages. The application of linkage analysis
to all four gospels allows one to compare and contrast them dialectically
as narrative frames of reference which make a Christological statement.
As we have already seen, every narrative has a narrator and an audience.
The first part of this chapter therefore summarizes what historical-critical
method has to tell us about the Beloved Disciple, who wrote the fourth
gospel, and about the community for whom he wrote it. Part two exam-
ines the prologue to the fourth gospel and the themes which it enunciates.
(I)
John’s gospel gives little internal evidence of direct dependence on the
synoptic tradition, although some have argued that the Beloved Disciple
at least knew Mark. More likely, the fourth evangelist, like the synoptic
writers, drew on the oral and, perhaps, written traditions about Jesus
available to him. Those traditions echo on occasion synoptic themes; but
on the whole the fourth evangelist seems to have preferred his own sources
for telling Jesus’ story.
The Community of the Beloved Disciple

The fourth gospel gives evidence of having emerged from a community
in crisis. The evangelist seems to feel the need to define his position over
against a variety of adversaries.They include 1) the disciples of John the
Baptizer, 2) the Jewish community, who had already expelled the Johannine
Christians from the synagogue, and 3) dissident Christians within the
Johannine community who denied several basic Christian beliefs, among
them the divinity of Jesus, His presence in the eucharist, and the saving
character of His death.
The Johannine community probably arose in or near Palestine. Its

members probably included former followers of John the Baptizer and
some eyewitnesses of Jesus’ ministry, among them the Beloved Disciple
himself. A second group with Samaritan connections may have merged
with the original community. Like the Hellenistic Christians who seem
to have first evangelized Samaria, the members of the second group ex-
hibited a strong anti-temple bias. The Johannine community seems also
to have contained Gentile converts; and it also seems at least possible that
at some point the community moved to the Diaspora. Eventually, the
Christian dissidents left the Johannine community and drifted toward
Gnosticism, while the rest of the community merged with the larger
sub-apostolic Church.1
The Johannine epistles give further evidence that the evangelist wrote
his gospel for a Christian community with serious internal divisions. While
the letters surely proceed from the community of the Beloved Disciple,
scholars debate whether or not they proceed from his pen or from that of
some other member of his community, possibly one of the later redactors of
the gospel. They also debate whether or not the gospel precedes the epistles.
The epistles, however, almost certainly postdate the gospel. The first
letter of John seems to presuppose familiarity with the text of the gospel
on whose themes it comments. Moreover, the letters give evidence that
the schism with the dissidents, which the gospel may have tried to avert,
had indeed happened. (1 Jn 2:18-9, 4:1; 2 Jn 7)
The letters of John also provide some evidence that his community
lacked adequate authority structures to deal with the heresy and schism
which divided it. (3 Jn 9-11) The Johannine church seems to have con-
sisted of a fellowship of house churches clustered around the Beloved
Disciple and around his teaching; but, initially at least, the Johannine
community probably lacked the more formal ecclesial structures of leader-
ship which had begun to characterize the great Church. The Johannine com-
munities did, however, have elders, or presbyters. (3 Jn 1) Traveling mission-
aries seem to have linked the cluster of Johannine communities.2 (2 Jn 10)
1. Cf. Raymond E. Brown, The Community of the Beloved Disciple: The Life, Loves, and
Hates of an Individual Church in New Testament Times (New York, NY: Paulist, 1979);
“The Gospel According to John—An Overview,” Chicago Studies, 37(1998), pp. 5-15;
Oscar Cullmann, The Johannine Circle, translated by John Bowden (London: SCM
Press, 1975); Günther Reim, “Zur Lokalisierung der Johanneischen Gemeinde,”
Biblische Zeitschrift, 32(1988), pp. 72-86; Stanley B. Marrow, S.J., “Johannine
Ecclesiology,” Chicago Studies, 37(1998), pp. 16-26; John F. O’Grady, “The Beloved
Disciple, His Community, His Church,” Chicago Studies, 37(1998), pp. 5-15.
2. The first epistle’s author writes that, because the members of the Johannine community
have the enlightenment of their Breath-inspired traditions concerning the revelation
made in Jesus, they do not need anyone to teach them the truth. As a consequence, the
author of the letter seeks not to catechize them, but to warn them “about those who
deceive you.” (1 Jn 2:26)
Some opine that the Diotrephes of the third letter, seems to have re-
fused to choose openly between the Beloved Disciple and his followers,
In explaining why he is writing, the author of the first Johannine letter implicitly
betrays the one of the problems in the Johannine community: the belief that the divine
Breath directly inspires each of its members. While belief in the Breath’s direct
inspiration expresses a truth, it could easily lead to a distorted, individualistic, “inner
light” mysticism.
The first letter names the liars against whom the community needs to guard: 1)
anyone who denies that Jesus is the Christ and 2) anyone who denies that Jesus is the
Son of God. (1 Jn 2:22) In the gospel of John, faith in Jesus as the incarnate Son of God
grounds faith in Him as messiah. The incarnation redefines the meaning of Jewish
messianic hope, because when the “Anointed One” appeared, the reality which He
embodied went far beyond the best hopes of the Jewish people. The letter warns that
those who deny the Son also deny the Father and therefore forfeit all claims to union
with both. Those who do confess Father and Son in virtue of that very confession
possess both. (1 Jn 2:23)
The exhortation which closes the first letter of John also illustrates the problem of
discerning the authentic inspiration of the divine Breath. The exhortation makes the
following points:
1) The fact that the dissidents claim the inspiration of the Breath of God for their
false teaching confronts the Johannine community with a problem in discernment. Not
every religious impulse which claims divine inspiration automatically enjoys it. (1 Jn 4:1)
2) In this the final age of salvation, false prophets abound. The multiplication of
lying prophetic voices makes the question of discernment all the more important and
acute. (1 Jn 4:1)
3) In the problem of discernment facing the Johannine community, a basic doctrinal
criterion allows believers to distinguish between the Breath of God and false prophecy:
namely, authentic prophecy from God “acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the
flesh.” False prophecy denies this fundamental truth. The Breath who proceeds from
the incarnate Christ could never inspire a denial of His incarnation. Those therefore
who deny the incarnation speak in the name of Antichrist. (1 Jn 4:2-4)
4) It follows, therefore, that only those who agree with the author of the first letter
speak in the name of God. (1 Jn 4:6)
5) The members of the Johannine community by confessing the incarnation of the
Son of God have already overcome the world and the false prophets who deceive it. The
Johannine community therefore belongs to God and not to the world. (1 Jn 4:4-6)
Cf. NJBC, 62: 28; Brown, Epistles, pp. 485-511; Klauch, op. cit., I, pp. 226-245;
Ignace de la Potterie, Au service de la parole de Dieu (Gembloux: Éditions J. Dudulot,
1969); H.H. Wendt, “Die Beziehung unseres ersten Johannesbriefes auf den zweiten,”
Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 21(1922), pp. 140-146; C. Spicq,
O.P., “La place ou le rôle des jeunes dans certaines communautes néotestamentaires,”
Revue Biblique, 76(1969), pp. 508- 527; John H. Elliot, “Ministry and Church Order
in the NT: A Traditio-Historical Analysis (1 Pt5, 1 & plls.),” Catholic Biblical
Quarterly, 32(1970), pp. 367-391; J. Michl, “Der Geist als Garant des rechten
Glaubens” in Vom Wort des Lebens (Münster: Aschendorf, 1951), pp. 142-151; Beda
Rigaux, L’Antichrist et l’opposition au royaume messianique dans l’Ancien et le Nouveau
Testament (Gembloux: Éditions J. Duculot, 1932); Pheme Perkins, “John’s Gospel
and Gnostic Christologies: The Nag Hammadi Evidence,” Anglican Theological
Review, Supplement 11(1990), pp. 68-76; François Vouga, “The Johannine School: A
Gnostic Primitive Tradition in Primitive Christianity,” Biblica, 69(1988), pp. 371-385;
Hans-Josef Klauk, “Kyria ekklêsia in Bauers Wörterbuch und die Exegese des zweiten
on the one hand, and the dissident members of the Johannine commu-
nity, on the other; but the failure of the third letter to mention the dissi-
dents casts doubt on that particular hypothesis. Some hypothesize (on
very little hard evidence) that Diotrephes was in fact attempting to estab-
lish the more stable leadership structures which eventually enabled the
Johannine community to blend into the larger apostolic Church.3 (3 Jn 9-11)
One cannot date the fourth gospel with any accuracy. The first version
of the gospel could conceivably have appeared sometime between the
years 70 and 85 a.d., although the text of John as we possess it gives
evidence of subsequent redactional editing and revision. Some date the
first gospel text even earlier. Ephesus ranks among the main contenders
for place of composition, although we cannot say for certain that the
fourth gospel emerged from that community.
Nor can one state with any certainty that John, the son of Zebedee,
wrote the fourth gospel. Of the four evangelists, however, the Beloved
Johannesbriefs,” Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 81(1990), pp.

135-138; “Zur rhetorischen Analyse der Johannesbriefe,” Zeitschrift für die
Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 81(1990), pp. 205-224; Bernhard Bonsack, “Der
Presbyteros des dritten Briefs und der geliebte Jünger des Evangeliums nach Johannes,”
Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 79(1988), pp. 45-62.
3. Cf. Jean Colson, L’énigme du disciple que Jésus aimet (Paris: Beauschense et ses Fils,
1969); M. de Jonge, “The Beloved Disciple and the Date of the Gospel of John” in Text
and Interpretation, edited by E. Best and R. McL. Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1979) pp. 99-114; Lewis Johnson, “Who Was the Beloved Disciple?”
Expository Times, 77(1966), pp. 157-158; Donald G. Rogers, “Who was the Beloved
Disciple,” Expository Times, 77(1966), pp. 213-214; Lewis Johnston, “The Beloved
Disciple—A Reply,” Expository Times, 77(1966), p. 380; B. Grey Griffith, “The
Disciple Whom Jesus Loved,” Expository Times, 32(1920-1921), pp. 379-381; H.
Mudie Draper, “The Disciple Whom Jesus Loved,” Expository Times, 32(1920-1921),
pp. 428-429; Floyd V. Vinson, “Who Was the Beloved Disciple?” Catholic Biblical
Quarterly, 68(1949), pp. 83-88; J. Edgar Bruns, “Ananda: The Fourth Evangelist’s
Model for the ‘Disciple Whom Jesus Loved,’” Studies in Religion, 3(1973-1974), pp.
236-243; N.E. Johnson, “The Beloved Disciple and the Fourth Gospel,” Church
Quarterly Review, 167(1966), pp. 278-291; Leon Morris, Studies in the Fourth Gospel
(Devon: Paternoster Press, 1969), pp. 139-214; G.D. Kilpatrick, “What John Tells Us
about John” in Studies in John (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1970), pp. 75-87; Paul S. Minear,
“The Beloved Disciple in the Gospel of John,” Novum Testamentum, 19(1977), pp.
105-123; Jürgen Roloff, “Der johanneische ‘Lieblingsjünger’ und der Lehrer der
Gerichtigkeit,” New Testament Studies, 15(1968-1969), pp. 129-151; Eric L. Titus,
“The Identity of the Beloved Disciple,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 69(1950),
pp.323-328; Robert M. Price, “The Sitz-im-leben of Third John: A New Reconstruc-
tion,” Evangelical Quarterly, 61(1989), pp. 109-119; David J. Hawkins, “Johannine
Christianity and Ideological Commitment,” Expository Times, 102(1990), pp. 74- 77;
D.C. Parker, “The International Greek New Testament Project: The Gospel of John,”
New Testament Studies, 36(1990), pp. 157-160; Philip W. Comfort, “The Greek Text
of the Gospel of John According to Early Papyri,” New Testament Studies, 36(1990),
pp. 625-629; John Christopher Thomas, “The Order of the Composition of the
Johannine Epistles,” Novum Testamentum, 37(1995), pp. 68-75.
Disciple shows the most accurate knowledge of first-century Palestinian

geography. The accuracy of his geography buttresses his claim to have
personally witnessed the events he narrates. Although scholars have tried
to identify the Beloved Disciple with specific New Testament figures, like
Lazarus or Barnabas, the absence of evidence makes firm identification
impossible.4
One may legitimately divide the fourth gospel into four parts: 1) the
Prologue (Jn 1:1-18); 2) the Book of Signs, which describes the public
ministry of Jesus in terms of a series of six revelatory miracles, each fol-
lowed, except for the first, second, and last by an explanatory discourse of
Jesus (Jn 1:19-12:50) ; 3) the Book of Glory, which narrates the passion,
death, and resurrection of Jesus as well as His sending of the Breath. (Jn
13:1-20:31); 4) the Epilogue, which appends stories of a post-resurrection
appearance in Galilee.5 (Jn 21:1-25)
(II)
The fourth gospel begins, not with an infancy narrative but with a hymn
interlaced with prose commentary. Probably of liturgical origin, the hymn
could conceivably have originated in the Johannine community. Either
the original evangelist or the final redactor of the gospel clearly intended
the hymn to introduce the gospel because two of the prose interpolations
refer to the ministry of John the Baptizer, which opens John’s narrative.
In addition, verse 11—”He came to his own, yet His own people re-
ceived Him not”—alludes in part to the Book of Signs; and verse 12—
4. Cf. Floyd V. Filson, “Who Was the Beloved Disciple?” Catholic Biblical Quarterly,
68(1949), pp. 83-88; John W. Pryor, “The Great Thanksgiving and the Fourth
Gospel,” Biblische Zeitschrift, 35(1991), pp. 157-179; Nicholas G. Timmins, “Varia-
tions in Style in the Johannine Literature,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament,
53(1994), pp. 47-64; Richard Bauckham, “The Beloved Disciple as Ideal Author,”
Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 49(1993), pp. 21-44; Duane F. Watson,
“Amplification Techniques in 1 John: The Interaction of Rhetorical Style and
Invention,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 51(1993), pp. 99-123; M.C. de
Boer, “Narrative Criticism, Historical Criticism, and the Gospel of John,” Journal for
the Study of the New Testament, 47(1992), pp. 35-48; Alastair H.B. Logan, “John and
the Gnostics: The Significance of the Apocryphon of John for the Debate about the
Origins of the Johannine Tradition,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament,
43(1991), pp. 41-69; Martin Rese, “Das Selbstzeugnis des Johannesevangeliums über
seinen Verfasser,” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovaniensis, 72(1996), pp. 75-111; F.
Neirynck, “The Anonymous Disciple in John 1,”Ephemerides Theologicae Lovaniensis,
66(1990), pp. 5-37.
5. For an alternative division, see: Charles H. Giblin, S.J., “The Tripartite Narrative
Structure of John’s Gospel,” Biblica, 71(1990), pp. 449-468; see also: Ruth B.
Edwards, “Reading the Book 4. The Gospel According to John,” Expository Times,
108(1997), pp. 101-105; Michael Oberweis, “Unbeachtete Lk-Parallelen in Stoffauswahl
und -Anordnung des Vierten Evangeliums,” Epehemerides Theologicae Lovaniensis,
72(1996), pp. 321-337.
”But to all who received Him, who believed in His name, He gave power
to become children of God”—alludes to the Book of Glory.
The hymn also introduces a number of other themes which the gospel
develops in considerable detail: Jesus’ pre-existence; His possession of
divine life as a personal prerogative; the fact that He functions as the
saving light of the world and of all humans; the conflict between light
and darkness; Jesus’ revelation of the divine glory; Jesus’ revelation as the
only Son of God.
Nevertheless, one also finds significant contrasts between the Prologue
and the gospel. The hymn celebrates the “Word (Logos)” of God (Jn 1:1);
but nowhere else in the gospel does one find “the Word” applied to Jesus
as a Christological title. Other key terms in the hymn also find no echo
in the gospel. After the prologue, the evangelist never again uses “charis”
as a term for covenant love. The term “fullness (pleroma)” which occurs
in verses 14 and 16 never reappears. The term “truth (aletheia),” which in
the prologue means “abiding fidelity,” means something quite different
in the gospel. Nor does the image of Jesus as having “pitched his tent”
among humans recur in the gospel narrative.
I shall consider the evangelist’s prose interpolations concerning John
and his ministry in the next chapter, which examines the Beloved Disciple’s
use of positive dramatic linkages. Here I focus exclusively on the four
poetic strophes of the hymn and on the other doctrinal comments which
the evangelist appends to the third and fourth strophes (vv. 17-8). The
first strophe (vv. 1-2) describes the relationship between the pre-existent
Word and God. The second (vv.3-5) explains the Word’s relationship to
creation. The third (vv. 10-12b) gives an account of the Word’s relation-
ship to “the world” and to the people in it. The fourth strophe (vv. 14
and 16) asserts the Word’s saving relationship to those who believe in
Him. The final doctrinal reflection which the evangelist appends to the
hymn functions both as a biblical inclusion (it alludes to the first stro-
phe) and as a reflection on strophes three and four.6
6. Cf. Schyler Brown, “Christology and the History of the Johannine Community in the
Prologue of the Fourth Gospel,” New Testament Studies, 30(1984), pp. 446-474; E.L.
Miller, “The Logic of the Logos Hymn: A New View,” New Testament Studies,
29(1983), pp. 552- 561; Gerard Rochais, “La formation du Prologue (Jn 1, 1-18),”
Science et Esprit, 1(1985), pp. 5-44, 2(1985), pp. 161-187; J.A.T. Robinson, “The
Relation of the Prologue to the Gospel of John,” New Testament Studies, 9(1962-1963),
pp. 120-129; Walter Schmithals, “Das Prolog des Johannesevangeliums,” Zeitschrift
für die Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 70(1979), pp. 16- 43; J.C. O’Neill, “The
Prologue to St. John’s Gospel,” Journal of Theological Studies, 20(1969), pp. 41-52;
Humphrey C. Green, “The Composition of St. John’s Prologue,” Expository Times,
66(1954-1955), pp. 291-294; Michael Theobald, Im Anfang war das Wort (Stuttgart:
Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1983); A. Feuillet, Le prologue du quatrième évangile (Paris:
Descleé de Brouwer, 1968); Joachim Jeremias, Der Prolog Johannesevangeliums (Stuttgart:
Caliver Verlag, 1967); Thomas H. Tobin, “The Prologue of John and Hellenistic
The Hymnic Prologue
The first strophe proclaims:
In the beginning was the Word (ho Logos),

And the Word was with God (pros ton Theon),
And the Word was God (kai Theos ên ho Logos).
He was in the beginning with God (pros ton Theon).
(Jn 1:1-2)
What does John mean by “the Word”? Here one needs to avoid reading
into the evangelist’s text Platonized, patristic interpretations of the term
“Word.” The hymn speaks dispensational rather than metaphysical lan-
guage: it recapitulates the story of divine salvation from before the cre-
ation to the coming of Jesus. As we shall see in part two, one strain of
patristic theology interprets “the Word” in the light of middle and
Neo-Platonic metaphysics. This particular Platonization of the Johannine
Logos (the tradition offers others) views “the Word” as the conceived word
of God, i.e. as the divine mind or intelligence. As the dispensational lan-
guage of the hymn suggests, however. the Beloved Disciple probably un-
derstands “the Word” historically, as the spoken word of God, as the one
through whom God creates the world and reveals His saving glory. As we
shall soon see, other verses in the prologue support such a reading of the
Johannine Logos.
The phrase “in the beginning” alludes to Gen 1:1: “In the beginning
God created the heavens and the earth.” When God created, the Word
already was. The imperfect tense in the verb “to be” asserts that, when
God created all things, the Word already enjoyed existence. One might,
then, translate the first verse of the prologue in the following manner: “In
the beginning, the Word was already existing.” In the Beloved Disciple’s
narrative, Jesus’ frequent use of the divine name, I AM alludes to the
Word’s eternal pre-existence. The Word does not come into being, in the
way in which creatures do: it simply exists as God does.7
Jewish Speculation,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 52(1990), pp. 252-269; Domingo
Muñoz Leon, “Las Fuentes y Estadios de Composicion del Prologo de Juan segun
Hofrichter,” Estudios Biblicos, 49(1991), pp. 229-250; Warren Carter, “The Prologue
and John’s Gospel: Function, Symbol, and Definitive Word,” Journal for the Study of
the New Testament, 39(1990), pp. 35- 58; Roland Meynet, S.J., “Analyse théologique
du prologue de Jean,” Revue Biblique, 96(1989), pp. 481-510; Michael Theobald,
“Geist- und Inkarnationstheologie: zur Pragmatik des Johannesprologs,” Zeitschrift für
Katolische Theologie, 112(1990), pp. 129-149; Piet Schoonenberg, “A Sapiential
Reading of John’s Prologue: Some Reflections on Views of Reginald Fuller and James
Dunn,” Theology Digest, 33(1986), pp. 403-421; Simon Ross Valentine, “The Johannine
Prologue—a Microcosm of the Gospel,” Evangelical Quarterly, 68(1996), pp. 291- 304.
7. Cf. George Neyrand, “Le sens du ‘logos’ dans le prologue de Jean,” Nouvelle Revue
Théologique, 106(1984), pp. 59-71; David Hill, “The Relevance of Logos Christology,”
Expository Times, 78(1967), pp. 136-139; Werner H. Kelber, “In the Beginning Were
The phrase “with God (pros ton Theon)” suggests that the Word existed
“beside God” as a co-eternal reality; but the proposition also connotes
relationship. The Word exists “turned toward God.” Moreover, as the
hymn proceeds it explicates the character of that relationship. Through
the Word God creates the world, effects saving enlightenment, and re-
veals His own glory. The hymn’s assertion that “the Word was God” also
finds an echo in the confession of Thomas—”My Lord and my God”—
which closes the gospel as the evangelist originally wrote it. (Jn 20:28)
Moreover, as the gospel unfolds the Son’s orientation to the Father ex-
presses itself in His unswerving obedience to the Father’s will.
Although John alone of the four evangelists deals with the pre-existence
of the Son of God, the idea of pre-existence probably predates Paul and
surfaces in the hymns reproduced in Philippians and Colossians. The
presence of pre-existence in three different New Testament hymns deriv-
ing from two different New Testament traditions suggests that the idea
enjoyed early currency in Christian liturgical worship.
Only the fourth evangelist tells the story of Jesus in a way which makes
His divine pre-existence a central doctrinal point of his gospel narrative.
John did not invent the idea of divine pre-existence; but, as we shall see,
he did develop it with theological complexity and subtlety.
Of the four evangelists, only John develops a language for talking about
the Christian God which begins to approximate the more technical philo-
sophical language of the fathers of the Church. John, however, modifies
biblical language in order to speak about the trinity instead of replacing it
with philosophical terminology, as the fathers would do. John speaks of
three distinct divine realities in the Godhead: the Father, the Son, and
the Breath [or “other witness (Paraklêtos)” like Jesus]. Moreover, the evan-
gelist uses two other Biblical terms in order to designate what the three
divine beings share in common: “God (Theos)” without the article (as
here) and “Breath (pneuma)” without the article. “Pneuma,” moreover,
designates not only the vital reality common to the three members of the
divine triad but also the divine life They share with believers. (Cf. 3:6,
4:24, 6:63) Moreover, as we shall see, John’s gospel also suggests a rubric
for understanding the divine unity: namely, the dynamic, mutual ind-
welling of the divine persons. (Cf. Jn 14:10-1)
The fourth verse of the first strophe repeats and underscores both the
eternal existence of the Word and His relationship to God. (Jn 1:2a) The
following strophes explain the character of that relationship.8
the Words: The Apotheosis and Narrative Displacement of the Logos,” Journal of the
American Academy of Religion, 62(1994), pp. 343-375; Ed. L. Miller, “The Johannine
Origins of the Johannine Logos,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 112(1993), pp.
445-457; Burkill, New Light on the Earliest Gospel, pp. 48-120.
8. Cf. NJBC, 61:21-22.
The second strophe asserts:
All things came to exist through Him,

And without Him (choris autou) nothing made came to exist.
In Him was life,
And the life was the light of humans (to phôs tôn anthrôpôn).
And the light shines on in the darkness,
And the darkness has not suppressed it (ou katelaben).
(Jn 1:3-5)
The first two verses of the second strophe portray the Word as the one
through whom God creates the world. One finds creation attributed to
the Son in other books of the New Testament. (Cf. Col 1:15-20; Heb
1:1-2; Rev 3:14) Moreover, here, as elsewhere in the New Testament,
creation through the Word connotes the existence of all things in the
Word: nothing exists apart from Him (choris autou).
The second verse of the second strophe also finds an echo later in Jesus’
final discourse to His disciples: “Without Me (choris emou) you can do
nothing.” (Jn 15:5) There too, the term “choris” not only designates Jesus
as the source of the disciples’ activity but also as the one in whom they exist.
Moreover, in the Prologue the light exists “in Him”; and, as the gospel will
assert, all those who live in the light also live in Him. (Jn 15:4)
In portraying the whole of creation as an expression of the Word of
God, the hymn underscores its revelatory character. Verse 10 will assert
the obscurity of that revelation: the world which came to be through the
Word did not acknowledge its divine source.
In designating the Word as the source of life, the hymn again alludes to
the book of Genesis, which portrays God as the source of all living things
and especially of human life. (Gen 1:1-2:7) The hymn’s identification of
life and light also recalls the priestly account of creation in Genesis, where
God makes light as the first of His creatures. (Gen 1:3) By calling life “the
light of humans,” however, the hymn also identifies light with the saving and
enlivening enlightenment of the Breath.9 (Jn 4:14, 7:37-9; Gen 3:1-7)
The present tense of the verb “shines (phainei)” connotes a continuous
activity. Despite the obtuseness and enmity of the darkness, the light
continues to shine. In the course of his gospel, moreover, the Beloved
Disciple will show how the struggle between the forces of light and dark-
ness, of God and Satan, leads to the ever clearer disclosure of the true
character of both antagonists. As it confronts the dark, the light shines
9. Cf. Georg Korting, “Joh 1,3,” Biblische Zeitschrift, 33(1989), pp. 97-104; Peter Cohee,
“John 1.3-4,” New Testament Studies, 41(1995), pp. 470-477; Jens W. Täger,
“‘Gesiegt! O himmlische Musik des Wortes!: Zur Entfaltung des Siegmotiv für
Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft und die Kunde der Alteren Kirche,” Zeitschrift für
die Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 85(1994), pp. 26-46.
more and more brightly, while the forces of darkness, in their relentless
attempt to suppress the light, disclose ever more clearly their violence,
malice, and hypocrisy.
The term “katêlaben” resists easy translation into English because of
the richness of its connotations in Greek. It suggests cognitive obtuse-
ness: the failure of the darkness either to understand or to appreciate the
nature of the light. The same verb, however, can also mean to master or
to overcome. Given the poetic diction of the hymn, it could conceivably
connote all these things simultaneously. The darkness, in its inability to
understand and appreciate the light seeks to master and extinguish it, but
all to no avail.10
The third strophe announces:
It was the true light

which enlightens every human
who was coming into the world (erchomenon eis ton kosmon).
He was in the world
And the world came to exist through Him,
And the world knew Him not.
He came to His own
And His own people received Him not.
But to all those who received Him
He gave power to become children of God (tekna Theou). (Jn 1:9-12)
In designating the Word’s light as “true” the hymn implicitly contrasts

true and false enlightenment. “True light” reveals the truth, while false
enlightenment deceives. Moreover, “true light” excludes no one from its
saving illumination: it seeks to enlighten every human mind and heart.
The phrase “was coming into the world (erchomenon eis ton kosmon)
would seem to modify the “true light” rather than “every human.” If one
takes it as modifying “every human,” the phrase alludes redundantly to
the fact of human birth. If, however, one takes it as referring to the Light,
then the phrase designates an ongoing process of enlightenment. In that
case, the coming of Jesus into the world and to His own people functions
as the culmination of an historical process of the divine Word’s revela-
tion. His rejection by the world brings to a climax its failure to recognize
creation as a revelation of the Word. By the same token, Jesus’ rejection
10. Cf. NJBC, 61:21-22; Peder Borgen, “Logos Was the True Light,” Novum Testamen-
tum, 14(1972), pp. 115-130; C.K. Barrett, “Katelaben in John i, 5” Expository Times,
53(1941- 1942), p. 297; Herbert Schneider, S.J., “‘The Word Was Made Flesh’: An
Analysis of the Theology of Revelation in the Fourth Gospel,” Catholic Biblical
Quarterly, 3(1969), pp. 344- 356; Bruce Vawter, “What Came to Be in Him was Life”
(Jn 1,3b-4a), Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 25(1963), pp. 401-406; Jürgen Becker,
“Beobachtungen zum Dualismus in Johannesevangelium,” Zeitschrift für die
Neutestamentalische Wissenschaft, 65(1974), pp. 71- 87.
by the chosen people brings to an historical climax their disobedience to

the Word of God. The coming of the light into the world has, moreover,
messianic connotations.11 (Cf. Is 9:2, 42:6, 60:1-2)
The doctrinal comment after the fourth strophe further teases out the
historical character of divine revelation. There the evangelist notes: “For
the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus
Christ.” (Jn 1:17) The Beloved Disciple regards Moses and the Law as
true divine witnesses to the event of Jesus. (Jn 5:46-7) Nevertheless, the
full and final manifestation of the “true light” which subsists in the Word
happens finally in the incarnation and especially in the final glorification
of the Word through His passion, resurrection, and sending of the Breath.
That revelation overcomes the insufficiency of the revelation made through
creation and through Mosaic religion.
Those who accept the “true light” find it empowering: it enables them
to live as children (tekna) of God. The fourth evangelist reserves the term
“Son (huios)” for Jesus, who enjoys divine sonship in a unique and privi-
leged way. The term “tekna” designates those who enjoy filiation through
the action of divine grace. The children of God live in the image of the
Word incarnate through the grace of adoption.
At this point the evangelist inserts a prose explanation of the kind of
gracious empowerment of which he speaks: “those who were born not
from blood, nor from the will of the flesh, nor from the human will, but
of God.” (Jn 1:13) The evangelist excludes any biological cause of second
birth (not from blood). (Cf. Jn 3:4-6) He also excludes sexual craving or
human decision as the cause of the second birth which he describes. Only
God can transform humans graciously into His children. The evangelist
will develop this idea of a second birth in his gospel when Jesus dis-
courses at night with the Pharisee Nichodemus. There Jesus will attribute
second birth to Christian baptism and to the action of the Breath of the
risen Christ. As we shall also see, the term “children (tekna)” in Johannine
vocabulary can serve as the equivalent of “believers.” (Jn 3:1-6)
The fourth strophe concludes the hymn:
And the Word became flesh (Kai Logos sarx egeneto)

And pitched His tent among us.
And we have seen His glory,
Glory as of the Only-Begotten of the Father
Full of grace and truth (charitos kai alêtheias).
For from His fullness (ek tou plêrômatos autou) we have
all received,
Grace upon grace (charin anti charitos). (Jn 1:14, 16)
11. Cf. John W. Pryor, “Jesus and Israel in the Fourth Gospel—John 1:11,” Novum
Testamentum, 32(1990), pp. 201-218; NJBC, 61:24.
The Word’s coming into the world reaches its culmination in the incar-
nation. As the divine Word incarnate, Jesus confronts us as the supreme
historical revelation of God. The hymn contrasts the eternal existence of
the Logos (vv. 1-2) and His coming to be (egeneto) as flesh, i.e., as fully
human and as subjected to the weakness and mortality of human exist-
ence. Some prefer to translate “egeneto” as “was born.”
We find a second contrast. The Word who dwells eternally in God’s
presence dwelt only for a time (set up his tent) among humans. The
image of the tent recalls Yahweh’s tenting among the Israelites during the
first Exodus (Cf. Ex 25:8-9) as well as the dwelling of Wisdom among
mortals (Cf. Sir 24:13). The image, then, points to the humanity of Jesus,
in all its limitation and human mortality, as the temple of God and as the
glorious dwelling place of divine Wisdom.
Finally, the fourth strophe clearly contrasts the divinity of the eternal
Word (v. 1) with His fleshy, human existence. Given the fourth evangelist’s
stress on the glorious saving power of Jesus’ death, one may detect a po-
lemic intent in the use of the term “flesh” to designate the humanity of
Jesus in its weakness and mortality.12
The incarnate Word confronts the believer as one “filled with grace and
truth.” The term “grace (charis)” here translates the Hebrew word “hesed,”
while the term “truth (alêtheia)” translates the Hebrew term “‘emet.” The
term “hesed” designates the mercy of God in gratuitously choosing Israel
despite its lack of merit, while “‘emet” designates God’s loving fidelity to
His covenant. In other words, the incarnate Word confronts the believer
as the supreme expression of God’s faithful covenant love. The fourth
gospel will develop this insight in considerable detail.
The plentitude of faithful covenant love finds an echo in the fullness of
divine grace which overflows from the incarnate and risen Jesus. Although
the term “pleroma” occurs only once in the fourth gospel, in verse 16 of
the prologue, one can see in the fullness of grace a tacit reference to the
eschatological plentitude with which the divine Breath dwells in Jesus.
(Cf. Jn 3:34) In that case the inexhaustible mercy which the prologue discov-
ers in the risen Christ coincides with the inexhaustible gift “without measure”
of the sanctifying Breath who dwells in Him.13 (cf. Jn 20:22-3)
The “we” of verse 14 refers to those who have beheld the glory of the
incarnate Word, viz., to the apostolic witnesses of His resurrection, al-
12. Cf. NJBC, 61:25; Klaus Berger, “Zu ‘Das Wort war Fleisch’ Joh. I, 14a,” Novum
Testamentum, 16(1974), pp. 161-166; Etienne Trochme, “La Parole devint chair et
dressa sa tente parmi nous: Réflexions sur la théologie du IVe Evangile,” Revue
d’Histoire et de Philosophie Religieuses, 74(1994), pp. 399-409; J.C. O’Neill, “The
Word Did not ‘Become’ Flesh,” Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft,
82(1991), pp. 125-127.
13. Cf. Ruth B. Edwards, “Charin anti charitos (John 1.16): Grace and the Law in the
Johannine Prologue,”Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 32(1988), pp. 3-15.
though, as we shall see, faith in the risen Christ without confronting

Him face-to-race also constitutes an especially blessed way of “seeing” the
risen Christ. (Jn 20:29) The glory of the risen One reveals the unique
relationship of the Son to the Father. As the “only begotten Son” of God,
the Word relates to the Father as His Son in a unique and normative way
which both measures and transcends the relationship to the Father of
those whom the Word graciously transforms into the “children (tekna)”
of God (v. 12).
The apostolic witnesses experience the only-begotten Son as [coming]
“from the Father.” i.e., as sent into the world by the Father. The phrase
“from the Father” refers therefore to the historical mission of the Word
rather than to His eternal procession from the Father, although in later
patristic trinitarian theology mission will reveal procession.
No one has ever seen God; the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of
the Father, He opened the way to Him. (Jn 1:18)
Some scripture scholars would include verse 18 in the prologue. More-

over, some manuscripts speak, not of “the only-begotten Son” but of “the
only-begotten God,” although “only-begotten Son” provides the better
reading. The verse’s diction, however, differs sufficiently from the rest of
the prologue (note, for example, the lack of kai’s) to suggest that it comes
from the pen of the evangelist rather than from the hymn’s composer.
Does the reference to the Son’s presence “in the bosom of the Father”
refer to Jesus’ ascension after His resurrection and reflect that pattern of
divine descent and ascent which characterizes the fourth gospel’s han-
dling of Jesus’ resurrection appearances? Possibly, but we shall probably
never know for certain.
Verse 18 closes the gospel’s hymnic introduction with a biblical inclu-
sion which refers back to the first verse of the prologue. The Son’s pres-
ence “in the bosom of the Father” echoes the fact that the Word dwells
eternally oriented “toward God” (v. 1), the Father. Moreover, together
with verse 17, verse 18 again designates the incarnate Word as the su-
preme, historical revelation of God’s faithful covenant love.14
14. Cf. NJBC, 61:26; Ignace de la Potterie, “C’est lui qui a ouvert la voie: la finale du
prologue johannique,” Biblica, 69(1988), pp. 340-370; Otfried Hofius, “‘Der in des
Vaters Schoss ist’ Joh 1,18,” Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 80(1989),
pp. 163-171; M.-E. Boismard, O.P., “‘Dans le sein du Père’ (Jo. 1,18),” Revue Biblique,
59(1952), pp. 23-39; Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John (2 vols.; New
York, NY: Doubleday, 1966), I, pp. 4-37; Ernst Hänchen, A Commentary on the Gospel
of John, translated by Robert W. Funk (2 vols.: Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1984), I, pp.
101-140.
The first Johannine letter, which may have functioned as a kind of circular letter to
all the Johannine house churches (1 Jn 3:9), begins without a formal salutation and
clearly echoes themes from the prologue of the gospel.
The Analogy of Christological Knowing
In studying the synoptic narrative Christology, I frequently reflected on
what I called “the analogy of Christological knowing.” By “Christological
We are announcing to you something we saw and heard, so that you might
have communion with us and communion with the Father and His Son, Jesus
Christ—something which existed from the beginning (ho ên ap’ archês), some-
thing we heard, something we saw with our eyes, something we perceived and
touched with our hands concerning the Word of life: this very life appeared
and we saw [it] and testify [to it]. And we are writing these things so that our
joy may reach fulfillment. (1 Jn 1:4)
In translating the above passage, one almost needs to paraphrase its fractured Greek
in order to render it into flowing English. Nevertheless, grammatically fractured or not,
the passage makes its point with sensate force.
The phrase “from the beginning” could conceivably allude to the opening words of
the Prologue of the gospel: “In the beginning the Word already was....” (Jn 1:1)
Scholars offer a variety of explanations for the shift in pronoun from “in” to “from.”
They also offer a variety of explanations of the term “beginning.”
In the context of the letter, however, “beginning” probably refers to the beginning
of Jesus’ ministry, i.e, the beginning of the sensible manifestation of the Word of life.
That could suggest that the Beloved Disciple himself, who claims in the gospel to have
witnessed Jesus’ ministry personally, wrote the first letter. (Cf. Jn 19:36, 21:24) The
“Word of life” would seem to refer to both the person and message of Jesus.
The introduction to the letter underscores a truth which the Prologue to the gospel
also asserts. The Prologue culminates in the proclamation that the eternal, pre-existent
Word of God became flesh. (Jn 1:1-5, 13-4) The introduction to the letter insists on
the physical, embodied character of “the Word, who is life.” The letter proclaims a
divine revelation which one could see, hear, and physically touch. (1 Jn 1:1)
Moreover, belief in the incarnate, physical, sensate character of the self-revelation of
the divine Word in Christ defines the basic condition for membership in the Johannine
community.
At the same time, communion in faith also insures union with the living realities to
which faith testifies: namely, union with the Father and with Jesus Christ. (1 Jn 1:3)
Finally, communion with the reality of God in a community of faith motivates the
shared joy of believers. (1 Jn 1:4) The author of the first epistle regards the Breath of
God as the living foundation of that communion (1 Jn 3:23-4, 4:1-6, 5:5-12)
The second and third letters do not elaborate a formal Christological doctrine,
although the salutation of the second letter and its body make some clear doctrinal
assertions:
Truly, I love you—and not only I but also those who have come to know the
truth, through the truth abiding in us which will remain with us forever. Grace,
mercy, and peace will be with you from God the Father, and from Jesus Christ,
the Son of the Father, in truth and love. (2 Jn 1-3)
The author of the second letter greets those who all abide in the same truth as he.
Clearly, that truth includes the confession of the creator God as Father and Jesus Christ
as the Son of God. The author assures those to whom he writes that, if the truth
continues to “abide (menousan)” with them, it will confirm them in the truth forever.
Their abiding in the truth expresses their obedience to the Father, who commands just
such faith. (2 Jn 4)
knowing” I mean the knowledge of Jesus which results from practical

assimilation to Him in the power of His Breath. By “the analogy of Christo-
logical knowing,” I mean the way in which a particular evangelist adapts
the story of Jesus to the conversion needs of a particular community with
a view to fostering its progress in practical, pneumatically inspired knowl-
edge of Jesus. The adaptations challenge a particular community of be-
lievers to face and to transcend specific obstacles to personal and corpo-
rate assimilation to Jesus in faith.
In analyzing Johannine narrative Christology, I shall also reflect on the
analogy of Christological knowing. The Beloved Disciple, as we shall see,
like the synoptic evangelists regards the knowledge of Jesus Christ as in-
herently practical. Because, however, the fourth evangelist writes for a
doctrinally divided community, he includes in his understanding of prac-
tical assimilation to Jesus “the deed of faith.” (Cf. Jn 6:28-29) Christian
practice, for the Beloved Disciple, includes acknowledging fully the di-
vine truth incarnate in Jesus. That knowledge has other moral conse-
quences; but the Beloved Disciple places consent to doctrinal truth about
the paschal mystery at the heart of Christological knowing.
Focal emphasis on the deed of faith already distinguishes the Beloved
Disciple’s mode of telling Jesus’ story from that of the synoptics. The
latter presuppose a context of faith as a condition for practical, moral
assimilation to Jesus in the power of His Breath. They tend, however, to
The author of the letter contrasts this truth with the fundamental error of the
dissidents, who “do not confess that Jesus Christ came in the flesh.” (2 Jn 7) In denying
the fundamental truth of the incarnation, the dissidents have not only severed
connection with the rest of the Johannine community, but they have also forfeited their
share in divine life:
Everyone who departs and does not remain in the teaching of Christ does not
possess God. One who abides in the teaching has both the Father and the Son.
(2 Jn 9)
Cf. NJBC, 62: 15, 36, 38; Brown, Epistles, pp. 149-188, 645-697; Klauck, op. cit.,
I, pp. 53-78; II, pp. 27-63; A. Feuillet, Le prologue du quatrième évangile (Paris: Desclée
de Brouwer, 1968), pp. 210-217; H.A. Guy, “1 John i, 1-3,” Expository Times,
62(1959-1951), p. 125; K. Greyston, “‘Logos’ in 1 John 1,1,” Expository Times,
86(1974-1975), p. 279; J.E. Weir, “The Identity of the Logos in the First Epistle of
John,” Expository Times, 86(1974-1975), pp. 118-120; M. de Jonge, “An Analysis of
1 John 1. 1-4” Bible Translator, 29(1978), pp. 322-330; Marc-François Lacan,
“L’oeuvre de la vie (1 Jo., 1, 4),” Recherches de Science Religieuse, 45(1957), pp. 61-78;
Joachim Kügler, “Die Belehrung der Unbelehrbaren: Zu Funktion des Traditions-
argument in 1 Joh,” Biblische Zeitschrift, 32(1988), pp. 249-254; Judith M. Lieu,
“What Was From the Beginning: Scripture and Tradition in the Johannine Epistles,”
New Testament Studies, 39(1993), pp. 458-477; Martinus C. de Boer, “The Death of
Jesus Christ and His Coming in the Flesh (1 John 4:2),” Novum Testamentum,
33(1991), pp. 326-346; Bart D. Ehrman, “1 Joh 4.3 and the Orthodox Corruption of
Scripture,” Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 79 (1988), pp. 221-243.
view obedience to the moral demands of life in the kingdom, rather than
doctrinal orthodoxy, as the practical test of faith.
The prologue to the fourth gospel reflects the fourth gospel’s doctrinal
focus. The prologue performs a literary function somewhat analogous to
the infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke but closer to the hymn which
serves as the thematic introduction to the letter to the Colossians. Like
the infancy narratives, the Johannine prologue introduces themes which
the gospel narrative will develop in greater detail. Like the introductory
hymn in Colossians, the prologue focuses on doctrinal issues.
That the evangelist or a later redcator would prefer a hymn to an in-
fancy gospel as the literary form best suited to introduce the narrative
which follows, itself deserves attention and comment. Hymns express the
shared faith of a worshipping community. Liturgical in origin, they ap-
peal, when used as literary prefaces, directly to shared worship as the
proper context for understanding the text which they introduce. Like the
hymn in Colossians, the prologue to John enunciates a common faith
expressed in shared prayer, very likely in shared eucharistic worship. Shared
faith and worship, therefore, provide an important hermeneutical key to
the narrative which follows.
When, moreover, one views the three most extended liturgical hymns
cited in the New Testament (Phil 2:6-11; Col 1:15-20; Jn 1:1-18) as
expressions of shared faith and worship, then the fact that all three assert
the pre-existence of the divine reality embodied in Jesus of Nazareth sug-
gests that this particular Christological motif functioned as a significant
theme in early Christian liturgical worship. In the case of the Johannine
prologue, in affirming the Son of God’s pre-existence with the Father, the
hymn enunciates a central doctrinal focus of the fourth gospel. Divine
pre-existence also contextualizes the other doctrinal themes which the
prologue introduces and which the gospel develops.
This chapter has examined the social context from which the fourth
gospel probably emerged. It has also analyzed the literary and thematic
structure of the fourth gospel’s hymnic prologue. The chapter which fol-
lows begins an analysis of the fourth gospel’s narrative structure by pon-
dering its positive dramatic linkages.
Chapter 2
John’s Positive Dramatic Linkages
This chapter examines the Beloved Disciple’s use of positive dramatic
linkages in order to structure the story of Jesus. The Johannine Jesus re-
lates positively to John the Baptizer, to the Father, to the Breath. As in the
synoptics, all these relationships have revelatory significance. In the fourth
gospel, however, Jesus also relates positively to two symbolic individuals:
namely, to the Beloved Disciple and to Mary.
This chapter divides into four parts. Part one examines Jesus’ relation-
ship to the Baptizer. Part two develops His relationship to the Father.
Part three describes how Jesus and the Breath relate. Part four depicts
Jesus’ relationship to the symbolic figures of Mary and of the Beloved
Disciple.
(I)
Two prose passages about John the Baptizer comment on the text of the
Prologue. Both concern the witness which John gave to Jesus. Both serve
the purpose of tying the Prologue to the account of John’s ministry which
immediately follows the prologue. The first prose passage about John in
the prologue states:
There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came for
testimony (eis martyrian), in order to bear witness to the light, that all
might believe through Him. He was not the light; but came to bear wit-
ness to the light. (Jn 1:6-8)
Though only human, the Baptizer speaks with a divine authority derived
from his prophetic commissioning by God. Although in the synoptic
gospels, the Baptizer directs his message of repentance primarily to Israel,
the fourth evangelist here interprets the Baptizer’s ministry theologically
within the broad sweep of salvation history: since Jesus came to bring a
universal salvation, the Baptizer’s witness to the Word ultimately serves
that universal salvation, which Jesus alone effects. As the light of the world,
only Jesus effects a universal saving enlightenment through His gift of
the Breath. The Baptizer testifies to Jesus’ saving act.
John the Baptizer Testifies to Jesus

In the fourth gospel, God sends the Baptizer primarily in order to testify
to Jesus. Some commentators find in this circumscription of the Baptizer’s
ministry evidence of a confrontation between the Johannine community
and the disciples of the Baptizer. Possibly so.
Without a doubt, however, in portraying the Baptizer as a witness to

Jesus, the Beloved Disciple introduces the forensic metaphor which he
will develop extensively in his narrative. By John’s forensic metaphor, I
mean that the evangelist portrays Jesus’ entire ministry as a kind of legal
trial in which His adversaries cross-examine Him about His own testi-
mony to the Father. Mark uses the messianic secret as an organizing meta-
phor for Jesus’ ministry. The proclamation of Christian Torah functions
as an organizing narrative metaphor for Matthew. The image of the pil-
grimage provides an organizing narrative metaphor for Luke. In the same
way, the metaphor of the trial textures the gospel of John. The Beloved
Disciple portrays the entire ministry of Jesus as His trial by His own
people and ultimately by the Roman empire. In the course of that trial,
humans pass a false judgment on Him, a judgment which the resurrec-
tion and the divine Breath’s witness overturns. In trying God’s Son, they
put God to the test. (Jn 16:8-11)
The image of the trial also fuels the Beloved Disciple’s theology of judg-
ment which re-enforces the metaphor. The image underscores the crucial
importance of commitment in faith to Jesus. Only those who believe
escape the judgment. Those who try Him, who put Him to the test in
their darkness and unbelief, place themselves by their malice under the
divine judgment. (Jn 3:16-21)
The first scene of the gospel immediately strikes a forensic note. It
describes John’s cross-examination by priests and levites from Jerusalem.
In the course of the gospel, Jesus’ enemies will subject Him in turn to
similar cross-examinations. Moreover, in responding to His cross-ques-
tioners, Jesus will more than once invoke the three corroborating wit-
nesses required by Jewish law to substantiate the truth of His own testi-
mony: namely, the testimony of the Father, the testimony of John the
Baptizer, and the testimony of the Jewish scriptures.1
In verse 14 of the Prologue,a redactor of the gospel has inserted a state-
ment of John the Baptizer about Jesus which reappears in Jn 1:30. In His
testimony, the Baptizer, testifies to Jesus’ pre-existence prior to His com-
ing in the flesh:
John bore witness to Him and cried: “This is He of whom I said, ‘He who
comes after me ranks before me, for he was before me.” (Jn 1:15, 30)
1. Cf. NJBC, 61:23; Brown, The Gospel of John, I, 27-28, 35-36; Hänchen, Commentary
on John, I, pp. 131-142; James Montgomery Boice, Witness and Revelation in the Gospel
of John (Toronto: Paternoster Press, 1976); M.-E. Boismard, “L’évolution du thème
eschatologique dans les traditions johanniques,” Revue Biblique, 68(1961), pp. 518-523;
Andrew T. Lincoln, “Trials, Plots and the Narrative of the Fourth Gospel,” Journal for
the Study of the New Testament, 56(1994), pp. 3-30.
Chapter 2: John’s Positive Dramatic Linkages 27
Some commentators have suggested that John the Baptizer here presents
himself as preparing the way for the return of Elijah, who had been taken
up to heaven and, by popular expectation, would return before the Day
of the Lord. In this sense, then, the one who came after the Baptizer
would also have existed before him. Perhaps so.
In thus summarizing the Baptizer’s witness, the final redactor could
also have reworked the Baptizer’s prophecy, recorded in the synoptics, of
the coming of the “mightier one.” Certainly, however, the redactor by
inserting the Baptizer’s witness into the prologue is explaining theologi-
cally the reason why Jesus “ranks before” John: As the pre-existent Logos,
the Son of God exists from all eternity.
In the synoptics, the Baptizer explains the superiority of the “mightier
one,” not by His divine pre-existence, but by his ability to baptize, not
just with water, but with a sanctifying Breath and with the fire of divine
holiness. Later in the fourth gospel, the Baptizer will testify that Jesus
alone will baptize with a Holy Breath; but, on that occasion the Baptizer
will fail to describe the Breath Baptizer as the “mightier one” of the syn-
optic gospels.
Some contemporary exegetes find in this initial testimony of the Bap-
tizer and in his subsequent testimony to Jesus evidence of a polemic con-
frontation between the Beloved Disciple’s community and the disciples
of the Baptizer. As we have seen, the synoptic gospels exhibit some em-
barrassment over the fact that Jesus, the leader of the Christian “way,”
submitted to the baptism of John. As a consequence, the synoptics use a
variety of narrative strategies in order to assert the superiority of Chris-
tian to Johannine baptism. The fourth evangelist, for his part, omits all
mention of Jesus’ having submitted to John’s baptism. Instead, the Be-
loved Disciple summarizes the two men’s relationship to one another by
having the Baptizer’s witness to Jesus’ allude, at least implicitly, to the
latter’s divine pre-existence.2
“The Jews” send, apparently, two different delegations to cross-examine
John the Baptizer in Bethany beyond the Jordan, where he is baptizing:
priests and levites from Jerusalem and representatives of the Pharisees.
(Jn 1:19, 24, 28)
The priests and levites represent the Sanhedrin and confront John as
national leaders with the highest ritual authority in Israel. The priests
and levites also show themselves most interested in issues of authority:
Does John have messianic pretensions? Does he claim to speak as Elijah
redivivus, or as the “prophet like Moses” foretold in Dt 18:15-18? In each
case John testifies with a negative answer. (Jn 1:19-21)
2. Cf. Georg Richter, “Bist du Elias? (Joh, 1,21)” in Studien zum Johannesevangelium
(Regensberg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 1977), pp. 1-41; Ernst Hänchen, Gott und
Mensch: Gesammelte Aussœtze (Tübingen: Mohr-Seibeck, 1965), pp. 329-332.
When pressed by the priestly delegation to justify his ministry of preach-

ing and baptism, the Baptizer cites Is 40:3. Both Mark and Matthew
assert that the ministry of the Baptizer fulfills this prophecy; but only the
fourth evangelist places this Isaian oracle on the lips of the Baptizer himself.
The fourth evangelist, also modifies slightly the text of the prophecy as
it appears in the synoptics. In the fourth gospel, the Baptizer has come
not to “prepare” the way of the Lord but to “make straight” His way. The
change in verb probably results from the fact that the text of the fourth
gospel deletes the second half of the prophecy as it appears in Isaiah. The
second half commands “Make straight in the desert a highway for our
God.” (Jn 1:22-3; Is 40:3; Mk 1:3; Mt 3:3)
In the fourth gospel as in the synoptics, the prophecy in Isaiah, which
originally looked forward to the return from the Babylonian exile as a
second exodus, takes on new apocalyptic connotations. The Baptizer de-
scribes the coming of God to save His people through a culminating,
decisive act.
The Baptizer’s ministry in the desert has the same symbolic overtones
as in the synoptics: Jewish hope located the dawning of final salvation in
the desert. In the fourth gospel, that dawning consists primarily in the
Baptizer’s testimony to Jesus. Desert symbolism also explains the concern
of the Jerusalem authorities with John’s authority: a prophetic voice in
the desert announcing the final dawning of salvation offered to popular
piety a religious authority distinct from the institutional authority of the
levitical priesthood.
A second delegation, this one from the Pharisees, then asks John to
justify His ministry of baptism, since he eschews messianic authority, on
the one hand, and the prophetic authority of either Elijah or the prophet
like Moses, on the other. If one reads the passage historically, the Phari-
sees interrogate John, not as the vested religious authority in Palestine,
but as committed Jews seeking a theological clarification of his response
to the priests and levites.
As in Matthew’s gospel, however, the Beloved Disciple associates the
Pharisees with the chief priests as a way of portraying them theologically
as the chief priests’ eventual heirs in leading the Jewish community. Later
in John’s gospel, for example, the Pharisees exercise high priestly author-
ity anachronistically; and they routinely expel those who confess Jesus
from the synagogue. (Jn 9:34, 11:47) Because in the evangelist’s day the
Pharisees seem to have led the attack against the disciples of Jesus, the
Beloved Disciple, like Matthew, links them in Jesus’ day with the chief
priests who opposed both John and Jesus. In Jesus’ day the Pharisees
would have had no authority to excommunicate.
The delegation from the Pharisees asks John: why, if you eschew an
eschatological identity, do you perform an eschatologically symbolic act
like baptizing? The fourth evangelist’s John answers in a self-deprecating

manner:
I baptize with water; but among you stands one whom you do not know,
the one who is coming after me, the thong of whose sandals I am unwor-
thy to untie. (Jn 1:26)
John’s reply echoes, with significant variations, words of John preserved

in Mark and in Matthew. (Mk 1:7-8; Mt 3:11) In this passage the
Johannine Baptizer unlike the synoptic Baptizer does not contrast his
own baptism with the Breath-baptism of the mightier one, even though,
later in the fourth gospel, the Baptizer does testify to Jesus as
Breath-baptizer. (Jn 1:33) Instead, the Johannine Baptizer stresses the
servile character of his relationship to Jesus. Slaves undid their masters’
sandal straps.
Some exegetes see in “the one who is coming” a cryptic reference to
Elijah. The Baptizer’s testimony on the following day, however, leaves no
doubt that in the evangelist’s estimate Jesus coincides with the one who
comes after John.3 (Jn 1:29)
The next day, the Baptizer sees Jesus coming toward him and testifies:
Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! This is he
of whom I said, “After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me, because he
was before me.” I myself never recognized Him, though the very reason I
came and baptized with water was that He might be revealed to Israel. (Jn
1:29-31)
One can read three different meanings into the phrase “the Lamb of God.”
In the first instance, it probably designates Jesus as the victorious Lamb
of Jewish apocalyptic who conquers the forces of evil opposed to God. In
the second instance, the image probably refers to the servant of God in
second Isaiah, who goes to his death like a lamb to the slaughter. By his
innocent suffering, the servant atones for the sins of “the many.” (Is 53:7)
Finally, the Lamb of God designates Jesus as the passover lamb. The Be-
loved Disciple’s passion account makes this third reference explicit. (Jn
19:29, 31) As the paschal lamb, Jesus frees those who believe in Him
from the slavery of sin. (Cf. Jn 8:44) By sheding His covenant blood,
Jesus effects a new exodus, a new liberation.
3. Cf. Pierson Parker, “‘Bethany Beyond Jordan,’” Journal of Biblical Literature, 74(1955),
pp. 257-261; Ivor Buse, “St. John and the First Synoptic Pericope,” Novum Testamen-
tum, 3(1959), pp. 57-61; B.M.F. Iersel, “Tradition und Redaktion in Joh. I 19-36,”
Novum Testamentum, 5(1962), pp. 245-267; Ernst Bammel, “The Baptist in Early
Christian Tradition,” New Testament Studies, 18(1971-1972), pp. 95-128.
The Baptizer repeats now his earlier testimony to Jesus already cited in
the prologue to his gospel. The Baptizer reminds the reader that he has
already said: “After me comes a man who has ranked before me (literally:
“has come to be before me”), because He was before me.” By reformulat-
ing the Baptizer’s witness from the prologue, the final redactor clarifies its
meaning. The one who follows the Baptizer temporally has already a greater
dignity than the Baptizer in virtue of His eternal existence (“He was be-
fore me”). Not only does Jesus’ pre-existence as the Word make Him
transcendently superior to the Baptizer; but it also holds the key to Jesus’
threefold ministry as the Lamb of God. As the Word of God incarnate,
Jesus triumphs decisively over sin and evil, atones for the wickedness of
“the many,” seals a new covenant, and effects a new exodus.
In his reply to the Pharisees on the preceding day, the Baptizer de-
scribed Jesus as one whom the Pharisees do not know. The ignorance of
the Pharisees foreshadows the unbelief which they will show toward Jesus
once He begins His ministry. Their ignorance also points to Jesus as a
“hidden messiah,” as one who grows and develops secretly in the midst of
Israel. It also foreshadows the unbelief of the Pharisaical leaders of the
hostile synagogue during the evangelist’s own day.
After testifying to Jesus as Lamb of God and as pre-existent, the Bap-
tizer underscores the theme of Jesus’ messianic hiddenness. John avows
that at the beginning of his own ministry, he himself did not know Jesus’
messianic identity.The Baptizer acknowledges the irony of his ignorance,
because his own ministry had only one purpose: namely, the disclosure of
the hidden messiah to Israel.
Moreover, the evangelist immediately qualifies the Baptizer’s ignorance
of Jesus’ messianic identity by having the Baptizer witness to the Holy
Breath’s descent on Jesus. She comes in order to transform Him into the
Breath-baptizer. The Breath’s descent dispels the Baptizer’s ignorance of
Jesus’ messianic identity and reveals Jesus as the chosen one of God.4
The Baptizer in the fourth gospel differs, then, from the Baptizer in
Matthew and Luke both in his perception of the Holy Breath’s descent
and in his certitude concerning Jesus’ messianic identity. (Mt 11:2-10,
Lk 7:18-28)
The Beloved Disciple writes:
4. Cf. NJBC, 61:30-32; Brown, The Gospel of John, I, pp. 42-54; Hänchen, Commentary
on John, I, pp. 143-156; C.E. Blakeway, “‘Behold the Lamb of God’ (S. John i. 29, 36),”
Expository Times, 31(1919-1920), pp. 364-365; E.J. Gilchrist, “‘And I Knew Him
Not,’” Expository Times, 19(1907-1908); pp. 379-380; J. Holzmeister, S.J., “Medius
vestrum stetit quem vos nescitis,” Verbum Domini, 20(1940), pp. 329-332.
And John bore witness: “I saw a Breath descend as a dove from heaven,
and it remained on Him. I myself did not know Him; but He who sent me
to baptize with water said to me: ‘He on whom you see the Breath descend
and remain, this is He who baptizes with a Holy Breath.’ And I have seen
and have borne witness that this is God’s chosen one.” (Jn 1:32-4)
In portraying the Baptizer as sent for no other purpose than to mani-

fest the hidden messiah to Israel, the fourth evangelist severely circum-
scribes the providential purpose of the Baptizer’s mission. The fourth
evangelist’s Baptizer paradoxically does not come primarily in order to
baptize. Instead, He comes primarily in order to testify to Jesus.5
In his account of the Baptizer’s testimony, the fourth evangelist is prob-
ably reworking theologically traditions about Jesus’ baptism analogous to
those recorded in the synoptics. In both the synoptic and Johannine tra-
ditions, the Baptizer predicts the coming of a Breath-baptizer. Both tra-
ditions identify Jesus as the Breath-baptizer of whom John spoke. In both
traditions the Breath descends on Jesus under the sign of a dove. In the
synoptics, the Father’s voice clarifies the dove’s symbolic meaning: the
Breath’s descent under the sign of the dove reveals Jesus, among other
things, as the specially beloved of God and as the beginning of a new
Israel. The Beloved Disciple, however, leaves the dove’s meaning shrouded
in obscurity.6
The Johannine account of the Breath’s descent departs from the synoptics
in other respects:
1) As we have seen, probably for polemic reasons, the fourth evangelist
omits any mention of Jesus’ baptism by John and therefore fails to link
the descent of the Breath to that event.
2) In Mark and Matthew, Jesus alone experiences the descent of the
Breath under the sign of a dove. Luke makes the descent a semi-public
event by having the Breath descend in bodily form. (Mk 1:9-11; Mt
3:16-7; Lk 3:21-2) In the fourth gospel, the Baptizer sees with his own
eyes the Breath’s descent.
3) In the fourth gospel the Father promises the Baptizer in advance
that he will witness the Breath’s descent on some person. Her descent will
5. The Beloved Disciple recognizes that John baptized (cf. Jn 10:40); but he completely
subordinates the Baptizer’s ritual activity to his testimony to Jesus.
6. Cf. Paul Jouon, S.J., “L’agneau de Dieu (Jean 1, 29),” Nouvelle Revue Théologique,
67(1940-1945), pp. 318-321; A. Negoista and C. Daniel, “L’agneau de Dieu est le
Verbe de Dieu,” Novum Testamentum, 13(1971), pp. 24-37; C.K. Barrett, “The Lamb
of God,” New Testament Studies, 1(1954-1955), pp. 210-218; John Howton, “Son of
God in the Fourth Gospel,” Novum Testamentum, 10(1963-1964), pp.227-233;
Joachim Jeremias, “‘Amnos tou Theou—pais Theou,’” Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentlische
Wissenschaft, 34(1935), pp. 115-123; A.Feuillet, “Le symbolisme de la colombe dans
les récits évangeliques du baptème,” Recherches de Science Religieuse, 46(1958), pp.
524-544.
mark that person out as the Breath-baptizer. The Baptizer subsequently

sees the Breath descend “as a dove from heaven and remain” on Jesus.
The Johannine Baptizer sees the descent of the Breath so that, in his role
as forensic witness to Jesus, he may testify to Jesus’ abiding possession of
the divine Breath. (Jn 1:32, 34)
4) The fact that the Breath abides with Jesus has special theological
connotations for the fourth evangelist. It suggests that, as Breath-baptizer,
Jesus possesses and dispenses the Breath in eschatological plentitude. (Jn
3:34, 7:38-9, 20:22; cf. 3:5)
5) The synoptics underscore the difference between John’s water bap-
tism and Jesus’ Breath-baptism. The fourth evangelist notes the differ-
ence but stresses it less than the synoptics, largely because the Beloved
Disciple desires to portray the ministry of the Baptizer primarily as foren-
sic testimony to Jesus.
6) In the synoptics, Jesus calls His disciples quite independently of
John. In the fourth gospel, the Baptizer’s testimony to Jesus plays a cru-
cial role in the call of the first disciples. The Beloved Disciple’s Baptizer
points Jesus out to two of his own disciples as “the Lamb of God.” Out of
curiosity they follow Him and immediately recognize Him as the mes-
siah. (Jn 1:35-41) The synoptics all portray John’s ministry as preparing
Jesus’ own; but they do not go out of their way, as the fourth evangelist
does, to identify Jesus’ first disciples as former disciples of the Baptizer.7
The fourth gospel notes that John suffered imprisonment but makes
no mention of his martyrdom at the hands of Herod. (Jn 3:24) Before
John’s imprisonment, some of his disciples, envious of the fact that Jesus
is baptizing more people than John himself, complain to the Baptizer of
Jesus’ greater success. (Jn 3:25-6) This verse in the fourth gospel gives the
only textual evidence we possess that Jesus initially claimed his disciples
by administering a baptism similar to John’s. A subsequent verse of the
fourth gospel, apparently inserted by a scribe, suggests that Jesus Himself
subsequently abandoned the ritual even though His disciples continued
to administer it. (Jn 4:1-3)
The disciples of John complain about Jesus’ baptism because a contro-
versy with “a Jew” over rites of purification has left them troubled. The
nature of the controversy remains obscure. (Jn 3:25) The fact, however,
that the fourth evangelist situates the complaint of the Baptizer’s dis-
ciples in the context of a controversy over ritual cleansing could reflect
the Johannine community’s quarrel with the Baptizer’s disciples over the
“purifying” merits of Christian and Johannine baptism. In that case the
7. Cf. Francis E. Williams, “The Fourth Gospel and Synoptic Tradition: Two Johannine
Passages,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 86(1967), pp. 311-319; Walter Wink, John the
Baptist in the New Testament (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); Georg
Richter, “Zur Frage von Tradition und Redaktion in Joh I, 19-34” in Studien zum
Johannesevangelium, pp. 288-314.
Jew in question would have challenged the Baptizer’s disciples to recog-

nize the superiority of Jesus’ baptism on the evidence of its greater suc-
cess. The fact that the Baptizer’s disciples complain to him that “all are
going to Him [Jesus]” tends to support such an interpretation.
The disciples’ complaint gives the Baptizer the opportunity to reca-
pitulate and embellish his earlier testimony to Jesus. He reminds his dis-
ciples that he acts at God’s behest: “No one can receive anything except
what is given one from heaven.” (Jn 3:27) The reminder reasserts that the
Baptizer has one providential task to perform: namely, to bear witness to
Jesus. The Baptizer’s disciples should, then, feel no surprise that Jesus is
in fact supplanting the Baptizer by His greater success.
The Baptizer also reminds his disciples that he has denied any messi-
anic authority for himself.
You yourselves bear me witness that I said, “I am not the Christ” but that
I am sent before Him. He who has the bride is the bridegroom; the friend
of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the
bridegroom’s voice; therefore, this joy of mine is now full. It is necessary
that He increase and that I decrease. (Jn 3:27-30)
The Baptizer here alludes to his denial of his own messianic identity to
the priests and Levites in the fourth gospel’s opening scene. In allowing
that he precedes the messiah temporally, the Baptizer probably recalls his
earlier citation of Is 40:3. In applying the Isaian text to himself, John
avows his role as Jesus’ forerunner. The phrase “I am sent before Him”
could also refer to the Baptizer’s subsequent statement that His ministry
has no other purpose than to reveal Jesus to Israel.
As we have seen, in the synoptic tradition, Jesus applies the metaphor
of the bridegroom to Himself as an explanation of His disciples’ failure to
imitate the penitential fasting of John’s and of the Pharisees’ disciples.
(Mk 2:18-19; Mt 9:14-7; Lk 5:33-9) In both the synoptic and Johannine
traditions. the image of the bridegroom points to Jesus as the divine spouse
of Israel whose presence fills His disciples with spontaneous joy.
The fourth evangelist places this metaphor on the lips of the Baptizer
himself. The swelling number of Jesus’ disciples all relate to Him as their
spouse, while Jesus relates to them as the divine, messianic bridegroom,
the loving, forgiving husband of the new Israel. In the union between
Jesus and His disciples, the Baptizer plays a subservient role, analogous to
that of the best man.8
8. Cf. T. Francis Glassen, “John the Baptist in the Fourth Gospel,” Expository Times,
67(1955-1956), pp. 245-246; James Mulenberg, “Literary Form of the Fourth
Gospel,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 51(1932), pp. 40-53; M.-E. Boismard, O.P.,
“Aenon près de Salem,” Revue Biblique, 80(1973), pp. 218-229; Oscar Cullmann,
“Der johannische Gebrauch doppeldeutiger Ausdrüke als Schlussel zum Verständnis
The Baptizer’s final witness clarifies the significance of the first sign
which Jesus gives His disciples when He transforms water into wine at
Cana. On that occasion, the steward complains to the bridegroom about
serving the best wine last. The complaint exemplifies Johannine irony:
the steward has come to the wrong bridegroom. Jesus, who gives messi-
anic wine in eschatological plentitude, stands revealed in this first sign as
the real bridegroom, as the divine messianic bridegroom. (Jn 2:1-11)
The Baptizer, as the bridegroom’s friend, rejoices to hear the
bridegroom’s, i.e., Jesus’ voice. In what context does the Baptizer hear
Jesus speak? The Baptizer himself leaves the context obscure; but the evan-
gelist supplies it in the commentary which immediately follows the
Baptizer’s testimony:
He who comes from above is above all; he who is of the earth belongs to
the earth, and of the earth he speaks; he who comes from heaven is above
all. He bears witness to what He has seen and heard, yet no one receives
His testimony. He who receives His testimony sets his seal on this, that
God is true. For He whom God has sent utters the words of God, for it is
not by measure that He gives the Breath; the Father loves the Son, and has
given all things into His hand; He who believes in the Son has eternal life;
he who does not obey the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God rests
upon Him. (Jn 3:31-6)
Both the Prologue and the Baptizer have alluded to Jesus’ eternal exist-
ence with the Father. (Jn 1:1-2a, 30) Here the evangelist probably speaks
in his own voice in order to link the Baptizer’s final witness to Jesus’
pre-existence with the Father prior to His incarnation. The evangelist
contrasts Jesus, who comes from heaven (above), with one who, like John,
has only an earthly origin. He also contrasts the testimony of Jesus, who
speaks of heavenly things which He has seen and heard, with the speech
of earthlings who, like John, know only the things of this world. To have
an earthly origin does not have malicious connotations in the fourth gos-
pel, although to have a worldly origin does, since Satan rules “the world”
and sets it in opposition to Jesus. Earthly origin connotes only finitude
and creaturely limitation. Only a person of divine, heavenly origin can
speak divine, heavenly truths. One whose created, human experience re-
mains earth-bound, can, like John, speak only of things which happen
on earth.
The evangelist also contrasts two ways of responding to the words of
one who speaks with divine, heavenly authority: namely, with either be-
lief or unbelief. Those who believe acknowledge and endorse (“set their
des vierten Evangelium,” Theologische Zeitschrift, 4(1948), pp. 360-372; Walter
Klaiber, “Der irdische und der himmlische Zeuge: Eine Auslegung von Joh 3.22-36,”
New Testament Studies, 36(1990), pp. 205-233.
seal on”) the truth of the heavenly person’s words. By disclosing transcen-
dent, heavenly realities, those words claim the believer with God’s own
authority. One must believe in Jesus as the Son of God sent from heaven
both by the Father and with the Father’s authoritative endorsement. Faith
in Jesus as the divinely sent Son of God leads to life.
Believers recognize that Jesus speaks God’s own words in virtue of the
fact that He both possesses and dispenses the Breath with eschatological
plentitude. The subject of the phrase “it is not by measure that He gives
the Breath” remains, however, ambiguous. It could refer either to Jesus or
to the Father. Does the Father send the Breath to Jesus in eschatological
plentitude, or does Jesus dispenses the Breath in eschatological plentitude?
Given the quasi-poetic diction of the fourth gospel, the evangelist very
probably intended both meanings. As we shall see, as life-giving water,
the Breath of Jesus quenches human thirst for endless life.
Unbelief does not lead to life. Instead, it subjects one to the wrathful
judgment of God. Here the evangelist alludes to the theology of divine
judgment initially developed in the conversation between Jesus and
Nichodemus. In Johannine theology, God judges the world by sending
His Son to save it. Those who believe in Him escape judgment, while
those who fail to believe stand judged in virtue of their own malicious
unbelief. (Jn 3:16-21)
As in the synoptics, then, the Johannine Jesus surpasses the Baptizer
because He baptizes with a sanctifying Breath, while John does not. More-
over, in the fourth gospel, Jesus dispenses the Breath with eschatological
plentitude. Jesus also surpasses the Baptizer because, as the incarnate Son
of God, He has existed eternally with God. The Baptizer has no such
divine dignity or authority. As the prophetic forerunner of Jesus, the Bap-
tizer plays the strictly minor role in salvation history of announcing Jesus’
arrival. Having done that, when confronted with Jesus’ testimony to the
Father, John fades contentedly into historical obscurity.9
In defending His sabbath healings, the Johannine Jesus invokes the
Baptizer’s testimony concerning Him. Jesus does so in the course of con-
structing a forensic argument based on Dt 19:15. The text in Deuteronomy
forbids the condemnation of anyone on the basis of the testimony of
only a single witness. Jesus then invokes John as someone who, together
with the Father and with Moses, has testified to Him and to the truth of
9. Cf. NJBC, 61:54-55; Brown, The Gospel of John, I, pp. 151-163; Hänchen, Commen-
tary on John, I, pp. 209-212; Georg Richter, Studien zum Johannesevangelium, pp.
387-391; Eta Linnemann, “Jesus und der Tœufer,” in Festschrift für Ernst Fuchs, edited
by G. Ebeling et al. (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1973), pp. 219-236; Rudolf
Schnackenburg, “Die ‘situationsgelösten’ Redestücke in Joh. 3,” Zeitschrift für die
Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 49(1758), pp. 88-99; Barnabas Lindars, “Two Parables
in John,” New Testament Studies, 16(1969-1970), pp. 318-329.
His ministry (Jn 5:31-3) Even in invoking John’s testimony, however, the
Jesus of the fourth gospel claims greater authority for His own testimony
and for that of the Father. (Jn 5:34)
Jesus describes John as “a lamp, set alight and burning brightly.” (Jn
5:35) The image of the lamp locates John in the realm of light, i.e., in the
realm of those who believe. It also assimilates John to the prophet Elijah,
whom the wisdom of Ben Sirah calls “a flame like a torch.” (Sir 48:1)
Jesus, however, rebukes the ephemeral character of His adversaries’ re-
sponse to John: “...and for a while you yourselves willingly exulted in his
light.” (Jn 5:35) Jesus’ remark underscores the passing character of John’s
ministry. It also deplores the superficial religious enthusiasm which it
temporarily evoked. Given the divine, transcendent authority of His own
and of the Father’s testimony, Jesus does not need the human, prophetic
witness of the Baptizer; but He invokes John’s testimony for the sake of
forensic argument.10
After the feast of Dedication, as Jesus’ ministry draws to a close, He
returns to the place where He began His own ministry: namely, to the
Jordan where John used to baptize. The return marks a Biblical inclusion
and recalls John’s testimony to Jesus which opened the fourth gospel.
While Jesus remains in the region, crowds flock to Him and give sponta-
neous testimony to the truth of John’s witness to Jesus: “John never per-
formed a sign....but whatever John said about this man was true.” As we
shall see, the signs which Jesus performs all find fulfillment in the paschal
mystery. In them the Father testifies to Jesus’ divinity and pre-existence,
which the paschal mystery discloses. As a mere earth-bound witness to
Jesus, the Baptizer performs no such signs. (Jn 10:40-2) The curious crowds
avow the truth of everything which John has said about Jesus even though the
paschal mystery, which validates the Baptizer’s testimony and reveals the deep
significance of Jesus’ miracles, still lies in the future.11

The Beloved Disciple’s forensic theology of judgment motivates in sig-
nificant ways his somewhat paradoxical portrait of the Baptizer. The evan-
gelist assigns the Baptizer the relatively minor role of a subordinate wit-
ness to Jesus. Humanity’s historical attempt to test God by putting the
incarnate Son of God on trial contextualizes theologically the Baptizer’s
witness.
10. Cf. NJBC, 61:81-82; Brown, The Gospel of John, I, pp. 222-223; Hänchen,
Commentary on John, I, pp. 261-267; Urban von Whalde, “The Witnesses to Jesus in
John 5:31-40 and Belief in the Fourth Gospel,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 43(1981),
pp. 385-404.
11. Cf. NJBC, 61:44; Brown, The Gospel of John, II, pp. 413-415; Hänchen, Commentary
on John, II, pp. 43-52; Ernst Bammel, “‘John Did No Miracle,’” in Miracles, edited by
C.F.D. Moule (London: A.R. Moubray and Co., Ltd., 1965), pp. 181-202.
I call the fourth evangelist’s portrait of John paradoxical because it

downplays the central thrust of John’s historical ministry: namely, his
administration of a baptism of repentance which prepared Israel to face
an immanent divine judgment. The fourth gospel acknowledges John’s
baptismal activity; but, without any other account of John than the Be-
loved Disciple’s, one might wonder why people called John “the Bap-
tizer” rather than “the Witness.” Certainly, in the fourth gospel, witness-
ing to Jesus, rather than baptizing defines the supreme providential pur-
pose of the Baptizer’s ministry.
More than polemic confrontation with the Baptizer’s disciples moti-
vates the Beloved Disciple’s redefinition of the Baptizer’s role in salvation
history. History forced the Beloved Disciple to acknowledge a relation-
ship between Jesus and the Baptizer; but the narrative centrality which
the fourth evangelist assigns to the paschal mystery also forced him to
re-conceive their relationship. The fourth evangelist made it clear that
the prophetic witness of a human figure like John belongs to a different
order of religious authority from the historical testimony of the Son of
God incarnate and of the Father who sent Him. The Baptizer spoke for a
short time with prophetic authority; Jesus, however, speaks with the au-
thority of the eternal Word of God made flesh. The deviations of the
Beloved Disciple’s portrait of the Baptizer from the kind of portrait which
the synoptics paint all serve these complex doctrinal ends in the fourth
evangelist’s narrative Christology.
This section has presented the Beloved Disciple’s account of Jesus’ rela-
tionship to John the Baptizer. The section which follows examines Jesus’
relationship to the Father by examining the pertinent Johannine texts. As
we shall see, Jesus’ relationship to the Father provides the fourth gospel
with one of its most developed doctrinal themes.
(II)
Jesus’ relationship to the Father constitutes a major doctrinal focus of the
fourth gospel. Hence, references to the Father abound there with far greater
frequency than they do in the synoptic gospels. As a consequence, the
Beloved Disciple elaborates a much more developed doctrine of the Fa-
ther than do any of the synoptic evangelists.
As in the synoptic gospels, the Greek word for “God”—Theos with a
definite article—refers to the Father. Hence, I shall once again consider
texts which use the term “ho Theos” together with texts which explicitly
invoke the Father’s name.
The Jesus of the synoptics proclaims the kingdom to crowds and cat-
echizes His disciples in the moral demands of discipleship. The Jesus of
the fourth gospel mentions the kingdom on only two occasions: once in
secret and a second time during His trial. (Jn 3:3,5, 18:36) Instead, the
Johannine Jesus during His mortal ministry with dogged determination

proclaims His own divinity to unbelieving Jews. Moreover, in describing
Jesus’ relationship to the Father, the fourth gospel returns repetitiously to
the same themes: Jesus’ privileged knowledge of the Father, His eternal
pre-existence with the Father, and His co-equality with the Father. In-
stead of simply repeating these themes, however, John’s Jesus develops
them incrementally. In the struggle of light against darkness, the full im-
plications of Jesus’ doctrinal claims emerge gradually, as the light grows
brighter and brighter.
Jesus and His Father

As we have seen, the Prologue to John’s gospel refers more than once to
the Father. The Word exists eternally with God and turned toward God.
The Word possesses divinity along with the Father. (Jn 1:1) The Son of
God dwells “in the bosom of the Father (eis ton kolpon tou patros).” The
phrase suggests the intimacy of Their relationship. (Jn 1:18) It also fore-
shadows the intimacy with which the Beloved Disciple relates to Jesus. At
the last supper, the Beloved Disciple will recline on Jesus’ bosom (En to
kolpo tou Jesou). (Jn 13:23) As we shall see, the Beloved Disciple symbol-
izes every believer.
The incarnate Word, as Son of God, reveals the Father’s glory, His di-
vine reality in all its effulgent excellence. (Jn 1:14) The Word does this by
sharing some measure of His Sonship with those who believe in Him: He
empowers them to become children of God by the grace of rebirth. (Jn
1:12-3, 3:3-5) No mere creature has ever seen God face to face. Only the
incarnate Son, the Word made flesh, has the power to reveal Him to
humans by transforming them into God’s children. The intimacy of their
friendship with Jesus causes them to enter into His own intimate rela-
tionship with the Father. (Jn 1:18)
As we have also seen, only in the fourth gospel does the Baptizer point
Jesus out as “the Lamb of God.” (Jn 1:29-36) When the image of the
lamb designates Jesus as the suffering servant, then the phrase “of God”
points to the Father as the object of Jesus’ service. When the image of the
lamb designates Jesus as the paschal lamb, then the Father provides the
lamb of sacrifice by sending Jesus. As a sacrificial lamb, Jesus gives His
life in obedience to the Father. The fourth evangelist also calls Jesus “the
Son of God.” The title has both messianic and incarnational connota-
tions. (Jn 1:34)
In the Johannine account of the call of the disciples, Nathanael calls
Jesus “the Son of God” and “the King of Israel.” (Jn 1:49) On Nathanael’s
lips both titles have messianic meaning. Jesus, however, immediately as-
sures Nathanael that he has only begun to glimpse the truth about Jesus’
person.
You believe, do you, just because I told you that I saw you under the fig
tree? You will see far greater things than that....Truly, I tell you, you will
see the sky opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the
Son of Man. (Jn 1:50-1)
As the glorified Son of Man, Jesus in the New Testament normally

functions as the one who passes final judgment on a sinful world. Here,
however, the Son of Man constitutes the privileged link between heaven
and earth. Jesus transforms the Son of Man into Jacob’s ladder. In Jacob’s
dream in Gen 28:10-9, the patriarch sees a ladder stretching from heaven
to earth with angels ascending and descending on it. Angels function as
God’s messengers and make the will of the invisible God known to hu-
mans. The apocalyptic rending of the heavens to which Jesus refers sym-
bolizes a revelation of the end time. Soon Jesus, as the glorified Son of
Man will mediate between God and those who see Him with the eyes of
faith. On that day, Nathanael will realize that all communication be-
tween God and humanity passes through Jesus.
The fact that Jesus describes the angels as belonging to God designates
the Father as the one who rules over the angelic realm. From Him the
angels descend to earth and to Him they return. When, therefore, the
disciples finally see the full revelation of Jesus’ glory, they will acknowl-
edge Him as their unique mediator with the Father.12
The final redactor of the fourth gospel places the cleansing of the temple
toward the beginning of Jesus’ public career, not during his final Jerusa-
lem ministry, as the synoptics do. The Beloved Disciple, however, at-
tributes Jesus’ prophetic action to much the same motives as do the
synoptics. Jesus rebukes the priests’ economic exploitation of temple
worship as scandalous. As in the synoptics, Jesus all but claims propri-
etary rights over His Father’s house.13 (Jn 2:13-7)
In the confrontation between Jesus and Nicodemus, the fourth evan-
gelist reflects on the Father’s saving purpose in sending Jesus. Some ex-
egetes opine that in the original version of the fourth gospel, this story
followed that of the man born blind, in order to contrast Nicodemus’
timidity in avowing any relationship to Jesus with the healed blind man’s
open confession of Him. Two arguments support this suggestion.
Nicodemus’s reference to the “many signs” Jesus has done. (Jn 3:2) As the
gospel now reads, Jesus has in fact performed only one sign, the first
miracle at Cana. (Jn 2:1-12) If, however, the encounter with Nicodemus
12. Cf. NJBC, 61:27-39; Brown, The Gospel of John, I, pp. 73-96; Hänchen, Commentary
on John, I, pp. 157-168; William O. Walker, Jr., “John 1.43-51 and ‘The Son of Man’
in the Fourth Gospel,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 56(1994), pp. 31-42.
Commentary on John, I, pp. 180-190.
belongs after Tabernacles, then Jesus would indeed have performed “many
signs.” The second argument points out that Jesus’ exchange with
Nicodemus develops the baptismal imagery implicit in the story of the
blind man’s cure.14 (Jn 9:6-7)
At the beginning of the incident, Nicodemus recognizes that Jesus comes
from God because of the many signs, or miracles, He has worked in Jerusa-
lem during the first of three Passovers in John’s gospel. (Jn 3:1-21; 2:23-5)
Jesus’ responds to Nicodemus’ incipient faith in His mission from God
by assuring him that only rebirth through water and the Breath intro-
duces one into the kingdom of God. (Jn 3:3-6) Jesus insists on the mys-
terious character of this second birth effected by God’s Breath. (Jn 3:7-8)
Then, Jesus promises Nicodemus that He, Jesus, is speaking the truth,
because He is only describing things which He has seen personally. In
speaking of rebirth in water and the Breath, however, Jesus still speaks of
an earth-bound event. If Jesus desired, however, He could speak of even
more mysterious things, of the things which He has personally witnessed
in heaven:
Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet do not understand this? I assure you
solemnly, we speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have
seen; but you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you earthly things,
how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things? No one has ascended
into heaven but He who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And as
Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be
lifted up, that whoever believes in Him may have life eternal. (Jn 3:9-14)
Here several points need noting. First, Jesus, in virtue of His divine
pre-existence, claims the ability to speak of events inaccessible to anyone
but Himself, heavenly events which He has personally witnessed. Indeed,
throughout the discourse Jesus speaks from an exalted, atemporal stand-
point, from the standpoint of one who perceives the paschal mystery in
prophetic anticipation as though it has already occurred.
Second, Jesus does not reveal to Nicodemus the heavenly events to
which he has unique access. He describes only events which happen on
14. Although I personally deem fairly straightforward the sacramental connotations of the
dialogue with Nicodemus, some exegetes question those connotations. Cf. Russell
Fowler, “Born of Water and Spirit (Jn 3),” Expository Times, 82(1970-1971), p. 159;
J. de la Potterie, “Naitre d’eau et naitre de l’Esprit: le texte baptismal de Jn 3,5,” Sciences
Ecclesiastiques, 14(1962), pp. 417-443; D.G. Spriggs, “The Meaning of ‘Water’ in
John 3.5,” Expository Times, 8(1969-1970), pp. 149-150; Hughes Smith, “houtos estin
pas ho gegennômenos ek tou pneumatos,” Expository Times, 81(1969-1970), p. 189; R.
Schnackenburg, “Die Sakramente im Johannesevangelium” in Sacra Pagina, edited by
J. Coppens et al. (Paris: J. Gabalda, Gembloux, Duculot, 1959), 2:235-254; William
C. Giese, “‘Unless One is Born Again’: The Use of a Heavenly Journey in John 3,”
Journal of Biblical Literature, 107(1988), pp. 677-693.
earth. He names two such events, both of them intimately related: namely,
rebirth in water and the Holy Breath and His being lifted up on the cross
into glory. Indeed, the fourth gospel ends with the crucified and glorified
Jesus breathing the divine Breath into His disciples so that they can com-
municate Her to others. (Jn 7:39, 12:32-3, 20:22-3) Any baptism ad-
ministered by Jesus or His disciples during His ministry would have re-
sembled Johannine baptism more than Christian baptism. (Cf. Jn 3:22,
4:2) The Johannine Christian would, however, have equated rebirth
through water and the Breath with Christian baptism.
Third, Jesus describes His ascension into heaven, His return to the
Father, as though it has already occurred. (Jn 3:13) Moreover, He uses
the perfect tense which connotes past finality. By describing a future event
with the perfect tense, the Beloved Disciple transforms it into a fait ac-
compli. Moreover, Jesus’ ascent to the Father will manifests His descent
from the Father.15 (Cf. Jn 16:9)
Finally, Jesus does not really answer Nicodemus’s question about what
makes rebirth in water and the Breath possible until He speaks of His
own passion: of His being lifted up in the way in which Moses lifted up
the serpent in the wilderness. (Num 21:4-9) All those stung by the saraph
serpents recovered from the bite if they gazed in faith on the bronze ser-
pent which Moses lifted on a pole. In an analogous way, the twice-born
will gaze with faith on Jesus lifted up on the cross and into glory. As we
shall see, in Johannine theology, Jesus’ lifting up on the cross itself begins
the revelation of His divine glory.
The Breath of God inspires faith in the glorified Jesus. The Breath,
moreover, coincides with the living water which will slake human thirst
for eternal life. Baptism will give mortals access to that living water and
so will make rebirth to eternal life possible.16 (Jn 4:13-5, 7:37-9; 1 Jn
5:5-8)
The passage which follows Jesus’ response to Nicodemus probably ap-
pends the evangelist’s own doctrinal reflections on Jesus’ words.17
15. Cf. Wayne E. Meeks, “The Man From Heaven in Johannine Sectarianism,” Journal
of Biblical Literature, 91(1972), pp. 44-72; A. Vergote, “L’exaltation du Christ en croix
selon le quatrième évangile,” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovaniensis, 28(1952), pp. 5-23.
16. Cf. John Bligh, S.J., “Four Studies in St. John II: Nichodemus,” Heythrop Journal,
8(1967), pp. 40-51; Otto Böcker, “Wasser und Geist,” Verborum Veritas, edited by O.
Böcker and K. Hänchen (Wuppertal: Theologischer Verlag Rolf Brockhaus, 1970),
pp. 197-202; J. de la Potterie, “Jesus et Nicodemus: de necessitate generationis ex
Spiritu,” Verbum Domini, 47(1969), pp. 141-150, 257-283; H. Hollis, “The Root of
the Johannine Pun—hypsôthênai,” New Testament Studies, 35(1989), pp. 475-478;
Ben Witherington III, “The Waters of Rebirth: John 3.5 and 1 John 5.6-8,” New
Testament Studies, 35(1989), pp. 155-160.
17. Some see this passage as a continuation of Jesus’ own discourse; some, as the
evangelist’s reflection on Jesus’ preceding words. If, on the one hand, the evangelist
wrote these reflections as a personal meditation on the words of Jesus, the fact that he
For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten18 Son, that
whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. For God
sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world
might be saved through Him. One who believes in Him is not condemned;
one who does not believe is condemned already because of not having
believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment,
that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather
than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one who does evil hates
the light, and does not come to the light, lest one’s deeds be exposed. But
one who does what is true comes to the light, that it may be seen that one’s
deeds have been wrought in God. (Jn 3:16-21)
This passage recapitulates much of the gospel’s prologue.19 It also enunci-

ates clearly the Father’s intentions in sending the Son into a sinful world,
subjected to the power of Satan. The Father desires only to save the world,
not to condemn it. As we have already seen, this passage foreshadows in its
own way the witness of the Baptizer, which follows immediately in the gospel
text. (Jn 3:22-30) In Jesus, the divine bridegroom, God reveals that He re-
lates to a sinful world only with a faithful love. That love seeks the world’s
good and desires to gift with eternal life those who live in the world.20
God, then, judges the world by revealing to it the absolute and uncon-
ditioned character of divine love. Those who reject that revelation stand
judged by their own loveless lack of faith. The struggle between light and
darkness which the gospel narrative will describe in considerable detail
embodies and begins God’s final judgment. In that struggle, God rejects
and condemns no one. Instead, sinners condemn themselves by sinning
against the light, by rejecting the light of divine love revealed in Jesus.
Those who suffer divine judgment do so because in their blindness they
cling to the sinful darkness and prefer it to the light.
In the course of the judgment two things happen. First, those who love
the darkness manifest more and more clearly the malice which motivates
appends them without any transition dramatizes the fact that theological concern
shapes the Beloved Disciple’s rhetoric. If, on the other hand, one takes the passage as
Jesus’ own words, the fact that He speaks of Himself in the third person and discourses
about the future conditions necessary for Christian baptism also re-enforces the
passage’s atemporal, doctrinal viewpoint. The passage, then, offers evidence that the
evangelist wants the reader to understand it as Jesus does: namely, from an atemporal,
doctrinal standpoint.
18. Cf. R.L. Roberts, “The Rendering of ‘Only Begotten’ in John 3:16,” Restoration
Quarterly, 16(1973), pp. 2-15.
19. Cf. Jerome Neyrey, “John III—A Debate over Johannine Epistemology,” Novum
Testamentum, 23(1981), pp. 115-127.
20. Cf. Pablo A. Cavallero, “Alcance teologico de me + Indicativo: A Proposito de Jn 3,
18 y otros loci neotestamenticos,” Estudios Biblicos, 40(1991), pp. 483-495; J.-G.
Gourbillon, O.P., “La parabole du serpent d’arain et la ‘lacune’ du Ch. III de l’évangile
selon S. Jean,” Revue Biblique, 51(1942), pp. 213-226.
their actions. Second, those who do believe in Jesus find themselves forced
to confess Him publicly. Nicodemus illustrates the second process. He
typifies the Jewish Christian who would prefer to confess Jesus secretly
and thus avoid expulsion from the synagogue. Nicodemus, therefore,
begins by seeking out Jesus secretly under the shelter of darkness. Later,
however, Nicodemus defends Jesus publicly to the Sanhedrin (Jn 7:50-1);
and, in the end, Nichodemus comes into the light. He declares his alle-
giance to Jesus publicly by joining Joseph of Aramathea in burying Him
with the reverence due to a king. The mode of burial expresses Nicodemus’s
public confession of faith in Jesus.21 (Jn 19:39)
The evangelist underlines the importance of his theology of divine judg-
ment by putting it later on the lips of Jesus Himself. (Jn 12:46-8) More-
over, the Beloved Disciple develops these same insights further in the
theological reflections which he appends to the Baptizer’s final witness to
Jesus. (Jn 3:31-6)
In the course of these reflections, the evangelist makes the following
points: 1) Jesus testifies to heavenly realities which in His pre-existence
He has personally witnessed. 2) The Father has sent Him into the world
to bear witness to these heavenly realities. 3) Some believe Jesus and some
do not. 4) Those who believe endorse and confess the truth which Jesus
reveals and embodies. In so doing, they confess the Father’s truthfulness
as well, for the Father sends the Son to testify to divine realities. 5) Jesus’
possession and sending of the Breath in eschatological abundance mani-
fests the truth which Jesus embodies and proclaims. 6) Out of love, the
Father has given all things into the Son’s hand so that the Son may serve
as the Father’s instrument of universal salvation and of universal judg-
ment. 7) Those saved through faith in Jesus will enjoy eternal life. 8)
Those who reject Jesus and His testimony call down upon themselves the
judgment and wrath of God.22
In his account of the exchange between Jesus and the Samaritan woman,
the evangelist develops further the theme of the messianic purification of
temple worship which the cleansing of the temple introduces. When the
Samaritan woman asks Jesus how He, a Jew, can ask her, a hated Samari-
tan and a woman, for a drink of water, Jesus replies: “If you had known
the gift of God, and who it is who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you
would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.” (Jn
21. Cf. Max Krenkel, “Joseph von Aramathäa und Nikodemus,” Zeitschrift für
Wissenschaftlische Theologie, 8(1965), pp. 438-445.
Commentary on John, I, pp. 194-207; L. John Topel, “A Note on the Methodology of
Structural Analysis in Jn 2:23-3:21,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 33(1971), pp.
211-220; F. Roustang, S.J., “ L’entretien avec Nicodeme,” Nouvelle Revue Theologique,
78(1956), pp. 337- 338; J. Duncan M. Derrett, “The Samaritan Woman’s Purity
(John 4:4-52),” Evangelical Quarterly, 60(1988), pp. 291-298.
4:10) Some interpret the “gift of God” as Jesus Himself, others as the gift
Jesus will give, i.e., the living water of the Breath. (Cf. Jn 7:39) Given the
poetic character of John’s diction and the fact that the poetic mind pre-
fers free association to clear logical distinctions, the evangelist probably
intended both meanings.
Later in the dialogue, when the woman asks Jesus whether one should
worship God in the temple on Mount Gerizim or in the temple in Jerusa-
lem, Jesus replies:
Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain
nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do
not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But
the hour is coming and is already here when the true worshippers will
worship the Father in Breath and in truth (en pneumati kai aletheia). For
the Father seeks such people to worship Him. God is Breath (pneuma ho
Theos) and those who worship Him, must worship Him in Breath and
truth (en pneumati kai aletheia). (Jn 4:21-4)
When Jesus gives the living water, the Breath who slakes human thirst for
eternal life, then Breath-inspired worship, wherever it occurs, will replace
the temple worship atop both Mount Gerizim and Mount Zion.
Breath-inspired worship will acknowledge and disclose the truth incar-
nate in Jesus. Breath-inspired worship, however, terminates ultimately at
the Father whom Jesus reveals. (Jn 8:45, 14:6, 17, 15:26, 18:37)
The term “pneuma (Breath)” without the definite article designates the
life which the Father possesses and shares with the Son and with the Holy
Breath. The gift of “the Breath (to pneuma)”— or Breath with a definite
article—communicates this divine life (“pneuma” without the article) to
those who believe. Without the article, then, the term “pneuma” desig-
nates both the life shared by the members of the divine triad and the
divine life which they communicate to those who believe. A share in
God’s own life slakes human thirst for life without end. That thirst only
the gift of living water, of the Breath Herself, can slake; for She commu-
nicates pneuma, a share in imperishable divine life.
Authentic worship of the Father must, then, embody divine life just as
it must acknowledge Jesus in faith as “truth,” as the unique and privi-
leged revelation of the Father. Later, in the bread-of-life discourse, the
evangelist will equate worship in Breath and truth with a eucharistic wor-
ship which acknowledges the real presence of Christ in the bread and
wine, His eucharistic body and blood.23 (Jn 6:52-65)
Jesus’ discourse after the cure of the paralytic at the pool of Bethsaida
further develops the theme of judgment. (Jn 5:24) In the process of re-
23. Cf. NJBC, 61:62; Brown, The Gospel of John, I, pp. 166-185; Hänchen, Commentary
on John, I, pp. 213-231; Günther Reim “Nordreich-Sudreich: Der vierte Evangelist als
flecting on the judgmental character of Jesus’ sabbath healings, the fourth

evangelist offers his own distinctive theological interpretation of their
revelatory meaning: they fulfill the meaning of the sabbath by manifest-
ing that the Father chooses to judge the world through the Son.
Jesus in justifying His sabbath healings makes an astonishing claim:
“My Father is working still, and I am working.” (Jn 5:17) As we have
seen, in the synoptic tradition Jesus gives an ethical justification for His
sabbath healings by appealing to the true purpose of the sabbath: the
sabbath seeks in Jewish piety to encourage not only worship of God but
the cultivation of virtue. Hence, good deeds done on the sabbath do not
violate the sabbath rest and do not count as “work.” John’s Jesus, by con-
trast, does not deny that He is working on the sabbath by performing
cures. Instead, He claims to imitate the Father, who also works on the
sabbath. In other words, John’s Jesus gives a doctrinal rather than an ethi-
cal justification for His sabbath miracles.
John’s Jesus is appealing to traditional rabbinic teaching. The rabbis
taught that, when God rested from creating the world on the seventh
day, God did not cease to act, even though God did terminate His active
creation of the world. On the sabbath, the rabbis taught, God retains
three keys which He never surrenders: the key of rain, the key of birth,
and the key of resurrection. Each “key” in its own way imparts life. By
imparting or withholding the gift of unending, risen life, God judges the
world. Hence, by constituting Jesus the source of risen life, the Father
reveals that He judges the world through the Son whom He has sent into
the world in order to save it. In claiming that His sabbath healings imi-
tate God’s action of the sabbath, Jesus portrays them as foreshadowing
the gift of risen life which He will impart when He breathes the divine
Breath into the disciples. In claiming to have the same right as the Father
to work on the sabbath, Jesus, as the evangelist notes, implicitly asserts
His equality with God the Father.24 (Jn 5:18-9)
Vertreter Christlicher Nordreichstheologie,” Biblische Zeitschrift, 36(1992), pp.

235-240; Tod D. Swanson, “To Prepare a Place: Johannine Christianity and the
Collapse of Ethnic Territory,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 62(1994),
pp. 241-263; R. Koester, “The Savior of the World (John 4:42),” Journal of Biblical
Literature, 109(1990), pp. 665-680; Rudolf Schnackenburg, “Die ‘Anbetung in Geist
and Warheit’ (Joh 4,23) im Lichte von Quran Texte,” Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentlische
Wissenschaft, 3(1959), pp. 88-94; William P. Hatch, “An Allusion to the Destruction
of Jerusalem in the Fourth Gospel,” Expositor, 17(1919), pp. 194-198; A. F. Wedel,
“John 4:5-26(5-42),” Interpretation, 31(1977), pp. 406-412; R. Loewe, “‘Salvation’ is
Not of the Jews,” Journal of Theological Studies, 32(1981), pp. 341-368; M. Taylor,
Jesus at the Well: John IV, 1-42 (New York, NY: A.D.F. Randolph & Co., 1984);
Winsome Munro, “The Pharisee and the Samaritan in John: Polar or Parallel,” Catholic
Biblical Quarterly, 57(1995), pp. 710-728.
24. Cf. Henry van den Bussche, “Guérison d’un paralytique à Jerusalem le jour de sabbat:
Jean 5, 1-18,” Bible et Vie Chrétienne, 61(1965), pp. 18-28.
Jesus’ discourse divides into two parts. Each in its own way develops
the theme of judgment and clarifies Jesus’ relationship to the Father.
Moreover, the first part of the discourse subdivides into two sections.
In the first section of the first part of the discourse, Jesus asserts that in
claiming the right to imitate the Father by working on the sabbath, He in
no way seeks to set Himself either over the Father or in opposition to the
Father. As Son, Jesus does not act “on His own accord (eph heautou).”
The Johannine Jesus has already declared that His “food is to do the
will of the one who sent me, and to accomplish His work.” (Jn 4:34)
Here, acting at the Father’s behest implies two things: 1) the Son never
deviates from the Father’s own activity but faithfully imitates whatever
He sees the Father doing; and 2) the Father out of love teaches the Son to
do the things He does by setting up the Son as an example for imitation.
Jesus, moreover, warns His adversaries that the Father intends to show
the Son how to do even greater works than curing a paralytic on the
sabbath. (Jn 5:19-30) The rest of the discourse reflects on the character
of those works. Initially, however, the Son’s obedient imitation of the
Father establishes an operational identity between the two. As the gospel
unfolds, Jesus will make it clear that this obediential, operational identity
flows from a deeper kind of unity: “The Father and I are one.”25 (Jn 10:30)
Jesus then names two works which the Father will give Him to per-
form. Both qualify as greater than the cure He has just effected. 1) The
Father, who has the power to raise from the dead and give life, will impart
the same power to the Son. (Jn 5:21) Later in John’s gospel, Jesus’ raising
of Lazarus will reveal Him in a preliminary way as “the resurrection and
the life.” (Jn 9:25-6) Jesus’ full revelation as resurrection and life begins,
of course, only with the paschal mystery. 2) The Father will entrust to the
Son the task of judgment. Moreover, the Father will do this in order that
humans may learn to show to the Son the same reverence which they
show the Father. (Jn 5:22-3)
At this point, the evangelist reminds the reader of the paradoxical way
in which the Father has chosen to judge the world: namely, by sending
the Son, not to condemn the world but to save it. (Jn 3:17; cf. 12:47) As
a consequence, anyone who accepts Jesus’ testimony not only honors and
believes in the Father who sent Him but will also escape judgment by
accepting the salvation, the eternal life, which Jesus has come to impart.
Paradoxically, then, the Father’s very sending of the Son into the world
in order to save it also judges the world, because those who do not believe
bring down God’s wrath on themselves. Jesus, then, would seem to func-
tion as judge differently for the damned and for the saved. He “judges”
25. Cf. Eduard Lohse, Die Einheit des neuen Testaments (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1973), pp. 62-72; Herold Weiss, “The Sabbath in the Fourth Gospel,”
the saved by raising them to eternal life. He judges the unbeliever by

provoking the choice for unbelief instead of the obedience of faith. That
choice effects a judgment of perdition which the Father acting through
the Son will ratify on the last day. (Jn 5:21-4; cf. 9:39)
The evangelist describes the manner in which final judgment will oc-
cur in the second section of the first part of this discourse:
I solemnly assure you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will
hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. For as the
Father has life in Himself, so He has granted the Son also to have life in
Himself, and has given Him authority to execute judgment, because He is
the Son of man. Do not marvel at this; for the hour is coming when all
who are in the tombs will hear His voice and come forth, those who have
done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the
resurrection of judgment. (Jn 5:25-29)
The fourth gospel espouses a realized eschatology analogous to that

presented in the synoptics. Already in the ministry of Jesus, the final
judgment is taking place. Those who hear Him in faith receive the kind
of life which will culminate in resurrection, while those who reject Him
place themselves under the judgment of ultimate divine rejection.
The life which the Son in His role as Son of Man imparts to the dead
comes to Him from the Father. Both Father and Son possess eternal life
in themselves, i.e., as a personal prerogative. The life in question consists
of the divine “breath (pneuma without the article)” which the Holy Breath,
whom Father and Son will together send, will impart to those who be-
lieve. (Jn 3:6, 14:15-24, 16:7)
The Father, then, establishes the Son as judge by empowering Him to
impart divine life to those who believe in Him and to withhold it from
those who reject Him. The full extent of this judicial authority will ap-
pear at the final resurrection when the dead will rise at Jesus’ voice. The
good will rise as a consequence of the saving gift of life He imparts to
them. The evil will rise to judgment.26
The first section of the discourse closes with a Biblical inclusion, as
Jesus repeats the same idea which opened the discourse: namely, Jesus
protests again that He does nothing of Himself but only what He sees the
Father doing. By the end of the first section of the discourse, however,
26. Cf. Joachim Wanke, “Die Zukunft des Glaubenden: Theologische Erwägungen zur
Johannischen Eschatologie,” Theologie und Glaube, 71(1981), pp. 129-139; Ray
Summers, “The Johannine View of Future Life,” Review and Expositor, 58(1961), pp.
331-347; Gustav Stählin, “Zum Problem der johanneischen Eschatologie,” Zeitschrift
für die Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 33(1934), pp. 225-259; C.F.D. Moule, “A
Neglected Factor in the Interpretation of Johannine Eschatology” in Studies in John
(Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1970), pp. 155-160; M.-E. Boismard, O.P., “Evolution du thème
eschatologique dans les traditions johanniques,” Revue Biblique, 68(1961), pp. 507-524.
Jesus has made it clear that His obedient imitation of the Father includes
not only His sabbath cures but also the greater works of raising the dead
and judging the world.
As the fourth gospel unfolds, the preceding theological themes surface
again and again in Jesus’ teachings concerning His relationship to the
Father. The Johannine Jesus never tires of repeating that His obediential
relationship to the Father reveals His real identity with the Father and
empowers Him, in the Father’s name, to judge the world and raise the
dead, even though in His first coming—i.e., in His incarnation—He
comes to save, not to judge, the world. (Cf. Jn 6:36-40; 7:16-7; 8:26,
28-9, 48-51, 55-58; 13:27-28; 12:44-50)
The second section of Jesus’ discourse on His sabbath healing also di-
vides into two parts. In the first subsection, Jesus constructs a forensic
argument to justify the truth of what He has just said. In the second
subsection, Jesus attacks the persistent unbelief of His adversaries by ap-
pealing to three witnesses whose testimony by Mosaic law establishes ju-
ridically the truth of His testimony: John the Baptizer, the Father, and
Moses. The second part of the discourse relates to the first by naming the
witnesses who will testify against unbelievers on the last day just as they
have testified on Jesus’ behalf during His ministry.
Jesus concedes that if He alone were to make the claims He has just
made, His adversaries could legitimately question the truth of what He
says. Citing Dt 19:15, however, Jesus argues forensically that the concor-
dant testimony of three witnesses suffices to establish its truth. Jesus then
names the three other witnesses who testify to Him.
Jesus first appeals to the witness of John the Baptizer and then to the
Father’s witness. The Father witnesses to Jesus by empowering the signs
He does. The fact that Jesus’ enemies fail to credit the Father’s testimony
manifests that they have neither heard the Father’s voice nor seen what
He looks like; nor do they possess His word in their hearts.
Again the book of Deuteronomy provides the background for Jesus’
words. (Dt 4:12-15) Deuteronomy states that in the revelation at Sinai
the people heard God’s voice even though they did not see Him. Jesus,
however, charges that His adversaries neither hear nor see God, because
they give no sign of cherishing His word in their hearts. If they had heard
God speaking, they would now acknowledge that Jesus speaks in the
Father’s name; and they would put faith in both Jesus and His word. (Jn
5:31-8)
Finally, Jesus explicitly cites the word of the Scriptures as the third
witness which testifies in His behalf. The Jews cling to the Scriptures,
especially to the Mosaic Law, as the life-giving word of God; but, if they
really believed the testimony of the Torah, they would recognize that it
gives life by pointing to Jesus as the source of that life. The fact that “the
Jews” refuse to come to Him in faith to receive the gift of life shows that
they do not in fact believe the testimony of the Scriptures. (Jn 5:39-40)
The second part of the second section of the discourse expands the
charge against Jesus’ enemies. They lack not only faith but love in their
hearts. The love in question has two possible meanings, probably both
intended. Jesus’ enemies neither imitate God’s love for humans, nor do
they love God in His own right. If they did love God, they would recog-
nize that Jesus shares in the very glory of the Father. Ironically, they ac-
cept readily enough the teachings of famous rabbis whom mere humans
praise; but they ignore the divine glory present in Jesus. They believe in
teachers who speak only in their own names and with human authority;
but they refuse to heed Jesus who speaks in the Father’s name and with
divine authority. Jesus, however, does not seek their approbation for Him-
self but for the Father in whose name He speaks.
The discourse ends with the warning that the Father will have no need
to accuse His unbelieving adversaries of their lack of faith and love. Moses,
the lawgiver, in whom they place their religious hopes, will himself repu-
diate them and accuse them before God. Moses, who testifies to Jesus in
the Scriptures, will testify at the last judgment that Jesus’ enemies never
believed in the things which he, Moses, wrote, because in his writings
Moses foretold the coming of Jesus. When, however, Jesus came, His
fellow countrymen failed to believe Him.
This condemnation of “the Jews” goes beyond anything one finds in
the synoptic tradition. As we shall see, however, the term “the Jews” takes
on negative connotations in John only when it connotes unbelief. In the
end, unbelief, not Jewishness, makes one an adversary of God.27
The bread-of-life discourse continues the diatribe against “the Jews’”
unbelief; but the bread-of-life discourse focuses on their refusal to accept
the life-giving bread of wisdom Jesus offers them. They also refuse to
acknowledge the eucharist as His body and blood. Moreover, as the dis-
course develops, it becomes clear that “the Jews” on this occasion include
also some of Jesus’ unbelieving disciples.
Commentary on John, I, pp. 239-267; John Bligh, S.J., “Jesus in Jerusalem,” Heythrop
Journal, 4(1963), pp. 115-134. In Jn 7:22-23 the evangelist again returns to Jesus’
sabbath healing. In the arguments which heat up during the feast of Tabernacles, Jesus
justifies His right to heal on the sabbath by appealing to the fact that circumcision could
occur on the sabbath. Circumcision in Jewish tradition makes the male child perfect
and whole by conforming him to Abraham, whom God urged to perfection. Despite
circumcision, the crippled man whom Jesus healed lacked wholeness. Jesus argues that
in healing him, He, Jesus, made the cripple whole in a way which parallels but even goes
beyond circumcision. See: J. Duncan M. Derrett, “Circumcision and Perfection: A
Johannine Equation (Jn 7:22-23),” Evangelical Quarterly, 63(1991), pp. 211-224.
The discourse opens with a dialogue between Jesus and the crowds
whom He fed in the desert. They had responded inappropriately to the
miracle by seeking to make Jesus king. When they seek Jesus out after the
miracle, He chides them once again for their unbelief:
I solemnly assure you, you seek me, not because you saw signs, but be-
cause you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not labor for the food which
perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of
Man will give you; for on Him God the Father has set His seal. (Jn 6:26-27)
Jesus’ sealing by the Father has received three different interpretations.

Some see it as an act of divine consecration, perhaps for sacrifice. Other’s
see the seal as a reference to the fact that Jesus images the Father: a seal
impresses upon wax the image which it bears. A seal on a letter or docu-
ment, however, also certifies the origin or source of the document, its
official sender. Jesus’ sealing by the Father, in this sense, probably refers
to the Father’s authentication of Jesus’ ministry by testifying in the signs
which Jesus works.
Once again, the evangelist might well have intended all three mean-
ings; but the crowd’s subsequent request that Jesus work a sign to move
them to faith favors the third interpretation. (Jn 6:30-1) So does Jesus’
insistence that the crowds recognize Him as sent by God. (Jn 6:29) More-
over, since Jesus’ sealing by the Father marks Him out as the source of
eternal life, Jesus’ sealing by the Father would also seem to include the
fact that He possesses and sends the Breath of God in eschatological abun-
dance.28 (Jn 1:33, 3:34-35)
When the crowd asks Jesus what “works of God” they should do as a
sign of their faith, Jesus replies: “This is the work of God: that you be-
lieve in Him whom He has sent.” (Jn 6:29) In the dispute between Pauline
and Jewish Christians on the relationship between faith and works, John
the evangelist claims the middle ground. The act of faith itself constitutes
a work pleasing to God.
Like both Paul and James, the Beloved Disciple sees faith as inherently
practical. Hence, Johannine faith and Christological knowing coincide,
since practical faith assimilates one to Jesus. The Beloved Disciple, how-
ever, develops the synoptic understanding of Christological knowing in
significant ways. The synoptics, as we have seen, tend to focus on the
moral consequences of commitment in faith to Jesus Christ, while as-
suming a creedal and liturgical context for Christian moral striving. Het-
erodoxy in the Johannine community, however, forced the Beloved Dis-
28. Cf. A. Feuillet, “Les thèmes bibliques majeurs du discours sur le pain de vie (Jn 6),”
Nouvelle Revue Théologique, 82(1960), pp. 803-822; B.J. Mahna, The Palestinian
Manna Tradition (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1968).
ciple to realize that doctrinal beliefs and beliefs about the meaning of
Christian worship give definitive shape to religious practice. As a conse-
quence, in the Johannine tradition, the deed of faith, what I have called
Christological knowing, encompasses not just Christian moral striving
but doctrinal assent as well. In Johannine theology, Christian orthopraxis
expands to include Christian orthodoxy. The deed of faith includes both
moral assimilation to Jesus and commitment to sound doctrinal inter-
pretations of both Jesus’ person and of the eucharistic worship which
nourishes Christian faith. Moreover, the Beloved Disciple insists on in-
terpreting both in thoroughly incarnational terms.29
The crowds react to this challenge with increasing hostility. They de-
mand that Jesus perform some sign which will justify their putting faith
in Him. They remind Jesus of the rabbinic belief that at the return of the
messiah, the manna, the heaven-sent bread which sustained the Israelites
in their desert wanderings and which ceased as soon as the Hebrews had
eaten the fruits of the promised land, would once again fall from heaven.
(Cf. Ex 16:4-36; Jos 5:12-13) In effect, then, the crowds are saying that,
if Jesus can make manna fall from the sky, they will consider believing in
His messianic identity. By making this demand, the crowds sin by “test-
ing God,” by setting the conditions which God must meet before they
will believe.30 (Jn 6:30-1)
Jesus replies by questioning the presupposition which underlies the
crowd’s request. In expecting that the messiah will cause bread to rain
from heaven, they misinterpret the Scripture. The messiah will not make
bread rain from heaven any more than Moses did. Only the Father gives
the true bread from heaven; and it gives life to the world. (Jn 6:32-3)
When the crowds ask Jesus for the gift of this life-giving bread, He
replies:
I am the bread of life; the one who comes to Me shall not hunger, and the
one who believes in Me shall never thirst. But I have said to you that you
have seen me and yet do not believe. All that the Father gives me will come
to me; and the one who comes to me I will not cast out. For I have come
down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of Him who sent
me, that I should lose nothing of everything which He has given me, but
raise it up on the last day. For this is the will of my Father, that every one
who sees the Son and believes in Him should have eternal life; and I will
raise him up on the last day. (Jn 6:35-40)
29. Cf. Roland Bergmeier, “Glaube und Werk: die ‘Werke Gottes’ in Damaskusschrift
II, 14-15 und Johannes 6, 28-29,” Revue de Qumran, 6(1967-1969), pp. 251-260.
30. Cf. M.J.J. Menken, “The Provenance and Meaning of the Old Testament Quotation
in John 6:31,” Novum Testamentum, 30(1988), pp. 39-56.
The bread of life gives life. In claiming to embody that bread and to
have the power to slake every human thirst, Jesus in His own way echoes
the words of divine Wisdom in the book of Ben Sirah. (Si 24:21) His
words also recall Is 49:10, which predicts that in the second exodus, in
the return from exile in Babylon, the people of God will know neither
hunger or thirst. Jesus, then, is claiming to embody at one and the same
time both the bread of divine wisdom and the way-bread of a new exo-
dus.
In the bread-of-life discourse, Jesus’ obedience to the Father expands to
include His willingness to welcome all those whom the Father gives Him.
In portraying the Father as the ultimate efficacious source of faith in
Jesus, the fourth evangelist explains what it means for the Father to dis-
pense bread from heaven: through the enlightenment of faith the Father
teaches believers to feed on Jesus as the bread of wisdom.
When the Jews murmur against Jesus in unbelief, He rebukes them
and repeats what He has just said: “No one can come to Me unless the
Father who sent Me draws him. And I shall raise him up on the last day.”
(Jn 6:44) Jesus then goes on to contrast knowledge of the Father through
faith with His own knowledge of the Father which results from face-to-face
vision:
It is written in the prophets, “And they shall be taught of God.” Everyone

who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. Not that anyone
has seen the Father except Him who is from God; He has seen the Father.
I solemnly assure you, the one who believes in Me has eternal life. I am the
bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the desert and died. This is the
bread which comes down from heaven, that one may eat it and not die.
(Jn 6:41-9)
Jesus interprets the Father’s action in leading believers to consent to

Him in faith as a fulfillment of the prophecy of Deutero-Isaiah that, in
the new Jerusalem, God would instruct the people personally. (Is 54:13)
Then Jesus immediately contrasts the knowledge of God which faith yields
with His own immediate and privileged knowledge of the Father. The
Father functions as the ultimate source of Jesus’ mission to save the world.
Jesus’ mission from the Father connotes His pre-existence with the Fa-
ther. The Son enjoys privileged, immediate knowledge of the Father be-
cause prior to His incarnation He lived in the immediate presence of the
Father.31
Jesus then returns to the theme of manna: to feed on Him in faith as
the bread of wisdom provides a messianic bread far superior to the kind
of manna which the crowds had demanded, more than a mere renewal of
31. Cf. A. Feuillet, “Les thèmes bibliques majeurs du discours sur le pain de vie,” Nouvelle
Revue Théologique, 82(1960), pp. 918-939.
the ancient manna. The ancient manna had no power to impart immor-
tality. Those who feed on Jesus in faith will never die because the Father
has appointed Him as the unique channel of imperishable, risen life. This
passage provides a rhetorical transition to the second, eucharistic section
of the Bread-of-life discourse.
In the first part of the discourse, to eat the bread of wisdom means to
acknowledge Jesus’ mission from the Father and eternal co-existence with
Him. In the second part of the discourse, the bread of wisdom trans-
forms itself into the eucharistic bread. In the second part of the discourse,
eating the bread of wisdom means to “eat the flesh of the Son of Man and
to drink His blood.” Eucharistic faith defines the condition for final res-
urrection, and the acceptance of Jesus as the personal incarnation of di-
vine Wisdom defines the content of eucharistic faith. In other words, a
thoroughly incarnational faith in Jesus also affirms His real eucharistic
presence. (Jn 6:52-4) Jesus concludes:
The one who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me and I in
him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so the
one who eats Me will live because of Me. This is the bread which came
down from heaven, not such as the fathers ate and died; the one who eats
this bread will live for ever. (Jn 6:56-58)
The eucharist imparts unending life because it causes the mutual ind-
welling of Jesus and those who feed upon Him eucharistically in faith.
That indwelling creates a bond between Jesus and those who feed on
Him, a bond which imitates the bond between Jesus and the Father. Jesus’
very mission into the world by the Father reveals that He draws His life
from the Father. In an analogous way those who feed on Him
eucharistically in faith will draw their life from Him. In the Bread-of-life
discourse, unending life means transforming, risen life. (Jn 6:44) Those,
then, who live with the life which eucharistic communion with Jesus
imparts will live forever because they will one day share in His resurrec-
tion. Eucharistic communion imparts, then, a down-payment on resur-
rection. Finally, verse 65 makes it clear that, just as the Father teaches
people to feed on Jesus as the Bread of wisdom, so too the Father func-
tions as the ultimate source of eucharistic faith in Jesus.32 (Jn 6:65)
Commentary on John, I, pp. 269-308; Peder Borgen, Bread from Heaven: An Exegetical
Study of the Concept of Manna in the Gospel of John and the Writings of Philo (Leiden:
E.J. Brill, 1965); A. Feuillet, “Les thèmes bibliques majeurs du discours sur le pain de
vie (Jn 6),” Nouvelle Revue Théologique, 82(1960), pp. 1039-1062; Edward Kilmartin,
S.J., “Liturgical Influence in John 6,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 22(1960), pp.
183-191; Xavier Leon-Dufour, S.J., “Le mystère du pain de vie,” Recherches de Science
Religieuse, 46(1958), pp. 481-523; Ulrich Wilckens, “Der eucharistische Abschnitt der
Johanneischen Rede von Lebensbrot (Joh 6:51-58)” in Neues Testament und Kirche,
In the fourth gospel, during the feasts of Tabernacles and Dedication,

the struggle between the light and the darkness intensifies. Tabernacles
celebrated the harvest; Dedication recalled the reconsecration of the temple
by Judas Maccabaeus. The Beloved Disciple situates the intensified struggle
between light an darkness during Tabernacles because its ceremonials in-
cluded, among other things, the illumination of the streets of Jerusalem
at night with flaming torches. As they close in combat, the forces of light
and the forces of darkness reveal their true identities with greater clarity.
Early in the embittered debates which mark Tabernacles, Jesus claims
that His teaching comes to Him directly from the Father. When Jesus’
adversaries marvel at His learning even though He has never had the
benefit of formal rabbinic training, Jesus replies:
My teaching is not Mine, but His who sent Me; if any one’s will is to do
His will, he shall know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am
speaking on My own authority. One who speaks on His own authority
seeks his own glory; but one who seeks the glory of him who sent him is
true, and in him there is no falsehood. Did not Moses give you the Law?
Yet none of you keeps the Law. Why do you seek to kill Me? (Jn 7:16-19)
Once again we find ourselves on familiar ground (Cf Jn 5:41-47). Jesus

derives His teaching, not from rabbis, but directly from the Father who
sent Him. In teaching as He does, Jesus obeys the Father. Those then
who desire to obey the Father will spontaneously recognize that Jesus’
teaching comes from God. Far from obeying the Law of God, however,
Jesus’ enemies betray their malice of will by plotting His murder.
The evangelist strikes a new note, however, when he observes that Jesus
does not seek praise, approval, or adulation for Himself but only for the
Father whose message He brings. Jesus’ self-effacement in seeking the
Father’s glory at the risk of His own life manifests that in claiming divine
Sonship He does not teach out of motives of selfish self-glorification. On
the contrary, in bearing witness to the Father Jesus risks violent death at
the hands of His enemies. That Jesus would continue to speak at such
personal risk manifests the selflessness with which He teaches and invites
edited by Joachim Glinka (Herder: Freiburg, 1974), pp. 220-248; Raymond E. Brown,
S.S., “The Eucharist and Baptism in John” in New Testament Essays (Milwaukee, WI:
Bruce, 1965), pp. 77-95; G.H.C. Macgregor, “The Eucharist in the Fourth Gospel,”
New Testament Studies, 9(1962-1963), pp. 111-119; Oscar S. Brooks, “The Johannine
Eucharist: Another Interpretation,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 82(1963), pp.
293-300; J.M. Thompson, “The Interpretation of John VI,” The Expositor, 11(1916),
pp. 337- 348; Barnabas Lindars, S.S.F., “Word and Sacrament in the Fourth Gospel,”
Scottish Journal of Theology, 29(1976), 49-63; John M. Perry, “The Evolution of the
Johannine Eucharist,” New Testament Studies, 39(1993), pp. 22-35; Eduard Schweizer,
“Joh 6, 51c-58—vom Evangelisten übernommene Tradition?” Zeitschrift für die
Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 82(1991), p. 274.
faith in those to whom He preaches. By the same token, Jesus’ actual

death embodies the ultimate certification of the selfless truth with which
He speaks.
Jesus’ teachings at Tabernacles repeat themes from the discourse fol-
lowing the cure of the paralytic at the pool of Bethsaida. Now, however,
they begin to reveal Jesus as the light of the world by developing and
deepening earlier themes. The light is growing. As the light shines more
brightly, the darkness simultaneously intensifies, exposed in all of its de-
structive malice by the light. The enemies of Jesus begin to betray their
violence of heart, even though they hypocritically deny it. Despite lip
service to Moses and the Law, their sinful disobedience to God makes
them lust for Jesus’ blood. Their malice contrasts with the selflessness
with which Jesus obediently proclaims His relationship to the Father.
While Jesus’ enemies plot His death, He willingly puts His life on the line for
the sake of the Father and in order to reveal the Father’s glory. As the struggle
between light and darkness intensifies, the two begin to separate.33
As in the discourse after His sabbath healing, Jesus, during the feast of
Tabernacles, again appeals to the Father’s testimony:
Even if I do bear witness to Myself, my testimony is true, for I know where

I have come from and to where I am going, but you do not know where I
come from or to where I am going. You judge according to the flesh, I
judge no one. Yet even if I do judge, my judgment is true, for it is not I
alone who judge, but I and He who sent me. In your Law it is written that
the testimony of two men is true; I bear witness to Myself, and the Father
who sent Me bears witness to Me. (Jn 8:14-17)
The passage repeats some familiar themes: 1) The truth of Jesus’ testi-
mony roots itself ultimately in His pre-existence with the Father from
whom He comes and to whom He returns. 2) His adversaries fail to
receive His testimony about His relationship to the Father because they
judge according to the flesh, by weak and fallible human standards. 3)
Jesus does not come to pass judgment on anyone. As we have seen, He
seeks instead to save the world. The same passage also says something
new: even were Jesus to judge the world, He would judge truly because
the Father ratifies His judgment on human sinfulness.34
As the struggle between light and darkness intensifies, the adversaries
of Jesus betray the fact that they do not know the Father. They do so by
asking Jesus, “Where is your Father?” Their question only dramatizes the
truth of what Jesus has just said, namely, that His adversaries have no clue
33. Cf. Johannes Mehlmann, O.S.B., “Propheta a Moyse promissus in Jo 7, 52 citatus,”
Verbum Domini, 44(1966), pp. 79-88.
34. Cf. Jean Pierre Charlier, O.P., “L’exegèse johannique d’un précepte légal, Jean VIII,
17,” Revue Biblique, 67(1960), pp. 503-515.
about where He comes from or where He is going. If they did, they would
know the Father who sends Jesus and recognize where to find the Father.
With the intensified struggle, the Light too shines more brightly. Jesus
begins His final testimony on the feast of Tabernacles by declaring: “I am
the light of the world. No follower of mine shall ever walk in darkness;
no, he will possess the light of life.” (Jn 8:12) This declaration clearly
alludes to the prologue of the gospel and begins in earnest to describe
how the light succeeds in shining despite darkness’s attempt to quench it.
(Jn 1:4-5) Moreover, as the dispute with the unbelieving “Jews” unfolds,
Jesus makes it clear that those who walk in the light confess His divinity.
Jesus has already alluded once to His return to the Father. He does so a
second time by saying: “I am going away and you will look for Me; but
you will die in your sin. Where I am going, you cannot come.” (Jn 8:21)
Hypocritically, His adversaries suggest that Jesus must be contemplating sui-
cide to talk about “going away.” (Jn 8:22) In fact, they themselves desire to
kill Him. Jesus, for His part, is alluding to His approaching martyrdom.
Deceit and incomprehension force Jesus to clarify the nature of His
relationship to the Father:
You belong to what is below, I belong to what is above, you belong to this
world—this world to which I do not belong. That is why I have told you
that you would die in your sins. Unless you believe that I AM, you will
surely die in your sins. (Jn 8:23-24)
As we have seen, in their account of Jesus’ walking on the water after

the second multiplication of loaves, both Mark and Matthew have Jesus
invoke the divine name—“I AM (ego eimi)”—as a narrative strategy for
transforming the miracle into a theophany which manifests His divinity.
(Mk 6:30; Mt 14:27) The fourth evangelist uses the same event as one of
the “signs” which precede the bread-of-life discourse. (Jn 6:19) In the
fourth gospel, Jesus has, then, already manifested His divinity to His
disciples. Now as the struggle between light and dark intensifies, He pro-
claims it boldly to the His adversaries.
Jesus, however, expects no response of faith to this proclamation. (Cf.
Jn 2:23-25) He recognizes the gulf which separates Him from unbeliev-
ers. They belong not simply to the realm of flesh, which the incarnate
Son of God has freely entered (Jn 1:14), but also to “the world,” to the
realm dominated and ruled by Satan. Jesus’ adversaries have already mani-
fested their Satanic affiliations by their murderous intent, by their unbe-
lief, and by their hypocritical lack of repentance. Jesus, for His part, even
though He comes to save the world, distances Himself utterly from the
world in its sinfulness. At the same time, He names the condition which
His Adversaries must meet if they hope to pass from the realm of dark-
ness to the realm of light: they must confess His divinity.
The warning, however, meets only with incomprehension. Jesus’ hos-

tile interlocutors ask Jesus, “Who, then, are you?” (Jn 8:25) Jesus replies:
Even what I told you from the beginning. I have many things to say about
you and condemn. But the one who sent me is true; and I speak to the
world the things which I have heard from Him. (Jn 8:26)
By their stubborn unbelief Jesus’ adversaries stand under the divine judg-
ment for their refusal to see the light shining in their midst. Jesus could,
then, pass judgment on them but refrains, since the Father has sent Him
to save rather than to condemn. He keeps repeating His message obedi-
ently to the world, despite its sinfulness and unbelief.
The crowds, however, persist in missing Jesus’ point.They do not even
understand that, when Jesus speaks of “the one who sent me,” He is actu-
ally talking about the Father. The obtuseness of the crowds manifests that
they ignore utterly Jesus’ heavenly origin. Jesus, realizing their lack of
faith, then says:
When you will have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I
AM and that I do nothing on My own initiative. No, I say only those
things which the Father taught Me. And the One who sent Me is with Me.
He has not left me alone, since I always do what pleases Him. (Jn 8:28-29)
In the final redaction of the fourth gospel, Jesus, in His conversation

with Nichodemus, has already alluded to His being “lifted up.”35 (Jn
3:14-5) On that occasion, Jesus had indicated its purpose: His elevation
in suffering and in glory would happen so that people could look to Him
with the eyes of faith and believe. Jesus now supplies the content of that
saving faith: it must acknowledge Jesus’ divinity, His identity with the
Father whose divine name He shares. Jesus also asserts here with greater
clarity than heretofore that his obediential relationship to the Father to
which He has repeatedly alluded actually manifests His divinity, His di-
vine identity with the Father.36
This time Jesus’ words seem to evoke a measure of consent from His
hearers. It will, however, soon become clear that the “believers” also refuse
to confess Jesus’ divinity. These half-believing disciples probably envisage
a faction among the evangelist’s adversaries who acknowledged Jesus as a
teacher or even as a prophetic teacher but drew the line at confessing His
35. In the original gospel, the Nichodemus incident probably followed the debates at
Tabernacles.
36. Cf. Geraldo Morujao, “A Unidade de Jesús com o pai em Jo 10,30,”Estudios Biblicos,
47(1989), pp. 47-64; Johannes Reidl, “Wehn ihr den Menschensohn erhoht habt,
werdet ihr erkennen (Joh 8, 28)” in Jesus und der Menschensohn (Freiburg: Herder,
1975), pp. 355-370.
divinity. Their lack of faith joins them to other unbelievers who reject
Jesus’ divinity. The separation of the light from the darkness now deep-
ens the division within the Johannine community which the bread-of-life
discourse began.
Jesus begins to instruct those who profess to believe in Him by setting
down the conditions for authentic discipleship:
If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the
truth, and truth will set you free. (Jn 8:31-2)
Those who abide in Jesus not only believe in Him but obey His com-
mandments as well. As we shall see, in the last discourse, those who abide
in Jesus bear abundant fruit. They draw their life from Him as branches
from the vine. They escape judgment. They live in the assurance that the
Father will hear and answer their prayers. (Cf. Jn 15:1-8)
The “believing” Jews, however, immediately make it clear that they
have no intention of abiding in Jesus. They do so by taking immediate
issue with what He has just said. They protest that they descend from
Abraham and have never lived as slaves to anyone. Their response sug-
gests that racial pride prevents them from hearing Jesus’ message of re-
pentance. The false disciples also confuse the slavery to sin of which Jesus
speaks with political and economic slavery. Hence, they fail to grasp what
Jesus means by abiding in His word: namely, that those who abide in His
word eschew sin. (Cf. Mt 3:8-9; Lk 3:7-8)
Jesus clarifies the kind of enslavement of which He speaks. He replies
that all those who sin suffer sin’s enslavement, an enslavement from which
only the Son of God can free them. Moreover, in freeing them He can
empower them to live as legitimate children of the Father, something a
slave of sin cannot do. Jesus can do this because He enjoys a privileged
kind of Sonship, a privileged relationship to the Father. (Jn 8:34-6)
Instead of rejecting their racial pride, Jesus’ interlocutors cling stub-
bornly to it. Their refusal to hear Jesus’ summons to repentance focuses
the rest of the dialogue on the question of fatherhood: the unbelieving
Jews claim first Abraham, then God Himself, as their Father; but they
cannot recognize in Jesus the one who reveals God as Father. Hence, by
their unrepentant lack of faith they finally reveal themselves as the chil-
dren, not of God, but of Satan.37
37. Cf. Henri van den Bussche, “Leur écriture et son enseignement: Jean 7.14-36,” Revue
Biblique, 72(1966), pp. 21-30; C.W.F. Smith, “Tabernacles in the Fourth Gospel and
Mark,” New Testament Studies, 9(1962-1963), pp. 130-146; Erich Grasser, “Die Juden
als Teufelssohne in Johannes 8, 37-47” in Antijüdaismus im Neuen Testament?, edited
by W. Eckert et al. (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1967), pp. 157-170; Nils Dahl, “Der
Erstgeborene Satans und der Vater des Teufels” in Apophorata, edited by W. Eltester
(Berlin: Töpelmann, 1964), pp. 69-84; Theo Preiss, “Aramasches in Joh. 8, 30-36,”
Theologische Zeitschrift, 3(1947), pp. 78-80.
In this final exchange during the feast of Tabernacles, the reposts occur
with greater and greater rapidity and hostility. In the course of the rapid-fire
exchange, Jesus’ enemies move from verbal hostility to attempted murder.
First, Jesus challenges His hearers’ racial pride by insisting that true
descent from Abraham must transcend mere physical generation. True
children of Abraham live by faith as Abraham did. Instead, Jesus’ enemies
refuse to consent to the word of God, a word which Jesus has received
from God Himself. Abraham by contrast heeded God’s word and did not
seek to murder those who proclaim it.
By imitating their father, the false disciples reveal their and his true
identity, much as Jesus reveals His Father by imitating Him obediently.
The false disciples descend from Satan, who from the beginning mur-
dered and lied. Satan lied in tempting Adam and Eve to sin. He mur-
dered in bringing death into the world. (Gen 2:15-17, 3:1-19) Jesus’ en-
emies slander Him and seek His death. Jesus, for His part, reveals His
true origin by the perfection of His obedience to the Father. The way one
lives, then, reveals one’s true origin. (Jn 8:39-44)
While boasting of having both Abraham and God as their father, Jesus’
enemies reject, revile, and insult Him. They ridicule His claim to have
God as His Father by questioning the legitimacy of His own birth. (Jn
8:41) Then they call Him a Samaritan and question His sanity. (Jn 8:48)
The epithet “Samaritan” not only expresses contempt but implies hetero-
doxy as well. (Jn 8:41) These accusations may well echo debates between
the Johannine community and its adversaries concerning Jesus’ identity.
Jesus replies:
I am not demented, but I do honor my Father while you fail to honor Me.
I do not seek glory for Myself; there is One who does seek it and He passes
judgment. I solemnly assure you, if anyone keeps my word, he shall never
see death. (Jn 8:48-51)
Jesus has already proclaimed repeatedly that He seeks not His glory but
the Father’s. He has repeatedly warned His adversaries that persistent
unbelief and sin will place them under God’s judgment. Here, however,
He sounds a new note. If Jesus does not seek His own glory, the Father
does. If then the Father seeks to glorify the Son, His enemies only betray
their ignorance of the Father by insulting and vilifying His Son. Jesus
therefore warns His adversaries to reflect that the Father will in this dis-
pute have the final word and will ensure the Son’s ultimate glorification.
(Cf. Jn 13:31)
When, however, Jesus promises that those who keep His word will never
see death, His enemies ridicule His claim as proof of His insanity. Since
Abraham and the prophets all died, Jesus in claiming to liberate His dis-
ciples from death must lay claim to a greater importance and dignity
than they. (Jn 8:52-53)
Jesus replies:
If I glorify Myself, My glory amounts to nothing. The One who glorifies

Me is the Father, whom you claim as “our God,” even though you do not
know Him. But I do know Him; and, if I say I do not know Him, I will be
like you: a liar. But I do know Him, and I keep His word. Your father
Abraham rejoiced at the prospect of seeing my day. When he saw it, he was
glad. (Jn 8:54-56)
The opposition between Jesus and His adversaries has reached a climax.
The Father seeks to glorify the Son, who alone knows Him and speaks
the truth about Him; but Jesus’ enemies reject and revile Him. Their
rejection of the Son whom the Father sent demonstrates their ignorance
of the Father Himself, whom they hypocritically claim to worship as God.
Were Jesus for His part to deny the truth of His message about the Fa-
ther, He would have to deny the Father, lie, and claim Satan as His Fa-
ther. Instead Jesus abides in His knowledge of the Father and obediently
keeps His word.
How did Abraham see Jesus’ day? In Jn 12:41, the evangelist, referring
to the prophet Isaiah’s inaugural vision, says that the prophet witnessed
the glory of Jesus. In other words, the Beloved Disciple views all manifes-
tations of the divine glory in the history of Israel as proleptic revelations
of the glory of the risen Christ. A similar notion probably grounds the
assertion that Abraham saw Jesus’ day.
Rabbinic teaching transformed into a laugh of joy Abraham’s scornful
laugh in Genesis at the idea of his becoming a father in his and Sarah’s old
age. (Cf. Gen 17:17) Moreover, the book of Jubilees (xvi 17-9) portrays
both Abraham and Sarah rejoicing at the divine promise that the chosen
people will descend from Isaac. The miraculous birth of Isaac foreshad-
ows the full revelation of God’s saving power in Jesus. Abraham’s joy at
Isaac’s birth perceives, then, in anticipation the “day” of Jesus and the
salvation which He brings.
When Jesus’ adversaries object: “You are not even fifty years old. How
can you have seen Abraham?” Jesus replies with a third solemn proclama-
tion of His divinity: “I solemnly assure you, before Abraham even came
to exist I AM.” (Jn 8:57) Jesus’ enemies finally realize that, in invoking
the divine name, He is claiming equal and eternal coexistence with God.
(Cf. Jn 1:1) Suddenly, the murderous violence in their hearts erupts and
they pick up stones to execute Him for blasphemy. Jesus, however, eludes
them.
From the evangelist’s standpoint, the violent attack on Jesus reveals His
adversaries’ true identity. They belong to the forces of darkness, the forces
of violence and of unbelief. The light, however, continues to shine in the

darkness; for Jesus, undaunted, boldly proclaims His divinity and
co-equality with the Father. Moreover, the darkness cannot quench the
light, because Jesus escapes from His murderers’ hands. In the resurrec-
tion He will also confound those who kill Him when He returns in risen
glory.38
The embittered debates at the feast of Tabernacles culminate in Jesus’
cure of the man born blind as a sign that He is indeed the light of the
world, as he has just claimed. (Cf. Jn 8:12) In the story of the cure one
finds several references to “God” which in their own way underscore some
of the points made about Jesus’ relationship to God the Father in the
course of the debates which precede the miracle.
When the disciples see the man born blind they ask Jesus whether the
man’s blindness results from a sin of his parents or from his own sinful-
ness. Jesus rejects the notion that physical suffering always results from
sin. Jesus says:
It was no sin on this man’s part, nor on his parents’ part. Rather, it was to
let God’s works be revealed in him. We must work the works of Him who
sent Me while it is day. Night is coming when no one can work. As long as
I am in the world, I am the light of the world. (Jn 9:1-5)
Instead of resulting from sin, the man’s blindness has a saving purpose.
It will allow God to perform “works” in him. Jesus has already made it
clear that all who come to Him in faith do so because the Father draws
them. In consequence of His cure at Jesus hands, the blind man will grow
in the enlightenment of faith. He will see deeper and deeper into the
person of Jesus. In speaking of the works the Father intends to accom-
plish in the blind man, Jesus refers, then, not only to his physical cure but
also and especially to the work of faith which the Father will accomplish
in Him. These works which the Father performs in and through Jesus
manifest that the Father has sent the Son into the world as its saving
light. Jesus’ own approaching passion will bring on the night when no
one can work. (Cf. Jn 13:30) Before darkness falls, however, Jesus must
reveal His identity as Light of the world by healing the blind man and
drawing Him to faith.
Commentary on John, II, pp. 5-32; Johannes Schneider, “Zum Komposition von Joh
7,” Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 45(1954), pp. 108-119; J. Blank,
Schriftanlegung in Theorie und Praxis (Munich: Kösel Verlag, 1969), pp. 207-220;
Horacio E. Lona, Abraham in Johannes 8: Ein Beitrag zur Methodenfrage (Bern:Herbert
Lang, 1976); M.J. Edwards, “‘Not Yet Fifty Years Old: John 8:57,” New Testament
Studies, 40(1994), pp. 449-454.
The divine origin of Jesus’ power to heal constitutes the central issue
between the cured blind man and the Pharisees who cross examine him.
The Pharisees begin by insisting that no one who violates the sabbath as
Jesus has in curing the cripple at the pool of Bethsaida can come “from
God.” (Jn 9:16) Jesus’ sabbath cure of the cripple also surfaced as an issue
in the debate between Him and “the Jews” which has just concluded. (Jn
7:21-24) As we have seen, in the fourth gospel Jesus’ sabbath cures in
John reveal Him as the Father’s chosen instrument for judging the unbe-
lieving. The Pharisees who cross-examine the blind man remain them-
selves blind to the meaning of Jesus’ sabbath healings. Their unbelief
places them under the judgment of God because in their intransigence
they persist in passing false judgment on Jesus. (Cf. Jn 7:24) Like Pilate
and the chief priests in Jesus’ trial, the Pharisees in judging the blind man
find themselves judged by Jesus in virtue of their unbelief. The blind
man, however, knows better. He makes his first step in faith when he
acknowledges Jesus as a prophet, as one who does indeed come from
God.39 (Jn 9:17)
In their second examination of the blind man, the Pharisees challenge
the cured blind man to “give glory to God” by confessing that Jesus is in
fact a sinner. The blind man at first professes ignorance of whether or not
Jesus is a sinner and repeats doggedly that he knows only that though
born blind he now sees. (Jn 9:24-5) As the cross examination proceeds,
however, the Pharisees accuse the cured blind man of being a disciple of
Jesus. At this the blind man confesses that, if Jesus had sinned, God would
not have worked the blind man’s cure through Him. At this confession of
faith, the Pharisees (anachronistically) expel the blind man from the syna-
gogue. (Jn 9:30-34)
Prior to passing judgment on the blind man, the Pharisees make their
own profession of faith: “We are disciples of Moses. We know that God
has spoken through Moses, but we don’t even know where this man comes
from.” (Jn 9:28b-29) We find here another tacit reference to the cure of
the cripple at Bethsaida and to the discourse which follows it. In that
discourse, Jesus invoked Moses as one of those who testify to Him and to
the truth of what He teaches. Jesus also insisted that those who believe
Moses will also believe in Him. (Jn 5:45-47)
Now the Pharisees manifest their hypocrisy by invoking the authority
of Moses while refusing to believe in Jesus. They ironically confess their
lack of faith by admitting their ignorance of Jesus’ origins. The reader, of
course, knows that Jesus comes from God.
As in the debate during Tabernacles which has just concluded (Jn
18:12-59), the discussion between the Pharisees and the cured blind man
39. Cf. Ernst Bammel, “Johannes 9.17,” New Testament Studies, 40(1994), pp. 455-456.
focuses on Jesus’ origin. In acknowledging Jesus as one who proceeds

from God, the cured blind man functions in the story as a type of the
disciple of Jesus who confesses Him fearlessly even though it means ex-
pulsion from the synagogue. (Cf. Jn 16:1-2)
Other images transform the cured blind man into a type of the dis-
ciple. At the end of John’s gospel, Jesus will send His disciples to testify to
Him in the power of the Breath. (Jn 20:19-23) That commissioning event
will reveal Jesus as Breath-baptizer. The fact, then, that Jesus cures the
blind man by sending Him to wash in the pool of Siloam, which means
“sent,” probably foreshadows Christian baptism, which incorporates be-
lievers into the apostles’ mission to bear witness to the risen Christ.
In some manuscripts, the encounter between Jesus and the blind man
after his expulsion from the synagogue culminates in the blind man con-
fessing faith in Jesus as the Son of Man. The blind man then bows down
to worship Him. (Jn 9:38) It seems likely, however, that some later redac-
tor added this verse to the story as a way of explicating the cured blind
man’s complete faith in Jesus.
Even without the added verse, however, the blind man clearly func-
tions in the story as a type of the believing disciple who escapes divine
judgment by his faith in Jesus. The Pharisees, by contrast, fall under God’s
judgment by hypocritically professing to believe in God at the same time
that they refuse to put faith in Jesus. Because of their unbelief they re-
main in their sins and will die in them.40 (Jn 9:39-41, cf. 8:24)
A discourse of Jesus in which He presents Himself as the good shep-
herd marks the transition from Tabernacles to the feast of Dedication.
The feast of Dedication celebrated the consecration of all the temples of
God in Israel’s history. Some evidence suggests that readings with pasto-
ral imagery marked the synagogue celebration of Dedication. During
Dedication, Jesus’ discourse develops the image of shepherd and applies
it to Himself.
In the fourth gospel, the events surrounding the feast of Dedication
call attention to the consequences of Israel’s rejecting Jesus as the light of
Commentary on John, II, pp. 33-42; J. Louis Martyn, History and Theology in the Fourth
Gospel (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1968), pp. 3-41; Calvin L. Porter, “John IX.
38, 39a: A Liturgical Addition to the Text,” New Testament Studies, 13(1966-1967),
pp. 387-394; Donatien Mollat, S.J., “Le guérison de l’aveugle-né,” Bible et Vie
Chrétienne, 23(1958), pp. 22- 31; John Bligh, “Four Studies in St. John, I: The Man
Born Blind,” Heythrop Journal, 7(1966), pp. 129-144; D. Bornhaeuser, “Meister, wer
hat gesuendight, dieser oder seine Eltern, dass he ist blind geboren? Joh. 9.2,” Neue
Kirchlische Zeitschrift, 38(1927), pp. 433-437; Mogens Mueller, “‘Have you Faith in
the Son of Man?’ (John 9.35),” New Testament Studies, 37(1991), pp. 291-294; J.M.
Lieu, “Blunders in the Johannine Tradition,” New Testament Studies, 34(1988), pp.
83-95.
the world: in repudiating Jesus, one repudiates the divine shepherd of

Israel Himself.
In presenting Himself as the good shepherd, Jesus makes several refer-
ences to His relationship to the Father. The image of the good shepherd
interweaves the themes of knowledge, obedience, and love. As the good
shepherd, Jesus knows His sheep and they Him with the same intimacy
as He and the Father know one another. (Jn 10:14-15)
As we have seen, however, Jesus knows the Father actively by imitating
Him with perfect obedience. Jesus’ obedience to the Father, therefore,
also includes the way He relates to His sheep: He lays down His life for
them in obedience to the Father, and takes it up again for their sake. As
we shall see, in the last discourse, Jesus will refer to His death for His
disciples as the supreme expression of His love for them. (Jn 15:12-13)
His death simultaneously expresses His perfect love and obedience to-
ward the Father. (Jn 14:31) The disciples will obey Jesus if they love one
another as He has loved them and willingly die for one another. (Jn
15:12-17)
The universality of the Father’s saving love appears in this, that Jesus
seeks ultimately to gather all people into His flock. (Jn 10:16) Moreover,
the Father endows Jesus’ death and resurrection with its universal saving
power and significance. (Jn 10:15, 17-18)
In the synoptic tradition, the Father raises Jesus from the dead. The
fourth evangelist, however, underscores the unity of Father and Son by
having the Father empower the Son to lay His own life down and take it
up again. As we have seen, in John, the operational unity of Father and
Son manifest their unity in being.41
Jesus’ speech on the feast of the Dedication interweaves the pastoral
image of the good shepherd with themes from the debate during the feast
of Tabernacles. Asked by the crowds to say plainly whether or not He
claims messianic identity, Jesus answers:
I did tell you, but you do not believe. The works which I am doing in My
Father’s name give testimony for me, but you refuse to believe because you
are not my sheep. My sheep hear my voice; and I know them, and they
follow Me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish. No one can
snatch them from my hand. My Father who gave them to me is greater
than all, and no one can wrest from My Father’s hand. I and the Father are
One. (Jn 10:25-30)
41. Cf. NJBC, 61:134-139; Brown, The Gospel of John, I, pp. 383-400; Louis T. Brodie,
“Creative Writing: Key to a New Methodology,” SBL Seminar Papers, edited by Paul
J. Achtmeier (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1978), vol. II, pp. 261-267; Jerome H.
Neyrey, “I Said: You are Gods: Ps 82:6 and John 10,” Journal of Biblical Literature,
108(1989), pp. 647- 663.
Familiar echoes from the discourse during Tabernacles include: 1) the

Father’s testimony to Jesus in the works He performs, 2) the persistent
unbelief of His adversaries, and 3) Jesus’ complete identity with the Fa-
ther.
Entwined with these themes, however, we find the following pastoral
images, which develop the parable of the good shepherd: 1) The intimate
cognitive relationship between shepherd and sheep manifests itself in the
sheep’s obedience to the shepherd. 2) The gift of eternal life demands
such obedience. 3) The unbreakable bond between shepherd and sheep
resists all hostility and opposition. 4) Jesus’ complete identity with the
Father whom no one ever overpowers or bests makes the bond between
shepherd and sheep unbreakable.42
Jesus’ claim to unity with God provokes the same reaction it did during
Tabernacles: the Jews pick up stones to execute Him for the sin of blas-
phemy. (Jn 10:31-3) Jesus refuses, however, to back down and again ap-
peals to the works the Father accomplishes through Him:
Is it not written in your Law, “I have said, ‘You are gods’?” If it calls “gods”
those to whom God’s word was directed, and Scripture cannot be annulled,
do you claim that I, whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world,
am blaspheming because I said: “I am Son of God”? If I do not do the
works of the Father, even if you do not believe Me, believe the works so
that you may come to know and understand that the Father is in Me and
I am in the Father. (Jn 10:34-38)
Jesus cites, not the Pentateuch, but the book of Psalms. Psalm 82:6
assimilates to God humans given power to pass judgment over other per-
sons. The psalm in fact castigates false judges by reminding them of their
mortality.
In citing Psalm 82, Jesus seems on first reading to gloss over the differ-
ence between the psalm’s metaphorical use of the word “gods” and the
literal sense in which He claims divine Sonship through His identity with
the Father. In fact, however, Jesus is arguing from the lesser to the greater.
If the psalm can call even fallible human judges “gods” in a metaphorical
sense, then the one through whom God has chosen to execute judgment
over the entire world can claim the title “Son of God” in a transcendent
sense.
42. Cf. J. Duncan M. Derrett, “The Good Shepherd: St. John’s Use of Jewish Halakah
and Haggadah,” Studia Theologica, 27(1973), pp. 25-50; Otfried Hofius, “Die
Sammlung der Herden zum Herde Israels (Joh 10.16-11.51f),” Zeitschrift für die
Neutestamentalische Wissenschaft, 58(1967), pp. 289-291; Gilbert Becquent, “Jésus,
bon pasteur, donne vie à une nouvelle communauté,” Esprit et Vie, 16(1970), pp.
241-242; J. Edgar Burns, “The Discourse on the Good Shepherd and the Rite of
Ordination,” American Ecclesiastical Review, 149(1963), pp. 386-391.
The Father’s consecration of Jesus fulfills the meaning of the feast of

Dedication, which commemorated the reconsecration of the Temple by
Judas Maccabeus after its profanation by the Syrians. The term “conse-
crated” also alludes to Jesus’ priestly consecration as Temple and victim
in His own passion.43 (Jn 17:19)
The book of signs ends as Jesus moves inexorably toward His “hour.”
The raising of Lazarus sets the stage for the final confrontation between
Jesus and His enemies by consolidating the hatred of the chief priests
against Him. The raising of Lazarus reveals Jesus as the resurrection and
the life. (Jn 11:25-26) The chief priests in condemning the source of
resurrection illegally to death refuse to acknowledge the truth which the
raising of Lazarus reveals. (Jn 11:26)
Jesus proclaims that Lazarus’s sickness will not end in death but will
instead glorify both God and God’s Son. (Jn 11:4) Still Jesus delays going
to Lazarus’s bedside, with the result that Lazarus dies before He arrives in
Bethany. (Jn 11:11-15)
When Martha comes out to greet Jesus on His arrival, she says: “Lord,
if you had been here, my brother would not have died. Even now, I am
sure that whatever you ask of God, God will give you.” (Jn 11:22)
Throughout the incident Martha functions as the woman of imperfect
faith who recognizes Jesus’ special relationship to the Father and con-
fesses His messianic authority but fails to grasp the full mystery of His
person.
Despite her messianic faith in Jesus, for example, Martha fails to com-
prehend the full extent of Jesus’ power to raise people from the dead. (Jn
11:25) When Jesus orders the stone which closes Lazarus’s tomb rolled
back, Martha objects that, with the decomposition of the body after four
days, there will be a stench. Martha’s remark betrays the imperfection of
her faith, but it also draws dramatic attention to the full scope of the
miracle Jesus will soon perform. As a sign of His power to raise the dead,
Jesus will even restore life to a rotting corpse.
Jesus assures Martha: “Didn’t I assure you that if you believed, you
would see the glory of God?” (Jn 11:38b-40) As we have seen, the ac-
count of the raising of Lazarus begins with Jesus’ promise to the disciples
that Lazarus’s illness will in the end glorify God. The two references to
God’s glory function as a Biblical inclusion. They also underscore the
Commentary on John, II, pp. 43-52; James S. Ackerman, “The Rabbinic Interpretation
of Psalm 82 and the Gospel of John,” Harvard Theological Review, 59(1966), pp.
186-191; J.A. Emerton, “Melchizedek and the God: Fresh Evidence for the Jewish
Background of John x. 34-36,” Journal of Theological Studies, 17(1966), pp. 399-401;
Anthony Hansen, “John’s Citation of Psalm LXXXII,” New Testament Studies,
11(1964-1965), pp. 158-162; “John’s Citation of Psalm LXXXII Reconsidered,” New
Testament Studies, 13(1966-1967), pp. 363-367.
purpose of the miracle. The raising of Lazarus glorifies God by revealing

the Son of God as “the resurrection and life.” (Jn 11:25-26)
Jesus ensures that the Father will receive glory from the raising of Lazarus
by praying publicly to the Father before He performs the miracle:
Father, I thank you because You heard Me. Of course, I knew that you
always hear me, but I say it because of the crowd standing by, that they
may believe that You sent Me. (Jn 11:41-42)
The prayer also clarifies further the way in which the miracle will glorify
both God and Jesus: namely, by evoking from those who witness the
miracle a faith which recognizes in the raising of Lazarus the Father’s
testimony to the Son. The miracle testifies that He has constituted the
Son the privileged source of risen life to those who put their faith in
Him. The fact that the Father has already heard Jesus’ prayer endows the
miracle with inevitability.44
In the synoptic tradition, the Father testifies verbally to Jesus in His
baptismal commissioning and in the transfiguration. In the fourth gos-
pel, the Father, as we have seen, testifies to Jesus principally by empower-
ing His miracles, the signs which reveal the full reality of His person.
During Jesus’ final Jerusalem ministry, however, the Father also testifies
to Jesus verbally.
During Jesus’ final Jerusalem ministry, some Greek pilgrims to the feast
ask to see Jesus. We are dealing here with “God fearers,” or Gentiles who
had converted to Judaism. Jesus takes their request as a sign of the saving
efficacy of the death He will soon die. The desire of the Greeks to “see”
Jesus foreshadows the faith of the Gentiles who will believe in Him. The
incident probably alludes to Is 52:15 and implicitly portrays Jesus as the
suffering servant of Duetero-Isaiah.45
Jesus does not respond directly to the request of the Greeks. Instead,
He comments on the deeper meaning of their desire to “see” Him:
Commentary on John, II, pp. 53-72; Max Wilcox, “The ‘Prayer’ of Jesus in John
XI.41b-42,” New Testament Studies, 24(1977-1978), pp. 128-132; James P. Martin,
“History and Eschatology in the Lazarus Narrative,” Scottish Journal of Theology,
17(1964), pp. 332-343; W.H. Cadman, “The Raising of Lazarus,” Studia Evangelica,
I, (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1959), pp. 423-424; Brain McNeil, “The Raising of
Lazarus,” Downside Review, 92(1974), pp. 269-275; Francis J.Moloney, “The Faith of
Martha and Mary: A Narrative Approach to John,” Biblica, 75(1994), pp. 471-493;
Manuel Rodríguez-Ruiz, “Significado Christológico y Soteriológico de Jn 11, 25-27,”
Estudios Biblicos, 55(1997), pp. 199-222.
45. Cf. H.B. Kossen, “Who Were the Greeks of John XII, 20?” in Studies in John (Leiden:
Brill, 1970), pp. 97-110; W.E. Moore, “Sir, We Wish to See Jesus: Was This a
Temptation?” Scottish Journal of Theology, 20(1967), pp. 75-95; Johannes Beutler, S.J.,
“Greeks Come to See Jesus,” Biblica, 71(1990), pp. 333-347.
The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. I solemnly assure
you, unless the grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains only a
single grain; but, if it dies, it bears much fruit. The one who loves his life
destroys it; while the one who hates his life in this world preserves it to live
eternally. If anyone would serve Me, let him follow Me, and where I am,
my servant will also be. The Father will honor anyone who serves me. (Jn
12:23-26)
In referring to His “hour,” Jesus alludes to the paschal mystery, the time
for His being lifted upon in suffering and in glory. Jesus foresees the
enormous fruit which will result from His death and glorification: namely,
the conversion of the Gentiles, the gathering into His fold of the “other
sheep” for whom He yearns.
Jesus also contrasts a life lived in egotistical self-love with His own will-
ingness to lay down His life in selfless obedience to the Father. The selfish
egotist ends by destroying the life he so jealously seeks to foster and pro-
tect. Jesus by contrast in dying will indeed preserve eternally not only His
own life but will also empower all those who believe in Him to do the
same.
The disciples will manifest that they possesses eternal life just as Jesus
does, if they exhibit the willingness to live and die with the same kind of
selfless love as Jesus exemplifies. (Cf. Jn 15:12-17) Those who serve Jesus
imitate Him as He imitates the Father: they stand by Him and share in
His passion so that they can also join Him in His glory. (Jn 14:1-3,
15:13-16:4) The Father honors those who truly serve Jesus by imitating
Him. The Father does so by insuring that they share in Jesus’ risen glory.46
Jesus, however, suddenly experiences dismay at the ordeal of suffering
which faces Him:
Now my soul is troubled. Yet what should I say: “Father, save me from this
hour?” No, this is just the reason why I came into the world. Father glorify
Your name!” (Jn 12:27-28)
The fourth gospel makes no mention of Jesus’ agony in Gethsemane,

although, as we shall see, Jesus’ question to Peter in the garden, “Shall I
not drink the cup the Father has given me?” does echo Jesus’ prayer in the
garden which the synoptic evangelists record. (Mt 26:39; Mk 14:36; Lk
22:42) Jesus’ expression of dismay at His approaching ordeal marks the
fourth evangelist’s closest approach to the synoptic Jesus’ prayer in
Gethsemane. In voicing His dismay, the Johannine Jesus insists once again
that the incarnation happened for no other reason than that Jesus be
lifted up in both suffering and glory. Jesus’ insistence places the paschal
46. Cf. Aemelius Rasco, S.J., “Christus, granum frumenti,” Verbum Domini, 37(1959),
pp. 12- 35, 65-77.
mystery at the heart of the incarnation. Moreover, Jesus overcomes His

dismay by surrendering in obedience to the Father. “Father, glorify Your
name!” means the same as “Your will be done.”47 (Mt 26:42)
The Father responds to Jesus’ prayer by publicly testifying to the Son.
A voice from heaven proclaims: “I have glorified it and will glorify it
again.” (Jn 12:28) The first personal pronoun in the voice’s statement
identifies it as the Father’s voice. As we have seen, in the synoptics, the
Father’s voice proclaims Jesus messianic Son of God in the image of the
suffering servant. In the fourth gospel, the voice insists on the typically
Johannine theme that both the passion and resurrection count as a single
saving act which reveals the divine glory.
The Father’s voice alludes both to Jesus’ exalted dignity and to His
approaching passion. In the synoptic tradition the Father’s voice desig-
nates Jesus as beloved Son of God, messiah, and suffering servant. In an
analogous manner, the Father’s voice in the fourth gospel first responds
to Jesus’ dismay by assuring Him that He, the Father, has already glori-
fied the Son’s name. This the Father has accomplished in the signs through
which He has testified to the truth of Jesus’ message. The Father then
assures the Son that He will also glorify Him in the future: both in His
passion and in His resurrection, which will bring to its culmination the
revelation of divine glory already disclosed in Jesus’ ministry.48 (Cf. Jn
13:31-32)
The unbelieving crowds, misunderstand the voice. Some dismiss it as
thunder, while others think that an angel has spoken to Jesus.49 (Jn 12:29)
The Book of Signs ends with a summary evaluation of Jesus’ ministry
to His own people and with a summary proclamation of His message to
them. In it the Beloved Disciple ponders the reasons for Jesus’ rejection
by His people and the saving significance of His person and message.
The evangelist cites two Old Testament texts in order to explain the
unbelief which greeted Jesus’ testimony to the Jews: Is 53:1 and Is 6:9-10.
The first citation asks why the chosen people as a whole failed to put
faith in Jesus. The second assimilates Him to the prophet Isaiah, whose
47. Cf. Xavier Léon-Dufour, “‘Père, fais-moi passer sain et soif à travers cette heure’ (Jn
12, 27)” in Neues Testament und Geschichte, edited by H. Ballensweiler and Bo Reicke
(Zürich: Theologische Verlag, 1972), pp. 157-165; Henri van den Bussce, “Si, le grain
de blé ne tombe en terre....(Jean 12, 20-39),” Bible et Vie Chrétienne, 5(1954), pp.
53-67.
48. Cf. Charles C.Torrey, “‘When I am Lifted Up from the Earth’ John 12,32,” Journal
of Biblical Literature, 51(1932), pp. 320-322; Ignace de la Potterie, S.J., “L’exaltation
du Fils de l’homme (Jn 12, 31-36),” Gergorianum, 49(1968), pp. 460-478; George B.
Caird, “Judgment and Salvation: An Exposition of John 12:31-32,” Canadian Journal
of Theology, 2 (1956), pp. 231-237.
Commentary on John, II, pp. 95-99.
message too was destined to go unheeded until divine retribution de-

stroyed the kingdom of Judah. (Jn 12:37-42)
One finds Is 6:9-10 cited in all the gospels as an explanation of the
failure of the Jewish people as a whole to respond to Jesus and His mes-
sage. (Cf. Mk 4:12; Mt 13:13-5; Lk 8:10) The synoptic tradition, follow-
ing Mark, uses the text to explain why Jesus spoke in parables. Instead of
using parables, the Johannine Jesus talks constantly and explicitly to the
vacillating and unbelieving crowds about His relationship to the Father.
Moreover, the fourth evangelist attributes the unbelief which Jesus’ teach-
ing receives to His enemies’ violence of heart and hypocrisy.
The evangelist ends the book of signs by lamenting the fact that many
Jews, even members of the ruling class, believed in Jesus secretly; but, for
fear of being expelled from the synagogue by the Pharisees, they failed to
confess their faith openly. The evangelist’s lament indulges in anachro-
nism. The Beloved Disciple retrojects his community’s expulsion from
the synagogue back to the time of Jesus’ ministry. At the time of Jesus,
the Pharisees had no authority to expel anyone from the synagogue. Even
less could they have expelled those “in authority.” Here, the Beloved Dis-
ciple rebukes crypto-Christians in the Jewish community of his own day
who refused to profess Jesus publicly for fear of expulsion from the syna-
gogue. (Cf. Jn 9:22)
In assessing the reluctance of crypto-Christians to acknowledge openly
their faith in Jesus, the evangelist notes ruefully: “They preferred the praise
(doxa) of humans more than the glory (doxa) of God.” (Jn 12:42-43) The
evangelist puns on the Greek word “doxa.” Instead of confessing the di-
vine glory (doxa) revealed in Jesus, those who refuse to profess their faith
in Him openly settle for mere human approval (doxa).50
After the evangelist’s assessment of Jewish unbelief, the Johannine Jesus
recapitulates the divinely revealed doctrines which will save those who
openly confess them. The same doctrines will stand in judgment over
those who refuse to believe. (Jn 12:44-50)
Jesus makes the following doctrinal points: 1) Those who believe in
Him believe in the Father who sent Him. (Jn 13:20; cf. Mt 10:41) 2)
Anyone who sees Jesus with the eyes of faith sees the Father also. (Jn
8:19; 14:7-9) 3) Jesus comes into the world in order to dispel its darkness
and in order to save the world. One need only confess Jesus as the light of
the world in order to escape the darkness of unbelief and sin. (Jn 1:3-9,
8:12-26) 4) Anyone who does put faith in Jesus escapes the judgment of
God. (Jn 3:16-8) 5) Those who refuse to put faith in Jesus stand con-
demned by the word He has spoken to them and by their own refusal to
believe. (Jn 3:18-21, 8:37-47) 6) Jesus speaks with perfect obedience only
50. Cf. M.J.J. Menken, “Die Form des Zitats aus Jes 6,10 in Joh 12,40,” Biblische
Zeitschrift, 32(1988), pp. 189-209.
what the Father tells Him to speak. (Jn 14:10) 7) Jesus obeys the Father’s
command by speaking what the Father tells Him to speak because He
knows that the Father’s message brings eternal life to those who hear it.
(Jn 6:63) Jesus’ reference to the Father’s commandment alludes to the
book of Deuteronomy 18:18-19, which prophesies the coming of a
prophet like Moses who will tell Israel whatever God commands Him.
The summary repetition of these familiar Johannine themes illustrates
the central place which Jesus’ relationship to the Father occupies in the
Beloved Disciple’s theological vision.51
The Father in Jesus “Hour”

In the fourth gospel, the Book of Glory narrates the story of Jesus’ “hour,”
the process by which He passes “from this world to the Father.” The
passion belongs in the Book of Glory because in Johannine theology it
too reveals the glory of God by disclosing Jesus finally and fully as the
divine bridegroom whose love leads him to lay down His very life for His
disciples in obedience to the Father’s will. (Jn 13:1-2)
Luke as we have seen records a brief discourse of Jesus at the last sup-
per. It numbers among the shorter discourses in Luke and pales by com-
parison with the journey discourse. Nothing in the synoptic tradition,
however, resembles the prolonged discourse to the disciples which John
records. The synoptic gospels all testify that Jesus during His public min-
istry gave instructions to His disciples about the moral demands of life in
the kingdom. The synoptics even suggest that He may have concentrated
His attention on them as He saw death approach. In the fourth gospel,
however, Jesus spends most of His public ministry upbraiding unbeliev-
ing Jews for refusing to acknowledge His pre-existence and equality with
the Father. John’s Jesus makes occasional remarks to His disciples during
His public ministry; but He addresses only one major discourse to the
disciples as such, namely, His last discourse. That Jesus would have waited
until He stood on the threshold of death in order to catechize His own
disciples lacks historical verisimilitude. The fact, however that the fourth
evangelist locates most of Jesus’ instructions to His disciples within the
Book of Glory underscores the eschatological character of discipleship.
We shall reflect on these issues in more detail in a subsequent chapter.
In its present form the last discourse gives internal evidence of consid-
erable redaction. In its original form the discourse probably ended with
Jesus’ command to leave the cenacle. (Jn 14:31) In its present form, how-
ever, the discourse continues for three more chapters. Later redactors have
expanded the original discourse itself with other sayings of Jesus. In the
course of the enitre discourse, Jesus speaks frequently of the Father.
At the beginning of the discourse, Jesus enunciates the fundamental

theme of the Book of Glory:
Now has the Son of Man been glorified, and God has been glorified in
Him. [If God has been glorified in Him,] God will in turn glorify Him in
Himself and will glorify Him immediately. (Jn 13:31-32)
Jesus announces that His passion marks the hour of His and of the Father’s
glorification. God in the passion reveals His glory in the Son through the
Son’s obedient death on the cross out of love for the Father.
Jesus speaks of His own passion in the past (aorist) tense and of the
resurrection and His eschatological glorification “in Himself ” in the fu-
ture tense. (Cf. Jn 12:28) The tense shift sharpens the distinction be-
tween the revelation of Jesus’ glory in His ministry and passion, on the
one hand, and its full revelation in His resurrection. The use of the past
tense also transforms the passion into a fait accompli.
Later in the last discourse, Jesus will enjoin the disciples to keep the
commands which He has given them. (Jn 14:15) Those commands in-
clude the disciples’ willingness to trust in the Father despite Jesus’ depar-
ture from them. They must have faith in the Father just as they have
placed their faith in Jesus Himself. (Jn 14:1; cf. Mk 11:22-24)
The trust which the disciples must place in Jesus has a strong
eschatological flavor. They must trust that, in leaving them, Jesus is actu-
ally going to prepare a “dwelling place (mone)” for them in His Father’s
house. The disciples must believe that the Father’s house has ample room
for all believers. (Jn 14:2-4) In describing heaven as a house with ample
room for all those who believe in Him, Jesus endows heaven with a cer-
tain intimacy. To dwell with Jesus in the Father’s house also connotes, of
course, life without end. In addition, the disciples must trust in Jesus’
eventual return in order to take them to dwell with Him in the Father’s
house. In speaking of His return, Jesus refers to the parousia, to His final
coming as eschatological judge. Dwelling with Jesus in the Father’s house
also alludes to the evangelist’s theology of mutual indwelling.
When Jesus assures the disciples that they know the way by which He
is going, the puzzled Thomas objects that they know neither where He is
going nor the way which leads there. (Jn 14:5) Thomas’s obtuseness forces
Jesus to respond:
I am the way and the truth and the life: no one comes to the Father except
through Me. If you knew me, you would recognize my Father too. From
now on you do know Him and have seen Him. (Jn 14:6-7; cf. Jn 10:1-5)
The first Christians, as we have already seen, originally called Christian-

ity “the way.” Here Jesus embodies the way to the Father, because, in
virtue of His identity with the Father, He reveals the Father in a privi-
leged manner.
“The truth” and “the life” clarify the manner in which Jesus functions
as “the way.” Jesus incarnates the truth about God, saving truth. He does
so both because of His identification with the Father and because of His
perfect obedience in teaching and doing everything which the Father has
commanded Him. The disciples will know the truth Jesus reveals by as-
similation to Him as the way. In other words, the Johannine tradition,
like the synoptic tradition, regards practical assimilation to Jesus as the
only genuine “way” to know Him in faith.
Truth and life coincide in Johannine theology. (Jn 1:4) In other words,
the life which Jesus communicates includes saving enlightenment. More-
over, in virtue of His identity with the Father, Jesus embodies divine life,
life itself. Hence, as we have seen, the life which He gives, the living water
of the Breath, slakes human thirst for eternal life. (Jn 3:14, 7:18-19,
20:22-23) The Breath’s enlightenment also inspires and empowers prac-
tical knowledge of the Father through assimilation to Jesus.52
Philip misses the point of Jesus’ statement that the disciples have al-
ready seen the Father and tells Jesus that, if He will only show them the
Father, they will rest content. (Jn 14:8) Jesus replies with the reproachful
question: “Philip, am I with you all this time, and you still do not know
me?”
Jesus now repeats for the disciples’ benefit many of the things He has
already said in His final summary statement at the end of the Book of
Signs. (Jn 12:44-50) 1) Anyone who sees Jesus sees the Father because
He and the Father exist in one another. (Jn 14:9-10; cf. 1:18, 12:45) 2)
The Father’s existence in Jesus manifests itself in the fact that He speaks
to them the words which the Father causes Him to speak. (Jn 14:10; cf.
12:49) 3) The disciples must believe in the mutual inexistence of Son
and Father, if not on the basis of the Son’s words then on the basis of the
works, the signs, which the Father accomplishes in the Son. (Jn 14:11; cf.
10:38) Jesus’ works manifest the dynamic, mutual indwelling of Father
and Son.
As this point, however, Jesus strikes a new note. He promises that,
because He is going to the Father, one who believes in Him will perform
even greater works than Jesus Himself. Prayer to Jesus and the invocation
of His name will effect the signs which the disciples will work. In other
words, Jesus’ presence with the Father in heaven will manifest the fact
that He shares personally the Father’s power to work miracles by empow-
ering the manifold signs which His disciples will work in their turn. By
52. Cf. Ignace de la Potterie, “‘Je suis la Voie, la Verité et la Vie’ (Jn 14,6),” Nouvelle Revue
Théologique, 88(1966), pp. 907-942; Rudolf Schnackenburg, “Johannes 14:7” in
Studies in New Testament Language and Text (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1976), pp. 345-356.
answering prayers made in the Son’s name, the Father too will manifest
His own glory, but “in the Son” through whom He acts. The diffusion of
Jesus’ miraculous powers throughout the community could conceivably
make their witness “greater” than His.53
Once again, the fourth evangelist conceives the mutual indwelling of
Son and Father in efficacious, dynamic terms. The Son has the power to
do whatever the disciples ask and will in fact answer any prayer they
make. The fact that the Son empowers the disciples to do what the Father
empowers Him to do manifests the mutual indwelling of the Father and
Son. It does so because Father and Son act simultaneously and effica-
ciously in responding to the disciples’ prayers which they offer in Jesus’
name. Jesus’ promise testifies to the revelatory significance which answered
prayer in Jesus’ name enjoyed in the Johannine community. (Jn 14:12-13)
Jesus makes another momentous promise: If the disciples obey His com-
mandments, He will ask the Father to send them “another witness (allon
parakleton)” like Jesus Himself. We shall reflect on the meaning of the
term “parakletos” in reflecting on Jesus’ relationship to the divine Breath.
Here it suffices to note that after Jesus returns to the Father, the “other
witness,” whom the Father will send the disciples, will abide thereafter
with them. Because the Father sends the “other witness” in response to
the Son’s prayer, Father and Son function as Her co-senders. (Jn 14:15-16)
Jesus then assures the disciples that, even if at present they do not fully
understand what Jesus means when He speaks of the mutual inexistence
of the Father and the Son, they will understand when He returns to them
in risen glory. (Jn 14:18-20) When the risen Christ confronts the dis-
ciples on Easter day, He will in fact impart to them the “other witness,”
the Holy Breath. (Jn 20:22-23)
The risen glory of Jesus’ resurrection manifests His divinity. It there-
fore reveals that the Father dwells in the Son and He in the Father. In
Johannine theology that mutual indwelling expresses the identity of life
which the Father and Son share. Moreover, the Beloved Disciple sees an
important link between resurrection and mutual indwelling. The resur-
rection will manifest that the Father acts efficaciously through the risen
Jesus in order to impart the Breath to the disciples. Because only God
sends God, Jesus’ co-sending of the Breath manifests Jesus’ divinity, His
oneness with the Father. Hence, the resurrection also reveals the perfect
mutual indwelling of Father and Son.
The gift of the Breath will, in addition, also enable the disciples to
understand the mutual inexistence of Father and Son because possession
of the Breath will cause the disciples to exist in the Son and Him in them.
By experiencing their own existence in the Son and His presence in them
53. Cf. Victor Manuel Fernandez, “Hacer ‘Obras Mayores’ que las de Cristo (Juan
14:12-14),” Revista Biblica, 58(1995), pp. 65-91.
through the Breath’s indwelling, the disciples will begin to experience

personally how Father and Son dwell in one another.
Jesus, however, puts a condition on the sending of the “other witness”:
only those who live in faithful obedience to His commands by imitating
His own obedience to the Father will experience the coming of the “other
witness.” The disciples’ obedience will manifest their love of Jesus. The
Father will respond to such love on the disciples’ part by loving them in
turn. Jesus too promises to love the disciples for loving Him. Jesus will
reveal His love finally and fully to the disciples when He rises and com-
municates the Breath to them; for that gift will express the fullness of that
love. (Jn 14:20-21)
Since Father and Son dwell in one another, the existence of the dis-
ciples in the Son through the action of the Breath will also cause the
Father to exist in the disciples as well. Since the Breath abides as a perma-
nent gift, both Father and Son will dwell permanently in the disciples.
They will make their home in those who believe and whose faith mani-
fests itself practically in obedience to Jesus’ commands. (Jn 14:13)
In obeying the Son, the disciples also obey the Father, because the com-
mands the Son speaks have been communicated to Him by the Father.
Hence, obedience to the Son’s commands will please the Father and mo-
tivate His gift of the Breath to the disciples. (Jn 14:24)
As the last discourse in its original form draws to a close, Jesus reverts
to the theme of His return to the Father. Instead of feeling sadness be-
cause Jesus goes to the Father, the disciples ought to rejoice “because the
Father is greater than I (meizon mou).” (Jn 14:28) The term “greater”
envisages the Son’s obediential relationship to the Father. Hence, the fact
that the Son regards the Father as “greater” presupposes rather than de-
nies their perfect unity with one another, because, as we have seen, the
perfect indwelling of Father and Son manifests itself in the perfection of
the Son’s obedience to the Father.54 (Jn 14:31)
In the extended form of the last discourse as we now possess it, Jesus
compares the mutual indwelling of the Son and of His believing disciples
to the organic unity between a vine and its branches. The disciples must
dwell in Jesus as the branch unites itself to the vine. The vine animates
the branch. Hence, only by dwelling obediently in Jesus can the disciple
hope to bear any fruit. Without Jesus the vine, the branches, the dis-
ciples, wither and die. (Jn 15:4-5)
Since the vine in prophetic preaching and psalms symbolizes Israel,
Jesus in claiming to be “the true vine” identifies all those who dwell in
54. Cf. NJBC, 61:177-187; Brown, The Gospel of John, II, pp. 581-657; Hänchen,
Commentary on John, II, pp. 115-128; Charles Kingsley Barrett, “The Father is Greater
Than I” in Neues Testament und Kirche für Rudolf Schnackenburg, edited by J. Glinka
(Freiburg: Herder, 1974), pp. 144-159.
Him through faith as members of the true Israel, of the faithful remnant
who believe. (Jn 15:1; cf. Is 5:1-7; Jr 2:21; Ps 80:8-18) In this context
Jesus imagines the Father as the gardener who tends the vine. He cuts off
fruitless branches and burns them; and He prunes fruitful branches to
make them even more fruitful. (Jn 15:1-2)
One bears fruit by faith in Jesus and by fidelity to His commands.
Those who fail to believe and to obey place themselves, as we have seen,
under the judgment of God. Branches severed from the life-giving vine,
they wither. The flames into which the vine dresser casts the faithless and
disobedient symbolizes the holiness of God as a judgmental force which
consumes God’s enemies.
The Father prunes the branches which remain on the vine. He does so
by sending Jesus to instruct the disciples in the truth. Fidelity to Jesus’
teachings will therefore render the disciples fruitful.55 (Jn 15:2-3)
The disciples reveal the Father’s glory. They do so in three ways.
First, they manifest the Father’s glory when they abide in Jesus through
faith and through obedience to His commands. Mutual love in obedi-
ence to Jesus’ commandments more than anything else reveals the mu-
tual indwelling of Jesus and His disciples. At the same time, Jesus’ obedi-
ent love for the disciples manifests the Father’s own love for them, since
all Jesus does expresses His obediential relationship to the Father. The
loving mutual indwelling of Father and Son models for the disciples how
they should relate to one another by living in obedient union with the
Son. The disciples’ obedient love of the Son will, then, cause the Father’s
love to bear fruit in their own lives and thus manifest the divine glory. (Jn
15:8-10)
Second, the Father receives glory from the faith and obedient love of
the disciples in yet another way. In obeying Jesus’ commands, the dis-
ciples actually obey the Father because Jesus commands nothing He has
not learned from the Father. The disciples live as friends of Jesus when
they heed His commands. Through their faith and obedient love, they
prolong in space and time Jesus’ own mission by the Father. As Jesus’
obedient fulfillment of that mission glorified God, so too will theirs. (Jn
15:15-16)
Third, the Father also receives glory in the disciples by answering any
prayer made in Jesus’ name. The answered prayer manifests that the Fa-
ther and Son act as one. (Jn 15:16-17)
In summary then, love, obedience, and answered prayer all manifest
the Father’s glory in the disciples. The fact, then, that Jesus has called and
chosen the disciples to serve as the medium through which the Father’s
55. Cf. Jan G. Van der Watt, “‘Metaphorik’ in Joh 15,1-8,” Biblische Zeitschrift,
38(1994), pp. 67-80.
glory becomes historically manifest ought to fill them with the fullness of
joy. (Jn 15:11)
As branches on the vine of Christ pruned by His teachings, the dis-
ciples can expect to meet with hatred and hostility from the world, the
Satanic realm which hates both Jesus and the Father. The perfect mutual
indwelling of the Father and Son transforms hatred for the Son into ha-
tred for the Father. The world hates Jesus because He has proclaimed His
identity with the Father. The world, therefore, will also hate the disciples
for repeating that testimony. (Jn 15:22-24)
The risen Christ will send the Holy Breath, the “other witness,” in
order to empower the disciples to bear witness to Jesus in the midst of a
hostile world. She will come to them from both Jesus and the Father and
will therefore manifest Their joint presence in the disciples. The fact,
then, that the Holy Breath issues from the Father as Her ultimate source
means that She makes the Father present in the disciples in a manner
analogous to His presence in Jesus. The disciples must therefore antici-
pate that their witness to the indwelling of God will subject them to the
same hatred and hostility which the world has shown Jesus Himself. As
in the Jesus’ case, the violent persecution of His followers will manifest
the unbelief and murderous malice of the dark powers. (Jn 15:18-20,
26-7)
Despite the hostility of the world, the Holy Breath’s action in the dis-
ciples will manifest Jesus’ presence in them and the righteousness of His
cause by inspiring their fearless testimony to His unity with the Father.
(Jn 16:10) The “other witness” will ensure that the disciples’ testimony
expresses faithful obedience to Jesus, the same kind of obedience as Jesus
exhibited to the Father. In testifying to Jesus, then, the disciples will obey
both Son and Father; and that sinless obedience will vindicate the justice
(dikaiosounês) both of Jesus and of His cause. (Jn 16:14-15)
Like the first part of the last discourse, the second returns as it closes to
the theme of Jesus’ return to the Father. In treating of Jesus’ return, the
second part of the last discourse both repeats things already said and
embellishes them with new insights.
The disciples want to ask Jesus to clarify the meaning both of His im-
manent separation from them for a short time and of His return to the
Father; but the disciples fear exposing their own ignorance. (Jn 16:17-19)
Jesus answers their unspoken question by assuring them that they face a
time of extreme sorrow but that it will not last long. (Jn 16:20-21) Jesus
also assures them that the joy which they will experience when He re-
turns to them will give them full satisfaction. When that day comes, they
will know the Father with a new immediacy which will make it unneces-
sary for Jesus to speak about the Father in metaphors and figures of speech.
Their new intimacy with the Father will express itself in petitionary prayer;
and the Father’s unceasing response to prayers offered to Him in Jesus’

name will manifest the intimate love which the Father has for all those
who love the Son. This intimate experience of the Father’s generous love
will bring the disciples’ joy to its fullness. Indeed, efficacious use of peti-
tionary prayer will draw the disciples into Jesus’ own Abba experience.
(Jn 16:23-27)
As for His return to the Father, Jesus asserts that He is simply returning
to the same state of existence He had before He came into the world. (Jn
16:28) Moreover, Jesus assures the disciples that, even though they will
abandon Him in the ordeal He is about to face, the Father will not aban-
don Him. No suffering or trial should, then, cause the disciples to doubt
that even in His passion Jesus triumphs over the world.56 (Jn 16:31-32)
The last discourse closes with Jesus’ priestly prayer. In the prayer, Jesus
models for the disciples the kind of intimate relationship to the Father
which they will experience after Jesus’ resurrection and after the coming
of the Breath. At the same time, the prayer expresses the abiding love and
concern for the disciples which Jesus will continue to have for them after
He has left them. The priestly prayer also recapitulates many of the themes
which Jesus has developed during the last discourse: the Son’s glorifica-
tion in Himself, His revelation to the disciples of the truth the Father has
entrusted to Him, the world’s abiding hostility to Jesus and to His dis-
ciples. Finally, the evangelist names Jesus’ motive in praying the prayer:
as He moves on to the full revelation of His glory through His passion
and resurrection, Jesus desires to share with the disciples the fullness of
His joy. (Jn 17:3)
Jesus begins the prayer by begging the Father to reveal His glory in the
Son so that the Son in turn can glorify the Father by imparting to the
disciples eternal life. As we have seen, this He will do by communicating
to them the living water of the divine Breath. That gift will manifest itself
in the disciples’ faith and confession of Jesus as the one who reveals the
Father and thus makes the one true God present. (Jn 17:1-3) The Son’s
glory does not differ, then, from the Father’s but itself manifests the Father’s
glory in and through the gift of the Breath. Moreover, the manifestation
of the divine glory unites the disciples to God and so ensures their life
with God after death.
Through His obedient fulfillment of His mission from the Father, Jesus
has already glorified the Father on earth. The full revelation of His divine
glory in the paschal mystery develops, therefore, in continuity with the
divine glory already revealed in Jesus’ life, in His ministry, in His teach-
ing, and in the signs He has performed. During His ministry, Jesus has
glorified the Father by teaching the disciples to name the one true God as
their Father. This Jesus has accomplished by revealing His own identity
with the Father, by revealing that He shares the same divine name (“I
AM”) as the Father. The revelation of the Son’s divinity coincides, there-
fore, with the revelation of the creator God as Father. (Cf. Jn 8:28)
In Jesus’ revelation as Son, the Father takes an active role. He draws the
disciples to Jesus and gives them to Him as a gift. Through faith in Jesus
they have come to know the Father in two ways: 1) they recognize that
Jesus comes to them from the Father, and 2) they have accepted all He
has taught and revealed to them as also coming from the Father. (Jn 17:4-8)
Moreover, having glorified the Father in all these ways, Jesus now begs
the Father to manifest the glory which He possessed before He became
incarnate. (Jn 17:5) That manifestation includes not only Jesus’ resurrec-
tion but the disciple’s testimony to Him in the power of the Breath. Jesus,
therefore, prays to the Father for His disciples, because they will continue
to manifest the Son’s glory on earth after He departs from them. Indeed,
the Father has given the disciples to Jesus for the express purpose that
they prolong historically the revelation of the Son’s glory on earth. The
disciples belong to the Father; and for that reason the Father has the
power to give the disciples to the Son as His own. The disciples will
manifest the glory of Jesus by their fidelity to the God Jesus reveals and
by their faith in God as Father. They will also reveal Jesus’ glory by their
union with one another in faith, obedience, and love.57 (Jn 17:10-12)
The fact that the disciples belong to the Father and to Jesus sets them
apart from the world by translating them into the realm of obedient faith
and love. (Jn 17:9, 14, 16) Among the disciples only Judas has fallen
victim to Satan’s wiles and thrown his lot in with the world by betraying
Jesus; and even this happened in order to fulfill the scriptures. (Jn 17:12,
cf. 13:27) Having kept the rest of the disciples safe from the hostile world,
Jesus, as he departs, commends the disciples to the Father’s care, because
they must continue to live in the world and suffer its hostility. (Jn
17:13-16) John’s Jesus, then, anticipates an abiding hostility between His
disciples and the world; but even though the hostile world will resist
them in hatred, the disciples, like Jesus, need to persist in challenging it
to repentance and to faith in Him.
Jesus asks the Father to “consecrate” the disciples “in truth.” Consecra-
tion sanctifies: it sets aside created realities for God and for divine pur-
poses. The disciples will experience that sanctification only if they cling
to the truth of the word which Jesus embodies and proclaims. Indeed,
57. Cf. Wilhelm Thüsing, Die Erhöhung und Verherrlichung Jesu in Johannesevangelium
(Münster: Verlag Aschendorff, 1970); Joseph Huby, “Un double problème de critique
textuelle et d’intepretation: Saint Jean XVII 11, 12,” Recherches de Science Religieuse,
27(1937), pp. 408- 421.
that very truth sanctifies them and so consecrates them to God by draw-
ing them into Jesus’ passion. (Jn 17:17)
Having asked the Father to consecrate the disciples, Jesus then “conse-
crates Himself.” In what does this self-consecration consist? As the bearer
and embodiment of God’s sanctifying word, Jesus incarnates the holiness
He communicates to the disciples and in this sense enjoys a consecration
“in truth” similar to the consecration He begs for the disciples, though
superior to it. Jesus, however, also says that He consecrates Himself for
the sake of the disciples (hyper autôn). (Jn 17:18) He consecrates Himself
in the same way in which sacrificial victims underwent consecration prior
to their ritual slaughter. Jesus is, then, looking forward to His own death
as a redemptive sacrifice for the sake of the disciples. The revelation of
His glory on the cross, in His resurrection, and in sending of the Breath
will all consecrate the disciples in truth.
The two consecrations have, as a consequence, an intimate connection
with one another. Jesus’ loving sacrifice of Himself for the disciples will
reach its culmination when, as risen Lord, He commissions them to bear
witness in the Breath’s power to the same truth to which Jesus Himself
testified. The disciples will, then, experience their own consecration in
truth by witnessing to Jesus. Then, through the world’s hostile opposi-
tion to their testimony, they will find themselves drawn into Jesus’ aton-
ing death.58 (Jn 17:18-19)
Having described the mission of the disciples as their consecration “in
truth,” Jesus closes the priestly prayer by commending to the Father all
those who will believe because of the disciples’ witness of faith. More
specifically, Jesus prays that all those who come to believe in Him will
participate in the unity which results from the mutual indwelling of the
divine persons. Father and Son dwell in one another within the Godhead
and so share the same divinity and life. The unity of Christians with one
another in obedient faith and love, their mutual indwelling in commu-
nity, will, then, manifest that they also dwell in God and God in them.
(Jn 17:20-21)
The unity of the disciples with one another and with Father and Son
through the action of the indwelling Breath will challenge the world to
believe in Jesus and in His mission by the Father. It will do so because it
will make the divine glory visible. The disciples’ love for one another will
also reflect and manifest Jesus’ love for them, just as Jesus’ love for His
disciples manifests the Father’s own love in sending the Son. (Jn 17:22-23)
58. Cf. Andre Feuillet, The Priesthood of Christ and His Ministers, translated by Matthew
J. O’Connell (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975); Jean Delorme, “Sacerdoce du
Christ et ministère: (à propos de Jean 17) semantique et théologie biblique,” Recherches
de Science Religieuse, 62(1974), pp. 199-219; Jean Giblet, “Sanctifie-les dans la verité—
Jean 17:1-26,” Bible et Vie Chrétienne, 19(1957), pp. 58-73.
Finally, Jesus prays to the Father that all those who believe will one day
behold His divine glory face to face in heaven, the same glory which the
Son enjoys eternally as the Father’s gift. (Jn 17:24-25)
Clearly, for the fourth evangelist, the divine triad provides the proto-
type of all communal unity on earth. The mutual bond of love uniting
Christians causes them to dwell in one another in such a way as to unite
them perfectly and endow them with divine life and glory. The unity of
the Christian community in mutual love approximates the divine unity
because it results from God’s action in the community and imitates the
divine love and mutual indwelling of Father, Son, and Breath. While the
priestly prayer does not address the question of the institutional unity of
the visible Church, it does rule out any institutional divisions incompat-
ible with the perfection of love to which faith in Jesus summons believ-
ers.
Moreover, the evangelist clearly regards union with Jesus in heaven as a
direct result of the union the disciples have had with Him on earth. The
face-to-face vision of His glory will bring the inchoate union with Him
which believers enjoy in this life to its culmination and perfection.59
The priestly prayer ends with the following promise:
Righteous Father, the world has not known you; but I have known you
and these have known that you have sent me. I have made your name
known to them and will continue to make it known, so that the love with
which you loved me may be in them, and so that I may be in them. (Jn
17:25-26)
In the first letter of John, the righteousness of God stands revealed in

His power to forgive sin and to purify human conduct of any trace of
moral or religious defilement. (1 Jn 1:9) The righteousness of the Father
contrasts, then, with the sinful unbelief of the world. It also grounds the
obedient faith of the disciples. In bringing the disciples to faith and in
separating them from a sinful world through divine forgiveness, the Fa-
ther holds the initiative. In accepting Jesus as sent by the Father, the
disciples both acknowledge His divinity and confess that the Son’s revela-
tion as Son simultaneously reveals the Father as Father.
Jesus promises that He will continue to reveal the Father’s name to the
disciples. As we have already seen, the Holy Breath in Her function as
“another witness” like Jesus makes the risen Christ present in the com-
munity. The community will then continue to know the Father to the
extent that the activity of the indwelling, divine Breath causes them to
embody the same kind of filial relationship to the Father as Jesus did.
59. Cf. Mark L. Appold, The Oneness Motif in the Fourth Gospel (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr,
1976); Jean Cadier, “The Unity of the Church: An Exposition of John 17,” Interpre-
tation, 11(1957), pp. 166-176.
When they do that, then Jesus will indeed dwell in them and they in
Him. Moreover, just as the Son’s love for the Father responds to the Father’s
prior love, so too the community’s love for the Father will respond to the
Father’s prior gift of love in the Son and Breath. The same love which
binds the members of the divine triad to one another will bind the dis-
ciples to the Father by teaching them to incarnate Jesus’ own love. In
Johannine theology, love provides the key to Christological knowing.60
The Father in the Passion

Although Jesus has assured the disciples that the Father will remain with
Him in His passion, we find only one reference to the Father in the fourth
evangelist’s passion narrative. In the garden after Jesus’ arrest Peter cuts
off the right ear of Malchus, the servant of the high priest. Jesus rebukes
him: “Sheath your sword. Am I not to drink the cup the Father has given
me?” (Jn 18:11; cf. Mk 14:47, Mt 26:515; Lk 22:49-50)
As we have seen, the fourth evangelist in his concern to portray Jesus’
passion as the saving manifestation of His divine glory omits any shame-
ful details from his narrative which might derogate from that revelation.
After Jesus’ scourging, for example, the soldiers strike but do not degrade
Him with mockery and spittle. (Jn 19:1-3)
The fourth evangelist seems to have omitted the agony in the garden
for similar reasons. Any sign of weakness on Jesus’ part would call atten-
tion to His humanity rather than to the divine glory His suffering mani-
fests. As we have seen, however, Jesus’ words to Peter do echo His prayer
to the Father as we find it recorded in the synoptic tradition. In all four
gospels Jesus speaks of the cup of suffering which the Father asks Him to
drain. (Cf. Mk 14:36, Mt 26:39; Lk 22:42) Like Jesus’ prayer in the
synoptics, Jesus’ rebuke to Peter points to His death as the ultimate ex-
pression of His obedience to the Father.61 (Jn 18:1-12)
The Father in the Resurrection

When Jesus appears to the ten disciples in the upper room on the evening
of Easter Sunday, He invokes the Father’s name in imparting to the dis-
ciples the gift of the divine Breath.
“Peace to you,” he said to them again; “As the Father has sent Me, so I send
you.” And when He had said this, He breathed upon them with the words:
“Receive a sanctifying Breath. If you forgive others’ sins, their sins are for-
given; if you hold them bound, they are held bound.” (Jn 19:21-23)
61. Cf. NJBC, 61:208; Brown, The Gospel of John, II, pp. 805-818; Hänchen, Commen-
tary on John, II, pp. 160-174.
During the last discourse, Jesus has, as we have seen, promised to im-
part to His disciples an abiding peace which transcends anything which
the world can give. (Jn 14:27) Now as the risen Christ He fulfills that
promise through the gift of the sanctifying, sin-forgiving Breath. The
fact that the Breath comes in sanctification and in order to effect the
forgiveness of sins, manifests the righteousness of the Father. (Jn 18:25)
Ultimately, the Breath comes from the Father since She comes to the
disciples through the Son whom the Father sends. (Jn 14:25-26, 16:7,
13) Moreover, Jesus’ words make it clear that He sends the sin-forgiving
Breath to the disciples in order that they might prolong His own mission
from the Father.
The risen Christ retains the wounds of His passion, (Jn 20:20) His
death, resurrection, and mission of the Breath in other words, stand his-
torically revealed as a single, saving event which effects the forgiveness of
sins. A sinful humanity will, however, experience that forgiveness only
through faith in Jesus and through obedience to His commands. Unbe-
lievers and sinners remain bound by the judgment of God.62

The synoptic Jesus proclaims the reign of God; the Johannine Jesus men-
tions the kingdom only once during His public ministry, and then only
in private discourse. (Jn 3:3) In Johannine theology, the paschal mystery
reveals the kingdom and the full scope of Jesus’ divine messianic king-
ship. Focus on the paschal mystery and on the divine truths which it
discloses also colors the Beloved Disciple’s account of Jesus’ relationship
to the Father.
As we saw in volume two, the synoptic evangelists use a variety of nar-
rative and rhetorical strategies in order to assert Jesus’ divinity. In their
portrait of Jesus’ relationship to the Father, however, the synoptic gospels
stress the moral attitudes toward the Father which Jesus exemplifies for
the disciples’ imitation. In all three synoptics, Jesus relates to the Father
in perfect obedience, unconditioned trust, and all-consuming love. More-
over, the synoptic Jesus typically effaces Himself before the Father.
Obedience, trust, and love also characterize the Johannine Jesus’ rela-
tionship to the Father; but, unlike the Jesus of the synoptics, the Johannine
Jesus constantly harangues unbelieving Jews about His co-equality with
the Father. In virtue of His divine pre-existence with the Father, the Jesus
of the fourth gospel claims unique knowledge of the inner life of God
and of other heavenly goings-on.
The atemporal viewpoint from which the Johannine Jesus discourses
about His relationship to the Father enables the fourth evangelist to clarify
62. Cf. NJBC, 61:234; Brown, The Gospel of John, II, pp. 1018-1052; Hänchen,
the ontological character of that relationship in much greater detail than

the synoptics. Even in discoursing about Jesus’ eternal relationship to the
Father, however, the Beloved Disciple appeals to the shared faith experi-
ence of his community rather than to metaphysical a prioris, in the man-
ner of some of the fathers of the Church.
The Johannine doctrine of the mutual indwelling of the divine persons
illustrates what I mean. The Beloved Disciple appeals to the Christian
community’s experience of the indwelling of the risen Christ in them
through the power of His Breath in order to validate his claim that within
the Godhead Father and Son dwell in one another. In both cases, obedi-
ence and co-activity provide the key to understanding the meaning of
indwelling rather than abstract metaphysical concepts. Moreover, the ex-
perience of the disciples’ dwelling in the Son through the power of His
Breath engages the Johannine community’s confession of Jesus’ real eu-
charistic presence. The obedience of faith and the experience of shared
eucharistic worship, therefore, provide the experiential keys which un-
lock the Johannine notion of mutual indwelling.
In the same way, a Johannine theology of the divine glory appeals di-
rectly to the faith experience of the Johannine community. The commu-
nity participates in the glory of the risen Christ through proclaiming His
oneness to the Father. At least, the community does so when it makes
that proclamation with the same selfless dedication to revealed Truth as
Jesus Himself exemplified. The Father’s glorification of the Son for the
fidelity of His testimony to the Father transforms the Son into the
Breath-baptizer; and the Breath whom He imparts reveals Jesus’ glory by
inspiring the disciples’ faith-witness to His divinity.
In other words, despite the Beloved Disciple’s insistence on doctrinal
aspects of Jesus’ relationship to the Father, the evangelist, like the synoptics,
vindicates the inherently practical character of Christological knowing.
Jesus knows the Father lovingly and obedientially. The disciples must
learn in their turn to know both Jesus and the Father lovingly and
obedientially. The disciples know the Father through loving, obediential
assimilation to Jesus, especially in His witness to the Father.
The beleaguered state of the Johannine community: its expulsion from
the synagogue for heresy, its polemic confrontation with the Baptizer’s
disciples, its internal debate with the Christian dissidents all color the
dualistic rhetoric of Johannine soteriology. Crisis precludes compromise.
Hence, the Beloved Disciple describes his community’s confrontation with
hostile unbelief and with internal doctrinal dissension as the conflict be-
tween two irreconcilables: the light and the darkness. In that conflict,
however, the Father’s universal saving will mutes somewhat the
soteriological dualism. Despite the world’s sinful self-alliance with the
forces of darkness, the Father desires only to save it and reveals in Jesus
the universal scope of His saving intentions.
With all its doctrinal sophistication, therefore, the Beloved Disciple’s
theological account of Jesus’ relationship to the Father roots itself in the
experience of Christological knowing. One comes to know who Jesus is
and the nature of His relationship to the Father through practical assimi-
lation to Him in the power of His Breath. That assimilation transforms
one into a child of God in His image. In the fourth gospel, such practical
assimilation also includes the deed of faith.
Those who respond to the Breath of the risen Christ prolong Jesus’
saving mission to a sinful world and like Him serve paradoxically as in-
struments of God’s judgment. That negative judgment falls, however,
only on those who stubbornly sin against the light. By glorifying God in
their faithful witness to Jesus’ divinity, the disciples come to know who
Jesus is by imitating Jesus’ own faithful witness to the Father in obedi-
ence, trust, and love.
This section has dealt with the Beloved Disciple’s perception of the
relationship between Jesus and the Father. The section which follows ex-
amines His relationship to the divine Breath.
(III)
The fourth gospel refers more frequently to the Father than to the divine
Breath. Still, the Beloved Disciple develops a rich pneumatology.
Jesus and the Holy Breath

As in the synoptic gospels, John the Baptizer insists on Jesus’ superiority
to himself and on the superiority of Christian baptism to Johannine. (Jn
1:24-27) As we have seen, however, the forensic tone of the Johannine
narrative transforms the Baptizer into one of the witnesses whose testi-
mony helps establish legally the truth of Jesus’ own proclamation of the
Father. In the fourth gospel the Baptizer actually witnesses the descent of
the Breath on Jesus and testifies to it.
The fourth evangelist insists characteristically on the permanence with
which the Holy Breath dwells in Jesus. She descends upon Him to re-
main (menein) with Him. The permanence of Her presence develops a
theology of divine indwelling. (Jn 1:32-34)
The Johannine Jesus fulfills the Baptizer’s promise that He will baptize
with a sanctifying Breath when on Easter He breathes Her into the dis-
ciples. She will dwell permanently in them and empower them to pro-
long Jesus’ own mission on earth by proclaiming the forgiveness of sins.63
(Jn 20:19-23; 14:27, 16:33)
63. Cf. NJBC, 61:32; Brown, The Gospel of John, I, pp. 55-72; Hänchen, Commentary on
John, I, pp. 150-156.
In His conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus reveals more about the na-
ture of Christian baptism: it effects rebirth in water and the Breath. The
Breath begets a share in divine life, pneuma without the definite article.
This heavenly, pneumatic begetting of life differs in kind from physical
begetting, which gives rise only to death-bound life, to flesh. The Breath
communicates by contrast Pneuma, or imperishable risen life. (Jn 5:5-6;
cf. 1 Jn 3:9, 5:1, 18) Moreover, the gift of “Breath” makes possible au-
thentic eucharistic worship by inspiring faith in Christ’s real presence in
the eucharistic elements. (Jn 6:52-65)
As we have already seen, in the fourth gospel the kingdom does not
occupy the central place in Jesus’ preaching which it holds in the synoptics.
Still, by portraying Christian baptism as the door which leads into the
kingdom, The Beloved Disciple implicitly points to the Christian com-
munity as the incipient realization of the divine reign on earth.
Those begotten of the Breath derive their life from above (anôthen).
(Jn 3:7) Jesus describes this heavenly begetting as a mysterious event.
Like the wind its origin and ultimate destiny remain mysterious; but the
baptized do experience the Breath in this life. They experience Her as a
powerful and mysterious force which draws them into the mystery of
Her origin and of their destiny. As we have seen, She comes from God,
the gift of Father and Son, and leads to risen life. The disciples can no
more control the Breath than they can control the wind. They must,
then, submit to the pneumatic impulse which Breath-baptism brings.
This account of pneumatic begetting clarifies what the prologue means
by being born of God.64 (Jn 1:13)
In His final testimony to Jesus, the Baptizer makes it clear that Jesus
imparts the Breath in eschatological abundance. John says: “He whom
God has sent utters the words of God, for without measure does He give
the Breath.” (Jn 3:34) The antecedent of the subject of the verb “give”
remains ambiguous. Does it refer to the Father who gives the Breath with-
out measure to the Son? Or does it refer to the Son who gives the Breath
without measure to the disciples? The evangelist probably intends both
meanings because He immediately adds that the Father gives all things to
the Son. In other words, the Father sends the Breath to dwell in the Son
in eschatological abundance so that the Son can breathe Her forth with
the same inexhaustible abundance. (Jn 3:35)
A similar ambiguity attends the Baptizer’s words: “He whom God has
sent utters the words of God.” (Jn 3:34) They could refer either to the
Commentary on John, I, pp. 194-207; Ignace de la Potterie, “Jesus et Nicodemus: de
revelatione Jesus et vera fide in eum (Jo 3:11-21),” Verbum Domini, 47(1969), pp.
141-150, 257- 283; Linda Bellville, “‘Born of Water and the Spirit’: John 3:5,” Trinity
Journal,1(1980), pp. 125-141.
Baptizer or to Jesus. John speaks with prophetic authority and therefore

derives His mission from God. Jesus speaks as the Son of God sent by the
Father to save the world. Again the evangelist probably intends the ambi-
guity: the Baptizer’s witness to Jesus helps validate the truth which Jesus’
speaks in the Father’s name, even though as Son of God incarnate Jesus
speaks with an even greater authority than the Baptizer.65
As we have already seen, in His conversation with the Samaritan woman,
Jesus offers to give “living water” which slakes human thirst for everlast-
ing life. (Jn 4:10-14) Living water means flowing, potable water, water
which causes plants to grow, relieves thirst, and animates living things.
Living water contrasts with the saline waters of the Dead Sea: unpotable
and death dealing.
Jesus also promises the Samaritan woman that the Breath will resemble
a “spring of water welling up to eternal life.” (Jn 4:14) Later in the same
conversation, Jesus foretells the day when people will worship God “in
breath and truth.” As we have seen, Jesus identifies “breath” (pneuma
without the definite article) with the life common to Father, Son, and
Breath. (Jn 4:23-24) The Breath begets Breath. Moreover, as we have also
seen, since the risen Christ functions as Her source, the Breath also acts
as a principle of risen life.66 (Jn 20:22-23)
During the feast of Tabernacles, the evangelist identifies the living wa-
ter which Jesus will give with the gift of the Holy Breath:
On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood up and cried out:
“If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me; let whoever believes in Me drink.
Scripture has it: ‘From within Him rivers of living water shall flow.’” Now
He said this about the Breath, which those who believed in Him were to
receive; for as yet the Breath was not [given], for Jesus was not yet glori-
fied. (Jn 7:37-39)
The Feast of Tabernacles celebrated the harvest. Every day of the

week-long celebration a priest scooped water with a golden pitcher from
the stream which supplied water to the pool of Siloam saying: “With joy
you will draw water from the wells of salvation.” The priest then carried
the pitcher in procession into the temple accompanied by the people
carrying myrtle and lemon branches. In the temple the priest poured the
water onto the ground through a silver funnel. On the last day, a seven-fold
Commentary on John, I, pp. 208-212; John W. Pryor, “John 3.3,5: A Study in the
Relation of John’s Gospel to the Synoptic Tradition,” Journal for the Study of the New
Testament, 41(1991), pp. 71-95.
66. Cf. NJBC, 61:56-62; Brown, The Gospel of John, I, pp. 166-185; G.J. van der Watt,
“The Use of ‘Aionios’ in the Concept Zoê Aionios in John’s Gospel,” Novum Testamen-
tum, 31(1989), pp. 217-228; J.-L. Ska, S.J., “Jésus et la Samaritaine (Jn 4): Utilité de
l’ancien testament,” Nouvelle Revue Théologique, 118(1996), pp. 641-652 .
circumambulation of the altar in the temple accompanied the pouring of

the water. These rituals provide the symbolic background of Jesus’ re-
newed promise of the living water.67
Jesus speaks in the preceding text as divine wisdom personified. In the
book of Proverbs, divine Wisdom invites people to come to her to eat
and drink. (Pr 9:3) The gift of living water will, then, impart divine wis-
dom to those who receive it. As we have also seen, it will in addition
communicate imperishable risen life; for, as the prologue has made clear,
in God life and light coincide. (Jn 1:4-5)
The Scripture text Jesus cites in verse 38 has no parallel in the Old
Testament. Some have suggested that it blends several texts (for example,
Zech 14:8 and Ez 47:1ff.). Whatever its source, the text contains another
grammatical ambiguity. To whose heart does the evangelist refer: to Jesus’
heart or to the believer’s? Once again the Beloved Disciples probably in-
tends both meanings. John has already referred to Jesus as Breath-baptizer
and source of the Breath. (Jn 1:33) At the same time, Jesus will commu-
nicate the Breath to the disciples to share with others in forgiving sins.
Scholars continue to debate both the punctuation and meaning of this
difficult passage.68 (Jn 20:21-23)
67. Cf. David Michael Stanley, S.J. “The Feast of Tents: Jesus’ Self-Revelation,” Worship,
34(1959-1960), pp. 20-27.
Commentary on John, II, pp. 9-20; C.F. Burney, “The Lord’s Old Testament Reference
in St. John VII. 37,38,” The Expositor, 20(1920), pp. 385-388; T. Herbert Bindley,
“John VII, 37, 38,” The Expositor, 20(1920), pp. 443-447; M.-E. Boismard, “De son
ventre couleront des fleuves d’eau,” Revue Biblique, 65(1958), pp. 522-546; Jean-Paul
Audet, “Les citations targumiques dans le quatrième évangile,” Revue Biblique,
66(1959), pp. 374-386; J. Blenkensopp, “John VII. 37-9: Another Note on a
Notorious Crux,” New Testament Studies, 6(1959-1960), pp. 95-98; Juan B. Cortes,
S.J., “Yet Another Look at Jn 7:37-38,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 29(1967), pp.
75-86; “‘Torrentes de agua viva,’ Una Nueva Interpretation de Jn 7, 37-38, Estudios
Biblicos, 16(1957), pp. 279-306; Gordon D. Fee, “Once More—John 7, 37-39,”
Expository Times, 89(1977-1978), pp. 116-118; A.-M. Dubarle, “Les fleuves d’eau vive
(S. Jean vii, 37-39),” Revue Biblique, 52(1945), pp. 238-241; Pierre Grelot, “‘De son
ventre couleront des fleuves d’eau’: La citation scripturaire de Jean VII, 38,” Revue
Biblique, 66(1959), pp. 369-374; “A propos de Jean VII, 38,” Revue Biblique,
67(1960), pp. 224-225; “Jean VII, 38: Eau du rocher ou source du temple,” Revue
Biblique, 70(1963), pp. 43-51; S.H. Hooke, “‘The Spirit Was Not Yet,” New
Testament Studies, 9(1962-1963), pp. 372-380; G.D. Kilpatrick, “The Punctuation of
John VII. 37-38,” Journal of Theological Studies, 11(1960) pp. 340-398; C.H. Turner,
“On the Punctuation of St. John VII, 37, 38,” Journal of Theological Studies, 11(1960),
pp. 340-342; M. Miguens, “El Agua y el Espiritu en Jn 7, 37-39,” Estudios Biblicos,
31(1972), pp. 369-398; C.H. Turner, “On the Punctuation of St. John VII, 37, 38,”
Journal of Theological Studies, 24(1923), pp. 66-70; H.D. Woodhouse, “Hard Say-
ings—IX ‘The Holy Ghost was not yet given’ John 7. 39,” Theology, 67(1964), pp.
310-312; K.H. Kuhn, “John VII. 37-8,” New Testament Studies, 4(1957-1958), PP.
63-65; Mariette Canevet, “Une fausse symetrie: La venue du Christ chez les parfaits
dans l”Ancien et le Nouveau Testaments selon Origène, in Joh I, VII, 37-40,”
As we have already seen, Jesus in His last discourse promises to send

the disciples “another witness (parakleton),” whom He identifies as the
Breath of truth and as the Holy Breath with which He will baptize. (Jn
14:16-7, 26) No other New Testament writer uses the term “parakletos.”
Its use in John reflects the forensic tone of His gospel.
“Parakletos” in Greek can mean an advocate, or attorney-at-law. It can
also mean a spokesperson, or intercessor. It can mean a comforter, or
consoler. Finally, it can mean a witness, or teacher.
Of the possible meanings “witness” seems the one most likely intended
by the evangelist. Although translators frequently render “parakletos” as
comforter, in the fourth gospel the Breath comes, not so much as a source
of comfort, but as the inspiration of the disciples’ witness, or testimony,
to Jesus. As She inspired Jesus’ testimony to the Father, so She will inspire
the disciple’s testimony to Him. The Breath of truth will come to the
disciples and abide in them as She abides in Jesus. As we have seen, this
insistence on the abiding character of the Breath typifies the fourth
evangelist’s understanding of our relationship to God. The Breath comes
only to those who respond to Jesus in faith. Hence, She cannot come to a
world trapped in sinful unbelief. (Jn 14:17) As the Breath of truth, the
second witness will enable the disciples to testify to the divine truth in-
carnate in Jesus. This She will accomplish by instructing them and re-
minding them of everything which Jesus taught. The term “witness” ac-
cords well with the Beloved Disciple’s forensic theology. (Jn 14:26)
It would appear that the Breath will instruct the disciples differently
from the way in which Jesus did. She will enable them to appropriate in
a new, vivid, and immediate way whatever Jesus has said to them. In
other words, She will bring a wise enlightenment which endows Jesus’
verbal instructions with new meaning. More than an angelic presence,
the Breath of truth teaches the disciples to grasp through obedient imita-
tion the very truth which Jesus embodies. As we have already seen, in the
fourth gospel as in the synoptics, the disciples know the truth Jesus em-
bodies by practical assimilation to Him, by entering into His own filial
relationship to the Father.
The enlightenment of the Breath will empower the disciples to pro-
long Jesus’ testimony to the Father. Both Son and Father send the Breath
to the disciples. (Jn 14:26, 15:26-27) As a consequence, She makes Them
present to the disciples and the disciples to Them.
Her testimony about Jesus to the disciples will find expression in the
disciples’ own testimony to Jesus and to the Father He reveals. The testi-
monies of the Breath and of the disciples coincide: the Breath testifies in
the disciples’ testimony. Moreover, the fact that the disciples have been
Gregorianum, 75(1994), pp. 743-749; Marten J.J. Menken, “The Origin of the Old
Testament Quotation in John 7:38,” Novum Testamentum, 38(1996), pp. 160-175.
with Jesus from the beginning of His ministry means that they can with
the Breath’s inspiration hand on faithfully everything which Jesus taught.69
Through Her testimony to Jesus in the disciples, the other witness will
also serve as an instrument of divine judgment. The unbelief of many
who heard Jesus and rejected Him has placed them under the divine judg-
ment. In the same way, the world’s hostility to Jesus, its refusal to believe
the Breath-inspired witness of His disciples, will cause it and those who
belong to it to stand before God condemned by their stubborn refusal to
believe. (Jn 16:7-11)
Specifically, the Breath will unmask the lies and errors of the world.
She will prove the world wrong on three issues. First, She will prove the
world wrong about sin. (Jn 16:9) The world condemned Jesus as a sin-
ner; and those guilty of the crime hypocritically protested their own faith
in God while murdering Him. When the Breath comes, She will make it
clear that Jesus’ murderers passed false judgment on Him precisely be-
cause they refused to believe in Him. Their violence and unbelief marks
them, not Him, as the real sinners.
Second, the other witness will, as we have seen, also show that the
world erred about justice. In condemning Jesus the world pretended to
act justly. The second witness will make it clear that His glorification and
return to the Father in heaven reverses the world’s judgment and un-
masks its injustice. (Jn 16:10) This the Breath will do by revealing the
justice of God in the forgiveness of sins. (Jn 20:19-23)
Finally, the other witness will prove the world wrong about condemna-
tion. The world condemned Jesus; but the other witness will make it
clear that in condemning Jesus the world through its sinful unbelief placed
itself under Jesus’ own judgment as eschatological judge. The Father, as
we have seen, sanctions Jesus’ condemnation of unbelief. The Breath of
truth, for Her part, manifests the truth in part by revealing that the world
stands under the dominion of Satan, not of God, and that God in the
paschal mystery has already condemned Satan. (Jn 16:11)
In summary, then, the Holy Breath, a witness for Jesus in the drama of
cosmic judgment, will confound the world by unmasking its lies and
falsehood. Without the cover of deceit, the world will stand clearly and
justly condemned by God and by His incarnate Son.70
Jesus must depart before the Breath can come, for She proceeds from
the risen Christ and therefore mediates risen life. Jesus’ glorification by
the Father in His passion and resurrection mediates the gift of the Breath
to the disciples. (Jn 16:7, 19:30, 20:22-23) Jesus’ departure should not,
70. Cf. M.F. Boismard, O.P., “Le paraklet, défenseur du Christ devant la conscience du
croyant (Jo. XVI, 8-11),” Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques, 33(1949),
pp. 361-389.
however, cause the disciples concern or anxiety, because the Holy Breath
of truth will enable them to appropriate the truth about Jesus. She will
also reveal to them truths which He, because of their weakness and ob-
tuseness, could not reveal to them while He lived among them. She will
instruct the disciples about the shape of the eschatological future which
is in process of dawning. (Jn 16:12-13)
The Beloved Disciple, using dispensational rather than metaphysical
language, characterizes the Breath’s relationship to the Son as obedien-
tial. Just as Jesus obeyed perfectly the Father who sent Him, so too the
Breath will obey Jesus who sends Her. Moreover, in virtue of Jesus’ obedi-
ential relationship to the Father, the Father sanctions everything the Son
says and does. Hence, the Father like the Son will sanction the new truths
to which the Breath in obedience to the Son will lead the Christian com-
munity. (Jn 16:14-15)
The Beloved Disciple espouses an open-ended understanding of divine
revelation. The self-disclosure of God begun in the incarnation reaches
its completion with the coming of the Breath who guides the Christian
community to “all truth,” even to truths which Jesus Himself never spoke.
(Jn 16:13) The perfect co-activity which discloses the mutual indwelling
of the divine persons ensures that both Father and Son endorse the Holy
Breath’s revelations about the future. The truth disclosed as revelation
unfolds enjoys, then, the authoritative sanction of all three members of
the divine triad.71
As we have seen, when the risen Christ appears to the disciples on
Easter, after a greeting of peace, He breathes on them and says:
As the Father has sent me, so I also send you. Receive a sanctifying Breath.
Whoever’s sins you forgive are forgiven them. Whoever’s sin you retain are
retained. (Jn 20:19-23)
Commentary on John, II, pp. 140-148; Otto Betz, Der Paraklet (Leiden: E.J. Brill,
1963); Raymond E. Brown, “The Paraclete in the Fourth Gospel,” New Testament
Studies, 13(1966- 1967), pp. 113-122; C.K. Barrett, “The Holy Spirit in the Fourth
Gospel,” Journal of Theological Studies, n.s. 1(1950), pp. 1-15; B.W. Brown, “The
‘Other’ Comforter,” The Expositor, 8th ser., 14(1917), pp. 273-282; George Johnston,
The Spirit-Paraclete in the Gospel of John (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1970); Sr. John Mary Hurley, C.S.N., “The Paraclete in the Fourth Gospel,” Bible
Today, 36(1968), pp. 2485-2488; J.G. Davies, “The Primary Meaning of
PARAKLETOS,” Journal of Theological Studies, n.s. 4(1953), pp. 35-38; Franz Mussner,
Praesentia Salutis (Düsseldorf: Patmos Verlag, 1967), pp. 146-158; Rudolf
Schnackenburg, “Die johanneische Gemeinde und ihre Geisterfahrung” in Die Kirche
des Anfangs, edited by R. Schnackenburg et al. (Leipzig: St. Benno Verlag, 1977), pp.
277-304; George Montague, The Holy Spirit: Growth of a Biblical Tradition (New
York, NY: Paulist, 1976), pp. 333-365; Bernard Guillieron, Le Saint-Esprit: Actualité
du Christ (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1978), pp. 79-105; Kurt Niederwimmer, “Zure
Eschatologie im Corpus Johanneum,” Novum Testamentum, 39(1997), pp. 105-116.
The Holy Breath comes to fulfill Jesus’ promise of a peace other than
the peace which the world gives. (Jn 14:27) The Breath creates peace by
forgiving sins and by revealing the justice of God. Moreover, as the source
of imperishable risen life, She creates a permanent peace which reconciles
humans to God and to one another.
As the other witness, the Holy Breath also comes to commission the
disciples. Jesus sends them forth to testify to Him in Her power. As She
inspired His witness to the Father, so She will now inspire their witness to
Jesus.
Jesus sends the disciples forth to mediate the sanctifying Breath to oth-
ers by forgiving their sins. One accepts divine forgiveness by believing
the disciples’ witness to Jesus as the divine bridegroom who loved a sinful
humanity enough to atone for their sins by His death, resurrection, and
mission of the Breath. That atonement reconciles sinners to God through
the action of the sin-forgiving Breath.72

Johannine pneumatology echoes a number of synoptic themes. Only Jesus
baptizes with the divine Breath. Breath-baptism draws one into Jesus’
own mission. The Breath conforms to Jesus those in whom She dwells.
The Breath inspires willingness to testify to Jesus even at the risk of one’s
life. Like Luke, the fourth evangelist stresses the judgmental character of
the Church’s proclamation of the risen Christ.
One also finds, however, important contrasts between synoptic and
Johannine pneumatology. While the synoptics tend to portray practical
obedience to life in the kingdom as the decisive sign of Breath-baptism,
Johannine pneumatology focuses more on the Breath’s inspiration of the
disciples’ testimony to Jesus’ divinity. Concern with belief in Jesus’ eu-
charistic presence also causes the Beloved Disciple to stress more than the
synoptics the Breath-inspired character of eucharistic worship.
Sharp theological focus on the revelatory centrality of the paschal mys-
tery also leads the Beloved Disciple to develop through narrative and
imagery the Pauline theme that the Breath confers a share in risen life. In
Johannine theology, moreover, the image of living water which imparts
72. Cf. NJBC, 61:234; Brown, The Gospel of John, II, pp. 1018-1045; Hänchen,
Commentary on John, II, pp. 203-217; Ernest C. Colwell and Eric L. Titus, The Gospel
of the Spirit: A Study in the Fourth Gospel (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1953); W.
Bartlett, “The Coming of the Holy Spirit According to the Fourth Gospel,” Expository
Times, 37(1925- 1926), pp. 71-75; Max Turner and Gary M. Burge, “The Anointed
Community: A Review and Response,” Evangelical Quarterly, 62(1990), pp. 253-268;
Udo Schnelle, “Johannes als Geisttheologie,” Novum Testamentum, 49(1998), pp.
17-31; Miguel Rodríguez-Ruiz, “Estructura del Evangelio de San Juan desde Punto de
Vista Cristológico y Ecclesiológico,” Estudios Biblicos, 56(1998), pp. 75-96.
endless risen life links this aspect of the Breath’s saving presence both to
baptism and to Jesus’ redemptive death.
Finally, the Beloved Disciple stresses more than the synoptics the role
of the abiding, indwelling Breath in developing doctrine and in revealing
the eschatological future. This stress may reflect another aspect of the
situation in which the Beloved Disciple’s community found itself. With
the death of the apostolic witnesses to the risen Christ, the community
may have wondered who would insure the Church’s fidelity to their testi-
mony. The Beloved Disciple looks to the Breath of the risen Christ as the
Church’s link to its risen Lord. Not only will She teach Jesus’ followers to
assimilate His teachings in a new and vivid way; but She will also reveal
to them things of which Jesus could not discourse prior to Her arrival.
Since She proceeds from the risen Christ, the divine Breath will faithfully
lead the Church into the eschatological future which He defines.
This section has examined the Johannine Jesus’ positive relationship to
the Breath. The section which follows meditates His positive relationship
to two historical but symbolic individuals: namely, to Mary, His mother,
and to the Beloved Disciple.
(V)
In the fourth gospel Jesus stands in a completely positive relationship to
two historical individuals: to His mother, Mary, and to the Beloved Dis-
ciple.
Jesus, the Beloved Disciple, and the New Eve

“The disciple whom Jesus loved” appears only in the Book of Glory, which
narrates the paschal mystery. The Beloved Disciple makes an entrance at
the last supper, where he reclines “close to the breast of Jesus,” a phrase
which expresses a personal intimacy analogous to Jesus’ intimacy with
the Father. (Cf. Jn 1:18) At Jesus’ announcement of the impending treach-
ery of one of the disciples, Peter signals to the Beloved Disciple to ask
Jesus to identify the traitor. The Beloved Disciple complies with the re-
quest. (Jn 13:21-25)
The Beloved Disciple joins Peter in following Jesus after His arrest; and
he also stands at the foot of Jesus’ cross on Calvary. The Beloved Disciple’s
presence at the beginning and at the end of the passion suggests his will-
ingness to accompany Jesus throughout the ordeal. (Jn 18:15, 19:25-27)
The Beloved Disciple also witnesses the sign of the blood and water
which flows from Jesus’ pierced side on the cross. Although the evangelist
seems to regard this event as another miraculous sign, the water he wit-
nessed could conceivably have consisted of bodily fluid. The evangelist,
however, sees revelatory significance in the fact that water as well as blood
flowed from Jesus’ side.
The blood symbolizes Jesus’ eucharistic blood which when drunk in

faith insures resurrection. (Jn 6:23) The water foreshadows the gift of the
Breath, the life-giving water imparted in Breath-baptism. (Jn 19:31-37)
The sign of water also refers to John 7:38-39, where Jesus prophesies that
living water will flow from His breast. The flow of water symbolizes the
Breath He will soon pour out on the disciples. With the blood, the water
testifies to the saving character of His death. So too does the fact that in
dying, Jesus “handed over the breath (paredoken to pneuma).” (Jn 19:30)
Jesus’ dying breath foreshadows His eschatological gift of the divine Breath
on Easter. (Jn 20:21-23) Finally, the water flowing from the side of the
crucified Christ reveals Him as the true temple of God from whom living
waters flow to give life to all the land.73 (Ez 47:1-12)
The preparation of the paschal lamb requires that its legs remain un-
broken. (Ex 12:46) The fact that the soldiers did not break Jesus’ legs as
He hung on the cross reveals Jesus as the paschal lamb, the lamb of God
to whom the Baptizer testified. By recalling the Baptizer’s prophecy, the
evangelist also implicitly recalls its other levels of meaning. The allusion
to the paschal lamb thus implicitly compares Jesus both to the suffering
servant, who dies as docilely as a lamb, and to the victorious lamb of
Jewish and Christian apocalyptic.
The fact that the soldiers leave Jesus’ legs unbroken probably alludes as
well to Ps 34:21. There God insures that the just who suffer persecution
will yet preserve their limbs intact. If so, then Jesus’ unbroken legs testify
to His innocent suffering.
The Beloved Disciple also notes that the piercing of Jesus’ side fulfills
another Old Testament prophecy: “They shall look on Him whom they
have pierced.” This prophecy offers a variant reading of Zech 12:10. The
full text of Zechariah describes the day of the Lord when He will in judg-
ment destroy all the enemies of Jerusalem. On that day the House of
David and the citizens of Jerusalem will look on the pierced one and
mourn for him as for a first-born son or only child. The death of the
pierced one resembles that of the suffering servant in second Isaiah in
that it brings redemption: it seems to lift the siege of Jerusalem and cause
Her vindication. (Zech 12:9-14)
73. Cf. Georg Richter, Studien zum Johannesevangelium, edited by Josef Hainz (Regensburg:
Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 1977), pp. 120-142; John Wilkenson, “The Incident of Blood
and Water in John 19.34,” Scottish Journal of Theology, 28(1975), pp. 149-172; A.F.
Sava, “The Wound in the Side of Christ,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 19(1957), pp.
343-346; J. Massingberd Ford, “‘Mingled Blood’ from the Side of Christ (John XIX,
34),” New Testament Studies, 15(1968-1969), pp. 337-338; Martinus J.J. Menkin,
“The Textual Form and Meaning of the Quotation from Zechariah 12:10 in John
19:37,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 55(1993), pp. 494-511; Martinus C. De Boer,
“Jesus the Baptizer: 1 John 5:5-8 and the Gospel of John,” Journal of Biblical Literature,
107(1988), pp. 87-106.
The passage in Zechariah concludes; “When that day comes, a foun-

tain will be opened for the house of David and for the citizens of Jerusa-
lem.” (Zech 13:1) For the evangelist, then, the prophecy of Zechariah
calls attention to the Easter gift of the living water: the gift of the Holy
Breath and of the forgiveness of sins which She will effect. In other words,
the water flowing from the side of the pierced Christ foreshadows that
Jesus is about to fulfill the text: “from within Him shall flow rivers of
living water.” (Jn 7:37-38) This Jesus will do when on Easter He pours
forth the divine Breath as the living water which slakes human thirst for
immortality.
Even though it seems historically unlikely that the Roman execution-
ers would have allowed people sympathetic to Jesus to stand at the foot of
the cross, the fourth gospel clearly portrays the Beloved Disciple as an
historical personage who witnessed Jesus’ death and the events which
accompanied it. The appendix to the gospel also identifies the Beloved
Disciple with the person of the evangelist. (Jn 21:24)
Like other historical figures in the fourth gospel, however, the Beloved
Disciple also takes on symbolic meaning. The Book of Glory transforms
the Beloved Disciple into a type of the believing Christian. Let us reflect
on the narrative strategies which the evangelist employs in endowing the
figure of the Beloved Disciple with symbolic meaning.74
As we have seen, the Beloved Disciple relates to Jesus with special inti-
macy. The fourth gospel invites the reader to enjoy a similar intimacy.
The Beloved Disciple testifies to the saving significance of Jesus’ death.
The evangelist clearly expects every disciple to share that faith and to
endorse that witness publicly.
The Beloved Disciple also models the way in which the believing Chris-
tian ought to relate to the risen Jesus. As we shall see when we reflect on
Jesus’ relationship to the disciples, the story of Jesus’ apparition to the
disciples parallels their call. The call of the disciples begins with Jesus’
invitation to them to “Come and see.” (Jn 1:39) The invitation sum-
mons them to more than physical sight. Instead, Jesus is inviting the
disciples to see deeply into the reality He incarnates and to do so with the
eyes of faith.
As the disciples begin to gather around Jesus, they recognize Him first
as the Lamb of God, then as the messiah. As we have also seen, Jesus then
promises them that, when the eschatological age dawns, they will “see” in
Him their privileged link to the Father. (Jn 1:35-51)
The disciples finally reach that culminating insight when they encoun-
ter the risen Christ. As a consequence, the fourth evangelist makes com-
74. Cf. NJBC, 61:227; Brown, The Gospel of John, II, pp. 932-962; Antonio Vincent
Cernuda, “El desviado Lazaro y el delumbrador Discipulo amado,” Estudios Biblicos,
52(1994), pp. 453-516.
ing to the vision of faith the motif of his resurrection narrative. In his
account of Jesus’ resurrection appearances, the Beloved Disciple repeat-
edly plays the terms “seeing” and “believing” off against one another. In
each encounter with the risen Christ, each disciple learns to “see” the
risen Christ through a different process of personal transformation in
faith.
Among the disciples, however, only the Beloved Disciple comes to res-
urrection faith without laying eyes on the risen Christ. When Mary
Magdalene informs the disciples about the empty tomb, both Peter and
the Beloved Disciple run to the tomb. The latter arrives first but waits for
Peter to catch up before entering the tomb. Peter sees its emptiness and
the burial cloths but does not come to resurrection faith until he encoun-
ters the risen Christ that evening in the upper room. The Beloved Dis-
ciple, by contrast, believes in the risen Christ only on the evidence of the
empty tomb and of the now useless burial cloths. (Jn 20:1-10) The deeper
faith of the Beloved Disciple also appears in the fact that he recognizes
Jesus instantly in His apparition on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Peter
does not recognize Jesus until the Beloved Disciple names Him. (Jn 21:7-8)
The Beloved Disciple’s ability to believe in the resurrection without even
seeing the risen Christ transforms him into a type of all those believers
for whom the fourth evangelist wrote his gospel. (Jn 20:29-31)
The symbolic meaning surrounding the Beloved Disciple helps endow
another historical personage with analogous symbolism: namely, Mary,
the mother of Jesus. In the synoptic gospels, only the women witness
Jesus’ death; and Jesus’ mother does not number among them. In the
fourth gospel, Mary stands at the foot of the cross together with the Be-
loved Disciple. (Jn 19:26) The Beloved Disciple’s presence at the foot of
the cross exemplifies another ideal which all believers should imitate: the
willingness to stand by Jesus in His passion, even at the risk of one’s own
life. Moreover, only in the fourth gospel does the dying Jesus give the
Beloved Disciple to His mother as her own son:
When Jesus saw his mother, and the disciple whom He loved standing
near, He said to His mother: “Woman, behold your son!” Then He said to
the disciple, “Behold your mother!” And from that hour the disciple took
her to his own home.75 (Jn 19:26-27)
tary on John, II, pp. 189-202; Thorwald Lorenzen, Der Lieblingsjünger in
Johannesevangelium (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk Verlag, 1971); Ralph Russell,
O.S.B., The Beloved Disciple and the Resurrection,” Scripture, 8(1956), pp. 41-50;
Martin Rese, “Das Selbstzeugnis des Johannesevangeliums über seiner Verfasser,”
Ephemerides Theologicae Lovaniensis, 72(1996), pp. 75-111.
Mary appears only twice in John’s gospel. She persuades Jesus to work
His first sign at Cana; and she stands at the foot of His cross. The two
appearances, one at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry and another at its
end, both occur on the last day of a symbolic week of events. They func-
tion, therefore, as a biblical inclusion. Mary at Cana also foreshadows
Mary on Calvary because the sign which she causes Jesus to work at Cana
anticipates His “hour,” the hour of His exaltation in suffering and in
glory. (Jn 2:4, 19:26)
In her first appearance at the marriage at Cana, Mary informs Jesus
that the wine provided for the wedding has run out. Jesus replies to her
enigmatically: “What to Me and to you, woman? My hour is not yet
come.” (Jn 2:5) The phrase “what to me and to you?” translates literally a
Semitic idiom. The idiom expresses mild disagreement with something
just said. By following the question “What to Me and to You?” with a
further statement—namely, “My hour is not yet come”—the evangelist
endows the idiomatic question with symbolic meaning. In effect, Jesus is
saying that the time has not come for Him to provide the wine He most
desires to provide. That gift must await the hour when He is lifted up in
suffering and in glory. Jesus is, of course, referring to the wine of the
eucharist which He will give as His blood when His hour comes. The
eucharistic wine will recall His saving death; but it will also foreshadow
in turn the messianic wine which the victorious Jesus will share with His
disciples at His second coming. These eschatological, eucharistic allu-
sions endow the question “What to Me and to you?” with deeper sym-
bolic meaning. Jesus is equivalently saying: “To what kind of wine are
you referring? My hour is not yet come.”76
76. The first letter of John both alludes to Jesus’ “hour” and develops its theological
meaning. The letter associates the coming of the Antichrist (1 Jn 2:18) with the second
coming. (1 Jn 2:28) The arrival of the “many Antichrists (antichristoi polloi)” makes it
certain that the second coming cannot lie far in the future. (1 Jn 2:18) By “many
Antichrists” the author of the letter probably means the dissident Christians who left
the Johannine community. The author brands them as false prophets. (1 Jn 2:19, 4:1)
Instead of yielding to the false blandishments of these Antichrists, the Johannine
community must recognize the true meaning of righteousness, the righteousness
revealed by God in Christ, so that when the Son of God returns they may welcome Him
in all confidence and not in shame. (1 Jn 2:28-9)
The author of the letter describes the eschatological situation of the Johannine
community as “the last hour (eschate hora)” approaches. (1 Jn 2:18) We find here a tacit
reference to “the hour” of Jesus in the gospel of John, the time of His lifting up in glory,
which includes not only His passion and resurrection but also the sending of the Holy
Breath. The hour of Jesus begins the last age of salvation which will culminate in the
second coming. The disciples continue to live that “hour,” namely, in the time of the
Breath.
In the first letter’s allusion to the second coming and final judgment, we also find
a tacit reference to the theology of judgment developed in the fourth gospel. Those who
live righteously in the light escape the judgment of God and need not fear the second
Mary apparently senses that the question “What to Me and to you?”

has a double meaning. She does not take Jesus’ reply as a refusal to do
anything to alleviate the embarrassing predicament of the bride and groom.
Instead, she senses the opposite and tells the servants to do whatever
Jesus tells them. Jesus then transforms fifteen to twenty-five gallons of
water into a wine more excellent that the one the married couple had
provided. (Jn 2:5-10) The abundance and excellence of the wine Jesus
provides also has symbolic significance: it foreshadows the abundance
and excellence of the messianic wine which Jesus will one day provide
and which the eucharist foreshadows.77
Both at Cana and on the cross, Jesus addresses Mary as “woman.” Jesus
uses the same title in addressing Martha. (Jn 19:26) The title has no
negative connotations in the fourth gospel and functions merely as a po-
lite way of addressing a mature person of the feminine gender. Ordi-
narily, however, a son would not have addressed his mother with this
title. In the fourth gospel, Jesus does so for symbolic reasons.
In Mary’s appearance at the foot of the cross, the evangelist endows the
title “woman” with symbolic significance. The Beloved Disciple, as we
have seen, functions as a symbol of all those who believe in Jesus without
having seen Him in His risen glory. In giving the Beloved Disciple to
Mary as her own son, Jesus therefore transforms her into the mother of
all who believe, into the new Eve of the new creation which He begins.
The first Eve mothered all humans in the flesh, the second Eve mothers
coming. Only those who disobey God and the commands which He has revealed
through His incarnate Son need fear judgment.
Cf. NJBC, 62: 22-24; Brown, Epistles, pp. 329-376; Klauck, op. cit., I, pp. 145-177;
W. Bosset, Der Antichrist in der Überlieferung des Judentums, des Neuen Testaments und
der alter Kirche (Göttingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht, 1895); Ignace de la Potterie,
“Anointing of the Christian by Faith” in The Christian Lives by the Spirit, edited by I.
de la Potterie and S. Lyonnet (Staten Island, NY: Alba, 1971), pp. 79-143; H. Hanse,
“Gott Haben” in der antike und im frühen Christentum (Berlin: Töpelmann, 1939), pp.
104-108; J. Michl, “Der Geist als Garant des rechten Glaubens” in Vom Wort des
Lebens, edited by N. Adler (Münster: Aschendorf, 1951), pp. 142-151; R. Yates, “The
Antichrist,” Evangelical Quarterly, 46(1974), pp. 42-50.
on John, I, pp. 169-179; A. Feuillet, “L’heure de Jésus et le signe de Cana: Contribution
a l’étude de la structure de quatrième evangile,” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovaniensis,
36(1960), pp. 5- 22; “La signification fondamentale du premier miracle de Cana (Jn
II, 1-11) et le symbolisme Johannique,” Revue Thomiste, 65(1965), pp. 517-535;
Johannine Studies, translated by Thomas E. Crane (Staten Island, NY: Alba House,
1964), pp. 17-34; F.J. Braun, O.P., Mother of God’s People, translated by John Clarke,
O.C.P. (Staten Island, NY: Alba House, 1967), pp. 48- 73; Jean Zumsteen, “Johannes
19,25-27,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, 94(1997), pp. 131-154; Jidith M. Lieu,
“The Mother of the Son in the Fourth Gospel,” Journal of Biblical Literature,
117(1998), pp. 61-77.
all the children of God reborn through faith and Breath-baptism. (Cf.
Gen 3:20)
The evangelist re-enforces this allusion to Genesis with hebdomadal
imagery. As we shall see, the events which begin and end Jesus’ ministry
both transpire within the compass of a week. (Cf. Jn 1:19, 35, 43, 2:1)
Jesus also dies on the seventh day after His anointing at Bethany. (Cf. Jn
12:1) In the priestly account of creation in Genesis, it happens in a week.
(Gen 1:1-2:4) These two weeks which begin and end Jesus’ ministry sym-
bolize the new creation. In that new creation, Jesus, as we shall see below
in greater detail, functions as the new Adam, while Mary, by accepting
the Beloved Disciple as her son stands revealed as the new Eve, as the
mother of all those who believe in Jesus, even without seeing Him.78

Luke’s infancy gospel, as we saw in volume two, transforms Mary into a
type of the believing disciple. The Beloved Disciple, however, develops a
much more extensive personal typology than Luke. As in the case of Luke’s
Mary, Johannine typology endows historical individuals with revelatory
significance.
The evangelist, who did not see the risen Christ, even transforms him-
self into a type of any other true believer. Through the quality of his faith
and through his witness to the sign of blood and water, the Beloved Dis-
ciple models for the reader the kind of graced response of faith which the
fourth gospel seeks to evoke.
Moreover, Johannine typology endows the figure of Mary with a more
exalted typological dignity than does Luke’s infancy gospel. As mother of
the Beloved Disciple, the Johannine Mary confronts the reader, not sim-
ply as a model for all believers, but as their mother in faith, as the new
Eve of the new creation which Jesus begins.
In a doctrinally divided community in bitter conflict with the local
synagogue over issues of faith, the Beloved Disciple recommends to Jesus’
faithful disciples two strategies for responding to such conflict. 1) They
must cultivate a special relationship of intimate love of the person of
Jesus. 2) They must testify to the full saving reality incarnate in the pas-
78. Cf. A. Feuillet, L’heure de la mère de Jésus. Étude de théologie johannique (Paris:
Franjeux-Prouille, 1969); “L’heure de la femme (Jn 16,21) et l’heure de la Mère de
Jésus (Jn 19:25-27), Biblica, 47(1966), pp. 169-184, 361-380, 557-573; Hugolinus
Langkammer, O.F.M., “Christ ‘Last Will and Testament’ (Jn 19, 26.27) in the
Interpretation of the Fathers of the Church and the Scholastics,” Antonianum,
43(1968), pp. 99-109; Anton Dauer, “Das Wort des Gekreuzigten an seine Mutter
und den ‘Jünger den er liebte,” Biblische Zeitschrift, 11(1967), pp. 222-239; 12(1968),
pp. 89-93; Braun, op. cit., pp. 77-124; Raymond E. Brown, S.S., “The Mother of Jesus
in the Fourth Gospel” in L’évangile de Jean, edited by M. de Jonge (Leuven: University
Press, 1975), pp. 307-310.
chal mystery. These activities will transform them into Jesus’ sisters and
brothers whose faith imitates that of Mary, the new Eve of the new cre-
ation.
This chapter has reflected on the Beloved Disciple’s distinctive han-
dling of the positive dramatic linkages which structure His gospel. The
chapter which follows ponders his equally distinctive development of the
negative dramatic linkages.
Chapter 3: Negative Dramatic Linkages in John 101
Chapter 3
Negative Dramatic Linkages in John
In the fourth gospel Jesus relates negatively to Satan, to “the Jews,” to the
Pharisees, to the chief priests, to Pilate and the Roman empire. This chapter
divides, then, into five parts. Part one examines the Johannine Jesus’ rela-
tionship to Satan. Part two ponders how He relates to “the Jews.” Part
three treats his conflict with the Pharisees. Part four analyzes his relation-
ship to the chief priests. Part five describes how Jesus relates to Pilate and
the Roman empire.
(I)
The fourth evangelist handles the figure of Satan very differently from
the synoptics. The Beloved Disciple describes no face-to-face confronta-
tion between Jesus and Satan in the desert. Indeed, we find the name
“Satan” in only one verse of the fourth gospel. At the last supper, Satan
takes possession of Judas after he eats the morsel of food Jesus gives him.
(Jn 13:27) Judas, now a creature of the dark powers, departs into the
night to work his treachery. (Jn 13: 30) Nevertheless, the fourth gospel
does develop a distinctive Satanology.
Jesus and Satan

The Johannine Jesus does not confront Satan personally in the desert;
but He does undergo temptations which echo His desert temptations in
the synoptics. Outside the Samaritan village of Sichar, the disciples urge
the hungry Jesus to eat. Jesus, however, refuses food protesting that “Do-
ing the will of Him who sent Me and bringing His work to comple-
tion—that is my food.” (Jn 4:31-3) In refusing the food offered to Him
by His disciples, Jesus makes substantially the same point as He does in
His first temptation in Matthew and in Luke. Humans draw their life
ultimately from obedience to God and not from bread or from the other
physical supports of survival.1 (Mt 4:1-4; Lk 4:1-4) After the multiplica-
tion of the loaves, the crowds try to take the Johannine Jesus by force and
make Him king. Jesus, however, eludes the king-makers and flees to the
mountain alone. (Jn 6:14-15) This incident echoes in its own way Satan’s
offer in the synoptics to give Jesus the kingdoms of this world. (Mt 4:8-11;
Lk 4:5-8) As His passion draws near, Jesus finds Himself tempted to ask
the Father to spare Him this ordeal but rejects the temptation. (Jn
12:27-28) This third temptation corresponds in its own way to the syn-
optic temptation to test God by setting conditions on personal willing-
ness to trust the Father. (Mt 4:5-7; Lk 4:9-12)
1. Cf. Alton F. Wedel, “John 4:5-26(5-42),” Interpretation, 31(1977), pp. 406-412.
The fourth evangelist portrays Jesus’ passion as Satan’s supreme effort

to put Him to the test. (Jn 14:30; Lk 4:13) Only Jesus’ last temptation in
John has, then overt Satanic connotations. Nevertheless, it fits the de-
monology of the fourth gospel that human agents should serve as Satan’s
instruments in putting Jesus to His final test.
At the end of the first part of the last discourse, Jesus tells His disciples
that “the ruler (archon) of this world” is drawing near but that “He has no
hold on Me (en emoi echei ouden).” (Jn 14:30) Jesus is referring to the fact
that He will soon confront Satan in the person of Judas in the garden,
just as the first Adam confronted Satan in Eden. (Jn 18:5) In arresting
Jesus, the chief priests, temple guards, and Roman soldiers all function as
Satan’s minions. John the evangelist is, then, portraying the passion of
Jesus as Satan’s supreme attempt to put Him to the test. In the fourth
gospel, Satan uses Judas as his special instrument.
One cannot, however, understand the identity of “the ruler of this world”
in John without understanding “the world,” which constitutes Satan’s
special realm. The fourth evangelist distinguishes two senses of “the world,”
one positive (or at least morally neutral), the other negative (and morally
pejorative). Only in its negative sense does the world belong to Satan,
and then entirely by its own choice.
Viewed positively, the world simply means creation: the realm of space
and time in which history transpires. God creates the world through His
Son. (Jn 1:10, 13:1) As a morally neutral term, “the world” in the fourth
gospel can also function as a synonym for “everybody.” (Jn 12:19, 14:22)
Even viewed negatively, however, the world remains an object of God’s
love. God sends His Son into a sinful world in order to take away its
sinfulness. God does not even send the Son to pass judgment on the
world’s wickedness. Instead, God sends the Son in order to save the world.
(Jn 1:9-10, 29, 3:16-17, 10:36) Jesus, therefore, relates to the world as its
light who seeks to put it in a life-giving relationship with God. (Jn 3:19,
4:42, 8:12, 9:5, 11:9-10, 12:46-47) Jesus also offers to the world the
enlivening bread of divine wisdom and life-giving eucharistic bread. (Jn
6:33-51) He openly proclaims to the world the saving message which the
Father wants it to hear. (Jn 8:26, 18:19)
Nevertheless, the world vitiated by sin hates Jesus because His testi-
mony lays bare its sinfulness. (Jn 7:7) The sinful world has closed its
heart to the gift of Jesus’ Breath and therefore does not respond to Him
in faith. (Jn 14:17) Because it ignores the Son, this wicked world also
ignores the Father who sent Him. (Jn 17:25) A sinful world passes false
judgment on Jesus and casts Him out as a sinner. (Jn 16:8-11) This world
even rejoices over Jesus’ passion and death. (Jn 16:20)
The evil world hates Jesus because He does not belong to it. (Jn 8:23)
Jesus does not belong to a world of sin because He takes His origin from
the Father before the creation of the world. (Jn 8:23, 17:5, 16) When,
therefore, Jesus leaves the world, He returns to the Father. (Jn 16:28,
17:11) The world, for its part, by its sinful refusal to believe in Jesus
transforms itself into the realm of darkness and of evil. (Jn 3:19-21)
The world’s resistance to Jesus’ saving message makes it morally inevi-
table that He will pronounce over it a judgment of condemnation, even
though He has come, not to condemn the world, but to save it. (Jn 9:39,
12:31) The world, for its part, stands judged by its own choice, by its
refusal to accept Jesus’ testimony to divine truth. (Jn 12:31, 16:8-11) In
the end therefore, Jesus relates lovingly to His own disciples, but stands
in a negative, adversarial relationship to an unrepentant, sinful world
because of its unrepentant sinfulness. In His priestly prayer, Jesus prays
to the Father for His disciples; but He does not pray for the world. (Jn
9:39, 12:31, 15:18, 17:9)
The obedience of faith translates one from a world of darkness into the
realm of light. (Jn 17:6, 9) God holds the initiative in separating sinners
from the world. Jesus’ choice and the Father’s saving gift cause one to
belong to God and not to the world. (Jn 15:19, 17:6, 9) Those who have
left the sinful, skeptical world know the abiding peace which Jesus brings,
a peace which flows from the forgiveness of sin and from the reconcilia-
tion of humans to one another and to God. The empowering gift of the
Breath effects that peace. (Jn 17:14-27, 20:19-23)
Although the disciples cease to belong to the world once they believe in
Jesus, they nevertheless remain in a hostile world after He returns to the
Father. (Jn 13:1, 14:19, 17:11) Faith in Jesus and in the Father whom He
reveals transforms one into the world’s enemy and demands that one
assume the same kind of adversarial prophetic stance toward the world as
Jesus did. (Jn 15:18-9)
As long as they live in the world, the disciples will, then, experience
trouble and persecution. Nevertheless, they should draw comfort from
the fact that Jesus by His sinless witness to divine truth has in fact over-
come both the world and its Satanic prince. Jesus’ own witness culmi-
nates in the paschal mystery. (Jn 16:33) Jesus, then, on leaving the dis-
ciples in a hostile world, places them under the tutelage of the “other
witness,” the Breath whom He sends them. Jesus also entrusts the dis-
ciples to the Father to protect from the evil one; for Satan will seek to put
them to the test just as he put Jesus to the test. (Jn 17:14-16)
Jesus leaves the disciples in the world because, despite the world’s hos-
tility, violence, and sinfulness, He still desires its salvation. He therefore
entrusts His disciples with the prolongation of His own mission to the
world. Just as He has testified to the world concerning the truth about
God, so too He sends the disciples into the world to testify to Him, so
that all might believe that the Father sent Him. (Jn 17:18-23, 18:37) As
members of the kingdom of light which Jesus creates, however, the dis-
ciples look for the fulfillment of their hopes, not in the world, but with
Jesus in heaven. (Jn 18:36)
Clearly, then, a good or morally neutral world becomes morally evil
and subject to Satan by its own stubborn resistance to the action of di-
vine grace, by its lack of repentance and of faith. As an embodied force of
evil and unbelief, the world in the fourth gospel numbers among its mem-
bers the hostile Jews, the Pharisees, the chief priests, Pilate, the Roman
empire, and everything which they symbolize.
As in the synoptic gospels, those who oppose Jesus and refuse to believe
in Him accuse Him of being possessed by the devil, although the fourth
evangelist does not transform this slander into the sin against the Holy
Breath as Mark and Matthew do. (Jn 7:20, 8:48-49, 52, 10:20-21; cf.
Mk 3:22-30, Mt 12:24-32) Rather for John, the devil, the father of lies,
uses his evil children to oppose and slander Jesus.2 (Jn 8:44)
2. Cf. Brown, The Gospel of John, I, pp. 508-509; Elizabeth R. Achtemeier, “Jesus Christ,
the Light of the World,” Interpretation, 17(1963), pp. 439-449; Takashi Onuki,
Gemeinde und Welt: Ein Beitrag zur Frage nach theologischen und praktschen Funktion
des Johannischen Dualismus (Düsseldorf: Neukirchlicher Verlag, 1984); Erich Grässer,
“Die Juden as Teufelssohne in Johannes 8:37-47” in Antijudaismus im Neuen Testa-
ment, edited by W. Eckert et al. (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1967), pp. 157-170; Nils Dahl,
“Die Erstgeborene Satans und der Vater des Teufels” in Apophorata, edited by W.
Eltester (Berlin: Alfred Topelmann, 1964), pp. 69-84; Heinz Kruse, S.J., “Das Reich
Satans,” Biblica, 58(1977), pp. 29-64.
Like the fourth gospel, the first Johannine letter reminds the believing community
that the faith and love to which they dedicate their lives sets them apart from “the
world.” The same ethical dualism between the world and the community of disciples,
between darkness and light as characterizes the forth gospel surfaces in the Johannine
letters as well. Membership in the Johannine community demands the renunciation of
the world and everything which it embodies. One cannot simultaneously love the
world and the Father of Jesus Christ. (1 Jn 2:15-6)
The world offers three illusory goods which corrupt the heart: “the desires of the flesh
(hê epithumia tês sarkos), the desires of the eyes (hê epithumia tôn ophthalmôn), and the
pride of life (hê alazoneia tou biou).” (1 Jn 2:16) The author of the first Johannine letter
dismisses the world and it desires as doomed to perish. (1 Jn 2:17) In what then, do
these ephemeral, corrupting desires consist?
In speaking of “the desires of the flesh” the author of the letter probably has more
in mind than illegitimate sexual desires and other purely carnal cravings. The term
probably includes all selfish sinful desires, whether closely tied to sins of the flesh or not.
“The desire of the eyes” probably means the human tendency to yield to the allure of
outward show, without asking about or understanding what constitutes true and
lasting value. “The pride of life” probably means all boastfulness, arrogance, and sinful
self-reliance which springs from the possession of things which support only biological
life, i.e., life in this world.
To these illusory and corrupting values, the first letter opposes the desire for what
lasts and has incorruptible value: namely, doing the will of God. “And the world is
passing away with its desires; but the one who does the will of God abides for eternity
(eis ton aiona).” (1 Jn 2:17)
Long before His betrayal by Judas, Jesus calls the disciple a devil; for in
the fourth gospel Jesus with preternatural prescience knows from the be-
ginning which of the Twelve will betray Him. (Jn 6:70-71) The devil
sows the seed of treachery in Judas’s heart. (Jn 13:2) When the moment
of betrayal comes, Satan, as we have seen, actually enters into Judas. (Jn
13:27) As a result, the confrontation between Jesus and Judas in the gar-
den of betrayal recalls, as we have also seen, the confrontation of the first
Adam with Satan in the garden of Eden. By the Christian era, the figures
of Satan and of the serpent had fused. Jesus, the new Adam, triumphs in
the garden over Satan and the forces of darkness to which the first Adam
succumbed. (Jn 18:1-12)
In the fourth gospel, then, Satan does not act directly on Jesus but
always uses human instruments. John’s Jesus does not even exorcise
demoniacs. Moreover, the evangelist names the created forces of evil which
conspired to nail Jesus to the cross: hypocritical lack of repentance, lack
of faith, violence of heart, treachery, and institutionalized oppression,
whether secular or ecclesiastical. (Jn 7:19, 25-30, 8:12-59, 10:31-39,
11:45-53, 19:1-16) The same Satanic forces which conspired to crucify
Jesus, continue to conspire to oppress His disciples.3 (Jn 15:18-16:4)

The fourth evangelist differs most obviously from the synoptics’ account
of Jesus’ adversarial relationship to Satan in his omission of any mention
of Jesus’ desert temptations. The fourth evangelist also makes no men-
tion of the controversy over Beelzebul, although during the feast of Tab-
ernacles, the Johannine Jesus’ enemies call Him demon-possessed. (Jn
8:48)
Read in context, the repudiation of the world and its desires distinguishes the
Johannine community of genuine believers from the dissidents, who have chosen not
to do the will of God but to follow the world and its desires. The author of the letter
makes this point more explicitly by paralleling the admonition to repudiate the world
and its cravings with a warning against the Antichrist, whom the dissidents follow and
proclaim. Moreover, in dedicating themselves to the shallow, passing values of the
world, the dissidents have forfeited their access to eternal life with God in Christ.
Cf. NJBC, 62: 21; Brown, Epistles, pp. 293-328; Klauck, op. cit., I, pp. 136-145; K.G.
Kuhn, “New Light on Temptation, Sin and the Flesh in the New Testament” in The
Scrolls and the New Testament, edited by K. Stehdahl (New York, NY: Harper, 1957),
pp. 94-113; Eduard Schweize, “Die hellenistische Komponent im neutestamentlische
Sarx-Begriff,” Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 48(1957), pp. 237-253;
John Pryke, “‘Spirit’ and ‘Flesh’ in the Qumran Documents and Some New Testament
Parallels,” Revue de Qumran, 5(1964-1965), pp. 345-360; Hans Josef Klauck, “In der
Welt—aus der Welt (1 Joh 2, 15-17): Beoboachtungen zur Ambivalenz der
Johanneischen Kosmosbegriffs,” Franziskanische Studien, 71(1989), pp. 58-68.
3. Cf. Eric Plummer, “The Absence of Exorcisms in the Fourth Gospel,” Biblica,
78(1997), pp. 350-368.
The absence from the fourth gospel of any personal confrontation be-
tween Jesus and Satan reflects the Beloved Disciple’s conviction that the
forces of anti-Christ take concrete embodiment in the world: i.e, in per-
sons and institutions who by their free choice prefer the darkness of hy-
pocrisy, unbelief, and violence to the light of God.
In this respect, Johannine Satanology bears a clear analogy to the Satan-
ology of the book of Revelation. In Revelation, Satan takes embodied
form in the Roman empire and in the blasphemous emperor Domitian
and his minions. In an analogous way, the Beloved Disciple’s account of
Jesus’ confrontation with Satan culminates in His trial before the Roman
governor.
This section has reflected on the Johannine Jesus’ negative relationship
to Satan. The section which follows ponders His negative relation to “the
Jews.”
(II)
The term “the Jews (hoi Judaioi)” has more than one meaning in the
fourth gospel, not all of them pejorative. First, “the Jews” designates the
Jewish people as a nation with particular ethnic customs. (Cf. Jn 2:6, 13;
4:9, 22; 5:1; 7:2; 11:55; 18:33, 35; 19:3, 20-21, 40) In this first use the
term has no negative connotations. Second, in chapters eleven and twelve
of the gospel, the term means “Judaeans” and refers to the people who
lived in the province of Judaea whether they supported or opposed Jesus.
In its second sense, therefore, “the Jews” can have either positive or nega-
tive connotations. Most frequently, however, “the Jews” in the fourth gospel
designates the enemies of Jesus. In its negative, purely pejorative sense,
the term “the Jews” refers to any who oppose Jesus. As a result, “the Jews”
refers often, though not exclusively, to the high priestly authorities in
Jerusalem. As in the case of “the world,” unbelief, not Jewishness as such,
endows the term “the Jews” with negative connotations. In this sense, the
Beloved disciple avoids anti-semitism; but his rhetorical use of the term
“the Jews” unfortunately invites an anti-semitic interpretation. In what
follows, I shall include the term “the Jews” in quotation marks whenever
in Johannine theology it refers restrictively and negatively to those who
resist faith in Jesus. The quotation marks seek to remind the reader that
the term does not designate all Jewish people.4
4. Cf. John Christopher Thomas, “The Fourth Gospel and Rabbinic Judaism,” Zeitschrift
für die Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 82(1991), pp. 159-182; Ingo Broer, “ Die
Juden im Johannesevangelium,” Diakonia: Internationale Zeitschrift für die Praxis der
Kirche, 14(1983), pp. 332-341; John Pawlikowski, “A Faith Without Shadow:
Liberating Christian Faith from Anti-Semitism,” Theology Digest, 43(1996), pp.
203-217, see especially: pp. 206-208.
Jesus and “the Jews”
Only the fourth gospel repeatedly calls the enemies of Jesus “the Jews.”
The evangelist’s pejorative designation of the enemies of Jesus as “the
Jews” reflects his own historical situation. The community of the Beloved
Disciple certainly stood in an adversarial relationship with the synagogue,
which had expelled the Johannine Christians for confessing Jesus’ divin-
ity. From a Jewish standpoint to attribute the divine name to any creature
amounted to idolatry and blasphemy. The Beloved Disciple, of course,
saw things differently.
Since Christianity in the first century had no status as an official reli-
gion of the empire, the expulsion of Christians from the synagogue had
serious political consequences and made Christians vulnerable to Roman
persecution. Under Roman law those who attended unauthorized public
gatherings could suffer arrest and interrogation under suspicion of con-
spiracy. The evangelist and his community had, then, suffered at the hands
of “the Jews” and could suffer more. The hostility between the synagogue
and Johannine Christians had, moreover, reached such a pitch that the
evangelist had ceased to hope for reconciliation with the local Jewish
community. His ethical dualism therefore caused him frequently to iden-
tify “the Jews” with the world, with those who stubbornly refuse to be-
lieve in Jesus.
In its pejorative uses, the term “the Jews,” has, then, both an historical
and a symbolic meaning in the fourth gospel. It designates especially the
hostile religious leaders of Palestinian Judaism. Symbolically, however,
those leaders symbolize the hostile synagogue of the evangelist’s own time,
especially the Pharisees. Moreover, as we shall see, on occasion in its pejo-
rative connotations the term “the Jews” refers also to dissident “Chris-
tians” who refused to confess the divinity of Jesus or to acknowledge His
real eucharistic presence.
In what follows, I shall examine those passages in which the term “the
Jews” refers to anyone who refuses to believe in Jesus. As we shall see, in
this context, the Beloved Disciples identifies “the Jews” both with those
Jews who reject faith in Jesus and with the Johannine dissidents.
Significantly, in his account of the bread-of-life discourse, the evange-
list does not refer to Jesus’ interlocutors as “the Jews” until they turn
hostile. “The Jews” refuse to believe that Jesus is the bread of divine wis-
dom who has descended from heaven. (Jn 6:35-41) The fourth evange-
list places on the lips of the unbelieving Jews an objection which resembles
in some ways the reaction of the unbelieving Nazarenes in the synoptics;
but the fourth evangelist gives the objection his own theological slant.
“The Jews” object: “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph? Don’t we know
His father and mother? How can He claim to have come down from
heaven?” (Jn 6:41-42; cf. Mk 6:1-6, Mt 13:53-58)
In the synoptic gospels, familiarity breeds contempt. The fact that the
people of Nazareth know well both Jesus and His family makes them
skeptical of His message and of His power to heal. The fourth evangelist,
however, transforms the fact that Jesus had human parents known to the
crowds into an objection against His existence in heaven prior to His
human birth. This denial of Jesus’ pre-existence amounts to a denial of
His divinity.
“The Jews” next find incredible Jesus’ promise to give them His body
and blood as food and drink. Moreover, despite Jesus’ warning that, un-
less they eat His flesh and drink His blood, they will never share in the
resurrection from the dead, large numbers abandon Him in disbelief.
The fourth evangelist identifies these “Jews” as disciples of Jesus. (Jn
6:52-66)
Although the fourth evangelist insists on the crucial importance of eu-
charistic worship and of faith in Jesus’ real presence in the eucharist, the
fourth gospel has, paradoxically, no account of the institution of the
eucharist. It seems at least plausible, even probable, that the gospel’s re-
dactor adapted the eucharistic section of the Bread of Life discourse from
the gospel’s original institution narrative. The fact that the Bread of Life
discourse takes place near the second Passover would have made it a suit-
able liturgical reading for Easter; and liturgical motives could conceiv-
ably have motivated our putative redactor’s editorial changes. We cannot
know for certain if this hypothesis explains the absence of an institution
narrative in John or not; but it enjoys genuine plausibility. In any case it
seems, at the very least, historically extremely improbable that Jesus dur-
ing His lifetime would have debated His contemporaries about His real
presence in the eucharist.
More likely, the evangelist is attributing anachronistically to Jesus’ con-
temporaries beliefs and attitudes which divided the Johannine commu-
nity itself. These references to “the Jews” suggest that some members of
the community of the Beloved Disciple, probably proto-Docetists, de-
nied not only the divinity of Jesus and His eternal existence with the
Father but also His ability to dwell in anything as material as bread and
wine. The evangelist’s adversaries in the synagogue would, no doubt, have
also denied both of these doctrines. In the Bread of Life discourse, then,
the evangelist apparently lumps together as “the Jews” both anti-Christian
Jews and heretical Christians.5
At Tabernacles, the evangelist again calls the crowds hostile to Jesus
“the Jews.” Even though some of the people in Jerusalem begin to regard
Jesus as the messiah, those hostile to Him come up with one rationaliza-
Commentary on John, I, pp. 284-308; Roger Le Deant “Une aggadah targumique et les
murmurs de Jean 6,” Biblica, 51(1970), pp. 80-83.
tion after another for not believing Him. Initially, people express aston-
ishment at Jesus’ teaching because He has not studied under one of the
outstanding rabbis in Jerusalem. (Jn 7:15) When Jesus charges the hos-
tile crowds with wanting His blood, they call Him a lunatic. (Jn 7:20)
Some of the people in the crowds wonder that the authorities in Jerusa-
lem have not taken action against Jesus and speculate whether even the
leaders have come to accept Jesus as the messiah; but they dismiss Jesus’
claims to messianic authority because they know His origins, that He
comes from Nazareth and not from Bethlehem. (Jn 7:25-28, 40-44)
At Tabernacles, therefore, after vacillation on the part of some of the
crowds, in the end “the Jews” turn against Jesus and seek His death. Here,
“the Jews” designates the chief priests, the Sanhedrin, and Pharisees; but
it also includes all those whose lack of faith in Jesus makes them hostile to
Him. As we shall soon see, the Beloved Disciple associates the Pharisees
with the chief priests because in his eyes the Pharisaical leaders of a hos-
tile synagogue perpetuated in his day the same unrepentant lack of faith
and violence of heart which the chief priests had exhibited in Jesus’ day.
In the course of His exchange with the crowds, Jesus Himself names
the reasons why His enemies refuse to believe in Him: 1) His cure of the
cripple on the sabbath (Jn 7:21-22); 2) the fact that they belong to the
world and not to God (Jn 8:23-24); 3) the fact that His hour has not yet
arrived for the full revelation of His divinity (Jn 8:28); 4) racial pride (Jn
8:39); 5) the fact that they are children of Satan. (Jn 8:44) As Jesus fore-
told in His conversation with His brothers, His testimony to the truth
and to the world’s malice turns “the Jews” against Him.6
6. The first letter of John calls its adversaries Antichrists. Having made this charge, the
letter identifies the fundamental norm which allows one to distinguish the children of
light from the children of darkness, the children of God from the children of Satan:
namely, living practical faith:
Everyone who acts justly has been begotten by God....Everyone who acts sin-
fully is really working lawlessness, for sin is lawlessness. And you know well
that Christ was revealed to take away sins, and there is nothing sinful in Him.
Everyone who abides in Him does not commit sin. Everyone who sins, has
never seen Him nor come to know Him. (1 Jn 2:29, 3:4-6)
We find here another echo of a fundamental theme in the gospel of John: God
requires of sinful mortals the deed of faith, which includes obedience to the divine
commands. (Jn 6:29, 15:7-12) For John the commands of Jesus replace the Torah as
the fundamental law of the Christian community. Those who disobey the commands
of God proclaimed by Jesus manifest by their disobedience their lack of faith. In
claiming their sinlessness and denying the saving efficacy of Jesus’ death, the dissidents
in fact manifest their sinful disobedience to the command of faith. They thus reveal that
they never knew or understood the divine revelation embodied in Jesus.
Tacitly recalling the confrontation in the fourth gospel between Jesus and His
adversaries during the feast of Tabernacles, the author of the first letter equates sinners
with the children of the devil and believers with the children of God. Those who live
The designation of the hostile crowds as “children of the devil” casts an

important light on the Beloved Disciple’s demonology. Any individual,
with the holiness of Christ live as God’s children, while all who sin against the
obedience of faith belong to the devil, since the devil functions as the source of sin just
as Jesus functions as the source of divine life. (1 Jn 3:3-8)
The author of the letter concludes:
And you know that That One appeared in order to take away sin, and that sin
is not in Him. Anyone abiding in Him does not sin; all who sin have never
seen or known Him. (1 Jn 3:5-6)
In effect, the author of the letter summarizes and sharpens the issue dividing him
from the dissidents. 1) In denying the saving character of Jesus’ death, the dissidents
deny the whole purpose of the incarnation. 2) Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, defines
the meaning of sinless living; hence, anyone who professes living, practical faith in Him
avoids sin. 3) In denying Him and His saving mission, the dissidents sin through their
very lack of faith.
In a brief aside, the author of the letter underscores the saving consequences of
authentic belief in Jesus Christ:
Look how much love the Father has shown us so that we may be called chil-
dren of God, as we are. On account of that the world does not know you, just
as it did not know Him. Beloved, we are now children of God, and what we
shall be has not yet appeared. We know that whenever He may appear, we
shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is. And everyone having
that hope purifies himself, just as He is pure. (1 Jn 3:1-3)
One finds here a significant development of some traditional Johannine Christo-
logical themes, although several themes strike a familiar note. The latter include: 1) The
incarnate Son of God embodies the love of the Father. 2) He came to transform those
who believe in Him into children of God. 3) The world fails to acknowledge those who
believe in Jesus just as it repudiated Him. Moreover, the world’s failure to recognize
God’s incarnate Son makes it impossible for the world to acknowledge God’s children
by grace.
Interwoven with these familiar themes, however, one finds some significant new
emphases.
1) The author of the letter contrasts the disciples’ present state and dignity as
children of God with what they shall become. What the disciples shall become when
they share fully in the glory of the risen Christ remains, however, shrouded in the
eschatological future.
2) The final appearance of Christ in glory will simultaneously disclose to them the
fullness of glory to which their present faith in Christ now destines them.
3) What the disciples will be when they share fully in risen glory exists on a
continuum with their present experience of faith. Even though the agnostic stance
which the author of the letter takes toward the concrete form which risen glory will take
in the case of the disciples leaves the meaning of glorification in Christ shrouded in the
mystery of the dawning eschatological future, nevertheless, glorification will bring to
perfection the knowledge of Christ which faith presently yields, since glorification will
yield face-to-face vision of the glorified Son of God. Nowhere in the gospel of John do
we find as strong a statement of the mysterious character of risen life with Christ,
although one could find here a development of Jn 3:8. There Jesus assures Nicodemus
that the future into which the Breath draws the believer remains shrouded in mystery.
any group of individuals, any institution opposed to Jesus in hostile un-

belief belongs to the sinful world and serves as a demonic instrument of
the forces of darkness in an evil parody of graced, divine filiation.
The stories of the cure of the blind man and of the raising of Lazarus
make it clear that “the Jews” intend to treat Jesus’ disciples with the same
violence which they showed toward Him. The man born blind serves, as
we have seen, as a type of the believing, persecuted Christian cast out of
the synagogue for confessing Jesus. (Jn 9:22, 34) Similarly, when the rais-
ing of Lazarus causes many to believe in Jesus, the chief priests add Lazarus’s
name to their death list.7 (Jn 12:9-11)

Johannine polemic against “the Jews” finds no parallel in the synoptic
gospels. It has earned the Beloved Disciple the charge of disseminating
4) The desire to share in the fullness of risen glory motivates the believing Christian’s
present avoidance of all sinful defilement. The true believer’s repentant concern to
avoid sin contrasts with the dissidents self-deceptive claims to impeccability.
The author of the letter would seem to be arguing at least implicitly that the present
distinction between the children of God and the children of the devil will reach full
revelatory clarity in the second coming and final judgment. Then the true children of
God will share fully in the glory of the risen Christ. Supply that the children of the devil
will share in the ultimate destruction of Satan and of His minions.
Cf. NJBC, 62: 25-26; Brown, Epistles, pp, 378-345; Klauck, op. cit., I, pp. 160-171;
S. Lyonnet, “The Notion of Sin in the Johannine Writings” in Sin, Redemption, and
Sacrifice, by S. Lyonnet and L. Sabourin (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1970),
pp. 38-45; I. de la Potterie, “The Impeccability of the Christian According to 1 Jn 3,
6-9” in The Christian Lives by the Spirit, by I. de la Potterie and S. Lyonnet (Staten
Island, NY: Alba, 1971), pp. 175-196; J. du Preez, “‘Sperma autou’ in 1 Jn 3:9,”
Neotestamentica, 9(1975), pp. 105-112; Antonio Vincent Cernuda, “La filiacion
divina segun kai en 1 Jn 2, 29 y 3, 1,” Estudios Biblicos, 36(1977), pp. 85-90.
7. Cf. NJBC, 61:104-126; Brown, The Gospel of John, I, pp. lxvii-lxxix, 305-368; Robert
G. Brachter, “‘The Jews in the Gospel of John,” Bible Translator, 26(1975), pp.
401-409; C.K. Barrett, The Gospel of John and Judaism, translated by D.M. Smith
(Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1975); J. Jorz, “Die Juden im Johannesevangelium,”
Judaica, 3(1953), pp. 129-142; Malcolm Lowe, “Who are the IOUDAIOI?” Novum
Testamentum, 18(1976), pp. 101-130; Ephrem Florival, O.S.B., “Les seins ne l’ont pas
recu (Jn 1, 11), Nouvelle Revue Théologique, 89(1967), pp. 43-66; Reginald Fuller,
“The ‘Jews’ in the Fourth Gospel,” Dialog, 16(1977), pp. 31-37; Philip Kaufmann,
O.S.B., The Beloved Disciple: Witness Against Anti-Semitism (Collegeville, MI: The
Liturgical Press, 1991); Erich Grässer, “Die Antijüdische Polemik im Johannes-
evangelium, New Testament Studies, 11(1964-1965), pp. 74-90; Severino Pancaro,
“The Church and Israel in the Gospel of John,” New Testament Studies, 21(1974-1975),
pp. 396-405; Walter W. Sikes, “The Antisemitism of the Fourth Gospel,” Journal of
Religion, 21(1941), pp. 23-30; G.A.F. Knight, “Antisemitismin the fourth Gospel,”
Reformed Theological Review, 27(1968), pp. 81-88; C. Dekker, “Grundschrift und
Redaktion im Johannesevangelium,” New Testament Studies, 13(1966-1967), pp.
66-80; Ludger Schenke, “Der Dialog Jesu mit den ‘Juden’ im Johannesevangelium:
eine Rekonstruktionsversuch,” New Testament Studies, 34(1988), pp. 573-603.
anti-Semitic bigotry. Certainly, over the centuries those who called them-
selves Christians too often quoted the fourth gospel in order to justify
their own sinful, bigoted, anti-Semitic attitudes.
Within the synoptic tradition, this strain in Johannine rhetoric finds
its closest narrative parallel in Luke’s account of Paul’s Gentile mission.
There Israel’s refusal to recognize that God chose it, not just for itself, but
for the sake of a universal salvation motivates repeated Jewish resistance
to the gospel.
The conflict between the Johannine community and the synagogue
helps contextualize historically the pejorative connotations which the
Beloved Disciple frequently ascribes to the term “the Jews.” Careful at-
tention to the different meanings with which the evangelist endows the
term suggests, however, that not Jewishness as such but unbelieving hos-
tility to his own community and its religious faith motivates the Beloved
Disciple’s negative use of the term. The evangelist’s extension of the term
to the Christian dissidents illustrates this point.
This section has examined how the Beloved Disciple employs the term
“the Jews.” The two sections which follow examine Jesus’ negative rela-
tionship to two groups among “the Jews”: namely, to the Pharisees and to
the chief priests. As we shall see, the Beloved Disciple regards both groups
as embodiments of the same dark powers.
(III)
Only one reference to scribes occurs in John’s gospel. Some scribes join
the Pharisees in bringing the woman caught in adultery to Jesus for judg-
ment. (Jn 8:3) Since the style of this story could suggest that someone
other than the original evangelist wrote it, it seems likely that a subse-
quent editor of the gospel inserted it into the events surrounding the
feast of Tabernacles. In other words, the original evangelist apparently
showed no interest at all in the scribal class at Jesus’ time.
Jesus and the Pharisees

The Beloved Disciple did, however, have definite opinions about Phari-
sees. The Pharisee Nicodemus, as we have seen, typifies one kind of Jew,
probably Jewish Christian members of the Beloved Disciple’s own com-
munity, who would have preferred to keep their faith in Jesus a secret but
who found themselves forced by persecution to come out into the open.
(Jn 3:1-9, 7:50, 19:39). As we have seen, in the unedited version of the
fourth gospel, Nicodemus probably made his appearance after the story
of the man born blind. If so, the juxtaposition contrasted his fearful ap-
proach to Jesus under the cover of darkness with the bold faith of the
healed blind man.
The Pharisees in the fourth gospel number among the enemies of Jesus
who refuse to believe in Him. In their relationship to John the Baptizer
and Jesus, the Johannine Pharisees, as we have seen, move from suspicion
to overt hostility. Representatives of the Pharisees join the chief priests
and Levites in cross-examining John the Baptizer. (Jn 1:24)
The Pharisees also keep a weather eye cocked on Jesus and note that He
is soon making even more disciples than John the Baptizer. (Jn 4:1) Fi-
nally, the Pharisees turn overtly hostile to Jesus during the feast of Taber-
nacles. When they recognize that some of the people are beginning to put
faith in Jesus, they (anachronistically) attempt to arrest Him. (Jn 7:32,
45-48)
At one point, in a scribal gloss, the fourth gospel asserts that the Phari-
sees sent the temple police to effect Jesus’ arrest. The Pharisees of Jesus’
day would, of course, have had no jurisdiction over the temple police.
The scribe, however, desires to portray the Pharisees of his own day as
sharing the chief priests’ hostility toward Jesus.8 (Jn 7:30-32)
When the temple police return from the attempted arrest empty handed,
they explain their failure by saying: “Never has a man spoken like this.”
(Jn 7:46) The Pharisees reject their explanation with self-righteous con-
tempt. They point out that none of the right people believe in Jesus:
neither they, nor the Sanhedrin. Only the masses of the people believe
who know “nothing of the Law—and they are damned!” (Jn 7:48-49)
During the feast of Tabernacles, scribes and Pharisees bring a woman
caught in adultery to Jesus for judgment. (Jn 7:2-6) (As we have seen, a
later redactor added this scene to the gospel.) These men of the Law have
contrived a neat legal trap for Jesus. If Jesus absolves the woman, He will
violate Mosaic law. If He orders her execution as Mosaic Law demands,
He will be in trouble with the Romans for ordering an execution without
jurisdiction.
Jesus, however, eludes the trap by refusing to do anything. He doodles
on the ground and remains silent until pressed. Then He responds, “Let
the one among you who has no sin cast the first stone.” (Jn 7:6-8)
Jesus recognizes that the scribes and Pharisees are simply using the
woman to trap Him legally. He acknowledges that Mosaic Law requires
8. Cf. NJBC, 61:109; Some have suggested that the original evangelist in referring to “the
Pharisees” here means the Sanhedrin; but that body did not consist exclusively of
Pharisees, although it may have contained some. The priestly Sadducees probably
dominated the Sanhedrin. Moreover, the evangelist understood well the difference
between the Pharisees and the Sanhedrin. It seems more likely, then, that the text is
anachronistically attributing to the Pharisees of Jesus’ day more authority than they
actually possessed. The fourth evangelist certainly portrays the Pharisees as
co-conspirators with the chief priests against Jesus. (Jn 7:45) Here the text attributes
to them an authority on a par with the priests, an authority they never wielded in Jesus’
day.
her execution by stoning; but He also censures the self-righteousness with

which His enemies have judged the woman. Their condemnation follows
the letter of the Law but fails to embody the Law’s true intent: compas-
sion, understanding, and mercy.
When one by one, beginning with the oldest, the scribes and Pharisees
retire in confusion, Jesus asks the woman whether anyone has condemned
her. She replies that no one has. Then Jesus says: “Nor do I condemn
you. You may go. But from now on avoid this sin.” (Jn 7:8-11)
Jesus’ merciful refusal to condemn the woman accords with the
Johannine doctrine that He has come not to condemn the world but to
save it. Indeed, the fact that immediately after the story of the adulterous
woman, Jesus reminds the Pharisees that He has not come to pass judg-
ment on the world may have motivated the editorial insertion of the
story of the adulterous woman as its preface. (Jn 8:15)
Jesus reasserts the non-judgmental character of His mission in another
discussion with a group of Pharisees. The legalistic Pharisees object to
Jesus that what He says carries no legal weight because He acts as His
own witness. (Jn 8:13) Their legalism cloaks a deeper lack of faith, which
Jesus quickly points out to them. They fail to recognize that He comes
from God and is returning to God. They fail to see that His Father stands
by Him and testifies to the truth of what He says in the signs He works.
If therefore the Pharisees judged with the eyes of faith, they would recog-
nize that even by strict legal standards Jesus’ word stands; for two wit-
nesses—He and the Father—testify to the truth of what Jesus teaches.9
(Jn 8:13-20)
After Jesus cures the man born blind, the Pharisees engineer his expul-
sion from the synagogue. When neighbors take the cured man to the
Pharisees, the latter first argue that Jesus could not come from God be-
cause He heals on the sabbath. (Jn 9:13-16) In fact, the Pharisees by
rejecting the miracle verify what Jesus has just said to them: namely, they
fail to recognize that the Father testifies to the Son by empowering Him
to do what only God can do. (Jn 9:17)
The fact that the miracle occurs on the sabbath recalls the sabbath cure
of the paralytic at the pool of Bethsaida. (Jn 5:1-47) Jesus’ discourse on
on John, II, pp. 21-22; John Paul Heil, “The Story of Jesus and the Adulteress (John
7.53-8.11) Reconsidered,” Biblica, 72(1991), pp. 182-191; J. Duncan M. Derrett,
“Exercitations on John 8,” Estudios Biblicos, 52(1994), pp. 439-451; Gail O’Day,
“John 7:53-8:11: A Study in Misreading,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 111(1992),
pp. 631-640; Bart D. Ehrman, “Jesus and the Adulteress,” New Testament Studies,
34(1988), pp. 24-44; Dieter Lührmann, “Die Geschichte von einer Sünderin und
andere Apokryphe Jesusüberlieferungen by Didymos von Alexandria,” Novum Testa-
mentum, 32(1990), pp. 291-316; Harald Shondorf, “Jesus schreibt mit dem Finger auf
die Erde, Joh 8, 6b-8,” Biblische Zeitschrift, 40(1996), pp. 91-93.
that occasion provides, therefore, the theological context for interpreting

the cure of the man born blind. As we have seen, Jesus’ first sabbath cure
reveals the signs which he performs as acts of divine judgment in the
Johannine sense of judgment. The signs reveal in a proleptic way the
divine truth which the paschal mystery will disclose in its fullness. In the
fourth gospel, divine truth and divine love coincide. The Father effects
judgment by sending the Son in order to incarnate divine truth and love
and in order to demand that people choose in the face of that revelation.
The judgment begun in the cure of the paralytic now continues in the
cure of the man born blind.
The cure of the blind man also reproduces the forensic tone of Jesus’
first sabbath miracle. In His defence of His cure of the cripple, Jesus, as
we have seen, appeals for legal justification to the testimony of three wit-
nesses: the Father, John the Baptizer, and Moses. The legal trial of the
cured blind man prior to his expulsion from the synagogue prolongs the
same forensic metaphor. The blind man’s legal trial prior to expulsion
invokes explicitly a Johannine theology of judgment. The Pharisees who
put the blind man on trial and who pass negative judgment on both him
and Jesus themselves stand judged by their blindness to the Light which
Jesus embodied. As we shall see, Pilate and the chief priests will experi-
ence a similar judgment when they condemn Jesus. (Jn 9:38-41)
At first, the Pharisees refuse to believe that, in the case of the blind
man, a miracle has in fact occurred. They summon the man’s parents to
testify to the fact that he suffered from blindness since birth. The parents
do so testify but will not discuss his cure for fear of expulsion from the
synagogue. (Jn 9:18-22) Obstinate in their unbelief to the end, the Phari-
sees repudiate both Jesus and the man born blind as sinners; and they
expel the man from the synagogue when he refuses to denounce Jesus.
They also contradict Jesus’ statement that sin did not cause the man’s
blindness. Instead, the Pharisees count his physical disability as proof of
his sin. (Jn 9:1-5, 24-34)
The story identifies the Pharisees with the unbelieving “Jews.” It also
points to them as those chiefly concerned to expel the disciples of Jesus
from the synagogue.10
The raising of Lazarus causes many to believe in Jesus. Witnesses of the
event inform the Pharisees about what Jesus has done and, presumably,
about the popular faith which His action has evoked. Alarmed, the Phari-
sees join the chief priests in plotting Jesus’ death. (Jn 11:45-7) The Phari-
sees also anachronistically join the chief priests in ordering Jesus’ arrest,
should He come to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. (Jn 11:57)
10. Cf. J. Warren Holleran, “Seeing the Light: A Narrative Reading of John 9,”Ephemeri-
des Theologicae Lovaniensis, 69(1993), pp. 354-382.
When Jesus enters Jerusalem in triumph, the Pharisees lament in dis-

couragement that the whole world is running after Jesus. (Jn 12:19) The
Pharisees’ own day arrives, however, when they join the chief priests in
sending the temple guards to arrest Jesus. (Jn 18:3)
Like Matthew, John makes the Pharisees directly responsible for Jesus’
death, although historically the chief priests and the Sanhedrin almost
certainly functioned as the principal agents of Jesus’ arrest and condem-
nation. Both evangelists are, however, projecting onto the Pharisees of
Jesus’ day the hostility which they themselves encountered in the Phari-
sees of their own generation. As in Matthew’s gospel, the anachronism
portrays the Pharisaical adversaries of the Johannine community as the
heirs to the priests’ leadership of the Jewish community. One with the
priests in wielding religious authority, they also inherit the priests’ unre-
pentant blindness and violence of heart. Both priests and Pharisees, there-
fore, serve as the instruments of the same dark powers.11

All four gospels describe conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees. In all
four gospels, these stories of conflict recall real confrontations during
Jesus’ ministry; but they also target “Pharisaical” tendencies in the Chris-
tian community. The synoptic evangelists identify those tendencies with
unbelief, legalism, formalism, judgmentalism, hypocrisy, and, on occa-
sion, greed.
The Beloved Disciple’s treatment of the Pharisees finds its closest ana-
logue among the synoptic evangelists in Matthew. The analogy springs
from an analogous cause: both communities found themselves in conflict
with a synagogue led by hostile Pharisees. Both evangelists portray an
alliance between the Pharisees and the chief priests to destroy Jesus.
This alliance almost certainly has theological rather than historical mo-
tives. Although some Pharisees may have belonged to the Sanhedrin, the
Pharisees of Jesus’ day lacked both the authority and the political clout
which both Matthew and John ascribe to them. In associating the Phari-
sees with the chief priests in their opposition to Jesus, both evangelists
seek to portray the Pharisees of their own day as the religious heirs of the
priestly aristocracy who engineered Jesus’ crucifixion. The Pharisees have
inherited the de facto leadership of the Jewish community which the chief
priests exercised in Palestine. Moreover, Pharisaical opposition to Jesus’
disciples proves them heirs to the unbelief and hostility with which the
Commentary on John, II, pp. 33-42; Kenneth L. Carroll, “The Fourth Gospel and the
Exclusion of Christians from the Synagogues,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library
Manchester, 40(1957-1958), pp. 19-32; Felix Gryglewicz, “Die Pharisäer und die
Johanneskirche” in Probleme der Forschung, edited by A. Fuchs (Munich: Verlag
Harold Wien, 1978), pp. 144-158.
chief priests greeted Jesus and His message. In the mind of both evange-
lists, Pharisaical persecution of Jesus’ disciples continues the work of the
chief priests. It embodies the same kinds of religious hypocrisy and unbe-
lief. Both evangelists make this point through narrative by linking the
Pharisees to the sacerdotal plot against Jesus.
Conflict between Church and synagogue, in other words, led both evan-
gelists to demonize their Pharisaical adversaries. Even though the Matthean
community seems not to have suffered as yet the formal expulsion which
confronted the Johannine community, Matthew paints an even more
negative portrait of the Pharisees than does the Beloved Disciple. In the
fourth gospel, the Pharisees clearly embody the forces of darkness, hy-
pocrisy, unrepentance, unbelief, and violence of heart as the chief priests;
but nowhere in John does one find anything resembling the bitter woes
against the scribes and Pharisees which the Matthean Jesus thunders. Para-
doxically, the fact that the Matthean community seems to have preserved
still some ties to the synagogue may help explain the virulence of Matthew’s
anti-Pharisaical rhetoric in comparison with John’s. Matthew seems to
have feared that Pharisaical influence upon Christian leaders would cause
them to ape all the Pharisaical vices which, in the evangelist’s eyes, con-
tradict the fundamental demands of Christian leadership. The expelled
leaders of the Johannine community probably felt no such temptation.
Moreover, the Beloved Disciple seems to have despaired of reconciliation
with the synagogue. As a consequence, the fourth evangelist contents
himself with associating the Pharisees hand-in-glove with the chief priests
as institutional embodiments of the dark powers.
This section has reflected on the Beloved Disciple’s inclusion of the
Pharisees among the unbelieving Jews. The section which follows reflects
on the conflict between Jesus and the chief priests.
(IV)
The fourth evangelist frequently uses the term “the Jews” as a synonym
for “chief priests.” When, for example, “the Jews” send priests and Levites
to question John the Baptizer, the delegation clearly comes from the chief
priests in Jerusalem. (Jn 1:19)
Jesus and the Priests

The cleansing of the temple, as we have seen, occurs early in John’s gos-
pel. In his account of this incident, the fourth evangelist includes an in-
teresting narrative detail. John’s Jesus in driving out the sellers and money
changers distinguishes between the rich and the poor. He deals with the
richer merchants more violently: with a whip of cords He drives out those
selling sheep and oxen together with their animals, and He overturns the
tables of the money changers. The poor vendors of doves, however, He
simply orders from the temple precincts with a command: “Get out of
here! Stop turning My Father’s house into a market place!” (Jn 2:13-16)
As in the synoptic gospels, Jesus by a prophetic act denounces the com-
mercialization of temple worship as a means of enriching an aristocratic
priesthood, whose members already belonged to the rich landed class.
Moreover, as in the synoptics, the temple officials challenge Jesus’ au-
thority to do what He is doing. With a typically Johannine twist, how-
ever, “the Jews” ask Jesus for a “sign” authorizing Him to take charge of
the temple. John’s Jesus replies: “Destroy this Temple and in three days I
will raise it up.” (Jn 2:18-19)
Here we find a major discrepancy between the synoptics and the fourth
evangelist. In the synoptic tradition we find the charge that Jesus will
destroy the temple and rebuild it on the lips of his adversaries. In Mark
and Matthew the false witnesses at Jesus’ trial charge Him with making
the boast. (Mk 14:58; Mt 26:61) The same two gospels place the charge
on the lips of those who taunt Jesus as He hangs on the cross. (Mk 25:9
Mt 27:40) In Acts Luke has the enemies of Stephen charge him with
saying that Jesus will destroy the temple. (Acts 4:14) The fourth evange-
list, however, puts this promise of rebuilding the temple on the lips of
Jesus Himself.
If one reads John’s account as an historical statement, Jesus charges the
chief priests with destroying the temple. He does not promise to destroy
it Himself. Taken historically, then, Jesus’ words assert that the commer-
cial corruption of worship over which the temple priests preside will one
day lead to the destruction of the Herodian temple, just as the sinfulness
of Israel had led to the destruction of Solomon’s temple. Viewed as an
historical statement, Jesus’ allusion to rebuilding the temple could, then,
signify the messianic act of rebuilding the temple and purifying its wor-
ship. The evangelist interprets the temple’s rebuilding as Jesus’ bodily
resurrection.
Like the synoptics, the fourth evangelist states that the cleansing of the
temple took place at Passover time; but in contrast to the synoptics it
does not happen at the Passover when Jesus died. John, as we have seen,
speaks of three Passovers in all: this one, the one which followed Jesus’
Bread of Life discourse, and the one at which He died.
The first two Passovers foreshadow the third. Moreover, as we have also
seen, the first two Passovers both allude to the purification of worship.
The first Passover begins the messianic purification of the temple by con-
demning the commercialization of its worship, while the second prom-
ises the eucharist which will embody authentic, pneumatically inspired
worship of God when people cease to worship either on Mount Gerizim
or in Jerusalem. (Jn 2:13-22, 4:21-23, 6:1-59, 13:1 ff.) Viewed theologi-
cally, the three Passovers reveal cumulatively that the paschal mystery
abolishes and supersedes both the Passover rite and temple worship.12
The cure of the cripple at the pool of Bethsaida again brings Jesus into
conflict with the hostile Jerusalem leaders, whom the evangelist again
calls “the Jews.” “The Jews” accuse the cured cripple of violating the sab-
bath by carrying the mat on which he had lain beside the pool. The man
replies that he is simply following the order of the one who cured him;
but, when pressed to disclose Jesus’ name, the cured cripple confesses
that he does not know it. (Jn 5:9b-13) Later, however, when Jesus con-
fronts the man and tells him not to sin again lest worse befall him, the
cured cripple informs the Jerusalem authorities that Jesus in fact per-
formed the miracle. (Jn 5:14-15)
In the synoptics, Jesus’ enemies object to His sabbath cures as viola-
tions of the sabbath rest. “The Jews” make the same objection in the
fourth gospel but add another objection: namely, that Jesus justifies His
sabbath cures by claiming the divine right to work on the sabbath, thus
making Himself equal to God. (Jn 5:15-18) In citing the second reason
for the hostility of the Jerusalem leaders to Jesus, the evangelist is prob-
ably projecting anachronistically onto the historical enemies of Jesus is-
sues which divided the Johannine community and the synagogue.
John begins the account of Tabernacles by noting that Jesus remained
in Galilee because “the Jews” desired to kill him. (Jn 7:1) Here the term
“the Jews” refers especially to the temple priesthood and to the Sanhedrin;
but, as the debates between Jesus and His adversaries unfold during Tab-
ernacles, He also charges the hostile crowds with seeking His blood.
The exchange between Jesus and His brothers before the feast makes it
clear that those who seek Jesus’ life belong to the world. Jesus’ brothers
urge Him to leave Galilee and go to Jerusalem during the feast as a way of
publicizing His miracles. The evangelist notes, however, that Jesus’ brothers
themselves did not in fact believe in Him. Conceivably, the Beloved Dis-
Commentary on John, I, pp. 180-190; see also, Ernst Hänchen, Gott und Mensch:
Gesammelte Aufsätze (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1965), pp. 93-105; F.-M. Braun, O.P.,
“L’expulsion des vendeurs du temple,” Revue Biblique, 38(1929), pp. 178-200; “In
Spiritu et Veritate,” Revue Thomiste, 52(1952), pp. 245-274; Henri van den Bussche,
“Le Signe du temple (Jean 2, 13-22),” Bible et Vie Chrétienne, 20(1957-1958),) pp.
92-101; Ocsar Cullmann, “L’opposition contre le temple de Jerusalem, motif commun
de la théologie Johannique et du monde ambiant,” New Testament Studies, 5(1958-1959),
pp. 157-173; Victor Eppstein, “The Historicity of the Gospel Account of the
Cleansing of the Temple,” Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 55(1964),
pp. 42-58; Siegfried Mendner, “Die Tempelreinigung und Golgotha (Joh 2:19-22),”
Biblische Zeitschrift, 6(1962), pp. 102-107; Xavier Léon-Dufour, “Le signe du temple
selon Saint Jean,” Recherches de Science Religieuse, 39(1951-1952), pp. 155-175; Udo
Schnelle, “Die Tempelreinigung unde die Christologie des Johnnesevangeliums,” New
ciple desires the reader to contrast the unbelief of these brothers in the
flesh with the faith of the Beloved Disciple who becomes Jesus’ brother in
faith at the foot of the cross. The advice of Jesus’ natural brothers seems
to spring from their false perception of Jesus as aspiring to secular
messianism. (Jn 7:1-4)
Jesus replies:
My time (kairos) is not yet come; but the time (kairos) is always suitable for
you. The world cannot possibly hate you, but it does hate Me because I
bear witness concerning it that its deeds are wicked. Go up to the feast
yourselves. I am not going up to this feast because my time (kairos) is not
yet ripe. (Jn 7: 6-8)
The term “kairos” designates a decisive moment of salvation. Jesus, of

course, is referring to His “hour,” to the time when He will be lifted up in
suffering and in glory. He is telling His brothers that He will make the
kind of public display for which they are calling when His hour comes.
Jesus fulfills this promise when He enters Jerusalem in triumph prior to
His passion. (Jn 12:12-19) In fact, Jesus goes to the feast of Tabernacles, but
secretly and not in the ostentatious way His brothers suggest (Jn 7:10)
Jesus recognizes that His brothers’ suggestion does not proceed from
faith in Him. His brothers, because of their unbelief and commitment to
secular messianism belong to the world. The world, therefore, looks fondly
upon them. Moreover, unlike Jesus, they have no need to wait the hour
appointed by the Father. By the world’s standards, any time suits for grasp-
ing power.
Finally, in His exchange with His brothers, Jesus enunciates a central
theme which the evangelist will dramatize during His account of Taber-
nacles: the world hates Jesus for speaking the truth about it and for un-
masking its hypocrisy and violence.
“The Jews”—namely, the chief priests and Sanhedrin—also expect Jesus
to engage in the kind of public display to which His brothers urge him.
(Jn 7:11) The crowds at Tabernacles divide into those who approve of
what Jesus is doing and those who regard Him as a charlatan. In their fear
of the Jerusalem authorities, the crowds fear to speak openly about Jesus.13
(Jn 7:11-13)
During the feast of Tabernacles, the evangelist speaks of two different
attempts to arrest Jesus. Although the evangelist leaves vague the identity
of those who initiate the first arrest, the context points to the temple
priesthood. After noting twice that Jesus was teaching in the temple, the
Commentary on John, II, pp. 5-8; Christian Dietzfelbinger, “Der ungeliebte Bruder:
Der Herrenbruder Jakobus im Johannesevangelium,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und
Kirche, 89(1992), pp. 377-403.
evangelist says: “Then they tried to arrest Him, but no one laid a finger
on Him because His hour had not yet come.”14 (Jn 7:30, cf.14, 28) The
attempt fails because the temple police find themselves spellbound by
Jesus’ words and return empty-handed. (Jn 7:46)
The second attempt also fails because the temple police once again find
themselves hard put to resist Jesus’ words. (Jn 7:46) When Jesus responds
to the attempted arrest with the warning that He will soon depart and
return to the Father, a place to which the unbelieving crowds have no
access, “the Jews” systematically distort what He has said by imagining
that He intends to take His ministry to Jews of the Diaspora. (Jn 7:35-36)
Later, when Jesus repeats the same warning, “the Jews” suggest in disbe-
lief that Jesus must be contemplating suicide when He suggests that He is
going where others cannot follow. (Jn 8:22) In both cases, “the Jews” prob-
ably designates both the unbelieving crowds and Jesus’ priestly adversaries.
Both slanderous suggestions point to an ironic truth. After Jesus’ resur-
rection, His disciples will spread His ministry not only to Jews of the
Diaspora but to Gentiles as well. Jesus will not, of course, commit sui-
cide; but He will freely lay does His life for those whom He seeks to save.
Disagreement about Jesus also surfaces in the Sanhedrin when
Nichodemus attempts to defend Jesus against the Pharisees. (Jn 7:47-52)
Nevertheless, “the Jews”—here, members of the Sanhedrin—fail to grasp
Jesus’ true identity or to understand that He is speaking to them about
the Father. (Jn 8:25, 27)
At the feast of Dedication, the hostile “Jews” in Jerusalem—most likely,
the priestly leaders or their representatives—challenge Jesus to declare
openly His messianic pretensions. Jesus replies that He has already told
them what they ask; but that they do not believe Him. (Jn 10:22-25)
Once again they seek to stone Jesus for claiming identity with the Father
(Jn 10:31-34, 11:8); and they make another unsuccessful attempt to ar-
rest Jesus. (Jn 10:39)
After the raising of Lazarus causes many to believe in Jesus, the Sanhedrin
conspires with the Pharisees to do away with Him. They do so to protect
the political hegemony of the client priesthood and the Jewish client ar-
istocracy.
“What are we to do,” they said, “now that this man is performing many
signs? If we let Him go on like this, everybody will believe in Him; and the
Romans will come and take away our holy place and our nation.” (Jn
11:47-48)
14. Only the chief priests would have had jurisdiction to initiate an arrest within the
temple itself. As we have seen, the fourth evangelist portrays the Pharisees as joining the
attempt to arrest Jesus because he assimilates theologically priestly unbelief and
hostility to the unbelief and hostility of the Pharisaical leaders in the synagogue of his
own day. (Jn 7:32)
These two verses also teem with ironies. In the signs Jesus performs,
the Father testifies to Him. The crowds, whom the Pharisees have already
dismissed as ignorant of the Law and therefore damned, recognize the
signs and believe in them; but the religious leaders and the Pharisees do
not. Their dismay at the faith of the crowds springs from their own lack
of faith. In addition, the Sanhedrin and the Pharisees fear that, if every-
one believes in Jesus, then the Romans will destroy Jerusalem and raze
the temple. That destruction will happen; but, from the evangelist’s stand-
point, it will follow from the stubborn unbelief of the chief priests and
Pharisees, not from faith in Jesus.
The evangelist adds to these ironies another. Caiphas, the high priest
replies to his co-conspirators’ cry of dismay with an abrupt rebuke: “You
know nothing; and you do not realize that it profits you that one man die
[for the people (hyper tou laou)] rather than have the whole nation per-
ish.” (Jn 11:49)
The term “laos” designates Israel as a theocratic nation. The phrase “for
the people” does not, however, appear in some of the early Latin patristic
writers, and it sounds strange on the lips of Caiphas. It makes his state-
ment into something like a profession of faith, while its omission turns it
into a cynical political calculation. A later redactor may, then, have added
the phrase to the text.
The evangelist, however, calls attention to an ironic double meaning in
the high priest’s advice, a double meaning which the scribe who probably
inserted “for the people” clearly understood. The evangelist does so by
interpreting Caiphas’s words as a “prophecy.” Caiphas is talking about
murdering Jesus in order to avoid Roman reprisals and to maintain the
status quo. In fact Jesus’ death will save the people, though not from the
Roman reprisals which will, in the evangelist’s estimate, punish the obsti-
nate unbelief of Jesus’ enemies. Rather, Jesus will save the people when
He dies, rises, and sends the sin-forgiving Breath to effect the universal
reconciliation of humanity with God and with one another through the
gift of endless messianic peace.
The evangelist interprets ironically the deeper, saving meaning of the
high priest’s cynical advice as a “prophecy.” (Jn 11:51) Calling the mur-
derous words of the high priest a prophecy contains yet another irony.
No matter what the chief priests do to prevent Jesus from succeeding,
their malice remains doomed to fail. God will use the very murder of
Jesus in order to insure His triumph; for Jesus by His love will transform
His murder into the supreme expression of divine love for a sinful hu-
manity. As the story of Jesus’ conflict with the temple priesthood un-
folds, the evangelist will develop this irony further, especially in the trial
of Jesus before Pilate.15
Commentary on John, II, pp. 73-81; J.T. Ensfelder, “Die Weissagung des Hohenpriesters
In the fourth gospel, the Sanhedrin’s secret plot against Jesus replaces
His public trial by that body. As we shall see, in his passion narrative the
fourth evangelist alone describes Jesus’ informal interrogation by Annas,
the father-in-law of Caiphas, the real high priest for that year. No other
gospel records this incident. In the fourth gospel, moreover, the interro-
gation comes as close as Jesus gets to a formal trial before the Sanhedrin.
The Beloved Disciple may offer the most historically plausible account
of Jesus’ legal encounter with the Sanhedrin. The absence of any formal
trial before the Sanhedrin also serves important narrative and theological
purposes in the fourth gospel. From the standpoint of narrative struc-
ture, the lack of a trial before the Sanhedrin focuses dramatic attention
on the trial before Pilate. As we shall see, the Beloved Disciple will por-
tray Jesus’ trial before the Roman governor as the judgmental confronta-
tion between the heavenly kingdom which Jesus embodies and the Ro-
man empire, which typifies the kingdoms of this world.
Jesus’ unofficial condemnation by the Sanhedrin without a trial causes
Him to withdraw temporarily in order to avoid direct confrontation with
the chief priests and Pharisees until His hour comes. (Jn 11:54) His en-
emies, for their part, stand ready to act against Him when He finally
makes His move. They have ordered anyone who knows Jesus’ where-
abouts to report it to them so that the temple police can arrest Him. (Jn
11:57)
Moreover, as we have seen, since the raising of Lazarus has caused the
people to turn to Jesus in faith, the chief priests decide to include Lazarus
on their hit list as well. (Jn 12:10) By including this detail, the evangelist
makes it clear that those whom Jesus has raised to life through baptismal
faith must stand ready to die with Him, if necessary.
The Chief Priests in the Passion

As we have already seen, the chief priests and Pharisees act in concert to
send the detachment which arrests Jesus. (Jn 18:2-3) In John, moreover,
the arresting band includes Roman soldiers as well as temple police. (Jn
Kaiphas—Eine exegetische Versuch über Joh XI, 50-51,” Theologische Jahrbücher
1(Tübingen, 1942), pp. 792-800; Werner Grimm, “Preisgabe einer Menschen zur
Rettung des Volkes” in Josepus Studien, edited by Otto Betz et al. (Göttingen:
Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht, 1974), pp. 133-146; Prosper Shecpens, “‘Pontifex anni
illius’ (Ev. de saint Jean, XI, 49, 51; XVIII, 14,” Recherches de Science Religieuse,
11(1921), pp. 372-374; Severeno Pancaro, “‘People of God’ in St. John’s Gospel,”
New Testament Studies, 16(1969-1970), pp. 114-129; Ernst Bammel, “John 11,
45-47” in The Trial of Jesus: Cambridge Studies in Honor of C.F.D. Moule, edited by E.
Bammel, SBT13 (Napierville, IL: Allenson, 1970), pp. 11-40; Margaret Barker,
“Caiphas’ Words in Jn 11, 50 refer to Messiah ben Joseph,” Ibid., pp. 41-46; James
Louis Martyn, History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel (Nashville, TN: Abingdon,
1979), pp. 64-100; Johannes Buetler, S.J., “Two Ways of Gathering: The Plot to Kill
Jesus in John 11:47-53,” New Testament Studies, 40(1994), pp. 399-406.
18:12) Temple and empire, as embodiments of the dark powers (Jn

14:3-31), conspire to put the Son of God on trial.
As we have also seen, for the fourth evangelist, Jesus’ passion begins the
full revelation of His glory. Narrative emphasis on the divine glory ex-
plains the Beloved Disciple’s omission of the agony in the garden; and
Jesus manifests His glory in a positive way by conquering His enemies
with a final proclamation of His divinity.
Jesus, fully aware of everything about to happen to Him, asks the ar-
resting band: “For whom are you looking?” The question recalls Jesus’
question to His first disciples and His subsequent invitation to them to
come and see. It also foreshadows the risen Christ’s question to Mary
Magdalene: “Whom are your seeking?” (Jn 20:15) John’s Jesus follows
His question to His disciples with the invitation to “come and see.” Soon
after hearing the question of the risen Christ, Mary Magdalene “sees”
Him in His risen glory. The Beloved Disciple also desires the reader to
“see” deeply into the events which follow Jesus’ question to His enemies.16
When Jesus’ enemies reply, “Jesus, the Nazorean,” Jesus responds by
saying, “I AM (ego eimi).” (Jn 18:4-5) Translators often render the words
“ego eimi” as “I am He,” but the Greek text has no “He” in it. The words
“ego eimi” identify Jesus as the one the cohort seeks; but they also pro-
claim the divine name “I AM” which He shares with the Father.
When the temple police and soldiers hear Jesus pronounce the divine
name they draw back and fall to the ground. (Jn 18:6) The Beloved Dis-
ciple thus transforms Jesus’ very arrest into a theophany. By merely pro-
nouncing the divine name which He shares with the Father, Jesus renders
those who have come to arrest Him powerless. Only after Jesus has dem-
onstrated that He remains in complete control of the situation does He
freely surrender Himself to the soldiers. (Jn 18:18) In the very moment
of His arrest, Jesus speaks and acts with a divine authority which mani-
fests His glory.
In surrendering Himself Jesus also makes sure that the soldiers allow
the disciples to depart. The act expresses His advance forgiveness of their
abandonment of Him in His passion. (Jn 13:38, 16:32-33) It also insures
the fulfillment of the promise which He made to the disciples in His
priestly prayer. In His priestly prayer Jesus had assured the disciples that,
from among their number, only Judas would know perdition, and then
only to fulfill the Scriptures.17 (Jn 17:12)
16. Cf. Raymond E. Brown, S.S., The Death of the Messiah (2 vols.; New York, NY:
Doubleday, 1994), I, pp. 259-262.
17. Cf. Gottfried Schulle, “Das Leiden des Herrn: Die evangelistische Passionstradition
und ihr ‘Sitz im Leben,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, 52(1955), pp. 161-205;
Sebastian Bartina, S.J., “‘Jo soy Yahweh’ Nota exegetica a Jo 18, 4-8,” Estudios
Ecclesiasticos, 32(1958), pp. 403-426; John Monro Gibson, “The Gethsemane of the
Fourth Gospel,” Expository Times, 30(1918-1919), pp. 76-79; Paul Winter, The Trial
Peter cuts off the ear of the servant of the high priest, possibly the high
ranking official who has accompanied the cohort which arrests Jesus. Only
the fourth evangelist names both the aggressive disciple and the maimed
servant. That a Hellenizing Jewish priest would have adopted a Gentile
name like Malchus has the ring of plausibility.
Peter wields the sword, the ear of Malchus falls to the ground. Luke as
we have seen, has Jesus heal the ear and rebuke any use of violence in His
defence. (Lk 22:51) John makes no mention of a healing. Instead he
gives the rebuke to Peter a different twist. The Johannine Jesus says: “Put
that sword back! Shall I not drink the cup my Father has given Me?” (Jn
18:11)
Jesus’ question, as we have seen, echoes the prayer which the synoptic
Jesus makes during His agony in the garden. (Mk 14:32-46; Mt 26:36-46;
Lk 22:41-2) One finds, however, no hint in John of conflict or of agony.
Instead, Jesus’ words express the same total and sovereign submission to
the Father as one finds in His last discourse. Jesus’ words reveal that the
world has finally no power over Jesus. He for His part freely submits to
the world’s violence in obedience to the Father.18 (Jn 14:30-31)
Only the fourth evangelist records the informal interrogation of Jesus
by Annas, the father-in-law of Caiphas, the high priest. (Jn 18:13-14)
The evangelist portrays this interrogation as a pure formality by remind-
ing the reader that the high priestly caste has already condemned Jesus to
death.19 (Jn 18:14)
As we shall see in considering Jesus’ relationship to His disciples, the
Beloved Disciple focuses the point of the interrogation on Jesus’ relation-
ship to His disciples. When Annas asks Jesus about His disciples and
doctrine, Jesus tells the high priest to question those He has taught, since
He has said nothing in secret. One of the temple police then slaps Jesus
in the face for speaking insolently. Jesus rebukes the guard with the words:
“If I spoke evil, bear witness to the evil; if rightly, why do you strike Me?”
(Jn 18:19-23)
The guard in striking Jesus suggests that He has violated Ex. 22:28,
“You shall not revile God nor curse a ruler of your people.” Jesus in reply-
ing takes note of that law but denies any culpability. He challenges the
temple guard to justify both his accusation and his violent act. Jesus’
of Jesus (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1961), pp. 44-50; Dieter Dormeyer, “Joh
18.1-14 par Mk 14.43-53: Methodologische Überlegungen zur Rekonstruktion einer
vorsynoptischen Passionsgeschichte,” New Testament Studies, 41(1995), pp. 218-239.
18. Cf. NJBC, 61: 207-208; Brown, The Gospel of John, I, pp. 805-818.
19. Having indicated that Caiphas, not Annas, presided as high priest that year, the
evangelist nevertheless designates Annas in the interrogation as “the high priest.”
Exegetes have puzzled over this apparent contradiction; but the evangelist could be
designating Annas as a member of the high priestly caste from whose number the
presiding high priest came. (Jn 18:19)
response also alludes to an incident during the feast of Tabernacles. On

that occasion Jesus countered the hatred of the crowd by challenging
them to convict Him of any sin or wrongdoing. (Jn 15:25) The policeman’s
violence now reproduces the same kind of unjust disbelief. His action
also reminds one of Jn 15:25: “They have hated Me without cause.” Annas
sends Jesus bound to Caiphas.20 (Jn 18:24)
The next morning, without a formal trial before the Sanhedrin, the
high priests take Jesus to Pilate for judgment; but they refuse to enter the
praetorium lest they incur ritual defilement. (Jn 18:28) This priestly con-
cern for ritual niceties at the very moment when they are engaged in
legalized murder strikes a bitterly ironic note by dramatizing the high
priests’ hypocrisy and shallow legalism.21
The priests’ legal scruple also provides the literary conceit which struc-
tures John’s account of the trial before Pilate; for the priests’ refusal to
enter the Praetorium forces Pilate to leave the building in order to con-
front the priests and to re-enter it in order to interrogate Jesus. His en-
trances and exits divide Jesus’ trial into scenes.
In the first scene, the high priests explain why they have not tried Jesus
according to Jewish law: they desire His crucifixion but have no author-
ity to order it. (Jn 18:31) Pilate asks what specific charge the chief priests
bring against Jesus. They reply that, if Jesus were not a criminal, they
would not have brought Him to Pilate for judgment. (Jn 18:29-30) When
Pilate tells the priests to judge Jesus by Mosaic law, the chief priests re-
mind Pilate that they cannot execute anyone and that the Romans must
handle capital punishment.22 (Jn 18:31-32)
Jesus’ enemies have already judged Him guilty of blasphemy. A charge
of blasphemy rooted in Jewish religious beliefs would, however, have car-
Commentary on John, II, pp. 16-174; Robert T. Fortna, “Jesus and Peter at the High
Priest’s House: A Test Case for the Question of the Relation between Mark’s and John’s
Gospel,” New Testament Studies, 24(1977-1978), pp. 371-383; Max Alain Chevallier,
“La comparution de Jésus devant Hanne et devant Caiphe” in Neues Testament und
Geschichte, edited by H.B. Weiler and Bo Reicke (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1972), pp.
179-185; W. Randoph Church, “The Dislocation in the Eighteenth Chapter of John,”
Journal of Biblical Literature, 49(1930), pp. 375-383; Johannes Schneider, “Zur
Komposition von Joh 18, 12-27,” Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft,
48(1951), pp. 111-119; Paul Winter, The Trial of Jesus, pp. 1-50; “Marginal Notes on
the Trial of Jesus,” Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 50(1959), pp.
221-251; Patrick Valentin, “Les Comparution de Jésus devant le sanhedrin,” Recherches
de Science Religieuse, 59(1971), pp. 230-236; Frank J. Matera, “Jesus before Annas:
John 18, 13-14. 19-24,” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovaniensis, 66(1990), pp. 38-55.
21. Cf. Brown, The Death of the Messiah, I, pp. 744-747.
22. Scholars debate the extent of the Sanhedrin’s authority to carry out death sentences
under Roman law. Some of the evidence does, however, support the fourth evangelist’s
statement that in Jesus’ time the Romans had in fact forbidden formal executions by
the Jewish authorities. (Jn 18:31)
ried no weight under Roman law. The chief priests, therefore, assure Pilate
that Jesus has committed a crime deserving capital punishment, but they
fail to name the crime in question. Eventually, as the trial unfolds, Pilate
will force them to confess their duplicity.
The evangelist observes at this point that in bringing about Jesus’ cru-
cifixion, the chief priests are in fact fulfilling Jesus’ own prediction of
how He would die. In speaking to Nicodemus, Jesus, as we have seen,
had predicted that He must be lifted up just as Moses lifted up the ser-
pent in the desert. (Jn 3:13-14) His lifting up will draw all to Himself. In
other words, it will accomplish the universal salvation which Jesus has
come to accomplish. (Jn 12:32)
The first phase of Jesus’ trial ends with Pilate exonerating the accused.
The governor declares that he finds the criminal charges against Jesus
without foundation. Pilate’s preliminary judgment suggests that he rec-
ognizes the religious character of the dispute between Jesus and the chief
priests. Accordingly, the governor refuses to involve the empire in decid-
ing the private religious disputes of its subjects.
As in the synoptics, however, Pilate waffles. He reminds “the Jews” that
at the feast of Passover he customarily releases a prisoner; and he offers to
release Jesus rather than the bandit Barabbas. “The Jews,” however, call
for Barabbas’s release instead. (Jn 18:38b-40) Here the term “the Jews”
refers to the high priests. (Cf. Jn 18:24, 35; 19:6) As in the synoptics, the
priests’ preference for the wrong “son of the father” foreshadows their
final repudiation of the Son of God incarnate. As a sop for the priests,
Pilate has Jesus scourged. (Jn 19:1-3)
Pilate, though balked, has not yet played out his hand. When the chief
priests and temple police see the scourged Jesus cloaked in purple and
crowned with thorns, they again demand His crucifixion. Pilate tells them
scornfully to execute Jesus on their own authority. For his part, he finds
no reason to require Jesus’ death. (Jn 19:4-6) This rebuke causes the chief
priests to say: “We have our own Law and according to that Law He must
die because He pretended to be God’s Son.” (Jn 19:7) In other words,
Pilate’s stubbornness forces the chief priests to confess that they are in
fact seeking a civil execution for the religious crime of blasphemy.
In the fourth evangelist’s vision of the struggle between light and dark-
ness, the conflict, as we have seen, makes the light to shine more brightly
and the darkness to grow deeper. Both happen when the chief priests
confess their true motives for desiring Jesus’ death. They reveal their mal-
ice and hypocrisy in having trumped up criminal charges against Jesus,
when in fact they seek His execution on religious grounds. At the same
time, in revealing the real reason why they want Him dead, they willy-nilly
proclaim His divine Sonship to the Roman governor. In the process they
draw Pilate deeper into guilt. They force the skeptical pagan governor (Jn
18:38) to face the religious implications of what they are demanding of

him.
Pilate reacts with dread. What motivates the dread? The realization
that by meddling in religious matters he could bring himself under the
censure of Rome? Superstitious dread of Jesus as a divine man? (Jn 19:8) In
John’s passion narrative, both motives could in fact motivate Pilate’s fear.
In the final scene of Jesus’ trial, the chief priests threaten Pilate by say-
ing: “If you release this man, you are not Caesar’s friend; every one who
makes himself a king sets himself against Caesar.” (Jn 19:12) A group of
senators together with some invited members of equestrian rank who
surrounded both Augustus and Tiberius bore the name “amici,” or
“friends” of Caesar. One has no way of knowing, however, whether the
phrase bore those connotations on the lips of the Johannine high priests.23
Some commentators see in the threat an implicit reference to the politi-
cal downfall of Sejanus in Rome in the year 31 a.d. Under such an inter-
pretation, the priests warn Pilate that he could suffer the same fate as
Sejanus unless he takes a hard line against Jewish secular messianism.
Other commentators find the allusion to Sejanus contrived.
In any case, the invocation of Caesar’s name persuades Pilate to con-
demn Jesus as a messianic pretender, even though Pilate has already judged
that the legal evidence does not support such a charge. (Jn 19:12)
Pilate, however, has not yet done with the priests. He forces them to
declare how they themselves view Jesus’ messianic status. He presents
Jesus to the priests as their king. The priests reply “We have no king but
Caesar.” (Jn 19:14-15) In other words, having been manipulated by the
priests to condemn Jesus unjustly, Pilate forces the chief priests to replace
allegiance to their true king and messiah with political allegiance to the
dark powers.24
In the fourth gospel, the chief priests do not mock the crucified Jesus as
they do in the synoptic gospels. Instead, they attempt to get Pilate to
revise the official inscription nailed to Jesus’ cross. The inscription publi-
cizes the crime which justifies Jesus’ condemnation and execution. Pilate
had written “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” The chief priests urge
the governor to revise the text to read: “This man said, ‘I am King of the
Jews.’” Pilate refuses. The chief priests have chosen Caesar as their king;
now they must suffer the curt rebuff of Caesar’s representative. (Jn
10:19-22)
The priests began by accusing Jesus of criminal activity, then confessed
that they really wanted Him executed for blasphemy. The priests next
23. Cf. Ernst Bammel, “Philos tou Kaisaros,” Theologische Literaturzeitung, 4(1952), pp.
205-210.
manipulated the governor’s political anxieties until Pilate condemned Jesus

as a secular messiah. Now they try to get Pilate to say that Jesus only
pretended to have royal messianic authority. Pilate refuses; and his refusal
means that Jesus, even as He hangs on the cross, still confronts the world
as its true messiah. At the very moment when the powers of darkness
seem to have triumphed decisively, the light continues to shine. The dark-
ness cannot overcome it. (Jn 1:5)
Moreover, Pilate has the inscription written in Hebrew, Greek, and
Latin in order to insure that anyone can understand the charge against
Jesus. In fact, the public execution near to Jerusalem causes many who
pass by to read and understand the charge. (Jn 19:20) The public publi-
cation of Jesus as the real king of the Jews, not only in Hebrew but in the
more universal languages of Latin and Greek, foreshadows ironically Jesus’
successful proclamation to the Gentiles as messiah and Lord. That proc-
lamation will follow upon His glorification.25
The chief priests make their final appearance in John when, under the
ambiguous designation “the Jews,” they ask Pilate to remove the cruci-
fied bodies from the crosses before the solemn sabbath. The priests’ shal-
low concern with ritual propriety after an act of legalized murder recalls
their hypocritical concern at the beginning of Jesus’ trial to avoid legal
impurity by refusing to enter the Praetorium. (Jn 19:31; cf. 18:28)

Like the synoptic evangelists, the Beloved Disciple regards the chief priests
as the principal agents of Jesus’ crucifixion. Like the synoptics, John por-
trays the priests as cynical, politically ambitious, calculating, hypocriti-
cal, religiously skeptical, and oppressive. Two theological motives color
the Beloved Disciple’s distinctive handling of the chief priests: his under-
standing of the providentially predetermined outcome of the struggle
between light and darkness and his forensic theology of judgment.
The conflict between Jesus and the chief priests which intensifies dur-
ing the feast of Tabernacles brings the theme of the struggle between light
and darkness to front and center stage. That struggle in a sense culmi-
nates in the chief priests’ frustrated attempt to keep Pilate from proclaim-
ing the crucified Jesus the king of the Jews. Despite its worst efforts, the
darkness lacks the power to quench or to hide the divine Light embodied
in Jesus.
The Beloved Disciple’s account of the conflict between the chief priests
and Jesus reaches a climax in Jesus’ trial before Pilate. Here the struggle of
the darkness against the light blends with the theme of judgment. In
condemning Jesus and in hypocritically forcing Pilate to condemn Him,
tary on John, II, pp. 192-193.
the chief priests together with Pilate stand judged before the one who
will condemn their action on the last day.
Ironically the very struggle between darkness and light also insures the
chief priests’ condemnation in the eyes of God. They stand condemned,
not by divine vindictiveness, but by their own choice. God seeks only to
save them in Christ; but, as a direct result of their successful attempt to
force Pilate to condemn Jesus, the chief priests find themselves forced to
confess publicly that they believe more in the Roman empire than in the
kingdom of God which Jesus embodies and which the pachal mystery
proclaims.
The Beloved Disciple’s vision of the struggle between light and dark-
ness offered the Johannine community comfort. It assured a beleaguered
community expelled for heresy from the synagogue and divided in its
own faith that no matter how hard the darkness seeks to quench the
light, the dark powers will fail. The chief priests had failed to quench the
light even on Calvary. Beside the crucifixion of God, the trials of the
Johannine community paled by comparison.
A Johannine theology of judgment also posed a challenge to Johannine
Christians. In Jesus God has revealed His absolute will to save; but every-
thing depends on human choice. Those who sin against the light choose
divine judgment. Johannine Christians must, then, choose wisely, or else
find themselves, side by side with the dissidents, the Pharisees, and the
chief priests, dominated by the forces of darkness. That warning would
have targeted especially the Johannine dissidents.
Only one negative dramatic linkage requires examination: namely, Jesus’
relationship to Pilate and to the Roman empire. The following section
ponders that relationship.
(V)
In contrast to the synoptics, the fourth gospel never mentions any of the
Herods. Instead, only Pilate, the Roman governor, stands as the personi-
fication of the rulers of this world. Pilate also symbolizes the skeptical,
unbelieving Gentile. (Jn 18:38) In the Beloved Disciple’s passion narra-
tive, therefore, the confrontation between Jesus and Pilate embodies a
face off between the heavenly kingdom which Jesus incarnates and the dark
powers of violence and unbelief which the Roman empire incarnates.
Jesus and Pilate

The evangelist structures the seven scenes of Jesus’ trial before Pilate
chiastically. The first scene and final scene correspond to one another. In
the first scene, the chief priests demand Jesus’ death (Jn 18:28-32); in the
seventh and last scene, they obtain it. (Jn 19:12-16a) The second and
sixth scenes also correspond. In both, Pilate interrogates Jesus. (Jn
18:33-8a, 19:9-11) The third and fifth scenes correspond. In both Pilate
declares Jesus innocent and gives His enemies a chance to choose for
rather than against Him. (Jn 18:38b-40, 19:4-8) In the central scene of
Jesus’ trial before Pilate, the Roman soldiers scourge Jesus and then mock
Him as King of the Jews. (Jn 19:1-3)
As we shall see in greater detail later, the Beloved Disciple will have
none of Mark’s messianic secret. The Johannine Jesus practices an open
messianism. He publicly acknowledges and proclaims His messianic dig-
nity. (Jn 4:26, 10:25-26) Moreover, in the course of telling Jesus’ story,
the evangelist has already portrayed others acknowledging Him as the
messiah. Andrew has called Jesus messiah. (Jn 1:41) Nathanael has pro-
claimed Him messianic Son of God and King of Israel. (Jn 1:49) After
the miracle of the loaves before the Bread of Life discourse, the people
come to make Jesus messianic king. (Jn 6:15) The crowds greet Jesus in
His triumphal entry as King of Israel. (Jn 12:13) On that occasion, the
evangelist interprets the triumphal entry as a fulfillment of a messianic
prophecy. (Jn 12:15)
As I have already indicated, the Johannine Jesus speaks only once about
the kingdom during his ministry, in a private conversation with
Nichodemus. (Jn 3:3, 5) Both the kingdom of God and Jesus’ royal dig-
nity function, however, as a central focus of Jesus’ trial before Pilate. That
the evangelist would center the proclamation of the kingdom primarily
in the paschal mystery rather than in Jesus’ public ministry reflects con-
sistently the movement of His Christological thought. As we shall see
below in considering the signs Jesus works, the fourth evangelist focuses
Jesus’ entire story on the paschal mystery, on “the hour” of His final and
full revelation in glory. When “the hour” comes, Pilate, the Roman gov-
ernor, serves ironically as the instrument providentially chosen by God to
proclaim publicly and officially that Jesus reigns as king of the Jews. In its
focus on the paschal mystery, Johannine narrative Christology resembles
Pauline kerygmatic Christology.
Pilate makes his first appearance in the first scene of Jesus’ trial. The
drama of the trial lies in the interaction between Pilate with the chief
priests, on the one hand, and between Pilate and Jesus, on the other. As
we have seen, the refusal of the chief priests to enter the Praetorium lest
they incur legal impurity creates the literary convention which separates
the different scenes in John’s account of Jesus’ trial.
Moreover, Pilate’s toing and froing cause him to oscillate between the
powers of darkness, represented by the chief priests, and Jesus, the light
of the world. Pilate’s physical movement dramatizes the governor’s moral
vacillation.26
26. Cf. Cf. Brown, The Death of the Messiah, I, p. 744; Gerard S. Sloyan, Jesus on Trial
(Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1973), pp. 110-125; J. Ramsey Michaels, “John 18.31 and
the ‘Trial’ of Jesus,” New Testament Studies, 36(1990), pp. 474-479.
As we have seen, in the first scene of Jesus’ trial the chief priests accuse
Jesus of criminal activity and indicate their intention to have Him cruci-
fied. In reflecting on the first scene the evangelist reminds the reader that
Jesus’ crucifixion will in fact “lift Him up” in suffering and in glory and
will transform Him into an instrument of universal salvation. (Jn
18:28-32) Despite all the machinations of the high priests, God has al-
ready determined the victorious outcome of Jesus’ confrontation with
the empire and with all the dark powers of this world.27
In the second scene of the trial Pilate confronts Jesus face to face for the
first time. He begins by asking Jesus: “Are you the King of the Jews?” (Jn
18:33) Here “the Jews” refers to the Jewish nation as a whole and has no
pejorative connotations. Pilate does not beat around the bush; he wants
to know whether Jesus claims secular, messianic authority and stands in
rebellion against Rome.
Josephus’s history of the Jewish wars indicates that in the decades be-
fore the destruction of Jerusalem more than one messianic claimant to
royal authority arose from the peasant class. Before entering into open
insurrection against Rome, these peasant messiahs not infrequently func-
tioned as bandit chieftains, just as David had before replacing Saul on the
throne. Pilate wants to know whether Jesus stands in insurrection against
Roman authority in the manner of these bandit chiefs.
Jesus answers with a question of His own: “Do you speak for yourself,
or did others say it to you about me?” (Jn 18:34) Jesus asks Pilate whether
he as governor has reasons to ask Him about His messianic pretensions or
whether the question flows from the accusations of the chief priests. Pilate
responds:
I’m not a Jew, am I? Your nation and chief priests handed you over to me.
What have you done? (Jn 18:35)
Pilate responds sarcastically to Jesus’ question: “Do you speak for your-
self?” He takes Jesus’ question to mean, “Do you yourself believe Me the
messiah?” He also seems to take the question to imply that he, Pilate,
takes messianism seriously. Pilate’s question: “I’m not a Jew, am I?” makes
it clear that he has no truck with Jewish messianic hopes and pretensions.
At the same time he confesses that he would not be interrogating Jesus
unless the chief priests had pressed criminal charges against Him. As gov-
27. Cf. Paul Winter, The Trial of Jesus, pp. 51-110; Donatien Mollat, S.J., “Jésus devant
Pilate,” Bible et Vie Chrétienne, 39(1961), pp. 23-31; Jacques Esiande, “Jésus devant
Pilate,” Foi et Vie, 73(1974), pp. 66-81; Josef Blank, “Die Verhandlung vor Pilatus, Joh
18, 28-19, 16 im licht Johanneischer Theologie,” Biblische Zeitschrift, 3(1953), pp.
60-81; J.E. Allen, “Why Pilate?” in The Trial of Jesus, edited by E. Bammel,
(Napierville, IL: Alec R. Allenson, Inc., 1970), 78-83.
ernor, Pilate wants to know how Jesus pleads to the charges laid against
Him: “What have your done?”
Jesus replies by stating that the kingdom of God which He proclaims
has nothing in common with the kingdoms of the world:
My kingdom is not of this world; if my kingdom were of this world my

subjects would be fighting to prevent my being handed over to the Jews;
now my kingdom does not belong here. (Jn 18:36)
In fact, Peter, as we have seen, fought in the garden to keep Jesus from
being arrested; but Jesus rebuked him and told him to sheath his sword.
(Jn 18:11) In the fourth gospel, the arresting party included Roman sol-
diers. According to the Beloved Disciple’s story line, therefore, Pilate could
quite possibly have received a report of the arrest. In the context of John’s
narrative, then, Jesus could conceivably be reminding Pilate that, at the
moment of His arrest, He had forbidden His disciples to take up arms
against the chief priests and the Romans. If so, then Jesus is adducing His
non-violent response to His own arrest as evidence that the kingdom of
God which He embodies belongs to a different order from the Roman
empire and from any other worldly kingdom.
The Beloved Disciple espouses, however, a realized eschatology. In the
incarnation of God’s only Son, the kingdom is already present, has al-
ready begun. The fact that the kingdom of God does not come from the
world implicitly designates heaven as its source. The fact that it does not
belong in the world designates heaven as the place where Jesus’ kingdom
will come to full and final realization.28
As we shall see in more detail below, however, the separation of “the
world” from the kingdom of God asserts a moral rather than a strict
metaphysical dualism. The two kingdoms rest on contradictory ethical
and religious presuppositions which demand a radical choice between them.
Pilate has twice asked Jesus if He claims the title “king of the Jews.”
Jesus now responds by pointing out that “the Jews,” acting in the person
of their official leaders, have delivered Him over to Pilate. They do not in
fact relate to Him as king but as their mortal enemy. Jesus, in other words,
also adduces the hostility of the Jewish leaders as evidence that the king-
dom of God which He proclaims has nothing to do with secular
messianism.
Pilate seems to accept the fact that the hostility of Jesus’ own people
argues against His being king of the Jews; but the governor remains un-
satisfied. Jesus has spoken of a kingdom and of subjects. Pilate wants to
know, therefore, whether Jesus lays claim to any royal title which opposes
the authority of Caesar. The governor therefore asks: “So you are a king?”
28. Cf. Brown, The Death of the Messiah, I, pp. 749-751.

In effect, Pilate is asking: “Even if you do not claim secular royal author-
ity over the Jewish people, do you in fact claim any kind of royal author-
ity?” (Jn 18:37a)
Jesus replies: “You are saying that I am a king. For this I was born, and
for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone
who is of the truth hears my voice.” (Jn 18:37b) Jesus notes first of all
that he, Pilate, is attributing to Jesus a secular kingship which He Him-
self does not claim. Jesus then states the authentic nature and scope of
His religious mission: to bear witness to “the truth.” As we have seen,
“the truth” in John means the saving truth about Jesus’ identity with the
Father together with everything which that truth implies.
Taken in context Jesus’ words suggest that His testimony to the truth
will culminate in His own death. During the feast of Tabernacles, as we
have seen, Jesus argued from His selfless willingness to risk death, to the
truth of His testimony to the Father. By actually dying for the message
He proclaims, Jesus will now give His ultimate testimony to its truth.
Having explained the true nature of His mission, Jesus then clarifies
for Pilate His relationship to His disciples: they do not relate to Him in
the way in which subjects relate to a secular king. Instead, they simply
accept the truth which He proclaims and incarnates.
Pilate replies to this proclamation of divine truth with the skeptical
question: “What is truth?” (Jn 18:38) The reply has no deep philosophi-
cal implications. Instead, it places Pilate outside the pale of those who
belong to “the truth.” Far from assenting to the truth which Jesus incar-
nates, Pilate does not even know what the term means. As we have seen,
failure to believe in the truth which Jesus proclaims and embodies places
one under the judgment of God. Pilate’s skeptical unbelief foreshadows
that despite his vacillation he, like the chief priests, will take his stand
finally with the forces of darkness and under divine judgment.29
Despite his mocking skepticism toward Jesus’ religious claims, Pilate,
on returning to the high priests, professes himself convinced by Jesus’
testimony that He poses no political threat to the empire. (Jn 18:38b) As
we have seen, Pilate then offers the chief priests their first opportunity to
repent of their enmity against Jesus. Pilate asks them to choose between
Jesus and Barabbas. They, of course, choose Barabbas, the bandit chief
and false “son of the father.” (Jn 18:39-40) Despite their professed zeal
for the Roman law, the priests, with Johannine irony, hypocritically pre-
fer to Jesus, whom a Roman judge has just exonerated, a bandit chief
already convicted of criminal and subversive activity.30
29. Cf. Benedict Schwank, “Was ist Wahrheit? (Joh 18, 38), Erbe und Auftrage, 47(1971),
pp. 487-496; Antonio Vincent Cernuda, “Nacimiento y Verdad de Jesús ante Pilato,”
Estudios Biblicos, 50(1992), pp. 537-551.
30. Cf. Mariano Herranz Marco, “Un problema de critica historica en el relato de la
Pasion: la liberacion de Barrabbas,” Estudios Biblicos, 30(1971), pp. 137-160; Alois
Pilate then orders Jesus scourged. (Jn 19:1) In Mark and Matthew the
scourging follows Jesus’ condemnation. The chiastic structure of the trial
narrative in the fourth gospel transforms the scourging into the central
event of the trial. As a consequence, the Johannine Jesus suffers scourging
before His condemnation. The centrality of the scourging in John also
reflects the fact that Jesus’ trial before Pilate proclaims the kingdom. In
mocking the scourged Jesus as king of the Jews, the soldiers proclaim a
deeper truth than they themselves realize.
The fact that the Johannine Pilate later declares that he finds Jesus
innocent of any crime (Jn 19:4) suggests that Pilate orders the scourging,
not as the preliminary to crucifixion, but, possibly, as a corrective pun-
ishment. Pilate also seems to hope that the chief priests will rest content
with the scourging. The fact that Pilate has ordered Jesus scourged de-
spite the fact that he finds Jesus guilty of no crime dramatizes the vio-
lence with which Roman legal “justice” dealt with difficult peasants like
Jesus.
In the central scene of Jesus’ trial, the soldiers, after the scourging, mock
Jesus as a false messiah. They put a purple cloak on Him, crown Him
with a crown of thorns, and for a prolonged period of time offer Him
mock reverence as king, while striking Him. (Jn 19:2-3) As we have seen,
the evangelist omits the degrading detail that the soldiers also spat on
Jesus.
The scene’s situation at the heart and center of Jesus’ trial endows the
mockery with ironic revelatory significance. In mocking Jesus as King of
the Jews, the soldiers, in the evangelist’s mind, ironically proclaim a deeper
truth than they realize. Jesus in fact reigns as messiah, but not for the
reasons which the soldiers contemn by their mockery. For the fourth
evangelist, Jesus’ messianic authority derives from the fact that He con-
fronts humanity as God incarnate and ultimately as humanity’s eschato-
logical judge. In mocking and abusing Jesus the soldiers unwittingly pro-
claim His kingship at the same time that they place themselves by their
violence and unbelief under His divine judgment.
Pilate displays the scourged Jesus, crowned with thorns and clothed in
royal purple, before the chief priests with the words: “See, I am bringing
Him out to you, that you may know that I find no crime in Him.” When
Jesus appears wearing the cloak and crown of thorns, Pilate says with
apparent contempt: “Look at the fellow! (idou ho anthrôpos)” (Jn 19:4-5)
Commentators on John’s gospel have found different symbolic mean-
ings in Pilate’s words: “idou ho anthropos.” One finds them frequently
translated as “Behold the man!” Some scholars believe that “the man”
Bajsic, “Pilatus, Jesus, und Barabbas,” Biblica, 48(1967), pp. 7-28; Johannes Merkel,
“Die Begnadigung am Passahfeste,” Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft,
6(1905), pp. 293-316.
refers to Jewish Hellenistic myths of the primal man. Others see in Pilate’s
words an unbelieving reference to Jesus as “mere man,” i.e., not the incar-
nate Son of God. Others equate “the man” with “the man of sorrows,”
the suffering servant of second Isaiah. Others find in “the man” an
eschatological title. Others still see in Pilate’s words a reference to 1 Sam
8:9 and a proclamation of Jesus as the divine king of Israel.
If one attends to the symbolic structure of John’s passion narrative,
however, one senses that the evangelist may well desire to parallel Jesus,
“the man,” with Mary, “the woman.” As we have seen, in Jesus’ passion
Mary by accepting the Beloved Disciple as her child becomes the mother
of all believers, the new Eve, “the woman” par excellence in the new cre-
ation. As we shall see, this occurs in the central scene of John’s crucifixion
narrative, a position which underscores its importance. Even on Calvary
Jesus begins the new creation by making Mary its Eve, the mother of all
who believe. I find it at least plausible, then, that in having Pilate call
Jesus “the man” the evangelist designates Him symbolically as the new
Adam, as “the man” par excellence in the new creation which He begins.
This interpretation finds textual support in the other Adamic imagery
present in the Johannine passion account. The passion narrative begins
in a garden. The image of the garden recalls the garden of Eden. In His
arrest Jesus confronts Satan in the person of Judas, just as Adam in the
garden of Eden confronted the serpent, which Jewish tradition later
conflated with Satan. (Jn 18:1-2, 5)
Jesus’ burial in a garden functions within John’s passion narrative as a
biblical inclusion. This second allusion to Eden suggests that the evange-
list desires the reader to interpret the entire passion narrative as a revela-
tion of Jesus as the new Adam. (Jn 19:41-42)
Finally, the fact that “anthrôpos” can designate any human, male or
female, fits in with Adamic symbolism. In the biblical account of human
origins, Adam would seem to have been created androgynous, since Eve
proceeds from him.31 (Gen 2:21-23)
As we have seen, the chief priests reject absolutely Pilate’s attempt to
save Jesus. At the sight of Him, the chief priests and temple police cry
out: “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!” Pilate replies: “Take Him yourselves
and crucify Him, for I find no crime in Him.” (Jn 19:6-7)
As we have seen, Pilate’s second proclamation of Jesus’ innocence forces
the chief priests to admit the deceit which led them to accuse Jesus of
having violated Roman law. Nevertheless, they continue to press for Jesus’
31. Cf. Dieter Bohler, “‘Ecce Homo!’ (Jn 19,5): ein Zitat aus dem Alten Testament,”
Biblische Zeitschrift, 39(1995), pp. 104-108; Rudolf Schnackenburg, “Die
Ecce-Homo-Szene und der Menschensohn” in Jesus und der Menschensohn für Anton
Vötgle, edited by R. Pesch and R. Schnackenburg (Freiburg: Herder, 1975), pp.
371-386.
death on the cross on theological grounds: Jesus must die on the cross,
not because He claims secular messianic authority, but because He has
violated Jewish law by blasphemously claiming equality with God. This
claim implicitly portrays Jesus as a false charismatic prophet whose de-
ceptions merit death.32 (Jn 19:4-8)
As we have seen, this shift in the charges brought against Jesus quite
possibly inspires in Pilate a double fear. On the one hand, he recognizes
that the chief priests are pressuring Him to crucify Jesus on religious
grounds, an act which could jeopardize his own political career. On the
other hand, Pilate begins to suspect that he is confronting a genuine reli-
gious reality; and that possibility inspires in him a superstitious religious
fear. In other words, by their religious hatred for Jesus, the chief priests
force Pilate beyond the mocking cynicism which he exhibited in his first
interrogation of Jesus.
Disturbed by these fears, Pilate tries to get to the bottom of Jesus’ reli-
gious claims. He brings Jesus back inside the Praetorium for a second
interrogation and asks Him: “Where are you from?” (Jn 19:9) The ques-
tion echoes the debates concerning Jesus’ origin which took place be-
tween Jesus and “the Jews” on the feast of Tabernacles. (Jn 7:41, 8:14-19,
23-4) In asking Jesus to name His origins, Pilate shows himself as igno-
rant of the Father as the unbelieving “Jews.” (Jn 8:14-19) Despite his
ignorance, however, Pilate nevertheless seems to fear that in Jesus he con-
fronts a noumenal divine presence.
Jesus responds to Pilate’s question about His origins with the same si-
lence as in the synoptic gospels. (Mk 14:61, Mt 26:62, Lk 23:9) Jesus
answered Pilate when the governor questioned Him concerning Roman
law. To this theological question, however, Jesus has nothing to say to the
pagan governor. By dabbling in religious matters, the Roman governor
has exceeded his jurisdiction.
Pilate warns the silent Jesus: “You will not speak to me? Don’t you
know that I have the power to release you, and the power to crucify you?”
(Jn 19:9) Jesus responds to this threat by confronting Pilate with the
guilt which he will incur by conspiring with the high priests in His ex-
ecution:
You would have no power over Me unless it had been give you from above;
therefore (dia touto) the one who delivered Me to you has the greater sin.
(Jn 19:11)
Jesus reminds the governor that all authority, including secular author-
ity derives from God. Implicitly, then, Jesus warns Pilate that he must
32. Cf. David W. Wead, “We Have a Law,” Novum Testamentum, 11(1969), pp.
185-189.
answer to God for the way in which he exercises that authority. As we

have already seen, in Johannine theology the Father has handed over all
judgment to the Son. Jesus’ statement about the origin of Pilate’s author-
ity, therefore, counters Pilate’s threat with a different kind of warning.
One day, Jesus, as eschatological judge, will stand in judgment over Pilate.33
Jesus, however, seems to indulge in a non sequitur. Even if all authority
derives from God, why should it follow that those who have delivered
Him to Pilate, namely, the chief priests, stand convicted of a greater sin?
If one sees in Jesus’ statement about the origin of authority an implicit
warning to Pilate that he will one day face Jesus as the eschatological
judge, then that warning endows the “therefore (dia touto)” with a kind
of meaning. The fact that Pilate must face Jesus as eschatological judge
implies that so must the chief priests. In that context, Jesus assures Pilate
that the priests stand convicted of greater guilt than he.
One need not, in my judgment, read into Jesus’ statement about the
greater guilt of the chief priests an exoneration of Pilate as the secular
instrument of “the world” which he represents, although some exegetes
have done so. For one thing, one belongs to the world by choice. More-
over, in the evangelist’s judgment both Pilate and the chief priests belong
to “the world.” Instead, Jesus seems to refer to exonerating circumstances
which mitigate Pilate’s guilt, circumstances already mentioned by the
evangelist in the course of his narrative. Those circumstances include the
following: 1)The chief priests claim to worship the one, true God and
ought, therefore, by rights to recognize His Son when He confronts them.
Pilate, the skeptical pagan, makes no such claim. His ignorance mitigates
his failure to recognize Jesus. 2) Pilate, the pagan skeptic, is seeking to
release Jesus rather than to condemn Him, while the chief priests, who
should know better, press relentlessly for His crucifixion. 3) Pilate will
eventually yield to the priests but only under pressure.
Jesus’ response leaves Pilate all the more eager to seek His release. (Jn
19:12) At this point, however, the chief priests, as we have seen, play
their trump card. They challenge Pilate’s allegiance to Caesar unless he
condemns Jesus as an insurrectionist. Jesus has made Himself into a king
and set himself in opposition to Caesar; if Pilate releases Him, the gover-
nor will support Jesus’ messianic claims against Caesar. (Jn 19:12)
Pilate has already made it quite clear that he does not look upon Jesus
as making secular, messianic claims. Confronted, however, with the pos-
sibility of having to answer to Caesar for having abetted rebellion, the
governor decides to condemn Jesus to crucifixion, but on civil, not on
religious grounds.
33. Cf. Dieter Zeller, “Jesus und die Philosophen vor dem Richter,” Biblische Zeitschrift,
37(1993), pp. 88-92.
The conflict between Pilate and the chief priests now reaches its ironic
climax. The chief priests have successfully manipulated the Roman gov-
ernor into violating his conscience by condemning Jesus for a crime which
Pilate does not believe Jesus has committed. The chief priests have also
forced the skeptical Pilate to face the religious implications of his con-
demnation of Jesus. In the process, however, they also caused the gover-
nor to proclaim Jesus publicly as king of the Jews. In doing so, Pilate
confers on Jesus the messianic title which befits Him, but not for the
reasons Pilate asserts. Pilate presents Jesus as a secular messiah, whereas
the evangelist has made it clear that Jesus’ messianic dignity flows from
His union with the Father. Moreover, Pilate in passing judgment on Jesus
forces the chief priests to choose between Him and Caesar. The chief
priests opt, as we have seen, for Caesar over Jesus, thus revealing that they
do indeed belong to this world, to the kingdom of Satan, and to the
forces of darkness.
Ironically, then, at the very moment when Jesus finds Himself judged,
the forces of darkness which pass judgment on Him make the choices
which place them under the judgment of God, a judgment which Jesus
Himself, as eschatological judge, will one day pronounce over them. In
other words, from the evangelist’s theological perspective, the judges, by
condemning Jesus, themselves stand condemned in the sight of God. (Jn
19:13-6)
The evangelist writes: Pilate “brought Jesus (êgagan exô Iêsoun) out and
sat down on the judgment seat (kai ekathisen epi biêmatos)....” (Jn 19:13a)
Unfortunately the English language cannot reproduce the grammatical
ambiguities of the Greek verb “ekathisen.” It can mean either to sit down
or to seat someone. If it means to seat someone, the verb “kathizein” has
a direct object. In principle, the noun “Iêsoun” could function as the ob-
ject of both the verb “brought out (êgagen exô)” and “sat down (kathisen).”
In other words, one could grammatically translate the passage in either of
the following ways: 1) “He [Pilate] sat on the judgment seat,” or 2) “He
[Pilate] made Jesus sit on the judgment seat.”
As we have seen, the evangelist has on other occasions taken advantage
of grammatical ambiguities in order to assert more than one truth simul-
taneously. One finds here another instance of the same stylistic ploy. If
one takes “ekathisen” literally and historically, then Pilate mounts the seat
of judgment to condemn Jesus; but, if one understands the judgment of
Pilate in the light of the evangelist’s theology of judgment, then Pilate
enthrones Jesus as eschatological judge. As a consequence, Pilate himself
and the chief priests become the ones judged in virtue of the very con-
demnation of Jesus which Pilate now pronounces at the chief priests’
insistence.
The evangelist identifies the precise place where the judgment occurred:
at a place called “the Pavement: “lithostrotos” in Greek, “Gabbatha” in
Hebrew. (Jn 19:13b) Scholars have to date failed to identify the place
with archeological certitude; but the evangelist’s reference to the precise
place of judgment forms a piece with his knowledge of first-century Pal-
estinian topography.
John also notes that Pilate pronounced judgment on Jesus at noon of
the Day of Preparation which preceded Passover. At noon of the Day of
Preparation, the slaughter of the paschal lambs began in the temple. At
that very moment, Pilate sets in motion the process which will kill the
Lamb of God, whose death, glorification, and sending of the Breath will
take away the sins of the world.34
As in narrating Jesus’ trial, the fourth evangelist endows his account of
Jesus’ crucifixion with a chiastic structure. The introduction (Jn
19:16b-18) and the conclusion (Jn 19:38-42) correspond. In the intro-
duction Jesus is raised on the cross, in the conclusion He is taken down
from the cross and buried. Between the introduction and conclusion, the
evangelist describes five scenes. The first and the fifth correspond. In the
first (Jn 19:19-22) Pilate denies the request of the chief priests to reword
the charge nailed to Jesus’ cross; in the fifth (Jn 19:31-37) Pilate grants
their request to have the bodies removed from the crosses before Passover.
The second and fourth episodes also correspond. In them Jesus’ execu-
tioners do something. In the second scene (Jn 19:23-24) they divide Jesus’
clothes among them by lot; in the fourth (Jn 19:28-30) they offer Jesus
wine. The third scene lies at the heart of John’s crucifixion narrative. In it
Jesus gives the Beloved Disciple to His mother to take as her son. As in
the trial of Jesus, the scene at the heart of the chiasm defines its focus.
Besides endowing his narrative with a chiastic structure, the evangelist
sets off each scene with a Biblical inclusion. Each scene begins and ends
with the same word or phrase. The verb “to write” sets off the first scene.
The noun “the soldiers” sets off the second scene. A reference to Jesus
“mother” sets off the third scene. The verb “to finish” sets off the fourth
scene. The final scene, the piercing of Jesus side, begins and ends with a
reference to the soldiers.
Commentary on John, II, p. 175-188; Ignace de la Potterie, “Jésus roi et juge d’apres Jn
19, 13: Ekathisen epi bêmatos,” Biblica, 41(1960), pp. 217-247; L.-H. Vincent, O.P.,
“Le lithrostos evangelique,” Revue Biblique, 59(1952), pp. 513-530; Pierre Benoit,
O.P., “Prétoire, Lithostrotos et Gabbatha,” Revue Biblique, 59(1952), pp. 531-550;
Joseph Bonsirven, “Hora talmudica,” Biblica, 33(1952), pp. 511-515; L. Pujol,
C.M.F., “In loco qui dicitur Lithostrotos,” Verbum Domini, 15(1935), pp. 180-186;
John J. O’Rourke,” Two Notes on St. John’s Gospel,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly,
25(1963), pp. 124-128; A. Kurfess, “Ekathisen epi bêmatos (Io 19, 13),” Biblica,
34(1953), p. 271.
The introduction to the passion states with stark detachment that the
soldiers led Jesus out of the Jerusalem to a place called Golgotha and
there crucified Him between two bandits. (Jn 19:16b-18) The rest of
John’s account of the crucifixion probes the saving significance of Jesus’
horrible death on the cross.35
As we have seen in reflecting on Jesus’ relationship to the chief priests,
Pilate’s refusal to change the wording of the charge nailed to Jesus’ cross
has the effect of proclaiming Him to Jew, Greek, and Roman as the mes-
sianic King of the Jews. In effect, Pilate proclaims to the world what he
has already proclaimed to the chief priests in Jesus’ trial. (Jn 19:19-22)
That universal proclamation in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek foreshadows,
as we have seen, the universal proclamation of Jesus not only as messianic
king but as risen Lord and God. It also dramatizes the inability of the
dark powers to quench the Light of the world.
In the second scene of the crucifixion, the soldiers divide Jesus’ clothes
among themselves. When, however, they come to His tunic (ton chitona),
they discover that it has no seams. Rather than rend it, the soldiers cast
lots in order to determine which of them gets to keep it. (Jn 19:23-24)
The Jewish high priest wore a garment called a “chiton.” (Ex 39:27) More-
over, Josephus tells us that this vestment consisted of a single woven cloth.
(Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, III, vii, 4; #161)
The evangelist, then, uses the incident of the division of Jesus’ gar-
ments in order to remind the reader of the priestly character of Jesus’
sacrificial death. At the end of His high priestly prayer, Jesus had conse-
crated Himself for this sacrifice so that His disciples might in turn be
consecrated in truth: i.e., dedicated to the divine service and worship by
their consent to the truth which Jesus embodies. (Jn 17:18) Now as Jesus
dies in sacrifice, the priestly character of His death reminds the disciples
that the truth which consecrates them to God includes faith in the sav-
ing, sacrificial character of Jesus’ death.36
The evangelist also points to this incident as the fulfillment of Ps 22:18:
“They divided my garments among them and for my raiment they cast
lots.” This verse occurs in the same psalm which Mark and Matthew
place on the lips of the dying Jesus. The psalm begins with the verse: “My
God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”
As we have seen, in this psalm the innocent poor man bereft of all
support but God prays in the midst of suffering and persecution for vin-
35. Cf. Martin Hengel, “Mors turpissima crucis: Die Kreuzigung in der antiken Welt und
die ‘Torheit’ des ‘Wortes des Kreuz’” in Rechtfertigung: Festschrift für Ernst Käsemann,
edited by J. Friedrich et al. (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1976), pp. 125-184.
36. Cf. Michel Aubineau, “La tunique sans couture du Christ; Exegèse patristique de Jean
19: 23-24” in KYRIAKON: Festschrift für Johannes Quasten, Edited by P. Granfield and
J.A. Jungmann (2 vols.; Münster: Verlag Aschendorff, 1970), I, pp. 100-127.
dication at God’s hand. He receives it. As in the synoptics, the fourth

gospel in citing Ps 22 portrays Jesus as the innocent poor man who clings
to God in the face of torture and death, while looking to God for ulti-
mate vindication. By alluding to Ps 22, the evangelist also implicitly re-
minds the reader of Jesus’ assertion that despite His abandonment by His
disciples, the Father stands with Him in His passion. (Jn 16:32)
As we have seen, Jesus’ gift of the Beloved Disciple to Mary as her son
also has saving significance. The disciple symbolizes any believer; and
Jesus’ gift of the Beloved Disciple to Mary transforms her into the new
Eve, “the woman” par excellence of the new creation, the mother of all
who believe. As we have also seen, that gift implicitly reveals Jesus as the
new Adam. (Jn 19:25-27)
Here, however, we need to reflect on the centrality of this scene in the
Beloved Disciple’s crucifixion narrative. Its central location in the chiastic
structure of that narrative endows it with central significance for the un-
derstanding of Jesus’ passion. The gift of the Beloved Disciple to Mary
points to the saving consequences of Jesus’ sacrificial death. His elevation
in suffering and in glory will transform Him into the last Adam, into the
universal savior and head of the new humanity which His glorification
begins. Moreover, the last Adam relates to all who believe in Him as brother
and sister. They share the same mother as He and in the new creation
remain bonded to one another with a special bond of intimacy. More-
over, the last Adam reveals the saving power of His death by creating a
new humanity on the very hill of Calvary.
After giving the Beloved Disciple to His mother as her son, Jesus real-
izes that the end is at hand. Having begun the new creation, Jesus has
completed His saving work in this life. The evangelist observes that, in
order to fulfill the scripture, Jesus at this point said, “I thirst.” (Jn 19:28)
Both Matthew and Mark record that the soldiers offered Jesus some
common wine to drink before He died.37 (Mk 15:36; Mt 27:48) The
fourth evangelist now records a similar incident; but he gives it his own
theological interpretation. In the fourth gospel Jesus initiates the soldier’s
action by asking for something to drink. Some see in His request another
instance of Johannine irony: the source of the living water dies in thirst.
The suggestion has some textual foundation; for, as we have seen, in the
sign of the blood and water which follows immediately upon this inci-
dent, the evangelist calls attention to the fact that Jesus will soon give the
living water of the Breath.
Which scriptures does Jesus fulfill? Some scholars point to Ps 69:22 as
the only Old Testament prophecy which some action of Jesus has yet to
fulfill. Ps 69:22 reads: “For my food they gave me gall, and for my thirst
37. Cf. Eb. Nestle, “Zum Ysop ben Johannes, Josephus, und Philo,” Zeitschrift für die
Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 14(1913), pp. 263-265.
they gave me vinegar to drink.”. Having fulfilled this prophetic text, Jesus
will have completed the work given Him by the Father. One can, how-
ever, take the evangelist to refer to the same obscure scripture text which
Jesus cited at the feast of Tabernacles: namely, “From within him shall
flow rivers of living water.” (Jn 7:38) The fact that the Johannine Jesus in
dying hands over His Breath as a foreshadowing of the Breath-baptism
which He will effect on Easter morning lends plausibility to the latter
interpretation. Thus understood, “I thirst” means that Jesus thirsts for
those whom the living water will claim as God’s children and as members
of the new creation.
The soldiers offer Jesus a wine-soaked sponge on a sprig of hyssop. A
small shrub, the hyssop would not have produced a branch capable of
sustaining the weight of a wine-soaked sponge. The allusion to hyssop
has, however, symbolic meaning. The passover ritual required the use of
hyssop to sprinkle Jewish doorposts with the blood of the paschal lamb.
(Ex 12:22) The Beloved Disciple’s allusion to hyssop as Jesus dies recalls
the blood of the paschal lamb as a way of reminding the reader that the
“Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” is shedding His
blood in loving forgiveness.
Jesus drinks the sour wine, says, “It is finished,” bows His head, and
dies. (Jn 19:29-30) Jesus’ final words express resignation and trust in the
Father. They also suggest that He must declare His mission complete
before death can claim Him. In that sense, Jesus’ dying words also recall
the Johannine notion that the Father has given Jesus power to lay down
His life and to take it up. John’s Jesus decides with sovereign authority
when the time has come for Him to die; but He does so only after having
completed the mission entrusted to Him by the Father.
Moreover, instead of saying that in dying Jesus gave up the ghost, the
fourth evangelist says that He “handed over the Breath (paredoken to
pneuma).” Jesus’ final breath on the cross prepares and foreshadows His
gift of the Breath on Easter morning. She will come to take away the sins
for which His death has atoned. Easter and Calvary coalesce into a single
saving event.38
38. Cf. G. Bampfylde, “John xix 28: A Case for a Different Translation,” Novum
Testamentum, 11(1969), pp. 247-260; Robert L. Brawley, “An Absent Complement
and Intertextuality in John 19:28-29,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 112(1993), pp.
427-443; Bruce Longenecker, “The Unbroken Messiah: A Johannine Feature and its
Social Functions,” New Testament Studies, 41(1995), pp. 428-441; Roland Bergmeier,
“Tetelestai, Joh 19.30,” Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 79(1988),
pp. 221-243; Ulrich B. Müller, “Zur eigentumlichkeit des Johannesevangeliums. Das
Probelm des Todes Jesu,” Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 88(1997),
pp. 24-55; Y. Simoens, S.J., “La mort de Jésus selon Jn 19,28-30,” Nouvelle Revue
Théologique, 119(1994), pp. 3-19; Donald Senior, C.S.P., “The Eloquent Meaning of
Jesus’ Death in the Gospel of John,” Chicago Studies, 37(1998), pp. 37-46.
In considering Jesus’ relationship to the Beloved Disciple, I have al-

ready reflected on the significance of the sign of blood and water. Here
one need only recall the major points of that analysis.
1) The blood and the water which flow from Jesus’ side foreshadow
Christian baptism and eucharist. They also link both rituals to the saving
death of Christ.
2) The water flowing from the side of the dead Savior reveals Him as
the temple of God from whom the living water of the Holy Breath will
soon flow in order to give life to the land through the forgiveness of sins.
3) The rubrics for preparing the paschal lamb forbade the breaking of
its legs. The fact that the soldiers pierce Jesus’ side rather than break His
legs, reveals Him as the paschal lamb whose blood seals a new covenant.
The assimilation of Jesus to the paschal lamb also recalls that He is “the
lamb of God.” As the lamb of God, Jesus in His death confronts the
reader as both the suffering servant and as the victorious lamb of Jewish
apocalyptic. The former atones for sin; the latter triumphs over it.
4) The evangelist also underscores the saving character of Jesus’ death
by assimilating Him to the “pierced one” of Zech 12:10, whose death
brings about the salvation of Jerusalem.
For the fourth evangelist, then, the sign of blood and water combines
with other prophetic texts from the Old Testament in order to reveal the
saving significance of Jesus’ physical death on the cross.39
39. Cf. Laurence Dunlop, M.S.C., “The Pierced Side: Focal Point of Johannine
Theology,” Bible Today, 86(1976), pp. 960-965; Gustaf Dalman, D.D., Jesus-Jeshua:
Studies in the Gospels, translated by P.P. Levertoff, (New Yori, NY: Ktav Publishing
House, 1971), pp. 211- 222; J. Ramsey Michaels, “The Centurion’s Confession and
the Spear Thrust,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 29(1967), p. 102-109; Hartwig Thyen,
“Aus der Literatur zum Johannesevangelium,” Theologische Rundschau, 44( 1979), pp.
97-134, esp. 118-127; Eduard Schweizer, “Dan Johanneische Zeugnis zum
Herrenmahl,” Evangelische Theologie, 12(1952-1953), pp. 341-363.
A passage in the first Johannine letter further illumines the meaning of the sign of
blood and water. The passage in question teaches that the threefold witness of Breath,
water, and blood inspire an authentic faith which overcomes the world:
Who then is it who conquers the world if not the one who believes that Jesus
is the Son of God? Jesus Christ is that one who came through the water and
the blood and the Breath; not in the water only but also in the water and in
the blood; and the Breath is the witness, for the Breath is the truth. Three
then are testifying: the Breath and the water and the blood, and the three are
in agreement. (1 Jn 5:5-9)
We find here a clear allusion to the testimony of the Beloved Disciple to the sign of
the water and blood which flowed from the pierced side of the crucified Christ. (Jn
19:31-5) The author of the letter regards that testimony as Breath-inspired. As we have
just seen, the water which flowed from Jesus’ pierced side not only revealed His physical
body as the temple of God but foreshadowed the outpouring of the Breath on Easter
which His dying Breath presaged. The same Breath, therefore, as inspired the Beloved
Disciple’s testimony to Jesus also inspires the baptismal faith of Christians, whose
Pilate makes one last appearance in the passion of Jesus, when, as in the
synoptics, he gives permission for Joseph of Aramathea to bury Jesus’
body. (Jn 19:38b) John, in contrast to Mark and Luke describes Joseph as
a secret disciple of Jesus. The description assimilates Joseph to Nicodemus,
who only in the fourth gospel assists Joseph in burying Jesus. John also
differs from the synoptics in omitting any reference to women witnesses
of the burial. Moreover, instead of describing the burial as hastily accom-
plished in the manner of the synoptics, John depicts it as reverentially
and thoroughly done. As we shall see, the Beloved Disciple assimilates
Jesus’ burial to the interment of kings.40
confession of Jesus includes not only pneumatic enlightenment but also faith in the
saving efficacy of His blood.
The author of the letter is contrasting the orthodox faith of his own community with
the heterodox “faith” of the dissidents. They presumably baptized and seemingly
claimed the enlightenment of the Breath; but they did not acknowledge the saving
character of Jesus’ death. The only testimony of faith which qualifies as true must
confess both the enlightening presence of the baptismal Breath and the atoning efficacy
of Jesus’ physical death.
As a final buttress to his community’s faith, the author of the letter stresses the divine
authority which resides in the Breath’s testimony to the saving character of Jesus’ death.
Divine authority takes clear precedence over any human authority. (1 Jn 5:8-9)
Moreover, the author of the letter repeats the same argument which he used in
attacking the dissidents in the opening of his letter: whoever denies the saving efficacy
of Jesus’ death makes God into a liar, since God Himself has testified to the contrary.
God’s testimony assures us that He gives us life through His Son. Implicitly, the author
of the letter is asserting that risen life proceeds from the whole paschal mystery: from
the death as well as from the resurrection of Jesus. Those who accept the divine
testimony have eternal life; those who deny it do not. (1 Jn 5:9-12)
The letter concludes with a reassertion of the author’s purpose in writing: “I have
written these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may
know that you have eternal life.” (1 Jn 5:13)
Cf. NJBC, 62: 30; Brown, Epistles, pp. 569-603; Klauck, op. cit., I, pp. 283-317;
F.-M. Braun, O.P., “L’eau et l’Esprit,” Revue Thomiste, 49(1949), pp. 5-30; Oscar S.
Brooks, “The Johannine Eucharist: Another Interpretation,” Journal of Biblical Litera-
ture, 82(1963), pp. 293-300; Georg Richter, “Blut und Wasser aus der durchbohrten
Seite Jesu (Joh 19, 34b),” Münchener Theologische Zeitschrift, 21(1970), pp. 1-21;
Manuel Miguens, O.F.M., “Tres Testigos: Espiritu, Agua, Sangre,” Studii Biblici
Franciscani Liber Annuus, 22(1972), pp. 74- 94; M. del Alamo, “Los ‘Tres Testificantes’
de la primera Epistola de San Juan, V.7,” Cultura Biblica, 4(1947), pp. 11-14; A.
Jaubert, “O Espiritu, e Agua e o Sangre (1 Jo 5,7-8)” in Acutalidades Biblicas, edited
by S. Voigt and F. Vier (Petropolis, Brazil: Voyes, 1971), pp. 616- 620.
40. The fact that the risen Jesus, unlike Lazarus, leaves behind Him the burial cloths in
which Joseph and Nicodemus bound Him could suggest that the resurrection made
their ministry to His corpse superfluous. Cf. NJBC, 61:222-228; Brown, The Gospel
of John, II, pp. 897-931; Hänchen, Commentary on John, II, pp. 188-202; Joseph A.
Fitzmyer, S.J., “Crucifixion in Ancient Palestine, Qumran Literature, and the New
Testament,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 40(1978), pp. 493-513; Maurits Sabbe, “The
Johannine Account of the Death of Jesus and its Synoptic Parallels (Jn 19, 16b-42),”
Ephemerides Theologicae Lovaniensis, 70(1994), pp. 34- 64.
As in the case of the chief priests, the struggle between light and darkness
and a Johannine theology of judgment color the Beloved Disciple’s han-
dling of the figure of Pilate. By eliminating Herod from his narrative, the
Beloved Disciple transforms Pilate into the sole symbol of secular oppres-
sion in his gospel. By replacing Jesus’ formal trial by the Sanhedrin with
a decision prior to the passion to kill Him, the evangelist focuses narra-
tive attention dramatically and symbolically on Jesus’ trial by the gover-
nor. Read in the light of a Johannine forensic theology of judgment, Jesus’
trial and condemnation by Pilate functions in John as the culmination of
the struggle between light and darkness. They also exemplify ironically
God’s judgment on the dark powers.
John goes out of his way to blame the chief priests for Jesus’ death; but
he does not exonerate Pilate, who condemns Jesus with full knowledge
that he could indeed be unjustly condemning the incarnate Son of God.
The fact, moreover, that both Pilate and the chief priests drag one an-
other down into the pit of guilt during Jesus’ trial also dramatizes the
victory of light over darkness.
By portraying Jesus’ trial as God’s judgment on Pilate and on the em-
pire whose oppressive power crucified Jesus, the Beloved Disciple includes
both in the host of dark powers over which Jesus has already triumphed.
Though expulsion from the synagogue made the Johannine community
vulnerable to persecution under Roman law, the divine judgment pro-
nounced over Roman oppression in Jesus’ trial exhorts the Johannine
community to stand firm in their commitment to divine truth.
Each of the four evangelists views Jesus’ passion from a different theo-
logical angle. Mark portrays Jesus’ crucifixion as the culminating conflict
between God and the eschatological forces of evil, although his narrative
also endows Jesus’ suffering and death with saving significance. Matthew’s
crucifixion narrative dramatizes the saving power of Jesus’ death with
cosmic, apocalyptic signs and with the multiple resurrections which fol-
low upon it. Luke portrays the crucifixion as the supreme embodiment
of divine forgiveness. Only the Beloved Disciple explicitly portrays the
crucifixion itself as a revelation of divine glory.
The Beloved Disciple’s theological interpretation of Jesus’ death almost
certainly targets the Johannine dissidents, who could apparently find no
saving significance in physical death. In response to such dualistic skepti-
cism, the Beloved Disciple uses rich imagery as well as chiastic ordering
in order to proclaim that the divine glory and saving power fully revealed
in Jesus’ resurrection already stands proleptically revealed on Calvary it-
self.
This chapter has examined the distinctive way in which the Beloved
Disciple describes Jesus’ conflict with the forces of evil. The chapter which
follows ponders the fourth evangelist’s account of Jesus’ ambiguous dra-

matic relationships. As in the synoptic gospels, the Johannine Jesus en-
joys an ambiguous relationship with both the crowds and the disciples.
Chapter 4
Ambiguous Dramatic Linkages in John
As in the synoptic gospels, the Johannine Jesus stands in a positive rela-
tionship to the crowds and to His own disciples. They, however, relate
ambivalently to Him. This chapter divides, then, into two parts. Part one
examines Jesus’ relationship with the crowds. Part two ponders His rela-
tionship with His disciples.
(I)
In the fourth gospel the crowds tend on the whole to react more nega-
tively to Jesus than they do in the synoptics. In the end, however, their
relationship to Him remains an ambiguous one.
Jesus and the Crowds

In the cure of the cripple at the pool of Bethsaida, the crowds do not
interact with Jesus but allow Jesus to slip away from the cured man in
anonymity. (Jn 5:13) In the bread-of-life discourse, however, the crowds
become more active. Impressed by His miracles, crowds follow Jesus to
the other side of the Sea of Galilee. (Jn 6:1-2) After He feeds the crowds
miraculously by multiplying the loaves and fishes, the crowds proclaim
Him the promised prophet like Moses and seek by force to crown Him
messiah. (Jn 6:14-5; cf. Dt 18:15-8) The crowd’s attempt to transform
Jesus into a Davidic king betrays the superficiality of their response to
His miracles.
As in the synoptics, after the miracle of the loaves, Jesus walks on the
water, invokes the divine name, and crosses to the other side of the Sea of
Galilee with the disciples. The abandoned crowds puzzle over Jesus’ dis-
appearance, since He had no boat. Eventually, they too recross the lake in
boats and discover Jesus in the synagogue in Capernaum.1 (Jn 6:22-6)
When the puzzled crowds ask Jesus at what time He returned to
Capernaum, Jesus rebukes their lack of faith in Him. He suggests that
they have followed Him to Capernaum because they want their bellies
filled again. The crowds, Jesus warns, have not “seen” the signs He has
performed. (Jn 6:26)
The crowds have indeed seen Jesus’ signs with their eyes; but here as
elsewhere the evangelist intends a deeper meaning for the word “see.”
The crowds have not seen deeply into their significance. If the crowds
had, they would do the one work pleasing to God: namely, believe in
Jesus. (Jn 6:28-9)
1. Cf. NJBC, 61: 86-87; Brown, The Gospel of John, I, pp. 231-256; Hänchen,
Commentary on John, I, pp. 269-283.
Chapter 4: Ambiguous Dramatic Linkages in John 149
As the bread-of-life discourse proceeds, many in the crowds make it

clear that they in fact have no intention of believing Jesus’ testimony.
Their persistent failure to “see” appears at once in their demand that
Jesus renew the gift of the manna as a proof of His messianic mission. (Jn
6:30-31) Had the crowds truly “seen” the multiplication of the loaves for
what it signified, they would have recognized in it a sign of the eucharis-
tic bread and wine which Jesus will give as His body and blood. They
would also have recognized its superiority to the original manna, which
lacked the power to give everlasting life. The eucharistic bread, by con-
trast, offers food which endures to eternal life. (Jn 6:11, 27) It does so by
embodying pneumatic worship. (Jn 6:62-63; cf. 4:31)
The crowds ask Jesus to give them always life-giving bread, but some
immediately show their lack of faith in Him when He claims to have
descended from heaven. They point to Jesus’ human father and mother
as proof that He did not in fact descend from heaven. By their unbelief,
the skeptics show themselves as “the Jews,” unbelieving and hostile. (Jn
6:41-2) In their hostile unbelief the crowds reject outright Jesus’ promise
to give them His body to eat and His blood to drink. (Jn 6:52) The
skeptics, as we have seen, include many of Jesus’ disciples. (Jn 6:59-60)
Jesus rebukes the crowds’ lack of eucharistic faith as a sign that they do
not possess the Breath of God or share in the life, the divine pneuma,
which She imparts. (Jn 6:63) As a consequence, they cannot worship in
“pneuma and in truth.” (Jn 4:24) Jesus assures the unbelievers, however,
that His coming glorification will embody an ever greater mystery than
the eucharist. (Jn 6:62) The crowds’ unbelief also betrays the fact that
they do not number among those whom the Father has drawn to Jesus
and gives to Him. (Jn 6:65)
The ultimately skeptical crowds in the Bread of Life discourse prob-
ably symbolize, then, two hostile constituencies: 1) heterodox Christians
who denied Jesus’ real presence in the eucharist and whose lack of faith
made them indistinguishable from 2) the unbelieving and hostile syna-
gogue.2
At the feast of Tabernacles the crowds stand divided for and against
Jesus. The hostility of the Jewish authorities endows the crowds’ debates
about Jesus with a guarded character. Some recognize His goodness, oth-
ers reject Him as a charlatan. (Jn 7:12-13) As the conflict between the
Commentary on John, I, pp. 284-308; B.J. Molina, The Palestinian Manna Tradition
(Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1968), esp. 94-106; Bertil Gärtner, John 6 and the Jewish Passover
(Lund: C.W.K. Gleerup, 1959); Roger Le Déaut, “Une aggadah targumique et les
‘murmures’ de John 6,” Biblica, 51(1970), pp. 80-83; Roland Bergmeier, “Glaube als
Werk? Die ‘Werk Gottes’ in Damaskusschrift II, 14-15 un Johannes 6, 28-29,” Revue
de Qumran, 6(1967), pp. 253-260; John Painter, “Tradition and the Interpretation in
John 6,” New Testament Studies, 35(1989), pp. 421-450.
light and dark intensifies, the crowds find themselves forced to choose
either for Jesus or against Him. Some of the crowds regard Jesus as the
promised prophet like Moses, while others name Him messiah. Those
opposed to Him reject His messianic claims on the basis of His Galilean
origins. (Jn 7:40-42) Some view Jesus as a lunatic. (Jn 7:20) In the end
the crowds cannot agree whether to put faith in Jesus or not. (Jn 7:43)
Jesus, for His part, accuses some of the crowds of wanting His death. By
the end of the feast of Tabernacles, Jesus proves Himself correct on this
point. Unbelieving disciples join “the Jews” in seeking to stone Jesus.3 (Jn
7:19, 8:59)
Despite these hostile encounters, the Johannine crowds eventually be-
gin to put faith in Jesus. The chief priests, like the Pharisees, begin to fear
that the crowds are beginning to take Jesus seriously. In their heart of
hearts, the priests have no regard for the truth of what the people may or
may not think. They regard the masses and their opinions with contempt.
(Jn 7:49)
The raising of Lazarus only intensifies that fear. Jesus prays before re-
storing Lazarus to life in order to inspire faith in the crowds. (Jn 11:42)
When many begin to believe in Jesus because of Lazarus, the chief priests
decide that the time has come to destroy both Jesus and the man whom
He has raised from the dead. (Jn 11:45, 12:9-10)
The raising of Lazarus also causes the crowds to gather for Jesus’ trium-
phal entry into Jerusalem. Those who have heard of the miracle want to
see Jesus, while those who have seen the miracle keep testifying to it.
Moreover, their testimony inspires dismay in the Pharisees.4 (Jn 12:10,
17-19)
Not all in the crowds, however, put their faith in Jesus. Some dismiss as
a thunderclap the Father’s testimony to Jesus during His Jerusalem min-
istry. Others call it an angelic voice. (Jn 12:29)
Finally, however, when Jesus promises that His lifting up in suffering
and glory will draw all people to Himself, the crowds respond in skepti-
cism and derision. They object that the messiah must remain forever. If,
then, Jesus faces crucifixion, He cannot be the messiah. (Jn 12:34) The
crowd’s objection exemplifies another bit of Johannine irony: Jesus’ “lift-
ing up” will in fact insure that He abides forever as messianic Lord. In
Commentary on John, II, pp. 5-32; David M. Stanley, S.J., “The Feast of Tents: Jesus’
Self- Revelation,” Worship, 34(1964), pp. 20-27; C.W.F. Smith, “Tabernacles in the
Fourth Gospel and Mark,” New Testament Studies, 9(1962-1963), pp. 130-146.
4. Cf. NJBC, 61: 127-160 passim; Brown, The Gospel of John, I, pp. 419-464 passim;
Hänchen, Commentary on John, II, 33-94 passim. Edwin D. Freed, “The Entry into
Jerusalem in the Gospel of John,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 80(1961), pp.329-338;
D. Moody Smith, “John 12;12 ff. and the Question of John’s Use of the Synoptics,”
addition, the skeptics among the crowds challenge Jesus to explain to

them who the Son of Man is. (Jn 12:34) The challenge, of course, only
reveals their lack of faith.

Like the synoptic evangelists, the Beloved Disciple uses the crowds as
backdrop to Jesus’ ministry. The Johannine crowds, however, also serve
the evangelist’s theological ends. In the bread-of-life discourse, the crowds
probably symbolize both the Johannine dissidents who reject Jesus’ real
eucharistic presence and the hostile synagogue. During the feast of Tab-
ernacles, the crowds dramatize the struggle between light and darkness in
their debates about Jesus’ identity. Unbelieving disciples join “the Jews”
in seeking to murder Jesus for blasphemously claiming oneness with the
Father. Those who begin to put faith in Jesus after He raises Lazarus
foreshadow those who will eventually believe in Him. The absence of the
crowds from Jesus’ trial heightens the conflict between Jesus, on the one
hand, and Pilate and the chief priests, on the other.
This section has reflected on Jesus’ relationship to the crowds in John.
The section which follows meditates His ambiguous relationship to His
disciples.
(II)
In the synoptic gospels Jesus calls His first disciples from their fishing
nets and promises to make them fishers of men. (Mk 1:16-26; Mt 4:18-22;
Lk 5:1-11) Nothing of the sort happens in the fourth gospel. Except for
Philip, Jesus issues no prophetic call to the first disciples. Instead, they
gather spontaneously around Him, drawn first by the witness of John the
Baptizer, then by their own enthusiasm for Jesus. In the synoptics, Peter
at midpoint in Jesus’ ministry confesses faith in Him as messiah. (Mk
8:27-30; Mt 16:13-20; Lk 9:18-21) In the fourth gospel, the disciples
have no doubt from the beginning about Jesus’ messianic identity.
Jesus and His Disciples

In dealing with the Johannine Jesus’ relationship to His disciples, I have
tried as much as possible not to repeat materials already covered in my
discussion of the Johannine Jesus’ relationship to the Father and to the
Breath. Since, however, both relationships engage the disciples relation-
ship to Jesus and through Him to the other members of the divine triad,
the reader would do well to recall some of the more important themes
developed in that earlier analysis before perusing the reflections which
follow.
True disciples abide in Jesus and in His words. (Jn 8:31-32) This abid-
ing communion ensures that they will never die (Jn 8:48-51) because
through faith in Jesus they have access to the divine Breath, the living
water which slakes human thirst for endless life. The living water slakes
that thirst by communicating a share in Jesus’ resurrection. (Jn 4:10-14)
The Breath dwells in Jesus in eschatological abundance because, as risen
Christ, He imparts Her in eschatological abundance to all who believe.
(Jn 1:32-34; 3:34)
The Breath of Jesus illumines His teachings and allows the disciples to
appropriate it. (Jn 14:26) She reveals to the disciples the meaning of the
Father and Son’s mutual indwelling by giving the disciples an experience
of dwelling in the risen Christ as branches on the vine of the new Israel.
The disciples’ obedience to Jesus, the shepherd of the new Israel, insures
that they abide always in Him. (Jn 10:14-15) Moreover, the disciples’
mutual indwelling in faith and love also draws them into communion
with all three members of the divine triad. (Jn 15:1-2)
Rebirth in water and the Breath introduces the disciples into the king-
dom of Jesus. (Jn 3:3-6) It also inspires authentic eucharistic worship in
Breath and truth, a worship which acknowledges Jesus’ real eucharistic
presence. (Jn 6:29) Such worship purifies and replaces temple worship.
(Jn 4:21-24)
Faith consecrates the disciples to the Father as His children in Jesus’
image. (Jn 17: 9, 14, 16) Faith teaches the disciples to recognize Jesus as
the way to the Father because He alone incarnates in His own person
divine truth and divine life. (Jn 14:16-17) Indeed, those who see with
the eyes of faith see the Father in seeing Jesus (Jn 14:6-7), because the
perfection of His obedience to the Father reveals the latter truly. (Jn 14:6-7)
The Breath with which Jesus baptizes His disciples sends them forth in
His image to proclaim the forgiveness of sins (Jn 19:21-23); but, because
Breath-baptism consecrates the disciples to the Father in Jesus’ image, it
simultaneously separates them from a sinful and unbelieving world. While
the disciples remain in the world, they nevertheless belong, not to the
world, but to Jesus and to the Father through the indwelling Breath. (Jn
17:9, 14, 16)
The disciples’ fearless confession of Jesus in the image of the healed
blind man consecrates them to God even in this world by drawing them
into Jesus’ passion. (Jn 17:17) The Father who judges the world through
the mission, death, and resurrection of His Son (Jn 5:25-29) will prolong
that judgment in the disciples’ witness to Jesus. The divine Breath, the
“other witness” like Jesus, will testify in the disciples’ testimony to Him.
(Jn 14:16-17)
In fulfilling their mission, the disciples must trust in the Father as Jesus
did (Jn 14:1); and that trust will teach them to yearn for the heavenly
mansions to which Jesus has preceded them in order to prepare a dwell-
ing place for them. (Jn 14:2-4) Finally, just as Jesus revealed the Father’s
glory in the world through the perfection of His obedient witness, so too
will the disciples by their testimony to the risen Christ. They will do so
by abiding in Jesus through faith (Jn 15:8-12) and through mutual love.
(Jn 15:15-16) They will also manifest the Father’s glory through the effi-
cacy of their prayers made to the Father in Jesus’ name. (Jn 15:16-17)
All these insights into the disciples’ relationship to Jesus derive from
meditation on those texts which describe His relationship to the Father
and to the Breath. As one ponders them, one wonders what the Beloved
Disciple might have to add to them, given their richness and depth of
insight. Nevertheless, the fourth evangelist has much more to say on the
subject of discipleship. The reflections which follow examine those texts
which dramatize the relationship between Jesus and His disciples more
immediately and directly.
In the priestly account of creation, it takes God a week to create the
heavens and the earth. (Gen 1:1-2:4) In the fourth gospel, it takes a week
for the first disciples to gather around Jesus. In other words, the call of
the first disciples occupies the first week of the new creation. This first
week, moreover, foreshadows the final week of Jesus’ ministry, which cul-
minates in the Paschal mystery. (Jn 12:1) On Calvary Jesus will inaugu-
rate the new creation proleptically by giving the Beloved Disciple, the
type of those who believe in Jesus without seeing Him in His risen glory,
to Mary, to new Eve and mother of all believers, in order to cherish as her
son. The first week of the new creation which opens John’s gospel also
foreshadows the week of apparitions of the risen Christ which culminates
in Jesus’ confrontation with the doubting Thomas.5 (Jn 20:1, 19)
On the first day, the Baptizer testifies to Jesus. (Jn 1:19-28); and on the
second day John points Jesus out as the Lamb of God and Breath-baptizer.
(Jn 1:29-34) On the third day, Jesus begins to gather His disciples. (Jn
1:35-49) On the fourth day, Jesus calls Philip and Nathanael and pro-
claims Himself the saving link between heaven and earth. (Jn 1:43-51)
On the seventh day, Jesus turns water into wine at Cana. (Jn 2:1-11)
The fourth evangelist links the beginning and the end of Jesus’ minis-
try in other symbolic ways. The first two disciples, one of them Andrew,
the brother of Simon, follow Jesus out of curiosity, when, on the third
day of the first week, the Baptizer for a second time points Him out to
5. Not everyone who divides the opening events of the Johannine Jesus’ ministry into
seven days does it in the same way. Given the disagreement, some also question the
textual justification of a hebdomadal division. The division suggested here rests on the
evangelist’s explicit textual references to the passage of time. Cf. M.-E. Boismard, Du
baptème à Cana (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1956); Thomas Barrosse, C.S.C., “The Seven
Days of the New Creation in St. John’s Gospel,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 21(1959),
pp. 507-516; L. Paul Trudinger, “The Seven Days of the New Creation in St. John’s
Gospel: Some Further Reflections,” Evangelical Quarterly, 44(1972), pp. 154-158;
Harold Saxby, “The Time Scheme in the Gospel of John,” Expository Times, 104(1992),
pp. 9-13.
them as “the Lamb of God.” (Jn 1:35-6) They follow Jesus at a distance.
When Jesus asks them what they are looking for, they respond: “Rabbi,
where do you dwell (pou meneis)?” Jesus replies: “Come and see.” (Jn
1:38-9)
Both the question and the answer have double meanings. The pro-
logue has already informed the reader that the incarnate Word “set up
His tent” among humans. (Jn 1:14) The Son of God dwells only tempo-
rarily on earth but dwells permanently in His Father’s heavenly mansion.
(Jn 14:1-2) In asking Jesus where He dwells, the disciples ask for more
than they realize.
The verb “meneis” also endows the question of the disciples with other
suggestive connotations. The fourth evangelist stresses the indwelling of
God. The Breath comes to Jesus to dwell in Him. (Jn 1:33) Jesus, the
Father, and Breath all dwell in one another and in the believing disciples.
(Jn 15:1-10, 17:20-3) The disciples will know fully where Jesus dwells
when they experience Him dwelling in them through the power of His
Breath. Then they too will dwell in Him. (Jn 16:12-15)
Jesus’ simple invitation to “come and see” also conceals depths of mean-
ing. His invitation will find its fulfillment when the disciples behold His
risen glory. After the disciples have gathered around Him, Jesus promises
them, as we have seen, that one day they will behold in Him the privi-
leged link between heaven and earth. They will see the heavens rent in an
apocalyptic manner and the angels of God ascending and descending
upon the Son of Man whose simultaneous possession of heavenly and
human characteristics makes him an apt mediator between God and hu-
manity. (Jn 1:51)
The final and full revelation of Jesus as apocalyptic Son of Man, as final
judge of the living and dead, and as the privileged link between heaven
and earth comes, of course, with the full revelation of His divinity in the
resurrection. (Jn 20:28) When, therefore, the fourth evangelist describes
the disciples’ encounter with the risen Christ, he focuses his narrative on
the different ways in which each disciple comes to “see” the risen Christ
with the eyes of faith.6 (Jn 20:1-29)
The evangelist mentions that the first two disciples encountered Jesus
at “the tenth hour,” or about four o’clock. Some think that the Beloved
Disciple is referring to the onset of the Sabbath rest and that the disciples
stayed with Him from Friday to Saturday evening. The gospel text, how-
ever, makes no mention of the sabbath rest; and it portrays the disciples
6. Cf. Friedrich Wulf, S.J., “Meister, wo wohnst du? (Jo 1.38),” Geist und Leben,
31(1958), pp. 241-244; Heinrich Zimmermann, “Meister, wo wohnst du? (Jo 1.38),”
Lebendiges Zeugnis (1962), pp. 49-57; Craig Kœster, “Hearing, Seeing, and Believing
in the Gospel of John,”,” Biblica, 70(1989), pp. 327-348; Klaus Scholtissek, “‘Mitten
unter euch steht er, den ihr micht kennt,’” Münchener Theologische Zeitschrift,
48(1997), pp. 103-121.
as active the following day. John’s reference to the setting sun could, as
others have suggested, possibly symbolize that the day of the Baptizer is
ending and that the day of Jesus is about to dawn. Certainly, however, the
reference to sunset marks the end of one day and puts the events which
follow on the next day, the third of the first week of Jesus’ ministry.
The following day, one of the two who had followed Jesus, Andrew,
brings his brother Simon to Jesus. In Matthew’s gospel, Simon does not
acquire the name Peter until he confesses Jesus as the messiah. (Mt 16:18;
cf. Mk 3:16) In John’s account, Jesus changes Simon’s name to Peter at
their first encounter. Moreover, while in Matthew, Peter acquires his new
name as a reward for confessing Jesus as the messiah and Son of God
before any of the other disciples, in the fourth gospel, Andrew informs
Peter that he has found the messiah even before Peter confronts Jesus. (Jn
1:40-2)
Peter’s association with Jesus comes on the third day of the new cre-
ation. The following day, Jesus calls Philip, who informs a skeptical
Nathanael that he and the other disciples have found “him of whom
Moses in the Law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth.” (Jn
1:43-4) Even before they witness the Father’s testimony to Jesus in the
signs He works, the disciples put their faith in the testimony of the wit-
nesses who support the truth of Jesus’ own testimony to the Father: namely,
Moses and the prophets. They have already heard and apparently accepted
the Baptizer’s witness that Jesus is “the lamb of God.” Their ability to
believe in these witnesses to Jesus will soon contrast with the unbelief of
Jesus’ adversaries. (Cf. Jn 5:46)
Nathanael, like doubting Thomas at the end of the gospel, proves ini-
tially skeptical. He asks: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (Jn
1:47) Philip’s confession of Jesus as the one who fulfills the Old Testa-
ment implicitly points to Him as the messiah. As we have seen, later on
Jesus’ enemies will use his origins in Nazareth to discredit His messianic
authority. (Jn 7:52) Nathanael here anticipates the objection.
Philip counters Nathanael’s skepticism with the same invitation which
Jesus has given to the first two disciples: “Come and see.” (Jn 1:46) The
invitation has the same symbolic meaning on Philip’s lips that it had on
Jesus’, as the encounter between Jesus and Nathanael will soon make
plain.
When Philip presents Nathanael to Jesus, He calls Nathanael an “Isra-
elite without guile.” Jesus then proves his messianic identity to Nathanael
by displaying preternatural knowledge of someone he has never met. Jesus
tells Nathanael that he saw him “under a fig tree.” Jesus’ reply could al-
lude to Zech 3:10, which also involves a calling and a fig tree. If so, the
evangelist is implicitly pointing to Jesus as the messianic “Branch” who
reigns as king. (Jn 1:49-50; Cf. Zech 3:10 and 6:12) Nathanael’s response
to Jesus tends to confirm this interpretation. Nathanael immediately con-

fesses Jesus as “Son of God” and “King of Israel.” (Jn 1:49) Nathanael has
begun to “see.” He now recognizes Jesus as messiah and names Him with
two messianic titles. Jesus, however, assures Nathanael that he hasn’t “seen”
anything yet. One day he will behold in Jesus the apocalyptic link be-
tween humanity and the Father.7 (Jn 1:50-1)
Three days later, on the last day of the first week of the new creation,
the disciples witness Jesus’ first sign, the transformation of water into
wine at Cana. In the following chapter I shall consider in greater detail
the meaning of each of the signs. Here it suffices to note that the presence
of Mary at Cana links this miracle to Jesus’ death on the cross and to the
sign of blood and water which follows His death. (Jn 2:1-6, 19:25-37)
As we have already seen, Jesus’ death, glorification, and sending of the
Breath fulfills the meaning of the first sign; for it reveals Him as the
divine bridegroom faithful in love to a sinful humanity despite rejection,
humiliation, and a cruel death. The disciples, moreover, recognize in this
first sign a revelation of the divine glory which the paschal mystery will
manifest in its fullness. (Jn 2:11) Cana completes the call of the disciples
and closes the first week of the new creation by foreshadowing the pas-
chal mystery which will enable the disciples finally to “see” Jesus.
The disciples also witness the cleansing of the temple. Moreover, the
redactor uses their presence there in order to make it clear that this first
Passover event will also derive its full meaning from the third and final
Passover when Jesus is lifted up in suffering and in glory.8 When Jesus
drives out the money changers and merchants, the disciples recall Ps 69:9.
The evangelist, however, changes the tense of the verb in the verse of Ps
69:9 from past to future and has it read: “Zeal for your house will con-
sume me.” The change in tense points, of course, to the passion and
names the cleansing of the temple as one of the important reasons why
the chief priests decided on Jesus’ death. (Jn 2:1-17)
The evangelist, as we have also seen, links the cleansing of the temple
to the resurrection by having Jesus justify His authority to purify the
temple with the promise: “Destroy this temple and in three days I will
raise it up.” (Jn 2:18) The future faith of the disciples plays a significant
7. Cf. NJBC, 61: 27-39; Brown, The Gospel of John, I, pp. 73-92; Hänchen, Commentary
on John, I, pp. 157-168; Amos B. Hulen, “The Call of the Four Disciples in John 1,”
Journal of Biblical Literature, 66(1948), pp. 153-157; F. Lamar Cribbs, “St. Luke and
the Johannine Tradition,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 90(1970), pp. 422-450, esp.
433-435; Craig R. Koester, “Messianic Exegesis and the Call of Nathanael (John
1.45-51),” Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 39(1990), pp. 23-34; C.E. Hill,
“The Identity of John’s Nathanael,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament,
67(1997), pp. 45-61.
8. In the original gospel, the cleansing of the temple probably occurred after the triumphal
entry during Jesus’ final Passover.
part in John’s narrative. The evangelist notes that the disciples did not
understand the meaning of Jesus’ words until His death and resurrection.
The sign of water flowing from Jesus’ pierced side as He hangs on the
cross will reveal Him as the temple of God from which flows the living
water of God’s sanctifying Breath. (Jn 19:34-37)
Moreover, John notes that the cleansing of the temple not only illu-
mines the meaning of this teaching of Jesus but that it also makes sense
out of the whole of the Old Testament. Resurrection faith understands
both the Old Testament and the cleansing of the temple from the stand-
point of the paschal mystery.9 (Jn 2:18-22)
The fourth evangelist portrays Jesus as conferring a baptism on His
early followers, much in the manner of John the Baptizer. Moreover, the
disciples join Jesus in conferring the ritual and apparently persist in it
even after Jesus abandons the rite. (Jn 3:22, 4:1)
A redactor or scribe seems to have inserted into the text of the gospel
the observation that Jesus Himself at some point stopped baptizing. The
redactor, possibly for polemic reasons, wanted to make it clear that Jesus
did not simply mimic John the Baptizer. The redactor could also have
desired to call attention to an historical fact: namely, that during most of
His own Galilean ministry Jesus did not in fact baptize His followers.
Certainly, the synoptic gospels never describe Jesus baptizing anyone. In
its final form, then, the text of the fourth gospel gives the impression that
Jesus began by baptizing but then abandoned the practice, although the
disciples continued to administer the rite.10
tary on John, I, pp. 181-193; A.M. Dubarle, “Le signe du temple (Jo II, 19),” Revue
Biblique, 48(1939), pp. 21-44; Cecil Roth, “The Cleansing of the Temple and
Zechariah XIV 21,” Novum Testamentum, 4(1960), pp. 174-181; Jean Giblet, “Le
temple et l’ éternelle alliance,” Égilse Vivante, 9(1957), pp. 122-125; Simon Marcel,
“Retour du Christ et reconstruction du Temple dans la pensee chrétienne primitive”
in Aux sources de la tradition chrétienne (Paris: Delachaux & Nestle, 1950), pp.
247-257; Xavier Léon-Dufour, “Le signe du temple selon saint Jean (Jn. 2:13-22),”
Recherches de Science Religieuse, 39(1951-1952), pp. 155-175; François-Marie Braun,
“In spritu et veritate,” Revue Thomiste, 52(1952), pp. 245-247; Francis J. Maloney,
S.B.D., “Reading John 2:13-22: The Purification of the Temple,” Revue Biblique,
97(1990), pp. 432-452; Odo Schnelle, “Die Tempelreinigung und die Christologie
des Johannesevangelium,” New Testament Studies, 42(1996), pp. 359-373.
10. Cf. NJBC, 61: 54; Brown, The Gospel of John, I, pp. 150-156; Hänchen, Commentary
on John, I, pp. 208-212; Michel Cambe, “Jésus baptise et cesse de baptiser en Judeé
(Jean 3, 22- 4, 3),” Études Théologiques et Religieuses, 53(1978), pp. 97-102; Marie-Émile
Boismard, “Aenon près de Salem: Jean III, 23,” Revue Biblique, 80(1973), pp.
218-229.
The fourth evangelist may have included information about Jesus’ use of the ritual
as a way of alluding to the origins of Christian baptism. If so, however, the fact that Jesus
seems to have abandoned the practice at best transforms His institution of it into a
half-hearted one.
As Jesus returns to Galilee after the first Passover, He stops exhausted at

Jacob’s well while the disciples go to the nearby Samaritan town of Sychar
in order to purchase food. (Jn 4:8) On their return the disciples experi-
ence shock on discovering Jesus in deep conversation with a Samaritan
woman; but they fear to rebuke Jesus for what they perceive as a serious
impropriety. In their own minds, however, they wonder why Jesus is speak-
ing to a woman and a Samaritan and what He hopes to accomplish by
such strange, even shocking, behavior. (Jn 4:27)
The evangelist notes specifically that the woman’s sex especially offended
the disciples. Rabbis never took women disciples, and some of them even
counseled against speaking to a woman in public. Jesus breaks this taboo
as a way of dramatizing the inclusiveness of His mission and message. It
embraces men and women alike.
The inclusion of women in the kingdom seems to have preoccupied
the fourth evangelist; women play a particularly important role in his
gospel. Mary, Jesus’ mother, as we have seen, appears as the new Eve. (Jn
2:1-5, 19:25-27) The Samaritan woman evangelizes the Samaritan people,
an act which foreshadows their future Christianization. (Jn 4:39) Martha
confesses Jesus as messiah, although, like Peter in the synoptics, with
imperfect insight. (Jn 11:21-27) Mary Magdalene functions as the apostle
to the apostles. (Jn 20:17-18)
The disciples also take umbrage at the fact that Jesus feels no qualms
about conversing with a Samaritan. (Jn 4:9) Jesus has escaped the hatred
which traditionally divided Jews and Samaritans. Just before the disciples
return, He tells the woman that one day the kingdom will embrace both
ethnic groups. (Jn 4:21-22) Jesus further demonstrates His lack of preju-
dice by staying at Sychar and catechizing the Samaritans for two days.
Moreover, at the end of those days the Samaritans acknowledge Jesus as
“the savior of the world.” (Jn 4:39-42)
One finds no traditions about Jesus’ ministry to Samaritans in the
synoptics. The fact that such traditions seem to have existed in the Johan-
nine community suggests the presence in it of a Samaritan contingent.
The Samaritans’ confession of Jesus as “savior” smacks of post-resurr-
ection Christian faith and foreshadows its universality.11
11. Cf. Margaret Pamment, “Is There Convincing Evidence of Samaritan Influence on
the Fourth Gospel?” Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 73(1982), pp.
221-230; John Bowman, “The Fourth Gospel and the Samaritans,” Bulletin of the John
Rylands Library Manchester, 40(1957-1958), pp. 298-329; Normand R. Bonneau,
O.M.I., “The Woman at the Well, John 4 and Genesis 24,” Bible Today, 67(1973), pp.
1252-1259; David Daube, “Jesus and the Samaritan Woman: The Meaning of
sygchraomai,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 69(1950), pp. 136-147; D.R. Hall, “The
Meaning of sygchraomai in John 4.9,” Expository Times, 83(1971-1972), pp. 56-57;
Robert Gordon Maccini, “A Reassessment of the Woman at the Well in John 4 in the
Light of the Samaritan Context,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 53(1994),
pp. 35-46.
The disciples make no mention of their shock and disapproval. In-

stead, they urge Jesus to eat the food which they have brought from the
village. Jesus replies: “I have food to eat of which you do not know.” (Jn
4:31)
In speaking to the Samaritan woman, Jesus has just endowed the image
of drink with deep religious meaning by promising the living water which
quenches the human thirst for immortality. (Jn 4:7-15, 7:37-38) Now in
speaking to the disciples, he does the same with the image of food. Sym-
bolic food and drink foreshadow the bread-of-life discourse.
Typically, the disciples misunderstand Jesus’ remark about food and
wonder if someone has brought Jesus something to eat in their absence.
(Jn 4:33) Like the synoptic evangelists, the Beloved Disciple often uses
the obtuseness of Jesus’ audience as a literary device for getting Him to
explain the deep meaning of what He says. Moreover, on this occasion in
explaining the symbolic meaning of the “other food” which nourishes
Him, Jesus addresses the disciples’ unspoken disapproval of His social
contact with the Samaritan woman.
Jesus tells the disciples:
My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to accomplish His
work. Do you not say, “There are yet four months, then comes the har-
vest.” I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see how the fields are already white
for harvest. He who reaps receives wages and gathers fruit for eternal life.
For here the saying holds true, “One sows and another reaps.” I sent you
to reap that for which you did not labor; others have labored, and you
have entered into their labor. (Jn 4:34-8)
John’s Jesus seems to have preternatural foreknowledge of the response

of faith which He will soon elicit from the Samaritans. He therefore uses
two peasant proverbs in order to catechize the disciples about the univer-
sal scope of their apostolic mission. The first proverb asserts: “There are
four months yet, then comes the harvest.” After citing the proverb, Jesus
contradicts it. The disciples need not wait the four months traditionally
needed for the harvest to ripen. The grain stands already ripe for the
sickle. (Jn 4:35-36)
Jesus assimilates the immanent evangelization of the Samaritans to a
harvest. He also links the mission He has received from the Father with
that evangelization. In effect, then, Jesus is asserting that the Father has
sent Him to work a universal salvation which breaks down the sinful
barriers traditionally dividing people from one another. In so speaking,
Jesus rebukes His disciples’ ethnic and sexist bigotry.
Jesus promises the disciples that their own ministry to enemies and to
outcasts, to men and to women, will earn them the rich wage of eternal
life. Indeed, they will share in the same reward of eternal life as Jesus
Himself; and they will celebrate with Him an eternal harvest festival. (Jn
4:35)
Jesus sees the involvement of the disciples in His own mission from the
Father as an illustration of a second peasant proverb: “One sows, another
reaps.” (Jn 4:37) Quite possibly, the proverb in its original meaning al-
ludes to the heavy taxes which the Palestinian peasantry paid to both the
empire and the temple. Those taxes probably gobbled up two-thirds of
every peasant income.
Jesus, however, transforms the proverb into a description of the dis-
ciples’ involvement in a work which “others” have begun. “Others” refers
most obviously to Jesus and to the Father. Some have argued, however,
that the antecedent of “others” also includes the Baptizer or even the Old
Testament prophets who prepared the coming of Jesus; but Jesus and the
Father provide the only antecedents explicitly mentioned in the text. (Jn
4:34) The disciples find themselves engaged in the same mission of uni-
versal salvation as the Father has entrusted to the incarnate Son.
Jesus uses the aorist tense (egô apesteila) to speak of His commissioning
of the disciples. (Jn 4:38) In fact, He does not send the disciples until He
rises from the dead and breathes into them a sanctifying Breath. Once
again, the evangelist, by using a past tense in order to describe a future
event, endows that event with inevitability of a fait accompli. The same
tense usage also exemplifies the Johannine Jesus’ tendency to speak from
the standpoint of the paschal mystery.12 (Jn 20:19-23)
We find no mention of the disciples in the healing of the man at the
pool of Bethsaida; but, as in the synoptic accounts of the multiplication
of the loaves and fish, in John, the disciples play an active role in this
miracle. The fourth evangelist names the disciples initially involved: Philip
and Andrew. The same two disciples will play an active role during Jesus’
Jerusalem ministry when they report to Jesus that “Greeks” desire to see
Him. (Jn 12:20-22)
In the fourth evangelist’s account of the miracle of the loaves, Jesus
knows that He is about to perform a miracle, but He tests Philip’s reac-
tion by asking him where they shall buy food to feed the multitude. (Jn
6:1-6) As in Matthew, Jesus’ question recalls the dismay of Moses at hav-
ing to feed a multitude of people in a deserted place. (Cf. Num 11:1, 7-9,
13, 22) The question therefore suggests the parallel between Jesus’ miracle
and the gift of manna in the desert, a theme which the bread-of-life dis-
course immediately develops in detail. The evangelist notes that Jesus
asks the question in order to test Philip because, in his telling of the story
12. Cf. NJBC, 61: 57-65; Brown, The Gospel of John, I, pp. 166-168 passim; Hänchen,
Commentary on John, I, pp. 213-237 passim; John Bligh, “Jesus in Samaria,” Heythrop
Journal, 3(1962), pp. 327-346; Elian Cuvillier, “La figure des disciples en Jean 4,” New
the Beloved Disciple avoids any hint of ignorance on Jesus’ part concern-
ing what will soon happen.
Andrew informs Jesus that a boy in the crowd has five barley loaves and
two fish; but Andrew despairs of feeding the crowd with such skimpy
fare. (Jn 6:8-9) Jesus takes the food, blesses it, and distributes it to the
people seated on the plentiful grass. In the synoptics Jesus gives the food
to the disciples to distribute. In the fourth gospel he seems to do it per-
sonally. (Jn 6:10-1; cf. Mk 6:41, 8:6; Mt 14:19, 15:36; Lk 9:16) The
fourth evangelist does not say that Jesus broke the bread; but Jesus’ action
has eucharistic overtones which the bread-of-life discourse will expound.
After all have eaten, Jesus sends the Twelve to collect the left-overs.
Each apparently carries a basket for that purpose; and each fills the bas-
ket. (Jn 6:13) The bread-of-life discourse closes with a reference to the
Twelve. (Jn 6:71) Their participation in the miracle of the loaves marks
their first appearance in the gospel of John.13
The crowds, as we have seen, convinced by the miraculous multiplica-
tion that Jesus is a prophet like Moses, try to crown Him king by force.
Jesus, however, eludes them and retires to the mountain alone. (Jn 6:15)
Jesus will have nothing to do with secular messianism.
For no clear reason, the disciples decide to depart without Jesus. As in
the synoptic accounts, they find themselves beset by a fierce storm which
slows their progress. They then see Jesus walking on the water. The sight
fills them with terror.
John, like the synoptics, treats this event as a theophany. Jesus calms
the disciples’ fears by saying: “I AM. Do not fear.” (Jn 6:16-20) As we
have seen, in the fourth gospel Jesus invokes the divine name many times
as a way of asserting His unity with the Father. Here He manifests His
divinity to His disciples. During the feast of Tabernacles, which follows,
He will proclaim it to the unbelieving “Jews.” The more public procla-
mation of Jesus’ divinity causes the light which Jesus embodies to spread.
Although Jesus initially directs the bread-of-life discourse to the skepti-
cal and unbelieving crowds, when He reaches the eucharistic section of
the discourse, some of the disciples repudiate His promise to give them
His body to eat and His blood to drink. The dissident disciples com-
plain: “This is a hard saying. Who can hear it?” (Jn 6:60)
As we have seen, the defecting disciples probably symbolize the
Johannine dissidents. (1 Jn 2:18-22) Jesus rebukes their unbelief and chal-
lenges them to recognize that His words offer pneuma and life itself. (Jn
6:61-62) Those who worship God in pneuma and truth will understand
the meaning of what He is saying. (Jn 4:23) Jesus explains to the faithful
disciples that those who abandoned Him for proclaiming His real eucha-
13. Cf. L. Th. Witkamp, “Some Specific Johannine Features in John 6.1-21,”Journal for
the Study of the New Testament, 40(1990), pp. 43-59.
ristic presence had attached themselves to Him without the Father call-
ing or drawing them. (Jn 6:65; cf. 1 Jn 2:19) By implication, had the
Father drawn them to Jesus, they would never have defected from Him.
Moreover, John’s Jesus once again shows preternatural prescience by know-
ing in advance not only who believes in Him and who does not but also
which of the Twelve will betray Him. (Jn 6:64, 71)
Peter speaks for the orthodox disciples by confessing in their name
faith in Jesus’ words. When Jesus asks the Twelve if they too desire to
abandon Him, Peter says: “Lord (Kyrie), to whom shall we go? You have
the words of eternal life; and we believe and have come to know that you
are the Holy One of God.” (Jn 6:66)
In the fourth gospel this confession of faith in the truth of Jesus’
life-giving eucharistic doctrine corresponds to Peter’s confession of Jesus
as messiah in the synoptic tradition. The title “Lord” has post-resurrection
connotations. The title “Holy One of God” has messianic connotations
and designates Jesus as one specially consecrated by God. Hence, the
second title foreshadows Jesus’ priestly prayer in which He will conse-
crate Himself as a sacrificial victim so that His disciples might themselves
know consecration to God through faith in the truth Jesus incarnates.
(Cf. Jn 17:19)
Jesus replies reproachfully to Peter’s confession of faith, “Did I not choose
you, the Twelve, and one of you is a devil?” As we have seen, when the
time comes for Judas to betray Jesus, Satan will enter into him. Now
Jesus in virtue of His extraordinary prescience, foresees Judas’s treach-
ery.14 (Jn 2:25)
During the feast of Tabernacles, false disciples play a significant role in
the struggle between light and darkness. As the struggle intensifies, it
causes those who profess hypocritically to believe in Jesus to reveal that in
fact they would rather see Him dead than accept His identity with the
Father. Racially proud, the false disciples claim the freedom and dignity
of the Abraham’s children; but they lack Abraham’s faith. Their actual
conduct reveals them as children of Satan by betraying the unrepented
violence in their hearts. That violence blinds them to the truth which
Jesus incarnates and causes them to reject utterly Jesus’ divinity. (Jn
8:31-59) Having rejected Jesus’ real eucharistic presence, the false dis-
ciples now reject the incarnation as well.
In this polemic passage, the evangelist targets in part dissident mem-
bers of his community who professed to believe in Jesus at some level,
perhaps as a prophetic figure, but who refused to acknowledge Him as
divine. The struggle between light and darkness forces these false dis-
ciples to reveal their murderous malice and unbelief. They show them-
14. Cf. Ludger Schenke, “Das Johanneische Schisma und die Zwölf (Johannes 6.60-71)”
New Testament Studies, 38(1992), pp. 105-121.
selves indistinguishable from unbelieving “Jews” who also repudiate Jesus’

divinity.15 (Cf. 2 Jn 7-10; 1 Jn 2:18-22)
The disciples witness the cure of the man born blind. Moreover, they
assume that either the man himself or his parents must have sinned for
him to suffer the affliction of blindness from birth. Jesus, however, cor-
rects this popular misconception. Disease and suffering need not result
from sin. In the case of the man born blind, his blindness has a providen-
tial purpose: namely, “that the works of God might be made manifest in
him.” (Jn 9:1-3)
As we have seen, “the works of God” about to occur include not only
the physical healing of the man born blind but his coming to faith in
Jesus. In virtue of his faith and fearless confession of Jesus despite his
expulsion from the synagogue, the man born blind functions, as we have
also seen, as a type of the believing disciple.
Like the trial of Jesus before Pilate, the trial of the man born blind
before the Pharisees unfolds chiastically. In the preface to the trial Jesus
cures the blind man to the astonishment of the man’s neighbors. (Jn 9:1-7)
In the conclusion, Jesus evokes an act of faith from the man born blind
and rebukes the unbelief of the Pharisees. The trial itself proceeds in three
scenes. In scenes one and three, the Pharisees cross examine the cured
blind man. (Jn 9:13-17, 24-34) In the central scene of the trial the Phari-
sees cross-examine the former blind man’s parents.
As we have seen, in structuring Jesus’ trial and execution chiastically,
the Beloved Disciple endows the central scene with special revelatory sig-
nificance. One would expect him to do the same in structuring the trial
of the cured blind man. In fact, the central scene contrasts the timidity of
the man’s parents and with his courage in testifying to Jesus. The parents
identify the man and confirm his blindness from birth; but, out of fear
that the Pharisees will expel them from the synagogue, they refuse to say
anything about Jesus. Their timidity contrasts with their son’s boldness
of faith. The contrast rebukes those members of the Johannine commu-
nity who fear to confess Jesus publicly lest they incur excommunication
by the Pharisaical leaders of the local synagogue.
By situating this scene at the heart of the former blind man’s trial, the
Beloved Disciple dramatizes an important dimension of discipleship. It
demands the fearless confession of Jesus, no matter what the consequences.
Only by courageously joining Jesus in His opposition to the dark powers
15. Cf. NJBC, 61: 85-103; Brown, The Gospel of John, I, pp. 230-304 passim; Hänchen,
Commentary on John, I, pp. 268-308 passim; Roger Le Deant, op. cit.; Peder Borgen,
“Observations on the Midrashic Character of John 6,” Zeitschrift für die
Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 54(1963), pp. 232-240; Andre Feuillet, Le discours sur
le pain de vie (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1967); B. Gärtner, John 6 and the Jewish
Passover (Lund: C.W. Gleerup, 1959).
which the Pharisees embody, does the blind man come to faith. Jesus’
disciples will also “come into the light” by fearless testimony to Jesus
under persecution.
The blind man sees more and more deeply into the person of Jesus as
he testifies fearlessly to Him. He first confesses Jesus a prophet. (Jn 9:17)
When he ironically asks the Pharisees: “Do you too want to become his
disciple?” the former blind man as much as confesses his own disicpleship.
(Jn 9:27) Moreover, when accused by the Pharisees of discipleship, the
man does not deny it. Then the man confesses Jesus’ true origin: Jesus
comes “from God.” (Jn 9:32) In the end, the man suffers expulsion from
the synagogue for his faith which he eventually professes to Jesus Him-
self.16 (Jn 9:34-38)
In the synoptics Jesus instructs His disciples about His coming martyr-
dom during His final journey to Jerusalem. The Johannine disciples be-
gin to glimpse the inevitability of the passion in the raising of Lazarus.
When Jesus decides to respond to the appeal of Martha and Mary and go
to Lazarus, the disciples remind Him of the danger He is risking, since
He has twice barely escaped death by stoning. (Jn 11:7; cf. 8:59, 10:31)
When Jesus persists in His decision to approach Jerusalem again, Tho-
mas bravely exhorts the other disciples: “Let us go, that we may die with
Him.” (Jn 11:16) This brave protest exemplifies Johannine irony; for,
when push comes to shove, Thomas, like all the other disciples except the
Beloved Disciple, will abandon Jesus. (Jn 16:32, 18:15, 19:25-27)
In the wake of Lazarus’s resurrection, the high priests decide on Jesus’
death. Jesus therefore withdraws temporarily from Jerusalem with the
disciples. (Jn 11:54)
The Disciples in the Jerusalem Ministry

The final week of Jesus’ ministry begins with his anointing at Bethany.
The fourth evangelist identifies the woman who anoints Jesus as Mary,
the sister of Lazarus. Moreover, unlike the unnamed woman in the
synoptics who anoints Jesus on the head in a gesture which proclaims His
messianic dignity, Mary, like the woman who was a sinner in Luke, anoints
Jesus’ feet and dries them with her hair. (Jn 12:3; cf. Mk 14:3-9; Mt
Commentary on John, I, pp. 33-42; G. Bornkamm, Geschichte und Glaube (Munich:
Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1971), pp. 65-73; James Louis Martyn, History and Theology in the
Fourth Gospel (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1979), pp. 3-62; Karlheinz Müller, “Joh 9,7
und das Jüdische Verständnis des Siloh-Spruchs,” Biblische Zeitschrift, 13(1969), pp.
251-256; John P. Comiskey, “‘Rabbi Who Has Sinned?’ (John 9.2),” Bible Today,
26(1966), pp. 1808-1814; Donatien Mollat, S.J., “Le guérison de l’aveurgle-né,” Bible
et Vie Chrétienne, 23(1958), pp. 22-31; John Bligh, “Four Studies in the Man Born
Blind: I,” Heythrop Journal, 7(1966), pp. 129-144; D. Bornkauser, “Meister, wer hat
gesündigt, dieser oder seine Eltern, dass er ist blind geboren? Joh 9,2,” Neue Kirchliche
Zeitschrift, 38(1927), pp. 433-437.
26:6-13; Lk 7:39-50) The fourth evangelist says that she used a pound of
extremely expensive ointment, called nard, in order to anoint Jesus. Its
smell fills the house.17 (Jn 12:3) The Beloved Disciple could conceivably
have conflated the two stories. In the conflated version, however, one
finds no hint that Mary has sinned. Instead, the story focuses on the
opulence of her gift.
In recounting this event, only the fourth evangelist names the person
who objects to the woman’s gesture: Judas the traitor. Judas asks: “Why
was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the
poor?” (Jn 12:4-5) The evangelist also notes that Judas, who managed
the disciples’ and Jesus’ finances had no concern for the poor and in fact
stole from the common purse. (Jn 12:6)
As we have seen, in the synoptic tradition, practical faith in the Father’s
providential care frees the true disciple to share the physical supports of
life with the poor and needy. Although, as we have also seen, the fourth
evangelist does not stress this dimension of Jesus’ teaching as much as the
synoptics do, the Johannine letters offer evidence that care for the poor
had high priority in the Johannine community. (1 Jn 3:17-22) The cu-
pidity of Judas suggests that he had failed to absorb this central teaching
of Jesus. His clandestine thievery also suggests that as Jesus’ death ap-
proached, the unfaithful apostle set himself to feather his own nest at the
expense of the poor.
Jesus rebukes Judas in the fourth gospel in much the same way as he
rebukes the critics of the unnamed woman in the synoptics: “Let her
alone, let her keep it for the day of my burial. The poor you always have
with you, but you do not always have me.” (Jn 12:7) Instead of saying
that Mary has anointed Him for burial as He does in the synoptics, John’s
Jesus says that Mary can use the rest of the ointment for his interment. In
both the synoptic and Johannine traditions, however, Jesus on this occa-
sion foresees his immanent demise.
As in the synoptic tradition, Jesus alludes to Deut 15:1-11, which teaches
that poverty would not plague Israel if people cared for the needy as the
Law requires. Since, however, with moral inevitability, poverty will dog
the lives of some, those with greater means should always show the poor
an open hand. Far from endorsing or justifying poverty, the phrase “the
poor you always have with you” reminds the disciples that they must
always give the poor a special place in their practical concern.18
17. Some see in the good odor which emanates from Jesus, who will rise from the dead,
a contrast with the stench which emanates from Lazarus’s rotting corpse. Cf. Nuria
Calduch Benages, M.N., “La Fragrancia des Perfume en Jn 12,3,” Estudios Biblicos,
48(1990), pp. 243- 265.
Commentary on John, II, pp. 82-89; Edward F. Glusman, Jr., “The Cleansing of the
Temple and the Anointing at Bethany: The Order of Events in Mark 11/John 11-12,”
When Jesus enters Jerusalem in triumph mounted on a young ass, the

fourth evangelist cites the same Old Testament text as Matthew: namely,
Zech 9:9. Like Matthew, the Beloved Disciple interprets the text as a
prophecy of the entry. The evangelist modifies the original text to read:
“Fear not, daughter of Zion; behold, your king is coming, sitting on an
ass’s colt.” (Jn 12:15) As we have seen elsewhere, Zechariah prophecies
the coming of a peaceful king who will banish violence from the land.
His riding on an ass rather than on a war horse, symbolizes not so much
His lowliness as His irenic reign.
The fourth evangelist notes that at the time of the triumphal entry the
disciples did not realize that Jesus was (perhaps quite deliberately) fulfill-
ing this messianic prophecy. Only after His resurrection did they realize
what Jesus had done. One finds an analogous reflection in John’s account
of the cleansing of the temple, which prior to the gospel’s redaction prob-
ably followed the triumphal entry, as it does in the synoptics. (Jn 12:16)
The evangelist is in effect saying that the full revelation of Jesus as the
king of peace prophesied by Zechariah arrived with the paschal mystery
when Jesus established His peaceable kingdom by suffering the violence
of others in forgiving love and by rising and sending the Holy Breath to
forgive sins. That forgiveness establishes His peace by reconciling people
to one another and to God.19 (Jn 18:33-8, 20:19-23)
SBL Seminar Papers, 1(1979), pp. 113-117; J. Duncan M. Derrett, “The Anointing at
Bethany,” Studia Evangelica, 2(Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1964), pp. 174-182; Antoine
Lemonnyer, O.P., “L’onction de Bethanie: Note d’exegèse sur Jean XII, 1-8,” Recherches
de Science Religieuse, 18(1928), pp. 105-117; Manfried Weise, “Passionswoche und
Epiphanie Woche im Johannes-Evangelium: Ihre Bedeutung für Komposition und
Konzeption des vierten Evangeliums,” Kerigma und Dogma, 12(1966), pp. 48-62;
T.W. Bevan, “The Four Anointings (Mt xxvi. 6-13; Mark xiv. 3-9; Luke vii.36-50;
John xii. 1-11),” Expository Times, 39(1927-1928), pp. 137-139; J. Edgar Burns, “A
Note on Jn 12,13,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 28(1966), pp. 219-222; André Legault,
C.S.C., “An application of the Form-Critique Method to the Anointing in Galilee (Lk
7, 36-50) and Bethany (Jn 12, 1-8),” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 16(1954), pp.
131-145; Charles H. Giblin, “Mary’s Anointing for Jesus’ Burial-Resurrection (Jn
12:1-8),” Biblica, 73(1992), pp. 560-564; J.F. Coakley, “The Anointing and the
Priority of John,”Journal of Biblical Literature, 107(1988) pp. 241-256; Ingrid Rosa
Kitzberger, “Mary of Bethany and Mary of Magdala: Two Female Characters in the
Johannine Passion Narrative: A Feminist, Narrative-Critical Reader-Response,” New
Testament Studies, 41(1995), pp. 564-586; Cullen Story, “The Mental Attitude of
Jesus at Bethany: John 11/33-38,” New Testament Studies, 37(1991), pp. 51-66.
19. Cf. NJBC, 61: 160; Brown, The Gospel of John, I, pp. 455-464; Hänchen, Commentary
on John, II, pp. 82-91; Edward O. Freed, “The Entry into Jerusalem in the Gospel of
John,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 80(1961), pp. 329-338; D. Moody Smith, Jr.,
“John 12.12ff. and the Question of John’s Use of the Synoptics,” Journal of Biblical
Literature, 83(1963), pp. 58- 64; Hermann Patsch, “Der Einzug Jesu in Jerusalem:
Eine historische Versuch,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, 68(1971), pp. 1-26;
Francis J. Moloney, S.B.D., “A Sacramental Reading of John 13:1-38,” Catholic
Biblical Quarterly, 53(1991), pp. 237-256; M.J.J. Menken, “Die Redaktion des Zitates
The Disciples at the Last Supper
Apart from his instruction in Samaria about the bountiful harvest, John’s
Jesus directs only one major discourse exclusively to His faithful disciples:
namely, His last discourse. As we have seen, Luke’s gospel contains a brief
final discourse at the last supper (Lk 22:21-38); but we find nothing in
the synoptics comparable to the extended instruction which the Johannine
Jesus gives the disciples at their last meal together. That Jesus would have
postponed catechizing His disciples in any significant way until the night
before He died lacks any historical plausibility. By situating most of Jesus’
instructions to His disciples in the last discourse, however, the Beloved
Disciple makes it theologically clear that one must understand the prac-
tical demands of discipleship in the context of the paschal mystery.
As we have seen, the disciples who abandon Jesus in the bread-of-life
discourse and who turn on Him at Tabernacles never really put their faith
in Him. The last discourse targets the faithful disciples exclusively. I have
reflected about Jesus’ relationship to the Father in the last discourse. Here
I focus on those sections of the last discourse which deal with the de-
mands of discipleship.
The evangelist marks the beginning of the Book of Glory with a sol-
emn preface. The preface insists on Jesus’ foreknowledge of His passion
and glorification. It also presents both as the supreme expression of His
love for His disciples. (Jn 13:1-2)
The foot washing which begins the last supper exemplifies the total
self-forgetfulness which the divine love incarnate in Jesus embodies. Fully
aware of His equality and identity with the Father and fully aware of His
immanent betrayal by Judas, Jesus nevertheless performs a menial service
normally reserved for slaves: He washes His disciples’ feet, including,
apparently, the feet of Judas. (Jn 13:2-5, 11)
When Jesus reaches Peter, the disciple protests: “Lord, are you going to
wash my feet?” The title “Lord” underscores the extreme condescension
of Jesus’ action and has, of course, post-resurrection connotations. Jesus
replies that Peter does not presently understand why Jesus is acting in this
way but that he will understand “later.” This “later” has a double mean-
ing. “Later” refers to Jesus’ explanation of His action which follows im-
mediately in the Johannine account; but “later” also connotes the new
knowledge of Jesus which the paschal mystery will work in Peter, even by
conforming Him to Jesus’ passion. (Jn 21: 18-19)
When Peter replies that Jesus will never wash his feet, Jesus demands
that Peter submit to the libation: “If I do not wash you, you will have no
heritage with Me.” (Jn 13:6-8) Jesus’ demand has both literal and sym-
bolic meaning. Literally, Jesus is telling Peter that, if he refuses submit to
aus Sach 9:9 in Joh 12:15,” Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 80(1989),
pp. 193-202.
the foot-washing, then Peter must renounce his discipleship, since as Jesus
will soon explain, He is giving the disciples an example of how they should
relate to one another. In other words, Jesus’ response to Peter makes mutual
service in His image a fundamental condition for discipleship. Taken sym-
bolically, however, Jesus’ words “If I do not wash you” allude to Christian
baptism, to rebirth through water and the Breath. So understood, the
“heritage” to which Jesus refers means a share in risen glory. (Jn 3:3-15)
Since baptism conforms one morally to Jesus through the empowering
illumination of His Breath, I find nothing to choose among a sacramen-
tal, a soteriological, and an ethical reading of this text. Exegetes have
defended all three interpretations.20
Peter replies over-enthusiastically to Jesus’ warning: “Lord, not just my
feet, but my hands and head.” Jesus replies ironically to this bit of excess:
“One who has bathed does not have to wash anything but his feet and he
is completely clean. You are clean, but not all.” (Jn 13:9-10)
Again Jesus’ words have both a literal and symbolic meaning. Taken
literally, Jesus is saying that one who has bathed on entering the house
needs only to wash the dust from the unpaved road from his feet. No
need therefore for Jesus to wash Peter’s head and hands. The sentence
“You are clean, but not all” taken literally simply repeats the same idea.
The evangelist, however, calls attention to Jesus’ deeper symbolic intent.
Jesus is alluding to the treachery in Judas’ heart which excludes him from
the ranks of those cleansed, just as “deadly sin” will in the Johannine
community exclude one from the ranks of the baptized.21 (Jn 13:11; cf. 1
Jn 5:16-17)
20. Cf. M. Sabbe, “The Footwashing in Jn 13 and its Relations to the Synoptic
Gospels,”Ephemerides Theologicae Lovaniensis, 58(1982), pp. 279-308.
21. Cf. NJBC, 61: 172-178; Brown, The Gospel of John, II, pp. 549-580; Hänchen,
Commentary on John, II, pp. 102-114; N.M. Haring, “Historical Notes on the
Interpretation of Jn 13:10,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 13(1951), pp. 355-375; W.K.
Grossouw, “A Note on John XIII 1-3,” Novum Testamentum, 8(1966), pp. 124-131;
M.-E. Boismard, O.P., “Le lavement des pieds (Jn XIII, 1-17),” Revue Biblique,
44(1935), pp. 22-23; B.W. Bacon, “The Sacrament of Footwashing,” Expository
Times, 43(1931-1932), pp. 218-221; Edouard Cothenet, “Gestes et actes symboliques
du Christ dans the IVe évangile” in Gestes et paroles dans les diverses familles liturgiques
(Rome: Centro Liturgico Vincentiano, 1978), pp. 95-116; Robert Eisler, “Zum
Fusswaschung am Tage vor dem Passah,” Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentlische
Wissenschaft, 38(1939), pp. 94-96; Ernst Lohmeyer, “Die Fusswaschung,” Zeitschrift
für die Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 38(1939), pp. 74-94; Georg Richter, Die
Fusswaschung im Johannesevangelium (Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 1967);
Johann Michl, “Der Sinn der Fusswaschung,” Biblica, 40(1959), pp. 697-708; Herold
Weiss, “Footwashing in the Johannine Community,” Novum Testamentum, 21(1977),
pp. 298-325; P.Aelfrid Kassing, “Das Evangelium der Fusswaschung,” Erbe und
Auftrage, 36(1960), pp. 83- 93; M.J.J. Menken, “The Translation of Psalm 41.10 in
John 13.18,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 40(1990) pp. 61-79; Michal
Jesus then resumes His outer garments and explains to the disciples the
significance of what He has done. If He, their teacher and Lord, conde-
scends to serve His own disciples like a slave, they should take His ex-
ample and similarly serve one another in His image. (Jn 13:12-5) This
admonition counts as the first of several “commandments” which Jesus
will give the disciples in the course of the last discourse. Later, Jesus will
make keeping His commandments the condition for loving Him.
Jesus appends three arguments for obeying this initial command. First
of all, the difference in dignity which separates Him from the disciples
remains much greater than the difference which separates the disciples
Wojciechowski, “La source de Jean 13. 1-20,” New Testament Studies, 34(1988), pp.
135-141; J.C. O’Neill, “John 13:10 Again,” Revue Biblique, 101(1994), pp. 67-74.
The postscript to the first Johannine letter makes the following points. The first
letter has insisted that the true children of God do not sin. (1 Jn 3:5-6, 9) In the
postscript, the author of the letter makes it clear, however, that he recognizes that even
believers occasionally commit minor offenses. When that happens, the community
needs only beg that God will forgive the lapse; and the efficacy which attends the prayer
of the believing community will insure divine forgiveness. In insisting that true
believers do not sin, therefore, the author means that they avoid what he calls “deadly
sin.” Deadly sin, serious violation of the commands of God, precludes reconciliation
with the community. Hence, the community should not pray for the reconciliation of
those guilty of such heinous offenses. They should, however, pray for the forgiveness
of peccadillos, with the confident expectation that God will answer such a prayer
uttered in faith. (1 Jn 5:14-7)
With this qualification, however, the strict moral dualism which separates those who
belong to God from “the world” still obtains. God protects those who belong to Him
from serious sin; for serious sin entails domination by the Evil One and by the world.
Such sinless lives embody the knowledge of the true God and insure that those who live
such lives also live in His Son. Living in the Son means present possession of eternal
life. (1 Jn 5:18-21) The postscript, then, does little more than repeat and clarify a point
which the author already made at the beginning of the letter, when he asserted that Jesus
intercedes with the Father for the forgiveness of minor offenses committed by those
who believe in Him. (cf. 1 Jn 2:1)
Cf. NJBC, 62: 32-34; Raymond E. Brown, The Epistles of John (The Anchor Bible:
New York, NY: Doubleday, 1982), pp. 607-641 [I shall hereafter refer to this work as
Epistles.]; Hans Josef Klauck, Die Erste, Zweite, und Dritte Johannesbrief (2 vols.;
Zürich: Benziger, 1992), I, pp. 321-347; O. Bauernfeind, “Die Fürbitte angesichts der
‘Sünde zum Tode’” in Von der Antike zum Christentum (Settin: Fischer & Schmidt,
1931), pp. 43-54; A.H. Dammers, “Hard Sayings—II: 1 John 5: 16ff.,” Theology,
66(1963), pp. 370-372; S.M. Reynolds, “The Sin unto Death and Prayers for the
Dead,” Reformation Review, 20(1973), pp. 130-139; D.M. Scholer, “Sins Within and
Sins Without: An Interpretation of 1 John 5:16-17” in Current Issues in Biblical
Interpretation, edited by G.F. Hawthorne (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1975), pp.
230-246; J.-L. Ska, “‘Petits enfants, prenez garde aux idoles’ 1 Jn 5,21,” Nouvelle Revue
Théologique, 101(1979), pp. 860-874; P. Trudinger, “Concerning Sins, Mortal and
Otherwise. A Note on 1 John 5, 16-17,” Biblica, 52(1971), pp. 541-542; Julian Hills,
“Little children, keep yourselves from idols: 1 John 5:21 Reconsidered,” Catholic
Biblical Quarterly, 37(1989), pp. 285-310; M.J. Edwards, “Martyrdom and the First
Epistle of John,” Novum Testamentum, 31(1989), pp. 164-171.
from one another. They relate to Jesus as subordinates: as servant to mas-

ter, as one sent to the sender. Their diminished dignity should, then,
make it easier for them to serve one another. In other words, mutual
service among the disciples should flow from the humble recognition of
one’s subordinate status. (Jn 13:16) Second, the disciples will find a life
of mutual service a source of real blessing. (Jn 13:17) Third, in welcom-
ing one another in obedience to Jesus and in imitation of His humble
service, the disciples will in fact welcome both Jesus Himself and the
Father who sent Him; for both Jesus and the Father identify with each
person to such an extent, that They take what is done to any individual as
done to themselves. (Jn 13:20) Jesus’ willingness, despite His divine sta-
tus, to serve the disciples as a slave stands in continuity with His willing-
ness to lay down His life freely for their sakes. One finds analogous in-
sights in the synoptics. (Mk 10: 41-45; Mt 20: 24-28; cf. Lk 22:24-27)
In a parenthetical remark, Jesus acknowledges that what He is saying
about the blessedness of service does not apply to Judas, who has already
betrayed Jesus in his heart. Jesus assures the disciples, however, that the
treachery of Judas fits into a providential plan foretold by the Scriptures.
(Cf. Ps 41:9) That fact plus Jesus’ own foreknowledge of His betrayal
should enable the disciples to continue to believe in His divinity in spite
of what He is about to endure. (Jn 13:18-19)
Jesus then announces that one of the Twelve will betray Him, and re-
veals to the Beloved Disciple and to Peter the identity of the traitor by
giving him a morsel of food to eat. Jesus even covers Judas’s exit by saying
to Judas as he leaves: “Do quickly what you are about to do.” The remark
makes the other disciples believe that Jesus is sending Judas, the keeper of
the purse, either to purchase something needed for their supper or to give
money to the poor. On Judas’s consumption of the morsel, Satan enters
into him. Judas breaks bread with Jesus but experiences no saving conse-
quences. Instead, he disappears into the night. The forces of darkness are
massing for their final attempt to quench the light which Jesus embod-
ies.22 (Jn 13:21-30)
Having given the disciples a commandment to serve one another as
slaves serve their masters, Jesus now gives a second related command. As
He prepares to leave the disciples and return to the Father, He gives them
the “new commandment” to love one another just as He has loved them.
Indeed, mutual love in Jesus’ image will mark His true disciples. (Jn
13:33-35)
Commentary on John, II, pp. 115-118; Wilfred L. Knox, “John 13.1-30,” Harvard
Theological Review, 43(1950), pp. 161-163; Antonio Garcia-Moreno, “Agapê (Amor
Christiano) en los Escritos Joanicos,” Estudios Biblicos, 51(1993), pp. 353-392.
The newness of the command flows from the fact that Jesus as the
unique way to the Father embodies the love which He enjoins on His
disciples. (Jn 14:6) The newness also flows from the paschal mystery which
gives ultimate expression to Jesus’ love through His willingness to lay
down His very life for His friends. (Jn 15:12-15) Obedient love of Jesus
transforms the disciple into a friend of Jesus who appropriates and there-
fore reincarnates in turn the love and truth which Jesus embodies. (Jn
15:13-15)
In a sense, the “new commandment” circumscribes the love command-
ment as one finds it in the synoptics. It circumscribes it by focusing Chris-
tian love on the members of the Christian community: “Love one an-
other.” Nowhere in the fourth gospel do we find Jesus counseling His
disciples to love their enemies. The radical ethical division which sepa-
rates believers from the world, the light from the dark, diverts the Be-
loved Disciple’s concern from the radical inclusiveness of the love com-
mand which the synoptic tradition stresses.
The “new commandment,” however, also intensifies the love command-
ment by focusing it on the paschal mystery. In his death for sinners, Jesus
embodies the fullness of divine love and provides the disciples with the
pattern of self-sacrifice they should show toward one another.
John’s Jesus also makes it clear that His love embraces the disciples even
in their sinfulness. When Peter protests that he will follow Jesus any-
where, even to the point of dying for Him, Jesus predicts the rash disciple’s
triple denial. (Jn 13:36-38) By implication, then, the love which the new
commandment enjoins on the disciples cannot make sinlessness in an-
other disciple the condition for loving that person. Rather Jesus is com-
manding the disciples to love one another with the same kind of forgiv-
ing, atoning love as He Himself embodies.23
23. Cf. Frank Stagg, “The Farewell Discourses,” Review and Expositor, 62(1965), pp. 459-
472; L. Cerfaux, “La charité fraternelle et le retour du Christ,” Ephemerides Theologiae
Lovaniensis, 24(1948), pp. 321-332.
The second part of the first letter of John portrays the Christian life as a life of love:
“This is the message you heard from the beginning (ap’ archês), that we love
one another.” (1 Jn 3:11)
In the context of the letter, “from the beginning” probably refers to the Johannine
community’s first evangelization; but it also refers implicitly to the beginning of Jesus’
proclamation of the gospel. The author of the first epistle formulates the love command
in the same way as the author of the gospel. Both formulations focus love primarily on
the members of one’s own faith community.
The author of the letter, however, explains in considerable detail the implications of
the Jesus’ command in the fourth gospel: “Love one another as I have loved You.” (Jn
15:12) The explanation clusters a variety of moral and doctrinal themes from the gospel
as a way of drawing out its meaning. At the same time, the author of the letter
introduces new insights of his own.
In his own way, however, the Beloved Disciple does inculcate love of
enemies. Jesus’ love for a sinful world exemplifies such love; and in the
paschal mystery Jesus models for the disciples the perfection of love. The
fact remains, however, that in speaking of the demands of discipleship
the fourth evangelist does not assert love’s universality as explicitly as the
synoptic tradition does. Besides ethical dualism, concern with internal
divisions in the Johannine church no doubt motivates the Beloved
Disciple’s stress on mutual love in community.
Jesus has given the disciples two commands: mutual service in His im-
age and the new commandment of atoning love. To these two command-
ments He now adds a third: belief in Him and in the Father He reveals.
Johannine orthopraxis, as we have seen, includes orthodoxy. (Jn 14:1)
Faith in Jesus has an eschatological dimension; for it includes the convic-
tion that in departing from the disciples, Jesus actually goes to prepare a
place for them in the Father’s house and will one day return to welcome
The familiar themes which echo the gospel include the following: 1) A life of love
distinguishes those who belong to God from those who belong to Satan. (1 Jn 3:12)
2) It gives assurance of the ultimate possession of risen life with Christ by translating
those who love in the present from the realm of death to the realm of life. (1 Jn 3:13-4)
3) In what concerns eternal life, those who refuse to love remain dead. (1 Jn 3:13-5)
4) The world’s hatred for those who obey the love command imitates and prolongs
historically the murderous hatred of the enemies of divine truth which the gospel
proclaimed. The first letter compares those enemies to Cain, the child of the Evil One.
Cain hated his brother Abel because of the very goodness of his brother’s actions. (1 Jn
3:12-4) Persecution for the sake of love ought, then, only to confirm one’s determina-
tion to live the love command which transforms one into a true child of God. 5) God
will certainly hear the prayers of those who live the love command. (1 Jn 3:21-2) 6) The
love command goes hand in hand with authentic faith in Jesus as the Son of God. (1
Jn 3:23) 7) For the believing Christian, the saving death of Jesus for sinners offers the
ultimate motive for mutual love in community. That Jesus gave His life for His
disciples must teach them to give their lives for one another. (1 Jn 3:16) 8) Faith and
love together ensure the divine indwelling. (1 Jn 3:24) 9) The Breath of the risen Christ
inspires both faith and love. (1 Jn 3:24)
Developed insights peculiar to the first letter include the following: 1) Love must
spring from the heart, for hatred kills love as effectively as an overt act of murder. Those
who love must, therefore, do more than avoid physical acts of violence. Rather they
must purify their hearts of all hatred. (1 Jn 3:15) 2) Genuine love demands the concrete
sharing of the physical supports of life. When the more affluent refuse to share with
those more needy then themselves, the affluent simply manifest that they do not in fact
love God. (1 Jn 3:17) 3) Practical love for the needy rectifies the conscience before an
omniscient God and absolves those who practice it of any fear of divine judgment. (1
Jn 3:19-21)
Cf. NJBC, 62: 26-27; Brown, Epistles, pp. 439-484; I. de la Potterie, “Aimer ses
frères et croire en Jesus Christ,” Assemblées du Seigneur, 2nd ser.; 26(1973), pp. 39-45;
J. Dupont, “Comment aimer ses frères (1 Jn 3, 13-18),” Assemblées du Seigneur, 1st ser.,
55(1962), pp. 24- 31; C. Spicq, “La Justification du Charitable (1 Jo 3, 19-21),”
Biblica, 40(1959), pp. 915-927; H.H. Wendt, “Zum ersten Johannesbrief,” Zeitschrift
für die Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 22(1923), pp. 57-79.
them into that extensive heavenly dwelling place. (Jn 14:1-3) Faith also
has an inherently incarnational character because it recognizes Jesus as
the embodied revelation of the Father.
The co-equality and mutual indwelling of Father and Son manifest
themselves historically in Jesus’ testimony to the Father and in the Father’s
testimony to Jesus. The Father, as we have seen, testifies to Jesus in two
practical ways: 1) by teaching Him to do the miracles which manifest the
truth of what He teaches and 2) by empowering Him to rise from the
dead. (Jn 14:4-11)
Christian faith also has a practical, expectant character: the disciples
should expect that whatever they ask the Father in Jesus’ name He will
give them. The disciples can then expect to do in Jesus’ name even greater
miracles than Jesus Himself, miracles which will manifest the Son’s di-
vine glory. (Jn 12:29-30, 13:31-32, 14:12-13)
These dimensions of faith all re-enforce one another. The expectation
of answered prayer buttresses the expectation of God’s final answer to
prayer in the second coming and vice versa. Similarly, incarnational faith
requires faith that God has in fact entered history in a radical, new way
and therefore has the power to transform history through answered prayer.
Moreover, as we have also seen, Jesus’ incarnation grounds His authority
as final eschatological judge.24
24. Cf. B.W. Bacon, “‘In my Father’s house are many mansions’ (Jn xiv. 2),” Expository
Times, 43(1931-1932), pp. 477-478; Robert H. Gundry, “In My Father’s House are
Many Monai (Jn 14:2),” Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 58(1967),
pp. 68-72; Rudolf Schanckenburg, “Johannes 14:7” in Studies in New Testament
Language and Text, edited by J.K. Elliot (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1976), pp. 345-356.
The author of the first Johannine letter proposes three concrete tests for discerning
true from false religious beliefs.
1) One cannot claim truly to know God while living a life which violates the
commandments of God. (1 Jn 2:3-5) This first norm of discernment makes it clear that
the author of the letter regards Christian faith as inherently practical. Authentic faith
recognizes the practical consequences of belief in Jesus Christ and lives out those
consequences.
2) One cannot claim to abide in God unless one lives as God incarnate lived:
“Whoever claims to abide in Him [God] must himself walk as He (autos) walked.” (1
Jn 2:6) In the first epistle, the term “That One (autos)” repeatedly designates the figure
of Jesus. (Cf. 1 Jn 3:3, 5, 7, 16; 4:17; Jn 2:21, 19:35)
The author of the letter justifies this second principle by appealing to the “new
commandment” which Jesus gave His disciples in His last discourse. (Jn 13:34-5)
Because the “new commandment” simply repeats the authentic Christian tradition, it
may strike the true believer as “old hat,” as something proclaimed “from the begin-
ning.” (1 Jn 2:7) “From the beginning” means here the same as it did in 1 Jn 1:1. “The
beginning” refers to the beginning of the self-revelation of God in Jesus, especially in
His ministry, death, and resurrection. Implicitly, therefore, the author asserts that
Jesus’ entire ministry embodied the love command.
Nevertheless, the love command enjoys a perpetual “newness” which derives from
the paschal mystery and its consequences. For any human life to conform in love to the
Jesus has given His disciples three interrelated commandments: believe

in the Father and in Me, serve one another as I have served you, love one
another as I have loved you. He now sums them up under the love com-
mand: “If you love Me you will keep My commandments.” (Jn 14:14)
Faith in Jesus and in the Father as well as mutual service must always
express and embody love. Moreover, those whose obedience to Jesus’ com-
mands manifests their love of Him will find themselves the objects of
Jesus’ and of the Father’s love.25 (Jn 14:21)
divine love incarnate in Jesus endows it with a newness which reveals the decisive
victory of light over darkness accomplished in the paschal mystery. (1 Jn 2:8; cf. 2 Jn
4-6)
3) No one can claim authentic enlightenment while hating another believer. Hatred
breeds scandal by leading another down the false path which leads into darkness. It
therefore reveals the darkness and the blindness of heart from which it proceeds. Love,
by contrast, never causes scandal and never causes one to sin. (1 Jn 2:9-11)
The author of the letter cites the enmity of the dissidents toward the orthodox as a
refutation of their claim to religious enlightenment. The letter will assert later that the
fact that the dissidents broke fellowship with the orthodox by leaving the community
proves that from the beginning they never functioned as real members of the
community. (1 Jn 2:19)
Once again the criteria for discerning authentic religious enlightenment build
cumulatively upon one another. If faith proves itself in Christian practice, then anyone
who fails to love with the forgiving, atoning love of Christ acts from some other motive
than faith. Hence, the hostility of the dissidents toward the orthodox and their
violation of communion (koinonia) demonstrates that some other motive than genuine
faith inspires their lives.
Cf. NJBC, 62: 18; Brown, Epistles, pp. 246-377; Klauck, op. cit., I, pp. 111-129; Paul
Jouon, “1 Jean 2,16: hê alazoneia tou biou: La présomption des richesses,” Recherches
de Science Religieuse, 28(1938), pp. 479-481; J. Edgar Burns, “A Note on John 16, 33
and 1 John 2, 13-14,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 86(1967), pp. 451-453; Antonio
Vincent Cernuda, “Enganan la oscuridad en el mundo: la luz era y manifesto lo
verdadero,” Estudios Biblicos, 27(1968), pp. 153-175, 215-232; Noel Lazure, “La
convoitise de la chair en 1 Jean II, 16,” Revue Biblique, 76(1969), pp. 161-205; Duane
F. Watson, “Rhetorical Analysis of 2 John According to Greco-Roman Convention,”
New Testament Studies, 35(1989), pp.104-130.
25. In his final exhortation to mutual love, the author of the first Johannine letter bases
his argument on the fact that “God is love” just as “God is light.” (1 Jn 4:8; cf. 1:5)
Because love defines the very reality of God, all love comes from God. Hence, all those
who love one another in the very act of loving know God and manifest the divine origin
of their love. (1 Jn 4:7-8)
The incarnation of the Son of God and His death for sin reveals historically the fact
that “God is love.” The supreme historical revelation of divine love in the incarnation
and death of God’s own Son embodies the utter gratuity of divine love. The author of
the letter explicitates an idea implicit in the gospel when he insists that God’s love for
us in Christ takes saving precedence over our love of God.
The love of God revealed in Christ creates our love for God and for one another.
Indeed, mutual love in community embodies authentic love for God; for one cannot
love a God one has never seen if one refuses to love a brother or sister with manifest
needs. Even more, mutual love in community brings to perfection the love which God
revealed in sending His Son to save us; for the saving love of God revealed in Christ
As we have seen, obedient love of Jesus will cause both the Father and
Son to dwell in the disciples. (Jn 14:23) As Jesus begins to speak of the
Breath’s action in the disciples, He develops the notion of mutual ind-
welling in considerable theological detail.
To faith in the Father and Son, Jesus now adds faith in the Holy Breath,
the “other witness” whom He will send the disciples. She will dwell for-
ever with and in the disciples. (Jn 14:15-17) She will communicate to
them the life of the risen Christ and empower them to “see” the risen
seeks to evoke in us a similar mutual, Christlike love. The Breath of the risen Christ
comes, in fact, to inspire that love. (1 Jn 4:9-12)
The idea that Breath-inspired Christian love “perfects” the revelation of divine love
in Christ goes beyond anything which one finds explicitly stated in the fourth gospel.
Moreover, the author of the letter stresses even more than the evangelist the intimate
connection between faith in the incarnation and Christian love. The incarnational
character of Christian love makes love and authentic faith inseparable, since the divine
love incarnate in Jesus ultimately motivates the mutual love of Christians. One must,
then, profess faith in the incarnation and in the saving death of Jesus in order to love
authentically as a Christian. In other words, Christological knowing includes the “deed
of faith,” heartfelt assent to the divine reality incarnate in Jesus. Authentic faith and
love coalesce and together manifest the divine indwelling which the Breath of God,
who inspires both, effects. (1 Jn 4:13-6)
Incarnational faith inspires mutual love in community by teaching one to recognize
that faith in Jesus Christ transforms one into a child of God. Those who truly love God
will, then, also love God’s children, as God does. In the end, therefore, the victory of
faith and the victory of love coincide. (1 Jn 5:1-4)
The author of the first letter offers two practical criteria for authenticating Christian
love: 1) Those who love face the day of final judgment without fear, because divine love
drives out all fear. Those, therefore, who fear the punishment of God, betray by their
fear their own lack of love. (1 Jn 4:17-9) 2) Authentic love of God manifests itself in
the practical care of the needs of one’s fellow believers. Anyone who claims to love God
without loving one’s fellow believers simply lies. (1 Jn 4:20-1) The author of the letters
like the author of the gospel stresses mutual love in community more than universal
love and probably does so for the same reasons.
Both the second and the third letters of John also take the same practical view of faith
as one finds in the gospel. The dissidents, in their denial of the incarnation, have
violated not only the truth but the love command as well, which demands that one live
according to the commands of God. (2 Jn 5-6) As we have just seen, in the gospel of
John, the love command functions as an omnibus command which includes among
other things the command to believe in Father, Son, and Breath. Those who destroy
the communion of faith manifest by that very evil act that they never really knew God.
(3 Jn 11)
Cf. NJBC, 62: 29; Brown, Epistles, pp. 512-568; Klauck, op. cit., I, pp. 245-264;
Celestin Charlier, “L’amour en esprit (1 Jean 4, 7-13),” Bible et Vie Chrétienne,
10(1955), pp. 57-72; D. Dideberg, S.J., “Esprit Saint et charité: L’exegèse augustinienne
de 1 Jn 8 et 16,” Nouvelle Revue Théologique, 97(1975), pp. 97-109, 229-250; C. Spicq,
O.P., “Notes d’exegèse johannique: La charité est amour manifesté,” Revue Biblique,
65(1958), pp. 358-370; M. de Jonge, Jesus: Inspiring and Disturbing Presence, trans-
lated by J. E. Steely (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1971), pp. 110-127; Roland Sheutz,
Die Vorgischichte der johanneische Formel: ho Theos agapê estin (Göttingen: von Hubert
& Co., 1917).
Jesus truly with the eyes of faith. (Jn 14:19) Through Her indwelling in
the disciples they will come to understand the mutual indwelling of Fa-
ther and Son because the Breath will effect the mutual indwelling of the
risen Christ and His disciples. (Jn 14:23) Presumably, the disciples’ ind-
welling in the risen Jesus will yield an analogous insight into His indwell-
ing in the Father.26
The Holy Breath of truth will empower the disciples to appropriate in
a new and intimate way the truth which Jesus embodies. She will remind
the disciples of Jesus’ teachings and disclose to them its meaning. (Jn
14:26) The indwelling of the Breath in the disciples will transform their
witness to the risen Christ into the Breath’s own witness. (Jn 15:26)
That witness will draw the disciples into conflict with the same dark
forces as crucified Jesus. Like Jesus, the disciples will find themselves per-
secuted, expelled from synagogues. Their enemies will imagine it their
duty before God to exterminate them. (Jn 15:20-23, 16:1-4) By Her
testimony in the disciples, the Other Witness will despite all opposition
prove the world guilty of sin and of unrepentant self-righteousness. (Jn
16:7-11)
The divine Breath will also disclose to the disciples the dawning
eschatological future. She will teach them new truths which Jesus never
spoke to them. In doing so, She will act in obedience to the risen Christ
just as His teachings embodied His obedience to the Father. (Jn 16:12-15)
In other words, the enlightenment of the Breath will encompass the
whole of history: past, present, and future. It encompasses the past: She
will enable the disciples to recall Jesus and all His teachings. It encom-
passes the present: through their witness She gives ongoing witness in an
unbelieving world. It encompasses the future: She will call the world to
26. Cf. M.E. Boring, “The Influence of Christian Prophecy on the Johannine Portrayal
of the Paraclete and Jesus,” New Testament Studies, 25(1978-1979), pp. 113-123; C.K.
Barrett, “The Holy Spirit in the Fourth Gospel,” Journal of Theological Studies,
n.s.1(1950), pp. 1-15; Otto Betz, Der Paraklet: Fürsprecher in häretischen Spätjüdentum,
im Johannes-Evangelium in neu gefundenen Gnostischer Schriften (Leiden: E.J. Brill,
1963), pp. 117-124; W. Bartlett, “The Coming of the Holy Ghost According to the
Fourth Gospel,” Expository Times, 37(1925-1926), pp. 72-75.
In describing Jesus’ intercession for sins the author of the first Johannine letter calls
Him a “paraklêtos with the Father.” (1 Jn 2:1) Curiously, then, the first letter applies
the term “paraklêtos” to Jesus, but not to the Breath. In the gospel, as we have seen, both
Jesus and the Breath function as witnesses who testify to the divine truth. In the gospel,
both testimonies occur on earth. After Jesus departs to the Father, the Breath comes to
testify to Him and to the Father in the testimony of the disciples.
The first letter uses the term “paraklêtos” in a different sense in order to depict Jesus’
perpetual intercessory office in heaven. The author of the letter suggests that by
testifying to the Father perpetually about His atoning sacrifice for sins, Jesus ensures
that the prayers for minor offeneses committed by Christians will in fact receive the
Father’s forgiveness. (cf. I Jn 5:14-21)
judgment and will disclose the shape of the future by revealing the full-
ness of divine truth.27
The Breath will glorify the risen Christ by empowering the disciples to
do in Jesus’ name even greater works than Jesus Himself. (Jn 14:12-13)
27. Cf. Kurt Niederwimmer, “Zur Eschatologie im Corpus Johanneum,” Novum
Testamentum, 39(1997), pp. 105-116.
The author of the first Johannine letter looks to “the anointing of the Holy One” to
give every member of the Johannine community knowledge. (1 Jn 2:20) The author
of the letter parallels the knowledge yielded by this anointing with the truths handed
down within the community of the orthodox. If the truths handed down to them abide
in them, then they will abide in the Father and the Son. (1 Jn 2:24)
To whom does the title “the Holy One” refer? The anointing of which the letter
speaks suggests that the “Holy One” refers to the sanctifying, sin-forgiving Breath who
proceeds from the risen Christ. (Jn 20:21-23) Since, however, the Breath also comes
to the disciples from the Father through the Son, the term “Holy One” could also
designate either the Breath or all three. (Jn 14:15-16)
Scholars with univocal minds who do not understand the workings of the intuitive
imagination seem to imagine that “the Holy One” can only designate a single referent.
Given the propensity of Johannine rhetoric to read multiple meanings into the same
phrase, however, it seems entirely possible that “the Holy One” refers in the first
instance to the sanctifying Breath of the risen Christ, in the second instance to the risen
Christ from whom this sanctifying Breath proceeds, and ultimately to the Father who
sends both Son and Breath. Every member of the community of believers “knows”
through the enlightening anointing of the Breath who proceeds from both Father and
Son.
That “the Holy One” refers in the first instance to the Breath of the risen Christ finds
re-enforcement from the kind of enlightenment to which the author of letter refers. He
characterizes the anointing in question as “abiding” and as yielding knowledge of “all
things.” (1 Jn 2:17) In the gospel of John the same traits characterize the enlightenment
of the Holy Breath. (Jn 14:16-7, 16:13) In claiming that faith discloses all things, the
author of the letter does not claim omniscience for believers but only that they live in
permanent possession of the font of all enlightenment and of all saving truth. Since the
enlightenment of the Breath gives them access to the truth incarnate in Jesus and in the
Johannine tradition, they “have no need for anyone to teach you.” (1 Jn 2:27)
The truth which abides in the Johannine community has roots not only in the
Breath’s enlightenment but in the historical revelation of God’s incarnate Son. That
truth coincides with what they heard “from the beginning.” (1 Jn 2:24) Here “from the
beginning” would seem to refer to the Johannine community’s first encounter with the
gospel. “Initial,” however, also probably refers also to the first proclamation ever of the
good news, namely, to Jesus’ own proclamation of the gospel.
The author of the letter also alludes to a promise (epaggêlia) made to the community
that those who have the truth proclaimed by Jesus abiding in them will abide in the
Father and in the Son. This promise, the author notes, coincides with “eternal life.” (1
Jn 2:24-5) Some see in the promise a present reality; some, a future, eschatological
reality. I find no reason in principle why the promise in question, which clearly roots
itself in the promises of Jesus in the fourth gospel, might not encompass past, present,
and future.
Ignace de la Potterie, “Anointing of the Christian Faith” in The Christian Lives by the
Spirit, edited by I. de la Potterie and S. Lyonnet (Staten Island, NY: Alba, 1971), pp.
79-143.
She will impart the abiding gift of eschatological peace by effecting the
forgiveness of sins which reconciles humanity to God and to one an-
other. (Jn 14:27, 20:19-23) The disciples’ commissioning by the risen
Christ in the power of the Breath expresses their prior call and election by
Him.28 (Jn 15:16, 20:19-23)
The paschal mystery involves, then, both the absence and presence of
Jesus. His death and glorification will put an end to His physical pres-
ence among the disciples; and that will cause them sorrow. (Jn 13:33,
14:18-9, 28-31, 16:4b-5) Yet, despite His temporary separation from the
disciples, Jesus will return to them in a way which fills them with joy, a
joy born of the knowledge of Him in His risen glory. (Jn 16:20-2, 20:20b)
They will rejoice too at answered prayers made in Jesus name. (Jn
16:23-24) Answered prayers manifest in their own way the presence of
the risen Christ in the midst of His disciples.
Despite His physical absence, the risen Christ will nevertheless abide
with His disciples through the indwelling of the Breath. He will dwell in
them and they in Him. They will draw their life from Him as branches
from a vine; and that mutual indwelling will cause the disciples to bear
much fruit. (Jn 15:1-5) Even the purification of suffering, the pruning of
the branches by the Father, will cause the disciples to bear even more
fruit. (Jn 15:2) Paradoxically, then, the paschal mystery will make the
absent Jesus mysteriously but really and intimately present in His dis-
ciples through the mutual indwelling which the divine Breath will ef-
fect.29
In His priestly prayer, Jesus acknowledges each of His disciples as a
personal gift to Him from the Father. They have put their faith in Him
and accepted Him and His testimony to the Father. (Jn 17:6-8) Jesus
prays that after His death and glorification the Father will keep the dis-
ciples true to Himself by their abiding in the words which Jesus has spo-
ken to them. (Jn 15:6-8, 14, 18:25-26) Given a Johannine interpretation
of mutual indwelling, for the disciples to abide in Jesus’ words, the words
must abide in them. Fidelity to Jesus’ words will “consecrate them in
truth” by dedicating the disciples to God through their possession of di-
vine truth. (Jn 17:17-19)
Jesus does not pray that the disciples leave the world. Instead, He prays
that, in the midst of the world’s wickedness and hostility, the disciples
28. Cf. Chr. Dietzfelbinger, “Die grösseren Werke, (Joh 14.12f),” New Testament Studies,
35(1989), pp. 27-47.
29. Cf. NJBC, 61:188-198; Brown, The Gospel of John, II, 658-738; Hänchen, Commen-
tary on John, II, pp. 129-146; M.-E. Boismard, “L’évolution du thème eschatologique
dans les traditions johanniques,” Revue Biblique, 68(1961), pp. 518-523; Richard
Kugelman, C.P., “The Gospel for Pentecost,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 6(1944), pp.
259-275.
will not yield to the temptations of the Satan. (Jn 15:14-5) Jesus also
prays for the perfect union of His disciples with one another, from gen-
eration to generation. That loving union among them will make mani-
fest the indwelling of Father and Son in them. It will also manifest the
risen Christ’s love for His disciples. (Jn 17:21-3) By implication, those
pseudo-disciples who break Christian communion belong, not to Christ,
but to the Evil One. Finally, Jesus prays that the disciples’ present share in
divine glory through the indwelling of the Breath will one day culminate
in risen glory with Him in heaven.30 (Jn 18:24; cf. 14:1-4)
The Disciples in the Passion

Judas appears in the passion only at Jesus’ arrest; but the reader already
knows that he will come to no good end. (Jn 17:12) In the arrest, Judas,
as we have seen, personifies Satan, who has already taken possession of
the unfortunate disciple. (Jn 13:27) Paradoxically, then, through his very
participation in the arrest, Judas helps reveal Jesus as the last Adam who
conquers the prince of this world by His faithful obedience to the Father.
(Jn 17:1-3, 5; cf. 14:29-31)
As we have seen, when Peter cuts off Malchus’s ear Jesus rebukes him
for his violence. Instead of resisting violently, Jesus obediently accepts the
cup of suffering which the Father has given Him to drink. (Jn 18:10-1)
Peter and “another disciple” follow the arrested Jesus to the house of
Annas. (Jn 18:15) In all likelihood, the reader should recognize in the
other disciple the Beloved Disciple whom the evangelist habitually asso-
ciates with Peter. (Jn 13:23-24, 20:2-9, 21:7) The Beloved Disciple’s pres-
ence at the foot of Jesus’ cross also suggests that he followed Jesus through-
out His passion. The fidelity of the Beloved Disciple in following Jesus
even to the end implicitly contrasts with the infidelity of Peter, who in
fulfillment of Jesus’ prediction will soon deny His master three times. (Jn
13:36-8)
The fourth evangelist tells the story of Jesus’ interrogation by Annas
with an irony which highlights Peter’s infidelity. The Beloved Disciple
knows the high priest personally and gets Peter admitted into the court-
Commentary on John, II, pp. 147-160; Mark L. Appold, The Oneness Motif in the Fourth
Gospel: Motif Analysis and Exegetical Probe in the Theology of John (Freiburg: Mohr,
1976); Jean Delorme, “Sacerdoce du Christ et ministère (à propos de Jean 17):
Semantique et theology biblique,” Recherches de Science Religieuse, 62(1974), pp.
199-219; Clinton D. Morrison, “Mission and Ethic: An Interpretation of John 17,”
Interpretation, 19(1965), pp. 259- 273; Jean Cadier, “The Unity of the Church: An
Exposition of John 17,” translated by Collette Preis, Interpretation, 11(1957), pp.
166-176; Jean Giblet, “Sanctifie-les dans la verité,: Bible et Vie Chrétienne, 19(1957),
pp. 58-73; Rudolf Schnackenburg, “Strukturanalyse von Joh 17,” Biblische Zeitschrift,
17(1973), pp. 67-78, 196-202; Boris Bobrinsckoy, “Die theologischen Grundlagen
des gemeinsamen Gebetes für die Einheit,” Una Sancta, 22(1967), pp. 25-37.
yard. As the maid admits him, Peter denies for the first time that he
belongs to the number of the disciples. (Jn 18:16-7) Peter joins those
warming themselves in the courtyard around a charcoal fire. A similar
fire will burn when, after the resurrection, Peter atones for his triple de-
nial by a triple avowal of love. (Jn 21:9)
In the meantime, the high priest questions Jesus about His teaching
and disciples. Jesus assures the high priests that His disciples will testify
to everything which He has said publicly if only the high priest will ques-
tion them. (Jn 18:19-21) At the very moment when Jesus is placing full
confidence in His disciples’ courageous willingness to testify on His be-
half, Peter with narrative irony publicly repudiates Jesus for the third
consecutive time.31 (Jn 18:25-27)
As we have seen, the fourth evangelist, like the synoptic writers, testi-
fies to the fact that Joseph of Aramathea secured Jesus’ body from Pilate
and buried it. (Jn 19:38; Mk 15:42-43; Mt 27:57; Lk 23:50) The fourth
evangelist, however, embellishes the story of Jesus’ burial with a number
of symbolic details.
In the fourth gospel, Nicodemus joins Joseph of Aramathea. His pres-
ence transforms him into a symbol of the secret Jewish Christian whose
dedication to doing the truth finally forces him to come out into the
light and confess Jesus openly. (Jn 19:39; cf. 3:21) Nicodemus began to
abandon the darkness of night for the public proclamation of Jesus when
he rebuked the Sanhedrin for passing judgment on Jesus without trying
Him. (Jn 7:50-52)
Now, at the height of the conflict between the light and darkness,
Nicodemus publicly testifies to his faith in Jesus by a symbolic gesture.
Nicodemus shows up with the equivalent of seventy-five pounds of myrrh
and aloes for use in Jesus’ burial. (Jn 19:39) Some commentators on John
have wondered, whether the huge amount results from a scribal error;
but it probably exemplifies the evangelist’s penchant for using exagger-
ated numbers in order to symbolize messianic plentitude. If so, then, the
abundance of myrrh and aloes parallels the abundance of the messianic
wine which Jesus provided at Cana and the abundant catch of fish which
will occur after His resurrection. (Jn 2:6, 21:11) One can see in the huge
Commentary on John, II, pp. 160-174; Robert Tomson Fortna, “Jesus and Peter in the
High Priest’s House: A Test Case for the Question of the Relation between Mark’s and
John’s Gospels,” New Testament Studies, 24(1977-1978), pp. 371-383; Maurice
Goguel, “Did Peter Deny his Lord? A Conjecture,” Harvard Theological Review,
25(1932), pp. 1-28; Eta Linnemann, “Die Verleugnung des Petrus” Zeitschrift für
Theologie und Kirche, 63(1966), pp. 1-32; Günther Klein, “Die Verleugnung des
Petrus,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, 58(1961), pp. 285- 328; Charles Masson,
“Le reniement de Pierre: Quelques aspects de la formation d’une tradition,” Revue
d’Histoire et de Philosophie Religieuse, 37(1957), pp. 24-35.
catch of fish of all kinds a foreshadowing of the large numbers of people,

both Jew and Gentile, who will respond to the apostles’ testimony to the
risen Christ. The huge outlay of spices has its own symbolism. It ensures
that the crucified Jesus receives a royal burial. Even in death, Jesus enjoys
royal, messianic homage.
Joseph and Nicodemus bury Jesus in a garden. (Jn 19:41-42) Jesus’
burial in the garden serves as a biblical inclusion and recalls His arrest in
a garden. As we have seen, the garden imagery implicitly designates Jesus
as the last Adam. (Jn 18:1-12) The two men also lay Jesus in a new tomb,
where no other body had ever rested. (Jn 19:41) When linked to the
garden imagery, the newness of the tomb suggests the newness of the
creation which the risen Christ will begin.32
The Disciples “See” the Risen Jesus

Mary Magdalene first discovers the empty tomb and informs Peter and
the Beloved Disciple. They run to see what Mary has discovered. The
Beloved Disciple outraces Peter but waits deferentially for Peter to arrive
before entering the tomb. The Beloved Disciple looks into the tomb,
however, and spots the linens used to wrap Jesus. When the Beloved Dis-
ciple sees the linen cloth which had been bound around Jesus’ head lying
there, he “sees” the risen Christ with resurrection faith. (Jn 20:1-8) As we
have seen, his ability to believe without actually encountering the risen
Jesus transforms him into the type of every Christian who believes with-
out seeing the risen Jesus face to face. (Jn 20:29) Once again, the Beloved
Disciples shows Peter up. Peter sees the empty tomb but can make noth-
ing of it. He will have to encounter the risen Christ before he can see in
the same way as the Beloved Disciple.33 (Jn 20:19-23)
After Peter and the Beloved Disciple depart from the tomb, Mary
Magdalene remains outside the entrance weeping. She looks into the burial
chamber and sees two angles, one at the head of the tomb and one at the
32. Cf. NJBC, 61: 226-228; Brown, The Gospel of John, II, pp. 932-962; The Death of the
Messiah, II, pp. 1258-1278; Hänchen, Commentary on John, II, p. 196; J. Spencer
Kennard, “The Burial of Jesus,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 74(1955), pp. 227-238;
Jeffrey L. Staley, “Subversive Narrator/Victimized Reader: A Reader Response Assess-
ment of a Text Critical Problem, John 18:12-24,” Journal for the Study of the New
Testament, 51(1993), pp. 79-98; Dennis D. Sylva, “Nicodemus and His Spices (John
19.39),” New Testament Studies, 34(1988), pp. 148-151; Jean-Marie Auwers, “La nuit
de Nicodème (Jean 3.2; 19.39) ou l’ombre du langage,” Revue Biblique, 97(1990), pp.
481-503; Jouette M. Bassett, “Mixed Signals: Nicodemus in the Fourth Gospel,”
33. Cf. William E. Reiser, S.J., “The Case of the Tidy Tomb: The Place of Napkins of
John 11:44 and 20:7,” Heythrop Journal, 14(1973), pp. 47-57; Basil Osborne, “A
Folded Napkin in an Empty Tomb: John 11:44 and 20:7 Again,” Heythrop Journal,
14(1973), pp. 437-440; Robert Mahoney, Two Disciples at the Tomb: The Background
and Message of John 20. 10 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1974).
foot. (Jn 20:11-12) The positioning of the angels has symbolic meaning.
Two angels also flanked the mercy seat of the altar in the Jerusalem temple.
The mercy seat symbolized the presence of Yahweh. During the rite of
atonement the chief priest sprinkled it with blood as a sign of the re-
stored bond of life uniting God and His people. Now Jesus’ tomb has
become the new mercy seat. The temple has ceased to function as the
center of worship, just as Jesus had promised the Samaritan woman at the
well.34 (Jn 4:21-22; Ex 37:9; Lev 16:1-16)
Mary Magdalene learns to “see” Jesus differently from the other dis-
ciples. When the angels ask Mary why she is weeping, she replies that she
grieves the theft of Jesus’ body. Mary turns and sees the risen Jesus in the
garden, but at first she cannot “see” Him in faith because of her preoccu-
pation with His cadaver. She will truly “see” Jesus when she learns that
resurrection involves the transformation of His physical body in a way
which changes radically Mary’s former relationship to Him. (Jn 20:11-15)
Mary recognizes Jesus in His risen glory when He pronounces her name.
(Jn 20:16) This touching scene reveals Mary as one of the true disciples
of Jesus, one of His sheep who hears the good shepherd’s voice and, on
hearing it, recognizes Him. (Jn 10:3, 14, 16)
The risen Christ tells Mary not to cling to Him. (Jn 20:17) The mild
rebuke suggests that Mary has either grasped at Jesus’ body or is trying to
do so. Jesus warns Mary not to preoccupy herself with His body. Nor
must she try to relate to Him as she had prior to the resurrection. His
transformation in glory requires a new kind of relationship in faith.35
Jesus then commissions Magdalene as the apostle to the apostles:
Do not cling to Me; for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my
brethren and say to them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father,
to my God and your God.” (Jn 20:17)
Jesus’ glorification in the resurrection has already begun His ascent to the
Father. That suggests that the fourth evangelist may have imagined each
resurrection appearance as a descent from heaven and a return to the
Father.
The phrase “My Father and your Father, My God and your God” also
has interesting theological connotations; for it suggests that Jesus’ rela-
tionship to the Father, while analogous to the disciples’ relationship, nev-
ertheless differs from it profoundly. As Son of God Jesus shares in the
Father’s very being and name, while He makes His disciples into the chil-
34. Cf. Philippe Simenel, “Les 2 anges de Jean 20/11-12,” Études Théologiques et
Religieuses, 67(1992), pp. 71-76.
35. Cf. Carmen Bernabe, “Transfondo derasico de Jn 20,” Estudios Biblicos, 49(1991), pp.
209-228; Edouard Delebecque, “Retour sur Jean XX, 9,” Revue Biblique, 96(1989),
pp. 81-94.
dren of God by an act of gratuitous grace, as the prologue to John’s gospel

teaches. (Jn 1:14-8) The risen Jesus therefore refers analogously to the
disciples as “brethren.” The paschal mystery transforms them into adopted
children of God in Jesus’ image. (Cf. Jn 1:12)
Mary becomes the apostle to the apostles when she testifies to them: “I
have seen the Lord.” (Jn 20:18) She formulates her testimony in a way
which suggests an official apostolic witness to the risen Christ. Moreover,
Mary announces her encounter with the risen Christ to the apostles
(aggellousa) as a formally commissioned messenger. In other words, the
fourth evangelist seems to have regarded Mary as one of the apostolic
witnesses to Jesus.36
The Beloved Disciple believed in the risen Christ without seeing Him.
Mary Magdalene had to learn to see the risen Christ by recognizing that
resurrection transforms the disciples’ former relationship to Jesus. On
the evening of Easter day, ten apostles (the Eleven minus Thomas) come
to resurrection faith by confronting the risen Jesus face to face. They have
locked themselves indoors out of fear of “the Jews,” but suddenly the
risen Christ stands in their midst.
The person who confronts them retains the wounds of His crucifixion.
That fact not only proves His identity but also reveals the passion and the
resurrection as a single saving event. (Jn 20:19)
Jesus then confers on the Ten the gift of abiding eschatological peace
which He had promised His disciples in His last discourse. The gift, as
we have seen, takes the form of the sin-forgiving Breath. Her descent
upon the Ten plus Jesus’ formal commissioning transforms them into
official witnesses to His resurrection.37 (Jn 20:19-23, cf. 14:27-28)
The appearance of the risen Christ to Thomas exemplifies yet another
way in which a disciple can come to the vision of faith. In the case of
Mary Magdalene misunderstanding has blocked vision. In the case of
36. Cf. NJBC, 61: 229-233; Brown, The Gospel of John, II, pp. 979-1017; Edward Lynn
Bode, The First Easter Morning (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1970), pp. 72-86;
Paul S. Minear, “We don’t know where....John 20,2,” Interpretation, 30(1976), pp.
125-139; A. Feuillet, “L’apparition du Christ à Marie-Madeleine (Jean 20, 11-18):
Comparaison avec l’apparition aux disciples d’Emmaeus (Luc 24, 13-35), Esprit et Vie,
88(1970), pp. 193-204, 209- 223; Bruno Violet, “Ein Versuch zu Joh 20.17,”
Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 24(1925), pp. 78-80; Ingrid Rosa
Kitzberger, “Mary of Bethany and Mary of Magdala: Two Female Characters in the
Johannine Passion Narrative: A Feminist Narrative-Critical Reader-Response,” New
Testament Studies, 41(1995), pp. 564-586; Gerald O’Collins, S.J. and Daniel Kendall,
S.J., “Mary Magdalene as a Major Witness to Jesus’ Resurrection,” Theological Studies,
48(1987), pp. 631-646.
37. Cf. A. Feuillet, “La communication de l’Esprit Saint aus apôtres (Jn XX, 19-23) et le
ministère sacerdotale de la réconciliation des hommes avec Dieu,” Esprit et Vie,
82(1977), pp. 2- 7.
Thomas, stubborn unbelief at first prevents him from seeing as the Be-
loved Disciple had.
Thomas commits the sin of testing God, of personally setting the con-
ditions for believing in the deity. Absent at the appearance to the Ten,
Thomas refuses to believe that they have seen the Lord until he probes
the nail wounds in Jesus’ hands with his own finger and puts his own
hand into the wound in Jesus’ side. (Jn 20:24-25)
A week later, the risen Christ compassionately meets doubting Thomas’s
conditions and calls him to faith. Thomas responds with the confession:
“My Lord and my God.” (Jn 20:27-28) The confession brings us back to
the prologue of the gospel, which had informed us that the Word who
exists eternally with God is Himself “God.” (Jn 1:1) Thomas’s confession
also provides a clear narrative affirmation that those who saw the risen
Christ experienced the vision as a theophany, as an encounter with God.
The gospel closes with Jesus’ blessing on all those who, like the Beloved
Disciple, will believe in Him without seeing Him face to face. The words
of Jesus play upon the notions of seeing and believing. He tells Thomas:
“Have you believed because you have seen Me? Blessed are those who
have not seen and yet believed.” (Jn 20:29) Face to face encounter has
brought Thomas to the vision of faith; but those who, like the Beloved
Disciple, believe without seeing the risen Christ nevertheless see Him
with the eyes of faith through practical assimilation to Him in the power
of His Breath.38
Although the disciples come to the vision of faith differently, in the
end they all nevertheless “see.” The appearance narratives which close
John’s gospel disclose therefore the deeper meaning in Jesus’ invitation to
the disciples at the beginning of John’s gospel: “Come and see.” (Jn 1:39)
The narrative order of the fourth gospel also suggests a pattern in the
disciple’s graced progress in John. Discipleship begins with a call from
Commentary on John, II, pp. 203-217; Reginald Fuller, The Formation of the Resurrec-
tion Narratives (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1971); A. Feuillet, “Les christophanies
paschales du quatrième évangile sont-ils des signes?” Nouvelle Revue Théologique,
97(1975), pp. 577-592; M. McNamara, M.S.C., “The Ascension and Exaltation of
Christ in the Fourth Gospel,” Scripture, 19(1967), pp. 65-73; Lihane Lupont,
Christopher Lash, and Georges Levesque, “Recherche sur la structure de Jean 20,”
Biblica, 54(1973), pp. 482-498; J.R. Mantey, “The Mistranslation of the Perfect Tense
in John 20.23, Mt 16.19, and Mt 18.18,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 58(1939), pp.
243-249; Léon Vaganay, “La finale du quatrième évangile,” Revue Biblique, 45(1936),
pp. 512-528; Thomas Matus, O.S.B., “First and Last Encounter,” Bible Today,
42(1969), pp. 2893-2897; Thomas Suriano, “Doubting Thomas: An Invitation to
Belief,” Bible Today, 53(1971), pp. 309-315; Felix Perles, “Noch einmal Mt 8.22, Lk
9.60, sowie Joh 20.17,” Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 25(1926),
pp. 286-287; Gert Hartmann, “Die Vorlage des Osterberichte in Joh 20,”Zeitschrift für
die Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 55(1964), pp. 197-220; Barnabas Lindars, “The
Composition of John XX,” New Testament Studies, 7(1960-1961), pp. 142-147.
Jesus. (Jn 1:35-51) Call culminates in incorporation into the kingdom

through baptism in water and the Holy Breath. (Jn 3:3) That incorpora-
tion empowers one to worship God eucharistically in Breath and truth.
(Jn 4:23, 6:1-59) The conflict between light and darkness draws the dis-
ciples into the passion of Jesus. (Jn 7:1-9:42) The passion, however, cul-
minates in vision, in seeing God.39 (Jn 20:1-29)
The fourth gospel in its original form ended with Jn 20:30-31. In these
concluding verses, the evangelist acknowledges that he has not recorded
everything Jesus did. What he has written, however, has a single purpose:
“that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that
believing you may have life in his name.”40 Chapter 21, however, narrates
a third apparition of the risen Christ to several disciples. It functions as
an appendix to the gospel.
As we have seen, the fourth evangelist links the figure of Peter to the
Beloved Disciple, but to Peter’s disadvantage. The appendix to the gospel
rehabilitates the figure of Peter and asserts his pastoral responsibilities in
the apostolic Church.
The appendix situates the third apparition on the shores of the Sea of
Galilee. Peter, Thomas, Nathanael, James, and John decide at Peter’s sug-
gestion to go fishing. As in the call of Peter in the gospel of Luke, they
fish all night without catching anything. (Jn 21:1-3; Lk 5:1-11) Luke’s
narrative, of course, happens during Jesus’ ministry, while the story in the
appendix happens after the resurrection. As we have seen, however, in
other respects, it resembles analogously the Lukan narrative.
The risen Christ appears on the shore at daybreak, with the dawning of
the light. Jesus addresses the disciples familiarly as “(paidia).” One could
translate “paidia” as slang, as roughly the equivalent of “lads.” Since, how-
ever, in the Johannine letters the same term designates believers as “chil-
dren” of the Church, the term probably points symbolically to the dis-
ciples as believers.41 (1 Jn 2:14, 18; 2 Jn 1-2)
39. Cf. Scott Gambrill Sinclair, The Road and the Truth: The Editing of John’s Gospel
(Berkeley, CA: Bibal Press, 1994); Raymond F. Collins, “Characters Proclaim the
Good News,” Chicago Studies, 37(1992), pp. 47-57.
40. Cf. L. Cardellino, “Testimoni che Gesu il Cristo (Gv 20,31) affinche tutti credano
di’autou,” Rivista Biblica, 45(1997), pp. 79-85.
41. The first Johannine letter calls the members of the orthodox community “children
(teknia, paidia),” “fathers (pateres),” and “young people (neaniskoi).” (1 Jn 2:12-14)
Some commentators interpret these terms as referring to three distinct groups in the
Johannine community. It probably makes sense, however, to take the first term
“children” as a designation of the community as a whole, whom the author of the
Johannine letters regards as the children of the “elect Lady,” the Church. (2 Jn 1; cf.
1 Jn 5:21) In that case, “fathers” and “young people” would designate two sub-groups
within the community. In the epistles the author uses “paidia,” “teknoi,” and “teknia”
interchangeably. (Cf. 1 Jn 2:12, 14, 18; 3:1-2; 5:21; 2 Jn 1-2)
If one accepts this interpretation of the letter’s terms of address, then in the mind of
its author the members of the Johannine community as a whole derive their identity
Jesus asks the disciples if they have caught anything. When they say
that they have caught nothing, he tells them to cast on the other side of
the boat. (In Luke’s account of the miraculous catch, they launch the
boats a second time at Jesus’ behest.) The disciples cast on the left and
pull in a huge quantity of fish. (Jn 21:4-6)
At this point John’s narrative takes a different turn from Luke’s. The
Beloved Disciple, always more perceptive than Peter, recognizes the risen
Lord and informs Peter of that fact. Peter puts on his outer garment,
apparently in order to prepare himself to greet Jesus with greater propri-
ety, jumps into the water, and makes his way to the shore which lies
about a hundred yards away. (Jn 21:7-8)
The other disciples eventually recognize the risen Lord even though
His glorification has changed Him. (Jn 21:12-13) Jesus’ changed appear-
ance suggests both the reality of the change which resurrection makes in
Him and the changed character of the disciples’ relationship to Him.
On the shore the disciples find Jesus with a charcoal fire which recalls
the charcoal fire at which Peter stood when he denied Jesus. (Jn 21:9; cf.
18:18) They also find bread and two fish roasting on the fire. Jesus in-
vites them to breakfast and tells them to bring some fish from the enor-
from two sources: 1) They (in contrast to the dissidents) acknowledge that their sins
have been forgiven in the name of Jesus. (1 Jn 2:12) The Johannine tradition, as we have
seen, links the forgiveness of sins with the gift of the divine Breath. (Jn 20:22-3) It also
links the gift of the Breath with the rebirth effected by Christian baptism. (Jn 3:5) 2)
The members of the Johannine community (in contrast to the dissidents) know the
Father. (1 Jn 2:14) Moreover, as we have seen in reflecting on the gospel of John, one
cannot know the Father without acknowledging His incarnate Son as the one who
reveals the creator God as Father.
The term “fathers” probably refers to the “elders” in faith who led the Johannine
community. (3 Jn 1) In that case, the author of the first letter characterizes authentic
Christian leadership as inspired by faith in “the One from the beginning (ton ap’
arches).” (1 Jn 2:13-4) The phrase “the One from the beginning” almost certainly refers
to the eternal Son of God who took flesh. Faith in the Son’s eternity, however, implies
both His co-existence with the Father and, therefore, the Father’s existence “from the
beginning” as well. Hence, the phrase, “the One from the beginning” probably
designates both Father and Son. In other words, authentic Church leadership must
conform to the norm of orthodoxy and confess the eternal co-existence of Son and
Father. (Cf. 1 Jn 2:22)
“Young people” would then designate the other members of the community who are
making progress in faith and love. The author of the letter characterizes them as
endowed with a strength which enables them to triumph over “the Evil One,” i.e., over
Satan and his minions. (1 Jn 2:13-4) In other words, they live in communion with
authentic Church leaders and make progress in the faith by resisting the Antichrist,
whom the author of the first letter will soon identify with the dissidents. (1 Jn 2:18-20)
Duane F. Watson, “1 John 2.12-14 as Distributio, Conduplicatio, and Expolitio,”
Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 35(1989), pp. 97-110.
mous catch they have made, one hundred and fifty three fish in all. (Jn
21:10-1)
As we have seen the size of the catch could symbolize the fruitful
apostolate of the witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection; but some scholars who
invoke rabbinic gemetria 42 in order to interpret the number 153 suggest
that the number computes to signify “the church of love.” Some see in
the meal which Jesus shares with the disciples a foreshadowing of the
Christian eucharistic love feast. Others invoke gemetria to have the num-
ber read “the children of God.” In this reading the number alludes to the
rich harvest which will result from the apostolic preaching and which the
abundant catch of fish symbolizes. Still others scholars discover in the
number 153 a gemetriacal allusion to the Greek letters iota, chi, and
theta. In that case the number symbolizes very cryptically indeed Jesus
Christ God, since the letter iota starts the name Jesus in Greek, chi starts
Christ, and theta starts the Greek word for God (Theos). The fact that the
nets do not tear despite the enormous number of fish caught underscores
the extraordinary character of the catch.43 (Jn 21:11)
In a gesture which recalls the multiplication of the loaves and fishes,
Jesus breaks the bread and gives it to the disciples. (Jn 21:13; 6:1-15) The
association of that miracle with the eucharist endows the present meal
with eucharistic symbolism. That symbolism has ecclesial connotations
and re-enforces a symbolic reading of the term “paidia.”
After breakfast Jesus asks Peter three times whether or not he, Peter,
loves Him. The evangelist uses two different verbs for love: agapan and
philein. Some exegetes argue that the two verbs mean fundamentally the
same thing: “to love.” Others argue etymologically and find different con-
notations in each verb. They trace “agapan” to “agapê,” the Greek word
for charity, the highest form of love. They trace “philein” to “philia,” or
friendship. They then argue that friendship constitutes a noble but lesser
love by comparison with charity.
If one accepts this distinction of meaning, in His first two questions to
Peter, Jesus asks Peter if he loves him with the love of charity: “agapas
me.” Peter replies that he loves Jesus with the love of friendship: “philô
se.” (Jn 21:15-16) In such a reading of the two verbs, Peter at first pro-
tests a more modest love than the one Jesus requires of him.
42. Gemetria signifies the rabbinic equivalent of ancient numerology. Like its pagan
counterpart it assigned numerical values to the letters of the alphabet.
43. This bewildering variety of interpretations leaves one somewhat skeptical of the
accuracy of readings based in gemetria. Cf. Antonio Pitta, “Ichthys ed opsarion in Gv
21,1-14: semplice variazone lessicale o differenza con valore simbolico,” Biblica,
71(1990), pp. 348-364; Paul Trudinger, “The 153 Fishes: A Response and a Further
Suggestion (John 21:11),” Expository Times, 102(1990), pp. 11-12; Kenneth Cardwell,
F.S.C., “The Fish on the Fire: Jn 21:9,” Expository Times, 102(1990), pp. 12-14; O.T.
Owen, “One Hundred and Fifty Three Fishes,” Expository Times, 100(1988), pp. 52-54.
In the third question and answer, however, the verbs switch. Jesus uses
“philein,” while Peter uses “agapan.” In other words, Jesus seems to call
into question whether Peter loves Him even with the love of friendship.
The doubt saddens Peter and forces him to up the ante by protesting that
he loves Jesus with the highest form of love, with the love of charity. (Jn
21:17)
The first time Jesus asks: “Simon, son of John, do you love me more
than these?” (Jn 21:15) Exegetes debate to what or to whom the phrase
“than these” refers. Does it designate Peter’s possessions: his boat and
nets? Does it designate the other disciples? If the latter, then the question
makes an ironic reference to Peter’s protestation of special devotion to
Jesus at the last supper. (Jn 13:37) In that case, Peter’s claim to offer Jesus
friendship only would reveal a chastened disciple. The repentant Peter
makes no boast of special devotion. His weakness has taught him better.
After each protestation of love on Peter’s part, Jesus gives Peter a com-
mission. First, Jesus says “Feed my lambs (boske ta arnia mou).” (Jn 21:15)
The second time He says, “Tend my sheep (poimaine ta probata mou) (Jn
21:16) The third time He says, “Feed my sheep (boske ta probata mou).”
(Jn 21:17) Despite the difference in the Greek words used to designate
Peter’s flock, the three commands probably mean fundamentally the same
thing. Jesus is handing over to Peter the responsibility of shepherding His
Church in the image of Jesus, the good shepherd, who gives His life for
His sheep; but the Johannine text does not justify attributing to Peter any
special juridical power over Jesus’ flock. (Jn 10:11-13) Presumably, the
sheep to which Jesus alludes include those “other sheep” whom He also
desires to include in His flock. (Jn 10: 16) As Jesus’ encounter with some
“Greeks” in Jerusalem has suggested, those “others” include Gentile Chris-
tians. (Jn 12:20-36) The image of fishing which opens the story could
connote apostolic outreach; the image of pastoring which closes it could
connote Church building.
The fact that Jesus asks Peter three times whether he loves Him sad-
dens Peter. (Jn 21:17) The number of times seems to provide the chief
motive for Peter’s hurt, since it recalls his triple denial of Jesus. If, how-
ever, one accepts the difference in meaning between agapan and philein,
then Peter would also feel hurt that Jesus seems to question even his friend-
ship. Jesus, however, is giving Peter the opportunity to undo his three
denials with a triple protestation of love.
Jesus underscores the fact that Peter, as a true shepherd, must in imita-
tion of Jesus Himself lay down his life for his sheep. (Jn 10:11-3) Jesus
makes this point by prophesying Peter’s martyrdom after the third com-
mission:
Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you girded yourself and
walked where you would; but when you are old, you will stretch out your
hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish to
go. (Jn 21:18)
The evangelist explains that Jesus is cryptically foretelling Peter’s death,

possibly by crucifixion. (Jn 21:19)
Jesus then charges Peter, “Follow Me.” (Jn 21:19) It would seem that
Jesus wishes to draw Peter aside; but the command also has deeper pro-
phetic meaning. In exercising pastoral leadership, Peter must imitate Jesus
and walk the way both of discipleship and of martyrdom.
Peter then asks Jesus what will happen to the Beloved Disciple, who as
usual is accompanying Peter. Jesus replies: “If it is my will that he remain
till I come, what is that to you? Follow Me.” (Jn 21:22) The final redac-
tor adds this detail as a way of countering a rumor in his community that
Jesus said that the Beloved Disciple would live until the second coming.
The redactor insists that Jesus made no such prediction. (Jn 21:23)
The passage treats the Beloved Disciple as an historical individual rather
than as a type of all believers. The gospel closes by naming the Beloved
Disciple as its author and by protesting that, if anyone attempted to write
all that Jesus did, the world could not contain all the books. (Jn 21:24-25)
The rehabilitation of Peter in the appendix makes it clear that the Be-
loved Disciple claims no superiority to the great apostle to whom Jesus
entrusted pastoral responsibilities and who followed Jesus even to mar-
tyrdom. The triple commissioning of Peter bears an analogous resem-
blance to Jesus’ promise in Matthew that He would build His church on
the rock of Peter (Mt 16:18-19). In the fourth gospel, however, Jesus
confers no “keys” on Peter. In Matthew, the keys, as we have seen, make
Peter into the chief rabbi in the new Israel. The Johannine Peter func-
tions more as a shepherd who proves his pastoral care by dying for his
sheep.44
Commentary on John, II, pp. 218-238; Savas Agourdes, “The Purpose of John 21” in
Studies in the History and Text of the New Testament in Honor of Kenneth Willis Clark,
Ph.D. (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1967), pp. 127-132; J.B. Bauer,
“‘Oves meae’ quaenam sunt?” Verbum Domini, 32(1954), pp. 321-324; Bishop
Cassien, “John XXI,” New Testament Studies, 3(1956-1957), pp. 132-136; B.W.
Bacon, “The Motivation of John 21. 15- 25,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 50(1931),
pp. 71-80; Peter R. Ackroyd, “The 153 Fishes in John XXI. 11—A Further Note,”
Journal of Theological Studies, n.s. 10(1959), p. 94; Robert S. Grant, “‘One Hundred
Fifty-Three Large Fish’ (John 21:11),” Harvard Theological Review, 42(1949), pp.
273-275; Lionel S.K. Ford, “St. John xxi. 23-25,” Theology, 20(1930), p. 229; Henry
Kruse S.J., “Magni Pisces Centum Quinquaginta Tres,” Verbum Domini, 38(1960),
pp. 129-148; M.-E. Boismard, O.P., “Le chapitre XXI de saint Jean: Essai critique
litteraire,” Revue Biblique, 54(1947), pp. 473-501; Otto Glombitza, “Petrus—der
Freund Jesu,” Novum Testamentum, 6(1963), pp. 277-285; Mathias Rissi, “Voll
The disciples play an important part in the fourth gospel; but they func-
tion there very differently from the disciples of the synoptic tradition. In
the synoptic gospels, Jesus spends a significant part of His public minis-
try catechizing the disciples in the moral demands of life in the kingdom.
The Johannine Jesus remains virtually silent about the kingdom during
His public ministry. Moreover, the Beloved Disciple locates most of Jesus’
instructions to the disciples in the last discourse. Had no other gospel but
the fourth survived, one would have the impression that Jesus spent most
of His public ministry proclaiming His divinity to unbelieving Jews and
that He turned to the disciples almost as an afterthought prior to His
own death.
Theological concerns explain the historical implausibility with which
the Beloved Disciple handles the disciples. During Jesus’ ministry they
chiefly witness the signs He performs. They also hear the discourses which
Jesus addresses to the confused and faithless crowds. As we shall see in
greater detail in the next chapter, Jesus’ discourses in John develop the
meaning of the signs, which in turn derive their ultimate meaning from
the paschal mystery. In other words, the Beloved Disciple focuses on the
paschal mystery because he regards it as the key to understanding Jesus’
person. That focus also explains why the evangelist locates virtually all
His instructions to the disciples in the Book of Glory. Discipleship roots
itself in the paschal mystery and has an inherently eschatological charac-
ter.
In Johannine theology, the paschal mystery also provides the correct
lens for understanding the practical demands of disicpleship. The Be-
grosser Fische, hunderteinundfünfizig, Joh 21,1-14,” Theologische Zeitschrift, 35(1979),

pp.73-89; Joseph A. Romeo, “Gematria and John 21:11—The Children of God,”
Journal of Biblical Literature, 97(1978), pp. 263-264; Alan Shaw, “The Breakfast on
the Shore and the Mary Magdelene Encounter as Eucharistic Narratives,” Journal of
Theological Studies, 25(1974), pp. 12-26; John F.X. Sheean, S.J., “Feed My Lambs,”
Scripture, 16(1964), pp. 21-27; Stephen S. Smalley, “The Sign of John xxi,” New
Testament Studies, 20(1973-1974), pp. 275-288; J.M. Thompson, “Is John XXI an
Appendix?” The Expositor, 8th ser., 10(1915), pp. 139-147; Alan Shaw, “Image and
Symbol in John 21,” Expository Times, 86(1975), p. 311; William J. Tobin, “The
Petrine Primacy: Evidence of the Gospels,” Lumen Vitae, 23(1968), pp. 27-70; Arthur
J. Droge, “The Status of Peter in the Fourth Gospel,” Journal of Biblical Literature,
109(1990), pp. 307-311; Timothy Wiarda, “John 21:1-23: Narrative Unity and Its
Implications,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 46(1992), pp. 53-71; W.
Schenk, “Interne Sturkturierungen im Schluss- Segment Johannes 21: Syggraphe +
Satyrikon/Epilogos,” New Testament Studies, 38(1992), pp. 507-530; Udo Schnelle,
“Johanneische Ekklesiologie,” New Testament Studies, 37(1991), pp. 37-50; Frans
Neirynck, “John 21,” New Testament Studies, 36(1990), pp. 321-336; J. Neville
Birdsall, “The Source of Catena Comments on Jn 21:25,” Novum Testamentum,
36(1994), pp. 271-279.
loved Disciple boils down gospel living to three basic commands: believe
in the Father, Son, and Breath; serve one another in Jesus’ image; love
one another as Jesus has loved you. All three commands derive their mean-
ing directly from the paschal mystery. The passion, resurrection, and send-
ing of the Breath reveal the divinity of Jesus. Moreover, Jesus’ love in
dying for His friends exemplifies Christian service and love. The Beloved
Disciple summarizes all three commands in the omnibus command of
love, which incorporates orthodoxy into orthopraxis.
The last discourse develops all three commands at some length, and it
illustrates how they all coalesce into the love command. During the last
discourse Jesus instructs the disciples at length concerning His relation-
ship to the Father and the new relationship which the disciples will have
toward Him when the Breath of truth, the “other witness” arrives. Their
witness to Jesus will draw them into His passion and thus teach them
how to love and serve in the image of the Crucified.
In both Johannine and synoptic theology, faith, then, remains inher-
ently practical. The synoptics interpret the practical demands of faith by
recalling Jesus’ historical proclamation of the kingdom. The Beloved Dis-
ciple interprets the demands of faith in the light of the paschal mystery
which radicalizes faith, love, and service. The paschal mystery radicalizes
the gospel by demanding that one practice it even unto death.
The synoptics also recognize that the confession of Jesus may lead to
martyrdom. In the end, therefore, the synoptic and the Johannine tradi-
tions offer complementary rather than contradictory accounts of Christo-
logical knowing. In both traditions, one comes to know Jesus through
practical assimilation to Him in the power of His Breath. The synoptic
account of the practical demands of life in the kingdom do not contra-
dict the more abstract Johannine commandments of faith, love, and ser-
vice. Rather, those demands render the four Johannine commandments
morally specific.
This chapter has examined the ambiguous dramatic linkages in John’s
gospel. The chapter which follows ponders the special way in which the
Beloved Disciple develops his thematic and allusive linkages.
Chapter 5
Thematic and Allusive Linkages in John
As we have already seen, in the course of describing Jesus’ relationship to
the other actors in His story, the fourth evangelist develops a variety of
doctrinal themes: Jesus’ pre-existence and equality with the Father, mu-
tual indwelling, the living water of the Breath, the role of the Breath as
the “other witness” to Jesus, etc. These doctrinal developments provide
important thematic linkages which tie together the story of Jesus.
This chapter examines three other sets of Johannine thematic linkages:
the signs which Jesus works, the discourses which comment on the signs,
Jesus’ last discourse to His disciples, and the theme of open messianism.
As we shall see, the Beloved Disciple makes his most characteristic use of
literary allusion by developing doctrinal themes incrementally across the
discourses.
This chapter divides into four parts. Part one examines the “signs” which
Jesus works in John. In part one I shall argue that the signs unify John’s
gospel by deriving their ultimate significance from the paschal mystery.
Part two reflects on the narrative purpose of the Johannine discourses. In
part two, I shall argue that the Beloved Disciple weaves together the mes-
sage of the discourses by using allusion in order to develop important
doctrinal themes in his gospel. As we shall see, the fourth evangelist sub-
ordinates allusion to doctrinal development more systematically than the
synoptic writers. Part two deals simultaneously, therefore, with two kinds
of linkages: the thematic linkage of the discourses and the way in which
allusive linkages develop doctrinal themes across the discourses.1 Part three
contrasts the open messianism of the fourth gospel with Mark’s messianic
secret. Part four ponders the doctrinal challenge of Johannine Christo-
logy.
(I)
As we have seen, the narrative of the fourth gospel divides into the Book
of Signs and the Book of Glory. While all the evangelists endow the
miracles of Jesus with a symbolic significance derived from the paschal
mystery, the fourth evangelist develops the symbolic meaning of Jesus’
signs differently from the synoptics. John narrates fewer miracles than
Matthew, Mark, and Luke; but the ones which the Beloved Disciple nar-
rates all develop important doctrinal themes.
1. Cf. R.H. Strachan, “The Development of Thought within the Fourth Gospel,”
Expository Times, 34(1922-1923), pp. 228-232.
Chapter 5: Thematic and Allusive Linkages in John 193
The Six Signs
In the fourth gospel, Jesus works six signs in all: 1) He transforms water
into wine at the wedding at Cana. (Jn 2:1-12) 2) He cures the royal
official’s son at Cana. (Jn 4:46-54) 3) On a sabbath He heals a cripple at
the pool of Bethsaida in Jerusalem. (Jn 5:1-14) 4) At Passover time, He
multiplies the loaves and fish and walks on the water. (Jn 6:16-24) As in
the synoptics, these two miracles cast light on one another and function
as a single, complex sign. 5) Between Tabernacles and Dedication, Jesus
cures the man born blind. (Jn 9:1-41) 6) Before His own death and res-
urrection, Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. (Jn 11:1-44)
The signs (semeia) in John have an explicit revelatory purpose. They
motivate faith by revealing Jesus’ divine glory. John’s Jesus therefore works
miracles in order to evoke faith in the divinity of His person and in the
divine origin of His ministry. Moreover, in the fourth gospel only faith
allows one to recognize the revelatory significance of Jesus’ signs. Jesus’
enemies throughout the gospel miss the revelatory significance of His
miracles because their unbelief blinds them, keeps them from “seeing”
the deep significance of His mighty works. The synoptic Jesus, by com-
parison, makes somewhat more modest claims. The synoptic Jesus, as we
have seen, regards His miracles as evidence that the kingdom which He is
proclaiming has already arrived in a preliminary fashion in His person
and ministry.2
Three of the Johannine signs fulfill and replace important feasts of the
Jewish liturgical calendar. The cure at Bethsaida reveals Jesus as the one
who fulfills the Jewish sabbath by disclosing His divine, eschatological,
judicial authority. (Cf. Jn 5:15-8) The sign of the loaves and fishes and
the sign of walking on water together reveal Jesus as the one who fulfills
the meaning of the Passover. (Jn 6:4) The cure of the man born blind
fulfills the meaning of the feast of Tabernacles by revealing Jesus as the
light of the world. (Jn 7:2, 10:22) Moreover, extensive discourses of Jesus
accompany these signs and elucidate their meaning.
Three of the signs, however, have no elucidating discourses: the two
miracles at Cana and the raising of Lazarus. The book of glory spells out
the meaning of the raising of Lazarus, which reveals Jesus as “the resur-
rection and the life.” (Jn 11:25) In other words, everything described in
the Book of Glory, including the last discourse, clarifies the meaning of
the final sign which Jesus gives.
2. Cf. Robert T. Fortna, “Source and Redaction in the Fourth Gospel’s Portrayal of Jesus’
Signs,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 89(1970), pp. 151-166; Loren L. Johns and
Douglas B. Miller, “The Signs as Witnesses in the Fourth Gospel: Reexamining the
Evidence,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 56(1994), pp. 519-535; Allan Mayer, “Elijah
and Elisha in John’s Signs Source,” Expository Times, 99(1988), pp. 171-173.
Events also clarify the meaning of the first sign: the transformation of
water into wine at Cana. Because this miracle anticipates Jesus’ “hour”
when He will be lifted up in suffering and in glory, like the last sign, the
first also looks explicitly to the events of the passion and resurrection in
order to fulfill its meaning. (Jn 2:4) In addition, however, other events
clarify the meaning of this first sign. The final redactor brackets these
elucidating events between the two miracles performed at Cana. Let us
then begin to reflect on the signs and on the events and discourses which
interpret them.
As we have seen, the transformation of water into wine at Cana occurs
on the last day of the first week of Jesus’ ministry. We have also seen that
the hebdomadal imagery connotes the new creation which Jesus, as the
second Adam, begins. The first week of Jesus’ ministry, therefore, fore-
shadows and anticipates the week-long events which surround the pas-
sion and the week of resurrection apparitions which close the gospel in its
original form. These associations plus the reference to Jesus’ “hour” in
His conversation with Mary at Cana make it clear that one cannot inter-
pret the meaning of this first sign without taking into account the saving
significance of both Jesus’ passion, resurrection, and mission of the Breath.
The sign which begins Jesus’ ministry, therefore, already signifies its end-
ing and consummation in the Book of Glory.
Johannine irony holds the key to the significance of this first sign. Jesus,
Mary, and the disciples all attend a wedding at Cana in Galilee; but in the
course of the festivities the wine gives out, to the intense embarrassment
of the young couple and their families. Mary calls Jesus’ attention to the
lack of wine. (Jn 2: 1-3)
As we have seen, Jesus in calling Mary “Woman” anticipates her revela-
tion as the new Eve, when she accepts the Beloved Disciple as her son at
the foot of the cross. At Cana Jesus says: “Woman, what to me and to
you? My hour is not yet come.” (Jn 2:4) As we have also seen, one might
legitimately translate Jesus’ colloquial response as: “Woman, of what kind
of wine do you speak? My hour is not yet come.”
In effect, then, Jesus sees a double meaning in Mary’s compassionate
remark: “They have no wine.” The crisis facing the married couple (and
implicitly all Jews) does indeed lie in the fact that they have no wine.
They lack the messianic wine of Jesus’ blood which He will give them in
the eucharist. Moreover, that eucharistic wine foreshadows the wine of
messianic victory, the superabundance of messianic wine which Jesus will
supply in the final, eschatological banquet which celebrates His ultimate
victory over the powers of darkness.
Mary, as we have also seen, seems to sense that Jesus is expressing reser-
vations about the symbolic meaning of her request, without denying the
request outright. Hence, she tells the servants: “Do whatever He tells
you.” Jesus tells the servants to fill six stone jars with water. The jars
provide water for ritual washings of purification and contain twenty to
thirty gallons each. Jesus, then, proposes to provide miraculously from
one hundred and twenty to one hundred and eighty gallons of wine for a
modest provincial wedding celebration. The superabundance of the mi-
raculous wine foreshadows the abundance of the messianic wine which
He will provide eucharistically when His hour of suffering and glorifica-
tion arrives. It also foreshadows the final messianic banquet. (Jn 2:6-7)
Finally, the evangelist underscores the miracle’s special link to Jesus’ own
glorification. The Beloved Disciple does so by insisting at the end of the
story that in performing this miracle Jesus manifested His glory in a pre-
liminary fashion to His believing disciples. (Jn 2:11)
At Jesus’ command the servants take the miraculous wine to the stew-
ard for tasting. The story reaches its climax when the steward complains
to the bridegroom that they should have served this more excellent wine
first and kept the inferior wines they had actually served until the guests
had gotten tipsy. (Jn 2:8-11) Ironically, the steward complains to the
wrong bridegroom; for the miracle anticipates Jesus’ revelation in the
paschal mystery as the true bridegroom, as the divine bridegroom who
loves Israel and humanity as a whole with an unshakable love despite
their malice and sinfulness. As the story of the sign indicates, Jesus will
bring that revelation to completion when His “hour” of suffering and of
glorification comes.3
The redactor follows the first miracle at Cana with a series of incidents
which cast further light on its meaning. He links these incidents to the
first miracle at Cana by bracketing them between it and a second Cana
miracle: namely, the cure of the official’s son. The bracketed events, in-
cluding the second cure, illumine the first miracle at Cana by introduc-
ing important themes which develop its theological significance. These
themes and incidents, like the first sign itself, all derive their ultimate
significance from the paschal mystery. As a consequence, they also cast
light on one another. The themes all undergo theological development as
the Beloved Disciple’s narrative unfolds.
The final testimony of John the Baptizer to Jesus relates most obvi-
ously to the first sign because it explicitly presents Jesus as the true bride-
groom. John, the friend of the bridegroom, plays second fiddle to Jesus
3. Cf. NJBC, 61: 40-41; Brown, The Gospel of John, I, pp. 97-111; Hänchen, Commentary
on John, I, pp. 169-179; Jean-Paul Michaud, Le signe de Cana (Jean 2, 1-11) dans son
contexte johannique (Montréal: Les Éditions Montfontaines, 1963); W. Nicol, The
Semeia in the Fourth Gospel (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1972); A Feuillet, “La signification
fondamentale du premier miracle de Cana (Jo. II, 1-11) et le symbolisme johannique,”
Revue Thomiste, 65(1965), pp. 517-535; A. Geyser, “The Sêmeion at Cana of Galilee”
in Studies in John Presented to Professor J.N. Sevenster on the Occasion of His Seventieth
Birthday (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1920), pp. 12-21.
and rejoices to hear His voice. (Jn 3:22-30) The Baptizer’s final testi-
mony underscores the ironic truth which endows the sign at Cana with
its revelatory significance: namely, that Jesus is the divine bridegroom faithful
in His love despite the worst which human sinfulness can do to Him.
The cleansing of the temple which follows the first sign, focuses fur-
ther attention on the paschal mystery. Jesus’ initial cleansing of the temple
foreshadows His death and resurrection (Jn 2:17, 19-22). It also fore-
shadows His revelation in His “hour” as the living temple of God. (Jn
2:21) As we have seen, the sign of blood and water on Calvary foreshad-
ows Jesus’ full revelation as the temple of God from whom the living,
life-giving water of the divine Breath flows. (Jn 19:33-6) That water Jesus
bestows when, as risen Christ, He communicates the sin-forgiving Breath,
the living water, to the disciples on Easter. (Jn 7:39, 20:19-23)
The encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman further ex-
plains how Jesus purifies the temple. Jesus foretells the coming of the day
when both Jew and Samaritan will worship, not in temples, but in Breath
and in truth. (Jn 4:19-25) Eucharistic worship will finally effect the prom-
ised purification. (Jn 6:63-4) Eucharistic worship also fulfills the gift of
messianic wine which the first sign at Cana promised. In other words,
eucharistic worship completes the purification of worship which the cleans-
ing of the temple begins.
The exchange with Nichodemus introduces two other themes whose
ultimate meaning the paschal mystery illumines: 1) rebirth in water and
the Breath and 2) judgment. Both themes also cast light on faith in Jesus
as the divine bridegroom. Let us reflect on how this occurs.
When at the end of John’s gospel the risen Christ breathes the
sin-forgiving Breath into the apostles, He fulfills the Baptizer’s prophecy
of a Breath-baptizer. (Jn 1:33-4, 20:19-23) The encounter with
Nichodemus, however, makes it clear that Christian initiation effects
Breath-baptism. Through ritual washing with water one is “reborn through
water and Breath.” (Jn 3:1-8) One could develop these insights in greater
detail. Here it suffices to note the connection between the encounter
with Nichodemus and the first sign which Jesus gives His disciples at
Cana. After His own rejection by Jew and Gentile alike and after His
desertion by most of the disciples, the risen Jesus will respond by sending
the sin-forgiving Breath. That act reveals Him finally and fully as the
divine bridegroom who loves humanity faithfully and unconditionally
despite its sinfulness. In other words, in Johannine theology, Jesus’ com-
plete revelation as divine Bridegroom and as Breath-baptizer coincide.
Moreover, Christian initiation gives access to Breath-baptism by effect-
ing rebirth in water and in Breath.
The redactor introduces the theme of judgment in his comment on the
conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus. The judgment which Jesus
effects also reaches revelatory fullness in the paschal mystery. (Jn 3:16-21)
The paschal mystery, as we have seen, brings to a culmination the struggle
of light and of darkness. In that culminating struggle, the forces of dark-
ness condemn Jesus only to find themselves judged by God for their sin
against the light which Jesus embodies. (Jn 7:1-10:42) Paradoxically, then,
the revelation of Jesus as the divine bridegroom in his passion and resur-
rection also coincides with divine judgment upon the dark powers. (Jn
19:12-6) Only those who accept the revelation of God’s forgiving love in
Christ escape judgment by welcoming the gift of the sin-forgiving Breath.
(Jn 20:21-23)
Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritan woman and His evangelization
of the Samaritans introduce still other themes and ideas which the pas-
chal mystery fulfills. Jesus’ promise of the living water to the woman at
the well finds its fulfillment in the paschal gift of the divine Breath (Jn
4:7-15; 20:19-23), and the fulfillment of Jesus’ promise to the woman to
replace temple worship with worship in Breath and truth foreshadows
Breath-filled eucharistic worship. (Jn 4:16-26; 6:60-71) The universal
salvation foreshadowed in the evangelization of the Samaritans finds its
fulfillment in the disciples’ commissioning to proclaim a universal for-
giveness to sins in the power of the Breath. (Jn 20:19-23) Moreover, all
these events also reveal Jesus as the divine bridegroom, as the God who
loves the world even in its sinfulness and seeks to bestow upon it the
eschatological gift of peace.
The second miracle at Cana, the second sign which Jesus gives the
disciples, also finds it fulfillment in the paschal mystery. The fourth evan-
gelist transforms the healing of the official’s son into a polemic against
the need to see signs as a condition for faith. (Jn 4:46-54) This miracle
story bears an analogous resemblance to the healing of the centurion’s
servant in Matthew and in Luke. (Mt 8:5-13; Lk 7:1-10) In the synoptic
accounts of this distant healing, Jesus shows immediate readiness to heal
the ailing man. In the fourth gospel He greets the request for healing
with the rebuke: “Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe.”
(Jn 4:48)
When the official begs Jesus earnestly to come heal his son, Jesus de-
mands of the official faith without sight: the man must believe that Jesus
has in fact healed his son without seeing the cure. He must rely on Jesus’
word alone that the cure has occurred. When the father hears that his son
began to improve at the very moment that Jesus pronounced him cured,
“he believed, and all of his household.” (Jn 4:49-54)
The second sign anticipates the blessing with which the evangelist ends
the gospel in its original redaction. Jesus says to the converted Thomas:
“Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who
have not seen and yet believed.” The Beloved Disciple functions, as we
have seen, as the prototype of all those who believe without seeing the
risen Christ. (Jn 20:29) The faith without sight demanded of the official
anticipates, then, the faith of the Beloved Disciple. (Jn 20:8) Faith with-
out a direct encounter with the risen Christ also enables God’s children
to see and acknowledge Jesus as the divine bridegroom.
One can, then, read the events in the Cana-to-Cana section of the book
of signs as an elucidation by event of the symbolic significance of the first
sign. That elucidation requires, however, that one read both the first sign
and the events which follow it in the light of the paschal mystery to which
the first sign clearly alludes and to which the subsequent elucidating events
more or less explicitly allude.4 (Jn 2:4)
In His third sign, Jesus cures the man at the pool of Bethsaida. The
cure occurs on the occasion of an unnamed feast. (Jn 5:1) The cure,
however, derives its liturgical and theological significance from the fact
that it occurs on a sabbath. (Jn 5:15-8)
As we have seen above, in the fourth gospel Jesus’ sabbath healings
signify that, as Son of God, Jesus judges the world on the sabbath just as
the Father does. Even more they reveal that the Father has placed all
judgment in the Son’s hands and has bestowed on Him the key of life
which only God wields, the power to grant risen life to whomever He
chooses. (Jn 5:19-30) Moreover, in Jesus’ sabbath healings, the Father
witnesses, along with John the Baptizer, Moses, and the prophets, to the
truth of Jesus’ message. (Jn 5:31-47)
Because Jesus’ sabbath healing discloses in a preliminary fashion Jesus’
union with the Father (Jn 5:18), its full significance will appear only with
the paschal mystery. Only Jesus’ lifting up in suffering and in glory will
disclose His divinity finally and fully. (Jn 8:28) Through His suffering
and glorification Jesus will finally draw all to Himself. (Jn 12:23-32) The
paschal mystery also reveals Jesus as eschatological judge. (Jn 19:12-6)
By revealing both Jesus’ saving power and judicial authority, the paschal
mystery manifests fully the significance of Jesus’ sabbath healings.5
The three Passovers in the fourth gospel link the fourth sign, the mul-
tiplication of the loaves and walking on the water, to the paschal mystery.
On the first Passover, Jesus cleanses the temple. (Jn 2:13-22) On the
second, he performs the fourth sign: the miracle of multiplication and of
walking on the water. (Jn 6:1-21) Both of these earlier Passovers, how-
ever, look to the third Passover, the Passover of Jesus’ “hour.” (Jn 13:1) As
Commentary on John, I, pp. 180-238; Francis J. Moloney, S.D.B., “From Cana to Cana
(Jn 21- 4:54) and the Fourth Evangelist’s Concept of Correct and Incorrect Faith,”
Salesianum, 40(1978), pp. 817-843.
Commentary on John, I, pp. 239-260; A. Duprez, Jésus et les deux guérisseurs: A propos
de Jean V (Paris: J. Galbalda, 1970).
a consequence, the events of all three Passovers illumine one another. In

the first, Jesus begins the purification of worship. In the second, He ad-
vances it by the promise of the eucharist. In the third, He completes the
purification of worship by dying, rising, and sending the sin-forgiving
Breath who inspires authentic worship in Breath and in truth.
As in the synoptics, Jesus’ walking on the water and invocation of the
divine name symbolizes Jesus’ victory over the forces of chaos which
threaten His disciples. This preliminary disclosure of His possession of
the divine name will also find its fulfillment in the full disclosure of His
divinity to His disciples in His resurrection. (Jn 8:28, 20:28-9) Together
the two miracles of multiplication and of walking on the water foreshadow
the scope of authentic eucharistic worship, which demands faith both in
Jesus’ divinity and in His real eucharistic presence.6
The cure of the man born blind, the fifth sign, reveals Jesus as the light
of the world. That revelation fulfills the liturgical symbolism of the feast
of Tabernacles with its nocturnal illumination of the streets of Jerusalem
by flaming torches. The miracle discloses Jesus as the light of truth shin-
ing in a world darkened by sin and unbelief.
As we have seen, the story of the healing of the man born blind has a
chiastic structure. The interrogation of the cured blind man’s parents lies
at the heart of the story. (Jn 9:18-23) During their interrogation by the
Pharisees, the beggar’s parents confirm his identity and his blindness from
birth; but they refuse to say anything about his cure for fear lest “the
Jews” expel them from the synagogue. Their fearful reticence contrasts
with the increasingly fearless testimony of the cured blind man. That
testimony leads in fact to the former beggar’s expulsion from the syna-
gogue. The trial of the man born blind by the Pharisees foreshadows
Jesus’ trial by Pilate. Both trials advance the gospel’s unifying forensic
metaphor. (Jn 9:24-39)
The cure of the man born blind reproduces the same dynamic as marks
the events during Tabernacles, which it terminates. In the struggle be-
tween light and darkness, the revelation of the truth which Jesus incar-
nates and divine judgment on sinful unbelief coincide. As the blind man
tary on John, I, pp. 268-283; M.-F. Merrouard, “La multiplication des pain et le
discours du pain de vie (Jean 6),” Lumière et Vie, 18(1969), pp. 63-75; Bertil Gœrtner,
John 6 and the Jewish Passover (Lund: C.W.K. Gleerup, 1959), Francois Quievreux, “Le
récit de la multiplication des pains dans le quatrième évangile,” Recherches de Science
Religieuse, 41(1967), pp. 97-108; G.H. Boobyer, “The Eucharistic Interpretation of
the Miracles of the Loaves in Mark’s Gospel,” Journal of Theological Studies, 3(1952),
pp. 161-171; John Paul Heil, Jesus Walking on the Sea (Rome: Biblical Institute Press,
1981), pp. 144-170; Cullen I.K. Story, “The Bearing of Old Testament Terminology
on the Johannine Chronology of the Final Passover of Jesus,” Novum Testamentum,
31(1989), pp. 316-324.
comes into the light of faith, the Pharisees incriminate themselves by

their stubborn unbelief. Like the other signs, this fifth sign also finds its
fulfillment in the paschal mystery when those the dark powers stand fi-
nally revealed in their sinful unbelief and when those who relate to Jesus
in faith finally “see” Him for what He is. (Jn 19:13-16, 20:1-31)
Both Tabernacles and Dedication intensify the struggle between light
and darkness. By situating the fifth sign between the two feasts, the Be-
loved Disciple suggests that it fulfills the liturgical significance of both.
The feast of Dedication develops pastoral imagery. In rejecting Jesus as
the light of the world, Israel also repudiates it divine shepherd.7
Commentary on John, II, pp. 33-42; Günther Bornkamm, Geschichte und Glaube:
Gesammelte Aufsätze (4 vols.; Munich: Chris Kaiser Verlag, 1971), IV, pp. 65-72; John
Bligh, “Four Studies in John: The Man Born Blind,” Heythrop Journal, 7(1966), pp.
129-144; Donatien Mollat, “La guérison de l’averugle-né,” Bible et Vie Chrétienne,
23(1958), pp. 22-31; J. Duncan M. Derrett, “John 9:6 Read with Is 6:10, 20:9,”
Evangelical Quarterly, 66(1994), pp. 251-254.
The first part of the first epistle of John develops the theme that “God is light; there
is no darkness in Him at all.” (1 Jn 1:5) As the author of the letter develops this theme,
it becomes clear that both he and the dissidents lay claim to divine enlightenment. In
the judgment of the letter’s author, however, the dissidents claim something which
they do not in fact possess. They propound false doctrine and therefore confuse the
light with the darkness.
The author of the letter first examines three false claims of the dissidents and
contrasts them with true and authentic doctrine. 1) The dissidents claim to live in
union with God; but in fact they dwell in darkness. (1 Jn 1:6) 2) The dissidents claim
to exist in a sinless state; but in fact they live in sin. 3) In the very act of claiming never
to have sinned, the dissidents sin by calling a liar the God who sent His Son to purify
from sin those who believe in Him. It would appear, then, that the dissidents claimed
an enlightenment which manifests their righteousness in the eyes of God, a righteous-
ness which absolves them from the need of redemption through the blood of Christ.
The three false boasts of the dissidents cast light upon one another. The dissidents
claim to live in union with God; but they ground that claim in an illusory sense of
innocence which leads them to deny a fundamental fact of divine revelation: namely,
the saving, atoning death of Jesus Christ. To claim an enlightenment which sets one
in opposition to the truth revealed in the paschal mystery only manifests that one walks,
not in the light of Christ, but in the darkness of unbelief.
The dissidents’ claim to impeccability seems to have taken the moral dualism of the
gospel in directions which the author of the first letter regards as extreme and
heterodox. The epistle’s author himself teaches that in Christ “there is no sin.” (1 Jn
3:5) The phrase asserts not only the sinlessness of Christ but the liberation from sin
which possession of His Breath effects. (1 Jn 3:6)
The dissidents may well have decided to move this doctrine in deterministic
directions which claimed an impeccability grounded in the possession of the Breath
rather than in Christ’s atoning death. In that sense, they would have recognized that
Christ came in water only, i.e., with a baptism which guarantees subsequent sinlessness.
They would, however, have simultaneously denied that Jesus came in both “water and
blood.” (1 Jn 5:3-8) In other words, they would have dissociated the resurrection and
the gift of the Breath from the saving death. The gospel of John, as we have seen, goes
out of its way to assert their inseparable unity.
The raising of Lazarus, as we have seen, discloses Jesus as “the resurrec-

tion and the life.” (Jn 9:25) This culminating sign alludes to the cure of
the blind man, since in Johannine theology life and light coincide. The
blind man’s illness has resulted from no sin but has as its purpose the
revelation of God’s saving action in him. (Jn 9:3) In the same way, Lazarus’s
sickness unto death brings about “the glorification of God.” (Jn 11:4) In
the case of the man born blind, the work God accomplished in him in-
cluded, as we have seen, both his physical cure and his coming to the
light of faith. In the case of Lazarus, his participation in the risen glory of
Christ includes a share in Jesus’ passion. (Jn 12:10-1)
The evangelist links symbols of light and of life in another way. Before
raising Lazarus from the dead, Jesus indicates that this miracle also re-
veals Him as light of the world. When Jesus suggests that He and the
disciples return to Judea to come to Lazarus’s aid, the disciples remind
Him that His enemies in Judea were just trying to stone Him. Jesus re-
plies:
Are there not twelve hours of daylight? If a man goes walking by day, he
does not stumble because he can see the light of this world. But if he goes
walking at night, he will stumble because he has no light in him. (Jn
11:9-10)
The light of this world refers most obviously to the sun, which, in
ancient Jewish optometry, filled the eye with light and thus enabled it to
see. Jesus’ allusion to the light of the world, however, also clearly points
to His own person. It recalls as well, what Jesus said before curing the
man born blind: namely, “We must work the works of Him who sent me
The author of the letter, for his part, not only insists that the death of Christ effects
the forgiveness of sin; but, both in the text of the letter and in its postscript, he makes
it clear that even the possession of the Breath does not guarantee the believer total
freedom from minor offenses. Even after baptism, one may, then, need to claim the
forgiveness effected by Jesus’ atoning death. (1 Jn 2:1, 5:14-21)
To these false boasts of the dissidents, the author of the first epistle contrasts
authentic Christian faith: 1) Those who truly live in the light share a fellowship which
flows directly from the atoning death of Jesus. (1 Jn 1:7) 2) Far from claiming a false
innocence, the true believer acknowledges the fact of personal and collective sinfulness
and claims the forgiveness of God revealed in Christ. Moreover, true believers look to
God to purify them from sin. (1 Jn 1:9) 3) Authentic faith trusts in the saving, atoning
death of Jesus as the source and revelation of divine forgiveness. His sacrificial death
takes away the sin of the world and reveals that He abides now eternally in heaven, in
the presence of the Father, interceding for sinners for whom He gave His life. The true
believer, therefore, clings to the Crucified as the source of forgiveness for sins
committed before and after one has achieved the light of faith. (1 Jn 2:1-2)
Zane C. Hodges, “Fellowship and Confession in I John 1:5-10,” Bibliotheca Sacra,
129(1972), pp. 48- 60; O. Schäffere, “‘Gott ist Licht’ (1 Joh 1, 5),” Theologische Studien
und Kritiken, 105(1933), pp. 467-476.
while it is day. Night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in

the world, I am the light of the world.” (Jn 9:5)
Both the cure of the man born blind and the raising of Lazarus allude
to the passion of Jesus as a temporary eclipse of the light. As Jesus pre-
pares to go to Lazarus’s aid, He assures the disciples that, as long as He
remains among them as the light of the world, they have nothing to fear.
That assurance itself has a double meaning. Most obviously it means that
while Jesus remains physically with the disciples, they have no cause for
fear; but John’s Jesus’ also alludes to His presence among the disciples
after His glorification through the illumination of the Breath. The Breath
makes the risen Christ present, and that presence too will dissipate the
disciple’s fears.8 (Jn 16:13-4) These allusions to Jesus as the light of the
world at the beginning of the story of the raising of Lazarus make it clear
that Jesus’ revelation as the light of the world and His revelation as the
resurrection and the life coincide. In fact, they coincide in the paschal
mystery when the risen Christ imparts the enlightening gift of the divine
Breath, the Breath of truth, who will lead the disciples into the fullness of
truth by imparting the living water of imperishable divine life. As we
have seen, no clarifying discourse accompanies this sixth and culminat-
ing sign. Instead, it foreshadows the Book of Glory as a whole from which
it derives its ultimate significance.
The fact that all six signs foreshadow the paschal mystery means that
they each call attention to a different facet of that mystery. The paschal
mystery reveals Jesus as the divine bridegroom of the first sign. The pas-
chal mystery requires a faith which consents to the person of Jesus as
risen Lord, even though one has not seen the risen Christ face-to-face. In
other words, one must believe, not only like the Beloved Disciple, but
also like the official of the second sign, who foreshadows the Beloved
Disciple’s faith. The third sign reveals Jesus as eschatological judge, and
the paschal mystery both begins and prolongs the final judgment by de-
manding that humanity choose in the face of this final and full revelation
of divine love in Jesus. The paschal mystery also completes the purifica-
tion of temple worship begun on the first Passover of John’s gospel by
empowering authentic eucharistic worship in Breath and truth, the wor-
Commentary on John, II, pp. 53-72; Brian McNeil, “The Raising of Lazarus,” Downside
Review, 92(1974), pp. 269-275; Léopold Sabourin, “Resurrectio Lazari (Jo 11, 1-44),”
Verbum Domini, 46(1968), pp. 350-360; Gerhard Lass, Die Auferweckung des Lazarus:
Eine Auslegung von Johannes 11 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1967);
Wilhelm Wilkin, “Die Erweckung des Lazarus,” Theologische Zeitschrift, 15(1959), pp.
22-39; Mark W.G. Stubbe, “A Tomb with a View: John 11.1-44 in Narrative-Critical
Perspective,” New Testament Studies, 90(1994), pp. 38-54; Delbert Burkett, “Two
Accounts of Lazarus’ Resurrection in John 11,” Novum Testamentum, 36(1994), pp.
209-232.
ship foreshadowed by sign four. Finally, the paschal mystery reveals Jesus
as simultaneously the light and life of the world, as the fifth and sixth
signs signify.
Because each of the signs highlights a facet of the paschal mystery, each
of them provides only a partial, proleptic disclosure of that saving event.
By focusing all the signs on the paschal mystery, the evangelist endows
them ultimately with a unity of meaning which makes it almost irrel-
evant which sign one chooses to contemplate first. Because every sign
points to the paschal mystery, every sign also illumines every other.9
This section has considered the signs and their significance. The sec-
tion which follows ponders the unique narrative use which the Beloved
Disciple makes both of Jesus’ discourses and of the literary device of allu-
sion.
(II)
This section examines how Jesus’ discourses develop the revelatory sig-
nificance of the signs. In the Book of Signs discourses expatiate on the
significance of three of Jesus’ signs: 1) the healing of the cripple on the
sabbath, 2) the multiplication of the loaves and fish and walking on wa-
ter, and 3) the cure of the man born blind. This section first reflects on
the correlation between sign and discourse. Next, it analyzes the incre-
mental development of basic themes across the discourses. In the course
of that analysis, I also examine the way in which the Beloved Disciple
uses allusion in order to develop Christological doctrine. Because I have
already considered the text of Jesus’ discourses in some detail in the pre-
ceding chapters, I content myself here with summarizing the results of
that earlier analysis.
The Discourses
As we have seen, the discourse following the healing of the cripple on the
sabbath develops the theology of judgment enunciated in Jesus’ encoun-
ter with Nicodemus. It interprets Jesus’ power to heal on the sabbath as
His wielding the divine keys of life and of judgment. Jesus’ ability to
impart life through physical healing also reveals proleptically His divine
power on the day of judgment to raise from the dead those who put faith
in Him.
The discourse divides into two parts. In the first part, Jesus proclaims
that His sabbath healings manifest His authority to give life and to judge
on the sabbath. The judgment which Jesus’ sabbath healing effects pre-
pares the final judgment when, on the last day, He as Son of God will
impart risen life to those who believe in Him. (Jn 5:19-31) The second
9. Cf. Robert T. Fortna, “Source and Redaction in the Fourth Gospel’s Portrayal of Jesus’
Signs,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 89(1970), pp. 151-166.
part of the discourse, as we have also seen, develops Johannine forensic

imagery and links it to the theme of judgment. In the second part of the
discourse, Jesus defends His right to heal on the sabbath by appealing to
three legal witnesses: the Father, who empowers the signs Jesus performs,
John the Baptizer who testifies to Him prophetically; and the Mosaic
scriptures which foretell His coming. Those who refuse to respond in
faith to this triple testimony stand under divine judgment.10 (Jn 5:31-47)
With the bread-of-life discourse, the light and the darkness begin to
separate. In the course of this discourse, Jesus’ faithless disciples refuse, as
we have seen, to recognize that feeding on the bread of divine wisdom
means acknowledging Jesus’ real eucharistic presence. The discourse in-
terprets the miracle of multiplication as a sign that Jesus embodies the
bread of divine wisdom and that He will one day give the eucharistic
bread of wisdom to those who believe in Him. Jesus’ identity with divine
Wisdom descended from heaven also makes sense of His power to walk
on water, as only God can do, and to invoke the divine name as His own.
His gift of the eucharist reveals the revelatory significance of the miracle
of multiplication and requires incarnational faith for its authentic cel-
ebration.
The bread-of-life discourse also divides into two parts. In part one,
Jesus first promises to give bread from heaven. Then He presents Himself
as the bread of divine wisdom which has already descended from heaven.
When unbelieving “Jews” question that Jesus has a heavenly origin, Jesus
rebukes their unbelief in the light of the theology of judgment developed
both in His conversation with Nichodemus and in His first discourse.
(Jn 6:32-50; cf. 3:17-21, 5:19-30)
Verse 51 of the bread-of-life discourse marks the transition to the sec-
ond part of the discourse. In verse 51, Jesus announces: “....the bread
which I shall give is my flesh, for the life of the world.” This causes “the
Jews” to question Jesus’ power to give them His flesh and blood as food
and drink. Later the reader learns that these “Jews” include Jesus’ own
disciples. (Jn 6:59-66) The second part of the bread-of-life discourse
equates the divine wisdom with faith in Jesus’ real eucharistic presence.
Commentary on John, I, pp. 239-267; Feliks Gryglewicz, “Die Ausssagen Jesu und irher
Rolle in Joh 5, 16-30” in Studien zum Neuen Testament und seiner Umwelt, 5, edited
by Albert Fuchs (1980), pp. 5-17; Eduard Lohse, Die Einheit des Neuen Testament
(Göttingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht, 1973), pp. 62-72; M.J. Moreton, “Feast, Sign,
and Discourse in John 5,” Studia Evangelica, 4, (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1968), pp.
209-213; Urban C. von Wahlde, “The Witnesses to Jesus in John 5: 31-40 and Belief
in the Fourth Gospel,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 43(1981), pp. 385-404;Wolfgang
Kraus, “Johannes und das Alte Testament: Überlegungen zum Umgag mit der Schrift
im Johannesevangelium im Horizont biblischer.Theologie,” Zeitschrift für die
Neutestamentlsiche Wissenschaft, 88 (1997), pp. 1-23.
(Jn 6:51-58) Eucharistic worship which incarnates such faith exemplifies

worship in Breath and truth. It communicates risen life. It will one day
replace all forms of temple worship.11 (Jn 6:63; cf. 4:21-24)
As we have already seen, during the feast of Tabernacles, the division
between the light and the darkness which began in the bread-of-life dis-
course intensifies. The dialogic character of the discourse at Tabernacles
causes it to resemble a legal cross-examination as Jesus’ enemies pose ob-
jection after objection to His teaching. The cross-examination culmi-
nates in the dark powers’ decision to quench the light by stoning Jesus.
The discourse at Tabernacles originally divided into two parts. Part one
spanned the feast’s week-long celebration. (Jn 7:10-36) Part two took
place on the final day of the feast. (Jn 7:37-53, 8:12-52) In the gospel’s
final redaction, the story of the woman caught in adultery divides the
second part of the discourse into two subsections. As in the case of the
bread-of-life discourse, the discourse at Tabernacles begins dialogically
but expands into longer speeches of Jesus to his adversaries.
The first part of the discourse advances through a series of increasingly
bitter exchanges between Jesus and unbelieving “Jews.” Jesus once again
insists that He teaches only what the Father tells Him to teach. He argues
that the selflessness of His testimony vindicates the truth of what He
says; and He traces the unbelief of His adversaries to their refusal to obey
the Law of Moses. (Jn 7:16-19) The reference to Moses links the dis-
course to the theme of judgment which Jesus’ discourse after His sabbath
healing developed. Those at Tabernacles who refuse to hear Moses’s testi-
mony to Jesus fall under the divine judgment. (Jn 5:45-47)
As the first part of the discourse at Tabernacles comes to a close, Jesus
rejects His adversaries’ claim to know His origins. (Jn 7:28-29) He warns
them that time is getting short. The day is fast approaching when Jesus
will go where His enemies cannot follow. (Jn 7:33-36) Jesus, of course,
refers to His return to the Father, as He explains to the disciples in the last
discourse. (Jn 13:33-14:3) His enemies cannot follow Him to the Father
Commentary on John, II, pp. 487-303; Peder Borgen, “The Unity of the Discourse of
John 6,” Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 50(1959), pp. 277-278;
Jean Noel Aletti, “Le discours sur le pain de vie (Jean 6): Problems de composition et
fonction des citations de l’Ancien Testament,” Recherches de Science Religieuse, 62(1974),
pp. 169-197; G. Bornkamm, Geschicht und Glaube 2 (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag,
1971), pp. 51-64; Peder Borgen, Bread from Heaven: An Exegetical Study of the Concept
of Manna in the Gospel of John and the Writings of Philo (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1965); “The
Unity of the Discourse in John 6,” Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft,
50(1959), pp. 277-278; Andre Feuillet, Le discours sur le pain de vie (Jean, chapitre 6),
(Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1967); Bertil Gärtner, John 6 and the Jewish Passover (Lund:
C.W.K. Gleerup, 1959); N. Mondula, La puissance vivicatrice de la chair du Christ selon
l’évangile de S. Jean (Rome: 1978); F.L. Steinmeyer, Die Rede Jesu in der Schule von
Capernaum (Berlin: Wiegandt & Grieben, 1892).
because they refuse to recognize that He comes to them from the Fa-
ther.12
The final section of the discourse at Tabernacles opens with Jesus’ prom-
ise of the living water whose gift will reveal Him as the promised
Breath-baptizer. The living water of the Breath will slake human thirst
for everlasting life. (Jn 7:37-39; cf. 1:33, 3:32-36, 4:13-14) Jesus then
proclaims Himself the light of the world. (Jn 8:12) Jesus’ promise and
proclamation disclose different facets of the same mystery, since in
Johannine Christology life and light coincide. (Jn 1:4) The divine Breath
who confers risen life will also function as a principle of enlightenment;
and the enlightenment of faith gives access to risen life. (Jn 14:15-21)
The promise of the living water and the proclamation of Jesus as the light
of the world therefore illumine one another. Jesus becomes the light of
the world when He breathes His divine Breath into His disciples. She in
turn functions both as a principle of enlightenment and as a source of
risen life. Since the same divine reality functions simultaneously as the
source of resurrection and enlightenment, it would appear that resurrec-
tion brings the enlightenment of faith to its culmination and comple-
tion.
The section of the discourse at Tabernacles which follows the story of
the adulterous woman takes the literary form of an embittered argument
between Jesus and His enemies. Jesus begins by recapitulating themes
from His earlier debates during the feast: His origin from the Father, His
selfless witness to the truth, His divine authority to pronounce judge-
ment, the forensic testimony of other witnesses (the Father and the Bap-
tizer) to the truth of His message. (Jn 8:14-18)
The rest of the discourse develops into a debate over origins. Jesus not
only reasserts that He takes His origin from God; but He also spells out
the soteriological implications of faith in His heavenly origin. That ori-
gin sets Him apart from His enemies whose sinful unbelief makes them
citizens of the world over which Satan presides. The time for them to face
judgment will arrive when Jesus is lifted up in suffering and glory. Unless
His adversaries judge correctly about Jesus, they will find themselves pow-
erless to follow Him in His return to the Father. (Jn 8:21-29)
The debate about origins takes a new turn when “the Jews” claim the
freedom of the children of Abraham. Jesus counters this claim with the
charge that His adversaries’ sinful hostility and unbelief manifest that
Satan has sired them, not Abraham. (Jn 8:34-47) The crowds then accuse
Jesus of demon possession. (Jn 8:48-54) Jesus claims instead that He
12. Cf. Gerard Rochais, “Jean 7: une construction litteraire dramatique, at la manière
d’un scenario,” New Testament Studies, 39(1993), pp. 355-378.
possesses the divine name. “The Jews” anticipate the judgement soon to
be passed on Jesus’ in His passion by seeking to stone Him.13 (Jn 8:54-58)
Jesus’ discourse during Dedication develops further the debates during
Tabernacles. The discourse at Dedication divides into two parts. In the
first part Jesus, in response to a challenge that He avow His messianic
pretensions, proclaims the parable of the sheep and the shepherd. In ex-
plaining this pastoral metaphor, Jesus announces that His unity with the
Father transforms Him into the divine shepherd of Israel. (Jn 8:25-30)
This claim leads to a second stoning attempt. In the second part of the
discourse, Jesus again invokes the forensic argument of the Father’s testi-
mony in sanctioning the works which He performs. Jesus also proclaims
the dynamic, mutual indwelling which makes Him one with the Father.
Jesus’ fearless reaffirmation of His divinity triggers a futile attempt to
arrest Him.14 (Jn 10:25-39)
The story of the man born blind follows the discourse and further dra-
matizes the separation of light and darkness during Tabernacles and Dedi-
cation. The blind man sees Jesus with the eyes of faith, while the Phari-
sees, who expel the man from the synagogue, persist in the darkness of
unbelief. The expulsion foreshadows, of course, the Johannine
community’s excommunication by the Pharisaical leaders of the local syna-
gogue as well as Jesus’ own condemnation by the dark powers.
Except for the last discourse, I have summarized each of the Johannine
discourses. In what follows, I shall argue that the discourses relate to one
another in a manner analogous to the way in which the signs do.
The Johannine Use of Allusion

As the discourses unfold, the Beloved Disciple repeatedly uses allusion in
the service of doctrinal development. This narrative strategy especially
characterizes the last evangelist’s narrative style. As we saw in the last
volume, among the synoptics, Mark clusters most of his literary allusions
around the two miracles of the loaves. Matthew characteristically uses
literary allusion in order to focus the story of Jesus on the Great Commis-
sion which terminates his gospel. Luke most characteristically uses liter-
ary allusion in order to tie together his two-volume study of Christian
13. Cf. NJBC, 61: 108-114; Brown, The Gospel of John, I, pp. 310-331, 339-368;
Hänchen, Commentary on John, II, pp. 9-20, 32-32; David M. Stanley, “The Feast of
Tents: Jesus’ Self- Revelation,” Worship, 34(1964), pp. 20-27; Charles W.F. Smith,
“Tabernacles in the Fourth Gospel and Mark,” New Testament Studies, 9(1962-1963),
pp. 130-146.
Commentary on John, II, pp. 43-52; Wilhelm Jost, “Poimên”: Das Bild vom Hirter in der
biblschen Überlieferung und seine christologische Bedeutung (Giessen: Kindt, 1939);
Otto Kiefer, Die Hirtenrede: Analyse und Deutung von Joh 10, 1-18 (Stuttgart:
Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1967).
origins. In the process, Luke assimilates Peter to Jesus and Paul to Peter.
The Beloved Disciple uses allusion very differently. In the fourth gospel,
as we have seen, all of Jesus’ signs anticipate the paschal mystery, while
the discourses endow the signs with their doctrinal meaning. Literary
allusion links passages in the discourses which develop incrementally the
same doctrinal theme. Typically, the Beloved Disciple repeats in a later
discourse ideas enunciated in an earlier discourse and then appends to
them new ideas which advance doctrinally beyond the earlier discourse.
In Johannine narrative theology, this gradual exposition of the truth about
Jesus dramatizes the incremental dawning of the divine light which He
incarnates. It also explains the repetitiousness of Johannine narrative style.
The I AM passages in John illustrate the incremental use of allusion
which the evangelist employs more systematically in the discourses. Jesus
first proclaims the divine name to the disciples while doing something
only the God of the Bible can do: namely, He walks on the waters and
claims the divine name, I AM, as His own. (Jn 6:20-21) The first part of
the bread-of-life discourse explains this miraculous sign when it portrays
Jesus as the incarnation of divine wisdom.15
In the discourse at Tabernacles, the Beloved Disciple links Jesus’ use of
the divine name to the theme of judgment. By claiming the name I AM,
Jesus proclaims His divine pre-existence and identity with the Father to
His unbelieving adversaries and faithless disciples. He simultaneously
warns His enemies that, unless they recognize His right to claim the di-
vine name, they will die in their sins. (Jn 8:23-24) His enemies dramatize
their intransigent lack of repentance by seeking to stone Him. (Jn 8:57-59)
Finally, in the garden where Jesus is arrested, He invokes the divine
name once again. He does so in order to vanquish His enemies before
freely submitting to the ordeal of the passion. (Jn 18:5-9) In the garden
Jesus enemies include both Jews and Gentiles. (Jn 18:3, 12)
Each time Jesus invokes the divine name, the struggle between light
and darkness intensifies. After Jesus proclaims Himself I AM to the dis-
ciples, the faithless among them refuse to recognize that assent to Him as
divine wisdom incarnate includes confessing His real eucharistic pres-
ence as well. During Tabernacles, Jesus’ use of the divine name consoli-
dates His enemies’ opposition to Him. Finally, Jesus invokes the divine
name at the beginning of His “hour,” in order to vanquish the dark pow-
ers gathered for their final futile attempt to quench the light.
Each time Jesus claims the divine name the light spreads. Jesus first
announces to His disciples His right to use the sacred name of God.
Then at Tabernacles He proclaims it to the Jewish people. Finally, in the
garden He extends its proclamation to Jew and Gentile alike. (Jn 18:3)
15. Cf. Bruce Grigsby, “The Reworking of the Lake Walking Account in the Johannine
Tradition,” Expository Times, 100(1989), pp. 295-297.
As the light shines more brightly, it simultaneously reveals with propor-

tionately greater clarity the hypocrisy and violence of unbelief.
The I AM passages in John illustrate how the evangelist uses literary
allusion in order to develop the same doctrine incrementally over a series
of texts. In what follows I shall reflect on how the Beloved Disciple uses
literary allusion incrementally in order to tie the discourses together doc-
trinally.16 As we shall see, the Beloved Disciple develops incrementally
the following theological themes across the discourses: 1) judgment, 2)
Jesus’ relationship to the Father, 3) pneumatic rebirth, 4) universal salva-
tion, and 5) the revelation of divine glory. Let us reflect on each of these
themes in turn.
The theme of judgment enhances and develops the fourth gospel’s fo-
rensic metaphor for Jesus’ ministry. In Jesus’ dialogue with Nicodemus,
the evangelist explains that God judges the world by revealing His un-
conditioned love of sinners and by demanding simultaneously that they
choose in the face of that revelation. Only those who refuse to accept
16. The Prologue announces a number of fundamental Johannine themes which the
discourses subsequently develop. Those themes include the following: 1) Jesus exists
with the Father before the beginning of the world. (Jn 1:1-3) 2) Jesus enjoys a unique
relationship to the Father. (Jn 1:1) 3) Jesus is God. (Jn 1:1) 4) Jesus embodies a
life-giving light which the forces of darkness struggle ineffectually to suppress. (Jn
1:9-11) 5) Jesus transforms those who believe in Him into God’s children through their
pneumatic rebirth. (Jn 1:12-13) 6) The incarnation of the Son of God manifests the
divine glory. (Jn 1:13-14)
The testimony of John the Evangelist and the call of the first disciples introduces
other themes which later discourses develop in greater detail. 1) Jesus alone baptizes
with the divine Breath. His power to do so manifests His divine, messianic identity. (Jn
1:24-34) 2) Jesus is the “lamb of God”: the lamb of the paschal sacrifice, the lamb-like
suffering servant, and the victorious messianic lamb of apocalyptic literature. (Jn 1:36)
3) One can “see” Jesus fully only with the eyes of faith and by dwelling with Him. (Jn
1:31-55)
As we saw above, the Cana-to-Cana section of John functions as a commentary by
event on the first sign. It introduces new themes for subsequent commentary in the
discourses. It also develops themes already introduced. 1) The cleansing of the temple
introduces and the conversation with the Samaritan woman develop the theme of the
purification of temple worship. (Jn 2:13-22, 4:22-24) 2) The conversation with
Nichodemus introduces the theme of pneumatic rebirth through water and Breath and
enunciates the Johannine understanding of judgment. (Jn 3;1-21) It also introduces
the theme of Jesus’ “lifting up.” (Jn 2:13) 3) The final testimony of the Baptizer
develops the symbolic image of the bridegroom introduced in the first sign. It also
associates receptivity to the gift of the divine Breath with the theme of judgment. Those
who accept the Breath escape judgment, those who refuse Her stand judged by their
unbelief. (Jn 3:27-36) 4) The conversation with the Samaritan woman introduces the
theme of living water and develops the theme of the purification of temple worship. (Jn
4:9-17) 5) The conversation with the disciples in Samaria introduces the theme of
universal salvation. (Jn 4:31-42) 6) The cure of the nobleman’s son introduces the
theme of the importance of believing in Jesus without seeing the risen Christ with one’s
own eyes. (Jn 4:43-54)
God’s offer of salvation and forgiveness fall under divine judgment. (Jn
3:14-21)
The first discourse, which follows Jesus’ sabbath cure of a cripple, as-
serts that the Father, although possessed of the divine authority to judge,
has entrusted all judgment into the hands of His incarnate Son by send-
ing Him to proclaim the truth to the world. (Jn 5:24, 27) Jesus’ procla-
mation of divine truth effects judgment because one stands judged by the
way in which one chooses to respond to Him. (Jn 5:22) Moreover, those
who assent to the truth to which Jesus testifies also consent to the wit-
nesses who corroborate Jesus’ testimony: 1) the Father who sanctions,
Jesus’ testimony by the works He performs, 2) the Baptizer, and 3) the
Mosaic scriptures. (Jn 5:31-47)
The bread-of-life discourse, delivered at the second Johannine Pass-
over, dramatizes Johannine judgment as Jesus’ faithless disciples reject
Him message of wisdom and real eucharistic presence. Their rejection of
the truth which Jesus incarnates places them under divine judgment. (Jn
6:41-66) The discourse at Tabernacles prolongs that judgment as “the
Jews,” who again include Jesus’ faithless disciples, repudiate Jesus’ divin-
ity. (Jn 7:31-36, 8:12-58)
The discourse at Tabernacles recalls a forensic theme from the discourse
on the sabbath: namely, that those who consent to the testimony of those
witnesses who corroborate Jesus’ witness will consent to Jesus’ own testi-
mony as well. (Jn 7:19, 8:16-19) The discourse then embellishes the theme
of judgment with new insights. It proclaims that those who refuse to
believe in Jesus judge by appearances and by human standards only. As a
consequence, they fail to see deeply into the mystery which He embod-
ies. (Jn 7:24, 8:15) [The Sanhedrin exemplifies this kind of obtuseness
when it unjustly condemns Jesus. (Jn 7:45-52, 9:39)] The discourse at
Tabernacles also asserts that Jesus could pass judgment on His adversaries
but that He refrains from doing so at present in obedience to His Father,
since He comes to save, not to judge, the world. (Jn 8:15-16; cf. Jn
3:14-21) The Father, however, who cares for Jesus’ glory, pronounces ul-
timate judgment on Jesus. Jesus’ enemies do not, then, pass final judg-
ment on Him. The Father “judges” Jesus by empowering Him to lay
down His life and to take it up again. The Father’s judgment reverses the
judgment of Jesus’ adversaries. (Jn 10:17-18)
The discourse after Jesus’ sabbath miracle enunciates another theme to
which the Beloved Disciple gives incremental doctrinal development:
namely, Jesus’ relationship to the Father. Jesus’ sabbath miracles manifest
the perfection of His obedience to the Father. They reveal that the Father
has entrusted the Son with the keys of judgment and of life. The perfec-
tion of Jesus’ obedience to the Father ensures the justice of the final judg-
ment He will pass on those who reject Him. (Jn 5:19-30)
The discourse on the bread-of-life embellishes these same themes with

the following four points. 1) The Father, who seals the Son’s testimony by
empowering the signs which Jesus performs, sends the Son as the bread
of life and as the embodiment of divine wisdom. Consent to that wisdom
frees one from a final judgment of repudiation and guarantees a share in
risen life. (Jn 6:35-40) 2) Jesus’ testimony to the Father expresses His
unique knowledge of heavenly events which in His divine pre-existence
He Himself personally witnessed. (Jn 6:46-47) 3) Jesus’ power to impart
risen life reveals the fact that He himself draws His own life from the
Father. (Jn 6:57) 4) The Father draws to the Son all those who consent to
Him in faith. (Jn 6:44)
The discourse at Tabernacles further develops the theme of Jesus’ rela-
tionship to the Father. The discourse first reasserts that Jesus’ mission by
the Father manifests that Jesus draws His life from the Father and knows
the Father with a privileged intimacy. (Jn 7:28-29) The discourse then
develops Jesus’ relationship to the Father in the following new ways. The
selflessness of Jesus’ obediential testimony to the Father manifests the
truth of what He says. Jesus risks His very life for the truth which He
proclaims. (Jn 7:16-19) Jesus’ return to the Father will also manifest the
truth of His testimony to the Father. (Jn 7:33-36, 8:14-15) Jesus’ origin
from and with the Father sanctions His personal invocation of the divine
name I AM. (Jn 8:23-24, 58) So does His “lifting up” on the cross and in
glory. (Jn 8:23-24) The Father glorifies the Son. (Jn 8:54)
The discourse at the feast of Dedication adds the following insights
into Jesus’ relationship to the Father. Jesus’ unique obediential knowl-
edge of the Father empowers Him to die for His sheep and therefore
reveals Him as the divine shepherd of Israel. (Jn 10:7-16) The Father
loves Jesus, the good shepherd, for His willingness to die for His sheep.
(Jn 10:17) The Father raises Jesus by empowering Him both to lay down
His life freely and to take it up again freely. (Jn 10:17-18) The mutual
indwelling of Father and Son, which Jesus’ selfless obedience to the Fa-
ther manifests, guarantees the truth of the judgment accomplished in the
Son’s proclamation of divine truth. (Jn 10:36-38)
The discourse at Tabernacles also illumines Jesus’ relationship to the
Father by introducing the theme of Jesus’ return to the Father. The dis-
course links faith in Jesus’ origin from the Father to the theme of His
return to the Father. It does so in the following ways. 1) Only those who
consent to Jesus’ origin from the Father and consequent unity with the
Father will be able to follow Him in His return to the Father. (Jn 7:28-36,
8:23-24) 2) Unbelief blinds one simultaneously to Jesus’ divine origins
and to the destiny of union with God which His return to the Father
reveals. (Jn 8:14-15) 3) Those who refuse to believe in Jesus’ divine ori-
gin (and, therefore by implication, in His divine destiny) have Satan as
their father. (Jn 8:42-47)
The Beloved Disciple also develops the theme of pneumatic rebirth in-
crementally and allusively across the discourses. As we saw above, the
idea of baptism through water and the Breath develops the theme of
adoptive sonship introduced in the Prologue. One becomes a child of
God through rebirth in water and the Breath. That same Breath-baptism
also fulfills Jesus’ promise of the living water. (Jn 1:12-13, 24-34, 4:9-17)
The other two discourses develop these themes further. The bread-of-life
discourse links the gift of the Breath to the purification of temple wor-
ship by pointing to eucharistic worship as the Breath-inspired prayer which
replaces temple liturgy. Breath-inspired eucharistic prayer also consents
to Jesus’ real eucharistic presence. (6:59-63) The discourse at Tabernacles
links the gift of the living water to the outpouring of the Breath effected
by the risen Christ. (Jn 7:37-39, 20:21-23) As we shall see, the last dis-
course will portray Her as the presence of the risen Christ.
The discourse at Tabernacles develops slightly the theme of universal
salvation. As we saw above, Jesus’ instructions to the disciples in Samaria
introduce the theme of universal salvation. The discourse at Tabernacles
develops this theme ironically. The discourse hints that, after Jesus’ re-
turn to the Father, He will “teach the Greeks.” In fact, He will do so by
pouring out upon them the enlightening Breath of God. (Jn 7:35-36)
This cryptic hint foreshadows the attempt of “Greeks” see Jesus during
His final Jerusalem ministry. (Jn 12:21-22) The discourse at Tabernacles
also proclaims that the universality of the salvation which Jesus brings
also results from the fact the He has come in order to illumine the whole
world. (Jn 8:12)
Finally, two Johannine discourses give incremental allusive develop-
ment to a Johannine theology of glory. In John’s prologue, the incarnation
makes the divine glory (doxa) manifest. (Jn 1:14) The first sign begins
the public revelation of that same divine glory. (Jn 2:11) The raising of
Lazarus prolongs its initial revelation. (Jn 11:4-40) By implication, so do
all of Jesus’ signs.
Two discourses in the Book of Signs develop the theme of glory: the
bread-of-life discourse and the discourse at Tabernacles. The bread-of-life
discourse contrasts human approval (doxa) with the glory (doxa) which
comes from God. One must prefer the glory of God to human approval.
(Jn 7:18) The discourse during Tabernacles makes the following three
points. 1) Jesus seeks only the glory of the Father. (Jn 7:18, 8:54) 2) The
Father for His part glorifies the Son. (Jn 8:54) 3) When Jesus Himself
experiences glorification, He fulfills His promise of the living water by
pouring forth the divine Breath. (Jn 7:37-39)
I have traced five doctrinal themes developed across the discourses in
the Book of Signs: 1) judgment, 2) Jesus’ relationship to the Father, 3)
pneumatic rebirth, 4) universal salvation, and 5) the revelation of divine
glory. Allusion links these themes to one another. It also links them to the
last discourse, which develops them still further and applies them specifi-
cally to the disciples. Moreover, as one might expect, the last discourse,
which occurs in the Book of Glory, develops at some length a Johannine
theology of glory. In what follows, I shall first consider the structure of
the last discourse. Then I shall reflect on its use of literary allusion in
order to develop specific doctrinal themes.
Allusive Linkages in the Last Discourse

The last discourse, as we have seen, underwent redactional amplification.
In its original form, the last discourse fell into two distinct but interre-
lated parts. In part one, Jesus reflected on the saving significance of His
departure. In part two, He promised the “other witness” who would guide
the disciples in His absence. Part two also described the activity of the
“other witness” in the disciples and ended with the promise of the
eschatological gift of peace. (Jn 15:1-16:33)
The supplement to the last discourse endows the entire discourse with
a rough chiastic structure. The final section of the supplement (Jn
16:16-33) develops the same theme as the first part of the original dis-
course (Jn 13:31-14:14): namely, Jesus’ departure and eventual return to
the disciples. The supplement’s second section (Jn 15:18-16:15) devel-
ops the same themes as the second part of the original discourse (Jn
14:15-31): namely, the coming of the “other witness” and Her activity in
the disciples. At the heart of the chiasm lies the parable of the vine and
the branches and the importance of mutual indwelling through love. (Jn
15:1-17)
The expanded discourse concludes with Jesus’ priestly prayer. The prayer
divides into three parts. In part one, Jesus beseeches the Father to reveal
His Son’s divine glory and to do so as a reward for Jesus’ own glorification
of the Father in the course of His ministry. (Jn 17:1-5) In part two, Jesus
asks the Father to protect His disciples as they confront a hostile world.
Jesus also consecrates the disciples to share in the priestly sacrifice of His
own passion. (Jn 17:9-19) In part three, Jesus then prays for all of those
who will believe in Him because of the disciples’ witness. Confronted
with a badly divided community, the Beloved Disciple has Jesus pray
especially that future believers will live united to one another in a way
which manifests the loving union of Father and Son. Finally, Jesus prays
that, by reverencing the divine name which both He and the Father share,
the disciples will one day also share in His risen glory.17 (Jn 17:20-26)
Commentary on John, II, pp. 115-159; John L. Boyle, “The Last Discourse (Jn 13,
31-16:33) and Prayer (Jn 17): Some Observations on Their Unity and Development,”
Biblica, 56(1975), pp. 210-222; Henri van den Bussche, Le discours d’adieu de Jésus:
Commentaire des chapitres 13 à 17 de l’évangile selon saint Jean, translated by C. Charlier
The last discourse embellishes four themes already developed across

the preceding discourses: namely, judgment, Jesus’ relationship to the
Father, pneumatic enlightenment, and especially the revelation of divine
glory. Let us ponder each of these doctrinal themes in turn.
I begin with the theme of judgment. The book of signs concludes with
a brief account of Jesus’ final Jerusalem ministry. It includes Jesus’ trium-
phal entry (without a concomitant cleansing of the temple) and the story
of the Father’s verbal testimony to Jesus. In explaining the Father’s testi-
mony to the crowds, Jesus announces that His lifting up on the cross and
in risen glory will pass judgment on the world and its sinfulness. That
announcement links the revelation of divine glory to the theme of judg-
ment. (Jn 12:31-32)
The doctrinal appendix to the last discourse also reflects on the theme
of judgment. The parable of the vine and the branches, which, as we have
seen, provides the total discourse with its chiastic center, discloses the
fate of those who stand under divine judgment: namely, they will be con-
sumed when confronted with the fire of divine holiness. (Jn 15:5-6) The
supplement also names the Breath of the risen Christ as the one who will
carry on the judgment begun in Jesus’ ministry. By inspiring the dis-
ciples’ testimony to Jesus, She will reverse the false judgment which the
world pronounced on Him. She will proclaim the world’s sinfulness in
condemning Jesus as a sinner. She will unmask the world’s injustice when
it passed false judgment on God’s Son. Instead, the divine Breath of truth
will reveal Jesus as the source of divine justice. Finally, in reversing the
world’s judgment on Jesus, the “other witness” will make it clear that in
God’s eyes the world itself stands condemned before the judgment seat of
God for its violence and unbelief. (Jn 16:8-11)
The parable of the vine and the branches develops a second theme:
namely, the theme of the mutual indwelling of Jesus and His disciples.
That mutual indwelling engages Jesus’ relationship to the Father. Jesus’
obedient love of the Father manifests the perfect, mutual indwelling of
Father and Son. In like manner, the disciples’ loving fidelity to all of
and P. Goidts (Tournai: Castermann, 1959); Charles Hauret, “Les adieux du Seigneur
(Jean XIII-XVII): Charte de vie apostolique (Paris: J. Gablada, 1952); Joseph Huby, Le
discours de Jesus après le Cène; suivi d’une étude sur la connaissance de foi dans Saint Jean
(Paris: Beauschene, 1933); Wilhelm Oehler, Das Wort des Johannes an die Gemeinde:
Evangelium Johannes 15-17; Johannes Briefe und Offenbarung des Johannes (Gütersloh:
C. Bertelsman, 1938); H. Leonard Pass, The Glory of the Father: A Study of S. John
XIII-XVII (London: A.R. Mowbray, 1935), Henry Barclay Swete, The Last Discourse
and Prayer of our Lord: A Study of John XIV- XVII (London: Macmillan, 1914); Jürgen
Becke, “Die Abscheidsreden Jesu im Johannesevangelium,” Zeitschrift für die
Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 61(1970), pp. 215-246; Odo Schnelle, “Die
Abschiedsreden im Johannesevangelium,” Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentlische
Wissenschaft, 80(1989), pp. 64-79.
Jesus’ commandments insures that Jesus dwells in them and they in Him.
(Jn 15:5-13) The fruitfulness of the disciples’ lives glorifies the Father, as
did Jesus’ own testimony to the Father. (Jn 15:8, 17:4-5) The Father for
His part has already pruned the disciples through the words which Jesus
has already spoken to them. That pruning ensures their fruitful witness
to Him and to His divine glory. (Jn 15:1-5, 16-17) Loving obedience to
all of Jesus’ commands will, then, draw the disciples into the experience
of mutual indwelling which Jesus and the Father share. That mutual ind-
welling will also reveal the Father’s glory and will express itself in an-
swered prayer. (Jn 15:7-8; cf. 14:11-13)
The first and last sections of the expanded discourse deal with Jesus
return to the Father. Jesus’ return engages another important dimension
of Jesus’ relationship to the Father. The first and last sections of the last
discourse develop the following doctrinal points. 1) Jesus’ return to the
Father will effect His own glorification at the Father’s hands. (Jn 13:31-32)
2)Jesus’ return to the Father does not threaten the disciples with judg-
ment; but it does threaten His unbelieving adversaries. (Jn 8:21) 3) As
for the disciples, Jesus’ return makes imperative their obedience to the
new commandment of love; for mutual love makes them disciples. (Jn
13:33-35)
Jesus’ return to the Father has very different consequences for believers
and for unbelievers. Jesus’ departure will sever His connection with those
who do not believe in Him. (Jn 21:8) Those, however, who do believe in
Him will suffer only a temporary separation, because Jesus goes to pre-
pare a place for them in the Father’s heavenly mansion and will return to
conduct them there. (Jn 14:1-4) Jesus’ return to the disciples after a brief
separation will, moreover, more than make up for the sorrow which His
temporary departure and absence caused. In fact, Jesus’ return will re-
verse the positions of the disciples and the world. The world which re-
joiced at Jesus’ death will find itself grief-stricken, while the disciples will
recognize in the grief they suffered at Jesus’ temporary disappearance the
birthing of new and indestructible life. Jesus’ return in risen glory will
therefore suffuse the disciples with a joy which nothing can take from
them. (Jn 16:16-22) Jesus Himself embodies the disciples’ way to the
Father because He both incarnates divine truth and functions as the source
of divine life. (Jn 14:6-8)
The theme of Jesus’ return to the Father also blends with the theme of
pneumatic enlightenment. Jesus’ departure to the Father prepares the coming
of the “other witness.” Indeed, unless Jesus departs, She cannot come
because Jesus’ resurrection effects the mission of the divine Breath in
eschatological plentitude as the Breath of the risen Christ. (Jn 16:4b-7)
In other words, Jesus’ return to the Father transforms Him into the
Breath-baptizer and effects pneumatic enlightenment.
The last discourse describes the action of the Breath in the following
terms. As the “Breath of truth,” the “other witness” will teach the dis-
ciples to appropriate Jesus’ teachings. Hence, Jesus’ return to the Father
will inaugurate a time of more perfect instruction for the disciples. (Jn
16:23-25; cf. 14:16) Knowledge of the divine Breath will result from
receiving Her in faith and from Her divine indwelling in the disciples.
(Jn 14:17) That indwelling will cause the disciples to dwell in one an-
other through love and will reveal to them the mutual indwelling of Fa-
ther and Son. (Jn 14:20-21) The Breath’s indwelling will also inspire the
obedience of faith and will thus cause both Father and Son to dwell in the
disciples. (Jn 14:23-24)
Only dwelling in Jesus through obedience to His word insures the dis-
ciples’ fruitfulness. Cut off from Jesus and therefore from His words and
from His Breath, the disciples can only wither and die. (Jn 15:1-6) Dwell-
ing in Jesus will bear fruit, among other things, in answered prayer. (Jn
15:7-8) The fruitfulness of the disciples which manifests the divine ind-
welling also reveals their prior divine election in Christ. (Jn 15:16-17)
The “other witness” will enliven the disciples by the gift of risen life. (Jn
14:19; cf. 3:13-14, 7:37-39) She will also impart an eschatological peace
which the hostility of the world will have no power to disturb. (Jn
14:27-31) Finally, besides inspiring the disciples’ testimony before the
world, the “other witness” will also disclose to them the eschatological
future. She will speak only what the risen Christ tells Her to speak, just as
Jesus Himself spoke only what the Father told Him to speak. (Jn 16:12-15)
In its original form, the last discourse focused on the relationship of
the “other witness” to the disciples. Those sections of the expanded dis-
course which deal with the “other witness” focus more on Her confronta-
tion with the world. That confrontation, however, involves the disciples,
since She confronts the world by inspiring the disciples’ witness to Jesus.
She witnesses in their witness.
In this context, the expanded discourse makes the following doctrinal
points. Because discipleship unites one to Jesus, it attracts the world’s
violent hostility. The world persecuted Jesus unjustly and without rea-
son. Hence, His disciples can expect no better treatment. (Jn 15:18-27)
The “other witness” will, however, confirm the disciples’ faithful witness
to Jesus in the face of hostility, ostracism, and persecution, even unto
death. (Jn 15:25-16:4) By setting the disciples in opposition to a violent
and hostile world, their Breath-inspired testimony to Jesus causes them
to share in His passion and sacrificial death. (Jn 17:15-19)
Finally, the last discourse develops at some length a theology of divine
glory as the historical manifestation of divine splendor. The Beloved Dis-
ciple introduces the theme of glory in the preface to the last discourse.
The “hour” of Jesus’ return to the Father coincides with the Father’s glo-
rification of the Son “in Himself.” (Jn 13:1, 31-32) The appendix to the
original discourse further develops the same theme. The fruitfulness of
the disciples which results from their dwelling in Jesus gives glory to the
Father. (Jn 15:8) The testimony of the “other witness” in and through
the disciples’ own testimony to Jesus will also manifest His divine glory.
(Jn 16:14)
The theology of glory developed in the last discourse also makes the
following additional doctrinal points. The Father glorifies the Son in the
resurrection so that the Son can continue to glorify the Father through
the mission of the divine Breath. (Jn 17:1-2) The risen life which the
Breath will impart communicates a share in the divine glory. (Jn 17:1-2)
Risen life takes the form of an empowering enlightenment which enables
people to recognize the divine glory embodied in Jesus and in His testi-
mony to the Father. (Jn 17:2-4)
The paschal mystery brings the historical revelation of divine glory to
its culmination. Jesus’ glorification of the Father on earth took two forms:
a) His proclamation of the Father’s words to the disciples and b) their
acceptance of that word in faith. Jesus’ words glorify God by manifesting
that He comes from the Father and speaks in the Father’s name. (Jn 17:4-8)
The divine glory revealed in the resurrection manifests Jesus’ heavenly
glory which He possessed with the Father even before the creation of the
world. (Jn 17:4-5)
The coming of the “other witness” prolongs the revelation of the divine
glory begun in Jesus. Moreover, the Breath-inspired disciples will do greater
works than Jesus Himself. Those works, their faith, and their testimony
to the risen Christ will all manifest His glory, just as His teaching and
performance of the works given Him by the Father manifested the Father’s
glory. (Jn 14:12-16, 16:14-17, 17:9-11) The mutual indwelling in love
of all believers manifests the glory which Jesus ever possessed in heaven
before the creation of the world. (Jn 17:20-23)
The gospel of John abounds in other allusive linkages. In this section,
however, I have focused on the Beloved Disciple’s most distinctive use of
literary allusion: namely, in order to develop the same doctrine incre-
mentally across the discourses. I have argued that such incremental doc-
trinal development dramatizes the waxing of the light in its struggle against
the forces of darkness. I have also suggested that it exemplifies the Be-
loved Disciple’s most characteristic use of literary allusion. The section
which follows ponders another important thematic linkage in the fourth
gospel: namely, the theme of “open messianism.”
(III)
As we have seen, the theme of the messianic secret plays an important
role in Markan narrative Christology. It repeatedly reminds the reader
that through the gift of faith, he or she is really in the know about Jesus’
true identity as Son of God, messiah, and suffering servant. The revela-
tion of the messianic secret also dramatizes the inevitable disclosure of
the full truth about Jesus: namely, His identity as both Son of God and
suffering servant. The other synoptic evangelists, as we have seen, assimi-
late, attenuate, and reinterpret the Markan messianic secret. In none of
the synoptic gospels, however, does one find the kind of open messianism
which characterizes the fourth gospel.
In the fourth gospel, the Baptizer’s failure to recognize Jesus depicts the
latter initially as a hidden messiah. (Jn 1:31) Once, however, the Baptizer
sees the Breath of God descend on Jesus and testifies to its significance,
the messianic character of Jesus’ mission enters the public record. (Jn
1:32-34) The disciples acknowledge Jesus as the messiah from their very
first contact with Him. (Jn 1:35-51) Jesus in talking to the Samaritan
woman tells her explicitly that He is the messiah. (Jn 4:26) After Jesus’
sojourn in their midst the Samaritans have no doubt about His messianic
identity. (Jn 4:29, 42)
The Johannine Jesus proclaims His messianic identity and authority
publicly and openly. (Jn 10:24-5) During the feast of Tabernacles and in
His final Jerusalem ministry, Jesus’ adversaries debate whether or not He
is the messiah; but their refusal to acknowledge it clearly places them on
the side of the forces of darkness. (Jn 7:26-31, 41-2; 12:34) During the
trial of the man born blind, his confession of Jesus as messiah merits the
former beggar’s expulsion from the synagogue. (Jn 9:22) In the course of
the gospel narrative, three people—Nathanael, Peter, and Martha—con-
fess publicly Jesus’ messianic identity. (Jn 1:49, 6:68-9, 11:27) Finally,
the Beloved Disciple narrates the trial of Jesus before Pilate in such a way
as to transform it into the ironic, public avowal by His enemies of His
royal messianic claims. (Jn 18:28-19:22)
In both the synoptic and Johannine traditions, Jesus possesses a special
gift of discernment, an uncanny ability to read human hearts accurately.
(Mk 2:8; Mt 9:4; Lk 5:22; Jn 2:23-25) Moreover, on one occasion in the
synoptic gospels—namely, when He gives His disciples instructions for
preparing the passover meal—Jesus exhibits something like ESP. He shows
an extraordinary and accurate knowledge of events before they happen.
(Mk 14:12-16; Mt 26:1-5; Lk 22:1-6) The Beloved Disciple, however,
gives even more narrative prominence to Jesus’ foreknowledge of events.
In the Johannine tradition, Jesus’ not only unusual but almost preter-
natural knowledge of future events reveals His messianic identity. (Jn
1:47-51; 4:15-9, 39; 6:70-1) That foreknowledge includes Jesus’ advance
knowledge of the “hour” of His passion and glorification. (Jn 2:4; 7:30;
8:20; 12:23-7; 13:32; 17:1)
In this context, I find it interesting that for all his open proclamation
of Jesus as the messiah, even the Beloved Disciple feels compelled to make
it clear that Jesus Himself repudiated secular, Davidic messianism. To
Nathanael’s profession of messianic faith, Jesus replies that the disciples
have only begun to see into the mystery of His own person. That mystery
embodies depths of truth which utterly transcend Davidic messianism.
(Jn 1:51) After the multiplication of the loaves and fish, Jesus refuses to
allow the enthusiastic crowds to make Him king. (Jn 6:15) When the
Johannine Jesus enters Jerusalem, as in the synoptics, He orchestrates the
event in a way which dramatizes the fact that He comes, not as a
bone-crushing, warlike Davidic messiah, but as a humble prince of peace.
(Jn 12:14-5) Finally, in His exchange with Pilate, the Johannine Jesus
makes it quite clear that the kingdom He proclaims has nothing to do
with either worldly kingdoms or power politics. His kingdom rests in-
stead on the proclamation of the divine truth incarnate in His person.
(Jn 18:33-38a)
Paradoxically, then, in its own narrative fashion the fourth evangelist’s
open messianism makes many of the same points about Jesus’ messianic
identity as does the Markan messianic secret. Jesus confronts the reader
of the fourth gospel as messiah, but not as a Davidic messiah. His messi-
anic dignity flows rather from the divine truth which He incarnates and
to which He bears witness. As in the synoptics, in Jesus’ person the fig-
ures of messiah and suffering servant blend. The kingdom Jesus estab-
lishes has nothing to do with worldly kingdoms founded on coercion
and violence. Instead, Jesus confronts the reader as prince of peace who
establishes His peaceable kingdom by sending the sin-forgiving Breath to
reconcile humans to God and to one another.18
(IV)
This first section of volume three has argued that the gospel of John
marks a significant shift in New Testament narrative Christology: the
shift from moral to doctrinal concerns. Both John and the synoptics see
faith and practice as intimately linked. Both narrative traditions seek to
advance Christological knowing through moral assimilation to Jesus in
the power of His Breath. The synoptic writers, however, tend to present
doctrinal beliefs as the given context for moral transformation in Jesus’
18. Cf. M.W.G. Stibbe, “The Elusive Christ: A New Reading of the Fourth Gospel,”
Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 44(1991), pp. 19-38; John Painter, “Quest
in John 1-4,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 41(1991), pp. 33-70; “Quest
and Rejection Stories in John,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 36(1988),
pp.17-46.
image through baptism in His Breath. In the synoptic narratives, there-

fore, rhetorical emphasis falls on moral transformation in faith rather
than on the faith which contextualizes that transformation. The fourth
gospel switches rhetorical emphasis to doctrine. Doctrinal orthodoxy pre-
occupies the Beloved Disciple. Orthopraxis in Johannine theology ex-
pands to include orthodoxy much more explicitly than in the synoptics.
One must do the deed of faith. The Johannine Jesus harangues his unbe-
lieving adversaries again and again about His unity with the Father, His
divine pre-existence, and His right to use the divine name I AM. His
disciples assent to that truth and thus perform the deed of faith.
In the Johannine letters, the dissidents’ violation of the law of love by
departure from the community of orthodox faith proves their hetero-
doxy and lack of faith. Had they believed the truth Jesus incarnates from
the beginning, they would never have departed.
Do the doctrinal preoccupations of the fourth evangelist cause him to
write a “higher” Christology than the synoptics? In the first volume of
this study I suggested that Christologists should replace the terms “high
Christology” and “low Christology” with “good Christology” and “bad
Christology.” Good Christology takes into account all the pertinent reve-
latory evidence in formulating a Christology. Bad Christology does not.
Hence, a “high” Christology which fails finally to do justice to Jesus’
humanity qualifies as bad Christology. So does a “low” Christology which
fails to do justice to His divinity.
We need to abandon the terms “high” and “low” Christology for an-
other reason: their vagueness. Popular usage of both terms has transformed
them into “weasel words” which blur a spectrum of different meanings.
Vague terms betray the human mind into badly muddled thinking, be-
cause one cannot verify or falsify a vague hypothesis until one clarifies
what it means. All too often, however, contemporary Christologists rest
content with vagueness.
If by a “high” Christology one means a Christology which affirms the
divinity of Jesus, then Johannine Christology ranks no “higher” than syn-
optic Christology. The two traditions use a variety of narrative strategies
in order to assert Jesus’ divinity; but both make the assertion, including
the gospels of Mark and of Luke. If, however, by a “high” Christology
one means a narrative Christology which insists explicitly and strongly
on Jesus’ divine pre-existence prior to becoming human, then Johannine
Christology obviously ranks “higher” than synoptic Christology.
As we saw in volume one, the encounter with the risen Christ revealed
Him as Breath-baptizer and therefore as divine. Those who saw the risen
Christ experienced His divinity directly, through a graced and empower-
ing enlightenment. The first Christian theologians had, however, to infer
his pre-existence from His divinity. The synoptic tradition did not make
that inference explicitly; the Johannine did. So does any “good” contem-
porary Christology.
If, moreover, by “high” Christology one means a Christology which
projects into Jesus’ humanity traits which would seem to belong properly
only to God, then Johannine Christology again ranks “higher” than syn-
optic Christology. This aspect of Johannine Christology causes, however,
more problems than it solves.
In both the synoptic and Johannine traditions the humanity of Jesus
reveals His divinity. In the synoptics, Jesus in his cosmological miracles
does what only God can do: He calms the waters of chaos and walks
upon the waves. Jesus does the same in the Johannine tradition; but, in
addition, the Johannine Jesus throughout His ministry displays an ex-
traordinary human awareness of His personal divinity and of His
pre-existence with the Father. The Jesus of the fourth gospels speaks ha-
bitually from the atemporal standpoint of the paschal mystery. He also
exhibits a more detailed knowledge of the future than does the Jesus of
the synoptics. These shifts in narrative rhetoric reflect the Beloved Disciple’s
passionate concern to vindicate Jesus’ divinity.
I shall consider these doctrinal issues in the following section when I
examine the question of Jesus’ human consciousness. Here it suffices to
note that the fourth gospel raises in a narrative context a speculative ques-
tion which narrative theology itself cannot solve: namely, the question of
“the communication of traits (communicatio idiomatum).”
The question of the “communication of traits” asks: Can one predicate
of the humanity of Jesus traits which belong properly only to the divin-
ity? By the same token, can one predicate of the divinity traits which
belong properly to the humanity? It would take generations for the fa-
thers of the Church even to formulate this question with any logical clar-
ity. It would take theologians even longer to come up with a plausible
answer.
Narrative Christology cannot answer the question of the communica-
tion of traits because the question raises a logical issue. Narrative Christo-
logy, however, eschews logical thinking for intuitive thinking. It there-
fore lacks the speculative tools to answer a very vexing question which
Johannine Christology by its narrative structure begins inchoately to raise.
When narrative patterns of thinking raise logical questions which they
themselves cannot answer, then they have reached the theological limits
of what narrative can accomplish. Appropriately, then, the fourth gospel
brings this consideration of New Testament narrative Christology to a
close.
In the following section, I shall reflect inferentially on Christological
doctrine. There I shall address the issue of the communication of traits.
Its satisfactory resolution, however, presupposes the prior satisfactory reso-
lution of a host of other doctrinal issues of extraordinary complexity.

Chief among them, of course, ranks the question of the hypostatic union
and what it might mean in a contemporary context.
Here perhaps it suffices to note what the Beloved Disciple’s doctrinal
preoccupations have done to gospel narrative. The synoptic Jesus with
considerable historical plausibility calls people to repentance and to sub-
mission to the practical demands of life under God’s reign. The Johannine
Jesus, by contrast, spends His entire public career discoursing to unbe-
lieving “Jews” about the doctrinal issues which divided the Johannine
community and which caused its expulsion from the synagogue. As a
consequence, the Johannine portrait of Jesus loses historical credibility
through anachronism. The historical implausibility of the Johannine por-
trait of Jesus dramatizes, as a consequence, the awkwardness of using
gospel narrative in order to resolve post-resurrection doctrinal debates.
The same awkwardness nudges the theological mind to abandon intui-
tive forms of thinking for inferential reflection on Christological and
trinitarian doctrine.
The fourth gospel brings one to the threshold of patristic theology in
yet another way. It dramatizes the intimate connection between Christo-
logical and trinitarian thinking.
In the first volume of this study I suggested that the current Christo-
logical crisis results in part from theologians’ failure to pursue Christo-
logy and trinitarian theology simultaneously. These two doctrinal strains
developed in tandem during the patristic era. As a consequence, no refor-
mulation of either does justice to the Christian tradition unless it suc-
cessfully coordinates both doctrines. In the doctrinal section of this study
which follows, I shall attempt to overcome this particular deficiency in
contemporary Christological thinking.
Nor can one do justice to Johannine theology unless one coordinates
Christological with trinitarian doctrine. Johannine narrative deals bril-
liantly with both. The Christomonism of contemporary theological think-
ing has focused far too narrowly on the alleged “highness” of Johannine
Christology. Commentators have misinterpreted that “highness” to mean
that among the four gospels only the last asserts the divinity of Jesus
unambiguously. In fact, all four evangelists assert the divinity of Jesus
clearly to anyone attuned to intuitive, narrative forms of expression. The
Beloved Disciple differs from the synoptic evangelists, not in asserting
Jesus’ divinity, but in insisting that Jesus’ divinity necessarily implies His
divine pre-existence.
Anyone who equates these two statements needs to study logic because
they confuse a premise with its conclusion. The divinity of Jesus func-
tions as the premise. That divinity entails as its logical consequence Jesus’
divine pre-existence. The apostles experienced Jesus as a divine reality in
His resurrection appearances; but the apostolic Church had to infer Jesus’
pre-existence because in this world one has no experiential access to it.
As I have already indicated, the Beloved Disciple insisted on Jesus’
pre-existence because he recognized the need to co-ordinate Christological
and trinitarian faith. Besides vindicating Jesus’ divine pre-existence, how-
ever, the fourth evangelist also hammered out terminology for talking
about the unity and trinity of God which anticipated some of the best
insights of patristic trinitarian theology.
The Beloved Disciple recognized the presence in the Christian Godhead
of three distinct personal realities: the Father, the Son, and the Breath,
whom he also called “the other Witness.” The fourth evangelist also de-
veloped a language for speaking about the unity of the members of the
divine triad. They all qualify as “God”. They share an identity of life
which John calls “Breath (pneuma).” One becomes a child of God when
the indwelling Breath communicates to one a share in that same divine
pneuma.
The fathers of the Church will replace these Johannine terms with more
abstract philosophical categories. They will call Father, Son, and Breath
“hypostaseis,” and they will replace the terms “God” and “Breath” with
“ousia.”The fourth evangelist, however, first made these theological dis-
tinctions, even though he used Biblical language in order to do so.
Moreover, in what concerns trinitarian theology, the Beloved Disciple
did more than recognize the need to find a way of talking both about
three distinct realities in the Christian God. He also formulated a theo-
logical explanation for the divine unity. Divine unity results from the
mutual indwelling of Father, Son, and Breath. Moreover, the Beloved
Disciple seems to have derived this explanation from reflection on the
indwelling of the risen Christ in the Christian community through His
mission of the “other witness.”
Maximus the Confessor and John of Damascus would call that ind-
welling “perichoresis.” The council of Ferrara-Florence would canonize it
as a legitimate way of conceiving the unity of the trinity. (DS 1331) Nev-
ertheless, the fourth evangelist first thought up the idea. Substance phi-
losophy finds the idea of mutual indwelling virtually unintelligible, since
substances by definition cannot exist in one another as in a subject of
inhesion. Nevertheless, in what follows I shall argue that “mutual ind-
welling” provides the best way of conceiving the unity of the trinity. As
we shall see, the mutual existence of the divine persons in one another
effects in them an identity rather than a mere similarity of life. Moreover,
I shall show that mutual indwelling becomes thinkable when one shifts
from a metaphysics of substance to a relational metaphysics of experi-
ence.
I shall return to these doctrinal considerations in the section which

follows. Here it suffices to note that the Beloved Disciple recognized be-
fore any other Christian thinker the need to coordinate Christological
and trinitarian thinking. He also effected that coordination with genuine
brilliance. In Johannine theology, the incarnation reveals the trinity at
the same time that the trinity contextualizes the incarnation. Moreover,
the Beloved Disciple articulated a Biblical language for speaking consis-
tently about both mysteries.
These Johannine insights mark a significant doctrinal advance over syn-
optic Christology. As a consequence, Johannine narrative Christology
forces doctrinal Christologists to face at an inferential level the insights
which the Beloved Disciple reached intuitively. Doctrinal Christology
must find a logically consistent way of speaking both about the Word
made flesh and about the divine, triune reality which He reveals. To these
complex issues I turn in the section which follows.
Part 2
Doctrinal Christology
Chapter 6
Issues in Post-Chalcedonian Christology
In the third chapter of volume one, I proposed testing the capacity of
foundational theology to provide an adequate speculative basis for re-
solving the current Christological crisis. Foundational theology derives
its criteria for doctrinal orthodoxy from a strictly normative insight into
the forms and dynamics of conversion.
Conversion, as we have seen, comes in five forms. Affective conversion
seeks to make intuitive beliefs psychologically responsible by promoting
healthy emotional development. Intellectual conversion measures the truth
or falsity of both intuitive and inferential judgments about reality as well
as the adequacy or inadequacy of the frames of reference in which the
mind reaches those judgments. Personal moral conversion measures the
extent to which decisions about interpersonal relationships respect hu-
man rights and duties. Socio-political conversion measures the decisions
which shape institutional policy by the extent to which they promote the
common good. Religious conversion measures human responses to the his-
torical self-revelation of God by their conformity to the demands of that
self-revelation. Christian conversion finds the reality of God normatively
but not exhaustively revealed in Jesus and in the Breath He sends.
Both a metaphysics of experience and the five forms of conversion struc-
ture the argument of the foundational Christology developed in these
three volumes. Foundational Christology asks: How does commitment to
Jesus Christ as the normative historical self-revelation of God transvalue in
faith the other four forms of conversion? One form of conversion transval-
ues another by causing one to re-evaluate it in the light of a novel frame
of reference. Christian conversion transvalues the other forms of conver-
sion in the frame of reference created by faith in the God historically
revealed in Jesus Christ and in His Holy Breath.
As Christian conversion transforms an initial global commitment of
religious faith into a psychologically responsible, intuitive perception of
the future, Christian conversion infuses into human experience the theo-
logical virtue of hope. Volume one derived a normative insight into
Christological hope from Pauline theology and from the book of Revela-
tion.
226 Part 2: Doctrinal Christology
As Christian conversion transforms an initial global faith into the in-

tuitive and inferential beliefs which intellectual conversion renders meth-
odologically responsible, Christian conversion infuses into human expe-
rience the theological virtue of faith. The narrative Christology devel-
oped in volume two and in the first part of this volume studied the intui-
tive dimensions of Christological faith.
The doctrinal Christology developed in this section endows Christo-
logical hope and faith with inferential precision. Like narrative Christo-
logy, therefore, doctrinal Christology deals with religious beliefs. Doctri-
nal Christology, however, advances beyond intuitive expressions of Christo-
logical faith by coordinating felt intuitive judgments about the God re-
vealed in Jesus Christ with logically formulated inferential judgments
about the same divine reality.
Traditionally, doctrinal Christology treats two interrelated issues: the
person of Jesus and His saving work. Doctrinal reflection on the person
of Jesus must deal one way or the other with Chalcedonian Christology.
Doctrinal Christology must also coordinate its account of Jesus’ person
with its account of the triune God whom Jesus and the paschal mystery
reveal.
The first three chapters of this section deal with the doctrine of Jesus’
person. The remaining chapters deal with the doctrine of His saving work.
As we shall see, when one approaches the work of Jesus with pragmatic
logic, it clarifies the doctrine of His person and renders it practical.
Any fallible, rational Christological hypothesis requires validation. Be-
fore one can verify or falsify any hypothesis, one needs to clarify it by
explicitating its operational consequences. A Christological hypothesis
seeks to interpret rationally and inferentially the proper object of all foun-
dational Christological reflections: namely, the nature of Christological
of knowing. By “Christological knowing” I mean the insight into Jesus
Christ which results from practical assimilation to Him in the power of
His Breath.
The logical, inferential interpretation of Christological knowing requires
two kinds of verification. One must verify such a theological hypothesis
both historically and morally. Let us try to understand why.
Christological knowing assimilates one to an historically revealed reli-
gious reality. Hence, logical Christological doctrines must find scholarly
verification in the historical and eschatological reality of Jesus and of the
paschal mystery. This section of volume three deals primarily with the
historical and eschatological verification of doctrinal Christology.
Christological doctrine, however, interprets a unique kind of knowing.
One knows Jesus Christ with Christological faith through practical as-
similation to Him in the power of His Breath. An historically verified
Christological doctrine insures that one has correctly interpreted the his-
Chapter 6: Issues in Post-Chalcedonian Christology 227
torical, personal, eschatological, religious norm to which Christological

knowing assimilates believers practically. The ultimate verification of a
Christological hypothesis consists, however, in the lived embodiment of
the practical consequences of this or that Christological doctrine. The
third and final section of this volume examines how one ought to go
about verifying Christological faith practically, through moral assimila-
tion to Jesus in faith and in the power of His Breath.
The historical verification of any Christological doctrine requires the
logical explicitation of its operational consequences. Its lived verification
requires putting those consequences into practice. As a consequence, the
historical verification and the practical verification of Christological doc-
trines both have an intimate relationship to one another. The historical
verification clarifies the doctrine’s operational consequences and makes it
liveable. The living of those consequences, however, provides founda-
tional Christological doctrine with its ultimate justification when it proves
that the doctrine in question does indeed foster Christological knowing.
The intimate connection between these two forms of verification drama-
tizes the inseparability of doctrinal from practical Christology. As a con-
sequence, one can interpret Christological doctrine adequately only when
one employs a sound pragmatic and relational logic of consequences.
I summarize here the Jesusology developed in volume one for two rea-
sons. First of all, having used these three volumes as Christological texts,
I know well that by the time most people reach this point in a lengthy
argument, they have largely forgotten the methodological presupposi-
tion and philosophical components of the account of Jesus’ humanity
which I developed in volume one. Second, that method and metaphysics
form an integral and constitutive part of the doctrinal argument about to
unfold. Those readers who feel that they have mastered the method and
metaphysics to which I refer may, then, prefer to skip the section which
follows. Others, I expect, will find it helpful.
This chapter, then, prepares the way for the experiential construct of
the hypostatic union developed in the following chapter. It does so in
two ways. First, it summarizes the Jesusology developed in volume one.
Second, it analyzes dialectically issues in post-Chalcedonian Christology
with which any systematic Christological doctrine must deal.
The Jesusology formulated in volume one proposes a scientifically plau-
sible, philosophical construct of Jesus’ humanity. No other Christology
in the entire history of Christian thought has ever invoked a scientifically
plausible, philosophical construct of Jesus’ humanity. That fact alone
speaks volumes about the reasons for the contemporary Christological
crisis. The Jesusology developed in volume one marks, then, an impor-
tant first in the evolution of Christological thinking. Moreover, even
though it deals with Jesusology rather than with Christology as such, a
scientifically plausible, experiential, philosophical construct of Jesus’ hu-

manity makes an important contribution to Christological doctrine:
namely, it supplies doctrinal Christology with a fallibilistically verified
understanding of Jesus’ human reality. That reality doctrinal Christology
must re-interpret inferentially in the light of the paschal mystery.
This chapter prepares the inferential formulation of an experiential
Christology in a second way: namely, it analyzes dialectically historical
issues with which an inferential interpretation of Christological knowing
must deal. In what follows, I shall examine four sets of issues: 1) those
raised by theological attempts to explain Chalcedon; 2) those raised by
rationalistic, Enlightenment Christologies; 3) those raised by neo-orthodox
Christologies and by contemporary New Testament Christology; and 4)
those raised by contemporary philosophical Christologies.
This chapter’s argument, then, divides into five parts. Part one summa-
rizes the Jesusology developed in volume one. Part two examines dialecti-
cally issues in the development of post-Chalcedonian Christology. Part
three reflects on questions posed by Enlightenment Christologies. Part
four ponders the Christological issues which Protestant neo-orthodoxy
and contemporary New Testament theology raise. Part five analyzes the
philosophical Christologies of Karl Rahner and of Edward Schillebeeckx.
The chapter which follows this one invokes criteria derived from a strictly
normative account of conversion in order to authenticate Chalcedonian
Christological doctrine. In a subsequent chapter, I propose an experien-
tial construct of the hypostatic union coordinate with the Jesusology de-
veloped in volume one. That construct will argue that in Jesus one en-
counters the finite human experience of being a divine person.
Since the incarnation reveals the trinity, chapter nine in this section
coordinates the construct of incarnation proposed in chapter eight with
an experiential construct of the trinity. Subsequent chapters in this sec-
tion deal with different aspects of Jesus’ saving work viewed as the his-
torical revelation of His person and mission.
(I)
I begin this chapter by summarizing the Jesusology developed in volume
one. I contextualized that Jesusology by pondering the issues raised by
Logos-anthropos Christology. Logos-anthropos Christology insisted that the
incarnate Son of God possesses a complete humanity. It responded to a
heterodox Logos-sarx Christology in which the divine Logos replaced Jesus’
human soul. As a result, in Logos-sarx Christology, Jesus’ humanity con-
sisted only of a physical body.
As we saw, Arius endorsed a heterodox, Logos-sarx understanding of the
incarnation. In response, the Logos-anthropos Christology developed by
the Cappadocian fathers and by other patristic thinkers reappropriated
and developed Origen’s insight that Jesus possessed a complete human

nature: a human soul as well as a human body. Among the Latin fathers,
Hilary of Poitiers, Jerome, and Gaius Marius Victorinus developed simi-
lar doctrines. Hilary, however, began the doctrinal divinization of Jesus’
humanity which would one day culminate in the inflated Christologies
of the middle ages.
The council of Chalcedon, as we saw, endorsed the general thrust of
Logos-anthropos Christology. It taught that Jesus has a complete human
nature (physis). In the incarnate Son of God’s person (hypostasis) the hu-
man nature co-exists with the divine nature (physis) without blending
into some kind of third reality.
The council of Chalcedon was groping for a creedal formula which
would heal the rupture in the Church which resulted from the excom-
munication of Nestorius, the patriarch of Antioch. At the council of
Ephesus, Cyril, patriarch of Alexandria, led the attack upon Nestorius. A
council of reconciliation, Chalcedon deliberately avoided endorsing any
particular philosophical understanding of the key terms of its Christo-
logical creed: namely, hypostasis and physis. Nor did the council explain
how the hypostasis brings together divinity and humanity without blend-
ing them into a third reality. The council’s vagueness invited further specu-
lation on the precise significance of its teachings.
Chalcedon, then, contented itself with setting general linguistic pa-
rameters for future discourse about the incarnation. It demanded that,
however one may choose to define “hypostasis” and “physis,” Christologists
who claim to express the shared faith of the Church must speak of only
one subsistent divine reality in the Word made flesh. The council also
required that orthodox Christology portray that subsistent reality as both
fully divine and fully human. Finally, Chalcedon prescribed that
Christologists in the future avoid blending divinity and humanity into
some fictive “theandric” reality, as indeed the monophysites had.
Chalcedon, in other words, left it to subsequent theological speculation
to clarify the meaning of the catechetical formulas it endorsed.1
Some of the theologians who propounded a Logos-anthrôpos Christo-
logy displayed more philosophical ambition. I suggested in volume one
1. Cf. R.V. Sellers, The Council of Chalcedon: A Historical and Doctrinal Survey (London:
S.P.C.K., 1953); Marcelo Merino, “El Articulo Christologico del Simbolo
Constantinopolitano en los Credos Orientales de Siglo IV” in Christo Hijo de Dios y
Redentor del Hombre, pp. 477-498. For the post-Chalcedonian theological reflection
which culminated in Constantinople II, see: Eugene M. Ludwig, O.F.M.,
Neo-Chalcedonism and the Council of 553 (Berkeley, CA: Doctoral Dissertation/The
Graduate Theological Union, 1983). Constantinople II asserted more explicitly than
Chalcedon the identity of the hypostatic reality incarnate in Jesus and the second
person of the trinity. See also: G.L.C. Frank, “The Council of Constantinople II as a
Model Reconciliation Council,” Theological Studies, 52(1991), pp. 636-650.
that the Platonic account of human nature toward which patristic Logos-
anthrôpos Christology gravitated endorsed five philosophical fallacies which
any contemporary account of the human must avoid:
1) Logos-anthrôpos Christology tended to acquiesce in substantial dual-
ism. Like good Platonists, patristic theologians tended to understand
humanity as two essentially distinct kinds of substance mysteriously united
into a single subsistent reality: a spiritual substance, or soul, and a mate-
rial substance or body. A credible contemporary account of Jesus’ hu-
manity must avoid this and all other dualistic patterns of thinking. Dual-
ism exemplifies a logical fallacy because it so conceives of interrelated
realities as to render their relationship to one another unintelligible.
2) The defenders of Logos-anthrôpos Christology understood Christo-
logical doctrine soteriologically. They saw that the historical incarnation
of God reveals simultaneously two things: the reality of God and the way
humans must live if they hope to experience saving union with the divine
reality. Unfortunately, however, the fathers in question tended to inter-
pret the reality of God in the light of the cosmic dualism which Platonic
thinking popularized. They conceived of God as essentially spiritual and
immaterial. They therefore tended to perceive saving union with God as
the spiritualization of human nature.
In volume one, I argued that a credible contemporary account of Jesus’
humanity must avoid sundering spirit dualistically from matter. In the
account of Jesus’ humanity, therefore, I avoided altogether the terms
“spirit” and “matter.”
3) The philosophical conception of the human which the proponents
of Logos-anthrôpos Christology popularized lapsed into yet a third kind of
dualism: namely, operational dualism. This third form of dualism im-
plied the other two. Having divided humanity into a spiritual soul and a
material body and having defined the reality of God as essentially spiri-
tual, Platonizing patristic theologians tended to endow the essentially
spiritual powers of the soul, the intellect and the will, with privileged
access to God.
I argued that a plausible, contemporary understanding of humanity
needs to avoid operational dualism along with cosmic and substantial
dualism. With hints from the North American philosophical tradition, I
sidestepped dualism by conceiving the humanity of Jesus in relational
philosophical categories; and, as I just indicated, I also deliberately avoided
using the terms “spirit” and “matter” in describing human experience. In
what follows, I shall also avoid them in describing the reality of the triune
God.
4) The proponents of Logos-anthrôpos Christology failed to develop an
adequate understanding of the meaning of “person.” They used the term
“hypostasis” in order to designate the particular subsisting reality we call
Jesus, the Son of God and second member of the divine triad; but they
left the term deliberately vague. The vagueness reflected in part a pro-
found suspicion of the rationalizing tendencies which had produced the
Arian heresy and which marked Arian polemic. Orthodox theology, even
when informed by philosophical presuppositions, tended by contrast to
insist on the ultimately mysterious character of the central realities of
Christian faith. Such insistence demanded that theologians approach
Christian doctrine contemplatively and reverently, not rationally and ar-
rogantly.
Any sound Christology needs, of course, to approach the mystery of
the Word made flesh reverently and prayerfully. In the end, however, any
adequate, contemporary, doctrinal Christology needs to come up with a
plausible inferential account of the meaning of “humanity” and of “di-
vinity.” It must also propose a credible descriptive definition of “person”;
for until one clarifies the meaning of these key Christological terms, one
cannot even begin to formulate an account of how humanity and divin-
ity relate to one another in the person of Jesus.
As we have already seen, much of the muddle in contemporary Christo-
logical thinking results from the lack of such terminological precision. It
also flows from logical muddle: namely, from half-baked hypotheses whose
unacceptable consequences go unexplored by those who formulate them.
5) Finally, the authors of Logos-anthropos Christology all tended to en-
dorse the philosophical fallacy called “essentialism.” They did so because
they thought like Greeks and because Greek philosophy, especially
Platonism and Aristotelianism, projected a world-view which assumed
that reality must resemble an unchanging idea, or essence.
I argued in volume one that an adequate contemporary understanding
of humanity must avoid all forms of philosophical essentialism. The con-
struct of human experience which I developed recognized the existence
of essences but refused to confuse them with principles of being. Rather
an “essence” means an evaluation abstracted from the reality evaluated
and the one doing the evaluation. Essences, in other words, function in
the way in which one perceives reality; they do not constitute the “what”
of perceived reality. Tendencies and decisions do.
I also proposed in volume one that, besides avoiding the fallacies of
Logos-anthropos Christology, any contemporary reformulation of the
meaning of humanity needs to avoid the extreme pessimism of classical
Protestant interpretations of human nature. It also needs to repudiate the
extreme optimism of a neo-Thomistic construct of the human.
Classical Protestantism erred in endorsing Augustine’s pessimistic doc-
trine of human nature. According to Augustine, sin so vitiates human
choice that one lacks the freedom to desire anything good or virtuous
without divine grace. Augustine insisted on the liberating effects of grace.
By that he meant that grace alone empowers one to choose the good; but
he left it vague whether or not a human nature determined to vice by its
corruption or to virtue by grace still enjoys freedom of choice.
Systematizing Augustinians, both Luther and Calvin insisted that an
Augustinian understanding of human nature in fact ruled out in prin-
ciple all freedom of choice. In classical Protestantism, either grace or the
devil rides the will and determines its choices. Moreover, Calvin made
the total depravity of human nature into the only legitimate lens for view-
ing theologically the incarnation of the Son of God. Only an incarnation
of God could undo the ravages of sin and purify through the action of
divine grace a fallen and completely polluted world.
During the Reformation, Catholics and Protestants agreed on the utter
necessity of grace; but they conceived human nature very differently. They
therefore also disagreed about how nature and grace relate. The council
of Trent eschewed Augustinian pessimism and endorsed the more mod-
erate medieval view that human nature, left to itself, can, despite its sin-
fulness, nevertheless perform some morally good acts.
As we saw in volume one, for a variety of historical reasons, Catholic
theology has tended to endorse a Thomistic formulation of medieval an-
thropological optimism. Transcendental Thomism especially has devel-
oped that optimism to indefensible extremes. Transcendental Thomism
finds in the spiritual power of the active intellect an insatiable craving for
Being, for Goodness, for Truth. As a consequence, the human intellect
allegedly enjoys a virtual infinity which endows it with an “unrestricted
desire to know.” Transcendental Thomism interprets theologically the
virtual infinity of the spiritual intellect and will either as “a natural desire
for the beatific vision” or as “a supernatural existential.”
In volume one, I argued that any adequate philosophical construct of
humanity needs to interpret the results of contemporary scientific inves-
tigations of the human. Those results belie virtual intellectual infinity.
Instead, they tend to substantiate the radical finitude of all human cogni-
tion. Ego inertia rather than an insatiable thirst for Truth and Being typi-
fies human cognitive behavior.
A Thomistic portrait of humanity also endorses two indefensible dual-
isms: operational and cosmic dualism. Operational dualism characterizes
some human powers as essentially spiritual and others as essentially or-
ganic and material. As a consequence, operational dualism cannot ex-
plain the sensory origins of spiritual knowledge. Cosmic dualism defines
eternity and time in such a way as to make their relationship to one an-
other inconceivable. Moreover, despite Thomistic metaphysical insistence
on the act of being, a Thomistic metaphysical anthropology still sub-
scribes to an indefensible Aristotelian essentialism.
In what concerns Christology, the inflated understanding of human

nature promoted by Thomism gave rise in the middle ages to a corre-
spondingly inflated Christology in which grace “divinized” the humanity
of Jesus in unacceptable ways. In a Thomistic account of the incarnation,
the human intellect of Jesus, like all other human intellects, has a natural
desire for perfect union with God. Aquinas also fallaciously endorsed the
Augustinian identification of the second person of the trinity with the
mind or intellect of God. He therefore concluded that the immediate
personal union of Jesus’ human intellect with the subsisting divine intel-
lect meant that from the first moment of His conception Jesus enjoyed
the beatific vision. As I have already indicated in the first volume, con-
temporary theologians generally reject this inflated account of Jesus’ graced
human experience.In my judgment, a defensible contemporary account
of human nature needs in addition to claim the middle ground between
classical Protestant pessimism and classical Thomistic optimism.
I found a genuine, if flawed, insight in the theological understanding
of human nature defended by Jonathan Edwards. This American theo-
logical genius distanced himself from classical Protestant pessimism by
arguing that human nature, left to itself, can indeed choose naturally
good things; but he also argued that without the assistance of God’s Breath,
human nature, left to its own resources cannot love in fact with the uni-
versality which the gospel requires, even if it aspires to the ideal of univer-
sal human benevolence. While I disagree with the logical terms on which
Edwards argued this position and with its deterministic, predestinationist,
and rigoristic connotations, such an understanding of human nature and
of the practical workings of divine grace nevertheless rings true to my
experience and accords with results of social psychology. Humans tend
spontaneously to care for their own; but they do not spontaneously reach
out to the alien and the stranger. Nor do they spontaneously love and
forgive their enemies. They do not spontaneously welcome the suffering
demanded by embracing the atoning love of Christ.
The violence in the streets of the United States, the contempt of
right-wing conservatives for the suffering of the poor, the genocide in
Bosnia-Herzogovina, the tribal massacres in Rwanda, the prevalence of
racism, classism, sexism, and other such perennial human follies in every
human culture tend, to my thinking, to bear out the truth of Edwards’s
suggestion. Accordingly in volume one, I proposed that we understand
human nature, not as virtually infinite, but as radically finite. The hu-
man heart can indeed love limited natural goods; but it cannot love with
the universal love of charity without the help of divine grace. Contempo-
rary children of Adam and Eve forgive their enemies, real or imagined,
no more spontaneously than Cain.
Toward an Experiential Christology
Foundational Christological method requires a contemporary Christo-
logy to advance in an inculturated manner. Inculturated thinking pro-
motes the enactment of Christianity in the symbol systems derived from
the particular culture which Christianity addresses. Inculturated theol-
ogy uses the gospel to challenge the sinfulness of that culture. Finally, a
balanced inculturated theology acknowledges the contemporary interna-
tionalization of culture and enters into dialogue with other cultural ex-
pressions of the faith propounded elsewhere in the Church universal.
I responded to the need to develop an inculturated Christology by pro-
posing a construct of human nature broadly derived from the North
American philosophical tradition. In the development of classical North
American philosophy, “experience” functions as a central, unifying cat-
egory. I therefore proposed that we understand Jesus’ humanity in the
broader philosophical context of a fallibilistic metaphysics of experience.
The American philosophical tradition has produced two irreconcilable
philosophical constructs of experience: one di-polar, subjectivistic, and
nominalistic; the other, triadic, social, and realistic. The “turn to experi-
ence” in contemporary theology tends to endorse di-polar nominalism.
Di-polar nominalism cannot, however, account for human religious ex-
perience because it reduces the object of all knowledge to concrete sensibles.
Because of its subjectivism, experiential nominalism also fails finally to
account for the social dimensions of experience. These inadequacies point
to another fallacy which any sound philosophical anthropology must
avoid: namely, nominalism in all of its speculative expressions.
In what concerns Jesus of Nazareth, volume one argued for the legiti-
macy of invoking a triadic, realistic, social construct of experience in or-
der to interpret His humanity. I defined experience as a process com-
posed of relational elements called feelings. I suggested that in the higher
forms of experience one can detect three kinds of feelings, or relation-
ships: evaluations, or particular intentional relationships; decisions, or
concrete, social and environmental relationships, and tendencies, or the
continuously spreading, general, habitual inclinations to decide or to evalu-
ate in a particular manner. Habitual tendencies orient the acting self to-
ward its future at the same time that decisive environmental impact con-
stitutes its immediate past.
I then developed a descriptive, philosophical phenomenology of hu-
man experience. First I explored the realm of evaluation. Human evalua-
tive responses begin in sensations, which by their emotive coloring, give evi-
dence of grasping, however vaguely, the vectoral tendencies present in things.
Evaluation becomes conscious when humans distinguish between their
own bodies and their surrounding environments. When that distinction
fades from consciousness, we go to sleep. Conscious evaluation focuses
finite human awareness; but it also shades into pre-conscious and uncon-
scious perceptions.
As human evaluative response to reality develops, the emotive dimen-
sions of experience disclose more adequately the nature of perceived ten-
dencies. They do so in an initial way in cognitive emotional responses
like fear, joy, anger, love, affection. They do so eventually in judgments of
feeling which terminate imaginative and deliberative forms of thinking.
Memories, images, and creative fantasy endow intuitive thinking with
greater scope and clarity. The lyric voice communicates personal responses
to reality. The narrative voice grasps reality through story.
Intentional continuity links intuitive, imaginative perceptions and in-
ferential thinking. Inferential thinking begins with constructing hypoth-
eses; and hypothetical thinking advances imaginatively and intuitively
even though it concludes to the initial logical classification of data in
need of rational explanation. That classification assumes that the behav-
ior of the data in question obeys certain laws which justify the definitions
one assigns when one hypothesizes. Columbus, for example, allegedly
inferred the roundness of the world from the way in which masted ships
appeared on the horizon.
Deductive inference reasons that, if one has classified the data in ques-
tion correctly, then other facts, not yet in evidence will appear if the law
which grounds one’s initial hypothesis holds true in reality. Hypothesis,
then, concludes to a way of classifying things. Deduction concludes to
predicted facts. Columbus, for example, inferred deductively that, if the
laws of nature had made the world round, then he could reach the “ori-
ent” by sailing west.
Inductive inference argues that the appearance of deductively predicted
evidence justifies belief in the reality of the laws which grounded one’s
original hypothesis. Induction, then, concludes to the reality of a ten-
dency in the nature of things. Those, for example, who first circumnavi-
gated the globe finally proved that, in conceiving the world as round,
Columbus had correctly understood how the laws of nature operate in
shaping planet earth.
Deliberative reasoning takes aesthetic, practical, and prudential forms.
One deliberates about possible decisions. Those decisions can fix either
intuitive or inferential beliefs. Then the mind deliberates aesthetically
(and intuitively) or speculatively (and inferentially). Decisions can also
and often do respond physically to some decisive environmental stimu-
lus. Then the mind deliberates either practically or prudentially. Delib-
eration can engage both inferential and intuitive beliefs; but in the end it
reaches a felt, intuitive judgment of feeling about the best way to deal
with a concrete situation.
The creative imagination holds the key to human evaluative response.

Imaginative creativity inspires healthy, flexible living, art, and literature.
It creates new speculative hypotheses. It brings confused or conflicted
situations to satisfactory, creative resolution.
Human evaluation exhibits, therefore, a continuum of human inten-
tional responses which expand from sensation, to emotion, to imagina-
tive thinking, to the three forms of rational inference, to deliberation.
Evaluation also endows experience with presentational immediacy. By
that I mean that evaluation defines the way in which the mind become
experientially present to its world and the world to it.
As a consequence, evaluation grounds the human experience of real
time. Sensations make the impact of the world upon the human organ-
ism initially present to it and the human organism present to its world.
Emotional response perceives more or less clearly, more or less vaguely,
the tendencies present in things. They therefore endow intuitive forms of
thought with a perceived, possible future. Imagination clarifies intuitively
what emotions perceive vaguely. Memories make the past present. Hypo-
thetical inference endows intuitive perceptions with initial logical preci-
sion; and in the process hypothetical thinking makes one present to real-
ity in a new way. In deductive thinking the hypothetical present becomes
a predicted future. In the verification or falsification of a deductive pre-
diction, the anticipated future either itself becomes present or yields to a
different kind of present reality. Deliberation makes possible futures real
and actual.
Having explored the realm of evaluation descriptively, I next attempted
to describe the realm of fact, or of decisive activity. I argued that deci-
sions express the evaluations they terminate. Hence, evaluation defines
the character of a decision. In the experiences of living things, which
exhibit habit-taking powers, decisions also either create new habits of
behavior or re-enforce old habits. Decisions also link experiences envi-
ronmentally and socially.
Decisions exhibit a transactional, collaborative, or coercive character.
Transactions involve decisive give and take. Collaboration focuses the
decisions of a group on a common goal. Coercion forces decisions on
others irrespective of their own desires. Decisions, then, reshape the world
either in life-enhancing or in oppressive ways.
Habit, the generalized tendency to act in a specific way, defines the
reality of the emerging self viewed philosophically as a developing experi-
ence. Autonomously functioning tendencies qualify as selves. By “au-
tonomy” I mean the capacity to initiate one’s own activity. Selves, how-
ever, do not have habits; they consist of a developing, continuously spread-
ing complex of habitual tendencies. In other words, each finite self exem-
plifies an historically and environmentally conditioned complex of ten-
dencies to react or to respond in identifiable ways. Living, habitual com-

plexes grow incrementally and continuously through decision, which ei-
ther creates a new habit or re-enforces an old one. Persons have the ca-
pacity to act with self-conscious responsibility. Things do not. One reacts
to things. One ought to respond to persons as persons.
Evaluations enjoy particularity, since every evaluative response simply
is what it is; but evaluations become individual, partially generalized, or
universal through intentional use. Actions endow experience with con-
creteness. They make it this rather than that. Tendencies endow experi-
ence with real generality. They orient it toward a future. Since particular-
ity, concreteness, and real generality defy descriptive reduction to one
another, the three modes of experiencing exemplify irreducible but inter-
related realms of experience.
Different kinds of experiencing selves exhibit different kinds of ha-
bitual behavior. Emerging, finite selves which act with self-conscious re-
sponsibility experience conversion. We call such selves “human persons.”
I define a person as a specific kind of autonomously functioning reality.
“Autonomy” is an adverb metaphorically transformed into a noun. “Au-
tonomy” describes, not a thing, but the way a habit or tendency operates.
A tendency functions autonomously if it initiates its own behavior.
The possession of autonomy transforms a tendency into a self. Dogs,
cats, minerals, and trees all qualify as selves because they initiate their
own activity. The chemicals which make up the bodies of dogs, cats, and
trees do not, however, function autonomously. Instead, they function as
integral parts of the autonomous reality we call a dog, a cat, or a tree.
Dogs, cats, and trees qualify as selves; but they do not qualify as persons
because they do not act with the kind of self-conscious responsibility
which characterizes converted personal behavior.
Autonomy qualifies the realm of tendency. Moreover, autonomy re-
mains incommunicable. No one can decide or evaluate for me. No one
can do my physical growing or learning for me. I must make my own
deliberative choices and live with their consequences. I need to do these
things, otherwise they will not happen. The incommunicability of autonomy
will become extremely important when we try to understand the hypostatic
union.
The tendencies which constitute a personal human self endow it with
real and vital continuity within development. The habits learned in child-
hood continue to condition the way in which the adult behaves.
Besides autonomous functioning and vital continuity, human persons
also manifest a capacity for critical, self-conscious activity. They can re-
flect on what they have done and measure their actions by norms, prin-
ciples, and ideals which they have interiorized. The five forms of conver-
sion mediate such an interiorization.
Humans become fully personal only through relationship with other

persons. Children must grow to personal, adult maturity in families which
nurture them. We tend to learn mimetically, by imitating others although
we learn in other ways as well. Interpersonal relationships exemplify the
relational character of experience.
The irreducibly social character of experience makes the institutional-
ization of experience inevitable. Institutions consist of groups of people
habitually acting in socially sanctioned ways. Through social interaction,
institutions exist within personal experience and condition the way in
which people respond to reality. They therefore help create and consti-
tute the emerging person.
Conversion perfects the personalization of experience. One converts
when one passes from irresponsible to responsible behavior in some realm
of experience. In volume one I described five forms of conversion: affec-
tive, intellectual, personal moral, socio-political, and religious. Christian
conversion exemplifies one kind of religious conversion.
In each form of conversion one takes responsibility for a different realm
of experience and measures it by different norms. Affective conversion
measures intuitive perception by psychological and aesthetic norms. In-
tellectual conversion measures intuitive as well as inferential beliefs by
methodological norms of truth and adequacy. Personal moral conversion
measures human interpersonal relationships by respect for rights and duties
in community. Socio-political conversion measures public policy and
practice by the common good.
I have identified seven dynamics within the total process of conver-
sion. Affective conversion animates the other forms of conversion. Intel-
lectual conversion informs and orders them. The two forms of moral
conversion help orient the other forms of conversion to realities and val-
ues which make ultimate and absolute claims. Socio-political conversion
deprivatizes the other forms of conversion at the same time that the other
four forms of conversion help authenticate socio-political conversion by
providing it with norms for measuring institutionalized justice and injus-
tice. Initial Christian conversion mediates between affective and moral
conversion by putting them in a new relationship with one another. On-
going Christian conversion transvalues the other forms of conversion in
faith.
The existence of seven dynamics within conversion implies the exist-
ence of seven counterdynamics. Each counterdynamic negates the posi-
tive fruits of the dynamic which it contradicts.
On the basis of the preceding descriptive analysis of personal experi-
ence, one can hazard a descriptive definition of the term “person.” I de-
fine a person as a dynamic, relational, autonomous reality imbued with
vital continuity and with the capacity for responsible self-understanding, for
making decisions which flow from that self-understanding, and for entering
into responsible social relationships with entities like itself.2
In volume one I distinguished between personal and communal aware-
ness. Individual human persons come to initial consciousness when they
distinguish between their own bodies and the surrounding environment
in which they act. Individual consciousness grows by distinguishing things
and seeing their relationship to one another. Unconscious human responses
fail to distinguish between the responding self and its world. The uncon-
scious mind helps organize, therefore, an interiorized world.
Communities of persons grow in consciousness by much more com-
plex processes of interpretation. When communities reach a consensus
concerning the event which founds them and the history which links
them to that event, they reach an initial sense of self-identity. Then on
the basis of that shared self-understanding communities need to decide
the ultimate and proximate goals which they want to realize together.
Having done so they must then mobilize all the gifts of those who belong
to the community in order to achieve those corporate goals. Communi-
ties will achieve such self-awareness only if they agree in advance to for-
give those members who betray it; for the refusal to forgive fragments
society and therefore destroys community. Finally, the presence or ab-
sence of conversion in a community and in the institutions which express
its shared life will also condition its level of responsible self-awareness.
Besides personal and communal awareness one must also distinguish
between autonomy and freedom. “Autonomy,” as we have seen, means
the bare capacity to initiate one’s own activity. Freedom means the ability
to act or not to act, to do this rather than that.
“Freedom” like “autonomy” exemplifies an adverb transformed into a
noun. Just as autonomy qualifies the realm of tendency, so too freedom
qualifies the way in which the realm of evaluation develops. Most funda-
mentally freedom results from the ability to distinguish consciously and
realistically among alternative modes of acting.
Evaluation specifies decision; and decision specifies in turn the tenden-
cies which it creates. Hence, the capacity to distinguish realistic alterna-
tive options determines the degree of freedom with which decisions and
tendencies develop. In other words, the kind of freedom one enjoys and
exercises derives causally from the modality of one’s evaluative response
just as autonomy, the ultimate capacity to act at all, exemplifies the way
in which tendencies shape an experience causally. A cause gives rise to
some particularity, actuality, or reality.
2. Cf. Donald L. Gelpi, S.J. The Divine Mother: A Trinitarian Theology of the Holy Spirit
(Lanham, MD: University Press of American, 1984), pp. 103-123; A. Grillmeier,
“Nature-Person-Hypostasis,” Theologia, 51(1980), pp. 734-738.
Like consciousness, on which it depends, freedom flickers. It also comes

in different kinds, depending on the specific habits one has chosen to
cultivate. One can distinguish three generic kinds of freedom. In its most
elementary exemplification freedom consists in the ability to act or not
to act, to do this rather than that. Personal conversion at an affective,
intellectual, moral, and religious level transforms elementary human free-
dom into responsible personal liberty by enabling one to live for the beau-
tiful, the good, and the true, including transcendent goodness, beauty,
and truth. Socio-political conversion further enhances human freedom
by creating environments which foster conversion at every level. Since
environments condition freedom, socio-political conversion seeks there-
fore to create social institutions which maximize responsible freedom for
both communities and individuals by institutionalizing conversion.
A finite created reality necessarily enjoys only conditioned freedom.
Environmental variables condition freedom by limiting or enhancing the
number of things among which one may choose. Conceptual variables
condition freedom because one must distinguish options evaluatively
before one can choose them freely. Perspectival variables condition free-
dom because the ability to see things from a variety of points of view
enhances one’s ability to deal with reality in a variety of ways. Habitual
variables condition freedom because one cannot choose to do something
without first learning how. Decisive variables condition freedom because
they determine the kind of satisfactions one chooses to cultivate and there-
fore the kind of freedom one opts to have.
The distinction between freedom and autonomy and their ultimate
grounding in different realms of experience will also function in an ex-
tremely important way in the explanation of the hypostatic union which
I shall soon develop. The reader should, then, keep these distinctions
carefully in mind in assessing the consistency and validity of the Christo-
logical argument developed in the following chapter.
In a metaphysics of experience, experience defines the nature of the
real and divides into what is experienced and the way in which one expe-
riences what is experienced. “Experience” transforms itself from a psy-
chological to a metaphysical category when one allows that experienced
realities stand within experience and not outside it. What is experienced
includes both decisive actions and the tendencies which ground them.
Those tendencies include both selves and persons. One’s evaluative re-
sponse to the decisive acts of experienced selves endows an experience
with its “how.”
Understood metaphysically, all experience has a symbolic structure. By
a “symbol” I mean whatever mediates the evaluative grasp of significance.
Events signify. By that I mean that they consist in actions and the ten-
dencies, the selves, which they disclose. Those selves have a dynamic rela-
tional constitution which the mind can grasp evaluatively if the mind
takes to trouble to think clearly about them. Events qualify as expressive
symbols because one can by endowing them with meaning through inter-
pretation grasp what they signify. Symbolic events, in other words, pro-
vide the significant reality which other kinds of symbols interpret
evaluatively.
Evaluative responses by interpreting events endow them with mean-
ing. Evaluations engage the whole realm of conceptual relationships from
sensation, to feeling, to imagination, to inference, to practical and pru-
dential reasoning. Unexpressed evaluations qualify as interpretative sym-
bols. Decision functions within interpretative symbols by fixing beliefs
and attitudes but without expressing them to other minds. Interpretative
symbols make no attempt to communicate to others one’s evaluative grasp
of significance.
Communications seek to express in ways which others will understand
how one responds evaluatively to events. Decision functions within com-
munication as a physical act which seeks to influence some other mind
through the intentional shaping of some kind of medium. The way we
communicate also conditions socially the way we evaluate.
The symbolic structure of experience renders it potentially social. De-
cisive acts link selves to their environment and persons to one another.
Communication makes experience actually social. Communication also
creates culture. By culture I mean all human behavior conditioned by
symbolic communication.
Institutions result from human cultural development. An institution
comes into existence when groups of persons behave habitually in so-
cially sanctioned ways.
Testing the Construct of Experience

In volume one, I proposed the preceding account of experience not as a
self-evident truth but as an hypothesis in need of testing and of verifica-
tion. I tested it philosophically in an initial way by arguing that it avoids
all the of the fallacies which have in the past led to confused thinking
about Jesus’ humanity. Specifically, it avoids substantial dualism, opera-
tional dualism, essentialism, and nominalism. When the time comes to
reflect on the trinity as a divine experience, I shall argue that this same
construct of experience also avoids cosmic dualism.3
I attempted to verify initially the construct of experience which I had
proposed by testing its ability to interpret and contextualize the results of
3. This metaphysical construct also avoids subjectivism and individualism. It avoids

subjectivism by including the object of experience within experience and by espousing
a perspectival realism. It avoids individualism by conceiving the self, its activities, and
its relationships as environmentally grounded, social, and inherently symbolic.
close scientific and clinical studies of human experience. I concluded that

the construct could do both. Moreover, in the process of verifying the
construct I was able to amplify it descriptively and reach some tentative
conclusions about Jesus’ human development.4
I drew the following conclusions about the way in which the human
experience we call “Jesus of Nazareth” plausibly developed. Among the
following numbered conclusions, one through five describe Jesus’ per-
sonal development. Numbers six through ten describe His social devel-
opment.
1) The same biological processes which underpin human development in
other persons certainly grounded and limited Jesus human development.
2) Jesus’ human mind probably developed through the cognitive stages
described by Jean Piaget. He therefore probably advanced from sensory-
motor thinking to transductive, or imaginative, thinking, and finally to
concrete operations.
The results of developmental psychology make it harder to say whether
or not Jesus developed a fully operational human mind in Piaget’s techni-
cal sense of that term. By that I mean that on the basis of present evi-
dence we find it very hard to know whether or not Jesus would have been
able to solve the kinds of rational puzzles which in Piaget’s psychology
exemplify operational thinking.
3) One can plausibly suppose that Jesus would have passed through the
first five stages of emotional development described by Erik Erickson. By
the time of Jesus’ public ministry, it also seems plausible to suppose that
He was living at stage six and was wrestling with issues of intimacy vs.
isolation. As death approached, he may well have had to struggle with
emotional issues surrounding the integrity and meaning of His life.
4) In what concerns Jesus’ moral development, one can plausibly sup-
pose that the rules of children’s games functioned for Him in His child-
hood as a symbol of larger social relationships. One can also plausibly
suppose that as He developed morally He acquired greater sensitivity to
the complexity of human moral situations.
5) One can plausibly assert that Jesus in the course of His human de-
velopment would have passed through the six stages of faith develop-
ment described by James Fowler. In other words, in early infancy, His
relationship to Mary and Joseph would have shaped his religious atti-
tudes unconsciously. Between three and seven He would have exhibited
intuitive-projective faith. Between seven and the onset of adolescence, he
would have advanced to mythic-literal faith. During adolescence He would
have advanced to synthetic, conventional faith.
4. In summarizing the results of the analysis of Jesus’ humanity, I shall not in this volume
repeat the documentation which I provided in volume one.
At some point before the start of His ministry, Jesus would have ad-
vanced through the other cognitive stages of faith; for, when we encoun-
ter Jesus in the gospels, He seems to have reached the highest cognitive
stage which Fowler describes, namely, universalizing faith. At some point
prior to the events of the gospel, Jesus would have experienced religious
conversion in the sense that he would have taken full adult responsibility
for His relationship with God. In volume one, I argued that Jesus’ con-
version, His personal transition to fully adult responsibility in every realm
of experience, need not have presupposed His sinfulness.
6) One can plausibly suppose that the infant Jesus developed some-
thing like the human self-awareness described by Daniel Stern. In other
words, He would have advanced from a vague sense of Himself as a de-
veloping neonate, to core self-awareness, and finally to linguistic
self-awareness. One can also plausibly suppose that affect attunement
between Jesus and Mary mediated His first stammering efforts to speak
Aramaic.
7) One can plausibly suppose that Jesus, like other children, learned to
interiorize the language patterns of His culture. One can also assert with
some probability that he interiorized the oral patterns of thinking of His
fellow Palestinian peasants.
8) One can suppose with very high probability that in His social matu-
ration Jesus started as a lap child, graduated to the status of a knee child,
and advanced to playing like a yard child. One can also plausibly assert
that Jesus as a school-age child received some schooling in Torah, possi-
bly at the synagogue in Nazareth and that he probably learned as an ap-
prentice his human father’s trade.
9) As he matured socially, one can plausibly suppose that Jesus ad-
vanced through something like the stages of social development described
by R.L. Selman. In other words, Jesus would have advanced from a inno-
cent, infantile egocentrism to a realization, reached between the ages of
four to nine, that others saw things from a different perspective from His
own. Between six and twelve, He would have begun to understand how
His own perspective appeared to others. Between the ages of nine and
fifteen, He would have shown the ability to view His interpersonal rela-
tionships from the standpoint of a third party. After twelve, He would
have developed the capacity to cultivate deep interpersonal relationships.
10) One can imagine with some plausibility that the male crisis of the
early thirties in part motivated Jesus’ decision to abandon His father’s
trade in Nazareth in order to listen to the preaching of John the Baptizer.
Having verified in a preliminary fashion and having expanded my con-
struct of experience by invoking the conclusions of developmental and
social psychology, I proposed a strategy for demonstrating the Christo-
logical relevance of a triadic, realistic, social construct of experience. I
tested that construct’s ability to interpret the results of the new quests for
the historical Jesus. When successful, those quests endow an experiential
understanding of Jesus’ humanity with an environmental context and
with historical concreteness. I first examined the world Jesus entered.
Then I reflected on the way in which He responded to that world.
In the first century the Roman empire cultivated a largely agrarian economy.
The aristocratic elite class and scribes could read and write; but one would
have encountered a literate peasant, like Jesus, much more rarely.
The ruling class stood at the top of the hierarchical social system which
the Roman empire enforced. Perhaps as few as five per percent of the
population, the ruling class controlled most of the imperial income.
The retainer class included imperial bureaucrats, scribes, and the army.
The retainer class as a whole guaranteed and perpetuated the power of
the ruling elite. So did the priestly class which may have accounted for
about fifteen percent of the population. Priests endowed imperial au-
thority with divine sanction.
The empire seems to have contained a small merchant class; but the
peasantry constituted the vast majority of the population. While some
peasants owned small plots of land, the majority probably farmed the
estates of rich landowners. Both classes of peasant carried brutal, insup-
portable tax burdens, and scratched out a precarious survival with the
little left them after the ruling class had taken the lion’s share of what they
produced. The artisan class to which Jesus belonged developed from the
peasantry and probably languished in even greater poverty than the peas-
ant farmers.
Slaves ranked below artisans and on the whole dragged out lives of
misery, brutality, and degradation, although some household slaves with
kindly masters enjoyed a somewhat more humane existence. The degraded
class consisted of prostitutes and unskilled workers, on the one hand, and
of the expendables, on the other: beggars, petty criminals, outlaws, pari-
ahs, and lepers. The degraded class occupied the bottom rung of the im-
perial social hierarchy.
First century Palestine seethed increasingly with social unrest. The Jewish
Herodian aristocracy and the aristocratic high priestly class aided and
abetted the Roman occupation of their homeland and sought to Helle-
nize Jewish faith and worship. The majority of Palestinian Jews, however,
remembered Judas Maccabeus’s successful battles against the Seleucids
and against their Hellenizing Jewish sympathizers. Most Jews longed for
liberation from Roman oppression. That longing took literary shape in
Jewish apocalyptic writings.
The Essenes and Pharisees both reacted against the Hellenizing laxism
of the Jewish priests and aristocrats with a form of religious rigorism. The
establishment of the Essene community predated Jesus. The Essenes or-
ganized themselves into communities which promoted a stringent read-

ing of the Law, practiced regular ritual baths, embraced celibacy, culti-
vated apocalyptic dreams of messianic revolution, and despised Jews less
rigoristic than themselves. The Pharisees sought to shore up the piety of
ordinary lay people by demanding that, in addition to the explicit moral
demands of the Torah, people adopt a variety of other traditional pious
practices which sought to guarantee the religious observances explicitly
required by the Law.
Most of the aristocratic priestly caste in Jerusalem belonged to the party
of the Sadducees. The Sadducees recognized the binding force of the To-
rah, but they resisted the rigorism of both the Pharisees and Essenes.
They denied the resurrection; and some of them yielded to Hellenizing
tendencies.
Peasant bandits roved the Palestinian countryside like wolf packs, prey-
ing on the rich with the connivance of the peasant poor. Some bandits
developed messianic aspirations. Apocalyptic peasant prophets arose from
time to time proclaiming religious messages to the oppressed masses.
Pilate, the Roman governor during’ Jesus public ministry, displayed an
administrative tendency to vacillate, although he could respond to popu-
lar unrest with acts of extreme violence and brutality. Eventually, his slaugh-
ter of his own subjects cost him his job.
The application of historical critical method to the New Testament
allows one to draw a somewhat detailed portrait of the founder of Chris-
tianity. Born into the artisan class probably about the year 6 or 7 b.c.,
Jesus probably learned His father’s trade of general handyman and prac-
ticed it in Nazareth until he left that city in order to listen to John the
Baptizer. Some evidence suggests that His parents would have inculcated
in Him a piety which scorned Hellenizing laxity. He almost certainly
spoke Aramaic as a first language; and, given the social demands of His
trade as an artisan, He could probably have gotten by in koine Greek. He
also probably learned to read the Torah in Hebrew, possibly in the syna-
gogue in Nazareth. Hasidic influences could conceivably have helped teach
Him to call God “Abba.”
Drawn to the preaching of John the Baptizer, Jesus certainly at some
point submitted to John’s baptism. Until His death Jesus seems to have
regarded John as a prophet. It would appear that John never returned the
compliment. We may take it as at least plausible that, as Luke indicates,
John denounced Herod Antipas’s many acts of oppression as well as his
adulterous marriage.
At the time of Jesus’ baptism by John or shortly thereafter, Jesus’ Abba
experience began to mature into a personal sense of religious mission.
Until the arrest, imprisonment, and assassination of the Baptizer by Herod,
Jesus may have engaged in a parallel baptismal ministry; but, if He did,
He seems to have abandoned it when He returned to Galilee to begin

proclaiming God’s reign. Jesus’ public endorsement of John the Baptizer
probably earned Him King Herod’s antipathy and could have caused Him
at times to live something like a fugitive existence.
Jesus probably believed that the reign of God which He was proclaim-
ing had already arrived in His own person, teaching, and ministry of
exorcism and faith healing. Entry into God’s reign demanded repentance
and the acceptance of the divine forgiveness which Jesus announced and
embodied. Jesus reached actively out to sinners and certainly practiced
table fellowship with them. The practice put Him on a collision course
with the Pharisees, whose rigorism He rejected. We do not know if Jesus
knew the Essenes; but given His rejection of Pharisaical rigorism and
elitism, it seems virtually certain that He would have also rejected their
more extreme embodiment in Essene piety.
Jesus, in contrast to other rabbis, almost certainly called some of His
disciples to follow Him. Unlike other rabbis, Jesus accepted woman dis-
ciples. Close disciples of Jesus had to renounce their possessions and dis-
tribute them to the poor. Close disciples also shared with Jesus from a
common purse which rich women disciples, who seem to have traveled
about with Him, regularly replenished. Jesus’ acceptance of women dis-
ciples and especially the presence of women followers in His personal
entourage would have scandalized His Jewish contemporaries.
Jesus chose twelve disciples as His close associates. His choice exempli-
fies a symbolic, prophetic act, not an ordination. A lay prophet, rather
than a levitical priest, Jesus never functioned as an ordained priest during
His mortal ministry. Nor does the historical evidence suggest that He
ever ordained anybody. Jesus’ choice of twelve men defined the purpose
of the renewal movement within Israel which He headed. It communi-
cated symbolically the fact that He was seeking to bring into existence a
new Israel, obediently submissive to God’s reign. The Twelve symbolized
the patriarchs of Jesus’ new Israel. Israel had no matriarchs. As a conse-
quence, the prophetic recall of history dictated the gender of the Twelve,
not the desire to exclude women from the Christian clergy, which, need-
less to say, did not even exist during Jesus’ lifetime. Jesus seems to have
involved the Twelve in a special way in His public ministry. He appears
also to have had a special relationship to Simon, James, and John, to
whom He probably gave ironic nicknames. He called the impetuous Simon
“the Rock (Peter)” and James and John “the sons of thunder.”
The reign of God which Jesus announced also demanded the restruc-
turing of Palestinian society on radically egalitarian lines. The reign of
God required that the weakest, most marginal, most oppressed members
of society receive preferential honor and advantage.
Jesus demanded of His disciples a radical trust in God which freed

them to share the physical supports of their lives with others, especially
with those in greatest need. The kingdom ruled out the selfish amassing
of wealth. It sought to bring into existence an open and completely in-
clusive community whose mutual sharing expressed its members’ mutual
forgiveness. That forgiveness imitated the Father’s forgiveness of sinners
and authenticated the disciples’ prayer. Jesus used parables, or stories which
sought to subvert the familiar world in which people lived in order to
open them to the new possibilities dawning in the arrival of God’s reign.
Jesus almost certainly cultivated personal prayer, although He also prob-
ably refrained from praying ostentatiously in public. He attended syna-
gogue worship and used such worship at times as the context for pro-
claiming God’s reign. He also taught outdoors and in private homes where
women and where people excluded from synagogue worship for their
sinfulness could hear Him.
Jesus, who saw John as a prophet, was Himself perceived as a prophet
and probably claimed prophetic authority for Himself and His ministry.
He seems to have seen His own ministry of proclamation, healing, and
exorcism as an assault on the kingdom of Satan. As prophet of God’s
reign, He seems to have expected to meet a violent death.
Jesus certainly restricted His ministry for the most part to Palestinian
Jews, especially the poorest and most marginal. Nevertheless, occasional
contact with sympathetic Gentiles and Samaritans of faith seems to have
led Jesus to envision the day when God’s reign would expand to include
Gentiles as well.
Jesus rejected secular, Davidic messianism with its sanction of military
violence. He seems to have believed that God’s reign must arrive
non-violently, and He sanctioned non-violent resistance to oppression.
Though perceived by some as a Davidic messiah, Jesus seems to have
resisted all pressure to become one. Jesus did, however, work miracles
and exorcise. Moreover, He probably interpreted both as signs that the
messianic age was already arriving in His own prophetic ministry.
Toward the end of His brief ministry, Jesus decided to confront Israel’s
religious leaders, the high priests in Jerusalem. He summoned them and
the people of Jerusalem to repentance and to submission to God’s reign.
He probably orchestrated His final entry into Jerusalem in order to por-
tray Himself ironically as a messiah with a difference: as a humble, peas-
ant prince of peace rather than as a warrior king.
By driving the vendors from the temple precincts, Jesus protested against
the high priest’s exploitation of the temple in order to line their already
rich pockets at the expense of the poor. He almost certainly at some time,
possibly during this final period of His ministry, prophesied the destruc-
tion of the temple because of the unrepentant religious intransigence of

Israel and especially of its priestly leaders.
Jesus seems to have foreseen that His final confrontation with the high
priests would end in His own death. At a final meal with His disciples in
Jerusalem, He gave them bread and wine as a prophetic sign of His body
and covenant blood. By that gesture He seems to have intended to por-
tray His impending death as His final self-gift to His disciples. He seems
also to have wanted to communicate to them His trust in the Father to
transform His dying into a life-giving event for them, an event which
would deepen within them their covenant commitment to God, as did
the sacrificial rite of atonement. Jesus expected, then, that His movement
would continue after His death.
As the fourth gospel suggests, the Sanhedrin quite plausibly reached a
decision about the need to get rid of Jesus prior to arresting Him. After
the arrest, the temple priests handed Him over to Pilate who crucified
Him as a messianic pretender. Jesus probably died in 30 a.d. He probably
lived into His middle thirties. His public ministry had probably lasted a
little over two years.
The preceding multi-disciplinary portrait of the humanity of Jesus as a
finite, developing human social experience deals in a systematic way with
two of the doctrinal issues which contribute to the contemporary Christo-
logical crisis. It approaches Christology in a way which takes fully into
account the historical character of Christian revelation by interpreting
history as experiential development. It also offers an historically concrete
understanding of Jesus’ humanity by incorporating the results of the new
quests for the historical Jesus into one’s understanding of that humanity.5
In this section, I have summarized the Jesusology developed in volume
one. The time as come to reflect upon the doctrinal issues raised by the
development of Chalcedonian Christology. To this dialectical analysis I
turn in the section which follows.
(II)
Until the emergence of rationalistic Enlightenment Christologies, the
teachings of the council of Chalcedon defined the fundamental doctrinal
presupposition of all Christological thinking. Chalcedon even conditions
Enlightenment Christologies despite the fact that they either deny the
personal divinity of Jesus or fail to give an adequate account of His divin-
ity; for even Enlightenment Christologies ordinarily offer an account of
how the divine and the human relate in Jesus.
In what follows, I shall first ponder the issues raised by the historical
development of orthodox Chalcedonian Christology. Next, I shall reflect
on the issues raised by Enlightenment Christologies. Finally, I shall argue
5. Cf. Wolfgang Beiler, “Der Weg Jesu: Der Verkündiger und der Verkündigte” in Die
Frage nach Jesus, pp. 69-150.
that contemporary orthodox alternatives to Enlightenment Christology

fail to deal adequately both with the issues which the latter raises and
with the issues posed by the development of Chalcedonian Christology.
Having reflected dialectically on the issues which a contemporary
re-thinking of Chalcedon requires, I shall in subsequent chapters first
authenticate Chalcedonian Christological doctrine and then propose an
experiential construct of the hypostatic union which reformulates
Chalecedon in a contemporary philosophical idiom. That reformulation
will deal with the issues raised by the development of Chalcedonian the-
ology and will correct the deficiencies in Enlightenment Christology. In
yet another chapter, I shall then coordinate an experiential Christology
with trinitarian doctrine.
Issues in Post-Chalcedonian Christology

As we have seen, Chalcedon requires that one make the divine person of
Jesus into the principle which unites His divinity and humanity without
transforming them into a third reality. Chalcedon, however, left vague
the technical definition of its key terms including the union of divinity
and humanity in Jesus. Patristic and medieval theologians offered a vari-
ety of explanations of how divinity and humanity unite in the person of
Jesus without blending into a third reality.
The principal explanations consist of the following:
1) Enhypostasis and anhypostasis;
2) the blending of hypostaseis;
3) reduction to mystery;
4) perichoresis, or mutual indwelling;
5) union by grace;
6) the substitution of divine for human dignity;
7) the actualization of humanity by divinity;
8) the incommunicability of personal existence;
9) the symbolic self-expression of the Logos in history.
Let us consider each of these solutions in turn.
1) Enhypostasis and Anhypostasis. Until recently, scholars credited
Leontius of Byzantium (485-543 a.d.) with formulating an enhypostatic
Christology. Enhypostatic Christology asserts that Jesus’ humanity de-
rives its hypostatic character from its existence in the second person of
the trinity. Scholars also attributed to Leontius the notion that the hu-
manity of Jesus has no human hypostasis and therefore, viewed in itself,
qualifies an anhypostatic. In fact, both ideas derive from a misinterpreta-
tion of Leontius put forward by a Protestant theologian named Friedrich
Loofs in 1887.6 Loofs’s misreading of Leontius has, however, received
6. See: Friedrich Loofs, “Leontius von Byzanz und die gleichnamigen Schriftsteller der
griechischen Kirche” in Texte und Untersuchungen 3, edited by Oskar von Gebhardt
and Adolf von Harnack (Leipzig, 1887), pp. 1-317.
widespread scholarly acceptance. Karl Barth, as we shall see, endorsed

Loofs’s flawed interpretation of Leontius; and with less enthusiasm so did
Edward Schillebeeckx. Loofs’s exegetical blunder also motivates many of
Piet Schoonenberg’s objections to Chalcedonian Christology.
Given its extensive influence, a contemporary Christology needs to come
to terms with the issues Loofs has raised, without, however, attributing
the position to Leontius. By “enhypostatos”,7 Leontius meant subsistence
pure and simple, not subsistence in something else. Moreover, despite
Loofs’s assertion to the contrary, neither “anhypostatos” nor “anhypostasis”
occur in Leontius’s writings.
Leontius defended Chalcedon against attacks by Nestorians and
Monophysites. The latter both objected that since, on Aristotelian pre-
suppositions, no nature exists without an hypostasis, then Chalcedonian
Christology logically entails the presence in Christ of two hypostases,
one for the divine nature and another for the human nature.
Leontius replied that all reality manifests unity in diversity. Leontius
recognized two kinds of complex unity: 1) things united by species (or
nature) but distinguished by hypostases and 2) things distinguished by
species (or nature) but united by hypostasis. The fact that individual dogs
all share the same nature illustrates the first kind of unity in diversity. The
fact that a human person has a spiritual soul and an essentially different
material body illustrates the second kind of union. In other words, Leontius
denied the presupposition of his adversaries that every nature requires its
own corresponding hypostasis; and he cited the presence in humans of
two different natural essences—one spiritual, the other material—as proof
of his point. (Cf. PG, 86, 1277C- 1280B)
Loofs erroneously interpreted Leontius as denying that Jesus’ human-
ity had a human hypostasis. Using the alpha privitive, Loofs accordingly
characterized Jesus’ human nature as anhypostatic. On Aristotelian pre-
suppositions, however, no nature exists without an hypostasis. Loofs mis-
read Leontius as saying that Jesus’ human nature acquires its hypostatic
character by subsisting in the hypostasis of the Logos. In other words,
Loofs erroneously interpreted Leontius’s “enhypostatos” to mean “subsist-
ing in,” when in fact it only meant “subsisting.”8
7. Leontius used the adjectival form rather than the more common “enhypostasis.” Cf.
John McIntyre, The Shape of Christology (London: SCM Press, 1966), pp. 95-96.
8. Cf. F. Leron Shults, “A Dubious Christological Formula: From Leontius of Byzantium
to Karl Barth,” Theological Studies, 57(1996), pp. 431-446; Aloys Grillmeier, “Die
anthropologisch-christologische Sprache des Leontius von Byzanz und ihre Bedeutung
zu den Symmikta Zetemata des Neuplatonikers Porphyrius,” in Hermeneumata:
Festschrift für Hadwig Hörner, edited by Herbert Eisenberger (Heidelberg: Carl
Winter, 1990), pp. 61-72; “The Understanding of the Christological Definitions of
Both (Oriental Orthodox and Roman Catholic) Traditions in the Light of the
Post-Chalcedonian Theology (Analysis of Terminologies in a Conceptual Frame-
work)” in Christ in East and West, edited by Paul Fries and Tiran Nersoyan (Macon,
Subsequent theological reflection has raised a number of objections to

the position put forward by Loofs. Moreover, theologians have tended to
assume that Chalcedonian Christology logically implies the position which
Loofs mistakenly attributed to Leontius. Those objections include the
following: 1) Hypostasis means substance. Within the context of an Aris-
totelian philosophy of substance, one who denies the hypostatic charac-
ter of Jesus’ humanity renders it insubstantial. 2) Since hypostasis implies
particularity, within the context of Aristotelian essentialism, anhypostasis
seems to deprive the humanity of Jesus of any particularity. That would
seem to transform it into an insubstantial abstraction. 3) Aristotelian sub-
stance philosophy requires that every physis have a hypostasis. Anhypostasis
violates that principle. 4) On the other hand, if one asserts the hypostatic
character of Jesus’ humanity, it would seem to compete with the hyposta-
sis of the Word.
To these objections, Loofs might have replied that the humanity de-
rives its hypostatic character from existence in the hypostasis of the divine
Logos. The hypostatic character of the Logos, therefore, endows the hu-
manity with both its substantial and its particular character. Hence, the
incarnation illustrates the principle that every physis has an hypostasis rather
than violates that principle.
Not all theologians find such explanations satisfactory. The Enlighten-
ment Christologies we shall examine below would, of course, deny the
presence in Jesus of any divine hypostatic reality.
Nevertheless, some modern Christologists continue to endorse Loofs’s
misrepresentation of Leontius’s position. Among them we find, as I have
indicated, major figures like Karl Barth9 and, somewhat less enthusiasti-
GA: Mercer University, 1987), pp. 65-82; Brian E. Daley, S.J., “A Richer Union:
Leontius of Byzantium and the Relationship of the Human and Divine in Christ”
Studia Patristica, 24(1993), pp. 239-265.
9. Barth rejected the position taken by nineteenth-century Lutheran kenotic Christology
by insisting that the Word’s assumption of flesh in no way implied His abandonment
of His divinity. Moreover, not only did Barth regard Chalcedonian Christology as a
sound interpretation of the New Testament witness to Christ; but he also held that the
Chalcedonian settlement implied both an anhypostatic and an enhypostatic interpreta-
tion of the hypostatic union. Anhypostasis and enhypostasis, he argued, imply one another:
anhypostasis correctly denies that Jesus’ human nature subsists in itself, and enhypostasis
correctly asserts that His humanity subsists in the Word and only in the Word.
Barth conceded, however, that Chalcedonian Christology forces the believer to
struggle with the tension which it creates between the incarnation as an event and the
incarnation as a fully revealed divine reality. Barth, moreover, in contrast to Emil
Brunner, not only accepted Jesus’ virginal conception but insisted on its utterly
miraculous character. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, translated by G.W. Bromily and
F.T. Torrence (New York, NY: Scribner’s Sons, 1956), I, ii, pp. 147-159. Cf. Emil
Brunner, Dogmatics, translated by Olive Whon (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster,
1952), II, pp.322-334; Hans Stickelburger, Ipse assumptione creatur: Karl Barths
Rückgriff aus die klassische Christologie und die Frage nach der Selbständigkeit des
Menschen (Bern: Peter Lang, 1979).
cally, Edward Schillebeeckx.10 In what follows, I shall argue that when

one shifts from a metaphysics of substance to a metaphysics of experi-
ence, one can avoid the objectionable connotations of Loofs’s language
while affirming the apparent intent of his position. I shall also argue that
an experiential construct of the hypostatic union avoids the essentialism
which Leontius’s position tacitly endorses.
2) The Blending of Hypostaseis. Ephraim of Antioch defended
Chalcedonian Christology by proposing the blending of hypostaseis.
Ephraim pointed out that, while Chalcedon denies the blending of the
divine and human natures in Jesus, it does not forbid saying that hypostaseis
can blend. In the hypostatic union, the human hypostasis and the divine
hypostasis blend into a single reality.11 Unfortunately, however, Ephraim
left unexplained exactly how one hypostasis, or substance, goes about blend-
ing with another in order to produce a single subsisting reality.
The position which I shall develop below avoids altogether the cat-
egory “substance” because of its essentialist connotations. Nor does it
endorse even a modified version of Ephraim’s position.
3) Reduction to Mystery. As I have already explained in volume one, the
rationalizing tendencies of the Arians led some subsequent orthodox think-
ers to stress the fundamentally mysterious character of the incarnation.
If, of course, one pushes this line of thinking to its extreme formulation,
then one holds in effect that the incarnation defies all rational explana-
tion. One must simply assent to it in faith.
Among twelfth century essentialist Christologists, Alexander of Hales
(d. 1245 a.d.) insisted on the mysterious and incomprehensible character
10. Schillebeeckx argues that, out of His Abba experience, Jesus assured humanity of a
future with and from God. One can claim that He lived a religious illusion; but
Christians claim otherwise. In the risen Christ, God reveals Himself as a power against
evil. Schillebeeckx holds that one cannot finally separate the objective from the
subjective elements in the resurrection. One needs to overcome empiricism by dealing
with the resurrection; but one also needs to overcome fideism through empiricism.
Unfortunately, Schillebeeckx interprets empiricism in nominalistic, quasi-Kantian
terms by reducing the objects of knowledge to concrete, sensible facts. In my judgment,
Schillebeeckx finally confesses the theological bankruptcy of his philosophical nomi-
nalism when he concedes that theology has finally no over-arching language to relate
the empirical Jesus and the Jesus of faith.
As for his own theological interpretation of the incarnation, Schillebeeckx concedes
that no one can be two persons simultaneously. In this sense, “we accept the
human-cum-personalistic character of Jesus’ being-as-man and starting from enhypostasis
ascribe to him a more or less nominal anhypostasis, since nothing is lost to Jesus of his
real being-as-human.” Schillebeeckx Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus: An Experiment in
Christology, translated by Hubert Hoskins (New York, NY: Crossroad, 1981), pp.
626-674; Donald L. Gelpi, S.J. The Turn to Experience in Contemporary Theology, pp.
9-23.
11. Cf. McIntyre, op. cit., pp. 96-101. McIntyre himself prefers the position of Ephraim
to Loofs’s reading of Leontius.
of the incarnation.12 The mature Martin Luther (1483-1546 a.d.) took

an analogous position. For Luther, the incarnation reveals the transcen-
dence and utter freedom of God. One can know it only through faith;
reason avails nothing.13 In a sense, Neo-orthodoxy endorses a similar
position when it excludes metaphysics from the doing of theology.14
The position which I shall develop below cheerfully concedes the mys-
terious character of the incarnation and that we know it only in faith.
One should not, however, confuse mystery with complete unintelligibil-
ity. The finite human mind finds any reality which it cannot compre-
hend mysterious. Theists, therefore, correctly characterize God as su-
premely mysterious, since God comprehends all things and is compre-
hended by no one except Himself. In other words, even a reality supremely
mysterious to peanut-brains like us exemplifies a supremely intelligible
reality which both understands and comprehends itself perfectly. Nor
would anything prevent in principle that such a God would choose to
communicate some of that intelligibility to finite human minds. In what
follows, I shall propose a philosophical interpretation of the hypostatic
union which I would hope the reader would find both intelligible and
consonant with the revelation which we have in fact received.
4) Mutual Indwelling. As we have seen, the gospel of John speaks of the
mutual indwelling of the Son in the Father and vice versa. Gregory of
Nazianzus (330-390 a.d.) first coined a technical theological term for
this idea: namely, “perichorêsis.” For Gregory, however, the term implied
principally the mutual predication of divine and human traits in Jesus.
(Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 18, 42)
Maximus the Confessor (c. 580-662 a.d.) gave the same term a very
different twist. Maximus, as we shall see, played a major role in the
monothelite controversy. The monothelites denied the presence of a hu-
man will in Jesus. Maximus in defending the presence of both divine and
human wills in Jesus, used the term “perichorêsis,” or mutual indwelling,
to describe the synergy, the dynamic blending, of the divine and human
wills in Christ. (Maximus the Confessor, Epistle 4, 8) I shall examine
Maximus’s position in greater detail below and use it as the starting point
for constructing an experiential Christology.
12. Cf. Walter S. Principe, Alexander of Hales’s Theology of the Hypostatic Union (Toronto:
Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1967), pp. 82 ff.
13. Cf. Marc Lienhard, Martin Luthers christlisches Zeugnis: Entwicklung und Grundzeuge
seiner Christologie (Göttingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht, 1973), pp. 108-114.
14. Barth grounded the objective possibility of revelation in the fact that it had actually
occurred. His Christology, like the rest of his theology, insisted that one approach the
incarnation in faith and with the a prioris of philosophical reason. Revelation discloses
the otherness of God and with it the fact and extent of rational blindness. (Barth,
Church Dogmatics, I, ii, 1-44).
Eventually, John of Damascus (690-760 a.d.) appealed to the mutual

indwelling of humanity and divinity in Jesus as a way of explaining the
hypostatic union. In John’s Christology, the mutual interpenetration of
the divine and human in Jesus meant that, while the divine operations do
not originate from the humanity, they do proceed through it as heat flows
through a metal held in a flame.
The metaphor of heat penetrating metal absolved John’s use of
“perichorêsis” of the charge of monophysitism, since in the physics of his
day, despite their mutual interpenetration, the heat and iron each retains
its own proper nature. Nor do the two blend into a third thing. The
heated sword does not become the heat which suffuses it; nor does the
heat become the sword. (John of Damascus, De Fide Orthodoxa, II, vii-ix)
The Damascene also argued that idea of mutual indwelling gives con-
crete meaning to the idea of “enhypostasis.”15 (John of Damascus, Ca-
pitula Philosophica, 44)
In dealing with the hypostatic union, I shall argue that a triadic, realis-
tic, social construct of experience makes the positions of Maximus and of
the Damascene philosophically thinkable.
5) Union by Divine Grace. The twelfth century produced, as I indicated
in volume one, a spate of essentialist Christologies. Though flawed by its
acquiescence in the fallacy of essentialism, essentialist Christology pro-
duced two different ways of trying to explain the hypostatic union: namely,
union by supernatural grace and substitution of dignity.
Alexander of Hales, for example, who, as we have seen stressed the
mysterious character of the incarnation, refused to compare it to any
union in nature. One can call it neither predicamental nor accidental. It
differs utterly from the union of a substance with its accidents. Alexander
underscored the uniqueness of the hypostatic union by calling it a “union
through grace (unitas per gratiam).” Moreover, Alexander interpreted the
grace of union in vigorous, efficacious terms. The efficacy with which the
deity unites itself to the humanity of Jesus sanctifies it.16
All orthodox theologians endorse the gratuitous, gracious character of
the union of the divine and of the human in Jesus. In the position which
I shall develop, I shall assert the graced character of the incarnation, but
I shall also argue that the historical revelation we have received yields
some insight into how that union comes about. Moreover, the explana-
tion I shall offer, like Alexander’s, invokes a divine and sanctifying effi-
cacy.
6) The Substitution of Dignity Other medieval essentialists explained
the hypostatic union differently from Alexander of Hales. William of
15. Cf. Leonard Prestige, “Perichoreô and Perichorêsis in the Fathers,” The Journal of
Theological Studies, 29(April, 1928), pp. 242-252.
16. Cf. Principe, op.cit., pp. 58-119.
Auxerre, for example, appealed to the concept of “dignity” in order to

explain why one does not find a human person in Jesus, only a human
essence or nature. Like Alexander of Hales, William appealed to the ac-
tion of divine grace in order to explain how divinity and humanity unite
in Jesus. The Son of God acts in and through Jesus; but Jesus does not act
through Himself (per se). As a consequence, Jesus acts with a divine rather
than with a human dignity. Since dignity belongs to the essence of
personhood, the replacement in Jesus of human dignity with a divine
dignity explains why in Jesus we encounter a divine rather than a human
person.17 Philip the Chancellor espoused a similar position.18
In my judgment, the essentialist presuppositions on which both posi-
tions rest renders them philosophically implausible as explanations, even
though Christian faith does discover in Jesus a divine dignity. In what
follows, I shall invoke a metaphysics of experience in order to explain
why.
7) Union by Actualization. As scholastic Christology evolved, one finds
a growing consensus that the concept of “subsistence” holds the key to
the hypostatic union.19 Of all the scholastics thinkers, however, Thomas
Aquinas probably offered the most innovative account of subsistence.
In the Summa theologiae, Thomas Aquinas contrasted Chalcedonian
orthodoxy with the Gnostic notion that Jesus possessed only an illusory
humanity, not a real one. He also rejected the “Nestorian” doctrine that
the incarnation requires the presence of more than one hypostasis in Christ.
Rather, the Son of God who existed in the Godhead from all eternity
became human in time. (Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, III, q. xvi,
aa. 1-6)
Aquinas not only endorsed Chalcedon but also advanced Chalcedonian
Christology by suggesting a novel explanation for how the hypostatic
union comes about. Aquinas endorsed Aristotelian hylemorphic theory.
He held that the human soul functions as the form of the body, which he
portrayed as quantified matter. In informing the body the soul makes it
into a human body and endows it with substantial intelligibility. The
soul also animates the body. (Ibid., I, lxxv, 1-7)
Aristotelian substances act and suffer through accidental powers which
qualify the substance. These powers together with the habits which modify
them and the actions which flow from them endow the human substance
with accidental intelligibility. (Ibid., I, lxxvi, 1-8)
17. Cf. Walter S. Principe, William of Auxerre’s Theology of the Hypostatic Union (Toronto:
Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1963), pp. 58-119.
18. Cf. Walter S. Principe, Philip the Chancellor’s Theology of the Hypostatic Union
(Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1975), pp. 52-68.
19. Cf. Wilhelm Breuning, Die hypostatische Union in der Theologie Wilhelms von Auxerre,
Hugo von St. Cher, und Rolands von Cremona (Trier: Paulinus Verlag, 1962).
Aquinas, however, advanced beyond Aristotle in his account of human

nature by distinguishing clearly between being and essence. Being desig-
nates something’s actuality, that it exists. Essence makes it into what it is.
Substance and the accidents which define the way something exists de-
fine the realm of essence. The act of being gives that essence actuality.
(Ibid., I, iii, 4)
The distinction between being and essence also allowed Aquinas to
distinguish clearly between supposit and nature. “Nature” designates an
essence as something which acts and is acted upon. “Supposit” designates
something as actually existing through the act of being which endows its
essence with actuality.
A person, Aquinas argued, is a supposit with an intelligent nature. In
explaining the hypostatic union, therefore, Aquinas argued that the eter-
nal act of being of the second person of the trinity gives actuality to Jesus’
human essence or nature. Jesus therefore possesses a complete human
nature, a substance endowed with accidental powers to act and be acted
upon; but, the divine act of Being which actualizes that human nature
also personalizes it by transforming it into a subsisting reality. In the in-
carnation, therefore, only one supposit (person, hypostasis) speaks and
acts. That person has, however, two natures. He possesses divinity from
all eternity; He acquires humanity when He actualizes the humanity of
Jesus in history. (Summa theologiae, III, q. xvi, a. 6-q. xvii, a. 2)
In discussing the way in which the hypostatic union unites two distinct
natures in the person of the Son, Aquinas also showed a care to avoid
predicating of one another the essential traits proper to each nature. Christ’s
human nature acts in a manner which expresses His human essence. The
second person of the trinity did use that human nature to work miracles
and to exorcise. Miraculous acts revealed the Son of God’s divine om-
nipotence; but Jesus’ human nature remained essentially finite. In His
humanity, therefore, Jesus lacked the power to create or to annihilate. As
human, He did not therefore enjoy omnipotence. Omnipotence belongs
to Him in virtue of His divine nature.20 (Summa theologiae, III, q. xiii, aa.
1-4)
20. As we saw in volume one, Aquinas did in a sense “divinize” Jesus’ human intellect by
granting it the beatific vision from the first moment of its existence in the womb and
by attributing to it infused knowledge which readied it for Jesus messianic work. In so
doing, however, Aquinas did not violate his doctrine of the communication of traits
(communicatio idiomatum) in the sense that the quasi-omniscience which Jesus’
intellect possesses in virtue of the beatific vision results from the action of divine grace
rather than from human nature as such. That fact, however, does not render Aquinas’s
position any more psychologically plausible. Cf. Elisabeth Reinhardt, “El Verbo-Imagen
y la Asuncion de la Naturaleza Humana, Creada ad Imaginem Dei, en la Doctrina de
Santo Tomas da Aquino” and Jose Ignacio Saranyana, “La Doctrina sobre el ‘Esse’ de
Christo en los Teologos de la Segun Mitad del Siglo XIII” in Cristo Hijo de Dios y
Redentor del Hombre, pp. 627-635, 637-647.
In assuming a human body, the Son of God also submitted to all its
physical limitations and defects. By His sufferings He satisfied for sin.
His sufferings manifested the reality of His humanity. (Summa theologiae,
III, q. xiv, a.1)
Divine filiation, however, belongs properly only to the person of the
Son through His eternal generation by the Father. As a consequence,
Jesus’ filial relationship to the Father differs from ours. His divine Sonship
results from the divinity which the Father communicates to Him from all
eternity. Because we share in Jesus’ filial relationship to the Father by
grace, we qualify only as God’s adopted children, not as His natural chil-
dren.21 (Summa theologiae, III, q. xxiii, aa.1-4)
Aquinas’s metaphysical account of the hypostatic union illustrates the
subtlety and creative fertility of his mind. It labors, however, under some
inconsistency. In Aristotelian metaphysics, potency always limits the act
which specifies it. Matter, for example, individuates the human soul which
animates it. Essence limits the act of being which actualizes it by making
it into a specific kind of being. According to strict Aristotelian principles,
then, the humanity of Jesus ought to limit the divine act of being which
actualizes it. In ceasing to enjoy infinite Being, however, the incarnate
Son of God would have forfeited His divine essence.
Aquinas, of course, denied that anything of the sort happened. In his
Christology, the humanity of Jesus does not limit the divine Being which
specifies it. Aquinas, however, failed, in my judgment, to explain ad-
equately from a philosophical standpoint why it does not. In what fol-
lows, I shall also invoke the notion of actualization in speaking of the
hypostatic union; but I shall define that philosophical term very differ-
ently from Aquinas.
8) Incommunicability. John Duns Scotus (1274-1308) rejected Aquinas’s
distinction between being and essence. Accordingly, Scotus denied that
the human nature of Christ existed through the act of being (esse) of the
Word. In the case of living things, he also equated being and life. He
therefore held that Christ’s human nature had its own proper being, or
vital reality (John Duns Scotus, In III Sent., d.6, q.1).
Scotus therefore proposed a very different explanation of the hypo-
static union, one which I find theologically extremely suggestive. Instead
of appealing to metaphysics in order to provide the “how” of the hypo-
static union, as Aquinas had, Scotus probed more deeply into the notion
21. Aquinas also stands out among medieval systematic theologians for his doctrinal
concern to incorporate into his Christology reflection on the mysteries of the life of
Christ. (Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, III, qq. xxxi-xlv) The quaestio method,
however, caused him to deal with those mysteries under the somewhat artificial rubric
of suitability. The comparative literary analysis of the gospels contained in volume two
of this study and in the present volume provides, in my judgment, a more adequate way
of dealing with those mysteries.
of “person.” Scotus regarded personal existence as the ultimate actuality

of a rational nature. Unlike Aquinas, however, Scotus did not derive his
explanation of the meaning of person, from Boethius.
Boethius defined “person” as “the individual substance of a rational
nature.” (Boethius, Against Eutyches, II, 1-5, 28-37) In the twelfth cen-
tury, Richard of St. Victor subjected Boethius’s definition of “person” to
a telling speculative critique. Richard did so in the course of writing his
De Trinitate, perhaps the most creative systematic trinitarian treatise to
emerge from the middle ages.
Richard saw that if one defines “person” with Boethius as “the indi-
vidual substance of a rational nature,” then anyone who espouses an Au-
gustinian theology of the trinity (as Richard together with most medieval
theologians did) must logically discover four substances in the triune God;
for, Richard argued, if the divine persons differ as substances, they would
have to do so in the manner of substances, which differ qualitatively.
That would mean that a Boethian definition of “person” when applied
within a trinitarian context demands the presence within the triune God
of four, qualitatively distinct realities. Such a conclusion, however, equiva-
lently denies the co-equality of the divine persons and leads to a quater-
nity of substance in God (Richard of St. Victor, De Trinitate, IV, viii,
xiii-xv).
Richard, taking his cue from Augustine, viewed persons as relational
entities; but he developed this fundamental Augustinian insight in inter-
esting and suggestive ways. He viewed persons not only as relational but
as ecstatic, social realities. Persons exist (ex-sistere) in the sense that they
not only derive their being from one another but relate socially in a com-
munion of love.
Finally, Richard discovered another trait which characterizes personal
existence, namely, its incommunicability. Accordingly, Richard defined a
divine person as the “incommunicable existence of the divine nature
(existentia naturae divinae incommunicabilis) (Ibid., III, ii-vii, xi-xvii, xxi).
Scotus endorsed all these insights of the Victorine including his defini-
tion of “person.” Accordingly, Scotus argued that an adequate definition
of person must include not only positive traits (like intelligence) but also
the negative trait of incommunicability.
Scotus looked to the incommunicability of personal existence in order
to explain how the hypostatic union occurred. The notion of “incommu-
nicability” implied for him a unique singularity of existence as well as the
negation of all dependence on another person. Given the divine will to
become incarnate as human, therefore, the human nature of Christ
through its existence in the person of the Son ceded its personal incom-
municability to the transcendent incommunicability of the person of the
divine Son.
Because Scotus conceived the grace of union in dynamic terms, he de-

nied a distinction which earlier essentialist Christologists had defended:
namely, the distinction between the active assumption of human nature
and the grace of union itself. In addition, Scotus argued that the grace of
union differs from habitual grace as cause differs from effect (Scotus,
Opus oxoniensis, d.1, q.1, nn. 1-5, 7, 13, 16).
In the experiential construct of the hypostatic union which I shall de-
velop, I shall argue for the fundamental soundness of the preceding
Scotistic insights.
9) Incarnation as Divine Symbolic Self-Expression. In his early theologi-
cal essays, Karl Rahner explained the incarnation as divine symbolic
self-expression. The early Rahner deplored what he called a dangerous
Christological myth: namely, that the humanity of Jesus symbolizes the
reality of God only extrinsically. Extrinsic relationship implies for Rahner
that the humanity reveals nothing to us about the divine reality itself.
Rahner found this myth exemplified in the Thomistic doctrine than any
person of the trinity could have taken flesh. Citing the Cappadocian fa-
thers as authorities, Rahner argued that only the second person of the
trinity could have become flesh; but he went beyond the Cappadocians
when he suggested an ontological correlation between human nature and
the second person of the trinity.
Rahner’s metaphysics of symbol attempted to explain the precise char-
acter of this correlation. Rahner distinguished real from artificially cre-
ated symbols. Real symbols express the symbolic character of reality it-
self. A real symbol comes into being, according to the early Rahner, when
one reality posits within itself another reality which functions as part of
itself without being the whole of itself. Human actions, for example, func-
tion as real symbols of the persons who originate them.
Invoking this definition of a “real symbol,” Rahner discovered a sym-
bolic structure in the inner life of the trinity. When from all eternity the
Father generates the Son, He posits within Himself a reality both distinct
from Himself and essentially one with Himself. As a consequence, the
Son of God confronts us as a real symbol of the Father.
Similarly, when Father and Son from all eternity spirate the Holy Spirit,
they posit within themselves a reality distinct from themselves but essen-
tially one with themselves. As a consequence, the Holy Spirit confronts
us in Her historical revelation as a real symbol of both Father and Son in
their relationship to one another.
When the second person of the trinity took flesh, He also posited within
Himself a human nature distinct from His own divine person and nature
but a human nature united to His person. As a consequence, that human
nature confronts us as a real symbol of the second person of the trinity.
In an analogous manner the sending of the Holy Spirit posits the church
within Her as a real symbol of Her divine person, even though the union
of Church and Spirit does not qualify as hypostatic in the way the incar-
nation does.
Moreover, the early Rahner also conceived the relationship between
human nature and the Son of God in dialectical terms which required a
theological re-definition of the term “human nature.” The early Rahner
rejected as “ontic” the traditional Aristotelian definition of human na-
ture as a rational animal. Viewed theologically, Rahner argued, “human
nature” means that reality which comes into existence when the second
person of the trinity expresses Himself in what is not-God, i.e., in space
and time. Rahner’s dialectical reading of the incarnation would, however,
seem to imply that, if the Father and the Spirit had chosen to express
their persons in space and time, in each case a nature different from hu-
man nature would have come into being, one which would express the
specific character of each of the other divine persons.22
In the experiential construct of the incarnation which I shall propose,
like Rahner, I shall portray the incarnation as the symbolic self-expression
of the Son of God in history. I shall, however, rest my argument, not on
his metaphysics of symbol, but on the symbolic structure of experience.
Nor shall I correlate human nature closely with the second person of the
trinity as he does; for, if one posits qualitative differences among the di-
vine persons, as Rahner’s theology of the incarnation would seem to im-
ply, then, as Richard of St. Victor correctly saw, one would seem to com-
promise the divine persons’ essential equality.
In this section, I have pondered some of the significant developments
in post-Chalcedonian Christology to which the experiential construct of
the incarnation which I shall present attempts to respond. Not every
post-Chalcedonian Christology, however, endorses the creed of Chalcedon.
A number of contemporary “low” Christologies call that creed into ques-
tion and replace it with another account of the relation of the divine and
human in Jesus. The “low” Christologies to which I refer seem to me to
acquiesce all too uncritically in the presuppositions of an Enlightenment
rationalism which seeks to force Christian revelation into the procrustean
bed of some pet philosophical system. To an examination of these so-called
“low” Christologies, I turn in the section which follows.
(III)
Nineteenth century Protestant kenotic Christology provides the proto-
type of contemporary “low” Christologies. The kenotic theologians de-
veloped different kinds of Christology; but, in one way or another, they
22. Ibid., 3-14. Cf. Joseph H.P. Wong, Logos-Symbol in the Christology of Karl Rahner
(Rome: Libreria Ateneo Salesiano, 1984).
portrayed the incarnation as negating Jesus’ divinity. As a consequence,

they moved Protestant Christological thinking away from a Christology
of identity, which asserts that Jesus is God, to a Christology of relation-
ship, which asserts that God is somehow present in the human person
called Jesus of Nazareth.
Kenotic Christology reflects Enlightenment presuppositions by mak-
ing the dialectical logic of German romantic philosophy the measure of
Christian faith. That logic led kenotic theologians to portray the kenosis
to which Paul refers in Philippians as the negation of the Son of God’s
divinity.
Kenotic Christology
Gottfried Thomasius (1802-1875) created nineteenth-century kenotic
Christology. For Thomasius, in becoming incarnate, the Son of God ceases
to share in the divine creative activity. The incarnation negates the Son’s
eternal likeness to the Father and replaces it with historical dissimilarity.
In the incarnation, Jesus’ sonship expresses itself instead in his human
obedience to the Father. Through his kenosis, then, the Son of God ceases
to function and act as God’s natural Son, so that the Godhead can ex-
press itself in an unfolding history and in an unfolding human conscious-
ness. The Son retains, however, some divine traits, because he continues
to share in the divine saving activity. Through His sinless obedience to
the Father, He restores communion between a sinful humanity and God.23
Thomasius claimed to have written a Christology compatible with
Lutheran orthodoxy. In the end, however, his incarnate God sounds less
like true God and true human and more like half God and half human.
Wolfgang Friedrich Gess (1819-1891), however, made no pretense at
orthodoxy. In becoming incarnate, he contended, the Logos gave up all
divine characteristics and replaced divine omniscience with a finite hu-
man consciousness.24 Johann Friedrich von Hoffman (1810-1877) taught
that the eternal “I” who became incarnate lost His divine nature and
23. Cf. Martin Breidert, Die kenotische Christologie des 19. Jahnhunderts (Gütersloh:
Guetersloh Verlaghaus Gerd Mohn, 1977), pp. 52-72; Joseph Francis Hall, The
Kenotic Theory: With Reference to its Anglican Forms and Arguments (New York, NY:
Longmans Green, 1898).
24. In contrast to Thomasius, Gess showed no interest in reconciling kenotic Christology
with Chalcedonian faith. Instead, he focused on attempting to explain how the
pre-existent Son can have the same “I” as the earthly Jesus. In becoming incarnate, the
Logos gave up all divine characteristics and replaced divine omniscience with a finite
human consciousness. By doing so, the Logos transformed himself into Jesus’ human
soul and thus knew with a developing human self-awareness. Paradoxically, Gess also
held that even during his earthly sojourn, Jesus’ soul remained an eternal Spirit which
rules both humans and angels. In the end, however, Gess could vindicate neither the
complete divinity nor the complete humanity of the incarnate Word. (Cf. Breidert, op.
cit., pp. 115-160.)
acquired a human nature instead, even though as a person he remained

divine. The acquisition of a developing human nature inaugurates a new
historical mode of existence in the eternal reality of God.25
Johann Heinrich August Ebrard (1818-1888) seems to have held that
in the incarnation the Logos functioned as a human soul and therefore
ceased to be the eternal reality it had been.26 Karl Theodor August Liebner
(1806-1871) and F.H.R. Frank (1827-1894) also developed accounts of
the kenôsis in which the second person of the trinity would seem to forfeit
His divinity by becoming human.27
In a German romantic version of the kenôsis, therefore, the Son of God
loses either all or some of His divine nature. This paradoxical and ulti-
25. Von Hoffman grounded his kenotic Christology neither in trinitarian theology nor
in the human experience of Jesus but in the present faith experience of the believing
Christian. Faith establishes the present relationship of the believing Christian with
God. Christ mediates that relationship by making an eternal reality historically present.
Von Hoffman, however, repudiated Chalcedonian Christology and tried to portray
the incarnation as an historical-trinitarian event. The incarnation of God in a medium
other than God gives God a new shape. Von Hoffman questioned whether the Son
proceeds eternally from the Father, since Scripture says nothing about God’s internal
relationships. Rather, in the incarnation, the eternal becomes temporal. Since the Son’s
divinity consists in a relationship to the Father, the Son does not abandon divinity in
the incarnation. The eternal “I” which is Christ before the incarnation becomes a
person like other human persons through entering history. In Jesus we do not
encounter a divine person with two natures but the union of a divine person with a
human nature. After Jesus’ glorification, the Spirit makes Him present and inaugurates
a new phase in trinitarian life by inaugurating a new historical mode of existence of the
divine reality. (Ibid., pp. 161-184.)
26. Ebrard brought kenotic theology into the reformed tradition. He held that by His
kenôsis the Son of God gave up His divine essence as well as His divine existence. By
“existence” Ebrard meant eternity, lack of conditioning, absoluteness. By “divine
essence” Ebrard meant qualities like divine holiness, wisdom, blessedness, etc. as well
as metaphysical traits like omnipotence, omnipresence, and a divine relationship to the
world. In the incarnation the Son of God exchanged a temporal for an eternal mode
of being; but He turned Himself into a man whose qualities manifested His divinity.
The Logos functioned as Jesus’ human soul. His soul enjoyed supernatural, but not
superhuman powers. Moreover, the human soul of Christ retained a consciousness of being
Son of God even though He had ceased to be the eternal Logos. Ebrard never explained what
happened to the world-ruling Logos, after the incarnation. Ibid., pp. 215- 231.
27. Liebner found in the notion of God as absolute love the key to every theological riddle.
He sought to replace substance philosophy with an ethic of love. Each “I” in the trinity
gives itself to a “not-I.” In the process, the divine persons alienate themselves from
themselves in the absoluteness of their gift. Liebner remained vague on the role of the
Spirit in the trinity. The incarnation reveals the Son’s absolute self-effacement before
the Father, a self-effacement which renders Him insubstantial. Since the trinity is an
eternal process, the incarnation reveals the Son’s role in that process. In the incarnation,
however, the Son loses the Father’s divine infilling. (Ibid., pp. 192-214)
Frank held that in Christ divine consciousness transforms itself into a developing
human consciousness. In His human consciousness, however, Christ knows His divine
consciousness only through faith. (Ibid., pp. 232-277)
mately heterodox account of the incarnation results in no small measure

from the fascination of kenotic theologians with the philosophical con-
fusions of German dialectical logic. In the end dialectical logic prefers
paradox and speculative groping to inferential precision. A method of
thinking that flawed could not help but breed confusion and error; but,
in the spirit of the Enlightenment, the kenotic theologians preferred to
depart from traditional Christian faith rather than to subject their logical
assumptions to the kind of rigorous criticism they deserve.
Process Christology
As we saw in volume one, both Friedrich Schleiermacher and Paul Tillich
espoused some version of the Unitarian Christ. The reader may examine
their positions in more detail by returning to the first volume of this
study.28 The Unitarian Christ confronts one as a human being of genuine
wisdom and even of prophetic insight, but not as a divine person incarnate.29
Contemporary Protestant process theology also develops “Christologies”
which promote a kind of philosophical unitarianism. Protestant process
theology ends in unitarianism when it tries to make the nominalistic
cosmology of Alfred North Whitehead normative for Christian faith. In
The Turn to Experience in Contemporary Theology, I examined some of the
philosophical contradictions which result from Whitehead’s endorsement
of a nominalistic, di-polar construct of experience.30 I will not repeat
28. Schleiermacher offered a highly rationalized, highly subjectivistic portrait of Jesus and
of the redemption he effected. One finds in his Christology an extreme form of
Arianism. Jesus confronts sinful humanity as a creature like themselves, even more like
them, indeed, than the super-creature whom Arius proclaimed. Schleiermacher’s Jesus
saves sinners by the perfection of the grace which he possesses as a creature. Moreover,
Schleiermacher’s romanticism blended with his pietism in order to transform into a
purely subjective event the work of grace present in Jesus and in those who believe in
him. [Cf. Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, translated by R.H. Mackin-
tosh and J.S. Stewart (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1928), pp. 355-473.]
Tillich presented Jesus as a model of religious faith, which the former renamed and
reinterpreted existentially as the “New Being.” The gulf between the infinite Being of
God and finite being which Tillich postulates on philosophical grounds opens such a
gulf between the creator and creation that God can never come to symbolic expression
in any finite reality. Tillich therefore denied the incarnation, the hypostatic union, and
the trinity which the incarnation reveals. One finds a rational consistency in his
thought even though it bears little resemblance to the shared faith of Christians. [Cf.
Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (3 vols.; Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
1967), II, pp. 86-94; see also: “The Religious Symbol” in Symbolism in Religion and
Literature, edited by Rollo May (New York, NY: George Braziller, 1960), pp. 75-77]
29. For a survey of Unitarian reflection on Jesus in the United States, see: Prescott
B.Wintersteen, Christology in American Unitarianism: An Anthology of Nineteenth and
Twentieth Century Unitarian Theologians (Boston, MA: The Unitarian Universalist
Christian Fellowship, 1977).
30. Cf. Donald L. Gelpi, S.J., The Turn to Experience in Contemporary Theology (Mahwah,
NJ: Paulist, 1994), pp. 52-89; Gerald O’Collins, “the Incarnation under Fire,”
Gregorianum, 76(1995), pp. 263-280.
those arguments here; but a brief survey of Protestant process Christo-

logy will illustrate the way in which much of it tacitly endorses an En-
lightenment rationalism.
W. Norman Pittenger set the tone for subsequent Protestant essays in
Whiteheadean Christology. Pittenger reacted to the fideistic methods of
Protestant Neo-orthodoxy by replacing it with Whiteheadean rational-
ism. Whitehead’s philosophical method requires that philosophy supply
religious faith with its content. Pittenger decided that Whitehead’s cos-
mology should do the same for Christology.
Pittenger rejected as contradictory Loofs’s interpretation of Leontius of
Byzantium which Karl Barth had endorsed. Instead, Pittenger reduced
Jesus to a society of overlapping, actual occasions of experience. In doing
so, he also reduced the presence of God in Jesus to “reversion.” In
Whitehead’s cosmology, reversion explains a novel process. Reversion
happens when a process “prehends,” or experiences, directly and imme-
diately a novel conceptual possibility in the mind of God. The novel
possibility has not yet become ingredient in the prehension in question.
In other words, Pittenger endorsed the questionable ontologism in
Whitehead’s account of process. Whiteheadean ontologism requires that
novelty in the universe result from the immediate “prehension” (i.e., ex-
perience) of one of the “eternal objects” (i.e., particular concepts of pos-
sibility) present in the mind of God.
In Whitehead, reversion advances the ongoing creation of the world.
Pittenger, however, equated reversion with the working of supernatural
grace. In the process, he confused the order of grace with the order of
creation. In thus naturalizing “grace” Pittenger demoted the presence of
God in Jesus to just one more instance of finite creative processing.
Pittenger’s Jesus confronts one, therefore as just one more human person
created by God. God’s presence in Jesus exemplifies “reversion,” nothing
more.31
Like Pittenger, David Griffin prefers Whiteheadean rationalism to
Neo-orthodox fideism. Like Pittenger, he ignores the fact that a more
nuanced theological method provides a middle ground between the two.
Griffin, however, cheerfully endorses the Enlightenment view that theol-
ogy and metaphysics coincide. Griffin regards the whole universe as a
revelation of God and recognizes a “subjective” element in revelation, the
“reversion” which exemplifies God’s creative action. Accordingly, Griffin
sees no reason in principle why some other person could not surpass the
revelation of God which took place in Jesus.32
31. Cf. W. Norman Pittenger, The Word Incarnate: A Study of the Doctrine of the Person
of Christ (London: James Nisbet, l959).
32. Cf. David R. Griffin, A Process Christology (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1973).
John B. Cobb’s process Christology shows more creativity than Griffin’s.

Cobb seeks to reinterpret the Platonizing Logos Christologies of Justin
Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Athanasius in the light of
Whitehead’s process Platonism. Whitehead endorsed the main lines of
Platonic philosophy, but reversed the direction of love. In Plato love drives
toward transcendence; in Whitehead, love (the lure of process) drives to
physical concreteness.
Cobb reinterprets the Logos of both the fathers and of the fourth gospel
as Whitehead’s “creativity/reversion.” He endorses, therefore, the main
lines of Pittenger’s account of the presence of God in Jesus but stresses its
cosmic dimension. Cobb’s Logos grounds creative advance throughout
the universe.
Cobb’s Jesus dons the robes of a philosophe and proclaims, in an utterly
incredible historical anachronism, Whitehead’s doctrine of creativity. Cobb
regards Jesus as the supreme human incarnation of the divine creativity
present in everything; but Cobb never justifies that claim. I personally
find Griffin more logically consistent when he recognizes that on
Whiteheadean presuppositions one ought to regard Jesus as a surpassable
revelation of God.33
In her attempt to elaborate a systematic process theology, Marjorie
Suchocki also reduces the presence of God in Jesus to just another in-
stance of Whitehead’s ontologized account of creativity.34
Other “Low” Christologies

In the first volume of this study, I argued that Rudolf Bultmann’s demy-
thologization of the gospel also exemplifies an acquiescence in Enlight-
enment rationalism. For Bultmann, modern science provides the mea-
sure of gospel credibility and renders Jesus’ miracles unacceptable to “the
modern mind,” whatever that might be. Bultmann’s existential
re-interpretation of the gospel also indulges in philosophical reduction-
ism.35 Among Catholic theologians, the “low” Christologies of Hans Küng,
of Piet Schoonenberg, and of Roger Haight also offer, in my judgment,
an inadequate and finally false account of the relationship of the divine
and human in Jesus.
Hans Küng endorses Bultmann’s call for a demythologized gospel and
makes historical critical method the measure of Christian belief. He as-
serts that the resurrection showed that Jesus was right and His enemies
wrong. The resurrection effects a breakthrough in human history. Küng
concedes that the honorific titles applied to Jesus in the New Testament
33. Cf. John B. Cobb, Christ in a Pluralistic Age (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1975).
34. Cf. Marjorie Hewett Suchocki, God, Christ, Church: A Practical Guide to Process
Theology (New York, NY: Crossroad, 1982).
35. Cf. Morris Ashcroft, Rudolf Bultmann (Waco, TX: Word Incorporated, 1972).
terminate at his person, but Küng denies that these titles define the scope
of Christian faith.
Küng believes that trinitarian faith must espouse monotheism, but he
fails to make it clear whether it must espouse trinitarianism. He ques-
tions whether “modern” Christians need to assert Jesus’ divine pre-existence
and settles for asserting merely that Jesus’ relationship to God existed
from the beginning and had a foundation in God Himself. Küng leaves it
vague, however, whether the relation in question qualifies as real and
personal or only conceptual. He explains the divinity of Jesus by asserting
that God proclaimed Jesus as His delegate and as the crucified one raised
to life.36
Küng’s minimalistic reformulation of traditional faith leaves it vague,
to say the least, whether or not Christological faith terminates at a divine
person. By what he fails to assert Küng seems to imply that faith in Jesus’
personal divinity has become optional because no longer acceptable to
“the modern mind,” whatever that vaguest and most useless of vague
phrases might mean.
Schoonenberg rejects Chalcedonian Christology as contradictory and
indefensible. He seeks to replace it with a neo-adoptionist reading of the
incarnation. Schoonenberg also dismisses the “high” Christologies of the
middle ages as no longer believable. He finds in Jesus Christ a human
person with whom God has identified totally. Schoonenberg believes in
Jesus’ resurrection; but he finally leaves woefully vague what God’s iden-
tification with Jesus implies.
Schoonenberg seems to endorse a vaguely Kantian epistemology when
he describes the resurrection as “unobjectifiable.” He does not naturalize
the divine presence in Jesus as do Protestant process theologians; as a
result, Schoonenberg’s position would seem open to the position devel-
oped by Haight.37
Franz Josef Van Beeck’s rhetorical Christology endorses Schoonenberg’s
position. In so doing, it betrays, in my judgment, its methodological
inability to deal adequately with doctrinal issues.38
Roger Haight’s “low” Spirit Christology has the virtue of drawing at-
tention to the failure of most modern Christologies to attend to the role
of the Holy Breath in Christological revelation. Haight, however, leaves
the personal character of the divine Breath obscure and settles for defin-
ing Her as a Biblical metaphor for the divine immanence. The Spirit was
36. Cf. Hans Küng, On Being a Christian, translated by Edward Quinn (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday and Co., 1974).
37. Cf. Piet Schoonenberg, The Christ: A Study of the God-Man Relationship in the Whole
of Creation and in Jesus Christ, translated by Della Couling (New York, NY: Seabury,
1971). In responding later to Schoonenberg’s position, I shall attempt to answer in
detail all the objections to Chalcedonian Christology which he raises.
38. Cf. Franz Josef Van Beeck, Christ Proclaimed (New York, NY: Paulist, 1979).
present in Jesus and inspired both his ministry and his Abba awareness.
Haight also finds the Spirit immanent in the early Christian community.
He eschews, unfortunately, repeating what the New Testament has to say
about the Spirit and tries instead to formulate a pneumatology “for to-
day.”
Haight misreads the council of Nicea as a Christological council. As I
indicated in volume one, the conciliar tradition failed to discover Christo-
logy as such until the council of Ephesus. Nicea concerned itself, not so
much with the presence of God in Jesus as with the divine co-equality of
Father and Son within the Godhead.
For Haight, moreover, Jesus qualifies as a human person, not as a di-
vine person. In this respect, Haight’s thought echoes Schoonenberg. It
also recalls one strain in Protestant kenotic theology, even though one
finds no indication that the kenotic theologians influenced Haight’s think-
ing directly. Haight discovers divinity present in Jesus only adverbially,
“not ontologically but functionally.” Jesus then embodies the Spirit as a
human person. Haight concedes that one can assert a greater presence of
the Spirit in Jesus than in us; but he questions any qualitative distinction
between the Spirit’s presence in Jesus and in other human persons.
Haight’ Spirit Christology completely ignores the Pauline witness. It
never mentions the resurrection or how that experience might have
changed Christian perceptions of the human reality of Jesus. Haight’s
Christology differs from that of process theologians in that it refuses to
naturalize the presence of God in Jesus and acknowledges instead its su-
pernatural, gifted character. In distinguishing nature from grace, Haight
moves more in the direction of Christian orthodoxy than Protestant pro-
cess Christology; but he never quite reaches it. In the end Haight’s Jesus
confronts us as just another human being, but more fully graced than
we.39
While Schoonenberg, Küng, and Haight write theology rather than
philosophy, one can nevertheless legitimately classify them as Enlighten-
ment Christologists because their “low” Christologies remain so low that
they transform Jesus into just another graced human person. Typically,
Enlightenment Christology sacrifices Jesus’ divinity to His humanity.
Neo-orthodoxy
Among modern Protestant Christologies, the Neo-orthodoxy of Karl Barth
and Emil Brunner offers a Protestant alternative to Enlightenment Christo-
logy.
Barth, in my judgment makes his most significant contribution to
Christology when he uses it in order to reformulate a Calvinistic doctrine
39. Cf. Roger Haight, “The Case for Spirit Christology,” Theological Studies 53(1992),
pp. 257-287; Jesus the Symbol of God (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1999).
of predestination. Instead of portraying God predestining individuals to

heaven or hell, Barth portrays Jesus as the sole object of divine election.
Jesus in Barth’s Christology confronts the believer as the elect one in whom
God also elects the rest of humanity. Those elected by God in Christ
experience themselves as chosen to believe in Him, to love Him, and to
have His prayer and His resurrection ever in their minds and hearts. God’s
election of humanity in Christ confronts one, therefore, with divine
omnipotence, righteousness, and mercy. It demands a response of faith.40
I find Barth’s theology of the cross less acceptable; but I shall postpone
reflecting on it until a subsequent chapter, when I shall consider the de-
velopment of atonement Christology. As we shall see, in handling the
meaning of atonement, Brunner does somewhat better than Barth.
In the end, however, Neo-orthodoxy’s expulsion of the philosophers
from its theological republic leaves it bereft of the intellectual tools it
needs to deal with the challenge posed by Enlightenment Christologies.
Nor can it deal adequately with the development of Chalcedonian Christo-
logy. Both problems demand the willingness to think through philosophi-
cal questions clearly, cogently, and validly. That, however, Neo-orthodoxy
refuses to do.
New Testament Christologies

Many New Testament Christologies suffer from an analogous deficiency,
in fact if not in principle. Wolfhart Pannenberg correctly insists on the
centrality of the resurrection in Christological thinking.41 Walter Kasper’s
New Testament Christology correctly characterizes the resurrection ap-
pearances of Jesus as a theophany. He also correctly calls for the develop-
ment of a Spirit Christology, even though he does so almost as an after-
thought.42 Both of these Christologies give insightful summaries of New
Testament Christology. While they do not rule out philosophical think-
ing in principle as Barth and Brunner do, neither do they employ it in
any systematic way. When, however, theology eschews critical philosophi-
cal thinking, it always runs the risk of falling into a dogmatism of taste.
When all is said and done, doctrinal Christological thinking needs to
invoke metaphysical categories because it must offer an inferential ac-
count of both created reality and of the reality of God. One does not find
40. Cf. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, translated by G.W. Bromiley and F.T. Torrence
(New York, NY: Scribner’s Sons, 1956), II, pp. 94-194.
41. Cf. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus God and Man, translated by Lewis L. Wilkins and
Duane A. Priebe (London: SCM Press, 1968).
42. Cf. Walter Kasper, Jesus the Christ, translated by V. Green (New York, NY: Paulist/
Burns & Oates, (1984); L. Renwart, S.J., “Portraits du Christ: Chronique de Christo-
logy,” Nouvelle Revue Théologique, 118(1996), pp. 890-897; “Que dit-on de Jésus?
Chronique de Christologie,” Nouvelle Revue Théologique, 119(1997), pp. 573-585.
such an account in the New Testament or in scholarly summaries of New

Testament thinking.
Philosophical Christologies
I recognize that during this time of fin-du-siècle intellectual decadence,
post-modernist skepticism proclaims metaphysics impossible. Of course,
when one proclaims that reality defies all metaphysical generalizations,
one makes a metaphysical statement about the nature of reality in general
and of the human mind’s ability to know it. Like universal skepticism,
such self-contradictory thinking inevitably deconstructs itself.
Theology cannot abandon metaphysics because it must give an infer-
ential account of God, of the world, of humanity, and of how the three
relate. To formulate such a speculative account requires philosophical
thinking. A logically consistent account of reality in general requires a
systematic philosophical theory of the whole: in other words, a meta-
physics.
Instead of abandoning metaphysics, contemporary theologians need,
in my judgment, to teach it modesty. As I argued in volume one, a sound
insight into the logical structure of human inference requires that any
metaphysical theory of the whole aspire to universal applicability at the
same time that it renounces any claims to a priori necessity.
Why does the structure of inference deprive metaphysics of any a priori
necessity? Because one must formulate an hypothesis before one knows
for certain whether or not one has taken into account all the relevant
data. Even an inductively verified hypothesis can require revision if sub-
sequently facts turn up which call it into question or if someone thinks of
a better frame of reference for dealing with the relevant data. Deductive
inference enjoys logical, but not psychological, necessity. Deductive think-
ing, however, only concludes to a possible future.
The inferential mind touches reality at two points: when it formulates
an hypothesis and when it verifies or falsifies one. At both points, fallibil-
ity dogs human thought. It especially dogs theories about reality in gen-
eral. Metaphysical theories need verification in lived human experience,
in the results of scientific investigations of reality, and in the historical
and eschatological data furnished by divine revelation. By failing to in-
voke metaphysical categories, New Testament theologies throw away the
very tool they need in order to construct a systematic account of the
Word made flesh.
Both Karl Rahner and Edward Schillebeeckx recognize the need to pro-
vide philosophical grounding for Christological thinking; but they in-
voke different philosophical presuppositions from those I have endorsed.
I find both philosophies demonstrably flawed and finally indefensible.
As I indicated in volume one, Rahner fallaciously believes that one can

use Kantian logic in order to formulate a classical metaphysics. Classical
metaphysics claims not only universal applicability but a priori necessity.
Kantian logic can guarantee neither because it recognizes only deductive
inference; and deductive inference, as we have seen, concludes only to a
result, to a possible, but unverified, set of facts. In other words, Kantian
transcendental logic presents a fallible hypothesis as a verified conclusion
at the same time that it calls it a deduction. Rahner’s invocation of this
muddled logic in order to make inflated metaphysical claims of necessity
as well as universality for his metaphysical anthropology leaves him fi-
nally blinded to the fact that close scientific studies of human nature call
into very serious question the dated Thomistic anthropology which lies
at the basis of his entire theology.43
In Foundations of Christian Faith, Rahner cheerfully concedes that his
Christology rests on an a priori understanding of human nature. His a
priori Christology also presupposes an a classical, priori understanding of
God: the divine Word cannot change in Himself, only in His humanity.44
Schillebeeckx, on the other hand, grounds his New Testament theol-
ogy in an indefensible, nominalistic, di-polar construct of experience.
Such a philosophy portrays experience as the subjective interrelation of
particular concepts with concrete percepts. Because it restricts thinking
to what goes on between one’s ears, such a construct of experience cannot
account for the social dimensions of experience. Because it equates reality
with concrete sense data, such a construct of experience cannot account
adequately for religious experience; for, while we do experience the di-
vine touch, we do not perceive it in the same way in which we sense
rocks, chairs, plants, and mountains.
A di-polar nominalism leaves Schillebeeckx unable to account for the
religious encounter with the risen Christ. As a consequence, he searches
for God in the conceptual pole of experience and claims to find him in a
subjective experience of graced salvation. That experience allegedly war-
rants inferring that Jesus must have risen from the dead. The New Testa-
ment, however, describes the experience of the risen Christ as an aston-
ishing interpersonal encounter, not as the conclusion of a rational infer-
ence based on a purely subjective experience of salvation.
Nominalism not only skews Schillebeeckx’s reading of the New Testa-
ment; but, in a work which seeks to lay Biblical foundations for Christo-
43. Cf. Donald L. Gelpi, S.J., “Thematic Grace vs. Transmuting Grace: Two Spiritual
Paths” in Grace as Transmuted Experience and Social Process: and Other Essays in North
American Theology (Lanham,MD: University Press of America, 1988), pp. 67-95.
44. Cf. Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of
Christianity, translated by William V. Dych (New York, NY: Seabury, 1978), pp.
1-176.
logical thinking, it leads him, paradoxically to avoid almost completely

any discussion of New Testament Christology. Schillebeeckx’s Jesus deals
with Jesusology, not with Christology. His second volume deals with New
Testament theologies of grace, although it pays occasional attention to
Christological themes. His third volume summarizes the first two and
appends some wise reflections on democratizing the Church.45
Both Rahner and Schillebeeckx recognize the unavoidability of invok-
ing philosophical categories in constructing a doctrinal Christology; but
a successful doctrinal Christology needs to build on more solid method-
ological and metaphysical foundations than either of these giants of con-
temporary theology has laid.
This chapter has undertaken a dialectical examination of issues in
post-Chalcedonian theology. By dialectic, I do not mean a Romantic con-
ceptual logic of position, contradiction, and sublation. Instead, I mean
the deliberative weighing of the advantages and disadvantages of differ-
ent interpretations of reality and of the frames of reference in which one
formulates those interpretations.
The chapter which follows abandons dialectical for foundational think-
ing. It begins to answer the question: How ought a fully converted contem-
porary Christian to respond doctrinally to Chalcedonian Christology?
45. Cf. Donald L. Gelpi, S.J., The Turn to Experience in Contemporary Theology (Mahwah,
NJ: Paulist, 1994), pp. 1-23.
Chapter 7
Authenticating Chalcedon
In the preceding chapter, I have summarized some of the major problems
and issues facing anyone who attempts in this day and age to lay system-
atic foundations for a doctrinal Christology. The present chapter argues
that a theology of conversion rooted in a sound metaphysics of experi-
ence allows one to deal adequately and inferentially with these issues.
The foundational Christology which follows avoids the philosophical
blunders which in the past have skewed Christological doctrine: dualism,
the extremes of anthropological optimism and pessimism, nominalism.
A sound foundational Christology eschews the fideism of Neo-orthodoxy
at the same time that it acknowledges the need to verify theological lan-
guage in the historical data of revelation. In invokes a fallibilistic meta-
physics of experience and occupies the middle ground between
neo-orthodox fideism and Enlightenment rationalism. A sound founda-
tional Christology also avoids the logical fallacies of Kantian transcen-
dental method. It replaces Rahner’s flawed metaphysical anthropology
with an understanding of the human supported by contemporary scien-
tific studies of human nature. Finally, it replaces a di-polar, experiential
nominalism with a realistic, triadic, social construct of experience.
The foundational Christology which I shall propose endorses many of
the legitimate insights summarized in the preceding chapter. Like Haight,
I shall propose a “Spirit Christology.” Unlike Haight, however, I shall
endorse Panneberg’s insistence that the resurrection offers the only ad-
equate standpoint for understanding the personal reality embodied in
Jesus of Nazareth. The foundational theology which follows also refuses
to replace doctrinal theology with a summary of New Testament Christo-
logy. Instead, it endorses a systematic metaphysics of experience. That
metaphysics allows one to formulate a testable doctrinal hypothesis about
the New Testament witness to Jesus Christ. Finally, the foundational
Christology which follows offers a defensible re-interpretation of
Chalcedonian Christology. It also deals in a systematic way with the is-
sues raised by the development of post-Chalcedonian Christological specu-
lation.
This chapter divides into two parts. Part one analyzes the aesthetic
Christology of Jonathan Edwards. It argues that Edwards identified the
method needed in order to formulate a sound, foundational, Christo-
logical doctrine. Part two invokes a contemporary theology of conver-
Chapter 7: Authenticating Chalcedon 273
sion in order to flesh out Edwards’s seminal insights. In the process of

doing so, it authenticates Chalcedonian Christology.
The next chapter will invoke the Christological insights of Maximus
the confessor in order to propose a experiential construct of the hypo-
static union. It will then test the speculative adequacy of that construct
by its ability to deal with the issues in post-Chalcedonian Christology
analyzed in chapter seven.
(I)
How does one go about formulating a doctrinal Christology in the con-
text of conversion? The Christological thinking of Jonathan Edwards
anticipates in an extraordinary way the methods of contemporary foun-
dational Christology. In this section, therefore, I shall summarize Edwards’s
creative approach to Christological thinking as a way of easing the reader
into the foundational Christological hypothesis which this chapter be-
gins to develop.
Aesthetic Christology: The Case of Jonathan Edwards

English Puritanism attenuated somewhat the extreme Augustinian pessi-
mism about human nature which both Luther and Calvin had defended.
Puritan divines continued to use the language of depravity in their pulpit
rhetoric and theological tracts; but the Puritan tradition moved closer to
the position taken at the council of Trent when it acknowledged that
human nature can in fact perform some naturally good acts.1
American Puritanism further modified classical Calvinism by nurtur-
ing the genius of Jonathan Edwards (1703-58 a.d.). Puritan pastor, evan-
gelist of the First Great Awakening, and defender of the Calvinist faith
against the skepticism of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Edwards
put together a fresh theological synthesis which emphasized the aesthetic
dimensions of Christological faith.2
Edwards’s aesthetic Christological vision reflected the conversion expe-
rience which he himself underwent as a young man. Troubled by the
Calvinist doctrine of predestination, as a young adult he passed through
a personal crisis of religious faith which culminated finally in a renewed
religious recommitment. He described his conversion in the following
terms:
The first that I remember that ever I found any thing of that sort of in-
ward, sweet delight in God and divine things, that I have lived much in
since, was on reading those words, 1 Tim. i. 17. “Now unto the king eter-
1. Cf. Perry Miller, The New England Mind (2 vols.; Boston, MA: Beacon, 1961), I, pp.
3- 280.
2. See especially: Roland Dellatre, Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan
Edwards (New Haven, CT: Yale, 1968).
nal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honor and glory for ever
and ever, Amen.” As I read the words, there came into my soul and was as
it were diffused thro’ it, a sense of the glory of the Divine Being; a new
sense, quite different from any thing I ever experienced before. Never any
words of scripture seemed to me as these words did. I thought with myself,
how excellent a being that was; and how happy I should be, if I might
enjoy that God, and be wrapt up to God in Heaven, and be as it were
swallowed up in Him. I kept saying, and as it were singing over these
words of scripture to myself; and went to prayer, to pray to God that I
might enjoy him; and prayed in a manner quite different from what I used
to do; with a new sort of affection. But it never came into my thought,
that there was any thing spiritual, or of a saving nature in this.
From about this time I began to have a new kind of apprehensions and
ideas of Christ and the work of redemption, and the glorious way of salva-
tion by Him. I had an inward, sweet sense of these things, that at times
came into my heart; and my soul was led away in pleasant views and con-
templations of them. And my mind was greatly engaged, to spend my
time in reading and meditating on Christ; and the beauty and excellency
of His person, and the lovely way of salvation, by free grace in Him. I
found no books so delightful to me, as those that treated these
subjects....And found, from time to time, an inward sweetness, that used
as it were to carry me away in my contemplations; in what I know not how
to express otherwise, than by a calm, sweet abstraction of soul from all the
concerns of this world, a kind of vision, of fix’d ideas and imaginations, of
being alone in the mountains, or some solitary wilderness, far from man-
kind sweetly conversing with Christ, and wrapt and swallowed up in God.
The sense I had of divine things, would often of a sudden as it were, kindle up
a sweet burning in my heart; an ardor of soul, that I know not how to express.
Not long after I first began to experience these things, I gave an account
to my father, of some things that had pass’d in my mind. I was pretty much
affected by the discourse we had together. And when the discourse was
ended, I walked abroad alone, in a solitary place in my father’s pasture for
contemplation. And as I was walking there, and looked up on the sky and
clouds; there came into my mind, a sweet sense of the glorious majesty
and grace of God, that I know not how to express. I seemed to see them
both in sweet conjunction: majesty and meekness join’d together: it was a
sweet and gentle, and holy majesty; and also a majestic meekness; an awful
sweetness; a high, and great, and holy gentleness.
After this my sense of divine things gradually increased, and became
more and more lively, and had more of that inward sweetness. The appear-
ance of every thing was altered: there seemed to be, as it were, a calm sweet
cast, or appearance of divine glory, in almost every thing. God’s excellency,
his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in every thing; in the
sun, moon and stars; in the clouds, and blue sky; in the grass, flowers,
trees; in the water, and in all nature; which used greatly to fix my mind.3
3. Jonathan Edwards, Personal Narrative, cited in Jonathan Edwards: A Profile, edited by
David Levin (New York: Hill and Wang, 1969), 26-7.
Intense religious experiences such as these—enrapturing glimpses of

the divine “excellence”—profoundly shaped Edwards’s Christological vi-
sion. The term “excellence” had special significance for him. Already as a
young student at Yale College, the young Edwards had endowed the term
with technical meaning. In his “Notes on the Mind,” which he wrote
partly in response to John Locke’s Treatise Concerning Human Under-
standing, Edwards found excellence in harmony, symmetry, and propor-
tion. He defined proportion as equality, or likeness, and deemed that it
resulted from the mutual consent of the parts to the whole and of the
whole to the parts. He found physical consent in graceful bodily propor-
tion; but he discovered the highest forms of excellence in mutual, inter-
personal consent among humans and especially between humans and
God.4
For Edwards, the God who is love and who both created and redeemed
the world exemplifies the highest form of excellence, since God alone of
His very nature consents in love to the whole of the creation He has
made. Moreover, only consent to God finally rectifies and orders prop-
erly our finite human consents. As a consequence, only when consent to
God measures and transforms our natural consents do they qualify as
“true virtue”; for consent to God reorders our natural longings by teach-
ing us to desire created goods only in the manner and proportion which
God wills of us. Moreover, consent to God universalizes our natural loves
and expands our hearts to embrace not only God but all created things in
God.5
As I have already indicated in the course of this study, I do not endorse
every aspect of Edwards’s account of the workings of divine grace. I reject
the determinism, predestinationism, and rigorism of his thought. I also
repudiate the flawed Ramist logic which allowed him to espouse these
flawed and ultimately heterodox theological beliefs. I do, however, agree
that, given the radical finitude of human nature and of its aspirations,
humans find it for all practical purposes impossible to love with the uni-
4. Cf. Harold P. Simonson, Jonathan Edwards: Theologian of the Heart (Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans, 1974); Robert W. Jenson, America’s Theologian: A Recommendation of
Jonathan Edwards (New York, NY: Oxford, 1988); Clyde A Holbrook, The Ethics of
Jonathan Edwards: Morality and Aesthetics (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan
Press, 1973); Stephen H. Daniel, The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards: A Study in
Divine Semeiotics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994); Terrence Erde,
Jonathan Edwards, Art, and the Sense of the Heart (Amherst, MA: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1980).
5. Cf. Leon Howard, ed., “The Mind” of Jonathan Edwards (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1963), 39-47, 71-8, 101, 113; Jonathan Edwards, The Nature of True
Virtue, edited by William K. Frankena (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press,
1969). I am aware that Stoics espoused the ideal of universal benevolence toward
humanity. Edwards, however, is speaking not about conceiving such an ideal but about
actually living it.
versality to which the gospel calls us. I also endorse Edwards’s assimila-
tion of religious and aesthetic experience as well as his distinction be-
tween the two. I also believe that the aesthetic dimensions of Christian
religious experience help motivate the consent of justifying faith. Finally,
I believe that such an understanding of justifying faith offers a fruitful
context within which to develop a foundational Christology.
Edwards, as we have seen in other contexts, held that we experience
beauty in the conscious consent to excellence and that we perceive the
beauty of God ultimately in the “cordial consent of being to Being in
general.” Edwards understood aesthetic experience as the simultaneous
affective perception of the goodness and truth of being. When we en-
counter excellence, it enraptures the heart most of all and yields a syn-
thetic insight into the mutual consent of created realities to one another
and, ultimately, into the mutual consent of all things in God.6
In Edwards’s theological vision, the revelation of the divine excellence
provided God with His “chief end” in creating the universe. By a “chief
end” Edwards meant that aim on which an agent places greatest impor-
tance. Clearly, if an agent has only one ultimate end in acting, that ulti-
mate end functions also as the agent’s chief end.
Echoing ideas in the thought of Scotus which he found reproduced in
the work of Nicolas de Malebranche (1638-1715),7 Edwards argued that
the divine goodness itself provides God with the only object adequately
proportioned to the divine will. He concluded, therefore, that even in
His dealings with creation God must have Himself as the ultimate object
of what He loves and seeks. If, in creating, God must seek His own excel-
lence, then God must have also created in order to manifest that same
excellence in the world which He made. The self-manifestation of the
divine glory, or excellence, constitutes, therefore, God’s chief end in cre-
ating the universe.8
In writing God’s Chief End, Edwards qualified in some ways the Cal-
vinist doctrine of predestination at least in this sense: he sought in this
posthumously published treatise to reply to the charges of Deists and of
liberal Protestant ministers that in a Calvinist world view, God had cre-
ated the world primarily to serve as a scaffold for His avenging justice.
6. Cf. Delattre, op. cit.

7. Cf. Jean Vethey, Jean Duns Scot: Pensée Théologique (Paris: Éditions Franciscaines,
1967), pp. 77-103; Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British
Context (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1981), pp. 1-47,
154, 322- 361.
8. Cf. Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, edited by John E. Smith et al.
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), VIII, pp. 405-463 Cf. Donald L.
Gelpi, S.J., “Conversion: Beyond the Impasses of Individualism,” in Beyond Individu-
alism: Toward a Retrieval of Moral Discourse in America, edited by Donald L. Gelpi, S.J.
(Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, pp.1-30.
Not so, Edwards replied: God could have created the universe only for
one reason, namely, to manifest His divine excellence, His glorious real-
ity, in creation in such a way that it left creatures rapt in a graced vision of
beauty.
I personally find Barth’s Christological reformulation of a New Testa-
ment doctrine of predestination more convincing than Edwards’s; and, as
the argument of subsequent chapters will make clear, I reject the atone-
ment Christology which Edwards inherited from the Protestant reform-
ers. Still, I deem Edwards’s account of the purpose of creation supported
by human religious experience: the grandeur and sublimity, the very ex-
cellence, of natural beauty tends to open the human heart to belief in the
reality of God.
Edwards also argued that, if excellence finds its supreme created em-
bodiment in consent to the divine beauty, then sin, dissent from God,
mars creation and obscures the divine glory. Sin, dissent, fragments the
world.
If, Edwards further contended, God had a single ultimate purpose in
creating the world, God has four fundamental purposes in mind in sav-
ing us: two negative purposes and two positive purposes, although the
positive purposes simply express the flip side of the negative. In the work
of redemption, God seeks negatively: 1) to triumph over His enemies
and 2) to undo the ravages of sin. God seeks positively: 3) to unify all
things in Christ and 4) to glorify the elect. God achieves victory over
Satan, his demonic minions, and over human sinfulness while simulta-
neously restoring the ravages of sin by unifying all things in Christ. More-
over, the process of unification culminates in the glorification of the elect.9
The history of sin narrates the fragmentation of the human race and
the sinful marring of the natural excellence of creation as it proceeds
from God’s hand. God undoes sin through His covenants; for covenanted
consent to God and to the world in ways which conform human wills to
God’s will reverses the dissent of sin.
The new covenant in Christ fulfills everything which the ancient cov-
enants narrated in the Old Testament typified. Indeed, each of the cov-
enants—with Noah, with Abraham, with Moses at Sinai, with the house
of David—manifests the eternal covenant between the Father and the
Son in which the latter freely took upon Himself to atone for human
sinfulness.10
In the incarnate Son of God, therefore, we encounter the perfect em-
bodiment of created and uncreated excellence: the perfect consent of God
to creature and of creature to God. As simultaneously divine and human,
9. Cf. Edwards, Works of President Edwards, (8 vols.; New York, NY: Burt Franklin, 1968)
V, pp. 13-20.
10. Ibid., pp. 20-192.
Jesus reveals to us “infinite highness and infinite condescension.” As God

He has no need for anything beyond Himself, and yet He condescends to
embrace and to befriend the smallest, the least, the most outcast and
abandoned. In the incarnate Word, we find the blend of “infinite justice,
and infinite grace.” The Son of God incarnate reveals to us the full extent
of God’s detestation for sin at the same time that He manifests the su-
preme victory of gratuitous divine forgiveness.
Jesus Christ combines, then, the most diverse excellencies: infinite glory
and deepest humility, infinite majesty and transcendent meekness, deep-
est reverence for God with perfect equality with God, infinite worthiness
of good and infinite patience of suffering, perfect obedience and supreme
dominion over creation, absolute sovereignty and total resignation, com-
plete self-sufficiency and total reliance on another.
All these excellencies express the conjunction of divinity and humanity
in Jesus. In addition, Edwards found in Christ “such diverse excellencies”
toward humans, that they defied cataloguing or description. Three such
“excellencies,” however, stood out in Edwards’s eyes: Christ’s justice in
judging sin, His mercy toward the repentant, and the truth He lived and
proclaimed.11
Edwards found the revelation of these excellencies in both the actions
and sufferings of Jesus: in the poverty of His incarnation, in the humility
of the hidden life, in His miracles of healing and in His cosmic miracles,
in His exorcisms, and in the special manifestations of His glory in His
baptism and transfiguration. Christ’s glory appears more clearly the more
abjectly He suffers humiliation, so that the cross, His self-sacrifice on
Calvary, stands forth as the supreme expression of His love. His holiness
reveals itself best in the very moment of his condemnation before the
Law. His worthiness stands forth in His suffering to be treated as worth-
less. Christ’s extremest sufferings express His greatest love. He triumphs
in victory by submitting to defeat; and His exaltation in glory reveals the
fullness of His divine excellence.12
The excellence revealed in Christ suffuses nature with saving signifi-
cance, as we use symbols from nature to name the excellencies we dis-
cover in Him. Moreover, the excellence of Christ has the power to touch
even hearts corrupted by sin and to teach them to claim the grace and
forgiveness which He came to bring. One appropriates that grace by choos-
ing Jesus Christ as one’s friend and as one’s portion.13
Christ has no more excellency in his person, since his incarnation, than he
had before; for divine excellency is infinite, and cannot be added to. Yet
11. Cf. Edwards, Works of President Edwards, VI, pp. 398-409.

12. Ibid., pp. 409-18.
13. Ibid., pp. 419-26.
his human excellencies are additional manifestations of his glory and excel-
lency to us, and are additional recommendations of him to our esteem and
love, who are of finite comprehension.14
Moreover, claiming as one’s own the excellence revealed in Christ en-

hances the excellence of those who believe by drawing them into an ever
more intimate commitment to the incarnate God. That God saves them
through their ever increasing participation through graced commitment
in the very love of God itself.15
Conversion, inspired by the Spirit of Christ, empowers a heartfelt re-
sponse to the Son of God’s incarnation of the fullness of divine and hu-
man excellence. Edwards gave initial shape to his theology of conversion
in an early sermon entitled “A Divine and Supernatural Light, Immedi-
ately Imparted to the Soul by the Spirit of God, Shewn to Be Both a
Scriptural and Rational Doctrine.” In it he argued for the utterly super-
natural character of the light of faith which motivates conversion.
Graced understanding cannot result from any natural impulse; justify-
ing faith differs from the common grace which God imparts to unbeliev-
ers in order to move them to achieve His historical purposes. The consent
of justifying faith requires by contrast that God act on the natural powers
of the mind in order to transform and sensitize them to the excellence
revealed in the gospel and in the things of religion. The divine touch
manifests to the heart both the truth and the attractiveness of divine
things. This light of faith results from the indwelling of God himself in
the human soul. Moreover, Edwards argued, the supernatural character
of such an enlightenment should appear reasonable to any reflective
mind.16
Edwards brought these insights into the dynamics of Christian conver-
sion to systematic expression in his Treatise Concerning Religious Affec-
tions. That work stands to this day as a classic treatise in discernment.
Having argued that affections constitute the major part of human reli-
gious experience, Edwards characterized genuine religious affections in
the following terms:
1) As supernatural, gracious affections flow from the Spirit of Christ
whose immediate indwelling in the soul lays a new foundation in the
natural faculties of the mind to perceive the excellence of God revealed in
creation and especially incarnate in Christ.
14. Ibid., p. 426.
15. Ibid., pp. 427-30.
16. Ibid., VIII, pp. 3-20. Hans Urs von Balthasar has developed a theological aesthetic
different from that of Edwards but in some ways convergent with it. Cf. Louis Dupré,
“Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theology of Aesthetic Form,” Theological Studies, 49(1988),
pp.299- 318; Paul E. Ritt, “The Lordship of Jesus Christ: Balthasar and Sobrino,”
Theological Studies, 49(1988), pp. 709-729.
2) Genuine religious affections express selfless love of the divine excel-

lence, since cordial consent to God puts right order into human self-love
by coordinating it with God’s love for His creatures.
3) Graced affections focus on God’s moral beauty, because falling in love
with the divine excellence inspires the desire to imitate it.
4) Graced affections mediate insight into divine things, since genuine
religious affections express not mindless emotion but a heartfelt grasp of
the truth as well as of the attractiveness of the divine excellence.
5) Graced affections ground a conviction of the certainty and reality of
divine things, since through conversion one begins to commune immedi-
ately in divine realities.
6) Graced affections inspire evangelical humiliation by teaching one the
full extent of one’s sinfulness.
7) Graced affections change human nature by inspiring an habitual love
of God and desire for divine things.
8) Graced affections conform one morally to Christ through the cultiva-
tion of love, meekness, peace, humility, forgiveness, and mercy in the
image of Jesus.
9) Graced affections enhance spiritual sensitivity by an ever increasing
responsiveness to the movements of the Spirit.
10) Graced affections produce balance of character through imitation of
the excellence of God revealed in Christ.
11) Graced affections deepen one’s desire for divine things, since the taste
of God, to which the natural person remains blind, increases as one deep-
ens in divine love;
12) Graced affections inspire Christian practice, since the final and deci-
sive test of the authenticity of any conversion consists in the willingness
to live according to the law of Christ.17
I have summarized Edwards’s aesthetic Christology in some detail in
part because by its originality it deserves retrieving in its own right. I
have, however, other motives for summarizing Edwards’s experiential ap-
proach to Christological thinking: namely, Edwards’s aesthetic Christo-
logy exemplifies in its own way how one goes about formulating a foun-
dational Christology. By that I mean that anyone who seeks to develop a
de-objectified, relational Christology, must situate it within a theology of
conversion. Moreover, one needs to show how consent to the person of
Jesus in faith gives practical shape to the kind of commitment which
Christian conversion demands.
This section has summarized Edwards’s aesthetic Christology. In the
section which follows I shall show how a contemporary foundational
Christology can, with proper theological and philosophical qualification,
17. Cf. Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, edited by John E.
Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), pp. 84-126, 193-461.
build constructively on Edwards’s seminal insights in order to authenti-

cate Chalcedonian Christology.
(II)
I shall argue in this section of the present chapter that when, building on
Edwards’s insights, one situates Christology in the context of a contem-
porary theology of conversion, then that theology authenticates the or-
thodoxy of Chalcedonian Christology.
Completing Edwards’s Project

When one reads Edwards’s theology in the light of the five forms and
seven dynamics of conversion already presented in this study, one realizes
that, far from describing every aspect of conversion, Edwards has in fact
correctly described an experience of initial Christian conversion and the
normative conversion dynamic which corresponds to it.
Initial conversion begins with initial repentance. Initial repentance en-
gages the heart. One repents initially by facing conscious and uncon-
scious negative emotions which blind one to the excellence incarnate in
Jesus and in people whose lives resemble His. By negative emotions, I
mean shame, guilt, fear, rage, despair. As one brings such negative emo-
tions to healing through conscious ego-integration, the positive emotions
have more scope to play. By the positive emotions I mean love, affection,
friendship, sympathy, aesthetic sensitivity.
One converts initially as a Christian when one acknowledges in Jesus
the human embodiment of divine excellence. The beauty of His life makes
one desire to follow Him. Christian conversion culminates, then, in a life
of discipleship; and the practical, moral demands of discipleship require
the conscience to submit to the religious norms and ideals which Jesus
embodied and proclaimed. In other words, repentance and practical com-
mitment to Jesus in faith describe the first dynamic of Christian conver-
sion on which Edwards’s theology focused.
The first dynamic of Christian conversion, as we have also seen, exem-
plifies faith in the broadest sense of that term. We call such faith justify-
ing because it initially rectifies the conscience and puts one in an obedi-
ential relationship to a self-revealing God. Justifying faith opens the whole
of the person to the transforming action of the divine Breath. It therefore
requires the subsequent transvaluation through ongoing conversion of
the four natural, or secular, forms of conversion: namely, affective, intel-
lectual, personal moral, and socio-political conversion. Edwards implic-
itly recognized this when he correctly made Christian practice the su-
preme test of the authenticity of an initial Christian conversion. In trans-
valuing the other forms of conversion, Christian practice demands, as we
have also seen elsewhere, practical progress in hope, faith, charity, and
the Christian search for social justice. I have called the religious aware-
ness which results from the ongoing transvaluation of the four natural
forms of conversion “Christological knowing” because it assimilates one
to Jesus in the power of His Breath.
Besides contextualizing Edwards’s theology of conversion, the founda-
tional theology developed in this study amplifies it as well. Edwards cor-
rectly perceived that affections play a prominent role in human religious
experience. He also correctly perceived that religious faith expresses cor-
dial consent to the excellence embodied in Christ. He correctly charac-
terized graced knowledge of Christ as ethical and practical.
A sound foundational theology of conversion endorses all these insights;
but it amplifies Edwards’s aesthetic Christology by taking into more ex-
plicit account the second dynamic which Christian conversion contrib-
utes to the total process of conversion: namely, the dynamic transvalua-
tion in faith of the other four forms of conversion.
The first two volumes of this study as well as the first section of this
present volume dramatize by their sheer heft the dominant role of intui-
tive religious perceptions within an experience of Christian conversion.
Those intuitive perceptions do not consist of a concatenation of subjec-
tive feelings, as a decadent, nominalistic Enlightenment philosophy would
have one suppose. Aesthetic experience grasps reality, perceives excellence,
judges and grasps with the heart reality, beauty, truth, and goodness.
The intuitive dimensions of Christian faith perceive religious realities
in the same way. As we have seen in the preceding sections of this study,
as a global consent in justifying faith transforms intuitive perceptions of
the future, it gradually over the course of a lifetime infuses into the hu-
man heart the theological virtue of hope. As that same justifying faith
transvalues intuitive perceptions of religious realities, it infuses over the
course of a lifetime the imaginative dimensions of theological faith. Both
Christian hope and intuitive Christian faith grasp realities. Christian hope
grasps the onrush of the divine Breath as the dawning eschatological fu-
ture. Intuitive Christian faith explores every aspect of the paschal mys-
tery.
When, moreover, one understands Christian hope and narrative Chris-
tian faith in the light of the epistemology which undergirds an integral,
five-fold conversion, that epistemology clarifies the way in which foun-
dational theology verifies doctrines historically. Christian hope and nar-
rative faith perceive the paschal mystery intuitively but really. The pas-
chal mystery, however, creates a new kind of experience and therefore a
new kind of history, a new kind of future. In the last age of salvation, the
future ceases to consist just in a naturally conceived set of possibilities
derived from remembered and reconstructed past experiences. In the
eschaton, the future becomes the onrushing Breath of the risen Christ.
In other words, through the historical missions of the Son and of His
Breath, the eternal God reaches into human history by actively trans-
forming human experience in the divine reality itself. That gratuitous act
of divine self-revelation falsifies cosmic dualism—the essentialistic split
between time and eternity—which has distorted human religious per-
ceptions in the west since the fourth century b.c. Those who live by faith
in the Breath of the risen Christ already possess risen life in this world
because here and now they experience their personal and ecclesial trans-
formation in the eternal reality of God.
Because it blends time and eternity, the eschaton actively engages hu-
man history, but it does so by transforming it in God. The graced trans-
formation of human experience has, then, an historical dimension; but it
differs from natural, secular history by exemplifying sacramental religious
events which both reveal and conceal the saving reality of God.
In a metaphysics of experience, history and the development of
inter-penetrating, interdependent finite experiences coincide. The
spatio-temporal character of experience demands the coincidence; for, in
a metaphysics of experience, Being is experience, and history is the devel-
opment of a particular kind of being, namely, spatio-temporal experi-
ence. Christian religious experience, therefore, reshapes and transforms
history not in spite of but in virtue of its present engagement with the
eternal reality of a saving God.
By faith one experiences God. In a triadic construct of experience, one
experiences God as “Breath,” as a personal vector which transforms expe-
rience persuasively and graciously by drawing it into the transcendent
realm of the divine. In the crucified and risen Christ, one confronts the
historical transformation of a concrete human experience in such a way
as to transform it into a conduit of the living Breath of God. In His
resurrection, as Paul insists, Jesus became a “life-giving Breath.” One ex-
periences the divine Breath as an empowering enlightenment which con-
forms one practically and morally to Jesus’ human experience. The hu-
man experience of the incarnate Son of God functions as the human
paradigm for responding graciously to God.
Human hope and the intuitive forms of Christian faith perceive these
complex religious realities aesthetically. By that I mean that they discover
in an eschatologically transformed history the embodiment of a divine
excellence which spontaneously draws and claims any human heart open
to the possibility of perceiving that excellence. In this sense, the eschaton
has as public a character as any other event in need of human evaluative
assimilation. Moreover, when interpreted in the light of a sound experi-
ential epistemology, these intuitive forms of religious knowing yield a
more fundamental lived insight into religious realities than do abstract,
rational religious doctrines. Let us reflect in more detail on the cognitive

limitations of doctrinal theological thinking.
One finds the same relationship between intuition and inference in the
natural and secular forms of experience as in religious reflection. We live
life largely at the level of intuition and of intuitive deliberation and only
rarely on the basis of logical inference alone. As C.S. Peirce saw clearly
and correctly, only the insane would ever try to live life on the basis of
abstract reason alone.18 Common sense includes the concrete reasoning
which Lonergan describes; but it includes much more than that. It also
includes intuitive insights into reality. Moreover, whenever we humans
understand anything abstractly and rationally, we simply endow with logi-
cal precision realities which we have already perceived and judged imagi-
natively and intuitively.
Logical inference enhances the precision and conscious control within
which we understand and judge reality; but logical thought exacts a price.
Precise definitions focus consciousness. In the process, they exclude from
awareness more than they reveal.
In a metaphysics of experience, history defines every emerging reality.
In order to understand any historical person or thing exhaustively, one
would have to recapitulate conceptually its entire spatio-temporal devel-
opment. No abstract inferential conception can do that. It can at best
enable one to deal more efficiently with extremely limited aspects of the
world one inhabits. In other words, in rendering human perceptions more
precise, inferential thinking, like a view through a microscope, acts like a
set a blinders. Through the lenses of a microscope, we see a few things
with enhanced precision; but we see a broader spectrum of reality when
we lift our eyes.
Because intuitive, imaginative thinking prefers spontaneous associa-
tion and synchronicity to precise definition and logical rigor, the intui-
tive grasp of reality yields a more global perception of the real than does
inferential thinking, although, as we have seen, the rational mind can
construct fallible metaphysical hypotheses. Both intuitive judgments of
feeling and verified logical inferences grasp reality within a fallible, per-
spectival realism. Intuition, however, ambles through the world wherever
fancy leads it. Inference, by contrast, advances like a locomotive on tracks
laid down in advance by hypothetical definition and by the rules of logi-
cal thinking.
As we have seen, metaphysical theories of the whole do attempt to
construct logical maps of the expansive terrain of reality which intuitive
perception discloses imaginatively; but like other forms of inference,
metaphysical thinking also develops under the constraints of definition
and of logic. So too, does the metaphysics developed in this study. It can
18. Cf. Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, 1.616-675.
blind as well as illumine. As a consequence, the metaphysical mind needs

to cultivate a constantly contrite fallibilism which makes it ready to ac-
knowledge any legitimate factual or logical challenge to its abstract
schematization of the real.
Scientific and scholarly thinking focus experience even more narrowly
than do philosophy and metaphysics. The philosophical mind, after all,
thinks macroscopically. It deals with experience as lived on a day-to-day
basis. Science and scholarship, however, delimit restricted realms of expe-
rience for detailed investigation. Their predefined objects and prescribed
methods sharpen experience like lenses of a telescope. The sharpness and
enhanced control can produce spectacular results; but the balanced mind
resists equating the focused results of science and of scholarship with
reality in general. For dealing with the macroscopic world, intuition, en-
hanced and supplemented by fallible, inferential metaphysical insights,
offers the more efficient and realistic cognitive avenue to lived reality.
Doctrinal theology seeks to endow the historical perception of reli-
gious realities with logical precision and with some measure of rational
control. Christological doctrines offer an inferential account of the reali-
ties disclosed to Christian hope and to the intuitive dimensions of Christo-
logical faith. In other words, because lived, intuitive experience yields
initial cognitive access to religious realities, theological doctrines need to
find their verification in the correct inferential interpretation of lived,
religious intuitions.
Doctrinal theologians need, therefore, to practice the humility which
logical fallibilism and the limitations of abstract, inferential thinking
impose upon them. Fallibilism reminds the doctrinal mind that it has a
better chance of formulating sound doctrine if it admits it might err than
if denies its own fallibility and finitude. The limitations of abstract, infer-
ential thought remind doctrinal thinkers that, in formulating doctrinal
theories, they in fact employ a focused mode of thinking ill-suited to deal
with the complexities of the lived, macroscopic religious experiences which
those very theories seek to interpret.
These insights cast light on the relationship between theological doc-
trines and the New Testament witness. Christian doctrines do not find
verification in the texts of the New Testament alone. Instead, they find
verification in the religious realities to which the New Testament testifies:
in intuitive religious experiences of realities illumined by the Biblical wit-
ness and especially in the kind of shared hope and faith to which the New
Testament testifies.
As we have seen, however, Christian hope and the intuitive dimensions
of Christian faith exemplify Christological knowing. Christological know-
ing yields a cognitive grasp of the person of Jesus which results from
practical assimilation to Him in the power of His Breath. That assimila-
tion has both an historical and a practical, ethical dimension. Because it

conforms believers to an historical human paradigm, Christological know-
ing engages our historical interpretations of Jesus’ person and mission.
Because, however, Christological knowing advances through practical
assimilation to Jesus in faith, it has, of necessity a practical ethical dimen-
sion. Both aspects of Christological knowing contribute to the authenti-
cation of Christological doctrine.
The practical character of Christological knowing places very real logi-
cal constraints on doctrinal Christology. It requires doctrinal theologians
to explicate inferentially the ethical consequences of Christological doc-
trines as an unavoidable condition for understanding what those doc-
trines assert speculatively and theoretically. As a consequence, only a prag-
matic logic of consequences provides an adequate method for rescuing
Christology from doctrinal vagueness. Such a logic simultaneously over-
comes any dualistic opposition between theory and practice. It does so
by insisting that the practical, ethical consequences of any given Christo-
logical doctrine clarify a doctrine’s speculative meaning.
The practical character of Christological knowing also requires that
lived faith experience serve as the laboratory for testing the authenticity
of Christian doctrine. By that I mean that a Christological doctrine whose
ethical consequences subvert the kind of faith experience which Christo-
logical hope and the intuitive dimensions of Christological faith exem-
plify stands revealed as fallacious and unauthentic. By the same token, a
doctrine whose ethical consequences enhance the intuitive forms of
Christological knowing qualify as authentic.
In the verification of Christological doctrines, moreover, the practical,
ethical testing of doctrines in lived religious experience and the scholarly,
historical testing of doctrines must of necessity interact. Any doctrinal
rendering of Christology whose ethical consequences tend to subvert the
intuitive dimensions of Christological hope and faith becomes by that
very fact both historically and theologically suspect. The doctrine’s
questionability derives from the fact that it fails to interpret adequately
the eschatological dimensions of Christian religious experience. By the
same token, one can expect any historical or theological doctrine formu-
lated on speculative presuppositions which abstract from the eschatological
character of Christian religious experience to lead to ethical consequences
which subvert lived assimilation to Jesus Christ in intuitive hope and
faith.19
The preceding reflections endow two familiar theological maxims with
greater operational and therefore with greater methodological precision.
19. Cf. Gerald O’Collins, Christology: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study of Jesus
(New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1995).
The first maxim asserts that theology consists in faith seeking under-
standing.
If doctrinal theology exemplifies faith seeking rational self-under-
standing, then the human mind must have cognitive access the realities
on which doctrinal theology reflects prior to their inferential, doctrinal
elaboration. The epistemology which undergirds this foundational
Christology argues that Christian religious experience first grasps those
realities intuitively and aesthetically and that such perceptions yield more
fundamental cognitive access to lived reality than abstract, inferential
modes of thinking.
The second maxim derives from the Christological controversies of the
fourth and fifth centuries. It asserts that any aspect of humanity which
the Son of God in His incarnation failed to assume would thereby lie
outside the realm of God’s saving action.
I shall return in another context to the Christological maxim that “what
is not assumed in the incarnation is not saved.” Here is suffices to note its
methodological soundness. The maxim implicitly acknowledges Christo-
logical knowing as the only adequate context for authenticating Christo-
logical doctrines. The maxim asserts in effect that the practical
soteriological consequences of Christological beliefs verify or falsify their
speculative truth. Such a principle accords with pragmatic logic, which
bridges the traditional dualistic gulf separating theory from practice. Prag-
matic logic clarifies the speculative meaning of any hypothesis by deduc-
ing its operational consequences. Christological hypotheses have
soteriological consequences which concretize and clarify their meaning.
So far, I have spoken only of the norms which the two dynamics of
Christian conversion provide for verifying or falsifying Christological
doctrines. The other four forms of natural conversion also provide norms
relevant to Christological thinking. Since, however, in and of themselves
the four forms of natural conversion abstract from the realities disclosed
to eschatological Christian faith, in and of themselves they offer only
negative norms for calling into question or invalidating doctrines.
Affective conversion, for example, teaches us that if a particular Christo-
logical doctrine fosters neurosis or psychosis it probably springs from a
naturally disordered psyche and not from a sound insight into the saving
realities disclosed to eschatological religious experience. Any interpreta-
tion of the kingship of Christ, for example, which would foster in Chris-
tian leaders obsessive, anxiety-ridden attachment to rational control and
to coercive power fails to qualify as Christologically and theologically
authentic.
By the same token, affective conversion also enhances the human ca-
pacity for aesthetic experience. Hence, any Christological doctrine which
blinds one to the divine beauty incarnate in Jesus would fail the test of
doctrinal authenticity. As we shall see, the evolution of medieval atone-

ment Christology illustrates well this particular doctrinal fallacy.
Intellectual conversion teaches one to call into question any Christo-
logical doctrine which invokes logical and methodological presupposi-
tions which blind the inferential mind to the very religious realities which
it seeks to understand. Enlightenment Christology, for example, and other
forms of theological rationalism fail this negative test.
Personal moral conversion teaches the doctrinal thinker that any Christo-
logical doctrine which inculcates personally irresponsible moral and reli-
gious practice fails to qualify as authentic. The restriction of Christo-
logical faith to religious sentimentalism exemplifies this particular doc-
trinal fallacy. A Christology which never discourses of anything besides
“me and Jesus” has failed to understand both Jesus and the practical con-
sequences of faith in the paschal mystery.
Similarly, a privatized rendering of Christological doctrine which fails
to acknowledge the way in which Christological faith challenges institu-
tional injustice also fails the test of doctrinal authenticity. Any Christo-
logy which lacks a social gospel would, then, fail this negative doctrinal
test.
I am suggesting that the four natural, secular forms of conversion in
and of themselves enhance eschatological, historical, and ethical norms
for judging Christian doctrine with negative pragmatism. Negative prag-
matism invokes the destructive consequences of a doctrine in order to
reject it as false; but negative pragmatism alone lacks the norms for au-
thenticating a particular doctrine as true. The natural forms of conver-
sion offer negative norms for invalidating theological doctrines because
they prescind from the realities of faith. At best, therefore, they provide
criteria for judging when a doctrine expresses misleading habits of inter-
pretation which blind one to eschatological reality.
When transvalued in faith, however, the natural forms of conversion
can make a more positive contribution to the authentication of theologi-
cal doctrines. The normative, aesthetic character of affective conversion,
for example, sanctions approaching Christological thinking initially in
the context of a normative theological aesthetics. Similarly, intellectual
conversion, when transvalued in faith eanbles one to distinguish between
sound and unsound theological methods. The two forms of moral con-
version enable moral theologians to deliberate prudently and discern-
ingly about ethical issues which the Bible completely ignores.
The preceding reflections cast light about the way in which doctrinal
theology ought to go about assessing the authenticity of Chalcedonian
Christological doctrine. First, doctrinal theology needs to reach an initial
judgment about the ability of the Chalcedonian creed to interpret the
realities disclosed intuitively to Christological hope and to the intuitive
dimensions of Christological faith. Second, doctrinal theology needs to

clarify the meaning of Chalcedonian Christology by explicating its prac-
tical, lived consequences. That clarification will prepare the way for a
judgment concerning the ability of Chalcedonian Christology to foster
Christological knowing.
Does, then, Chalcedonian Christology actually interpret the
eschatological realities disclosed to Christian hope and to the intuitive
dimensions of Christian faith? The answer to that question lies in review-
ing the relevant conclusions reached in the earlier Christological sections
of this study.
In the paschal mystery, Jesus rises from the dead. He experiences resur-
rection as the culmination of His own personal transformation in God.
Jesus, however, does not just rise as an individual. Instead, He rises as
the last Adam, as “a life-giving Breath” who communicated divine life to
those who saw Him and who continues to communicate it to those who
call upon Him in faith. The communication of divine life as Breath trans-
forms Jesus into the last Adam because it establishes Him as the unique,
eschatological source of risen life, of total human transformation in the
Breath of God. His communication of the divine Breath undoes human
sin and its consequences, redefines the destiny of humanity, and so be-
gins the new creation.
Jesus rises with unique efficacy because only His resurrection effects
resurrection in others. Those rise with Jesus who experience the efficacy
of His resurrection in the gift of His Breath. Jesus’ resurrection therefore
stands as an absolutely unique eschatological event which bridges by blend-
ing this world and the world to come. As the sole efficacious, eschatological
source of resurrection in others, Jesus’ resurrection and it alone serves as
the prototype of all other resurrections. Other religious founders have
left behind books or doctrines; only Jesus begins the eschatological age
with everything which that new beginning implies. Only Jesus baptizes
in a divine, sanctifying Breath.
The Biblical term “the Breath of God” designates the experience of
God’s active presence in human history. That active presence takes the
form of an empowering enlightenment which enables one to speak and
act in the name of God. The reality of the Breath and the reality of God
coincide. Moreover, only God commands or sends God.
The fact, then, that those who encountered the risen Christ experi-
enced Him as “a life-giving Breath,” as Her efficacious source, reveals
historically and eschatologically His divinity. Moreover, the revelation of
Jesus’ divinity discloses simultaneously the eschatological future. Through
the Breath of Christ’s enlightenment of believers the God revealed in the
paschal mystery becomes their future.
Those who saw the risen Christ experienced a theophany to which

others have cognitive access through the empowering faith which the
Breath of Christ inspires. The Breath of Christ reveals Him to believers
by drawing them actively into His Abba experience. Though He now
dwells with God, the fact that the risen Christ continues to send His
Breath into human hearts prolongs the historical revelation of His resur-
rection.20
As the efficacious source of divine life, the personal reality revealed in
the risen Christ had to exist in the eternal Godhead before taking flesh;
and, by assuming humanity in all its frailty and by freely and obediently
submitting to death on the cross, the Son of God revealed God’s unshak-
able love for a sinful world. The cross also reveals the perfection of Jesus’
obedience to the Father, just as the resurrection reveals both His oneness
with the Father and the Father’s love for Jesus. Together both events de-
mand that Jesus, as the obedient Son of God, must have lived a sinless
life, since God cannot sin.
Because the resurrection reveals Jesus’ personal divinity and the iden-
tity of life He shares with the Father, Jesus stands historically and
eschatologically revealed as the divine reality through which the creator
God acts to save us. If the Father acts through the Son, then the Son
relates to the Father with obediential efficacy. With the Father, therefore,
the risen Christ exercises universal obediential sway over creation and
possesses divine authority to pass judgment upon all creatures.
Because those who saw the risen Christ experienced Him as the per-
sonal source of God’s Breath, Jesus and the divine Breath share a func-
tional identity. Wherever, therefore, the Breath acts, the risen Christ acts;
and by Her action She makes the risen Christ present in those who believe.
Because the risen Christ’s mission of the divine Breath reveals His per-
sonal divinity, it also reveals that He and the Breath share an identity of
divine life. Breath-baptism communicates a share in that life.
The experience of Breath-baptism gives one access to the mind of God
and of Christ because it enables one to perceive the world in the way in
which Jesus did. If Jesus’ transformation in the Breath culminated in His
resurrection, then our present share in the Breath begins our share in His
risen, divine life and destines us for resurrection in His image when we
experience total transformation in God after death. Because the resurrec-
tion transformed Jesus bodily, our total transformation in God will also
transform us bodily, even though the exact nature of the risen body re-
mains mysterious. Nevertheless, desire for personal and ecclesial trans-
20. Cf. Josef Finkenzeller, “Die Aufstehung Christi und unsere Hoffnung” in Die Frage
nach Jesus, pp. 181-270; Leo Elders, “Resurrexit tertia die secundum Scripturas” in
Cristo Hijo de Dios y Redentor del Hombre, pp. 909-916; Francisco Ocariz, “Estudio de
la Resurreccion de Cristo en Cuanto Causo de la Resurreccion de los Hombres, Segun
la Doctrina de Santo Tomás de Aquino,” Ibid., pp. 969-984.
formation in Jesus’ image makes Christian hope immediately practical

and orients those who believe toward final resurrection.
Breath-baptism begins the experience of “Christological knowing,”
which yields that understanding of Jesus which results from converted
transformation in His image through the empowering enlightenment of
His Breath. Only the apostles saw the risen Christ, but they too came to
know Him most deeply through the subsequent experience of Christo-
logical knowing. The apostles’ encounters with the risen Christ therefore
begin historically and eschatologically the transformation of humanity through
graced conversion in their and especially in His image.
Moreover, Christological knowing, knowledge of Christ through pneu-
matic assimilation to Him, yields a higher form of knowing than just
seeing the risen Christ. Even in the case of the apostles, Christological
knowing brought the converted knowledge acquired in their original res-
urrection encounters to conscious perfection. As a consequence, the
apostles founded the Christian Church, not primarily by leaving beside a
“deposit” of abstract, propositional doctrines but primarily by modeling
for others and explaining to them the historical and eschatological grounds of
Christian conversion and of the Christological knowing which it embodies.
Christological knowing seals the new covenant in the heart of all be-
lievers by drawing them into the paschal mystery. By that I mean, Christo-
logical knowing teaches believers to enter practically into the atonement
of Christ by suffering the effects of sin, as Jesus did, without sinning.
Human willingness to enter into the atonement of Christ manifests His
victory over the Satan and over the evil principalities and powers which
rule this world.
The Breath whom the risen Christ sends dwelt in Him personally with
eschatological fullness, since He functions as Her divine, efficacious source.
She comes to the Christian community first of all corporately, commu-
nally, and ecclesially and only then personally and individually. Both the
letters of Paul and the Acts of the Apostles leave no doubt on that point.
In other words, individual believers share in the divine life which
Breath-baptism communicates by participating through baptismal faith
in the eucharistic community of faith which She creates by dispensing
the charisms.
Because sin takes embodied form in the world in ways which corrupt
human hearts, salvation must ultimately extend to the world itself. It
must undo all the embodied effects of sin. Christians therefore look for-
ward to a new heaven and a new earth purified of sin and injustice. That
world will stand finally and fully revealed when all rise corporately with
Christ from the dead. The incarnation of the Son of God therefore binds
God permanently not just to humanity but to the entire physical uni-
verse in a new, unique, and saving way.
Apocalyptic Christian hope discerns the ultimate shape of the dawning

eschatological future. Such a hope bases its perceptions of the future on
the realities disclosed in the paschal mystery. Put dispensationally, the
God who acted through Jesus to save the world also acted through Jesus
to create it and will act through Him in order to judge it. Hence, Jesus’
divinity reveals Him not only as the Alpha, as the one through whom
God made all things, but also as the Omega, as the world’s final judge.
Jesus’ divine judicial authority makes Him the Lord of history and em-
powers Him to reveal through the prophetic Breath the shape of the fu-
ture. As divine apocalyptic judge, Jesus presides over the whole course of
human history.
Jesus shares His messianic and judicial authority with those who be-
lieve in Him by empowering them through His gift of the Breath to
testify to His resurrection and to the divine realities which it discloses. In
forcing a choice for or against Jesus, that testimony prepares and in a
sense predetermines God’s final judgment on the world. As one chooses,
so one stands judged.
The woes of the end time result from humanity’s sinful refusal to re-
spond in faith to the Breath of the risen Jesus. Human unbelief therefore
also makes inevitable the conflict between the victorious Lamb of God
and Satanic incarnations of blasphemy, sin, and evil like the Roman em-
pire and contemporary global capitalism.
The sufferings of persecuted Christians during the end time prolong
the passion of Jesus by drawing them into His atoning, priestly sacrifice.
One atones for sin by suffering its consequences without sinning. The
innocent sufferings of Christians reveal Jesus’ eschatological victory over
sin, suffering, and death by empowering them to defy all three.
Resurrection with Christ incorporates one into the heavenly Jerusa-
lem, the new creation which God alone can bring about. In the new
creation, citizens of the new Jerusalem will one day see God face to face
in the knowledge born of perfect mutual love.21
21. The writings of the New Testament which deal principally with Christian hope—
namely, the letters of Paul and the book of Revelation agree on many fundamental
points:
1) The resurrection reveals the divinity of Jesus.
2) The fact that God acts through Jesus to save us reveals the Son of God as the one
through whom the Father acts efficaciously upon the world no matter what He does.
The Father therefore also creates the world through the Son and will judge it through
the Son.
3) The revelation of Jesus’ divinity establishes His messianic authority.
4) Jesus’ death reconciles a sinful humanity to God by atoning for sin. His death and
resurrection also seal a new covenant between God and humanity.
5) The innocent sufferings of Christians prolong the passion of Christ in space and
time. Jesus does not save us from suffering but in the midst of suffering and through
suffering.
One needs to measure Christological doctrine not only against the

eschatological future which the paschal mystery makes manifest to Chris-
tian hope but also against the intuitive perceptions of Christian faith. As
we have seen, the four gospels reveal God by using narrative in order to
promote Christological knowing in those who believe.
All four gospels use narrative strategies to assert the divinity of Jesus. In
portraying Him as the Breath-baptizer, for example, the four gospels all
implicitly assert His divinity, since only God can function as the effica-
cious source of the divine Breath. Matthew and John especially link the
full revelation of Jesus’ divinity to His resurrection and to the divine
Breath’s eschatological mission.
The gospels also assert Jesus’ divinity by having Him do things which
only God can do and then by calling attention to the divine character of
His actions. In the synoptics, for example, Jesus’ sabbath healing and
forgiveness of the paralytic illustrate this particular narrative strategy.
All four gospels use Jesus’ cosmological miracles in order to assert His
divinity. Jesus calms the watery forces of chaos with a word, a power
which only God possesses. He walks on the waters of chaos, as God does
in the Old Testament. Moreover, Jesus proclaims His divinity by claim-
ing the divine name as His own in Mark, Matthew, and John.
The fourth gospel has Jesus invoke the divine name repeatedly. The
Beloved Disciple insists not only on Jesus’ divinity but on His eternal
dwelling with the Father before He took flesh. In addition, the fourth
evangelist begins the coordination of Christological and trinitarian faith
by anticipating in Biblical language the trinitarian doctrine of the early
councils. The Beloved Disciple has a name for each member of the divine
6) Discipleship commits one to active opposition to the Satanic principalities and

powers of this world.
7) Resurrection culminates in face-to-face vision of God.
The Christologies of hope which one finds in Paul and in the book of Revelation also
contrast in significant ways:
1) The book of Revelation stresses the priesthood of Christ more than Paul.
2) It characterizes the book of Revelation to portray Jesus as the victorious Lamb of
God.
3) The book of Revelation makes it clearer than Paul does that Christian hope has
an overtly political and economic dimension. Commitment to Christ demands that
one long for the final destruction of oppressive and blasphemous human institutions.
Both the prophet John and Paul, however, expected the opposition to Christ to
intensify before the arrival of the end time. Moreover, the book of Revelation insists
even more than Paul does on the non-violent character of Christian prophetic
opposition to the forces of evil.
4) Paul insists more than the book of Revelation on the universality of the salvation
accomplished in Christ.
5) In a Pauline Christology of hope, the Holy Breath plays a much more central role
than in the book of Revelation.
triad: Father, Son, and Breath. He also has two names for the divinity
which They share in common: namely, Theos and pneuma without the
article. Finally, John has a way of describing the unity of the trinity: namely,
mutual indwelling.
If doctrinal Christology must clarify rationally the divine realities dis-
closed to eschatological Christian hope and faith, then those revealed
realities make the creed of Chalcedon inevitable. A Christology which
correctly interprets the shared hope and intuitive faith of Christians must
find a way of talking about the single, subsistent reality we call Jesus of
Nazareth. It must also find a way of talking about His divinity and His
humanity without blending them into a fictive theandric reality neither
fully divine nor fully human. Finally, one must, as Chalcedon did, coor-
dinate one’s account of an incarnate God with trinitarian faith. In other
words, the doctrinal interpretation of the New Testament enunciated at
Chalcedon correctly prescribed the linguistic parameters of any sound
Christological doctrine.
In reducing the incarnation to a doctrine, Chalcedon did not, of course,
deal with every aspect of New Testament Christology. Nor did it intend
to do so. Chalcedon, moreover, did not endorse any particular philo-
sophical way of formulating its Christological creed. As a consequence,
far from ending Christological speculation on the incarnation, Chalcedon,
in answering the question which the council of Ephesus raised, invited
the historical development of Christology; for anyone who endorses
Chalcedonian Christology must face the daunting task of expressing
Chalcedonian doctrine with greater logical, inferential consistency than
Chalcedon itself.
The very terminological vagueness of Chalcedon forces subsequent sys-
tematizing Christologists to define Christological doctrine with greater
logical precision that Chalcedon itself. Doctrinal Christology needs to
define rationally what it means by the reality of God, by human reality,
and by the reality of the world which Jesus saves. A contemporary Christo-
logy also needs to test its fallible, hypothetical theory of the whole against
the realities revealed in Jesus and in the mission of His Breath. It needs
therefore to find a consistent way of talking about a person possessed
simultaneously of both divinity and humanity. It also needs to formulate
a coordinated doctrinal account of the social reality of the triune God.
Inevitably, then, any doctrinal interpretation of the meaning of Chalcedon
challenges Christologists to formulate an inferentially consistent, philo-
sophical metaphysics. Most contemporary Christological confusion re-
sults from the failure of Christologists to rise to that speculative chal-
lenge.22
22. Cf. John P. Galvin, “I Believe...in Jesus Christ, His Only Son, Our Lord,”
Interpretation, 50(1996), pp. 373-382.
In what follows I shall test the ability of a metaphysics of experience to

interpret the historical and eschatological realities disclosed to Christo-
logical hope and to intuitive Christological faith. Moreover, in reformu-
lating Chalcedon, I shall attempt to overcome somewhat its impoverish-
ing abstractness by deducing the saving practical consequences of
Chalcedonian Christological faith. Finally, I shall offer an interpretation
of the trinity which coheres logically with the experiential construct of
the incarnation which I shall propose.
In this chapter, I have been arguing that a sound insight into the reali-
ties disclosed intuitively to Christian hope and to the intuitive dimen-
sions of Christian faith authenticate Chalcedonian Christology. In the
course of the argument, I have invoked historical and eschatological evi-
dence. In later chapters, I shall also invoke ethical criteria for the same
methodological purpose. In shall do so in the course of considering the
saving consequences of the hypostatic union. For the moment, however,
I am focusing on the ontological reality historically and eschatologically
embodied in the incarnation.23 In the chapter which follows, I shall urge
that the monothelite controversy holds the doctrinal key to formulating
an experiential, metaphysical construct of the hypostatic union.
23. Anthony Tyrell Hanson constructs, it seem to me, an argument analogous to the one
presented in this chapter. See: Anthony Tyrell Hanson, The Image of the Invisible God
(London: SCM Press, 1982).
Chapter 8
Reformulating Chalcedon
This chapter begins to construct an experiential understanding of the
hypostatic union. In elaborating that experiential construct, I shall de-
velop seminal insights of Maximus the Confessor, the principal defender
of Christian orthodoxy during the monothelite controversy. In order,
however, to grasp the point of Maximus’s Christology, one must first re-
call how the monothelite controversy arose and the relevant issues which
it raised.
This chapter divides into three parts. Part one retrieves the issues raised
by the monothelite controversy. It focuses on the Christology of Maxi-
mus the Confessor, one of the most suasive defenders of orthodoxy in
that dispute. Part two argues that when one re-interprets Maximus’s
Christology in the light of a triadic metaphysics of experience, that meta-
physics provides the key for understanding the hypostatic union. Part
three begins to test the adequacy of an experiential construct of the hypo-
static union by assessing its ability to deal with the issues raised by the
development of post-Chalcedonian Christology. I begin, then, with an
examination of the monothelite controversy.
(I)
The monothelite controversy resulted from the good intentions of the
Emperor Heraclius (575-641 a.d.). In the fifth and sixth centuries, the
Christian emperor who ruled in the east played a much more active ad-
ministrative role in the inner life of the Church than did the Roman
emperor in the west. Heraclius, for example, felt called to bring about a
reconciliation of the heretical monophysite church with the orthodox
church. In that laudable enterprise, the emperor groped for a theological
formula which would reunite the two divided communions.
He devised a formula from elements which he discovered in the writ-
ings of Cyril of Alexandria and Severus of Antioch. As we saw in volume
one, Cyril used the term “mia physis” in order to designate the person of
Christ. For Cyril the term connoted the dynamic way in which the di-
vine and human blend in Jesus. Unfortunately, the term also caused
Nestorius, the patriarch of Antioch, to suspect Cyril of endorsing the
monophysite heresy. The council of Ephesus had vindicated Cyril’s or-
thodoxy, but without endorsing his use of the term “mia physis.” Heraclius
hoped that, by resurrecting the term and by reinterpreting it in the light
of the theology of Severus of Antioch, he could lure the monophysites
back into the church.
Chapter 8: Reformulating Chalcedon 297
With Severus, the emperor argued that the dynamic unity of divinity
and humanity of which Cyril had spoken could take place only if the
incarnate Word possesses a single will and a single action. Unfortunately,
Heraclius interpreted Severus’s position in a way which suggested to some
at least that the incarnate Word possesses a divine but not a human will.
The emperor interested Cyrus, the metropolitan of Sebastepol, in his
ideas and in 631 a.d. saw him consecrated patriarch of Alexandria.
Heraclius commissioned Cyrus to use Alexandrian theology in order to
lure the monophysites back into the great Church. The act of union,
which attempted to serve as the basis for reconciliation with the
monophysites professed “one Christ as Son, performing things attribut-
able to God and man in one theandric operation.”
Sergius I, the patriarch of Constantinople (610-638 a.d.) also sympa-
thized with the emperor’s efforts and communicated his reflections on
the notion of a single will in Christ to Pope Honorius I (625-638 a.d.)
Honorius replied that one could speak of one will in Christ if one meant
by that to deny any conflict between the divine and human wills in Christ.
In 634 a.d., Sophronius, the patriarch of Jerusalem, further clarified the
terms of the controversy soon to erupt when he sent to the pope his
Epistola synodica. In it Sophronius clearly distinguished the divine and
human wills in Christ and suggested that “theandric acts” must proceed
from both sides simultaneously.
The monothelite controversy erupted in 638 a.d., when emperor Hera-
clius published his Ekthesis in which he stressed the unity of will in Christ.
Many thought that the emperor had either suppressed altogether Christ’s
human will or that he had so fused it with the divine as to eliminate it for
all practical purposes. Pope John IV in union with a Roman synod con-
demned this doctrine as the heresy of monothelitism.
This initial papal condemnation led to others. In 647 a.d., Pope
Theodore I condemned Paul, the patriarch of Constantinople, when the
latter refused to repudiate monothelitism. In 647 a.d. emperor Constans
II (641-668 a.d.) issued a decree prohibiting all discussion of the pres-
ence of two wills in Christ. This prohibition earned condemnation by
Pope Martin I.
Maximus the Confessor emerged as the most articulate of the orthodox
opponents of the monothelite heresy. In defending the presence of two
wills in Christ, one divine and the other human, Maximus advanced
Chalcedonian Christology in a number of significant ways.
First, Maximus saw clearly that Christ’s possession of a human nature
demanded that He also possess all the powers of activity proper to that
nature. Hence, if humans possess wills, then Christ too has to have had a
finite human will.
Second, Maximus realized that Chalcedonian Christology inevitably

raises psychological questions about the incarnation. Specifically, Maxi-
mus argued that unless Jesus possessed both a human will and a divine
will, one could not explain the agony in the garden. Jesus’ prayer in the
garden, “Not my will but your will be done” reveals that in His human
will He experienced repugnance to submitting to death in fidelity to His
mission from the Father. (Maximus the Confessor, Opusc. theol. et pol.,
PG 91, 65AB)
At the same time Jesus’ complete submission to the Father manifested
the perfection of His obedience to the Father’s will. (Ibid. 68A) Maximus
argued, therefore, that the duality of wills reveals the duality of natures in
Christ, while the perfect unity of Jesus’ will with the Father’s divine will,
the dynamic synergy of the two wills, manifests the unity of His person.
Third, Maximus developed the soteriological implications of the two
wills united in perfect harmony. Jesus, by His natural human repugnance
in the face of death, revealed His saving solidarity with the rest of hu-
manity. In the perfection of His obedience to the Father, however, He
transformed His humanity into the graced pattern to which other hu-
mans must conform. Like Jesus, every adopted child of God must learn
to say, “Not my will but Yours be done.” (Ibid., 68BCD)
The fusion of the divine and human wills in Christ, the synergy present
in His incarnate, theandric life recreates human nature in the divine im-
age. (Epist. ad Thalass., 60, PG 90, 624BC) It constitutes the incarnate
Word supreme mediator between God and humanity. It transforms Him
into the new head of the new creation.
Finally, the fact that the passion and death of Jesus put His obedience
to the Father to the supreme test means that the incarnation culminates
in the paschal mystery and that the cross of Christ stands at the heart of
human redemption.1
The Lateran council (649 a.d.) condemned monothelitism. (DS 500)
So did the third council of Constantinople (680-681 a.d.). The latter
taught that the incarnate Son of God had two wills “undivided (adiairetos),
unexchangeable (atrepotôs), unmixed (ameristos), unconfused (asygchtos).”
Constantinople III also asserted the complete submission of the human
will to the divine. (DS 553-559)
This section has examined issues raised by the monothelite contro-
versy. The section which follows will show that, when one interprets the
Christology of Maximus the Confessor in the light of a realistic, social,
1. Cf. Pierre Piret, Le Christ et la trinité selon Maxime le Confesseur (Paris: Beauchesne,
1983); Dom Julian Stead, O.S.B., “The Meaning of Hypostasis in Some Texts of the
‘Ambigua’ of Saint Maximos the Confessor,” Patristic and Byzantine Review, 8(1989),
pp. 25-33.
triadic metaphysics of experience, Maximus’s doctrine holds the key to

explaining the hypostatic union doctrinally.2
(II)
This section begins to formulate an experiential construct of the hypo-
static union by invoking a metaphysics of experience. It first recalls the
broad outlines of such a metaphysics. It then argues that such a meta-
physics can interpret consistently the reality of an incarnate God.
A metaphysics of experience takes experience as its root metaphor for
reality in general. This fallible philosophical hypothesis defends the le-
gitimacy of imagining all reality as experience in some form. Having made
the suggestion the metaphysician of experience has then to clarify the
philosophical meaning of experience by defining it rationally and philo-
sophically. The metaphysics of experience which I am proposing defines
“experience” as a process made up of relational elements called feelings. It
finds three generic kinds of feelings in the higher forms of experience:
evaluations, decisions, and tendencies.
Whitehead’s philosophy of organism postulates that even the most
primitive physical process has an evaluative component. The metaphys-
ics of experience which I am proposing rejects, however, Whitehead’s
di-polar, nominalistic construct of experience which makes such a sug-
gestion necessary. A triadic metaphysics of experience leaves open the
question whether or not pre-protoplasmic realities feel one another
evaluatively. I find it plausible that unconscious evaluation plays some
role in organic life. Both conscious and unconscious evaluations certainly
play a role in sensate life; but a metaphysics of experience leaves it finally
to the positive sciences to determine through close investigation of na-
ture whether or not evaluative response characterizes both primitive or-
ganic processes and even more primitive physical processes.
In the metaphysics of experience which I am proposing, therefore, I
leave it an open question whether in the lowest forms of experience two
or three variables function. At present, I do not think that the evidence
allows one to rule out the possibility that in purely physical reactions like
chemical change only two variables function: namely, decisive action and
tendency. Among living organisms, the emergence of conscious evalua-
tion seems to depend on the development of a nervous system.
Interpreting Chalcedon Experientially

The council of Chalcedon, as we have seen, did not define the technical
Christological terms it popularized. It left it to theologians to determine
with philosophical precision what “hypostasis” and “physis” mean. A tri-
2. Cf. Nicolas Lopez-Martinez, “Magisterio Cristologico de los Concilios I y III de

Constantinopla” in Cristo Hijo de Dios y Redentor del Hombre, pp. 393-409.
adic metaphysics of experience equates “hypostasis” with “person” and

“physis” with experience. It discovers two kinds of experiences in the sec-
ond person of the trinity: one divine, the other human.
By an “hypostasis” I mean a person. Moreover, as I have already ex-
plained, by a “person” I mean a dynamic, relational, autonomous reality
imbued with vital continuity and with the capacity for responsible
self-understanding, for making decisions which flow from that
self-understanding, and for entering into responsible social relationship
with entities like itself. Jesus of Nazareth confronts us a person.
The person of Jesus confronts us historically as a finite developing hu-
man experience. Were one to base Christology exclusively on the mortal
ministry of Jesus while simultaneously ignoring the paschal mystery, one
would have to agree with Schoonenberg, van Beeck, and Haight that in
Jesus one encounters a human person as well as a human experience.
Were one to base Christology only on Jesus’ mortal ministry, however,
one would formulate a Jesusology, not a Christology.
When, however, one takes the paschal mystery into account, as one
must in order to pursue Christology as such, then one must also confess
Jesus’ divinity. On this point Pannenberg has the right of it: Christology
makes the paschal mystery central to understanding the full reality of
Jesus. Pannenberg, however, lacks the metaphysical tools he needs in or-
der to endow this fundamental insight with adequate inferential preci-
sion.
In the paschal mystery, Jesus confronts one as the autonomously func-
tioning, efficacious source of a divine reality, namely, the Breath of God.
Only God can command or send God. As the Breath-baptizer, the risen
Christ confronts us as just such a reality and therefore as an autono-
mously functioning divine person and a facet of the divine experience. If
that divine person also lived and died as human, then, within the paschal
mystery, the person named Jesus confronts one as a divine person with a
finite, developing human experience.
I shall postpone any consideration of the role which the person of Jesus
plays within the reality of God until I have dealt doctrinally with the
incarnation; for the incarnation reveals the inner life of the trinity. Here
it suffices to note that, in an experiential construct of the hypostatic union,
one defines the Chalcedonian term “physis” as “an experience.” One also
discovers two experiences in Jesus: one finite, human, and spatio-temporal
and the other infinite, eternal, and divine.
When one interprets Maximus’s synergy of the divine and human wills
in Jesus in the light of a realistic, triadic metaphysics of experience, voli-
tional synergy unites the divine and the human in Jesus. In order to un-
derstand, however, how a metaphysics of experience makes thinkable both
this synergy and the personal unity which it effects, one needs to examine
in closer detail how the New Testament perceives the relationship be-
tween the Father and His incarnate Son.3
The New Testament repeatedly describes the God revealed in Jesus as
acting efficaciously. God chooses freely. (Act 1:7, Rom 8:11, Gal 1:15,
Eph 1:3-4, Col 12:13, 1 Th 1:4, 2 Th 2:13-14, James 2:5, Tit 1:1) God
speaks. (Mt 4:1-4, 10:33, 17:5; Mk 1:12-13, 9:7-8; Lk 3:2, 4:1-13, 9:16;
Jn 3:34, 5:28, 8:18, 9:3, 10:25; Heb 1:1, 5-14, 3:8, 12, 11:17) God
legislates norms of human conduct. (Mk 7:8-13, 12:28-34, 5:36-37; Mt
22:34-40; Lk 2:25-28; 1 Th 4:1-8) God wills the salvation of all people.
(Mt 18:14, 35; Act 28:28; 1 Th 2:4) God expresses love and acts lovingly.
(Jn 3:15-16, 5:9, 13:49-50; Rom 5:5; Col 3:12-13; 2 Th 2:13-14) God
decides the course of history. (Lk 8:7; Act 1:7, 13:36, 3:18-21, 28:20; Jn
11:52-53; 2 Cor 5:18; Eph 1:3-14; 1 Pet 3:17) God executes judgment
decisively. (Mt 6:1, 4, 6, 18, 10:28; Lk 12:5-6, 16:15; Act 23:3; Rom
2:2, 8, 3:6, 19-20, 8:34; 1 Cor 4:5, 5:13; 2 Th 1:1-2, 8:2; 1 Tim 4:1; Rev
14:17, 16:17) God not only hears prayers and responds to good works;
but God also forgives sins and acts mercifully. (Mt 18:19-20; Lk 1:78;
Act 10:4, 27:24; Mk 2:7-12, 6:14-15, 12:25; Jn 9:45; Rom 12:7) God
makes promises and keeps them. (Tit 1:1; Heb 6:13)
The New Testament also describes the relationship between the Father
and the Son as efficacious and decisive. Father and Son speak with one
another. (Mt 10:33; Lk 12:8; Rom 8:33) The Father entrusts all things to
the Son, while the Son returns everything to the Father. (Mt 11:25-27,
13:43; Lk 1:32, 10:21-22, 22:28-30) The Son imitates the Father, says
only what the Father says. (Jn 5:19, 10:38, 14:10-11, 12)
In the New Testament the Father always inaugurates each new saving
impulse which advances salvation history. The Father long ago gave the
Law to Moses. (Rom 3:21, 7:24, 8:7; Mt 15:3-4; Act 7:1-53, 22:14,
24:14-15) The Father proclaims Jesus His Son and also commissions Him
as messiah and suffering servant. (Mt 9:8; Mk 1:11; Lk 3:22; Act 2:22)
The Father raises Jesus from the dead and exalts Him to His right hand
where the Son reigns in power. (Mt 23:22, 29-33; Mk 12:24-27; Lk
22:44-45; Act 2:23, 32, 3:15, 5:31-33, 13:30, 34, 17:31, 26:8; Rom 6:4,
Phil 2:9-10, 1 Pet 1:21) In exalting the Son, the Father establishes Him
as the beginning of a new creation. (Mk 10:6-9, 13:19; Gal 6:15; Eph
1:3-14, 2:10; 1 Cor 15:21, 45; Rom 1:20, 15:13, 6:14; Act 17:24-29;
Heb 2:10, 3:4)
The Father and the Son act decisively together. The Son’s words and
deeds establish the Father’s reign on earth. (Mt 12:28, 13:43; Lk 7:13,
18:39, 19:42-44; Jn 3:10) The Father acts in and through the Son in
order to effect the miracles He performs. (Jn 3:34, 5:20, 10:17, 13:49-50,
3. Cf. Michael Slusser, “The Exegetical Roots of Trinitarian Theology,” Theological
Studies, 49(1988), pp. 461-476.
14:10-11, 20; 15:9, Heb 2:4) Father and Son act together in sending the
divine Breath. (Lk 11:13; Act 33-34, 5:32, 10:38, 11:23, 15:9, 14, 19; Jn
6:23, 14:6, 26, 20:21; Rom 8:3; 1 Cor 1:4, 3:10, 7:7, 12:6; Gal 3:5; 1 Pet
4:6-11) The Son makes the Father efficaciously present. (Jn 14:8-9; Heb
9:24)
In the fourth gospel, as we have seen, the Father empowers the Son to
raise Himself from the dead. (Jn 10:17-18) Johannine rhetoric, there-
fore, suggests that even in the resurrection, the Father acts efficaciously
through the Son.
The Son does not relate to the Father mechanically. Instead, the Son
responds to the Father’s decisive initiatives freely and autonomously. (Mk
4:1-11, 26:36; Lk 4:1-13, 21-25; Mk 8:33, 12:11, 14:37) Luke portrays
the boy Jesus already busy in the things of His Father. (Lk 3:50) Jesus
proclaims doing the Father’s will His very food and drink. (Mt 4:1-3; Lk
4:1-4; Jn 4:34) In the fourth gospel, the Son acts and speaks in perfect
submission to the Father and in faithful imitation of what the Father
does. (Jn 5:19, 30, 10:38) Finally, the Son passes the supreme test of His
obedience to the Father by submitting to death on the cross. (Mt 26:36-46;
Mk 14:32-42; Lk 22:40-46; Jn 10:18, 29; Heb 2:8; Rom 8:11; Eph
2:16-17; Phil 2:6-11; 1 Pet 3:18)
In other words, the New Testament consistently interprets Jesus’ rela-
tionship to the Father as a free, responsible, efficacious, interpersonal
collaboration. The fact that Jesus responds to the Father with self-conscious
human responsibility makes Him both human and a person. Because the
resurrection reveals Jesus as Breath-baptizer, as source of a divine reality,
it reveals Him as a divine person also possessed of a human experience.
Because the person of the Son obeys the Father in all things, that divine
person confronts one as a personal source of obediential efficacy within
the Godhead.
As Maximus the Confessor saw clearly and correctly, the conflict in
Gethsemane between Jesus’ human preferences and the divine will re-
quires the presence within Him of a finite, human capacity for decision
distinct from the divine will to which it must submit. One discovers,
then, two principles of decisive efficacy in the incarnate Son of God: one
finite and human, the other divine and therefore infinite.4
The two types of decisions in Jesus together with the corresponding
tendencies which ground them constitute what an earlier philosophy called
His divine and human “wills.” In a metaphysics of experience, however,
“will” does not mean a power of the spiritual soul with a fixed formal
object, as it does in Thomistic Aristotelianism. It means instead a devel-
oping, autonomous tendency to decide in specific ways.
4. I shall define and clarify the meaning of the term “divine infinity” in the next chapter.
A metaphysics of experience views each human experience as emergent

and developmental. The character of every decision results from the kind
of evaluative responses which it terminates. Hence, each decision rede-
fines incrementally one’s “will,” one’s developing tendency to respond
decisively to the decisions of others. The specific character of one’s “will”
results, then, from the kinds of decisions which have shaped it histori-
cally. The same holds true of Jesus’ human “will.”
Ordinary humans are born into a sinful world. Because our environ-
ment shapes us in all kinds of subtle ways, it corrupts both our con-
sciences and our choices. Children raised in a racist, sexist, militaristic,
capitalistic culture like ours will, without the help of graced counter-
influences, grow up with moral inevitability racist, sexist, militaristic, and
greedily capitalistic. Such children experience the corrosive power of “origi-
nal sin” American style. Even baptized Christians who experience the
help of divine grace and the graced moral support of fellow believers still
succumb, often unconsciously, to the corrupting influences of a sinful
culture. Those Christians experience the corrosive power of “concupi-
scence.”
In order, then, to grasp the implications of the preceding doctrinal
statement, one needs to probe more deeply the meaning of original sin
and of concupiscence. The terms “original sin” and “concupiscence” de-
rive from sacramental theology; but they have Christological relevance;
for, if the risen Christ confronts us as divine and as therefore sinless, He
must somehow have avoided the corrupting influences of original sin
and of concupiscence.
“Sin” divides into personal sin and original sin. “Personal sin” desig-
nates one’s own sins as opposed to the sins of others. “Original sin” desig-
nates all other forms of sin in the experience of those born without super-
natural grace, except for their own personal sins. Original sin, therefore
includes not only the sins of individuals but also the human
institutionalizations of sin. By “concupiscence” I mean sinful forces in
the experience of the baptized, forces distinct from their own personal sin
which nevertheless come from sin and lead to sin. (DS 1515)
In a metaphysics of experience, any experienced reality stands within
experience, not outside of it. Hence, both institutionalized sin and the
personal sins of others shape one as an experience. Often enough without
reflecting on what one is doing, one appropriates the vicious personal
example of others, for the simple reason that humans tend to learn mi-
metically: through imitation.5 One also interiorizes unreflectively and with
moral inevitability the sinful attitudes and values which human institu-
5. As I use the term mimetic it does not necessarily imply René Girard’s theory of mimetic
desire. Cf. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, translated by Patrick Gregory
(Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972).
tions systematically inculcate with social sanctions. Institutions can, of

course, also inculcate virtuous attitudes; but they also can and do incul-
cate vice and sin. Left to its natural resources alone, human nature can-
not resist the corrupting influences of a sinful culture. With moral inevi-
tability, those evil influences poison the deepest center of our hearts.6
Such an understanding of original sin requires one to view it
perspectivally. Each individual experiences original sin from a different
angle of vision, from a different point in space and time. My personal
sins contribute to your experience of original sin, just as your personal
sins contribute to my experience of original sin. Original sin designates,
therefore, the environment of sin into which humans are born and to
which they will succumb with moral inevitability when left to their natu-
ral resources alone.
Since original sin designates environmental sin, Christian initiation takes
away original sin by changing one’s situation, by introducing one through
a process of conversion into a graced environment which equips one to
name all sin, both personal and original, as sin and to resist it. Christian
initiation does not, however, abolish the sinfulness of a converted
Christian’s environment. After initiation, one still experiences sinful en-
vironmental influences other than one’s personal sins, influences which
come from sin and lead to sin. Sacramental theology calls such sinful
influences “concupiscence,”7
In corrupting us, original sin does not abolish our humanity; but it
does make us less perfectly human than we might otherwise have been.
Left to ourselves, then, we have no experience of sinless humanity.
The New Testament proclaims Jesus sinless. That proclamation makes
sense if one also accepts Jesus’ personal divinity. Otherwise it does not.
Jesus of Nazareth grew up in first century Palestine. He too lived in a
thoroughly sinful world. As a consequence, original sin and concupiscence
would have corrupted Him with the same moral inevitably with which
they corrupt the rest of us, unless the will of God shaped His every hu-
man choice. In other words, as Maximus the Confessor saw correctly and
clearly, in Jesus only a perfect synergy of the sinless divine will and other-
wise peccable human will could have guaranteed His sinlessness.
Enlightenment theologians who deny the divinity of Jesus and yet as-
sert his sinlessness have, in my judgment, failed to think deeply and accu-
6. Cf. Ugo Bianchi, “Augustin sobre la Concupiscencia,” Augustinus, 36(1991), pp.
39-51; Michael Azkoul, “Peccatum Originale: The Pelagian Controversy,” Patristic
and Byzantine Review, 3(1984), pp. 39-53.
7. This argument presupposes the doctrine of original sin developed in Committed
Worship. Cf. Donald L. Gelpi, S.J., Committed Worship: A Sacramental Theology for
Converting Christians (Collegeville, MI: Liturgical Press, 1993, pp. 240-245. See also:
Stephen J. Duffy, “Our Hearts of Darkness: Original Sin Revisited,” Theological
Studies, 49(1988), pp. 597-622.
rately about the corrupting power of environmental sin. Only Jesus’ per-
sonal divinity allows one to infer plausibly the sinlessness of His human
decisions. If, however, Jesus had sinned, then the so-called redeemer of
humanity would need as much redemption as anyone else.8
In Jesus the same experiential variables which constitute other human
experiences constituted His. Jesus responded to reality both evaluatively
and decisively. As His human personality took shape, His human will
consisted in a finite, developing complex of general tendencies to respond
decisively to reality.
In a metaphysics of experience, all experiences can resemble one an-
other only analogously. The same generic variables define the shape of
every human experience: evaluations, decisions, and tendencies. But each
human experience views the universe from a different point in space and
time. Nurture, culture, and temperament all cause people to develop dif-
ferent ways of habitually perceiving reality, different skills for reshaping
reality decisively. Experiences which develop in different physical and
cultural environments differ correspondingly.
In order to experience original sin and concupiscence as such, one must
acquiesce in their sinfulness. Jesus experienced the forces of sin as sin; but
in His case they did not cause Him to sin. In other words, if the divine
will shaped Jesus’ human will to sinless ends, Jesus experienced the sin-
fulness of His environment without, however, experiencing either origi-
nal sin or concupiscence as such.
Understood as human experiences, the rest of humanity can, then, re-
semble Jesus at best only analogously. The fact, moreover, that Jesus em-
bodies a sinless human experience and we a sinful one increases the dis-
similarity between Him and the rest of us without, however, completely
abolishing the analogy.
By that I mean that Jesus’ sinlessness heightens the contrast between
His human experience and ours, without, however, making it wholly other.
On the contrary, sinlessness makes Jesus more perfectly human than we are.
In the late sixteenth century, Bianism taught that when Adam and Eve
fell they did not lose supernatural grace but lost their humanity instead.
The official pastoral magisterium correctly condemned Bianism as her-
esy (DS 1901-1980); but every heresy usually contains some kernel of
truth. Bianism correctly calls attention to the fact that sin dehumanizes
us; but it overstates the case when it suggests that sin obliterates our human-
ity altogether. Sin does not destroy humanity; but it does diminish it. It leaves
us less perfectly human than we otherwise might have become.
If Jesus confronts us as both human and sinless, then He, not the rest
of us, defines the meaning of humanness concretely and paradigmatically.
8. Cf. Berthold W. Köber, Sündlosigkeit und Menchsein Jesu Christi (Göttingen:
Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995).
I am not suggesting, as Rahner does, that Jesus defines the meaning of

humanness because human nature corresponds qualitatively to the per-
son of the Son. Rahner’s position, in my judgment, makes the co-equality
of the divine persons finally unthinkable. Rather, I am arguing that, if
the eschatological revelation of Jesus’ divinity through His efficacious
mission of the divine Breath entails His sinlessness (and it necessarily
does), then only the efficacious transformation of Jesus’ finite human
experience in the obediential reality of the second person of the trinity
could have created the sinless human experience we call Jesus of Nazareth.
Without efficacious transformation in God, Jesus would, like any other
ordinary human experience, have acquiesced with moral inevitability in
the corrupting, deforming, disgraceful influences of original sin and
concupiscence.
The letter to the Hebrews grasped this truth. The author of the letter
taught that sin destroys human relationships and divides humans from
one another. Hence, the fact that Jesus confronts us as both human and
sinless makes Him into the only perfectly accessible human. (Heb 4:15-16)
Jesus’ sinlessness means that nothing divides Him from us. His accessi-
bility, moreover, enhances His humanity in reverse proportion to the way
in which sinful divisions make the rest of humanity less fully human than
it might otherwise have been.
An anecdote may illustrate the point which I am trying to make here.
Several years ago, a painfully serious student in the throes of a crisis of
faith once told me, “Unless Jesus is like me in every way I cannot believe
in him.” I thought ironically, but did not say aloud, “If Jesus really is like
you in every way, then I cannot believe in Him.”
I have since heard others repeat that student’s narcissistic demand more
than once. Unfortunately, anyone who persists in such an attitude suc-
cumbs to Jesus’ desert temptation to test God, to set personally the con-
ditions under which one is willing to relate to God instead of accepting
the conditions which God’s historical self-revelation demands. The Bible
correctly equates the sin of testing God with unbelief. This particular
form of Christological unbelief replaces the salvation historically offered
to humanity by an incarnate God with a form of shallow narcissism. In a
culture as narcissistic as ours, contemporary Christians may find the al-
lure of Christological narcissism powerful. Their salvation, however, re-
quires them to resist it.
Jesus’ divinity insures, then, that His every choice avoids the taint of
sin. That sinlessness makes Him not only more human than the rest of
us; it makes Him uniquely and perfectly human. Moreover, the synergy
of Jesus’ divine and human wills explains both His sinlessness and the
paradigmatic perfection of His humanity. The same synergy also explains
the hypostatic union. Let us try to understand why.
If one interprets the synergy of the divine and human decisions which
created Jesus of Nazareth in the context of a philosophy of substance,
then that synergy qualifies as only an accidental union between two dis-
tinct substances with fixed essences, one divine, the other human. In
substance philosophy both Jesus’ human will and its activities qualify as
accidents. As a consequence, the synergy of wills in Jesus has psychologi-
cal, but not metaphysical significance.
If, however, one interprets that same synergy in the context of a meta-
physics of experience, then volitional synergy assumes metaphysical mean-
ing. By that I mean that the fact that the Son’s infinite divine will ruled
His every finite human choice means that the human experience we call
Jesus of Nazareth developed with a divine rather than with a human au-
tonomy. To put the same insight concretely, whenever Jesus spoke, God
spoke. Whenever Jesus acted, God acted. Both the speaking and acting
transpired within the finite compass of human experience. Hence, they
embodied divine decisions to act and to suffer within the compass of a
finite human experience.
In creating, the deity freely circumscribed divine freedom and divine
omnipotence because the act of creation required that God subsequently
take autonomous created choices into account in His dealings with the
universe. In other words, in creating the world God freely chose vulner-
ability to the consequences of created choices, since what we do makes a
difference to a loving and saving God.
In effecting the eternal Son’s incarnation in Jesus of Nazareth, the deity
freely chose to circumscribe divine freedom and omnipotence even more
radically. The incarnate Word freely undertook to act and to suffer within
the limits of a single human experience. His miracles manifested the di-
vine source of His decisions, even though their full revelatory signifi-
cance did not become historically clear until Jesus’ rose and sent His illu-
minating Breath to teach us what they signify.9
In a metaphysics of experience, as we have also seen already, autonomy
describes the way some, though not all, tendencies function naturally.
Autonomous functioning creates a self. Tendencies which do not func-
tion autonomously do not qualify as selves but as integral facets of an
autonomously functioning self. The chemicals of the human body, for
example, do not qualify as selves because the human self which they help
constitute rules them with vital efficacy. As a consequence, chemicals
9. Besides building on the insights of Maximus the Confessor, the position suggested here
develops in an experiential frame of reference the instrumental understanding of the
incarnation proposed by Thomas Aquinas. See. Paul C. Crowley, S.J., “Instrumentum
Divinitatis in Thomas Aquinas: Recovering the Divinity of Christ,” Theological
Studies, 52(1991), pp. 451- 475. See also: Constantine N. Tsirpanlis, “Natural Will
and Gnomic Will in Saint Photius’ Christology,” Patristic and Byzantine Review,
21(1983), pp. 156-161.
both function and behave differently when they make up a human body
and when they do not. When organic chemicals function autonomously
in the human body, they turn into pathologies: tumors and cancers.
Within the context of a metaphysics of experience, human persons ex-
emplify a particular kind of self. Since autonomous functioning makes a
tendency into a self, its absence prevents any tendency from qualifying as
a self in its own right. A tendency which does not qualify as a self in its
own right also cannot qualify as a person in its own right. Because the
Son of God rules His human experience efficaciously with His divine
will, that experience grows and develops with a divine rather than with a
human autonomy. The sinlessness of the divine decisions insures the in-
tegral humanity of Jesus’ finite, developing experience; and that sinlessness
also transforms Jesus’ unique human experience into the paradigmatic
human experience by recreating humanity in its original sinless integrity.
As the New Testament proclaims, the hypostatic union transforms Jesus
of Nazareth into the last Adam, into the beginning of the new creation,
which redeems the sinfulness of the old.
Because Jesus’ sinless human experience develops with a divine au-
tonomy, it does not qualify as a human person in its own right. It func-
tions instead as an integral facet of the divine self, the divine person, to
whom it belongs. The experience we call Jesus of Nazareth belongs to the
Son of God because the second person of the trinity owns it by initiating
all its decisive actions in response to the finite forces which impinge upon
it. In other words, when understood in the context of a metaphysics of
experience, the synergy of the divine and human wills in Jesus transforms
Him and Him alone into the finite, developing human experience of
being a divine person.10
No mere human person could ever function as the paradigm of the
kind of transformation which Jesus models for us. Jesus models the su-
pernatural, graced transformation of human experience in the living real-
ity of God. Only the divine Word incarnate can function as the paradigm
for such a transformation. Only He could have effected the kind of effi-
cacious transformation of human experience which purifies it of the dis-
tortions of sin because only He functions as a source of decisive obedien-
tial efficacy within the Christian Godhead. Only He could empower His
10. One reviewer of The Divine Mother objected to my saying that the Son of God gave
decisive shape to His human experience. The reviewer said he preferred to look upon
Jesus’ humanity as both autonomous and free. The remark illustrates the perverse
tendency of theologians to remain satisfied with fixing their belief on the basis of
personal taste. If one applies a logic of consequences to the proposition that Jesus’
humanity enjoyed autonomy in its own right, then it follows necessarily that Jesus
confronts us as a human person in His own right. If so, then, one must either posit two
persons in Jesus, one divine and the other human or deny Jesus’ personal divinity. I find
both conclusions heretical.
fellow humans to imitate Him through the gift of His Breath. Human
persons left to their own resources can serve as natural paradigms for
natural growth processes. But human persons left to their own resources
cannot model perfectly sinless behavior, nor can they impart the super-
natural means for graced assimilation into God. Even the saints function
as paradigms of Christian behavior only in so far as they help us by their
example to understand the alluring divine excellence incarnate in Jesus.
As Paul the apostle correctly urged his congregations, “Imitate me insofar
as I imitate Christ.” Paul knew well that only Jesus offers the ultimate
and perfect paradigm of graced transformation in God.11
An experiential construct of the hypostatic union in no way compro-
mises the account of Jesus as a finite, developing human experience which
I proposed in volume one and summarized earlier in this volume. In-
stead, an experiential construct of the hypostatic union situates Jesus’
finite, developing, human awareness within the divine experience. Even
more, that same metaphysics allows one to explain His human freedom
of choice. Finally, a metaphysics of experience allows one to understand
how the Son of God experienced temptation. Let us consider in turn
each of these interrelated points.
An experiential construct of the hypostatic union endorses Karl Rahner’s
criticism of the three levels of consciousness which an inflated Thomistic
Christology ascribed to Jesus.12 It agrees with Rahner that Jesus’ scientia
beata, the special awareness He possessed in virtue of the hypostatic union,
consisted in His finite, developing, human awareness of His own divine
person. An experiential construct of the hypostatic union, however, re-
places a dated Thomistic account of human self-awareness with a realis-
tic, triadic, social construct of experience.
The gospels give us no detailed information about Jesus’ unique per-
sonal self-awareness. We can, however, assert with historical certitude that
His human self-awareness included His Abba experience, His sense of
relating to the creator God reverentially, yet intimately, as Father. It in-
cluded His passion to obey the Father in all things. Did Jesus’ religious
experience also include, as the gospel of John suggests, consciousness of
11. Much of Mariology systematizes popular devotional beliefs about Mary, many of
which have no foundation in the surviving historical evidence. Her personal sinlessness
numbers among those beliefs; but even in traditional Mariology that sinlessness results
from a special privilege of grace. Not even the sinless Mary can, then, function for her
fellow humans as the ultimate paradigm of graced transformation in God because as
a graced creature she cannot function as the empowering source of divine grace as the
risen Christ does. The ultimate paradigm of a supernatural transformation needs to
function as the efficacious source of God’s Breath. Mary does not. Only the risen Jesus
does.
12. Cf. Karl Rahner, Schriften zur Theologie (Cologne: Benziger, 1962), V, pp. 223-243;
cf. also, Donald L. Gelpi, S.J., Life and Light: A Guide to the Theology of Karl Rahner
(New York, NY: Sheed and Ward, 1966), pp. 15-19.
His divine pre-existence and of other events within the eternal life of the
Godhead?
When one applies the norms of the new quests for the historical Jesus
to this aspect of Johannine theology, then the Beloved Disciple’s portrait
of Jesus’ personal self-awareness takes on the character of a theologou-
menon rather than of an historical description of Jesus’ psyche. In sim-
pler language, it would appear that the Beloved Disciple portrays Jesus
discoursing about His divine pre-existence with the Father as a way of
dealing theologically with the issues dividing his community from the
synagogue and from the Johannine dissidents. What the Johannine Jesus
says about His divine pre-existence enjoys theological truth; but, in my
judgment, it lacks historical plausibility.
In an experiential construct of the incarnation, the fact that Jesus’ hu-
man mind would of itself have no immediate access to the mind of God
does not rule out the possibility that He experienced, when He needed
them, special graced illuminations of the Breath of God. He enjoyed, for
example, the charism of prophecy and seems to have exhibited an ex-
traordinary capacity for discernment. Indeed, the Jesus of the gospels
gives evidence of having enjoyed every kind of charismatic empower-
ment, including the gift of miracles. Indeed, the synergy of the divine
and human wills in Jesus explains His capacity of working miracles in the
striking manner in which He very probably did, by a simple command.
Such pneumatic empowerment need not, however, have yielded His per-
sonal realization of His divine pre-existence with God from all eternity
and probably did not.
Since, moreover, as we have seen, resurrection and graced enlighten-
ment coincide, Jesus’ human mind would not have reached a full grasp of
His personal relationship with God until He rose from the dead. During
His lifetime, Jesus ‘scientia beata, the privileged self-awareness which flowed
from the hypostatic union, need not have contained anything more than
an ever subtler and more nuanced, loving insight into His relationship to
the Father. That developing insight the Breath of God worked persua-
sively in Him. As we have seen, the Breath of God functions within graced
human experience simultaneously as a source of empowering illumina-
tion and as a principle of resurrection. These two graced functions de-
scribe different facets of a single experiential transformation. If, however,
resurrection and graced illumination go hand in hand, then Jesus need
not have reached a full understanding of His personal relationship with
God until He rose from the dead. The Jesus of the Beloved Disciple, as
we have seen, habitually speaks from the ahistorical standpoint of the
paschal mystery.
Maximus the Confessor correctly recognized that Chalcedonian Christo-
logy raises questions about Jesus’ psychological development. An experi-
ential construct of the hypostatic union endorses that insight. It also al-
lows one to flesh out in scientifically plausible detail how Jesus’ human
experience developed.
As we saw in volume one, when one verifies a triadic philosophical
construct of experience in the results of contemporary psychology, those
results amplify one’s philosophical understanding of experience with the
verified results of detailed studies of normal human development. I re-
viewed those results at the beginning of this volume; but in order to
appreciate the Christological significance of these philosophical and psy-
chological insights, we need to recall them here.
The same biological processes which shape other human experiences
shaped Jesus’ human experience. As an infant, Jesus quite plausibly ad-
vanced from core self-awareness, to subjective self-awareness, and finally
to linguistic self-awareness. He interiorized the linguistic patterns of His
culture, including, it would appear, the oral modes of thinking prevalent
among the peasantry of Palestine. As He grew, the infant Jesus developed
from a lap child, to a knee child, to a yard child. He also had to deal with
questions of gender identity and with peer relationships.
Jesus very probably went through the same stages of cognitive develop-
ment as other humans. Hence, at year one, Jesus would have had the
sensory-motor consciousness of a one-year-old. As a small child He would
have viewed the world imaginatively, or “transductively.” He would then
have advanced to the stage of concrete operational thinking. At this point
in the evolution of developmental psychology, however, the evidence leaves
it an open question whether or not Jesus ever advanced to fully opera-
tional thinking.
By the time of His public ministry, Jesus may have been wrestling with
emotional issues of intimacy vs. isolation. One may even imagine with
some degree of plausibility that the male emotional crisis of the early
thirties partially motivated Jesus’ decision to abandon Joseph’s trade in
Nazareth in order to hear the preaching of John the Baptizer. As Jesus
approached death, He may have found Himself wrestling with the emo-
tional conflicts involved in the crisis of integrity vs. despair.
In what concerns Jesus human moral development, one can plausibly
suppose that, as in the case of other children, the child Jesus viewed the
rules of children’s games as symbolic of larger social relationships. It also
appears at least plausible, if not highly probable, that as Jesus developed
morally, He acquired greater human sensitivity to the complexity of hu-
man moral decisions.
As Jesus developed socially, it would appear at least plausible that He
gradually acquired a more nuanced sense of human social relationships.
Jesus’ human experience would, then, have advanced from the spontane-
ous and innocent egocentrism of infants to a greater and greater appre-
ciation of human friendship. Certainly, in His relationship to His dis-

ciples, Jesus exhibits, especially in His passion, a breathtaking capacity
for sustained friendship.
In His religious development, Jesus would, quite plausibly, have passed
through all the stages of human religious consciousness: from the chaotic
religious awareness of the infant, to the mythic-literal religious conscious-
ness of the small child, to the conventional religion of the early teenager,
to the responsible religion of the fully converted adult. Here the reader
should recall that in volume one I argued that the passage through con-
version from innocently irresponsible to responsible behavior need not
involve the passage from sin to repentance, only the passage from infan-
tile and adolescent immaturity to adult maturity.
In all of these developing experiences, Jesus would have also grown in
His self-understanding as a person through self-reflection, prayer, and
interaction with other persons. The finitude of His human experience would,
however, have deprived the Son of God’s human experience of any direct
access to the mind of God. Here too He became like us in all things.13
Even as a mature adult, then, Jesus’ human self-awareness probably
consisted only in His consciousness of standing in a special filial relation-
ship with God. As He grew and advanced through the events of His
public ministry He would have understood with greater and greater depth
the implications of that relationship. In that growing self-understanding,
however, Jesus would have had no more direct access to the ideas in God’s
mind than any other human experience does. The Breath of God, would
have presided persuasively over His developing personal self-under-
standing; but He could honestly say that He did not know things which
the Father did. The gospels tell us that He did in fact so speak.
If the radical finitude of Jesus’ human experience requires that it would
have advanced through expanding stages of consciousness in all the dif-
ferent finite realms of human experience, then, that same finitude de-
prives it of any claim to graced quasi-omniscience. On this point, Scotus
had the right of it and Aquinas did not. During His lifetime, Jesus did
not enjoy an objective vision of universal truth. Like other humans, he
experienced God’s Breath as an immanent principle of divine enlighten-
ment; but His religious consciousness developed in a manner analogous
to other finite human religious experiences.
Nevertheless, Jesus experienced the divine Breath differently from us,
as both Matthew and Luke make clear. In both gospels, as we have seen,
the divine Breath comes to Jesus under the sign of the dove. She comes
13. As we have seen, a triadic philosophical construct of experience, in contrast to

Whitehead’s di-polar theism, rejects ontologism. As a consequence, in a triadic
experiential construct of Jesus’ human experience, He would have enjoyed no more
direct access to the ideas in God’s mind than any other human experience enjoys.
therefore to disclose to Him His identity as the specially beloved Son of

God and as messiah in the image of the suffering servant. She comes to
reveal Him to us as Breath-baptizer and therefore as divine. She comes to
us under the sign of fire because she confronts us in our sinfulness as a
sanctifying principle of purification and of judgment.
When one reads these New Testament images in the light of a meta-
physics of experience, that metaphysics entails that we experience the
Breath of God only persuasively because we develop as morally vulner-
able autonomous human experiences who retain the ability of sin. Jesus
however experienced the Breath of God and the enlightenment which
She brings in the course of His sinless, efficacious, obediential transfor-
mation in the second person of the trinity. Moreover, Her enlightenment
of His human experience reveals Her historically as the cognitive link
within the divine experience between the Father and the Son and there-
fore as the mind of God.
An experiential construct of the hypostatic union also corrects kenotic
theology’s attempt to replace the divine consciousness of the second per-
son of the trinity with a finite historical human consciousness. We need
to identify two kinds of consciousness in the incarnate Word: one divine
and omniscient, the other human and developing.
Medieval Christology erred in a different direction from kenotic Christo-
logy when it projected as many divine traits into Jesus’ graced human
consciousness as possible. In almost divinizing Jesus’ human awareness
through the action of divine grace, medieval Christologists mislocated
the mystery of the incarnate Son of God’s double consciousness. By the
mystery of Jesus’ double consciousness, I mean that the incarnation re-
quires that one situate Jesus’ finite developing human awareness within
His divine omniscience. The quasi-divinization of Jesus’ graced human
awareness mislocates the mystery in Jesus’ human experience, whereas
the mystery properly belongs in the divine omniscience.
As we shall see in greater detail in the next chapter, God, as the su-
preme exemplification of experience, experiences everything experience-
able. The incarnation, however, caused the second person of the trinity
to experience the human experience called Jesus of Nazareth differently
from all other created experiences. The fact that Jesus’ human experience
developed with a divine autonomy caused the second person of the trin-
ity to own it personally. Through the incarnation, the Son of God expe-
rienced a particular, finite, developing, historically conditioned human
experience as His own finite, developing, historically conditioned, hu-
man experience. God’s efficacious owning of a human experience in the
incarnation makes that human experience utterly unique in the history
of the world.
In the incarnation therefore the Son of God experienced Jesus’ igno-

rance as His human ignorance, Jesus’ sensations as His sensations, Jesus
emotions as His emotions, Jesus’ finite human dreams and imaginings as
His human dreams and imaginings, Jesus’ thought processes as His finite
human thought processes, Jesus’ suffering as His suffering, Jesus’ human
temptations as His own human temptations.
The incarnate Son of God’s finite, developing human experience had,
however, no special, direct access to the divine omniscience. Jesus of
Nazareth knew only those realities to which His finite habits of cognitive
response and the graced illumination of the divine Breath gave Him ac-
cess.
An experiential construct of the hypostatic union provides, then, an
orthodox interpretation of the kenôsis of which the Christological hymn
in Philippians speaks. The kenôsis of the Son of God means that in every-
thing which concerns Jesus of Nazareth, the Word of God freely chose to
act and to suffer strictly within the limits of His finite, developing hu-
man experience. This the Son of God did in order to reveal to us the full
extent of God’s love for us. He also did it in order to save us.14
Jesus’ Freedom
An experiential construct of the hypostatic union allows one to vindicate
the flickering, finite freedom of Jesus’ human choices. Let us try to un-
derstand why.
In the preceding chapter, I summarized the triadic construct of experi-
ence which this study endorses. I indicated at that time that the distinc-
tion between autonomy and freedom would function significantly in an
experiential construct of the hypostatic union. The time has come to
explore that distinction’s Christological significance and importance.
In a metaphysics of experience autonomy and freedom qualify differ-
ent realms of experience. Autonomy means the bare capacity to initiate
either evaluation or decision. Autonomy qualifies the realm of tendency.
By that I mean that tendencies function either autonomously or not.
Tendencies which do not function autonomously function instead as in-
tegral elements in some larger self or person. Inorganic chemicals, for
example, function autonomously. Organic chemicals do not. Instead,
organic chemicals function as integral facets of a larger, more or less com-
plex, living self.
Elementary freedom means the ability to act or not to act, to do this
rather than that. Converted liberty means freedom to live for the beauti-
14. Cf. Philip Kaiser, Das Wissen Jesu Christi in der lateinischen (westlichen) Theologie
(Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 1981). Kaiser correctly insists on the develop-
mental and dialogic character of Jesus’ human self-awareness. He also argues correctly
that Jesus’ self- awareness had both a revelatory dimension and a trinitarian structure.
ful, the true and the good, in both their natural and supernatural mani-
festations. Both forms of personal freedom qualify the realm of evalua-
tion because humans can choose freely only to the extent that they can
distinguish realistically practicable options. In order to do that, the hu-
man mind needs first to grasp those options evaluatively. Since, more-
over, personal consciousness grows through making distinctions and see-
ing relationships, both freedom and consciousness flicker; and, in practi-
cal deliberation, they flicker together.
Autonomy displays no degrees; it exhibits an either-or character. You
cannot do my growing for me; either I grow or remain stunted. Freedom
by contrast does have a more or less. It waxes and wanes in different
social, environmental, and psychological contexts. Freedom also comes
in different kinds depending on the kinds of cognitive and practical skills
a given individual cultivates. I have described above the environmental,
conceptual, perspectival, decisive, and habitual variables which condi-
tion freedom. By conditioning human awareness of possible realistic op-
tions, those variables cause human freedom to flicker.
If a divine person ruled all Jesus’ human decisions efficaciously, then
that divine person found Himself more or less humanly free at different mo-
ments in His historical career. Jesus at age two experienced more human
constraints on His freedom than Jesus at age thirty. Jesus teaching beside the
Sea of Galilee faced more realistic options than when He hung on the cross.
In virtue of the synergy which characterized Jesus’ divine and human
choices, the Son of God made finite human decisions and made them
freely. Those decisions enjoyed human freedom only to the extent that
Jesus’ finite human mind could at any given point distinguish realistic
alternative modes of acting. Hence, the same variables which condition
any exercise of human freedom conditioned Jesus’ finite human freedom
and caused it to flicker. By the same token, after He came of age fully in
every realm of His human experience, the Son of God enjoyed liberty in
the sense defined above. By that I mean that He enjoyed an enhanced
human capacity to desire the good, the true, and the beautiful, a capacity
rooted in an integral, five-fold conversion.
The essentialism of substance philosophy sets Jesus’ divine and human
decisions in conflict. To say, in the context of substance philosophy, that
the second person of the trinity decides efficaciously the choices of a
human will which by its very essential constitution enjoys freedom seems
to violate that will’s created nature.
A metaphysics of experience, however, eschews all forms of essential-
ism, including this one. In dealing with the hypostatic union, that meta-
physics also avoids seeming to assert any irreconcilable competition be-
tween Jesus’ divine and human wills. In an experiential construct of the
hypostatic union, the synergy between the incarnate Word’s divine and
human wills does not abolish the freedom of His free and finite human
choices. It only causes the second person of the trinity to experience those
free and flickering choices as His own.
In the exercise of free choice, Jesus experienced the temptation to sin,
to disobey the will of God as He perceived it. The New Testament leaves
no doubt on that score. Indeed, Jesus’ agony in the garden dramatizes all
too vividly His capacity to experience even acute human repugnance to
doing and suffering what the Father asked of Him.
The gospels mention three specific temptations which Jesus endured.
As death approached He probably felt the fallacious allure of all three
temptations more and more powerfully. Jesus experienced the tempta-
tion to self-reliance, to trust in Himself rather than in the Father. He
experienced the temptation to test God, to set conditions on His willing-
ness to trust the Father. Finally, Jesus felt the all-too-common human
impulse to counter violence with violence and to found the kingdom of
God on force rather than on the forgiving worship of a forgiving Father
and on non-violent resistance to evil.
In His finite human experience, the Son of God felt the allure of all
three temptations. Because His human experience grew with divine au-
tonomy, the incarnate Word experienced them as His very own tempta-
tions. He also felt them as temptations to sin, to do something which
contradicted the divine will; but He did not yield to them. Indeed, as
God He could not.
That does not mean, however, that from a human standpoint the in-
carnate Word did not acknowledge the human attractiveness of the sinful
alternatives which He freely rejected. He freely rejected them because He
distinguished within His human consciousness between trusting in one-
self and trusting in God, between testing God and trusting God uncondi-
tionally, between the vision of God’s peaceable kingdom and the violence
of worldly kingdoms.
Autonomy qualifies the realm of tendency adverbially. Freedom and
liberty qualify the realm of evaluation adverbially at the same time that
they specify the decisions which terminate human evaluations. Jesus’ fi-
nite developing human experience could, therefore, grow with a divine
autonomy and yet remain not only humanly free but also humanly
tempted in the same way as any other finite, developing human experi-
ence. In Jesus’ case, however, a divine autonomy ultimately decided
whether to yield to a temptation or to reject it. In every temptation and
in every circumstance, He opted to do the divine will as He understood it
with His human mind.15
15. Cf. Johannes Stöhr, “Reflecciones teologicas en Torno a la Libertad de Christo en su

Pasion y Muerte” in Cristo Hijo de Dios y Redentor del Hombre, pp. 805-849.
In this section, I have presented in a preliminary manner an experien-

tial construct of the hypostatic union. In the next section and in the
chapters which follow this one, I shall test the adequacy of this Christo-
logical hypothesis by clarifying its operational consequences deductively
and by testing its adequacy to resolve debated issues in the historical de-
velopment of Christology.
(III)
In the preceding section, I presented an experiential construct of the hy-
postatic union. If that construct can deal successfully with the issues raised
by the development of Chalcedonian Christology, by Enlightenment
Christology, and by contemporary orthodox alternatives to Enlighten-
ment Christology, then it will give fair promise of theological adequacy.
This section begins to test that adequacy.
As we saw in an earlier chapter, Friedrich Loofs first formulated an
“anhypostatic” interpretation of Chalcedonian Christology and errone-
ously attributed the position to Leontius of Byzantium. The objections
to Loofs’s use of the term “anhypostasis” argue that: 1) it deprives Jesus’
humanity of substantial reality, 2) it denies its particularity, and 3) it
violates the Aristotelian principle that every physis subsists in its own hy-
postasis. Those same definitions and presuppositions seemed to set Jesus’
human hypostasis, if He had one, in competition with His divine hyposta-
sis. These objections tacitly presuppose the truth and adequacy of an
essentialistic substance philosophy.
The shift from substance philosophy to a metaphysics of experience
demands the philosophical redefinition of physis and hypostasis. In a meta-
physics of experience subsistence, hypostatic reality, results from autono-
mous functioning. Read in the light of a metaphysics of experience the
Son of God’s human nature becomes a finite, developing human experi-
ence whose specific character, like that of every other human experience,
derives from its total history: from the totality of interactions, evaluations,
decisions, and habitual tendencies which constitute it. Its history, therefore,
rather than its substantial individuality endows it with its particularity.
The fact that Jesus’ human experience develops with a divine autonomy
does not, then render that experience insubstantial. Instead, divine au-
tonomy transforms that historically unique human experience into the
perfectly human experience of being a divine person.
In a metaphysics of experience, the term “autonomy” functions, as we
have seen, not as a noun but as an adverb. By that I mean that “au-
tonomy” designates the way in which a particular tendency or set of ten-
dencies develops. The hypostatic union does not, therefore, cause Jesus’
human experience to lose anything substantial. It simply changes the way
in which the tendencies which constitute Jesus’ human experience function.
Finally, because a metaphysics of experience defines both physis and

hypostasis differently from classical Greek philosophy, it violates no prin-
ciples of that philosophy. By the same token, by equating hypostatic sub-
sistence not with a thing but with a way of functioning, a metaphysics of
experience avoids any apparent competition between Jesus’ divine and
human substances.
A metaphysics of experience can also make better sense of the theologi-
cal term “enhypostasis” than classical substance philosophy. “Experience”
becomes a metaphysical term as soon as one admits that experienced re-
alities stand within experience and not outside it. Then reality divides
into what is experienced and the way in which experienced realities are
experienced.Experienced realities stand within experience and help de-
fine its specific character. When we experience another person, that per-
son truly becomes a part of us. The person does not become an integral
part of us because he or she continues to function autonomously. Still,
personal experiences do blend into one another, as we know all too
poignantly when we grieve for the death of a loved one. This blending of
experiences exemplifies their mutual existence in one another.
Jesus’ human experience, however, existed within the divine experience of
the Son of God with even greater intimacy than that with which other hu-
man experiences exist socially in one another. The fact that the Son of God’s
human experience grew and developed with a divine autonomy transforms it
into an integral facet of His divine person. Jesus of Nazareth confronts us as
the thoroughly finite human experience of being a divine person. As a conse-
quence, the Son of God’s human experience exists in the divine experience in
a manner which endows it with a personal divine identity.16
As we saw in the preceding chapter, Ephraim of Antioch defended the
blending of divine and human hypostaseis in Jesus as a way of explaining
the hypostatic union. Within the context of substance philosophy, I find
the notion of the blending of substances logically self-contradictory. Sub-
stances by definition subsist in themselves and not in another as in a
principle of inhesion. In such a philosophical universe, that two sub-
stances would blend remains philosophically unthinkable.
Even in the context of a metaphysics of experience, the fact that Jesus’
human experience develops with a divine autonomy does not mean that
divine and human autonomy blend in Him. The either-or character of
autonomy precludes such an interpretation of the hypostatic union. If in
Jesus we confront an acting human person, then we cannot simultaneously
confront an acting divine person and vice versa, any more than your say-
ing something causes me to speak. If Jesus’ human experience developed
with a divine autonomy, then His human actions confront us as the hu-
16. Cf. Michael Azkoul, “Perichorêsis: The Christology of the Icon,” Patristic and
Byzantine Review, 7(1988), pp. 67-85.
man actions of a divine person. If he functioned with only human au-

tonomy, then those same acts would not confront us as the actions of a
divine person but only as actions of a human person indistinguishable
from any other human person.
A metaphysics of experience makes the hypostatic union thinkable. A
metaphysics of experience allows one to think philosophically without
contradiction the mutual inexistence of two experiences, one divine and
the other human without their blending into a third reality. In that meta-
physics realities which experience one another exist in one another, since
what one experiences stands within one’s experience not outside it. The
two experiences do not blend into a third subsistent reality because they
remain experientially distinct, one finite and the other infinite.
In an experiential construct of the hypostatic union, the divine Word’s
divine experience remains fully divine; and His human experience re-
mains a thoroughly finite human experience. Jesus has a finite human
experience of His personal reality and of the reality of God. At the same
time, the divine experience remains uncreated, infinite, and eternal. Since,
moreover, the efficacious transformation of one experience in another
occurs in the course of natural organic growth and assimilation, it vio-
lates no philosophical principle to suggest the efficacious transformation
of Jesus’ human experience in the personal reality of the Son of God. Hence,
it also makes philosophical sense in the context of a metaphysics of experi-
ence to describe Jesus as the human experience of being a divine person.
Still, the philosophical thinkablility of the hypostatic union does not
deprive it of its uniqueness, of its gracious character, or of its mystery.
Only in Jesus Christ do we encounter the human experience of being a
divine person. Having created us, nothing compelled God to become
human in order to save us from our own sinful folly. We therefore expe-
rience the incarnation as pure and gratuitous gift, as the supreme em-
bodiment of divine grace. Finally, in the incarnate Son of God we con-
front the unfathomable mystery of divine compassion, condescension,
forgiveness, and love. Within the context of a metaphysics of experience,
however, the reduction of the incarnation to mystery does not imply its
rational unintelligibility.
A metaphysics of experience also makes mutual indwelling (perichoresis)
philosophically thinkable. As we saw, different Greek fathers of the Church
endowed this term with a variety of meanings.
Gregory of Nazianzus used the term “perichoresis” to describe the mu-
tual predicability of the divine and human in Jesus. The predicability of
divine and human traits in the hypostatic union raises the question of the
“communication of traits (communicatio idiomatum).” An experiential
construct of the hypostatic union requires, with Aquinas, that one predi-
cate both divine and human traits of person of the Son. It also forbids
that one ever predicate them of one another. Jesus’ human experience
remains thoroughly human; His divine experience remains thoroughly
divine. It therefore violates the principles of logic to attribute divine traits
to Jesus’ human experience or human traits to Jesus’ divine experience.17
Maximus the Confessor used the term “perichoresis” in order to de-
scribe the synergy of divine and human wills in the hypostatic union. As
I have already explained, an experiential construct of the hypostatic union
endorses Maximus’s doctrine of synergy and finds in it the key to under-
standing the hypostatic union. That metaphysics also makes his use of
“perichoresis” philosophically thinkable, since Jesus’ human experience
exists in His divine person and is encompassed by His divine experience,
but as The Son of God’s own finite, developing, human experience.
John of Damascus used “perichoresis” in order to explain both the unity
of the trinity and the unity of the divine and the human in the incarnate
Word. As we shall see in more detail in the following chapters a meta-
physics of experience endorses the Damascene’s trinitarian use of the
term.18 It also endorses his Christological use of “perichoresis.” The divine
and human experiences exist in one another in the incarnation without
blending. Jesus experiences God within a finite, developing, human per-
spective. In His divinity the second person of the trinity experiences His
finite, developing, human experience from the standpoint of divine om-
niscience.
Because the Son of God’s human experience develops with a divine
autonomy, that experience dwells in the second person of the blessed
trinity as an integral facet of His personal reality. An experiential con-
struct of the hypostatic union therefore endows the rhetorical metaphors
which John of Damascus used to explain perichoresis with inferential and
philosophical content.
An experiential construct of the hypostatic union also endorses the
position that the union of the divine and human in the person of Jesus
17. The later Luther’s theology contrasts with Aquinas’s sound interpretation of the
communication of traits. In his commentary on the councils of the Church, the aging
Luther sought to vindicate the orthodoxy of the Protestant position. He endorsed the
Nicene homoousios and questioned whether Ephesus dealt fairly with Nestorius. At the
same time, he faulted Nestorius for denying the communicatio idiomatum. He also
criticized Eutyches for confounding the traits of divinity and humanity.
In his own handling of the communicatio idiomatum, however, Luther stressed what
he called the genus majestaticum and attempted to attribute to the humanity as many
divine traits as he could, apart from immortality and creative power. In addition,
Luther insisted on the suffering of God in the incarnate Christ.
Critics of his rhetorical use of the genus majestaticum have suggested that it leads to
Docetism and that Luther’s insistence on the suffering of God leads to monopysitism.
That latter objection presupposes, of course, a classical philosophical conception of the
divine immutability. (Lienhard, Martin Luthers christologisches Zeugnis, pp. 228-264)
18. Cf. Gelpi, The Divine Mother, pp. 132-143.
expresses the working of gratuitous divine grace and differs from any
merely natural union. Things in nature do cease to function autonomously
on occasion. Think of the chemicals ingested into the human body. The
Son of God did not, however, ingest His human experience in the same
way in which we digest food. Moreover, only in Jesus do we encounter
the human experience of being a divine person.
Hence, Alexander of Hales did well to insist on the uniqueness of the
gracious union of the divine and human in Jesus. That union also differs
from the way in which God dwells graciously in us, for, as human expe-
riences, we retain our human autonomy. As a result, the Breath of God
must transform us persuasively as human persons. In His humanity the
incarnate Son of God also experienced the Breath’s persuasive illumina-
tion; but, in contrast to us, that illumination advanced the efficacious
transformation of His human experience in such a way as to make it the
human experience of being a divine person. The graciousness of the hy-
postatic union derives from the fact that in it God freely gives Himself to
a sinful humanity in a manner which utterly exceeds anything which
sinful humanity has a right to claim to deserve of God.
Grace transforms human nature in three ways: grace heals, perfects,
and elevates sinful humanity. The incarnation effects all three gracious
results efficaciously and prototypically.
In all the gospels, Jesus’ healing miracles foreshadow the deeper healing
which the paschal mystery effects. Jesus’ power to heal physical blindness
foreshadows His power as risen Lord to heal the blindness of sin and
unbelief. Like Bartimaeus, the blind whom Jesus heals follow Him on
“the way.” Jesus’ power to heal the deaf and dumb foreshadows the gra-
cious illumination which the Breath of Christ will effect when She em-
powers believers to hear the gospel and to proclaim it. Jesus’ exorcisms
foreshadow the deliverance from the Satanic principalities and powers of
this world which His resurrection and sending of the Breath effect. The
sacramental rite of anointing institutionalizes the Christian community’s
faith in the risen Christ’s power to heal humanity physically, morally, and
religiously.
The incarnate Son of God, however, heals humanity not only effica-
ciously but prototypically. He does so by dying to sin in His flesh. That
death to sin (together with His resurrection and sending of the Breath)
transforms Him into the last Adam. The efficacious gracing of Jesus’ hu-
man experience which the incarnation effects recreates humanity in its
primordial innocence and freedom from sin. By His sinlessness, there-
fore, Jesus models for a sinful humanity the kind of human religious
commitment which heals humanity’s sinfulness.
The incarnate Word also perfects humanity prototypically and effica-
ciously. Given the finitude of human nature, its vulnerability to original
sin and concupiscence, and its spontaneous and instinctive egocentrism,

we humans left to ourselves lack the capacity for universal love. We love
our own spontaneously: our friends, our families, and the members of
other social groups with which we identify. We do not, however, sponta-
neously love our enemies. Nor do we love spontaneously the stranger and
the alien. We spontaneously tend instead to view them with fear, suspi-
cion, and hostility. We humans divide society spontaneously into in groups
and out groups; and we tend to respond to the members of out groups
with suspicion, fear, and hostility.
Jesus perfects human nature by incarnating within the limitations of
human experience a universal, divine love. Only God loves all things by
His very nature. By embodying the universality of divine love Jesus gra-
ciously elevates human nature to a new level of perfection.
Love, of course, always operates in the concrete. We must love, not the
abstract essence of humanity, but concrete persons in concrete acts of
benevolence. Jesus universalizes human love by insisting that it exclude
no one in principle and that it include even one’s enemies, even those one
tends spontaneously to despise and to hate. Jesus’ preferential concern
for the poor, for the marginal, for sinners, for outcasts, and for the ex-
pendable dregs of human society gives human shape to the universality
of divine love and in the process models it prototypically for the rest of
humanity.
Jesus effects that love in sinful human hearts by the gift of the divine
Breath. The Breath of the risen Christ relates to sinful Christians in three
ways: through justifying faith, through sanctification, and through char-
ismatic empowerment. By justifying faith She converts human hearts to
Christ-like living. By sanctifying human experience She teaches us to
hope, to believe, and especially to love in Jesus’ image. By Her charis-
matic empowerment She transforms sanctification into concrete deeds of
service for the Church and for humanity.
The risen Christ perfects human nature by the gift of His Breath. The
universal Christ-like love which She inspires makes Christian hope, faith,
love, and charismatic service authentic and practical. By teaching the
human heart to love universally, Christ’s Breath makes humanity more au-
thentically human than it could ever become left to its own natural resources.
The incarnation elevates human experience by uniting it personally
and eternally to the Godhead. Jesus does this prototypically by exempli-
fying the human experience of being a divine person. His transformation
in the Breath of God from conception to resurrection embodies for the
rest of humanity what human experience looks like when perfectly and
efficaciously united to God.
Jesus elevates humanity efficaciously by creating the eschaton: by dy-
ing in sinless obedience to God and by rising as a “life-giving Breath,” as
source of one’s own decisions about thinking and about acting physically.
An autonomously functioning reality cannot communicate its autonomy
to anybody or anything else. You cannot do my growing for me. You
cannot decide what I believe or do. Nor can I do the same things for you.
As we have seen, for Scotus the term “incommunicability” implied the
unique singularity of existence as well as the negation of dependence on
another. A metaphysics of experience would endorse both insights. The
exercise of autonomy decides the development of an experience and makes
it into the unique kind of experience which it becomes. Moreover, in a
world in which experiences exist in one another, the exercise of autonomy
makes them both relationally distinct and mutually independent at the
same time that they exist in one another.
In the chapter which follows, I shall coordinate an experiential con-
struct of the hypostatic union with an experiential understanding of the
trinity. In the course of doing so, I shall endorse Rahner’s suggestion that
in the incarnation one encounters the Son of God’s symbolic
self-expression, although I shall explain that self-expression and
self-communication in different philosophical terms from Rahner. I must,
however, postpone any discussion of Rahner’s position until I have first
sketched an experiential construct of the trinity.
The preceding reflections suggest, however, that an experiential con-
struct of the hypostatic union has the ability to deal philosophically with
some of the important issues raised by the development of Chalcedonian
Christology. It also promises to deal adequately with the issues raised by
different Enlightenment Christologies. To this second set of issues I turn
in the paragraphs which follow.
Enlightenment Christology has engendered two interrelated approaches
to Christology. One approach espouses a frank rationalism which con-
fines religious faith strictly within the bounds of reason. This version of
Enlightenment “theology” betrays liberal theologians into mouthing
Christian words while denying the fundamental content of Christian faith.
A second approach seeks to reconcile reason with faith but tends, even in
what concerns the historical self-disclosure of God, to value purely ratio-
nal categories more than those derived from the experience of faith. The
second form of Enlightenment “theology” offers a rationally watered-down
account of divine revelation. In the first chapter of this section, I in-
cluded under the category “Enlightenment Christology” Protestant kenotic
Christology, Process Christology, and the so-called “low” Christologies
defended by some contemporary theologians.
An experiential approach to Christology replaces the flawed Romantic
dialectical logic of nineteenth-century kenotic theologians with a sound
inferential and relational logic of consequences. Moreover, an experien-
tial construct of the hypostatic union refuses to make the incarnation of
the Son of God contingent on His abdication either of divinity or of

some measure of divinity. Such thinking leads inevitably in one of two
directions. Either it endorses monophysitism by portraying a Jesus who
qualifies as neither fully divine or fully human; or it endorses some modi-
fied expression of Arianism by portraying Jesus as a human person pretty
much like everyone else.
An experiential Christology also avoids identifying the Logos with Jesus’
human soul, in the manner of Johann Ebrard. Instead, as a consequence
of the incarnation, the divine person of the Word begins to experience
finite, living, organic, developing human evaluations, decisions, and ten-
dencies as His own human experience.
An experiential construct of the hypostatic union rejects process
theology’s invocation of a Whiteheadean ontologism in order to explain
the divine presence in Jesus. In Whiteheadean cosmology, reversion, or
the prehension of an eternal object in the mind of God, seeks unsuccess-
fully to explain process. Process Christologists invoke the same flawed
philosophical concept in order to explain the “divine presence” in the
human person called Jesus. In a triadic, realistic, social construct of expe-
rience, developing tendencies successfully explain process.
In Protestant process Christology the creation of a finite experience
and its gracing coincide. The experiential construct of the hypostatic union
proposed above refuses to join process Christologists in naturalizing the
grace embodied in the incarnation by identifying it with God’s creation
of the world through “reversion.” In fact, the events which reveal the
incarnation make it clear that divine grace functions as a supernatural
gift over and above the gift of creation. The experiential construct of the
incarnation presented above views Jesus as a divine person incarnate and
not just as the supreme exemplification of human creativity.
That same experiential Christology also repudiates the attempt of pro-
cess theology to portray Jesus anachronistically as a Whiteheadean
philosophe. Instead, an experiential Christology seeks to incorporate into
its account of Jesus’ humanity a historically verified account of His actual
religious message.
Finally, in contrast to Griffin’s Christ, an experiential construct of the
hypostatic union discovers in the spoken Word made flesh a unique hu-
man embodiment of God. Jesus’ humanity also qualifies as unsurpassable
in the perfection of its personal union with God and in its utter sinlessness.
I shall reflect in a later chapter on the normative claims which Jesus’
uniqueness entails. Here it suffices to note that when one replaces
Whitehead’s nominalistic di-polar construct of experience with a triadic,
relational, social construct of experience one does not need to force Chris-
tian faith into a badly constructed, procrustean philosophical bed, as Prot-
estant process Christology unfortunately and repeatedly does.
As we saw above, Piet Schoonenberg attempted to replace Chalcedonian

Christology with a refurbished adoptionism because he deemed the ob-
jections to Chalcedon overwhelming and, apparently, irrefutable. In pre-
senting Schoonenberg’s position in an earlier chapter, I promised to con-
sider in greater detail the difficulties with Chalcedon which he raised.
The time has come to keep that promise.
In criticizing Chalcedon Schoonenberg argued that Chalcedonian
Christology cannot account for the incommensurability between divine
infinity and human finitude. Schoonenberg leaves the definition of “in-
finity” vague but seems to take for granted that it means the infinite act
of Thomism.
A metaphysics of experience, as we shall see, concedes the infinity of
God but defines it differently from Aquinas. Instead of endorsing Aquinas’s
view of God as infinite act, a metaphysics of experience adopts Hilary of
Poitier’s more functional and more philosophically defensible19 defini-
tion of divine infinity. Viewed functionally, an infinite reality encom-
passes all things and is encompassed by no other reality.
Moreover, as we shall also see in greater detail in the next chapter, an
experiential approach to the trinity discovers an analogy between human
social experience and the divine society of the trinity. Far from character-
izing divine and human experiences as incommensurable, therefore, a
metaphysics of experience discovers an analogous resemblance between
the social reality of God and human social reality. That analogy makes
the incarnation and the sending of the divine Breath entirely appropriate
ways for God to reveal Himself in human social history. That same anal-
ogy establishes a measure of commensurability between divine and hu-
man social experience, because, while they differ, they also resemble one
another. I shall deal with these issues in greater detail in the course of
coordinating an experiential Christology with an experiential construct
of the trinity.
Schoonenberg faulted Chalcedonian Christology for reifying Jesus’
humanity as a metaphysical essence. Schoonenberg’s objection applies to
essentialist elaborations of Chalcedonian Christology but not to the coun-
cil of Chalcedon itself, which endorsed no particular philosophical inter-
pretation of its key theological terms. The metaphysics of experience which
subtends an experiential construct of the hypostatic union rejects all forms
of philosophical essentialism. It therefore avoids as well Schoonenberg’s
censure.
Schoonenberg criticized Chalcedonian Christology for using ahistorical
language in describing Jesus’ humanity. This objection does apply to the
Chalcedonian Christological creed and to some essentialist post-Chalce-
19. In my judgment the philosophical notion of infinite act leads logically to Spinozistic
modalism.
donian Christologies. It does not, however, apply to the multi-disciplinary

construct of Jesus’ humanity which an experiential rendering of
Chalcedonian Christological doctrine invokes. That construct makes the
notion of Jesus’ humanity concrete by approaching it in a multi-disci-
plinary context. Insights from developmental psychology into Jesus’ plau-
sible human development concretize it. So do the verified results of the
new quests for the historical Jesus.
Schoonenberg also rejected Chalcedon because it poses for him an un-
acceptable theological dilemma: namely, it forces one to absorb Jesus’
human personality into the reality of the Word or else put the individual
center of Jesus’ human reality in competition with the Word.
The preceding experiential account of the hypostatic union does nei-
ther. As Jesus’ human experience developed with divine autonomy it ac-
quired a distinctive human personality. The gospel portraits echo aspects
of that personality even though they do not provide a detailed psycho-
logical portrait of Jesus. Jesus’ teaching, for example, certainly gravitated
toward parable and proverb. Those teaching patterns reflect the influence
of oral culture and suggest a possible psychological bias toward intuitive
patterns of thinking. The gospels also gives us some sense of Jesus’ ap-
proachability, compassion, mercy, courage.
By endorsing and developing philosophically Maximus’s doctrine of
volitional synergy as the key to the hypostatic union, an experiential con-
struct of the hypostatic union does not put Jesus’ human reality in com-
petition with His divine reality. They act in perfect collaboration. More-
over, as we shall see in the next chapter, Jesus’ human experience func-
tions as a perfect iconic communication of His person.
By answering all of Schoonenberg’s objections, an experiential Christo-
logy undercuts any motive for replacing Chalcedonian Christology with
Schoonenberg’s adoptionism.20 It suggests rather that Schoonenberg’s
problems with Chalcedon stem from a failure to think things through
philosophically. An experiential construct of the incarnation also shows
up some of the more obvious inadequacies in Schoonenberg’s position.
Schoonenberg fails to explain how an ordinary graced human being could
have avoided the morally inevitable corruption of original sin and of
concupiscence. Schoonenberg’s account of the resurrection ignores Pauline,
Matthean, and Johannine Christology. It therefore also fails to grasp the
relationship of the resurrection to the sending the Breath. As a conse-
quence, it fails to validate the role which the mission of the Breath by the
risen Christ plays in revealing His divinity.
Schoonenberg clearly wants to make Christological faith credible in a
secularizing, rationalistic, post-Christian Europe. In the end, however,
20. For Schoonenberg’s objections to Chalcedon, see: Piet Schoonenberg, The Christ,
translated by Della Couling (New York, NY: Seabury, 1969), pp. 50-65.
his “low” Christology degenerates into bad Christology and betrays the
shared faith of the Church.
Hans Küng’s minimalist reading of Christological doctrine also pro-
ceeds from an understandable pastoral concern to communicate with “the
modern mind.” A term like “the modern mind” labors, of course, under
lamentable vagueness and can mean almost anything. Moreover, by can-
onizing historical-critical method as the tacit norm of Christian faith,
Küng so understates the shared Christological faith of the Church that
he leaves both the hypostatic union and the trinity in serious doubt. An
experiential Christology clearly endorses both Chalcedonian orthodoxy
and the shared trinitarian faith of the Church.
Haight’s Spirit Christology correctly calls attention to the need to make
the divine Breath more central to Christological thinking. Unfortunately,
however, Haight mistakes Jesusology for Christology because he fails to
root his “Spirit Christology” in the paschal mystery. By ignoring the pas-
chal mystery, Haight fails to recognize that the resurrection and sending
of the Breath transform one’s graced perceptions in faith of the way in
which She relates to Jesus during His mortal ministry. Haight, as a conse-
quence, assumes that the divine Breath graces Jesus in much the same
way in which She graces other humans. Hence, Haight’s Christ resembles
more the Mary of classical Catholic Mariology than the traditional object
of Christological faith. Haight’s Spirit-filled Jesus confronts one as the
most perfectly redeemed of all creatures. How that redemption occurred
remains, however, unexplained and on Haight’s terms unexplainable.
An experiential construct of the hypostatic union also proposes a Breath
Christology; but, unlike Haight, it makes the paschal mystery normative
for Christological thinking. In the paschal mystery, Jesus stands revealed
not as a perfectly graced human person but as personally divine because
in His resurrection He functions as the efficacious source of the divine
Breath and therefore as the source of divine life itself. In an experiential
Christology, Jesus confronts the world as the human experience of being
a divine person.
Haight, however, correctly recognizes that any adequate Christology
needs to take into account the divine Breath’s presence in Jesus during
His mortal ministry. I shall do that presently in reflecting on the
soteriological consequences of the hypostatic union. Still, in portraying
Jesus as just a human person in whom the Breath dwells more fully than
in other human persons, Haight finally makes it impossible for Jesus to
save anyone. In the New Testament, Jesus saves us by putting us in a
life-giving relationship with God. That He does by sending the Breath. If
Jesus only receives the Breath like anyone else, He cannot function as
Her source. If He does send Her, as the New Testament manifestly testi-
the efficacious, mediating source of the Breath whose enlightenment cre-

ates the last age of salvation by drawing sinful humans persuasively into
the mystery of God and of risen life with Christ.
As we have seen, some medieval essentialist theologians explained the
hypostatic union by appealing to the substitution of divine for human
dignity. Since medieval essentialists fallaciously reified essences, they
thought of that substitution as the removal of one essence, “human dig-
nity,” and the insertion of another, “divine dignity.”
A metaphysics of experience avoids the essence fallacy by refusing to
reify essences. In a metaphysics of experience, essences belong to the how
of experience, not to its what. The term essence designates an evaluative
response abstracted from the reality it presents and from the one who
evaluates. As a consequence, in the context of a metaphysics of experi-
ence, the essentialist notion of the substitution of one essence for another
in the metaphysical constitution of some reality makes no sense.
Nevertheless, an experiential construct of the hypostatic union does
discover in the Word made flesh a divine dignity. It explains that dignity,
however, in functional rather in than in essentialistic terms by asserting
that Jesus’ human experience develops with a divine autonomy and there-
fore confronts us as the human experience of being a divine person.
An experiential construct of the hypostatic union rests on different
metaphysical presuppositions from those endorsed by Thomas Aquinas.
It therefore does not endorse his metaphysical explanation of the hypo-
static union in the philosophical terms in which he presented it. Aquinas,
as I indicated above, explained that union as the actualization of Jesus’
human essence by the act of Being of the second person of the trinity.
If, however, one redefines the meaning of actualization in terms com-
patible with a metaphysics of experience, then in an experiential con-
struct of the incarnation the grace of union does in a sense consist in the
actualization of Jesus’ humanity. In a metaphysics of experience, evalua-
tion exemplifies possibility, tendency exemplifies reality, and decision
exemplifies actuality. Hence, in portraying the hypostatic union as the
decisive, obediential transformation of a human experience in a divine
person, an experiential construct of the hypostatic union does under-
stand the grace of union as actualization. Here, however, actualization
means decisive transformation.
A metaphysics of experience endorses Scotus’s insistence on the incom-
municability of personal existence. Moreover, a metaphysics of experi-
ence equates that incommunicability with human autonomy adverbially
conceived. The adverbial character of autonomy means that the noun
“autonomy” does not designates a thing; instead, it describes the way a
tendency functions. Autonomy always remains irreducibly one’s own and
therefore incommunicable because it designates one as the efficacious
fies, then in His risen glory He confronts us as the efficacious source of

divine life and therefore as God.
I have been pondering the varieties of Enlightenment Christology in
the light of an experiential construct of the hypostatic union. Not every
modern or contemporary Christology, however, qualifies as an “Enlight-
enment Christology.” Only those Christologies do which either espouse
a straightforward rationalism or which justify a bad Christology by call-
ing it a “low” Christology.
One finds, moreover, theological alternatives to Enlightenment Christo-
logy: both Protestant neo-orthodoxy and philosophical Christologies
which remain within the parameters of Christian orthodoxy. In the final
paragraphs of this section, I shall compare both kinds of Christology
with the experiential Christology developed in this volume.21
As we saw in reviewing the issues raised by post-Chalcedonian Christo-
logy, neo-orthodoxy overreacts to Enlightenment rationalism by refusing
to think metaphysically. The same flaw mars much contemporary New
Testament theology. Unfortunately, when theologians refuse to think
philosophically and metaphysically, they tend, in the course of fixing their
religious beliefs and their uncritically held philosophical beliefs, to fall
into the dogmatism of taste. All other things being equal, the attractive-
ness of a doctrinal hypothesis justifies adopting it in a tentative way; but
it does not establish the hypothesis’s truth.
The experiential Christology here proposed endorses a fallibilistic ap-
proach to philosophical metaphysics. By that I mean that a metaphysical
theory of the whole needs verification not only in lived human experi-
ence but also in the verified results of more focused sciences. In other words,
an experiential Christology discovers both a critical and a constructive role
for philosophy in the formulation of Christological doctrine.
Nevertheless, an experiential Christology honors the insights of
neo-orthodoxy to the extent that it makes the historical self-revelation of
God in Jesus and in the mission of His Breath the measure of all philo-
sophical God-talk. In other words, in what concerns the reality of God,
revelation judges philosophy, not philosophy revelation.
Among recent attempts to reformulate Christological doctrine, both
Rahner and Schillebeeckx stand out for their concern to vindicate a place
for philosophy in the formulation of Christian doctrine. Their
Christologies rest, however, on philosophically questionable assumptions.
In his mature Christology, Rahner distinguishes between a priori and a
posteriori Christology. Rahner’s a priori Christology seeks to update Anselm
21. For an orthodox approach to Spirit Christology, see: Ralph Del Colle, Christ and
Spirit: Spirit Christology in Trinitarian Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1994). See also: Antonio Aranda, “Christologia y Pneumatologia” in Christo Hijo de
Dios y Redentor del Hombre, pp. 649-669.
of Canterbury’s Cur Deus Homo by grounding it in transcendental method

and in a Maréchalean metaphysical anthropology. Transcendental method
posits in the human spirit an a priori orientation to God as absolute mys-
tery. In the supernatural existential Rahner discovers an a priori, graced
orientation to Christ. As a consequence, Rahner argues, Jesus Christ con-
fronts us as the absolute savior, as the only one who fulfills the a priori
yearning of the human spirit for God.22
By a posteriori Christology Rahner means the objectification of our
graced a priori orientation to Christ as absolute savior. We objectify that ori-
entation by conceptual confrontation with the historical reality of Jesus.23
The experiential Christology developed above rejects all a priori rea-
soning as logically unjustifiable. Moreover, an experiential Christology
replaces Rahner’s dated Thomistic anthropology with a philosophical
construct of human nature which interprets and contextualizes the re-
sults of contemporary scientific studies of the human. Those studies tend
to call into question fundamental assumptions of Maréchalean Thom-
ism. Among the discredited assumptions I would include both faculty
psychology and the virtual infinity of the human intellect.
The preceding construct of the hypostatic union also corrects the philo-
sophical presuppositions which mar Schillebeeckx’s New Testament
Christology. The construct I have developed replaces his di-polar nomi-
nalism with a realistic, triadic, social construct of experience. As we saw
in volume one, philosophical nominalism fails to explain both the reli-
gious and the social dimensions of experience. It also fails to give an ad-
equate account of scientific knowing since its denial of real generality
deprives science of its object: namely, the laws operative in things. Di-polar
nominalism gives short shrift to the social dimensions of experience by
reducing cognition to the subjective interrelation of concrete percepts
and abstract concepts. As a consequence, all cognition happens between
one’s ears. Nominalism renders religious experience unintelligible by re-
ducing the objects of knowledge to concrete sense data.
A triadic construct of experience corrects the philosophical blunders of
nominalism by endorsing a Peircean realism. Such a realism makes both
the social and religious aspects of experience thinkable. One conceives
experience in social, relational, realistic terms rather than as a subjective
event. One experiences the reality of God as a vectoral reality leading
experience to the transcendence of all created realities. Scientists perceive
the laws of nature inferentially.
22. Cf. Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith (New York, NY: Seabury, 1978), pp.
1- 202; Joseph H.P. Wong, Logos-Symbol in the Christology of Karl Rahner (Rome:
Libreria Ateneo Salesiana, 1984).
23. Ibid., pp. 203-244.
In contrast to Schillebeeckx, therefore, the experiential Christology I

have developed makes thinkable an encounter with the risen Christ as
the cause of resurrection faith. Moreover, as I shall soon show, the posi-
tion which I have developed makes soteriology integral to Christology,
not its premise, as Schillebeeckx fallaciously suggests.
Retrospect and Prospect

In the preceding chapter I argued that the aesthetic Christology of Jonathan
Edwards points the way toward a sound foundational approach to Christo-
logical thinking. By situating Christological faith solidly in the context
of conversion, Edwards’s Christology helps clarify how one ought to go
about verifying Christological doctrines: namely, by their ability to ad-
vance Christological knowing. In this chapter, I have argued that the
Christology of Maximus the Confessor holds the key to a sound doctri-
nal understanding of the hypostatic union when one interprets the voli-
tional synergy of which Maximus speaks in the light of a triadic, realistic,
metaphysics of experience.
So far, however, I have only proposed an initial hypothesis for inter-
preting philosophically the person of Jesus. Two formidable doctrinal tasks
still need completion. The theoretical credibility of an experiential con-
struct of the hypostatic union hinges on one’s ability to co-ordinate it
with a sound doctrinal interpretation of the reality of the trinity which it
reveals. The chapter which follows undertakes that coordination.
An experiential Christology faces, however, yet a second doctrinal chal-
lenge. Because it reflects on the lived experience of Christological know-
ing, i.e., of practical assimilation of Jesus in the power of His Breath, an
experiential Christology needs to clarify the theoretical meaning of its
philosophical understanding of the hypostatic union by exploring its prac-
tical consequences. Those consequences do not function as mere practi-
cal corollaries to purely speculative religious beliefs. A sound logic of con-
sequences abolishes the dualistic separation of theory from practice and
requires that one view the operational consequences of any hypothesis as
the clarification of its theoretical meaning. Theological hypotheses have
moral and religious operational consequences.
The doctrinal chapters which follow the next one will explicate the
consequences for Christological knowing which an experiential construct
of the hypostatic union entails. The exploration of those consequences
will force a doctrinal examination of the saving scope of Jesus’ ministry,
death, resurrection, and mission of the divine Breath. First, however, I
shall coordinate an experiential construct of the hypostatic union with an
experiential construct of the trinity.
Chapter 9
Coordinating Chalcedonian and Trinitarian Doctrine
This chapter explores the trinitarian implications of an experiential con-
struct of the hypostatic union. Needless to say, one cannot deal adequately
with trinitarian theology in the narrow compass of a single chapter. In
what follows, I shall do little more than summarize the construct of the
trinity which I developed in The Divine Mother: A Trinitarian Theology of
the Holy Spirit.
In The Divine Mother, I argued that one must coordinate trinitarian
and Christological doctrine because the incarnation reveals the trinity at
the same time that the trinity contextualizes the incarnation. Accord-
ingly, after dealing in that volume with trinitarian issues in some detail, I
sketched initially and in outline the experiential construct of the hypo-
static union developed in the preceding chapters. At that time I acknowl-
edged the need to argue for that construct’s theological adequacy at greater
length and promised to do so. This study keeps that promise.
In this chapter, I can no more deal in detail with the issues of trinitarian
theology than I could deal with the details of Christology in writing The
Divine Mother. Anyone who desires to ponder at greater length the issues
implicit in the experiential construct of the trinity which I am about to
sketch should meditate the argument developed at greater leisure in the
pages of The Divine Mother.
This chapter divides into five parts. Part one examines the experiential
foundations of trinitarian faith. Part two argues that one may legitimately
conceive the triune God as the supreme exemplification of experience.
Part three discusses the way in which a triadic, realistic, social, experien-
tial construct of the Christian deity understands both the unity and the
tri-personal character of the Christian Godhead. Part four addresses a
complex of issues whose discussion I postponed in the last chapter. I refer
to the need to assess foundationally Rahner’s suggestion that the incarna-
tion effects the symbolic self-revelation and self-communication of the
triune God. Part five argues that an experiential construct of the trinity
responds to the challenge issued by Johannine narrative Christology to
coordinate incarnational with trinitarian doctrine. An experiential un-
derstanding of both trinity and incarnation also provides a doctrinal lan-
guage for interpreting Johannine narrative Christology’s best incarnational
and trinitarian insights.
(I)
Before trinitarian faith found doctrinal formulation, it took the form of a
religious experience. In what, then, did that experience consist?
Chapter 9: Coordinating Chalcedonian and Trinitarian Doctrine 333
Jesus called God “Abba.” He also summoned His disciples to enter into
His filial relationship with God. The paschal mystery, however, endowed
Jesus’ Abba awareness with new revelatory significance. In His mission of
the divine Breath, the risen Christ stands historically and eschatologically
revealed as divine; and His humanity stands revealed as the human expe-
rience of being a divine person distinct from the Father.
As a consequence, the paschal mystery also opens a unique and privi-
leged window on the inner, social life of God. If Jesus confronts us as a
divine person sent by the Father and therefore distinct from Him, then
the characterization of Jesus’ relationship to God as filial tells us some-
thing important about the immanent, social life of the Deity. The pas-
chal mystery has, then, important metaphysical consequences for under-
standing the transcendent reality of God.
Karl Rahner advanced trinitarian thinking when he suggested that we
need to blur somewhat the traditional theological distinction between
the immanent and economic trinities. The term “immanent trinity” re-
fers to the mystery of the triune God in its eternal transcendence. The
term “the economic trinity” refers to the trinity’s historical revelation.1
In my judgment, we can never dispense altogether with the distinction
between the immanent and the economic trinity. The historical mission
of the Son and Breath do reveal the trinity; but they do not reveal the
divine reality exhaustively. No finite, historical, spatio-temporal revela-
tion can, then, ever fully reveal the infinite reality of God. Rather, the
missions of Son and Breath reveal the trinity sacramentally, in the broad-
est sense of the term “sacrament.” Broadly defined, “sacrament” desig-
nates an event which simultaneously reveals and conceals the reality of
God.
Both the incarnation and the sending of the Breath qualify as such
sacramental events. The incarnation reveals to us something both true
and important about the Son of God; but it does not reveal His person
exhaustively. The mystery of the Church reveals to us something both
true and important about the action of God’s Breath; but it does not
reveal Her exhaustively.
The sacramental character of Christian revelation makes the distinc-
tion between immanent and economic trinity doctrinally inevitable. We
need dispensational theological terms in order to describe the limited
revelation of God which we have received in the unfolding historical
missions of the Son and of the Breath. We also need metaphysical terms
to talk about the infinite transcendent reality of God which manifests
itself only partially, but really and truly, in that revelation.
1. Catherine LaCugna’s God for Us attempts to put Rahner’s position in an historical

context. Cf. Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God For Us: The Trinity and Christian Life
(San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1992).
Metaphysics supplies theology with the doctrinal language it needs to

speak about the reality of God in its transcendence. A metaphysical theory
of the whole aspires, as we have seen, to universal applicability but can-
not guarantee it. Metaphysics proposes only a fallible hypothesis about
the nature of the real. It elaborates that hypothesis by exploring the logi-
cal implications of a root metaphor for reality. A metaphysics of experi-
ence takes “experience” as its root metaphor and attempts to define the
meaning of that metaphor with philosophical precision.
A metaphysics of experience like any other metaphysics needs verifica-
tion both in lived human experience and in the results of the positive and
scholarly sciences. Since, however, reality includes the reality of God,
metaphysics also needs to verify its God-talk theologically in eschatological
experience. It does so in the events which reveal God to us historically
and eschatologically.
When one elevates an hypothesis to metaphysical status, one predicts
that it will interpret as defined philosophically any reality whatever. Meta-
physics, therefore, finds verification if it enjoys both applicability and
adequacy. Metaphysical categories enjoy applicability if they interpret some
realities in the sense in which one has defined them philosophically. They
enjoy adequacy if one fails to encounter in experience anything which
they cannot interpret in the philosophical sense in which one has defined
them. An applicable and adequate metaphysical hypothesis qualifies as a
working but revisable philosophical hypothesis.
In inferential thinking about the historical and eschatological
self-revelation of God in Jesus and in His Breath, the economic trinity
verifies or falsifies doctrinal discourse about the immanent trinity. By
that I mean that any account of the transcendent reality of God must
interpret the historical self-revelation of God which we have in fact re-
ceived. For example, a metaphysics which portrays God as essentially
simple and as unrelated to the world, in my judgment, fails to interpret
the de facto historical revelation of the triune, covenanting God revealed
in the paschal mystery.
The Christian God stands revealed historically in the missions of the
Son of God and of His Breath. We experience the mission of the Son of
God in the person and mission of Jesus, the Word of God made flesh. We
experience the mission of the divine Breath as the gracing of human per-
sonal and social experience. That gracing discloses within experience a
divine dynamic tendency, a thrust from and toward God present and
operative within salvation history; for we experience God’s Breath as a
transcendent source of graced illumination which draws us into the mys-
tery of God by conforming us to the image of His incarnate Son.
Within the context of a metaphysics of experience, one may legitimately
describe the mission of a divine person as the gracious and purposeive
transformation of human experience which reveals sacramentally the re-

ality of the person sent, the character of the relation of that person to the
other divine persons who function in the sending, and the conditions
one must meet in order to experience the sending.2 If the missions of Son
and Breath reveal the trinity, then one must verify any metaphysical as-
sertion about the reality of the triune God in a sound dispensational
account of those missions.
In this section, I have reflected on the experiential verification of
trinitarian doctrine. The section which follows argues that one may le-
gitimately characterize the triune God as an experience.
(II)
In the preceding chapter, I have suggested that a realistic, social, triadic
metaphysics of experience can interpret the reality of the hypostatic union.
Can it also interpret the reality of the triune God as it stands historically
revealed in the paschal mystery?
In a metaphysics of experience three kinds of variables lend dynamic
structure to the higher forms of experience: evaluations, decisions, and
tendencies. We discover all three variables revealed in the historical mis-
sions of Son and Breath.
As we saw in reflecting on Jesus’ mortal ministry, it seems highly prob-
able that people perceived Jesus of Nazareth as a Breath-filled prophet.
Jesus probably viewed Himself in the same way. If so, then Jesus reached
His understanding both of His filial relationship to the Father and of His
prophetic mission by the Father through the illumination of the divine Breath.
In the paschal mystery Jesus stands revealed as a divine person. His glorified
humanity reveals that person to us sacramentally, but really and truly.
If Jesus understood His relationship to the Father through the illumi-
nation of the Breath, then She confronts one historically as the cognitive
link between Father and Son. In other words, Paul the apostle correctly
described Her as the mind of God. He also called Her the mind of Christ
because She who inspired Jesus’ religious vision teaches the Christian
community to view the world through His eyes.3 (1 Cor 2:11-16)
2. Cf. Donald L. Gelpi, S.J., The Divine Mother: A Trinitarian Theology of the Holy Spirit
(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), pp. 17-82.
3. One reviewer of The Divine Mother suggested that in calling the divine Breath “the
mind of Christ” that I was flirting with Apollinarism. If so, then, Paul the apostle was
an Apollinarist. If by Christ one means the divine person of Jesus, then, the divine
Breath does indeed function as the mind of God. If by Christ one means His humanity,
then the divine Breath obviously differs from His finite human mind although She
certainly inspires His religious vision and shaped the way His human mind perceived
things. In this sense she confronts us, as the apostle Paul correctly asserts, as the mind
of Christ. She also teaches faltering humans to perceive things as Jesus did. In other
words, She gives them access to His mind by inspiring Christological knowing. You will
find similar affirmations in The Divine Mother. They have nothing to do with
Apollinarism.
If the Holy Breath stands historically revealed as the mind of God,

then She functions within the Godhead as a divine principle of evaluative
response. In other words, Christian revelation justifies saying that God
perceives reality evaluatively.
The Christian God also acts decisively. As we saw in reflecting on the
hypostatic union, the New Testament consistently describes both Father
and Son as acting decisively, efficaciously, and collaboratively. The Father
by originating the Son’s mission into the world stands historically re-
vealed as an aboriginal principle of creative and of saving efficacy within
the Godhead. The Son through His faithful accomplishment of His effi-
cacious mission from the Father stands revealed as an autonomous source
of obediential efficacy within the Godhead. Moreover, as we saw, the
Son’s obediential relationship to Father and Breath reveals Him as God’s
spoken Word, as the one through whom the Father and Breath act upon
creation. The efficacious acts of God reveal, then, that decisions also func-
tion within the divine reality.
Tendencies also function within the triune God. The historical mission
of the Son by the Father reveals His distinction from the Father. The
historical mission of the Breath by the Father through the Son reveals
Her distinction from both of them. Mission reveals the distinction of
divine persons by manifesting historically their procession from one an-
other in the Godhead. The historical missions of Son and Breath there-
fore disclose the existence within the Godhead of three distinct selves, of
three autonomous tendencies, to act and to respond.
In a metaphysics of experience, the higher forms of experience exhibit
three variables: evaluations, decisions, and tendencies. If, then, evalua-
tions, decisions, and tendencies all function within the Deity, then one
may legitimately interpret the reality of Christian God as an experience.
Thomas Aquinas correctly rejected the a priori reasoning of Anselm of
Canterbury’s ontological argument. Anselm, however, had keen insight
when he defined God as that reality than which one can conceive none
greater. In the Proslogion Anselm used his definition of the divine su-
premacy in order to lure one contemplatively from pondering one divine
attribute after another; for, in describing a supremely perfect God, one
cannot affirm any one divine perfection without simultaneously insisting
that the full reality of God surpasses it.
Anselm’s definition of God speaks directly to religious experience.
Within religious experience, the infinite, all-encompassing reality of God
resists corralling by finite concepts and images. No facet of the Godhead
analogously interpreted by an image or concept exhausts the divine real-
ity. Deus semper major: God is always more. As soon as the human mind
has named one divine perfection, it knows that it can continue naming
God indefinitely without ever exhausting the divine excellence.
Aquinas correctly argued that analogy holds the key to metaphysical

discourse about the transcendent reality of God. As we have seen, ana-
logical God-talk advances in three steps. First, one affirms that some cre-
ated reality resembles God. Jesus, for example, said that our relationship
to God resembles our relationship to a human father. By that He meant,
among other things, that our relationship to God in trust animates us
and incorporates us into God’s egalitarian family. Second, in analogical
thinking about God one next denies that the divine reality can ever coin-
cide with the finite created reality it resembles. The reality of God does
not resemble in every respect our relationship to our human fathers. God,
for example, did not beget us sexually. Third, one asserts that finite cre-
ated perfections which in some way reveal God to us exist within the
Godhead in an utterly transcendent manner. The gift of divine life, for
example, utterly transcends the gift of natural, mortal human life. More-
over, entering Abba’s family sets us into a sibling relationship with every
other person.
I have just argued that one can legitimately conceive God as an experi-
ence. I have asserted, therefore, that human social experience triadically
interpreted resembles the divine reality in some way. The two realities,
however, do not simply coincide. Divine social experience differs in sig-
nificant ways from human social experience; for the divine transcendence
requires that one conceive the reality of God as the supreme exemplifica-
tion of social experience.
Charles Hartshorne has written clearly and eloquently about the su-
premacy of the God of Alfred North Whitehead.4 The metaphysics of
experience which I am defending agrees with Hartshorne endorsement
of the divine supremacy, but it conceives the reality of God in realistic,
triadic terms rather than in the categories of Whitehead’s di-polar nomi-
nalism. That same metaphysics does not join Hartshorne in endorsing
Anselm’s ontological argument.5
As the supreme exemplification of experience God exceeds the com-
prehension of every other finite, created experience because His supremacy
causes Him to experience every experienceable reality including the di-
vine reality. As we have seen, moreover, in a metaphysics of experience,
experienced realities stand within experience, not outside of it. Hence,
the all-encompassing character of an infinite divine experience logically
entails panentheism.
Panentheism differs from pantheism. Pantheism identifies all reality,
even created reality, with the reality of God. Panentheism distinguishes
4. Charles Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1948).
5. Cf. Charles Hartshorne, Anselm’s Discovery: A Re-Examination of the Ontological Proof
for God’s Existence (Lasalle, IL: Open Court Press, 1965).
between the reality of God and created reality; but it asserts that created
reality exists relationally within the reality of God. Both the New Testa-
ment and Christian tradition support a panentheistic understanding of
the relationship between God and creation.
A realistic, social, triadic metaphysics of experience makes panentheism
philosophically thinkable. In a world of experiences, autonomy creates
real distinction among functioning selves and persons. Autonomously
functioning experiences exist within one another to the extent that they
experience one another. They differ, however, as distinct selves in virtue
of their autonomous functioning. As the creator of all things, God knows
all created reality both actively and causally. God also knows the divine
reality. If the divine reality experiences all things, then they must exist in
the divine reality. God encompasses them; but they do not encompass
God.6
As the supreme exemplification of experience, the reality of God both
resembles and differs from spatio-temporal experiences in a number of
significant ways.
1) Spatio-temporal experiences exhibit finitude.Every finite experience
finds itself surrounded by other experiences with which it must interact
in order to become what it will become. The divine experience, however,
enjoys infinity because it encompasses all other experiences and is en-
compassed by no other reality.
2) Spatio-temporal experiences exhibit a dynamic relational structure.
A triadic metaphysics of experience discovers in the higher forms of finite
experience three kinds of relationship: conceptual, decisive, and general,
habitual relationships.
The same relational realities constitute the divine experience; but, as
the supreme exemplification of experience, the divine reality in contrast
to finite experiences confronts us as supremely relational. Heightened re-
lationship in a metaphysics of experience implies perfection, not imper-
fection, because reality and relationship coincide.7
3) Finite experiences develop transactionally. Decisive actions link selves
to one another. Among persons they forge the social links among them.
As we shall soon see, the triune character of the divine experience endows
it with a social character analogous to human experience. Finite experi-
ences, however, only relate positively to a limited number of other expe-
riences. As the supremely relational reality, God would also qualify as the
supremely social reality.
6. Cf. Donald L. Gelpi, S.J., The Divine Mother: A Trinitarian Theology of the Holy Spirit
(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), pp. 95-100.
7. Cf. Earl Muller, S.J., “Real Relations and the Divine,” Theological Studies, 56(1995),
pp. 673-695.
4) As we saw in reflecting on the dynamic structure of human experi-

ence, finite experiences have both a spatial and a temporal character. The
other autonomously functioning selves and persons with whom a finite
experience interacts constitute its spatial environment. Moreover, as we
have also seen, the evaluative structure of experience endows a finite ex-
perience with a real temporal structure. As the all-encompassing experi-
ence, the divine reality environs all other things but constitutes its own
environment because nothing can encompass it and therefore environ it.
In other words, the divine experience transcends the limits of space and
time, even as the deity intervenes within space and time.
5) The supremacy of the divine experience also implies its eternity. Cre-
ated beings come into existence and therefore cannot exist eternally. Cre-
ation in turn implies the dependence of created reality on the creator;
and causal dependence implies the superiority of the creator to the crea-
ture. If God enjoyed created existence, then God would depend on some
reality greater than Himself and lose His supremacy. In losing His su-
premacy, however, God would then cease to be God. Since therefore God
cannot come into being as creatures do, God enjoys eternal existence.8
Supremacy entails other distinguishing characteristics which cause it to
transcend finite, spatio-temporal experiences.
1) The divine supremacy requires logically that nothing else can rival
God in perfection. As the supreme exemplification of reality, God can
lack no conceivable perfection without forfeiting supremacy and there-
fore divinity.
2) Divine supremacy necessarily entails divine uniqueness. Every expe-
rience enjoys a unique perspective on reality. Only God, however, en-
compasses all reality within the scope of the divine experience. As the
only all-encompassing reality and as the only reality unrivaled in perfec-
tion, the divine experience exhibits a special quality of uniqueness.
3) Supreme perfection necessarily implies the divine desirability. As the
experience of all experienceable perfection, the divine experience exem-
plifies the plentitude of truth, goodness, and excellence, as Jonathan
Edwards saw. Because we experience the supremely excellent reality of
God as supremely beautiful, we also experience it as supremely desirable.
4) Supremacy also necessarily requires God’s ontological priority to all
created reality. Unique, all-encompassing, and underived, God stands as
the source of every other finite, created reality.
5) Supremacy necessarily entails omniscience. The experience of every
experienceable reality knows everything knowable: the totality of possi-
bility, of probability, and of actuality.
6) Supremacy necessarily entails omnipotence. God’s power to act must
express the supremacy of the divine experience. God therefore can do
8. Ibid., pp. 40-43, 83-100.
anything compatible with His reality and supremacy, including acts of

free self-limitation. God limits Himself when He freely decides not to
exercise His omnipotence.9
The supremacy of the divine experience demands that all things exist
in God in the way in which they are. Error mars experience. If, therefore,
the divine experience ever erred in its grasp of creation, it would forfeit
both supremacy and divinity. Hence, God experiences all things as they
are; and they exist in God in the same way.
The relational character of experience entails the relational distinction
of God from all creatures and they from God. In a metaphysics of expe-
rience autonomous functioning makes things distinct.
Humans may exist in God in one of three ways. They exist in God only
naturally when they develop autonomously in complete abstraction from
the divine reality. They exist in God graciously when they respond in faith to
some historical self-manifestation of God. They exist in God sinfully when
they set themselves in opposition to God by disobeying the divine will.
The way humans choose to exist in God makes a difference to God.
God did not have to create. Having created, God did not have to choose
to enter into covenant with humans. Nor did God have to inaugurate the
new covenant by becoming human, dying, rising, and sending the divine
Breath. Nothing creatures do can ever make God cease to be God. Nev-
ertheless, by freely choosing to enter into a loving relationship with hu-
mans, God also freely chose to suffer vulnerability in those relationships.
The crucified Son of God reveals the full extent of the divine vulnerabil-
ity. It follows that we quite literally please God when we respond to the
divine reality and to one another lovingly. We also displease and dishonor
God when we do the opposite.
The way humans choose to exist in God makes a difference in the way
in which God exists in them. When we consent to God, we deepen in a
unitive relationship of love. When we choose to exist only naturally we
fail to grow in graced union with God. When we sin seriously, we exclude
God’s gracious presence from our lives.10
In this section I have argued to the legitimacy of conceiving the triune
God as the supreme exemplification of experience. The section which
follows ponders the tripersonal character of the Christian deity.
(III)
Western theologians have traditionally spoken analogously of three per-
sons in God. Both Karl Barth and Karl Rahner have, however, questioned
the legitimacy of calling the three members of the divine triad “persons.”
9. Ibid., pp. 92-94. 10. Ibid., pp. 96-100.

Both wanted to replace the term person with the term “mode,” which has
some foundation in the Christian tradition.
Barth argued that in a contemporary context “person” connotes per-
sonality. Since Barth found it misleading to speak of three personalities
in God, he preferred modal to personal language for designating the three
members of the divine triad, even though he claimed to mean by “mode”
what theologians have traditionally meant by a divine person: namely, a
special, distinct, individual, relational way of existing.11
Rahner’s insistence on the utterly mysterious character of God left him
loathe to predicate the term “person” of both finite humans and of the
three members of the divine triad. He also defines “person” as an autono-
mous center of consciousness and freedom.He therefore feared that pos-
tulating three such centers in God leads to tritheism.12
In my judgment, to speak of three modes in God rather than three
persons does not interpret the historical revelation we have in fact re-
ceived. I have described a person as a subsistent, autonomously function-
ing self capable of self-understanding, of acting out of that self-under-
standing, and of entering into responsible relationship with realities like
itself.
When we understand Jesus’ Abba experience in the light of the paschal
mystery which reveals His divinity, it discloses the presence within God
of an interpersonal relationship between the Father and the Son. The
Father sends the Son out of saving love. The incarnate Son of God re-
sponds to the Father autonomously, self-consciously, and with a perfectly
responsible, sinless obedience.
Despite the attempt of both Barth and Rahner to replace the term
“person” with the term “mode” in speaking of the members of the divine
triad, only the term “interpersonal” interprets the relationship between
Jesus and the Father. It makes no sense to call that relationship a deep,
intermodal experience. In other words, the historical revelation which we
have in fact received does not verify Rahner’s and Barth’s trinitarian ter-
minology.13
If Jesus relates as one person to another in dealing with the Father, then
the Son of God must also enjoy an interpersonal relationship with the
divine Breath. The co-equality of the divine persons demands it. That
same co-equality demands that Father and Breath respond to the divine
Son as persons.14
11. Barth, Church Dogmatics, I-I, pp. 405-418.

12. Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, pp. 71-75.
14. Ibid., pp. 103-119. Cf. Petro B.T. Bilaniuk, “The Holy Spirit in Eastern Christian
Iconography,” Patristic and Byzantine Review, 1(1982), pp. 101-116.
If we find more than one personal reality in the Godhead, then the
divine experience enjoys an inherently social character. If so, however,
then we can, perhaps, understand the social relationships of the divine
persons to one another on an analogy with human social experience.
Love binds human persons together in such a way that they begin to
share a similarity of life. Mutual loving consent unifies and integrates
personal experience. Dissent, as Edwards saw, fragments it with hatred,
violence, exclusion, persecution, dissolution.
Mutual consent blends two experiences and unites persons in love. It
also assimilates human experiences to one another. Loved and loving chil-
dren resemble their parents. Friends and spouses learn to share the same
hopes, aspirations, ideals. Teachers and students share common interests,
viewpoints, and enthusiasms.
While the mutual consent of love among human persons creates a simi-
larity of life among them, it never creates an identity of life, because finite
persons remain physically separated. A finite, developing human self puts
together a body as a life-support system from nurturing elements in the
surrounding environment. Physical distinction ensures that each human
person do his or her own living and dying, however much the mutual
blending of their lives unites them and makes them similar.
The divine persons, however, do not labor under the same physical
constraints as human persons. Transcendence of space and time endows
the divine persons with a real but disembodied existence. In addition, the
paschal mystery reveals the free, total, and mutual self-donations of the
divine persons to one another in selfless love.
In His self-donation to the Father in the passion, the Son simulta-
neously gives Himself to the divine Breath who inspires His obedience.
The resurrection reveals the Father’s self-gift to the Son by manifesting
Jesus’ Lordship. The resurrection also reveals the Breath’s self-gift to the
Son by transforming Him into a life-giving Breath who shares with the
divine Breath an identity of life.
Moreover, among disembodied divine persons, mutual self-donation
creates, not a similarity, but an identity of life. The Father in giving Him-
self in love to the Son and Breath communicates to them the fullness of
His creative omnipotence. The Breath in giving Herself totally to Father
and Son becomes their very mind and endows them with personalizing
self-consciousness. The Son in giving Himself totally to the Father and
Breath by His obediential self-gift transforms Himself into the one through
whom they act on any created reality. In other words, each divine person
contributes something distinctive to the shared life of the Godhead by
functioning as its eternal source.
Moreover, besides creating the identity of life which makes them into a
single divine reality, the eternal mutual self-donation of all three divine
persons also effects their perfect mutual inexistence. Let us try to under-
stand why.
One cannot unify a complex reality by identifying it with a perfectly
simple substance, as Augustinian trinitarian theology suggests. Besides
invoking the fallacy of essentialism, essential simplicity makes complex-
ity within God by definition impossible. Nevertheless, the historical mis-
sions of Son and Breath reveal to us the distinction of the divine persons
from one another within the Godhead; and, by definition, distinction
entails complexity. In medieval theology, a “notion” refers to a predicate
which describes a real relationship of distinction among the divine per-
sons.
Medieval trinitarian theology correctly discovered in the Godhead the
four notional relations of active and passive generation and active and
passive spiration. Active generation describes the Father’s eternal rela-
tionship to the Son. Passive generation describes the Son’s eternal rela-
tionship to the Father. Active spiration describes the Father and Son’s
simultaneous causal relationship to the Breath. Passive spiration describes
Her relationship to them. If, with the medieval schoolmen, one also views
the Father’s inability to be generated as a notional predicate, one would
also have to concede that the Father’s innacebility denies rather than as-
serts a relationship.
In my judgment, medieval theology correctly acknowledged relation-
ships of distinction within the trinity. The fact that the Father sends the
Son reveals that the Father begets the Son from all eternity. The fact that
Father and Son send the Breath reveals that She proceeds efficaciously
from them from all eternity. They “spirate” Her.
Medieval trinitarian speculation failed, however, to develop an adequate
doctrine of unifying relationships within the Godhead. Contemporary
trinitarian theology needs, therefore to compensate for that failure; for in
the last analysis one can only make sense out of the unity of a complex
reality by its internal relational structure.
Jesus exemplifies most clearly within space and time how divine per-
sons relate to one another; and, as the Beloved Disciple correctly realized,
Jesus does so most perfectly in the paschal mystery. On Calvary Jesus
gave Himself in perfect obedience to the Father’s will and to the Breath’s
illumination. In other words, free and mutual self-donation in love de-
scribes how three distinct persons within the Godhead relate unitively to
one another. They give themselves to one another lovingly, freely, and
totally.
The resurrection completes the revelation begun on Calvary by dis-
closing that the Son of God shares an identity of life with the Father and
the Breath. That identity of life requires that They give themselves lov-
ingly to the Son as totally as He gives Himself to Them.
The co-equality of the divine persons also requires that they all give
themselves to one another. The reason should be clear: any divine person
who refused the gift of self to the other divine persons would fall short of
the perfection of divine love and by that act of selfishness forfeit divinity.
Moreover, the revealed, kenotic character of the Son’s self-gift to the
Father and Breath, the totality of His self-emptying into Them, prepares
the totality of His infilling by their perfectly kenotic self-gift to Him. In
other words, the kenotic character of the divine persons’ mututal self-
donation makes possible the totality of their self-gift to one another as
well as the identity of life which they share.
The mutual, loving, self-gift of the divine persons to one another holds
the key to the immanent social life of the trinity. In giving Himself to
Son and Breath the Father endows them with creative efficacy while nev-
ertheless remaining eternally the source of creative efficacy in the Godhead.
In giving Herself to Father and Son, the divine Breath becomes their
mind and personalizes them; but She remains eternally the source of con-
ceptual enlightenment within the Godhead. She inspires the Father’s cre-
ative wisdom and conceives the Word spoken to us in the incarnation.
Her eternal conception of the Son allows us to imagine Her as the divine
Mother.15 In giving Himself obedientially to Father and Breath the Son
transforms Himself into the one through whom they act in creating the
world and in saving and judging it. The Son, however, remains eternally
the source of obediential efficacy within the Godhead.16
16. One reviewer of The Divine Mother accused me of holding that the divine Breath
begets the Son even though I explicitly denied that She does on more than one occasion
in that book. The reviewer spoke of “the efficacy of conceptions.” Anyone who talks
about the efficacy of conceptions cannot tell the difference between thinking about ice
cream and eating it. I did say that in giving Herself to the Son the divine Breath
conceives the Word which He embodies. I distinguished, however, between the
efficacious relationship of begetting which characterizes the Father’s relationship to the
Son and the unitive relationship of conception which characterizes the Breath’s
relationship to Him. In other words, the reviewer chose to ignore the expanded
doctrine of notions which I had developed as well as the distinction between relations
of distinction and unitive relations which it expounds.
The reviewer also asserted that the Christian tradition offers no precedent for such
an understanding of the relationship of Son and Breath. Again he erred. In taking such
a position I merely endorsed a suggestion made by the Latin father Gaius Marius
Victorinus. (Cf. Gelpi, The Divine Mother, pp. 217-218)
The same reviewer suggested that in speaking of unitive relationships within the
Godhead, I endorsed the same position as Moltmann. To the best of my knowledge
Moltmann has never spoken of unitive relationships in God. Like Moltmann I do
believe that one must begin trinitarian theology with the persons and not with the
divine substance as Augustine did. In other words, Moltmann endorses, as I do, the
approach to the trinity taken by the Greek fathers generally. I find other aspects of
Moltmann’s trinitarian theology unacceptable, particularly his dialectical reading of
Jesus’ death.
The perfection with which the divine persons give themselves to one
another creates the identity of divine life which unites them. The fact
that their infinity17 frees them from the limitations of embodiment en-
ables them to give themselves to one another with a totality denied to
humans. Human persons share, not an identity, but only an analogous
similarity of life. Identity of life entails that the divine persons exist in
one another totally and perfectly.
Like Gaius Marius Victorinus, an experiential construct of the trinity
explains the unity of the divine persons by the identity of life they share.
(Gaius Marius Victorinus, To Candidus, VII, 1-X, 37; Against Arius, I, 2.
1-4, 51. 19-15; 9, II, 1. 57. 28-29) Like John of Damascus and the coun-
cil of Ferrara-Florence (DS 1331), that same construct also explains their
unity by their perfect and total mutual inexistence.18
This section has argued that a metaphysics of experience can plausibly
account for the tripersonal character of the Christian God and can offer
a plausible account of the unity of the trinity. The section which follows
reflects on the revealability of the divine experience.
(IV)
In reviewing some of the major historical issues with which a contempo-
rary doctrinal account of the hypostatic union must deal, I noted that
Karl Rahner conceives the hypostatic union as the symbolic self-revelation
of the Son of God and that he discovers a symbolic structure within the
trinity. An experiential construct of the incarnation agrees with both sug-
gestions. A metaphysics of experience defends, however, a different meta-
physics of symbol from the one proposed by Rahner.
As we have seen, experience exhibits three kinds of symbols: expressive
symbols, interpretative symbols, and communications. Viewed experien-
tially, a symbol mediates the evaluative grasp of significance.
Moreover, if one approaches the trinity experientially, one has no other choice than
to begin with the divine persons. We experience two divine persons historically and
eschatologically. We experience the second person of the trinity directly in the
incarnation; we experience the divine Breath only through His mediation. We
experience the Son of God as an divine person incarnate. We experience the divine
Breath as a personal, immanent, illuminating, divine vector within history which lures
it to the transcendent ends which God desires by conforming humans to the incarnate
Word.
We have no direct experiential access to God’s essential reality. The divine essence,
by which I mean the infinite divine experience in its transcendence of space and time,
provides no experiential ground for thinking about God. Those, therefore, who prefer
to begin trinitarian thinking with the divine essence need to study logic. Cf. J.S.
Grabowski, “Mutual Submission and Trinitarian Self-giving,”Angelicum,74(1997),
pp. 489-513.
17. The reader should recall that by “the divine infinity” I do not mean infinite act. I mean
that the divine reality encompasses everything and is encompassed by nothing.
By an expressive symbol, I mean a physical event, like a chemical reac-

tion or an earthquake, an event whose dynamic relational structure the
human mind can grasp. Events signify because they have a dynamic rela-
tional structure which the mind can grasp evaluatively and interpreta-
tively, if the mind takes the trouble to think clearly about events. Expres-
sive symbols engage decisive acts and the general tendencies which ground
them.
By interpretative symbols I mean the evaluations which disclose to us
the significant structure of events and endow them with meaning prior
to any overt act of communication. Interpretative symbols engage con-
ceptions and the habitual ways of evaluating which ground them but
without communicating them. Decisions which fix intuitive, inferential,
and prudential beliefs create interpretative symbols by creating habits of
evaluation.
By a communication I mean a physical act which seeks to express to
one mind the evaluative responses of another. All speech acts—signifi-
cant gestures, art, language—exemplify communications.
All three symbols function transcendently in the triune God. Tran-
scendent divine symbols differ from finite created symbols in virtue of
their supreme significance and of their supreme meaningfulness. The eter-
nal efficacious generation of the Son by the Father exemplifies a tran-
scendent expressive symbol. So does the Father and Son’s eternal
co-spiration of the divine Breath. As the mind of God, the divine Breath
exemplifies a transcendent interpretative symbol. As the one through
whom God speaks to and acts upon the world, the Son exemplifies a
transcendent, divine communication.
Expressive symbols signify because they have a dynamic relational struc-
ture which a mind can endow with meaning. Interpretative symbols en-
dow expressive symbols with felt but unexpressed meaning. Communi-
cations transform interpretative symbols into socially expressed mean-
ing.
Human experience and divine experience have, then, an analogous
dynamic symbolic structure. Human and divine symbols resemble one
another by the way in which they mediate the evaluative grasp of signifi-
cance. Divine symbols differ from human symbols by the supremacy of
their perfection. Hence, a divine experience which contains all three kinds
of symbols must logically exemplify supreme intelligibility, supreme in-
telligence, and supreme communicability.
The incarnation confronts us as the efficacious transformation of one
symbolic reality in another. The humanity of Jesus embodies for us a
divine communication, a divine word; for it confronts us as God’s sym-
bolic self-expression and self-communication to a sinful humanity. One
grasps that communication in faith through the empowering enlighten-
ment of the risen Christ’s Breath. The triune God’s historical and
eschatological self-communication advances in two stages. First, Jesus
embodied a human reality which expresses and communicates to hu-
manity how God relates to a sinful world and how that world ought to
relate to God. Second, as the risen Christ, Jesus sends His Breath in order
to empower sinful humans to grasp by living in His image the reality
which He embodies.19
The preceding account of the incarnation as divine self-revelation and
self-communication grounds the notion of symbol more explicitly in ex-
perience than Rahner’s metaphysics of symbol does. It also avoids invok-
ing a confusing Hegelian dialectic in explaining the incarnation. By that
I mean that the account of the incarnation which I am proposing does
not find a unique correlation between humanity and the person of the
Son as Rahner’s Christology does.
This section has argued that a metaphysics of experience allows one to
express doctrinally the fact that in the incarnation one encounters the
historical self-revelation and self-communication of God. The section
which follows shows that an experiential understanding of both the in-
carnation and the trinity can interpret doctrinally the best incarnational
and trinitarian insights of Johannine narrative Christology.
(V)
The preceding doctrinal account of the hypostatic union and of the trin-
ity responds to the doctrinal challenge of Johannine narrative Christo-
logy that one coordinate inferentially one’s understanding of these two
intimately interrelated mysteries. It also provides an inferential frame of
reference for rethinking the Beloved Disciple’s intuitive rendering of Chris-
tian revelation.
In pondering the reflections which follow, the reader should recall that
a doctrinal interpretation of Johannine incarnational and trinitarian the-
ology differs from an exegesis of the Johannine text. A doctrinal interpre-
tation of a Biblical text like the gospel of John attempts rather to
contextualize the best insights of a particular biblical author within a
systematic, inferential view of divine revelation. The coordination of in-
tuitive and inferential expressions of faith concerns us here rather than
exegesis. That coordination and contextualization frequently requires going
beyond what the text of John itself has to say since the inferential mind
speaks in a different symbolic idiom from the narrative mind.
Like the Beloved Disciple, an experiential construct of the trinity en-
dorses the Son of God’s divine pre-existence. As a facet of the divine
experience, the second person of the trinity exists eternally with both the
Father and the Breath. Moreover, the second person of the trinity con-
19. Ibid., pp. 151-215
fronts us unambiguously as God’s spoken Word, as the one through whom

the Father and the Breath speak and act efficaciously upon the world.20
A experiential trinitarian theology also interprets inferentially a
Johannine account of the relationship of the Son to the Father. In the
fourth gospel, the Son relates obedientially to the Father at the same time
that the Father creates and judges the world efficaciously through the
Son. An experiential trinitarian theology takes account of these insights
and contextualizes them when it asserts that the Son’s obediential rela-
tionship to both the Father and the Breath within the trinity transforms
Him into that eternal principle through whom both the Father and the
Breath accomplish whatever they do in creation. In other words, the sec-
ond person of the trinity mediates efficaciously and obedientially Their
action upon the created universe.
An experiential trinitarian theology also interprets inferentially the
Johannine doctrine that prior to His incarnation, the second person of
the trinity possesses divine life in His own right and does so from all
eternity. An experiential construct of the trinity also goes beyond Johannine
theology by allowing one to name the source of the Son’s divine life:
namely, the mutual loving self-donation of the divine persons; for all
three divine persons enliven one another eternally.
An experiential construct of the trinity also interprets the perfect
co-action of Father and Son of which the fourth gospel speaks. Whenever
the Father acts on any created reality, He acts through and with the Son.
20. One reviewer complained that in The Divine Mother I simplified the Biblical witness
to the divine Breath because some exegetes find the term “the word of God” used in
a variety of ways. In have examined every text in the Bible which deals with the divine
Breath and all describe Her as a principle of empowering enlightenment.
Biblical authors may indeed use the term “word” in a variety of ways. Exegetes
certainly interpret that term in a variety of ways. In explaining the prologue of John,
they tend, however, to project into it an Augustinian philosophical identification of
word and concept and of the Word with the divine intellect.
In developing a foundational account of incarnation and trinity, one must, more-
over, move beyond the results afforded by the functional specialty of exegesis; for one
must verify or falsify Biblical and exegetical language in the historical events which
reveal God to us. The fact that Jesus came to His Abba awareness through the
enlightenment of the divine Breath means that She, not He, stands historically revealed
as the cognitive link between Father and Son and therefore as the mind of God. That
historical fact falsifies any Platonizing assimilation of the Johannine Word to the divine
mind.
The same reviewer asserted that the Johannine Word in fact means the mind of God
rather than the spoken word of God. The assertion goes beyond the textual evidence.
The text of the fourth gospel speaks of the eternal Logos only in its prologue. Nowhere
does it distinguish between the spoken and conceived word of God, as the fathers of
the Church later would. Given the dispensational character of the Beloved Disciple’s
Christology, I find it more likely that he would have meant by the Logos the spoken
word of God. In his gospel, he certainly portrays Jesus as the one through whom God
speaks to us and acts upon us rather than as a divine intellect.
So does the divine Breath, since from all eternity She inspires the Father’s
creative, saving, and redemptive wisdom. She therefore conceives the gra-
cious Word which the Father speaks in sending the Son.
Johannine rhetoric asserts that since the Son sends the Breath, She will
teach only what the Son tells Her to teach. In so speaking the Beloved
Disciple describes the Breath as standing in an obediential relationship to
the Son analogous to the Son’s obediential relation to the Father.
In speaking of the Breath’s obedience to the Son who sends Her, the
Beloved Disciple is using dispensational descriptive language, not the
inferential, explanatory language of doctrinal theology. The evangelist is
assuring his readers that as Christian doctrine evolves historically, the
Breath will inspire no doctrine which contradicts the divine truth incar-
nate in Jesus. The Breath’s obediential relationship to the Son in Johannine
narrative theology also urges the disciples to trust that the Breath’s inspi-
rations will conform them obedientially to Jesus just as Jesus’ perfect obe-
dience conformed Him to God the Father.
Within the context of Johannine theology, therefore, the Breath’s obe-
diential relationship to the Son would seem to raise soteriological issues
rather than trinitarian ones. If, however, as an experiential construct of
the trinity insists, the saving missions of the divine persons also reveal
their relationship within the Godhead, ought not the Breath’s
soteriologically significant obedience to the Son also to have trinitarian
implications as well?
In an attempt to answer the preceding question, let us first ponder
doctrinally the different ways in which Son and Breath function in the
gracing of human experience. Then let us ask whether this soteriological
diversity reveals anything about the relationship of the Son and Breath to
one another within the Godhead.
Irenaeus of Lyons referred to the Son and the Breath as the “two hands
of God,” as two historically distinct manifestations of God’s saving activ-
ity. If one interprets this insight in the light of an experiential construct
of the trinity, it leads one to identify both an efficacious and a persuasive
dimension to the gracing human experience. The Son communicates cre-
ated grace efficaciously, the Breath communicates it persuasively. As
Breath-baptizer and spoken Word of God, the Son eternally mediates the
Breath’s persuasive intentions. The Son’s efficacious communication of
grace mediates its persuasive transformation of human experience in a
manner analogous to the way in which speech acts communicate mean-
ing. In other words, an experiential construct of the trinity and of the
incarnation endorses the doctrine defended by eastern orthodox theolo-
gians that, in the gracing of human experience, the Son always functions
as mediator and the Breath as mediation. His efficacious touches com-
municate to us the divine ideas without giving us immediate cognitive
access to those same divine ideas. The Breath conceives the saving illumi-
nation which the Son communicates efficaciously. In addition, She serves
as the quasi-locus in the divine experience for the gracing of human per-
sons, just as the Son serves as the quasi-locus for the gracing of that unique
human experience whom we call Jesus of Nazareth. The Breath functions
as the quasi locus of human gracing because within the trinity She func-
tions as a cognitive, persuasive principle rather than as a principle of effi-
cacy. That allows us to experience Her illuminations persuasively at the
same time that we retain our human autonomy. As we have seen, a hu-
man experience efficaciously transformed in God develops with a divine
autonomy which transforms it into the human experience of being a di-
vine person.
Human persons confront both one another and God as finite, autono-
mously functioning persons. Social communication among human per-
sons requires both physical speech acts and the evaluative interpretation
of those acts. When God communicates graciously with humans, some-
thing analogous happens. Within personal religious experience we feel
ourselves on occasion touched efficaciously by God. When that happens
we also need to interpret conceptually the significance of that touch.
Moreover, we experience the graced interpretation of the divine activity
as mediated by that touch. Ignatius of Loyola called such experiences
“consolation without cause.”
Whenever the divine persons act on any reality outside of themselves
they act simultaneously. Otherwise the activity of one person and the
non-activity of the other would compromise their perfect co-equality.
During the patristic period, heterodox, subordinationist interpretations
of the “the two hands of God” ascribed certain activities to one person
and denied them to another.
If the divine persons in fact act simultaneously, then one needs some
kind of doctrinal justification for the tendency of the New Testament
and of the Christian creeds to ascribe particular acts to particular per-
sons. The creeds, for example, associate the Father especially with cre-
ation, the Son with redemption, the Breath with the graced creation of
the Church.
In an experiential construct of the trinity, the particular contribution
which each divine person makes to the eternal life of the Godhead pro-
vides the realistic basis for the attributive predication of certain charac-
teristics to one person rather than to another. We attribute creation espe-
cially to the Father because within the trinity He functions as the aborigi-
nal and efficacious source of all. That eternal fact establishes what ortho-
dox theologians call the divine monarchy. We attribute the graced illumi-
nation of the believers especially to the Breath because She contributes
personalizing consciousness eternally to the shared life of the Godhead.
We attribute redemption especially to the Son because through His obe-

diential relationship to the other divine persons He functions eternally as
the one through whom they act efficaciously and graciously on creation.
An experiential construct of the trinity would, therefore, ascribe the
efficacious gracing of human experience ultimately to the Father, proxi-
mately and redemptively to the Son, and illuminatively to the Breath.
The incarnate Son also mediates the divine Breath’s illumination. When-
ever the trinity touches us efficaciously the three divine persons always
act through the Son. That efficacious divine touch creates in us a finite
graced illumination (created grace) which takes its ultimate origin within
the Godhead from the divine Breath. When we interpret the divine touch
correctly, created grace conforms the character of our human response to
the divine touch and to the divine Breath’s saving intentions. We there-
fore ascribe the persuasive gracing of experience to the Holy Breath of
God even though we also recognize that the second person of the trinity
functions as the eternal efficacious mediator of all saving acts of divine
grace.
Only in the incarnation does grace unite a human experience hypo-
statically to God. Jesus’ filiation by the Father within the Godhead ex-
presses and exemplifies His divinity. We remain human persons even when
graced. That grace, of course, conforms us creatively and obedientially to
the paradigmatic example of God’s incarnate Son. We therefore experi-
ence divine grace as transforming us into God’s adopted children, not
into divine persons. Grace does not conceive in us the human experience
of being a divine person, as the grace of union does in Jesus.
As adopted children of God, we do not experience grace worked effica-
ciously in us as it was in Jesus. Rather we experience the mediated illumi-
nation of the divine Breath as persuasive, as luring and inviting us into a
loving relationship with the triune God.
In what concerns the gracing of human experience, the Beloved
Disciple’s rhetoric of obedience roots itself in the experience of mission.
Because the Father sends Jesus, He relates obedientially to the Father.
Because both Father and Son send the Breath, She relates obedientially to
both of them. She can therefore disclose to humans nothing which con-
tradicts the love relation between Father and Son.
When one interprets the Beloved Disciple’s dispensational use of obe-
diential language within the context of a metaphysics of experience, one
realizes first of all that his language engages two different realms of expe-
rience. The Son acts in the order of efficacy as a divine communication.
The Breath, who functions within the Godhead as an interpretative sym-
bol, acts persuasively through the Son’s mediation. In other words, be-
cause the risen Christ mediates the Breath, She through His mediation
inspires in us graced awareness of what He embodies. Second, while the
Son acts upon the disciples directly and efficaciously in mediating the
Breath, She reaches the disciples only through the Son’s mediation. Third,
the illumination which She communicates, the participation in divine
life which the Beloved Disciple calls “pneuma” differs from Her person. It
consists in a share in the divine life; but it yields no immediate access to
the mind of God. We come to know the Breath only through the incar-
nate Word’s efficacious mediation.
Interpreted within the context of a metaphysics of experience, more-
over, the Breath’s obediential, soteriological relationship to both the Fa-
ther and the Son does reveal to us something about Their relationship to
one another within the Godhead. In the higher forms of created experi-
ence, decision fixes belief. In this sense, decision dictates efficaciously the
way in which finite human minds respond evaluatively to reality before
that response takes form in overt acts of communication.
When one interprets the trinity as the supreme exemplification of ex-
perience, then something analogous happens within the Godhead. The
perfect, loving, mutual self-donation of Father and Son within the trinity
does decide efficaciously the way God responds evaluatively to every-
thing; for that mutual, efficacious self-gift insures that the divine wisdom
can perceive both itself and created reality only lovingly. Hence, by de-
ciding the evaluative shape of the eternal divine mind, the eternal, mu-
tual self-donation of Father and Son within the trinity spirates the divine
Breath. It determines the divine mind efficaciously to respond to every-
thing lovingly. Even within the trinity, that decisive act of mutual
self-donation on the part of the Father and Son would also ground an
obediential relationship to Them on the part of the Breath whom Their
mutual self-donation spirates. It demands that She know all things lov-
ingly.
A metaphysics of experience also provides logical categories for inter-
preting the Johannine notion of mutual indwelling. In John the mem-
bers of the divine triad dwell in one another. They also dwell in believers
and believers in Them.
In a metaphysics of experience mutual indwelling (perichorêsis) does
not designate an anomalous mode of existence proper to God alone. In-
stead, it describes accurately the way in which everything exists. When
reality and experience coincide, then experienced realities stand within
experience, not outside of it. As a consequence, those who experience
one another by that very fact exist within one another at the same time
that they remain distinct from one another in virtue of their autonomous
functioning. Within the trinity, the mutual indwelling of divine persons
consists in the mutual identity of life which they share in consequence of
their perfect and mutual self-donation in love. The three divine persons
remain distinct in virtue of Their autonomous functioning, but They use
their autonomy in order to create the identity of divine life which unites
Them in a perfection of love and social communion which creates in
turn their unity. Their use of autonomy only unites Them. It never di-
vides Them. On the contrary, it creates in turn the identity of divine life
which they share with perfect co-equality.
Among the writers of the New Testament, the Beloved Disciple, as we
have seen, first formulated a vocabulary for talking about both the unity
and trinity of God. In Johannine theology, the names of the three mem-
bers of the divine triad foreshadowed what a later theology would call the
distinction of persons in God. Johannine theology also offers two words
for the divinity common to Father, Son, and Breath: namely, Theos and
pneuma. Theos looks more to the immanent life of the Godhead. Pneuma
designates the divine life in which believers participate through the gift
of the Breath of the risen Christ.
A metaphysics of experience provides a philosophical way of interpret-
ing these aspects of Johannine trinitarian theology inferentially. That
metaphysics interprets Father, Son, and Breath as three persons within
the Godhead. Their common personal existence consists in the identity
of life which results from their eternal mutual self-donation in love. A
metaphysics of experience interprets the Johannine term “pneuma” as the
transmutation and transvaluation of experience which results from ac-
cepting the empowering enlightenment of the Breath mediated and com-
municated by the risen Christ.
Johannine theology interprets the reality of God as life, light, and love.
A metaphysics of experience also offers a doctrinal interpretation of these
basic Johannine metaphors. Within the trinity, the Father functions as
the aboriginal and efficacious source of life, the Breath as its illuminative
source, and the Son as the loving communication of both illumination
and life. As the communication of divine truth, the Son embodies the
divine light which the Breath of God conceives eternally and discloses to
believers dispensationally through His mediating touch. In His ministry
and especially in the paschal mystery, Jesus also communicates to us the
saving, redemptive love of the Father which the divine Breath conceives
within the Godhead.
A metaphysics of experience also offers a doctrinal interpretation of the
“fleshy” character of the incarnation. It consists in the second person of
the trinity’s obediential appropriation of a finite, vulnerable, human ex-
perience as personally His own. Like the Beloved Disciple, a metaphysics
of experience traces the vulnerability of Jesus’ humanity to its finitude
and embodied character.
An experiential construct of the hypostatic union also endorses and
interprets doctrinally the theological legitimacy of the Johannine Jesus’
invocation of the divine name. Through the efficacious, obediential trans-
formation of a human experience in the second person of the trinity,

Jesus’ words and actions confront us as the words and actions of a divine
person. The divine name correctly designates that person as the autono-
mous source of those actions.
By the same token, the human words and deeds of Jesus reveal the
divine glory by communicating the personal reality of the Son in His
relationship to both the Father and the Breath. The Son’s obedience to
the Father glorifies the Father because His words and actions disclose the
obediential character of His eternal relationship to the Father. The Son’s
return to the Father glorifies Him “in Himself ” because the complete
transformation of Jesus’ human experience in God terminates the divine
kenôsis. I define “kenôsis” doctrinally, as God’s decision in the incarnation
to act and to suffer strictly within the limits of an individual human
experience. After the resurrection, the incarnate Word casts off these
self-imposed restraints and uses His glorified humanity as the efficacious
channel of God’s universal saving action in the world.
This chapter concludes preliminary doctrinal reflections on the person
of Jesus. As we have seen, doctrinal Christology traditionally considers
first the person of Jesus and then His saving ministry. As I have already
indicated, a logic of consequences blurs the abstract neatness of that dis-
tinction. Doctrinal reflection on the ministry of Jesus explicates the prac-
tical consequences of the doctrine of His person and makes the latter
doctrine practical. Moreover, both Jesus’ ministry and the hypostatic union
disclose the reality of His person. In the context of the present study,
therefore, the doctrine of Jesus’ ministry extends and develops the reflec-
tions contained in the opening chapters of this section.
So far, I have considered dialectically a number of issues raised by the
development of post-Chalcedonian Christology which I deemed impor-
tant. I have argued that a sound insight into the eschatological realities
grasped by intuitive faith and hope authenticate Chalcedonian Christo-
logy. I have also suggested that Chalcedonian doctrine in its original for-
mulation needs inferential clarification. Finally, I have tested in a pre-
liminary way whether a metaphysics of experience can endow inferential
perceptions of the hypostatic union and of the trinity which it reveals
with greater logical precision. I judge the results of that initial experi-
ment promising.
In the chapter which follows I shall begin examining the saving signifi-
cance of Jesus’ ministry. Appropriately, then, I begin this second set of
doctrinal reflections by asking: What does it mean to confess Jesus Christ
doctrinally as one’s savior?
Chapter 10: How Jesus Saves: Issues in Atonement Christology 355
Chapter 10
How Jesus Saves: Issues in Atonement Christology
This section of the present volume deals with doctrinal Christology. As
we have already seen, doctrinal Christology deals with Jesus’ person and
with His saving work. Salvation means standing in a life-giving relation-
ship with God. Accordingly, the opening chapters of this section devel-
oped first a doctrine of Jesus’ person by proposing an experiential con-
struct of the hypostatic union. The present chapter begins doctrinal con-
sideration of Jesus’ saving work. As we shall see, however, the person
embodies the work; the work reveals the person.
This chapter examines dialectically the soteriological issues raised by
atonement Christology. The following chapter proposes a doctrinal ac-
count of the saving consequences of the incarnation. As we shall see in
the chapters which follow chapter eleven, every aspect of Jesus’ ministry
has saving significance. In pondering Jesus’ ministry from a doctrinal
standpoint, I shall in subsequent chapters focus on its four traditional
dimensions. I shall consider Jesus’ ministry as prophet, as priest, as king,
and as eschatological judge.
The doctrinal interpretation of Jesus’ ministry which follows presup-
poses and develops the experiential construct of the hypostatic union
already presented in the preceding chapters. Indeed, the method which
shapes this study demands that construct as a doctrinal context for un-
derstanding Jesus’ ministry. Let us try to understand why.
Doctrinal Christology invokes Christological knowing as the norm for
authenticating Christological beliefs. Christological knowing consists in
conscious practical assimilation to Jesus in the power of His Breath.
The risen Christ sends the Breath. Every historical mission of a divine
person consists in the graced transformation of human experience in the
person sent as its quasi-locus in the Godhead. The mission of the Son
consists in the persuasively graced, efficacious transformation of a single
human experience into the human experience of being the second person
of the trinity. The mission of the Breath of Christ consists in the persua-
sive social transformation of the rest of human experience in the third
person of the trinity. In this sense, then, the historical mission of the
divine Breath coincides with the mission of the Church, which it illu-
mines and empowers.
In every historical mission of a divine person, one sends and another is
sent. The Breath’s mission by the risen Christ reveals His divinity, since
only God sends God. The council of Chalcedon, as we have seen, cor-
rectly set initial linguistic parameters for speaking about the incarnation
of the second person of the trinity.
As we have also seen, however, Chalcedonian Christology requires both
metaphysical elucidation and logical clarification. In the preceding chap-
ters, I have argued for the legitimacy of interpreting the hypostatic union
in the light of a triadic metaphysics of experience. That experiential
Christology builds directly on the work of Maximus the Confessor and
portrays Jesus as the finite, human experience of being a divine person.
The present doctrinal clarification of that initial Christological hypoth-
esis invokes a pragmatic logic of consequences. A pragmatic logic clarifies
the meaning of any hypothesis, including any Christological hypothesis,
by deducing its operational consequences. The practical saving conse-
quences of the incarnation take historical and eschatological shape in
Jesus’ saving ministry. Those consequences both clarify and authenticate
any particular doctrinal rendering of Chalcedonian faith. They clarify
the meaning of the hypostatic union by predicting deductively its practi-
cal, soteriological consequences. One verifies those consequences in part
by living them; for a sound insight into the operational consequences of
a sound hypothetical interpretation of Chalcedonian faith will teach
Christian converts how to advance practically in Christological knowing.
By reverse logic, the practical consequences of an unsound Christological
hypothesis will not only not advance Christological knowing but will
even tend to subvert it.
A pragmatic logic of consequences accords well, then, with the practi-
cal character of Christological knowing. Hence, the pragmatic clarifica-
tion of the meaning of an experiential rendering of Chalcedon will, if
successful, offer a doctrinal account of the practice of Christological know-
ing. Moreover, it will do so by explicating the saving consequence of the
historical and eschatological ministry which reveals to us Jesus’ person.
In other words, a pragmatic rendering of Christological faith resolves
the debate between Aquinas and Scotus about the nature of theology.
Aquinas regarded theology as a speculative science, while Scotus looked
on it as a practical science. A pragmatic logic of consequence overcomes
the dualistic split between theory and practice which lay implicitly at the
basis of the disagreement between the Angelic Doctor and the Subtle
Doctor. In pragmatic logic, the practical, operational consequences of
any hypothesis clarify its speculative meaning. In other words, practice
clarifies speculative intent, while belief consists in the willingness to take
responsibility for the operational, practical consequences of what one af-
firms speculatively.
In the course of this chapter and of the one which follows it, I shall
argue that medieval atonement Christology fails to pass the test of doctri-
nal authenticity because it offers an interpretation of the saving conse-
quences of the hypostatic union which tends to undermine both Christo-

logical knowing and Chalcedonian faith. This chapter assesses dialecti-
cally the issues raised by both a New Testament understanding of Jesus’
atoning death and by medieval atonement Christology. The chapter which
follows argues for the necessity of replacing medieval atonement Christo-
logy with a Christological soteriology derived from the New Testament.
The next chapter also ponders the salvation of non-Christians and the
cosmic dimensions of salvation in Christ.
The present chapter divides into six parts. Part one elaborates a Biblical
theology of atonement and describes its impact on patristic soteriology.
Part two ponders the emergence of Anselmian atonement Christology.
Part Three traces the development of an Anselmian understanding of
atonement during the high middle ages. Part four describes the appro-
priation of the Anselmian tradition in classical Protestantism. Part five
documents the continued influence of Anselmian motifs in modern and
contemporary Christology. Part six assesses the results of Anselm’s Christo-
logical experiment.
(I)
Since the first century Christians have confessed Jesus as savior. Jesus
saves us by putting us in a life-giving relationship with God. Over the
centuries, however, theologians have disagreed about how Jesus saves us.
History provides theology with a laboratory for testing its doctrinal
hypotheses. One cannot, of course, confine theological thought to infer-
ence alone; but, as the rhetorical, pastoral theology of the fathers of the
Church gave way to scholasticism, logical patterns of thinking tended
more and more to dominate theology, especially in the west. One can,
then, trace through history the development of specific theological hy-
potheses: their emergence, the deductive explication of their consequences,
the relative adequacy with which they interpret the New Testament wit-
ness, and their capacity to foster or undermine Christian orthopraxis.
Atonement Christology
Medieval atonement theory offers one possible way of understanding the
saving work of Jesus. Largely a product of the twelfth century, atonement
Christology fueled Christological debate during the high middle ages. At
the time of the reformation, classical Protestant theology reformulated
medieval atonement theory in the light of an Augustinian doctrine of
human depravity. Moreover, a medieval understanding of atonement sur-
vives in transmuted form in a number of modern and contemporary
Christologies.
In order to appreciate the novelty of medieval atonement Christology,
one needs to contrast it with New Testament and patristic patterns of
thinking. A Christian theology of atonement has roots in the Jewish cel-

ebration of the Day of Atonement and in the theology which surrounded
that celebration. As a theological idea, “atonement” implies three others:
the fact of human sinfulness, divine redemption from sin, and the recon-
ciling sacrifice which that redemption requires. The New Testament in-
voked all these ideas in order to understand the saving significance of the
paschal mystery.
In Genesis the story of Adam and Eve narrates not only the origins of
humanity but also the origin of sin. The first human couple disobeys
God out of a desire to decide personally what only God can ultimately
decide: namely, the nature of good and of evil. Their disobedience ex-
presses their refusal to trust the word of God, and it entails immediate
consequences: separation from God as the source of life, the transforma-
tion of human labor into drudgery, sexual oppression, violence, war, and
the fragmentation of the human race (Gen 2:1-11: 32).
The Old Testament uses a variety of images to describe the reality of
human sin. When we sin, we miss the mark (Pr 19:2, 18:35), we deviate
from the purpose which God has for us. Sin irritates and exasperates
God. (Dt 4:25, 32:21) The sinner owes God a debt which only God can
remit. (Dt 24:10; 1 Mac 15:8)
Old Testament theology associates the notion of redemption in a spe-
cial way with the exodus. “Redemption” designates the means which God
uses in order to save Israel. God acquires (redeems) Israel as His chosen
people by saving the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt. (Ex 12:27; 14:13; Is
63:9; Jer 31:32) Redemptive salvation also consecrates Israel to the ser-
vice of God. (Ex 19:5; Dt 26:18) The covenant effects that consecration
by binding Israel and God to one another in life-giving ways. God thus
saves His people by freely and gratuitously re-establishing a life-giving
relationship with them. (Ex 6:6-9, 34:10-35; 2 Sam 7:23-26)
The sins of Israel frustrated God’s redemptive designs by setting Israel
against God. The ritual sacrifice of atonement undid symbolically the
divisive consequences of sin. That sacrifice mediated divine forgiveness
and restored Israel each year to God’s favor. (Lev 4:20, 31; Num 15:22-31;
Is 28:18) During the Hebrew rite of atonement, the sacrificing priest
sprinkled blood on the propitiatory (hilasterion), i.e, on the horns, or
four corners, of the altar and on the people. The sprinkled blood symbol-
ized life and re-established ritually and symbolically the bond of life be-
tween God and His people. The sprinkled blood thus ritually restored
and renewed the covenant.
Indeed, in all the ritual uses of blood in the Old Testament—in the
passover sacrifice, in the covenant renewals, and in the rite of atonement—
blood always symbolized life, never punishment, never substitution. The
sprinkling of blood always ritualized either the creation or the restoration
of the covenant as a life-giving bond uniting God and His people. That
bond overcame the division which sin had marred and destroyed.
In the fourth servant song of second Isaiah, the mysterious figure of the
servant atones for sin by his innocent suffering. By suffering the conse-
quences of sin without sinning, the servant reconciles sinners to God. (Is
53:10) As in the rite of atonement, the term “atonement” here means
at-one-ment, the restoration of a shattered relationship between God and
humans and among humans themselves.
In the Old Testament, atonement connotes sin, redemption, and sacri-
fice. The New Testament reinterprets all three ideas in the light of Jesus
and of the paschal mystery.
The synoptic tradition distinguishes between sin as an act (hamartia)
and sin as a state of lawlessness (anomia). The act of sin (hamartia) sub-
jects the sinner to the power of Satan and demands repentance and a
change of heart. Repentant sinners encounter divine forgiveness as a free
and gratuitous gift. (Mk 1:5, 2:5; Mt: 3:6, 12:34, 15:10-20; Act 2:38) In
Christ, God also cancels the debt of lawlessness (anomia) which oppresses
humanity. (Mt 6:12, 11:4)
Johannine theology, in contrast to the synoptic tradition, uses the term
“hamartia” to designate sin in general. (Jn 1:29) In the fourth gospel, all
sin separates us from God (Jn 3:5ff ), reveals the inner corruption of the
human heart (Jn 8:40), and transforms the sinner into a child of the
devil. (Jn 2:16, 3:8, 4:5, 8:12,34,44) Jesus, on the other hand, takes away
our sins by the gift of His Breath. (Jn 20: 22-3)
Paul uses the term “hamartia” in the plural to designate sinful actions
and in the singular in order to designate a more general state of sinful-
ness. (2 Co 11:16, Rom 14:23) Like the synoptics, Paul also applies the
term “anomia” to the human state of sinfulness. He opposes anomia to
justice (dikaiosunê) (2 Th 2:7, 8) and describes sin as a debt which God
must cancel. (Col 1:14, Eph 1:7, Rom 3:25)
For Paul, at the root of all sin lies greed, the desire for forbidden goods.
(Rom 7:7, 1:29; 1 Co 10: 6, 20: 17; Col 3:5, Eph 5:5; 1 Tim 6:10) Sin
exemplifies idolatry. (Rom 1:24; Gal 5:13; Col 3:5, Eph 5:5) It subjects
us to the powers of this world. (Rom 5:12-21) It mars creation. (Rom
8:19-22) It dwells in the human heart. (Rom 7:18, 25) It operates through
the flesh. (Rom 8:4-13) It uses the Law as its tool. (Rom 7:7 ff.) It ex-
presses itself in acts of transgression. (Rom 5:20 ff.) It manifests the power
of death, both temporal and eternal. (Rom 2:11, 5:12-21, 6::16, 20:6,
28:8, 7:5,10,23; 1 Co 15:26)
In dealing with human sinfulness, then, the New Testament distin-
guishes between personal sins and a general state of human sinfulness,
even though different New Testament authors use different terms to des-
ignate the two interrelated realities. As we have seen, a later theology

would call the state of sinfulness “original sin.”
In the New Testament, faith in Jesus Christ saves humanity from sin.
(Lk 7:50, 8:12) Father, Son, and Breath all act to save us: the Father as
the aboriginal source of salvation (Tit 1:3-4, 2:10-3, 3:4-6), the Son as its
mediator (Heb 9:15), the Breath as its present, gracious inspiration. (Rom
7:9-11) Faith acknowledges the divine saving action and responds to it
on the terms which the deity sets. (Rom 5:9-10, 8:24)
Paul insists in a special way on the eschatological character of our salva-
tion in Christ: the present gift of the Breath, our downpayment on salva-
tion, begins our ultimate resurrection. (Rom 8:9; 1 Co 6:9, 15:50; 2 Co
1:22; 6:2; 1 Th 2:12) The Breath of God frees us from the power of the
flesh, from sin, from the Law, and from death. (2 Co 1:22, 5:5; Eph
1:14)
In the New Testament the atoning death of Christ redeems us from sin.
God redeems us in Christ by reclaiming us for Himself, by re-acquiring
us through the paschal mystery: through the death and glorification of
Jesus and through His mission of the Breath. Nowhere does the New
Testament speak of redemption as a bargain, as a debt paid to anyone. As
in the Old Testament, blood purchase in the New Testament signifies,
not compensation, but acquisition. (Gal 2:20, Eph 1:7, 5:2, 25; Col 1:14;
Jn 10:11, 15, 27) The paschal sprinkling of Jesus’ covenant blood estab-
lishes a bond of life between us and God. That bond transforms us from
sinners into God’s cherished possession. (Heb 7:20-9:28)
The New Testament never applies to Jesus the image of the scapegoat.
When the New Testament speaks of Jesus as the atonement for our sins,
the statement has nothing to do with God punishing Jesus or with God’s
treating Him as a surrogate victim. Instead, through the cross of Christ,
God manifests His mercy by freely suffering the consequences of human
sinfulness without retaliating in kind, with sinful, vindictive violence.
Jesus effects our at-one-ment with God because in the Crucified, God
reveals His unconditioned love and will to forgive us, if only we repent.
When the risen Christ sends His Breath into the hearts of sinners, He
freely and gratuitously effects that repentance and reclaims us for God.1
Patristic commentary on the atoning sacrifice of Christ remained re-
markably faithful to these New Testament insights. The fathers taught
that Jesus gave up His life for us, that He saves us, that He mediates
1. Cf. Anthony J. Tambasco, A Theology of Atonement and Paul’s Vision of Christianity

(Collegeville, IL: The Liturgical Press/Michael Glazier, 1991); Werner Zager, “Wie
kam es im Urchristentum zur Deutung des Todes Jesu als Sühegeschen? Eine
Auseinandersetzung mit Peter Stuhlmachers Entwurf einer “‘Biblischer Theologie des
Neuen Testaments,’” Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 87(1996), pp.
165-186.
between God and sinful humanity. Through the paschal mystery God
justifies us gratuitously through Christ and in the gift of His Breath.
Only an insignificant handful of patristic writers spoke of Jesus’ death
as ransoming us from the devil or as paying a price to Satan. The vast
majority of the fathers correctly rejected such an interpretation of Jesus’
death as a betrayal of the New Testament witness.2
(II)
One needs to recall the preceding Biblical and patristic insights in order
to appreciate the revolution which medieval theology wrought in a west-
ern Christian understanding of the atoning sacrifice of Christ. Anselm of
Canterbury (1033-1109) began the revolution. The soteriological Christ-
ology which he created would influence generations of later thinkers.
Moreover, despite significant thematic variations in the atonement tradi-
tion, one discovers one important constant which runs from Anselm of
Canterbury to the present: namely, that by suffering Jesus had to pay to
the Father the price which divine justice exacts of humanity for its sins.
Anselm’s Revolution
Anselm of Canterbury launched medieval atonement Christology at the
end of the eleventh century. Anselm proposed his theory in a short trea-
tise entitled Cur Deus Homo? (Why A God- Man?). In it he tried to dem-
onstrate rationally the necessity of a divine incarnation in order to atone
for human sin.
At first, the rest of the theological community greeted his theory of
atonement with less than enthusiasm. Not until the thirteenth century
did the schoolmen begin to adopt and explore with some system the
implications of Anselm’s novel Christological hypothesis.
In its origins atonement Christology attempted to rationalize Chalce-
donian Christology by explaining why human redemption requires the
incarnation. In all of its various transformations, medieval atonement
Christology invoked four interrelated ideas: the insult which sin shows to
God, the injury which it does to humanity, the punishment which it
entails, and the satisfaction through suffering which it demands of the
Redeemer. Jesus’ innocent suffering restores the imbalance which sin
2. For a documented and more detailed discussion of these issues, see: Stanislaus Lyonnet
and Léopold Sabourin, Sin Redemption, and Sacrifice (Rome: Biblical Institute, 1970);
H.D. McDonald, The Atonement of the Death of Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book
House, 1985); Robert H. Culpepper, Interpreting the Atonement (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 1966); Timothy Gorringe, God’s Just Vengeance (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996); Hans Kessler, Die theologische Bedeutung des Todes Jesu: Eine
traditionsgeschictliche Untersuching (Düsseldorf: Patmos Verlag, 1970); Karl Heinz
Olig, “Zum Verständnis der Christologie: Die Rezeption Jesu auf Basis der Sinnfrage,”
Diakonia: Internationale Zeitschrift für die Praxis der Kirche, 26(1995), pp. 294-304.
introjects into the universe by paying to the Father the debt owed Him
by sinners.
Anselm defined sin as a failure to submit to the will of God. Both
angels and humans have sinned and by their sin have skewed the order of
the universe by dishonoring God.
In Anselmian atonement theory, the justice of God requires that He
punish sin vindictively before He can forgive it. God inflicts this punish-
ment actively on sinful creatures.
Vindictive punishment implies three things. 1) The punishment does
not include the sinner’s voluntary submission to God. 2) The punish-
ment does not restore to God the goods which sinful disobedience de-
nied Him. 3) The punishment does not win the forgiveness of sin; nor
does it restore a life-giving bond between God and sinners. In other words,
it has no saving consequences. (Cur Deus Homo? I, 11-4) As a conse-
quence of sin, for example, God punishes humanity vindictively by de-
priving it of eternal beatitude and by thus condemning it to corporeal
death. (Ibid., I, 19,24; II, 1-2)
Anselm understood atonement as satisfaction to the Father for sin. His
understanding of satisfaction presupposed, therefore, his understanding
of both sin and divine vindictive punishment. Like vindictive punish-
ment, satisfaction for sin demands three things: 1) Satisfaction must re-
submit humanity’s will to God. 2) Satisfaction must repay God for the
dishonor and injustice which sin shows Him. 3) Satisfaction must restore
to humanity the goods lost through sin.
Anselm postulated the need for a perfect proportionality between the
good offered to God in order to satisfy for sin, on the one hand, and the
dishonor done Him by sinful insubordination, on the other.3 (Ibid., I,
11, 22-3). This insistence on a due proportionality between sin and the
price which sin exacts distinguishes Anselm’s articulation of a substitu-
tionist4 interpretation of atonement. Anselm’s sense of proportionality
also contrasts with less moderate restatements of his position.
For Anselm, therefore, satisfaction for sin requires two things: 1) Satis-
faction must offer to God some good not otherwise due to God. 2) That
good must be proportionate to the dishonor to God which sinful disobe-
dience has offered Him.
No mere human can fulfill either condition. As for the first condition,
no human act can fulfill it, because humanity already owes everything to
God in consequence of the divine creative act. Nor can a human act
3. Satisfaction must also reverse the devil’s victory over humanity by giving human kind
a decisive victory over the devil. Atonement does that by restoring to heaven the
number of the elect whom God had originally predestined for salvation.
4. In substitutionist atonement theory, as we have seen, the incarnate Son of God takes
the place of sinners in paying the Father the debt owed Him because of sin.
fulfill the second condition, because no created good bears any propor-
tion to the divine honor which sin has insulted. Of itself, therefore, the
human race lacks the ability to atone for sin. (Ibid., I, 8-9, 20-21)
In the second book of Cur Deus Homo? Anselm attempted a rational
demonstration of the fact that God had to take a human nature to Him-
self in order to atone for sin. In contrast to later atonement thinkers,
Anselm himself did not teach that God commanded the death of His
innocent Son; nor did he teach that the incarnate Son of God owed His
death to the Father as a satisfaction for sin. (Ibid., I, 8). Anselm did assert
the perfect obedience of the incarnate Son to the Father, and Anselm did
regard the Son’s death as an inevitable consequence of such obedience in
a sinful world (Ibid., I, 9). Anselm’s Christ submitted to the Father by
accepting the divine decree which required that He suffer in payment for
the debt of sin. (Ibid., I, 9; II, 11)
Because humans die as a result of sin, the innocent Christ stood under
no obligation to give His life in atonement for sin. In other words, He
did not already owe His death to God. Instead, the incarnate Son chose
freely to die for a sinful humanity, although He might in fact have chosen
otherwise. The incarnate Word’s death thus fulfilled the first condition
required for satisfying God for the dishonor done Him by sin because it
offered to God a good not otherwise due to God. (Ibid., II, 10, 18)
Jesus’ death also fulfilled the second condition by offering to God a
good proportionate to the dishonor done to the deity by sin. Anselm
held that one should prefer the destruction of the entire created universe
to the commission of even a single sin (Ibid., I, 21). In dying freely for
sin, the incarnate Son of God in fact offered to the Father a good greater
than the whole of creation.
As a consequence, the death of Christ atones for sin both intensively
and extensively: intensively because it offers to God a good proportion-
ate to the dishonor wrought by sin. The death of Christ atones for sin
extensively because it offers a good adequate to satisfy for the sins of all
human kind. (Ibid., II, 10, 14, 18) Moreover, because only God’s incar-
nate Son can atone for sin, only by His incarnation and death can God
graciously undo the effects of human sinfulness.
The atoning death of Christ also restores what humanity lost through
the fall. The benefits which Christ wins in dying for sin belong to Him
personally. Since, however, He already possesses all the goods which His
death wins, He freely gives to humanity the reward due to Him for His
suffering. The death of Christ thus restores gratuitously the unjust im-
balance which sin introduced into the order of the universe and gains
back for humanity the goods which they forfeited by sin: namely, the
beatific vision and freedom from death. (Ibid., II, 19)
Although no one seems to have noticed it at the time, Anselm’s Cur

Deus Homo? radically transformed a Latin theological understanding of
atonement. As we have seen, in both the New Testament and in the writ-
ings of the fathers, atonement means at-one-ment, reconciliation, the
re-establishment of a life-giving relationship with God through a gra-
cious act of divine forgiveness. Neither in the New Testament nor in
virtually all of the fathers does atonement mean paying back to God the
price for sin. Anselm changed all that. In Anselmian atonement theory a
dishonored God requires in vindictive justice that someone suffer for the
dishonor done to the deity by acts of human sinfulness before God can
forgive sinners.
Anselm also transformed the way in which theologians understood the
saving consequences of Jesus’ death. In the New Testament and in the
fathers, the term “salvation” looks to the relationship between God and
humanity. In a sense, the same holds true in Anselm’s soteriology; but, by
portraying the incarnation as the only way in which humanity could pay
back to God the debt it owed His dishonored dignity, Anselm made sal-
vation initially and causally into an inter-trinitarian issue between the
Father and the Son and only subsequently into an issue between God and
humanity.
Anselmian atonement theory also projected an element of human vin-
dictiveness into God the Father. Anselm’s Father cannot forgive freely
and gratuitously, as the Father does in the New Testament. Anslem’s Fa-
ther demands suffering in others as the antecedent price of forgiveness.
Anselmian atonement theory thus transformed the innocent Son of God
into the Father’s victim. True, Anselm’s Son freely consents to suffer vic-
timization; but suffer it He does. As atonement theory evolved both di-
vine vindictiveness and divine victimization would take on increasingly
sinister connotations.
(III)
The preceding section describes Anselm’s atonement Christology. This
section examines how subsequent medieval thinkers appropriated his ideas.
The Anselmian Heritage

It took time for Anselm’s atonement Christology to capture the medieval
theological imagination. Peter Abelard (1079-1142 a.d.) in his commen-
tary on the letter to the Romans did, however, advance medieval atone-
ment theory by teaching that the redeemer had to substitute for human-
ity as the victim of divine justice.5 (Peter Abelard, Comm. in ep. Pauli ad
5. Abelard in his commentary on Romans offered a variety of definitions of sin, among
them 1) any voluntary act of contempt for God and 2) the punishment God imposes
for such contempt even upon those who do not actively show contempt for God. In
Abelard’s mind, the sin of Adam justified such punishment (Peter Abelard, Comm. in
Rom., 4:25, 5:8, 9, 6:9) Other twelfth century thinkers also portrayed
Jesus redemptive death as His payment to God of the debt owed by hu-
manity as a result of sin.6
Alexander of Hales (d.1245) wrote a commentary (Glossa) on the
Lombard’s book of Sentences which failed to advance medieval atone-
ment Christology in any significant way; but his Franciscan successor at
the University of Paris, John of la Rochelle (c. 1190-1200 a.d.), pub-
lished after Alexander’s death a Summa in Alexander’s name entitled
Summa fratris Alexandri. This work began to bring atonement Christo-
logy into the mainstream of medieval theological thinking.
The Summa fratris Alexandri propounded a much simplified version of
Anselmian Christology. In the vision of John of la Rochelle, sin confronts
God with two simple alternatives: either to punish human sin or to sat-
ep. Pauli ad Rom., 5:19). Adam’s sin merited death for all his descendants and the loss
of the beatific vision with the eternal punishment which such a loss entails (Ibid., 5:13,
16, 19).
In Abelard’s theology, however, God, in contrast to Anselm’s vindictive Father,
seeks to convert us by manifesting His love for us. God does this especially in the
sacrifice of Christ (Ibid., 4:25). Freedom from divine punishment for sin demands an
act of divine forgiveness which wipes the sin away. (Ibid., 3:27, 4:7, 5:16,19) Christ
both reveals to us the charity which evokes our conversion and frees us from the
punishment due to sin. He accomplishes the latter by suffering in our stead the
punishment imposed by God for sinful disobedience to His will.
6. Hugh of St. Victor (1085-1141 a.d.) taught that the fall of Adam demands that
humanity both repay God for the loss He suffered in Adam’s fall and satisfy for the
contempt which sin offers to the deity. No member of a sinful race, could, however,
repay God adequately. Hence, God mercifully decided to become human so that by
His innocent suffering He could offer a payment which exceeded the loss effected by
Adam’s original sin. Since only an innocent human could redeem the loss to God
effected by sin, Christ accomplished this by freely taking on Himself the corporeal
death imposed on sinners. This act of free and generous love satisfied for the contempt
of humanity’s sinful disobedience and gained the divine mercy. (Ibid., I, viii, 4)
The Christological reflections of Richard of St. Victor (d. 1173 a.d.), while brief and
cryptic, exhibit a conscious debt to Anselm. He saw in the incarnation a fitting divine
response to the sin of Adam and Eve. They had exalted themselves foolishly before God
when they disobeyed God by deciding for themselves the difference between good and
evil. They thus transformed themselves and their descendants into God’s enemies.
Richard’s Christological meditations presuppose, as Anselm had, that the forgive-
ness of the sin of our first parents demanded a punitive expiation which only a
God-man could offer to God. Richard therefore found it appropriate that God chose
to undo the pride of our first parents with a free and gracious act of self-abasement.
Moreover, since humanity had sinned through folly, Richard also found it fitting that
God accomplish our redemption through the incarnation of divine wisdom itself.
(Richard of St. Victor, Ad Me Clamat ex Seir, viii-xvi)
William of Auxerre (c.1150-1231 a.d.) also spoke of the atonement of Christ as His
satisfaction for the sin of Adam and portrayed that sin as excluding every human from
heaven. Satisfaction required that the humility of one person counterbalance the pride
of Adam and that the satisfaction offered to God for sin should have the same value as
the damned human race. (William of Auxerre, Summa aurea, III, t. 1, qq. 7-8)
isfy for it. God chose satisfaction; and Christ accomplished the satisfac-
tion.
John’s atonement theory, in contrast to Anselm’s, turned on the notion
of divine infinity rather than the notion of proportionality. John mea-
sured the evil of a sin by the dignity of the one offended. The sin of Adam
offended an infinite God. It therefore effected infinite evil. An infinitely
evil offense demands infinite satisfaction, infinite punishment.
Under such a presupposition, only an infinitely good person can offer
adequate satisfaction for the infinite evil of sin and thus satisfy for an
offense offered to an infinitely good God. Moreover, only an infinite
person can undo the disastrous consequences to human nature which sin
produces, for only an infinite person has a value equivalent to the whole
of human nature. That infinite person must, however, also be human in
order to represent human nature before God (John of la Rochelle, Summa
fratris Alexandri v.4(2),# 6, ad 3m, ad 4m, #8, ad 1m, ad 2m).
One finds no trace in John’s argument of the complex balancing of
different proportionalities which characterized Anselm’s theory of atone-
ment. Instead, John of la Rochelle argues relentlessly from the infinity of
the one offended to the infinity of the one who must undertake an infi-
nite atonement. John of la Rochelle’s invocation of the notion of infinity
did nothing to improve the allure of Anselm’s vindictive God. John’s God
acts with an infinite vindictiveness which takes satisfaction in the infinite
sufferings of His innocent Son. As we shall see, John Duns would quite
correctly find the argument unconvincing.
Subtler minds than that of John of La Rochelle would wrestle with the
implications of Anselmian atonement theory: among them, Albert the
Great and Bonaventure.
Albert the Great (1193-1280 a.d.) expanded Anselmian atonement
theory by invoking the merits of Christ in addition to His payment of
sin’s debt in order to explain the saving significance of Jesus’ death.7 As
7. In his commentary on the third and fourth books of the Lombard’s Sentences, Albert
reproduced most of the Lombard’s own Christological reflections but with some
embellishment. Like John of la Rochelle, Albert invoked the notion of infinity in
contrasting the pride of Adam and the humility of Christ; and he also introduced the
Anselmian concept of satisfaction as a price for sin which humanity must somehow pay
to God. After the sin of Adam, a divine decree barred the human race from heaven until
humanity paid the price of satisfaction. Adam’s proud contempt for an infinite God
demands an infinite satisfaction to atone for it (Albert the Great, Commentarium in 3
et 4 Sententiarum, III, d.18, a.14, IV, d. 15, a.5).
Albert asserted that Christ paid the price of redemption with a humility adequate for
the entire human race and that He thereby reopened the gates of heaven (Ibid., III,
d.19, a.5, ad 4m); but Albert failed to clarify precisely how this occurred.
Albert did, however, attempt to explain how the death of Christ reverses original sin.
Tacitly assuming with Augustine that original sin transmits its taint through corporeal
generation, Albert argued that the one who takes away original sin must, like Adam,
medieval atonement theory developed, moreover, the notion of merit

would take on enhanced soteriological significance.
In his commentary upon the Lombard’s Sentences, Bonaventure
(1221-74 a.d.) explored more fully than Albert the Great had exactly
how the redeemer undoes the effects of Adam’s fall. Bonaventure’s theol-
ogy of atonement, like Albert’s, focused more on the restoration of hu-
manity than on the reparation of the injury done to God, although
Bonaventure did assert the penal character of the passion. In Bonaventure’s
thought, atonement primarily fulfills the condition required for the ap-
plication of the merited grace of forgiveness to humanity. That grace de-
livers sinners from punishment.8
In his commentary on the Lombard’s Sentences, the young Thomas
Aquinas (1226-74 a.d.) blended themes from both Anselm and John of
La Rochelle. He conceded that the sin of humanity displays a certain
infinity in that it shows contempt for an infinite good. The corruption
which results from sin manifests a similar infinity in its unlimited genera-
tive power. The infinity of sin makes it impossible for any finite creature
function as a principle of the human race but in a different order from the order of
physical generation which Adam initiated. Christ functions as principal of the human
race in both His divinity and His humanity. As God, Christ confronts us as the creative
source of human existence and as the saving source of grace. As human, Christ
confronts us as the meritorious rather than as the creative principal of grace: He merits
grace for all humanity and functions as the head of the mystical body (Ibid., III, d. 20,
a.7, ad 1m, ad 2m).
Christ not only merits grace, He also satisfies for sin by freeing humanity from the
condemnation of eternal punishment and from the guilt and deformation of the divine
image in humanity which always accompanies eternal damnation (Ibid., III, d.19, a.2).
In the end, however, Albert left the concrete meaning and mode of satisfaction as vague
as one finds it in the Lombard’s original text.
8. Bonaventure set the scene for this discussion by endorsing a number of the Lombard’s
basic positions: A divine decree requires satisfaction for the sin of Adam before anyone
gain admission into heaven. Such satisfaction involves both the penal reparation
through suffering of the offense that sin offers to God and a restoration of what
humanity lost through the fall of Adam. It requires therefore both charity and suffering.
Bonaventure, however, did not believe that in His passion Christ had suffered
punishment for sin (Bonaventure, Commentarium in 3 et 4 libros Sententiarium, IV,
d.18, a.2, q.3, d.20, a.1, qq. 3 and 5).
In explaining how Christ undid the effects of sin, Bonaventure echoed important
Anselmian themes. The fact that the redeemer needs to enjoy the capacity to
communicate justification to all humans means that He must be divine and thus enjoy
the power to impart saving grace universally, instead of just possessing it personally. In
other words, the redeemer needs to head the Mystical Body (Ibid., IV, d.20, a.1, q.3).
The passion of Christ remits the punishment due to sin, eradicates guilt and iniquity,
and, as a consequence, releases sinners from the obligation of all the penalty due to sin.
The death of Christ frees one immediately from the eternal punishment due to sin.
Only in the future life does it free one from sin’s temporal punishment (Ibid., d.18, a.2,
q.3, ad 3m; d.19, a.1, q. 1,c, ad 2m, q.4, ratio 4; In 4 Sent., d. 15, I, a.1, q.2,c).
to satisfy for it.9 (Thomas Aquinas, In III Sent., d.1, q.1, a.2, ad 5m;
d.20, a.2; In IV Sent., d.15, q.1, a.2, ad 1m)
In the Summa, however, the Angelic Doctor backed off from such an
interpretation of Jesus’ passion. The mature Aquinas restricted the pur-
pose of atonement to the need to undo the contempt which sin shows for
God. The mature Aquinas defined satisfaction as the act of presenting to
an offended party something which the offended person loves as much or
more than he or she hates the offense. The magnitude of the love of
Christ, the value of His life as the God-man, and the fact that He bore
the greatest of sufferings—all these things outweigh in the eyes of God
the contempt which human sinfulness shows to the deity (Thomas
Aquinas, Summa theologiae, III, q.48, a.2, c).
Clearly, the mature Aquinas had serious second thoughts about
Anselmian atonement theology. In the Summa he down-played the penal
character of satisfaction. (Ibid., q.46, a.6, c, ad 6m). Instead, he focused
on Christ’s communication of His merits to humanity as the head of the
Mystical Body. The bond of charity uniting Christ as the head of the
Mystical Body to His members allows Him to communicate to others
9. In Aquinas’s early Christology, three tasks confront the one who redeems from sin: 1)
to satisfy for the offense made to God, 2) to offer to God a good at least equivalent in
value to the good lost to God through the corruption of the whole of humanity and 3)
to restore humanity to its pristine state (In III Sent., d. 19, a.3, q.1, sol.; q.2, sol.; d.20,
a.3, ad 2m, a.3, sol., ad 6m). The redeemer must satisfy for the offense sin offers to God
through penal suffering, which alone cleanses from sin and restores right order (Ibid.,
d.20, a.1, q.2, sol; In IV Sent., d. 15, q.1, a.4) The union of the divine nature to the
human in Christ insured the adequacy of the penal satisfaction He offered on the cross.
The corporeal life He offered to God contained more good than the eternal life enjoyed
by other humans in virtue of the union of His human soul with His divine person. By
dying Christ also satisfied for the temporal punishment due to sin, since His death has
more value than all the temporal punishments required by both original and actual sin
(In III Sent., d.19, a.3, q.1, sol, q.2, sol., d.20, a.3, ad 2m, a.3, sol., ad 6m).
The young Aquinas held that human nature enjoys a quasi-infinity since it can be
indefinitely multiplied. As quasi-infinite, human nature has more value than any
individual human person. Hence, satisfaction for its corruption requires an infinite
action, namely, the action performed by the God-man in virtue of the divine power
present in His human action (Ibid., d.1, a.2, ad 6m, 9m; d.18, a.6, q.1, sol.; q.2, sol.;
d.19, a.1, ad 1m; q.2, sol.; a.5, q.2, ad 3m; d.20, a.2, ad 4m.).
For the young Aquinas, only Christ could lift the condemnation of sin from
humanity by communicating to a fallen race His own merits. In the incarnate Word,
the divinity uses its humanity as its instrument to transform the whole human race.
Christ’s human activity thus merits a reward commensurate to the needs of the whole
of humanity. As God, Christ exercises power over the whole of human nature and has
more than sufficient power to extend the fruits of His merits to whomever He chooses.
Moreover, He shares with others a grace which He possesses in its fullness. He also
reduces temporal punishment for sin by His suffering, provided, of course, one lives
joined to Him by faith and by charity (Ibid., d.18, a.6, q.1, ad 2m; q.2, sol.; d.19, a.1,
q.1, ad 4m; q.2, sol.;a.3, q.2, sol.).
the fruits of His satisfaction for sin: both forgiveness and salvation (Ibid.,
q.19, a.4, c, ad 1m; q.48, a.2, ad 3m).
Scholars debate the authenticity of the commentary by John Duns
Scotus (1274-1308) on the third and fourth books of the Lombard’s Sen-
tences; but whatever its authorship that commentary articulated a radical
critique of medieval atonement theory. In what follows I shall assume its
Scotistic authorship.
The commentary denied outright that the sin of Adam required infi-
nite atonement. One cannot consider the sin of Adam, the act of a finite
creature, an infinite evil. At best the sin of Adam enjoyed an extrinsic
infinity in that by sinning Adam turned away from an infinite good.
Satisfaction for the sin of Adam did not, then, require infinite atone-
ment. It required only another analogous human act of either equal or
greater value both in itself and for others. In fact, Scotus argued that any
act of human love of God, whether performed by Adam or by any holy
human being, could have atoned for the sin of Adam as long as it ex-
pressed a greater concentration of will than Adam’s sin had (John Duns
Scotus, In 3 Sent., d.19, q.1; d.20, q.1).
Scotus replaced the notion of satisfaction with that of merit. By “merit”
he meant something which an offended person ought to accept. The ac-
ceptance obliged the one accepting to give another some boon in return.
(Ibid., d. 18, q.1). Christ merits by freely offering His life to the Father in
His passion. As a human act, this self-oblation remains finite. God can,
therefore, neither see in it an infinite good nor grant for it an infinite
reward (Ibid., d.19, q.1).
At the heart of Scotus’s argument lay the presupposition that the for-
mal goodness of an act flows from the nature which elicits it. Not even a
divine person, therefore, can produce an infinitely meritorious act in a
finite, created nature. With Anselm, however, Scotus continued to think
of Jesus’ passion initially as a transaction between the Son of God and the
Father.
The Shape of Medieval Atonement Christology

Medieval atonement theory developed in identifiable stages. Anselm con-
tributed the notion that the redeemer must satisfy for the dishonor to
God which sin effects by meeting the demands of punitive justice. Abelard
introduced the idea that Christ substitutes for humanity by enduring the
punishment imposed by God for sin. The Summa fratris Alexandri intro-
duced the idea that sin shows infinite contempt for God and therefore
demands an infinite satisfaction. The young Aquinas endorsed and de-
veloped this suggestion.
In the thirteenth century, however, atonement Christologists increas-
ingly concerned themselves with the restoration and rehabilitation of
humanity through the reversal of sin’s consequences. In the same century,
Albert the Great attributed the saving efficacy of Christ’s death to its
meritorious character. In the fourteenth century Scotus rejected the idea
that any finite act can accomplish either infinite evil or infinite good, not
even the finite acts of Christ. He therefore appealed to the merits of Christ
to explain the efficacy of redemption.
Medieval atonement Christology displayed broad areas of consensus at
the same time that it raised a number of unanswered theological ques-
tions. One may identify the following broad areas of consensus:
1) Atonement Christology tended to regard sin not only as a violation
of the divine will but as humanity’s contempt for its creator.
2) Atonement Christology proposed that the offense and insult which
sin offers to God demands punishment by God’s vindictive justice before
God can forgive it.
3) Divine vindictive justice requires that God actively inflict suffering
upon a sinful humanity.
4) The suffering demanded by sin pays God back for the contempt and
dishonor sin offers Him at the same time that it restores humanity to the
divine favor and re-opens the gates of heaven to a fallen human race.
5) Atoning suffering for sin must offer to God a good proportionate to
the evil which sin effects.
6) Sinful humanity cannot offer to God the proportionate good which
atonement requires.
7) The death which the innocent Christ freely chose to suffer did in
fact pay God back for the sin of humanity. Jesus’ death also undid sin’s
evil consequences by restoring the cosmic imbalance which sin intro-
duces into the order of the universe.
Medieval atonement Christology’s invocation of the category of vin-
dictive justice and its portrayal of atonement as a payment made to God
contrast sharply with the understanding of atonement developed by both
the biblical and the patristic witness.
Medieval atonement theory also raised a number of questions which it
left unanswered. What role does the Father play in the condemnation of
His innocent Son? Does the Son actually owe His death to the Father?
Does the Son accomplish the atonement by actually enduring the suffer-
ing which divine vindictive justice demanded as a price for sin? As the
centuries passed, theologians would offer a variety of answers to ques-
tions such as these, often with negative results.
This section has examined important medieval responses to Anselmian
atonement theory. The next section probes that theory’s appropriation in
classical Protestantism.
(IV)
Scotus’s assault on medieval atonement Christology would not insure its
demise. At the time of the Reformation, Protestant theologians would
read the Anselmian Christological tradition through systematizing Au-

gustinian eyes. Moreover, as we shall see, this Protestant re-reading of
medieval atonement theory continues to color the Christology of mod-
ern thinkers like Karl Barth and of Jürgan Moltmann.
Atonement in Classical Protestantism

Martin Luther (1483-1546 a.d.) never wrote a systematic treatise in
Christology. One must glean his theological perception of the person
and saving mission of Jesus Christ from the voluminous corpus of his
writings as a whole. As a consequence, the evolution of his Christological
thought parallels the different phases of his career as a reformer.
Luther derived his Christology from four principal sources: 1) from
the fathers of the Church, especially Augustine; 2) from selected medi-
eval theologians like Peter the Lombard, John Duns Scotus, William of
Ockham, Pierre d’Ailly, and Gabriel Biel; 3) from medieval piety: espe-
cially from Bernard of Clairveaux and from John Tauler, from the
neo-platonic mysticism of Augustine and of Pseudo-Dionysius, and from
the devotio moderna which took classic expression in Thomas A’Kempis’s
Imitatio Christi; and 4) from the Bible, especially from New Testament
Christology. Luther seems to have completely ignored the Christology of
the great thirteenth century scholastics.10
In his early commentary on Romans, Luther made his first systematic
contact with Pauline Christology and enunciated a theme which would
dominate all his future Christological reflections: namely, the intimate
link between Christology and soteriology.
One finds other foreshadowings as well. The early Luther linked the
saving Lordship of Christ to His presence in apostolic preaching and in
the proclamation of the Word. His thought also displayed an indebted-
ness to Anselmian atonement Christology. Luther, however, used Anselm
only selectively. He broke with Anselm when he denied that God could
not have saved us except through the cross; but in other respects Luther
endorsed the general thrust of Anselm’s thought. The innocent Christ
comes to satisfy for sin by paying the Father the debt sinners owe Him.
In Luther’s commentary on the letter to the Hebrews, Anselmian atone-
ment theory took another sinister turn. The young Luther portrayed the
crucified and innocent Christ as the victim of the Father’s relentless wrath.
10. Cf. Marc Lienhard, Martin Luthers chirstologisches Zeugnis: Entwicklung und Grundzüge
seiner Christologie (Göttingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht, 1973), 14-37. Luther
developed his early Christology in his scriptural commentaries on the Psalms and on
the letters to the Romans and to the Hebrews. In his commentary on the Psalms, he
portrayed Christ as the saving mediator foretold by the prophets. Platonic influences
on his early Christological thought surfaced in his depiction of Christ as the reconcili-
ation of opposites. In the course of developing these themes he did not hesitate to place
the words of the psalms themselves on the lips of Jesus. (Ibid., 37-44.)
In righteous anger the Father abandons the Son to the torments of the
cross. In this act of divine abandonment, the saving paradox of the cross
confronts sinners with the mystery of a self-revealing, yet hidden God.
The revelation of the Father’s wrath against human sinfulness marks,
however, only a moment in the process of salvation. Calvary gives way to
the revelation of divine forgiveness in the risen Christ. In rising, Christ
triumphs not only over the divine wrath but also over the principalities
and powers of this world.11
As controversy transformed Luther the monk into Luther the reformer,
it led him to stress all the more the centrality of the cross of Christ in
human salvation. The suffering of God on the cross effects the salvation
which faith in Christ claims.
Luther the reformer proclaimed the cross as the critical point of entry
into the mystery of Christ. That mystery challenges humanity to acknowl-
edge the horrific extent of its sinfulness so that the repentant may claim
the justifying forgiveness of Christ and imitate Him by the power of His
grace and Spirit.
In his zeal for reform, Luther also embellished rhetorically the wrath
which the Father visited on His innocent, crucified Son. All the Father’s
righteous enmity against humanity for its sins He vented upon the aban-
doned and crucified Christ. In freely suffering this awful outpouring of
divine anger, the crucified Christ overcame it so that as the risen Lord He
might manifest the Father’s love. In other words, as Luther’s thought
matured not only did it endorse the idea that atonement initially engages
the inter-trinitarian relationship between the Father and the Son; but he
also transformed the atonement into a veritable contest between paternal
vindictiveness and filial patience.
Anselm had contented himself with portraying the innocent Son mer-
iting our salvation by His innocent suffering. For the mature Luther, the
crucified Christ functions more like a heat shield which receives, absorbs,
and nullifies the Father’s otherwise unrelenting anger against sinners. Only
the Son of God’s willingness to absorb that wrath can keep it from con-
suming us vindictively in the fires of hell. This the Son accomplished by
a free and loving act of self-abasement which communicates salvation
and sanctification to sinners.
Luther’s reforming oratory stressed the saving rather than the sanctify-
ing results of the cross. In a sense, therefore, even though Luther under-
stood the cross’s saving consequences differently from Anselm, his por-
trayal of the death of Jesus stood well within the spirit of Anselmian
Christology. An offended God demands penal satisfaction from His Son
before He is willing to forgive human sinfulness.
11. Ibid., 44-68.

Luther’s atonement Christology differs from Anselm’s chiefly by giving

the Father a more actively vindictive role in the satisfaction process. In-
stead of receiving the atoning merits of the Son, Luther’s Father actively
visits His avenging wrath upon the Crucified. The Son, for His part,
saves us from being consumed by the divine vengeance by throwing Him-
self in the path of the Father’s righteous anger.12
12. Ibid., 69-88. As Luther’s Christology matured, his nominalism led him to stress the
mystery present in the incarnation, which conceals God so that God can find humans
in their sinfulness. The majesty of God hides itself in the incarnation so that God can
offer us His heart, love, grace, and liberation from sin, death, and the devil. The
incarnation thus reveals the transcendence and sovereign freedom of God. We know
the divinity of Christ only through revelation and faith. The incarnation also reveals
the trinity, the very mystery of the inner life of God. (Ibid., 108-14.)
The mature Luther offered a straightforward interpretation of the kenotic character
of the incarnation. Kenôsis means that in the incarnation the person of the Son became
Jesus Christ without ceasing to be God and chose as human to walk among us as one
who serves. In the person of the incarnate Word. God Himself suffered and died for
us. In making atonement for us, Jesus confronts us as the only mediator between God
and a sinful humanity. In our lost state only enmity and wrath exist between humanity
and God. By enduring the Father’s enmity in His own person and by rising again, the
Son of God Himself won for us the victory over sin, death, and the devil. (Ibid.,
134-46.)
In his controversy with the radical left of the Protestant reformation over Christ’s
eucharistic presence, Luther further developed his understanding of the sacramental
consequences of the incarnation. He found in Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531) his
principal antagonist. Zwingli denied that the eucharist confers grace and that as a sign
it strengthens faith. For Zwingli eating the body and blood of Christ in the eucharist
meant hearing the word of God. Moreover, for Zwingli, the eucharist counted only as
a memorial service, nothing else. Zwingli held that in the incarnation Christ took on
a human nature (rather than turned into a man) but that the act of faith in the
incarnation terminates at the divine nature only. Zwingli, moreover, restricted the
sufferings of Jesus to His humanity only and regarded the passion of Jesus as simply a
past historical event.
Luther found a connection linking these heretical errors. Since apart from the
humanity of Jesus we have no access to God, Luther insisted that the New Testament
requires faith in the real presence of Christ in the eucharist. He resisted the total
spiritualization of both the incarnation and the eucharist. Luther insisted that the
glorified flesh of Christ plays a positive role both in our salvation and in Christ’s real
eucharistic presence, since through His glorified flesh Christ sends His Spirit into the
world, the Spirit who inspires the faith which animates eucharistic worship. The real
presence of Christ in the eucharist reveals, then, His risen glory. It makes the passion
of Christ into a present reality.
In contrast to Zwingli, Luther insisted that God Himself had suffered in the passion.
He grounded the universal presence of Christ in the divine person of Jesus but His
saving eucharistic presence in the Lordship of the risen Christ. In his saving presence,
the incarnate Word has bound Himself by His promise to the eucharistic bread and
wine. In the wake of the eucharistic controversy, we find in Luther’s writings a stronger
contrast between two facets of God: the God of revelation and the “hidden God,” or
God as He exists in Himself. (Ibid., 146-184.)
In the Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin (1509-64 a.d.)

made it even clearer than Luther had that he approached the doctrine of
the incarnation in the light of an Augustinian theory of human depravity.
Calvin began his treatise on “The Knowledge of God the Redeemer”
with reflections on original sin, which he defined as “an hereditary de-
pravity and corruption of our nature, diffused through all parts of the
soul, rendering us obnoxious to the Divine wrath, and producing in us
those works which the Scripture calls ‘the works of the flesh.’” Original
sin deprives humanity of all goodness and afflicts infants as well as adults.
It corrupts every human power of activity “by a natural depravity, but
which did not result from nature.”13
Sin destroys humanity’s capacity to choose the good and enslaves the
human will to sin. Sin deprives humans of grace. The undoing of sin
results from the grace of regeneration. Those without faith in Christ may,
then, know the virtuous thing to do; but they cannot of themselves per-
form it. As a consequence, everything which proceeds from human na-
ture deserves divine condemnation. Indeed, the utter depravity of hu-
man nature provided Calvin’s Christology with “the principal point of
the argument.”14 The total ruin of human nature means that humanity
can find salvation only in Christ, for apart from Christ we confront God
as children of wrath, unable to please Him in any way whatever.15
In contrast to Luther, Calvin held that the abject corruption of human
nature made the incarnation necessary; for only the coming of Christ
could transform heirs of hell into heirs of heaven. Only by suffering the
punishment which sin merited could Christ succor a ruined humanity and
restore a fallen and polluted world. In taking on flesh, the Son of God freely
associated Himself with everything vile and the contemptible.16
Christ descended into hell not simply to announce the gospel to those
who had died but in order to break the power of hell by suffering the
tortures of the damned; for “it was requisite, also, that he should feel the
severity of the Divine vengeance, in order to appease the wrath of God, and
satisfy for justice.” In his cry on the cross, “My God, my God, why have your
forsaken me?” Christ even feared for the salvation of his own soul.17
Although Christ can only merit at God’s good pleasure, nevertheless,
He truly did merit salvation for us. Christ therefore functions as the pri-
mary cause of salvation, faith as its secondary cause. Through the sacri-
fice of Christ sinners acquire gratuitous righteousness; for He sustained
13. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, translated by John Allen (3 vols.;
Philadelphia, PA: Presbyterian Board of Christian Education, 1936), II, i, 1-9.
14. Ibid., II, ii, 1-24; iii, 1-24, iv, 1-8.
15. Ibid., II, viii, 1-3, x, 1-23, xi, 1-15.
16. Ibid., II, ii, 1-7, xiii, 1-4, xiv, 1-8.
17. Ibid., II, xvi, 1-19.
the punishment which we deserve. His death, therefore, enjoys expiatory,

placatory, and satisfactory efficacy.18
By blending an Augustinian doctrine of depravity with Anselmian atone-
ment theory, Luther and Calvin exaggerated and underlined the least
defensible tenets of Anselmian Christology. Anselm’s God demands suf-
fering as the price for sin and accepts the Son’s proportional atonement
for human deviation from the divine will. The God of classical Protestant
theology vents His unrelenting hatred for a sinfully polluted humanity
on His innocent, crucified Son. Enlightenment rationalists would, with
good reason, soon point out that such a God exhibits a peculiar sense of
justice.
The appropriation of Anselmian atonement theory in classical Protes-
tantism continues to color Protestant Christology and soteriology to this
day. It also finds an echo in the Christology of Hans Urs von Balthasar.
The section which follow examines the hues of that coloration.
(V)
One finds a strong echo of classical Protestant atonement theory in the
Christologies of Karl Barth and Jürgen Moltmann. Since Barth precedes
Moltmann historically, I consider Barth first.
The Modern and Contemporary Anselmian Heritage

In Barth’s Christology Christ atones for sin within history; but the atone-
ment takes precedence over all of history and reveals Jesus as the unique
and only savior of a sinful humanity. Through the incarnation the elect-
ing creator becomes the elected creature; but, “because he negates God,
the man elected by God, the object of divine grace, is himself necessarily,
and logically, with all that it involves, the man negated by God....The
Holy One stands in the place and under the accusation of a sinner and
with other sinners.”
Through His kenotic incarnation God reveals Himself in Christ as stand-
ing for us. Christ first took our place as our Judge by stripping us of all
hypocritical pretensions to self-vindication before God. Christ also took
our place as sinners by making Himself responsible for the sins of all. In
taking our place as sinners and bearing the full force of God’s wrathful
“No” to sin, the crucified Christ confronts us as the “supremely objective
source of knowledge” of our sinful state before God.
In taking on our evil case and answering for it as ours, Christ forgives
sins. Hence, nothing remains for us to do as sinners except to accept the
forgiveness of sin judged and remitted in Christ. Christ becomes our
Judge by submitting to the divine judgment in our place. His death has a
18. Ibid., II, xvii, 1-5. American Puritanism endorsed an Anselmian approach to
atonement. See: Dorus Paul Rudisill, The Doctrine of the Atonement in Jonathan
Edwards and His Successors (New York, NY: Poseidon, 1971).
catastrophic character because it destroys the old age of sin and brings
into existence the new age of redemption.19
In raising Jesus from the dead the Father acts differently from the way
He acted in the passion, even though the two acts finally constitute one
single saving act of God because of their intimate relationship to one
another. In raising Jesus, the Father passes judgment on the passion and
designates Jesus crucified and risen as the one Word of God whom all
must hear if they desire to be saved.20
19. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, translated by G.W. Bromley and F.T. Torrence (New
York, NY: Scribner’s Sons, 1956), IV, pp. 131-322.
20. Ibid., pp. 342-57. The doctrine of the glorification of Jesus describes His homecoming.
Jesus’ humanity both resembled ours and differed from it. He differs as one human differs
from another; but He also differs in that His history coincides with the exaltation of
humanity through His total obedience to the will and decree of God. By becoming human
the Word did not cease to be God; instead, he assumed humanity into God in a new way.
All three divine persons act in the incarnation, but not in the same way. The Son’s
self-abasement reveals His person specifically. The incarnation expresses the determi-
nation of the Son’s human essence (Wesen) by His divine. In the incarnation the human
essence at first veils the divine so that the divine might eventually glorify the human.
The mutual conditioning of the two essences grounds the communicatio idiomatum.
The hypostatic union effects the communicatio gratiae. The hypostatic union effects
a special gracing of the Son since He bore our sinfulness without sinning. His
sinlessness and impeccability establishes His brotherhood with all other humans
because it transforms Him into the one who reconciles humanity to God. Through His
sanctification Jesus receives power (potestas not potencia) to forgive sins. Since His
sanctification culminates in His obedience unto death on a cross, the humiliation and
glorification of the Son coincide.
Finally, in the incarnation one must also speak of a communicatio operationum, since
in Jesus God and humanity act as one. (Ibid., IV, 2, pp. 1-73)
All these communications of God in the incarnate Word effect a consortium
divinitatis, a familiar presence of God among humanity. Through the self-revelation
of God in Jesus we now encounter the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Jesus. The incarnation
makes the Spirit concrete, because the Spirit conforms us to Jesus. Moreover, our
transformation in the Spirit reveals the glory of God. Jesus rises from the dead (the terminus
a quo of the resurrection) and ascends into heaven (the terminus ad quem of the resurrection).
Ascension translates Jesus into the hidden realm of the divine. (Ibid., 116-54)
Glorification reveals Jesus as the royal man. The unforgettable memory of Jesus
began that revelation; but the glorification completes it. Resurrection reveals Jesus as
Lord. Not a political revolutionary, Jesus nevertheless proclaimed a kingdom whose
freedom has revolutionary implications. The kingdom reveals that God stands with the
suffering, the oppressed, the marginal. In Jesus an alien power entered history and
endowed His actions with a supernatural power, a power revealed in His miracles which
incorporate the suffering and oppressed into the kingdom.
Glorification also transforms our perception of the cross of Christ. The resurrection
reveals the passion as Jesus’ triumph over death. The glorification of the Son imparts
a new direction to salvation history and demands that sinners submit to Jesus’
judgment on their sinfulness. We know ourselves only in confrontation with Jesus
Christ because only in Him is the telos finally and fully revealed.
The resurrection also gives us access to the Spirit of the risen Christ who advances
history to the goal He sets and embodies. (Ibid., pp. 154-377) Cf. Berthold Klappert,
Barth’s appropriation of classical Protestant atonement Christology

mutes its rhetorical excesses; but it nevertheless replaces a New Testa-
ment account of atonement with transmuted Anselmian ideas. Like
Anselm, Barth mislocates the drama of redemption by portraying it pri-
marily as an intra-trinitarian transaction between Father and Son. The
incarnate Son substitutes for a sinful humanity and suffers the punish-
ment which it deserves. As a consequence, the God of wrath whom Luther
and Calvin described survives in Barth’s portrayal of the crucifixion in
the Father’s wrathful “No” to sin.21
Among contemporary Christologists Jürgen Moltmann (1926- ) blends
themes from Karl Barth’s neo-orthodoxy with the same kind of dialecti-
cal thinking which characterized nineteenth century kenotic theology.
True to his Lutheran roots Moltmann claims that the cross of Christ
holds the key to his entire theology. As a contemporary, twentieth-century
theologian, however, Moltmann’s theology of the cross addresses a very
different social situation from either Luther or nineteenth-century kenotic
Christologists. Moltmann has attempted to demonstrate the contempo-
rary relevance of Christianity to a post-Christian Europe by moving a
Lutheran theology of the cross in a political direction.22
Moltmann holds that one can know God only through God; but, in
the cross, God is revealed in a Christ whom God abandoned. Jesus did
not die a fine death. He approached it with trepidation. On the cross, He
cried out to the God who had left Him in utter dereliction. The death of
Jesus called into question the deity of the Father He had proclaimed.23
Versönung und Befreiung: Versuche, Karl Barth kontextuel zu Verstehen

(Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1994).
21. Emil Brunner (1889-1966) showed less enthusiasm for atonement Christology than
did Barth. Brunner observed that Christian tradition offers two ways of understanding
the atonement: the subjective theory of Abelard and the objective theory of Anselm.
Abelard held that the death of Jesus gives us the clearest revelation of the love of God.
This position, however, does not take into sufficient account human guilt. Anselm’s
position sins in the direction of too much objectivity by teaching that only the Son of
God could have expiated the infinite guilt of humanity. This theory has elements of
truth in it but does not accord with the New Testament. Anselm, therefore, needs
correction by Abelard, whose subjective approach includes the element of faith. Paul
saw that all we undertake of ourselves comes under the curse of the Law. Jesus forgave
sins in His own name and by His own authority. In the cross, moreover, God reveals
His love for a sinful humanity in spite of its sinfulness. The Son experienced the curse
of the Law and through the cross penetrated to the depths of human existence. Were
we to focus on divine forgiveness alone, we would miss the earnestness of sin. Instead,
the cross confronts us with the full weight of human sin and demands that we as a
consequence abandon all attempts at self-justification. (Ibid., 291-8)
22. Cf. Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God, translated by R.A. Wilson and John
Bowden (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), pp. 1-25.
23. Ibid., pp. 145-153.
In The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God, Moltmann devel-
oped the dialectical implications of these assertions. Moltmann envis-
aged a progressive, dialectical revelation of the trinity in history.
First, Jesus, whom Moltmann asserts must be understood as a “human
person,” proclaimed the kingdom of God. The Father sent the Son to
proclaim the kingdom at the same time that the Spirit allowed the Son to
call God Abba. In the first stage of the revelation of the trinity, therefore,
“the Father sends the Son through the Spirit. The Son comes from the
Father in the power of the Spirit. The Spirit brings people into the fel-
lowship of the Son and of the Father.”24
The passion of Jesus constitutes the second stage in the dialectical rev-
elation of God. In Jesus’ passion the Father withdraws from the Son and
leaves Him alone. Jesus’ unanswered prayer in the garden begins His pas-
sion. On the cross the Son despairs when He cries out: “My God, my
God, why have You forsaken me?” As a consequence, Calvary marks a
break in the very life of the trinity. The Father casts off and curses the Son
for our sakes; the Son suffers the forsakenness. During the triduum from
Good Friday to Easter, therefore, the Holy Spirit alone abides as the bond
between the Father and the Son.
On Calvary, the trinity means the Father gives up His own Son to
death in its most absolute sense for us, while the Son gives Himself up for
the same purpose. Moreover, the common sacrifice of the Father and Son
comes about through the Holy Spirit who continues to link the Son,
even in His forsakenness and despair, with the Father. How the Spirit
accomplishes this remains obscure, to say the least.25
Moltmann’s reading of classical Protestant atonement Christology uses
dialectical logic in order to radicalize it. As in the case of kenotic Christo-
logy, the incarnation negates aspects of the inner life of the triune God.
In nineteenth century kenotic Christology, the incarnation effects that
negation. In Moltmann, the tragedy of the cross does. The Father aban-
dons the Son and thereby ceases to be Father; the Son despairs on the
cross and ceases to be the Son. Hegelian logic, however, supposedly saves the
day when the resurrection negates the negation of the cross and commits the
triune God to the struggle for human liberation within history.26
Moltmann deserves commendation for his attempt to endow Christo-
logy and trinitarian theology with political significance; but his endorse-
24. Cf. Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God, translated
by Margaret Kohl (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1981), pp. 61-74.
25. Ibid., 75-83.
26. In Moltmann’s Christology, the resurrection reveals the Son’s homecoming to the
Father and begins the full eschatological revelation of the Son which will happen when
all humanity perceives His Easter glory. The glory of God appears on the face of the
risen Christ and reveals Him as Son enthroned in power. That glory endows His
ministry with new saving significance.
ment of a confused dialectical logic exacts too high a doctrinal price for
radicalizing the gospel. I also find the price unnecessary.
Moltmann fails to explain how a human person can also be a divine
person. He leaves it obscure why the death of a human person should
make any difference to the inner life of God. He also fails finally to extri-
cate himself from the inadequacies of medieval atonement theory. For
Moltmann, the drama of salvation plays itself out between Father and
Son. It temporarily disrupts the inner life of the trinity: during the Easter
triduum only the Holy Spirit keeps the Godhead from complete frag-
mentation.
In Moltmann’s thought the moral vindictiveness of the wrathful God
of classical Protestantism transforms itself into the Father’s heartless aban-
donment of the Son as He hangs in dereliction on the cross. How the Son
of God manages to save us after He commits the sin of despair never
finds an adequate explanation in Moltmann’s Christology.
Even as astute a theologian as Wolfhart Pannenberg cannot finally ex-
tricate his Christology from the distortions of medieval atonement theory.
Pannenberg betrays his rootedness in the Lutheran tradition when he
interprets the eucharistic words of Jesus as endorsing a medieval theology
of penal substitution. Pannenberg argues that redemption requires penal
substitution because sin imposes a moral debt to God which needs pay-
ing. Christ “became sin” by suffering the misfortune which human sin-
fulness merited.27
Hans Urs von Balthasar’s dramatic soteriology also echoes the Anselmian
tradition. Von Balthasar finds five motifs in Christological soteriology. 1)
After the resurrection, therefore, the trinity means: The Father raises the Son
through the Spirit; the Father reveals the Son through the Spirit; the Son is enthroned
as Lord of God’s kingdom through the Spirit. (Ibid., 83-88)
The resurrection elevates Jesus into the inmost being of the Godhead. In becoming
Lord of the kingdom He acquires a new relationship to the Spirit, whom He now sends
in charismatic abundance to effect a new creation.
With the coming of Pentecost, the Trinity now means: The Father raises the dead
Son through the life-giving Spirit, the Father enthrones the Son as the Lord of His
kingdom, and the risen Son sends the creative Spirit from the Father to renew heaven
and earth through baptismal incorporation into Christ.
In baptism itself, we encounter the Trinity in yet a different way. In baptism the
trinity means: a) the eschatological history of God which opens out onto the future; b)
the unity of the Father, Son, and Spirit stands therefore as an open unity and not as a
closed one; and c) that openness seeks the unification of all believers, of humankind,
and of the whole creation. As this future unfolds, the trinity means: the Father subjects
everything to the Son, the Son transfers the consummated kingdom to the Father, and
the Son subjects Himself to the Father. In the incarnation we perceive the trinity as
Father, Son, Spirit; but as an eschatological reality we perceive the trinity as Spirit, Son,
Father. (Ibid., 97-114)
27. Cf. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus God and Man, translated by Lewis L. Wilkins and
Duane A. Priebe (London: SCM Press, 1968), pp. 245-269, 279.
The Son gives Himself through the Father for the salvation of the world.
2) Jesus, the sinless one, “changes places” with sinners. 3) This redemp-
tive act sets humanity free. 4) The same act communicates to humans a
share in trinitarian life. 5) The whole drama of salvation reveals divine
love.28
In depicting Jesus’ death for sinners, however, von Balthasar portrays
the Son as the object of divine vindictive anger. In von Balthasar’s script
for his “theo-drama,” Jesus hangs upon the cross utterly abandoned by
both by God and humans.29
(VI)
I began these reflections on atonement Christology by suggesting that
history functions as the laboratory for testing the truth or falsity, ad-
equacy or inadequacy, and ethical consequences of theological theories.
The time has come to assess the results of Anselm’s Christological experi-
ment. In my judgment, the theological community needs to declare it a
failed experiment once and for all and to consign it to the same theoreti-
cal dust bin as medieval alchemy.
Sympathetic commentators on Anselmian atonement theory point out
that it derives, not from the New Testament, but from the hierarchical
structure of medieval society and from the ethos which such a society
presupposed. That ethos demanded the violent punishment of crime by
mutilation, torture, and legalized murder. That ethos also presupposed
that no one who occupied a lower rung of society possessed the dignity or
worth to offer satisfaction for offending anyone who occupied a higher
rung.
As we have already seen, the verification of a doctrine invokes both
historical and religio- ethical norms. The doctrine must interpret cor-
rectly the historical revelation which we have in fact received. That rev-
elation defines the practical scope of Christological knowing. As a result,
the moral consequences of a sound doctrine will promote practical as-
similation to Jesus in the power of His Breath. In my judgment, Anselmian
atonement theory fails both tests of doctrinal orthodoxy.
Weighed theologically, Anselmian atonement theory seriously distorts
how God has in fact accomplished human salvation in Christ. Saving
redemption concerns most fundamentally the triune God’s relationship
to a sinful humanity. It does not primarily and initially concern the rela-
tionship of one member of the trinity to another, as medieval atonement
theory fallaciously asserts. By subsuming the drama of redemption into
the inner life of God, Anselmian atonement theory mislocates it and, in
28. Cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama, translated by Graham Harrison (5 vols.;
San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1994), IV, p. 317.
29. Ibid., IV, pp. 349-356.
the process of mislocating, Anselmian atonement theory badly misun-

derstands that drama.
Anselm also blundered badly when he constructed a Christological
hypothesis on the assumptions of medieval hierarchicalism and of medi-
eval penal practice. Both institutions seriously contradict fundamental
ethical demands of life in the kingdom of God proclaimed by Jesus.
As we have seen, the kingdom calls for the construction of a radically
egalitarian society in which the neediest and most marginal receive pref-
erential support and honor. One cannot reconcile such a vision with the
stratified social structure of medieval Europe. Similarly, the kingdom re-
quires its members to relate to one another in mutual forgiveness. One
cannot reconcile mutual forgiveness in the image of Christ with divine
approbation of legalized mutilation, torture, and murder.
Finally, in its classical Protestant formulation, atonement Christology
exaggerated some of the most pessimistic elements in late medieval piety.
In the thought of Luther and Calvin, that pessimism generated and popu-
larized the vision of an infinitely angry and vengeful God whom reflec-
tive people, understandably enough, found somewhat difficult to trust.
Should we, after all, really wonder at the difficulty of loving a God who
takes infinite satisfaction in torturing His innocent Son?
Anselmian atonement theory does, however, build on some sound in-
sights. Sin does introduce disorder into the universe, a disorder which
God desires to reorder. Jesus did die in obedience to the Father’s will.
How, then, ought one to go about correcting the errors and oversights of
Anselmian atonement theory? To this question I turn in the chapter which
follows.
Chapter 11
Jesus the Savior
The preceding chapter traced the development of atonement Christo-
logy. It contrasted medieval and modern atonement Christologies with
the understanding of Jesus’ saving death presented in the New Testament
and in the writings of the fathers. This chapter develops a positive doctrine of
atonement which calls into question the doctrinal adequacy of medieval atone-
ment theory and the soteriological Christologies which it inspires.
This chapter divides into three parts. Part one argues for the need to
replace atonement Christology in its Anselmian and post-Anselmian for-
mulations with a foundational account of salvation in Christ which bet-
ter accords with the New Testament and patristic witness. Part two dis-
cusses the four ways in which Jesus in fact saves us. Part three reflects on
the cosmic dimensions of salvation in Christ and on Christological and
soteriological issues raised by the dialogue among world religions.
(I)
Nothing in the New Testament suggests that the Father wanted Jesus to
die a horrible death by torture. Rather the New Testament suggests that
the Father sent Jesus to tell us the truth about Himself and about us and
in order to summon us to repentance, reconciliation, and sinless living.
Jesus proclaimed again and again that God desires to forgive us if only we
repent. Jesus also warned that the refusal to repent and to forgive one another
sets the human heart in irreconcilable opposition to a forgiving God.
Jesus died in obedience to the Father because a forgiving God required
Him to persist in summoning humans to repentance and mutual recon-
ciliation, no matter what they did to Him, even though they kill Him.
His suffering then reveals the unconditioned character of God’s love and
will to forgive us.
If, moreover, the divine persons relate to one another in an attitude of
total and mutual self-donation in love, then the Father took no pleasure
or sadistic satisfaction in His incarnate Son’s death by torture. On the
contrary, we need to recognize in the passion of the Son the compassion
of both the Father and the Breath.1
The resurrection confirms this insight; for, when humanity had done
its worst and assassinated God incarnate, the risen Lord used His divine
omnipotence, not in order to take vengeance on His enemies, assassins,

Chapter 11: Jesus the Savior 383
and sinful disciples but in order to purify humanity of its sinfulness through
the free and gratuitous gift of His own Breath.
Those who conspired in order to murder the Son of God, like those
who continue to murder Him in the “little ones” whom He loves best, do
indeed stand under the judgment of God by their refusal to repent. That
refusal does not, however, alter God’s loving desire for reconciliation with
humanity. It contradicts that desire by its unregenerate sinfulness.
Jesus’ non-violence, His gratuitous forgiveness of sin, even His own
murder, which He suffered without demanding vindictive retaliation—
all these things give the lie to Anselm’s suggestion that God requires vin-
dictive punishment of humans before He is willing to forgive them. On
the contrary, the paschal mystery makes it clear that God responds to sin,
even to the sin of murdering God’s incarnate Son, without any hint of
vindictive vengeance. The treachery of Judas grieved Jesus, but it did not
cause Him to lash out vindictively at the traitor. Instead, Jesus persisted
to the end in seeking reconciliation with His betrayer. The risen Christ
did not flog, mutilate, or kill the disciples who abandoned Him fearfully
and denied Him sinfully. Instead, He lovingly changed their hearts. Jesus
the Lord proclaims and embodies a passionate divine desire for reconcili-
ation with a sinful humanity; and He offers that reconciliation as a gratu-
itous gift of life. Moreover, having offered it, He also gratuitously effects
it in sinful human hearts by the gift of His Breath.
The paschal mystery does pass judgment on humanity’s hypocrisy and
sinfulness. As universal judge, the risen Christ warns unrepentant and
sinful mortals of the tragic consequences which flow from refusing the
saving reconciliation which He brings.
In the New Testament, Jesus does speak on occasion of divine retribu-
tion and of divine anger, (Mt 3:7; Lk 3:7, 21:23) but His condemnation
of vindictive anger in human relationships precludes projecting human
vindictiveness into God. (Mt 5:22) The God Jesus proclaims does not
live on a lower moral plane than humans. Jesus comes precisely to save us
from divine retribution, not to inflict it. (1 Th 1:10, 5:9) How, then,
ought one to interpret the meaning of divine retribution?
The New Testament names the kind of behavior which angers God:
namely, the refusal to repent and to accept the gratuitous gift of divine
forgiveness which Jesus proclaims and embodies. (Jn 3:36; Rom 1:18;
2:5, 8; 3:5; 5:9; 9:22; 12:19; Eph 2:3, 5:6; Col 3:6; 1 Th 5:9; Heb 3:11;
4:3; Rev 6:16, 17; 11:18, 14:8, 10, 19, 15:1, 7; 16:1, 19, 18:3, 19:15) In
the letter to the Romans, Paul, even in his relentless denunciation of
universal human sinfulness, proclaims that God’s anger at sin does not
take the form of actively inflicting punishment on humans but in allow-
ing intransigent sinners to suffer the consequences of their own evil choices
in the hope that the experience of self-inflicted misery will bring them to
recognize their evil plight and repent. (Rom 1:18-27, 13:5)
Even lovers can make one another angry; but, if one loves in the image
of Christ, anger never turns into spite, violence, or wounding. Divine
anger exemplifies the ire which results from flouted and unrequited love.
Because, however, God exemplifies the perfection of mutual self-donation
in love, divine anger never degenerates into vindictive hatred. Even in
anger, God continues to love us.
The New Testament also makes it clear that Christian behavior which
conforms to the demands of discipleship avoids vindictive displays of
anger as scrupulously as the incarnate Son of God did. If God incarnate
summons us to love our enemies in His image, that means that God loves
His bitterest enemies even before they repent, even at the moment when
they sin most grievously against Him. (Mt 5:22; Lk 22:47-51; Jn 18:10-11;
Eph 4:26, 31, 6:4; Col 3:8; 1 Tim 2:8; Tit 1:7; Jam 1:19-20) It makes no
logical, theological, or moral sense for God to forbid spiteful, vindictive,
and violent behavior in humans only to indulge in such vicious, spiteful
behavior Himself.
As we have seen, the New Testament does use the image of fire to sym-
bolize the holiness of God. That holiness purifies those who repent and
seek God’s healing forgiveness; but it destroys those who refuse to repent.
One need not, however— indeed, one should not—interpret the destruc-
tive power of divine holiness as an expression of divine vindictiveness.
Rather, the moral demands of the life in the kingdom cause the unrepen-
tant sinner to experience the very holiness of God as a reality which threat-
ens to undo their sinful being.
The message which the Father sent the Son to proclaim and which the
Breath of God inspired within Him makes very specific moral demands.
The vision of the kingdom makes it clear that God sides with the poor,
with the marginal, with the degraded, with the oppressed, with the ex-
pendable. That means that God stands against those who line their pock-
ets at the expense of the poor, against those who push others to the mar-
gins of society, against those who abuse and degrade other persons, against
all oppressors, against those who turn their backs indifferently on those
who are perishing. The message of the kingdom tells us that God stands
ready to forgive any sinner who repents but that God cannot forgive the
sins of those whose lack of repentance prevents them from forgiving oth-
ers. If God has set His heart on forgiveness, then those who refuse to
forgive set themselves against God and by that refusal make reconcilia-
tion with God impossible.
Those who set their hearts intransigently against God experience the
approach of divine holiness not as a blessing but as a threat to their very
selves. No wonder. As emerging experiences, we create ourselves by our
own choices. If we freely set ourselves against God, then face-to-face en-
counter with the holiness of God threatens to unravel the deepest fibers
of our being which we have freely woven into a tight pattern of intransi-
gent sinfulness. The approach of divine holiness promises no consolation
to those who have set their very being in relentless opposition to every-
thing which the holiness of God exemplifies. On the contrary, unrepen-
tant, vindictive sinners and unrepentant religious hypocrites experience
the approach of divine holiness as the annihilation of everything which
they have chosen to become.
In a very real sense, then, the suffering and martyrdom of prophets
reveal historically the real possibility of hell. Humans can and do develop
deep attachments to their own sinfulness. Because the approach of God
seeks to undo those attachments, unrepentant and intransigent sinners
resist that approach as a threat to what they have chosen to become. As a
consequence, the assassination of a prophet like Martin Luther King does
more than attack the person of the prophet. Those who kill prophets
would silence and kill the prophet’s God, if they could. In Jesus’ case, we
had the chance to murder God, and we took it. Intransigent unrepentance
has, as a consequence, the capacity to transform a face-to-face confronta-
tion with God into a hellish experience.
God, then, judges us by telling us lovingly the truth about ourselves
and about the divine reality which Jesus embodies. Those who have cho-
sen to embody realities and values which contradict the truth embodied
in Jesus hear the judgment of God, not as good news, but as a terrifying
assault on their being. To hear the gospel as good news, sinful humans
need to receive it into repentant hearts. When they do, they know the
healing power of the divine forgiveness which Jesus proclaimed and em-
bodied. When they do not, the good news fills them with vindictive rage
and justifiable terror.
The Beloved Disciple saw correctly and with wonderful clarity that
those who accept the revelation of divine forgiveness with repentant and
faith-filled hearts never experience a divine judgment of repudiation. Only
those experience the holiness of God as an annihilating judgment who
prefer sin to God, darkness to divine light, hate-filled violence to recon-
ciling divine love.
Some defenders of the Anselmian tradition argue that one trivializes
sin unless one confesses that God punishes it vindictively. If, however,
one takes the mind of Jesus as the measure of sin, then God would have
to sin in order to punish sin; for, pushed to the extremest test on Calvary,
Jesus refused to counter violence with violence. Risen, moreover, in glory,
He sought, not retaliation, but reconciliation and forgiveness. God does,
however, take the sin of vindictiveness with utter seriousness, with such
total seriousness that God would never descend to committing it.
The cross does in fact reveal all the hideousness of sin in stark and
all-sufficient terms. Calvary displays the utterly repulsive sight of human
vindictiveness hell-bent on destroying the divine excellence incarnate in

Jesus. In the cross we confront the human assassination of an infinitely
loving God. I would think that anyone would have supped full of horrors
who has pondered that deicide in all of its implications.
The God of the New Testament does reveal the full horror of sin; but
God does so precisely by suffering sin and its consequences in love and
without retaliating violently and vindictively. As a consequence, the cross
embodies the perfection of divine forgiveness at the same time that it
casts the glaring light of divine revelation on the most depraved corners
of the human heart. As the fourth gospel correctly insists, the full revela-
tion of the light of God’s love puts the full horror of sin in clearest and
starkest relief. On Calvary, the perfection of divine, reconciling love and
the hideous malice of the dark powers stand simultaneously and deci-
sively revealed.
Jesus on the cross did not pay anything to the Father. He did not suffer
as a human scapegoat or as a surrogate victim of God’s active, destructive,
and vindictive wrath. On the cross, God suffered human, not divine,
wrath. On the cross, Jesus did not protect us from the Father’s vindictive
vengefulness; rather He embodied in His humanity the perfection of di-
vine love and forgiveness in the face of sinful, unjust, human malice and
institutionalized vindictiveness. The cross reveals humanity’s rejection of
God, not the Father’s rejection of the Son. Suffering human sinfulness
without vindictive retaliation exacted a terrible price from Jesus. He paid
that price in forgiving love; but He did not pay it to anyone.
Contemporary theology both Protestant and Catholic has repudiated
an Augustinian doctrine of human corruption. Sin diminishes and dis-
torts our humanity, but it does not vitiate it totally. Even sinful humans
can perform naturally good acts.
The construct of human nature developed in this study attempts to
avoid the extremes of Protestant pessimism and of Thomistic optimism.
That theological shift undercuts any theological justification for belief in
the wrathful God of classical Protestantism. Nevertheless, some preach-
ers continue to perpetuate popularly the dated Christological rhetoric of
the first reformers.
The philosophers of the Enlightenment had the right of it, in my judg-
ment, when they criticized the God of Calvinism as unjust to take ghoul-
ish satisfaction in the hideous sufferings of His innocent Son. The vision
of the Father visiting His unrelenting spite on the innocent Jesus sends a
confused moral message to those who hear it preached; for, if God can-
not forgive others until He has vented his vengeful spleen on somebody,
even on His totally innocent Son, why should one expect weak and sinful
humans to treat their enemies any differently?
In a sense Moltmann’s dialectical reading of the crucifixion takes the

excesses of classical Protestant rhetoric to its logical conclusion. If in fact
God had treated His innocent and crucified Son as heartlessly as classical
Protestant rhetoric suggested, He would in effect have abandoned Him
as he died a death of torture. Since a morally responsible human being
would not treat a dog that way, the suggestion that one divine person
would treat another divine person so heartlessly qualifies in my judgment
as blasphemy. In abandoning the Son, the Father would indeed have aban-
doned His very paternity and therefore also His divinity. The wrathful
God portrayed in the extremest forms of evangelical rhetoric forfeits di-
vinity through the sin of vengeance. The fact that Moltmann also makes
the Son forfeit His divinity by committing the sin of despair only com-
pounds the problem.
Feminists who deride the idea of atonement as divine child abuse need
to recognize that they are legitimately rejecting only one strain in the
Christological tradition, a strain which other theologians, including those
of the male persuasion, also reject. Moreover, all theologians need to take
into account other more theologically acceptable interpretations of Jesus’
atoning sacrifice.
Correctly understood, the cross does not encourage women or any other
oppressed group to acquiesce supinely in suffering, as some feminist theo-
logians fear. Jesus died because of His relentless prophetic opposition to
all forms of human sin and oppression. In making the last first and the
first last, He promoted all oppressed people, women included, to a privi-
leged position in the new Israel He was founding. He also transformed
the privileged into the willing slaves of the underprivileged. Christian
atonement, like Christian service, insists on the practical rectification of
all forms of social oppression and injustice. The greater the oppression
one suffers, the greater the claim one makes on those more privileged
than oneself and the more exalted one’s status in the new Israel.
John Duns Scotus stands out among medieval Christologists for His
forthright rejection of John of La Rochelle’s version of atonement Christo-
logy. Unfortunately, however, Scotus’s criticism did not go far enough.
Scotus spoke of the merits of the suffering Christ instead of the price He
paid to the Father. In speaking of the merits of Christ, however, Scotus
still tacitly conceded that, at least initially, salvation consists primarily in
a transaction between Father and the Son.
Instead, the noun “salvation” designates the relationship which the en-
tire triune God desires to have with humanity. The triune God wants to
stand in a life-giving relationship to humanity, one which unites the di-
vine and the human in love and reconciliation. A more thorough criti-
cism of medieval atonement theory than the one which Scotus attempted
would have relocated the drama of salvation where it belongs: between
sinners and the saving reality of the entire Godhead, not between the Son
and the Father, as von Balthasar and others have done.
I have been arguing in this section that medieval atonement theory
offers a misleading and doctrinally unsound way of understanding how
Jesus saves us. What shape, then, would a sound foundational interpreta-
tion of Christian salvation take? To this question I turn in the section
which follows.
(II)
In this section, I shall argue that Jesus saves us in four ways: 1) His sinless
life heals, perfects, and elevates human nature; 2) His proclamation and
embodiment of the kingdom provides us with the pattern of sinless liv-
ing; 3) the paschal mystery reveals the ultimate goal of God’s saving ac-
tivity; 4) the abiding gift of the Breath empowers us to live in Jesus’ im-
age and through conformity to Him to attain the goal of God’s saving
action in us.2
2. For other approaches to Christological soteriology, see: Theophil Tschipke, O.P., Die
Menscheit Christi as Heilorgan der Gottheit (Freiburg: Herder & Co., 1940); Ian G.
Wallis, The Faith of Jesus Christ in Early Christian Traditions (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995); Paul S. Fiddes, Past Event and Present Salvation: The Christian
Idea of Atonement (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989); Illtyd
Trethowen, The Absolute and the Atonement (New York, NY: Humanities Press Inc.,
1971); Martin Jarrett- Kerr, C.R., The Atonement in Our Time (New York, NY:
Morehouse-Gorham Co., 1953); Arthur C. Hedlam, The Atonement (London: Hodder
and Stoughton, 1935); Michael Winter, The Atonement (Collegeville, MI: The
Liturgical Press/ Michael Glazier, 1995); Vernon White, Atonement and Incarnation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); David L. Wheeler, A Relational View
of the Atonement (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 1989); James E. Tull, The Atoning Gospel
(Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1982); Ulrich Simon, Atonement: From
Holocaust to Paradise (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 1987); Theodor Herr,
Versönung statt Konflkt (Paderborn: Creator Verlag, 1991); F.W. Dillstone, The
Christian Understanding of Atonement (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1968); Gerhard
Ebeling, “Der Sünetod Christi als Glaubensassage,” Jürgen Becker, “Die
neutestametliche Rede vom Sündetod Jesu,” Wilfried Hörle, “Die Rede von der Liebe
und vom Zorn Gottes,” Klaus-Peter Jörns, “Der Sünetod Jesus Christi in Frömmigkeit
und Predigt,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, Beiheft 8, edited by Gerhard Müller
(Tübingen, J.C.R. Mohr, 1990); Culin E. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement (Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989); Dorothy Soelle, Christ the Representative (Philadelphia,
PA: Fortress, 1967); Robert S. Franks, The Atonement (London: Oxford University
Press, 1934); Don S. Browning, Atonement and Psychotherapy (Philadelphia, PA:
Westminster, 1966); John Goldengay, ed., Atonement Today (London: SPCK, 1995);
John Murray, The Atonement (Philadelphia, PA: Presbyterian and Reformed Publish-
ing Co., 1962); M.D. Philippe, O.P., Le mystère du Christ crucifié et glorifié (Paris:
Éditions Alsatia, 1968); Leon Morris, The Cross in the New Testament (Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans, 1965); Elizabeth A. Johnson, “Jesus and Salvation,” Proceedings of the
Catholic Theological Society of America, 49(1994), pp. 1-18; Paul F. Knitter, “Clear
Distinctions but Uncertain Paths,” Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of
America, 49(1994), pp. 19-23; M.M. Rossi, “Salvezza, appartenenza, identità,
testamonianza anabasi verso il Gubileo,” Angelicum, 74(1997), pp. 219-242.
Christians rightly call Jesus savior. Jesus does not just teach a doctrine
of salvation, in the manner of the other founders of the great world reli-
gions. He alone among religious founders fully embodies salvation in the
perfection of His sinlessness. By the same token, Jesus does not just teach
us about God. Instead, He embodies personally the living reality of God.
All other human founders of religions confront us as sinners who have
achieved a limited measure of religious insight. Only Jesus incarnates
personally in perfect human form the saving reality of God itself.
In a metaphysics of experience, one understands the growth of experi-
ence as a process of collaborative self-creation with the help of God. Natural
self-creation presupposes the divine creative activity, God’s ongoing cre-
ation of the universe. Graced self-creation presupposes God’s free and
gratuitous intervention in human history in order to undo the effects of
human sinfulness. We call that intervention the new creation, the recre-
ation of humanity in the image of the sinless, Breath-filled, risen Christ.
The gift of God’s Breath undoes the effects of sinfulness in us. Without
the risen Christ’s efficacious mission and without His Breath’s persuasive
gracing, human experience remains vulnerable to the corrupting influ-
ence of the situational sin which theologians call “original.” Those influ-
ences stand within natural experience and teach it to act in ways which
defy God. Even with divine grace, the inertia of sinful habits and the
coercive power of sinful social structures leave believers susceptible to
concupiscence; for concupiscence, as we have seen, means those forces in
the experience of the justified, other than their own personal sins, which
come from sin and still lead to sin.
In contrast to us, the synergy of divine and human decisions in Jesus
worked grace in Him with a perfection which exceeds the gracing of any
other human experience. The efficacious obediential transformation of a
human experience in the second person of the trinity made it invulner-
able to both original sin and concupiscence. It made Jesus invulnerable
to original sin because from the first moment of the incarnation the sinless
Son of God decided Jesus’ conscious and unconscious human decisions.
Jesus experienced all the sinful forces which shaped His human world;
but He experienced them neither as original sin nor as concupiscence
because they never led Him to sin personally.
As we saw in the last two chapters, the perfectly sinless, efficacious
gracing of the human experience we call Jesus of Nazareth restored and
recreated humanity in Him in a way which makes Him more perfectly
human than sinners like ourselves. As more perfectly human, the sinless
Christ begins the new creation. Jesus saves us, then, by embodying the
perfection of sinless, graced union with God. As we also saw, not only
does the dynamic recreation of humanity in the incarnation heal it of its
sinfulness; but it also perfects it by empowering it to hope and to love
with a God-like universality. Grace elevates humanity by orienting it in

this life to perfect union with God in the world to come.
In the preceding paragraphs, I have been considering the first way in
which Jesus saves us: namely, by graciously recreating human nature in
His own person and by healing, perfecting, and elevating it through the
gift of His Breath. In the paragraphs which follow, I shall focus on the
second way in which Jesus saves us, namely, by proclaiming the reign of
God. First, I shall summarize the moral demands of life in the kingdom
by recapitulating themes developed in volume two. Then I shall reflect
doctrinally on their saving consequences.
Jesus saves us by proclaiming and embodying the vision of the king-
dom. That vision raises to human consciousness the sinlessness which He
embodied personally. Life in the kingdom gives that sinlessness practical
meaning and therefore clarifies what it means. Indeed, without the vision
of the kingdom, faith in the sinlessness of Jesus would languish in ab-
stract and impractical vagueness.3
Entrance into the kingdom demands repentance as its first condition.
Repentance demands in turn the renunciation of Satan. Christian repen-
tance gives one access to Jesus’ religious vision by requiring that one face
and reverse all those attitudes, beliefs, and commitments which contra-
dict His mind and attitudes. What attitudes, then, must the repentant
Christian renounce? Jesus’ negative relationships in the gospels dramatize
the attitudes which contradict the kingdom.
Christian repentance calls one beyond self-righteous legalism, beyond
religious snobbery, beyond contempt for others. The repentant do not
judge others. They do not substitute for God’s commands human cus-
toms which contradict God’s saving will. The repentant renounce greed
and the exploitation of other people. They renounce the idolatry of
amassed wealth.
Christian repentance also demands that one abjure the ways of the
principalities and powers of this world. Those ways include moral and
religious compromise, sensuality, and human respect. The kingdoms of
this world use coercion to insure the personal advantage of the few. The
3. For Christians, sin consists in deviation from God’s will rather than in a fall. The image
of sin as a fall presupposes the two-tiered, dualistic universe of Platonism and of
Gnosticism. In a cosmos divided into divine spirit and either illusory or corrupt matter,
sin takes the form of a fall from a higher spiritual realm into a lower, material realm.
Christians, however, view sin teleologically and historically, not cosmologically and
dualistically. God created the world with a saving plan in mind, an ultimate goal for
creation and for human history. The nature of that goal stands finally and fully revealed
in the paschal mystery because only the paschal mystery opens a window on the inner
social life of God into which the divine Breath draws us. Ultimately, divine grace seeks
to enfold us in the shared embrace of perfect love which unifies the divine experience.
The vision of the kingdom orients us practically toward that union by schooling us in
divine love in this life.
world incarnates violence of heart and violence in deed. It leaves passion

unbridled. It exploits and oppresses the weak.
Christian repentance requires that one renounce all expressions of false
religion: superstition, the hypocritical use of religious institutions for vio-
lence or personal gain, religious skepticism, sanctioning the oppression
of others in God’s name.
Finally, repentance reverses all such sinful attitudes by inspiring one
with the willingness to accept Jesus’ offer of divine forgiveness. That ac-
ceptance commits one to living with His own compassion for sinners, for
the suffering, and for the disadvantaged. In the process, repentance heals
the shame, anger, fear, and guilt which distort human relationships and
which separate humans from God and from one another.
Those who embody the mind and attitudes of Christ live in perennial
conflict with Satan. Satan personifies all those persons and institutions
who oppose the establishment of God’s reign on earth. Satan inspires the
refusal to believe in the God revealed in Jesus and in His Breath. Satan
persuades one to replace trust in God with sinful self-reliance, to set con-
ditions on one’s willingness to trust God, and to substitute for God’s
reign the oppressive kingdoms of coercion, vindictiveness, and violence
over which the prince of darkness presides.
Christian repentance bears positive fruit in faith in Jesus Christ as the
normative revelation of who God is and what God calls humans to be-
come. Faith in Jesus Christ interprets His ministry and message in the
light of the paschal mystery. One encounters Jesus in resurrection faith
when one perceives Him as the human experience of being a divine per-
son. In that encounter, one recognizes in His religious vision the human
embodiment of God’s mind, of God’s saving attitudes. As a consequence,
the paschal mystery reveals Jesus as the concrete historical norm of au-
thentic religious faith. Belief in the resurrection thus endows the vision
of the kingdom with morally ultimate and absolute claims. It transforms
it from the utopian ideal of a socially marginal, first-century peasant
prophet into a reality worth living for and, if necessary, worth dying for,
because it incarnates sinless, divine excellence.
As the gospels teach us, faced with the paschal mystery, humans can
betray Christ and deny Him. They can stand by Him in His suffering
and dying. They can take up their cross and follow Him. They can also
continue to crucify Him in the poor and oppressed.
Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom invited others into His own Abba
experience. It summoned them to relate to God with reverential trust
and love. As synoptic narrative Christology teaches, relating to the Father
in Jesus’ image demands principally:
1) the repentant acceptance of divine forgiveness,
2) longing for the establishment of God’s reign on earth,
3) trust in the Father’s providential care of each person,

4) willingness to share one’s bread with others, especially the marginal
and needy
5) willingness to forgive others, even one’s enemies,just as God forgives
anyone who repents and seeks His mercy, and
6) the renunciation of violence against others and the steadfast refusal
to use violence or coercion in order to establish God’s reign.
Some feminists perceive the image of God the Father as sexist and there-
fore exclusive. Without doubt, however, Jesus Himself intended the im-
age as unrestrictedly inclusive. Faith and trust in the Father requires the
willingness to live as brothers and sisters united in the one human family
of God. The family of God includes anyone repentantly obedient to the
vision of the kingdom. Moreover, God’s family excludes no one in prin-
ciple and seeks to include all people, both men and women, on an egali-
tarian basis. The family of God reaches out actively to those whom soci-
ety regards as expendable: the degraded, the outcast, the marginal, the
most wretched. God’s children even long to welcome their repentant en-
emies as brothers and sisters in the Lord.
As we also saw in reflecting on synoptic narrative Christology, for Jesus,
faith did not mean abstract intellectual assent to religious propositions. It
meant the willingness to recognize the revelatory character of His own
person and ministry and therefore to trust in the Father whom He pro-
claimed.
In Jesus’ religious vision, trust in God’s providential care over one’s life
frees one to share one’s “bread,” the physical supports of one’s life with
those in greatest need. Such sharing redefines the purpose of human la-
bor. Those who share the mind of Christ renounce the selfish accumula-
tion of wealth. Instead they labor in order to have something to share
with the needy and with the marginal. Christian sharing also typically
takes the form of hospitality. It seeks to create a community of sharing.
Jesus not only trusted the Father but did so unconditionally. Jesus laid
down His life in obedience to the Father and in doing so trusted Him to
transform His very death into a life-giving event for others, an event
which would bind them even more closely to God. He embodied that
trust when He instituted the eucharist.
Because sharing the physical supports of life expresses trust in God,
unconditioned trust demands unconditioned sharing in the sense that
one refuses to set conditions in principle on one’s willingness to share
with others. By that I mean that when one shares in the image of Jesus,
one does not ask whether others deserve what one shares with them but
whether or not they need it. Christian sharing therefore seeks to break
down the barriers which keep people from sharing bread with one an-
other in community. It seeks in this sense to create a classless society.
Because Christian sharing excludes no one, it seeks to create an

all-encompassing human community of faith.
In Jesus’ preaching, sharing must also express mutual forgiveness. It
finds expression, therefore, in table fellowship with sinners and with the
outcast. It embraces one’s enemies. Mutual and universal forgiveness also
authenticates Christian prayer. It welcomes heretics. Moreover, authentic
worship of the Father grounds the kingdom and motivates living accord-
ing to its moral demands.
Finally, as Paul the apostle saw, in the eschatological age begun by the
resurrection, Christian sharing includes sharing the Breath’s charisms. That
sharing creates in turn the shared hope, faith, and love of the Church and
thus gives one access to the mind of Christ.
The Breath of Christ empowered Jesus’ mission. Her inspirations en-
dowed what He said and did with divine authority. Those who share the
mind of Christ find themselves also drawn into His mission. They pro-
long His proclamation of the kingdom. They seek, therefore, to draw all
people into its ambit.
Only Jesus, however, functions as the efficacious source of the Breath.
Hence, only Jesus possesses Her in eschatological plentitude. One’s char-
ismatic empowerment by the Breath of Christ therefore gives practical
definition to the way in which both individual Christians and Christian
communities seek to advance the overall mission of Christ in the world.
These, then, constitute fundamental moral demands of life in the king-
dom. They also make sense of the Tridentine teaching that Jesus not only
redeems us but demands our obedience. Indeed, our very obedience to
the vision of the kingdom redeems us by schooling us in a universal di-
vine love.
Still, Trent’s assertion that Jesus functions redemptively as a “legislator”
needs qualification. Jesus’ does make specific moral demands of His fol-
lowers; but He does so by calling them beyond a law-and-order ethic to a
religious, melioristic morality of ideals. (Cf. DS 1571) Indeed, as the
apostle Paul saw clearly, Jesus “legislates” precisely in a way which saves
humanity from the law and from all forms of shallow legalism.4
Obedience to the moral demands of life in the kingdom also saves us
from sin by undoing the consequences of sin in our own hearts and in
our world. Sin, as we saw earlier in this chapter, transforms toil into drudg-
ery. The vision of the kingdom saves us by redeeming human labor from
the greed which exploits the labor of the poor. The kingdom also re-
deems labor by giving it a new purpose: namely, the creation of a com-
munity of sharing which reaches out to the neediest in society.
4. I began to explore the way in which the human conscience assimilates such an ethical
vision at the end of volume two; and I shall extend that exploration still further in the
final section of this volume. Here I merely note the soteriological implications of
shifting from law-and-order ethics to the morality of faith demanded by the kingdom.
Sin gives rise to sexual oppression. The vision of the kingdom demands
repentance of all embodiments of sexism in the Church as well as in
secular society. The kingdom therefore saves us by demanding an end to
the battle of the sexes which both sexism and reverse sexism perpetuate.
The kingdom also forbids the sexual abuse of other persons; and the pas-
chal mystery requires us to reverence the bodies of believers as temples of
the divine Breath.
The kingdom, moreover, creates an egalitarian community of mutual
sharing. As Paul the apostle correctly saw, that sharing also includes the
Breath’s charisms. In God’s kingdom, therefore, men and women both
have access to the same kinds of charismatic ministry, including ordained
ministry, provided they manifest the competence in faith to minister.
Sin divides humans from one another through deeds of violence. The
vision of the kingdom saves us by demanding the healing of violence
through mutual forgiveness and reconciliation. It also commits the chil-
dren of God to walking the same path of non-violent, prophetic resis-
tance to evil as Jesus did.
Sin subjects humans to the principalities and powers of this world. The
vision of the kingdom saves us by subverting the powers. It demands that
those in positions of authority function not as tyrants but as the loving
and voluntary slaves of the communities they serve.
Sin corrupts the human heart. The vision of the kingdom saves us by
healing the corrupted heart through repentance and gospel living.
Sin mars creation and destroys its beauty through selfish exploitation.
The vision of the kingdom saves us by demanding the renunciation of
the kind of selfishness which spawns environmental degradation. The
kingdom thus prepares the new creation by healing the destructive im-
pact of sin upon the old one.
Sin separates one from God. Obedience to the vision of the kingdom
reconciles one to God. Incorporation into the kingdom also breaks the
power of death which results from sin; for those who embody the king-
dom live Breath-filled lives which will one day culminate in perfect union
with God.
The New Testament distinguishes between sin as an act and sin as a
state. Obedience to the demands of life in the kingdom rectifies sinful
acts by conforming them to the will of God. The same obedience heals
the state of sin by creating grace-filled institutional environments which
counter the corrupting influence of original sin and concupiscence.
These reflections on the second way in which Jesus saves us also lend
doctrinal sanction to two aspects of Jonathan Edwards’s aesthetic Christo-
logy. First of all, these reflections clarify the meaning of Christian prac-
tice, Edwards’s twelfth and culminating sign of truly gracious affections.
By that I mean that Christian practice invokes a melioristic ethical ideal-
ism which discovers in Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom the ultimate

moral aims and ideals of Christian living.
Second, the preceding reflections also confirm Edward’s understand-
ing of sin as dissent from God and from those whom God loves. By the
same token, they also confirm Edwards’s doctrinal rendering of salvation
as the cosmic unification of consent. Moreover, as in Edwards’s Christo-
logy, an experiential rendering of salvation portrays consent to the divine
excellence incarnate in Jesus as God’s saving strategy for reunifying a
sin-shattered world of warring experiences. Moreover, in a metaphysics
of experience, the cosmic unification of consent assimilates the saved per-
suasively into the mutual consent of love which unifies the divine experi-
ence. The Breath’s empowering illumination lays a new foundation within
experience for evoking that consent by healing, perfecting, and elevating
natural and sinful attitudes, habits, and commitments.
In the preceding paragraphs, I have considered the second way in which
Jesus saves us: namely, by His proclamation of God’s reign. Jesus, how-
ever, saves us ultimately and especially through the paschal mystery. To this
third aspect of His saving ministry I turn in the paragraphs which follow.
The paschal mystery inaugurates the work of saving sinners by bring-
ing the life and ministry of Jesus to revelatory completion. As we saw in
volume one, Jesus saves us in the paschal mystery in three obvious ways.
First, Jesus died to all sin on Calvary. Second, Jesus rose as a “life giving
Breath.” Third, in rising and sending the Breath, Jesus revealed histori-
cally and eschatologically salvation’s universal scope. Let us reflect doctri-
nally on each of these points in turn.
The crucified savior embodies the perfection of sinless obedience to
God. As the apostle Paul saw clearly, on the cross Jesus, through His
obedience to the Father even to death, died once and for all to sin. More-
over, as the Beloved Disciple teaches, in dying to sin, the crucified Jesus
also confronts the world as the divine Bridegroom, as the perfect human
embodiment of the forgiving love of God. A Pauline and a Johannine
theology of the cross express, then, the negative and positive side of the
same divine mystery.
In addition, because of the Beloved Disciple’s single-minded focus on
the paschal mystery, Johannine theology spells out in even greater detail
than Paul the practical conditions for conformity to Jesus in His death.
As we have seen, the Beloved Disciple roots his account of the moral
demands of discipleship, not so much in Jesus’ public proclamation of
the kingdom as in the paschal mystery itself. In the Johannine Jesus’ last
discourse, the entire paschal mystery—Jesus’ death, resurrection, and mis-
sion of His Breath—endows Jesus’ commands to His disciples with their
eschatological newness. The disciples’ faith must embody itself in a love
and service which imitates the love and service of the crucified savior. In
Johannine morality, therefore, the ultimate test of dying to sin consists in

the loving willingness to lay down one’s very life for God and for those
whom God loves. God, moreover, even loves “the world,” the very hu-
man forces massed against Jesus in homicidal fury. The divine love incar-
nate in Jesus yearns for the world’s salvation.
Pauline soteriology, as we have seen, equates “death to sin” with put-
ting on the mind of Christ, i.e. with practical assimilation to Him in the
power of His Breath. Moreover, as we saw in volume one, Paul’s under-
standing of the “mind of Christ” echoes in significant ways the ethics of
discipleship which the synoptic evangelists put upon Jesus’ own lips.
An experiential account of Christological soteriology discovers, then,
complementarity, not contradiction, in the Pauline and Johannine ac-
counts of the moral demands of discipleship. Moreover, Pauline morality
echoes in significant ways a synoptic account of the moral demands of
discipleship. Those demands endow both the kingdom and salvation with
clarifying, practical meaning.
In fact, the paschal mystery radicalizes the practical demands which
the kingdom made upon Jesus Himself. The kingdom demands trust in
the Father. By dying in obedience to His mission from the Father, Jesus
embodied total and unconditioned trust. The kingdom requires one to
share with others one’s bread, the physical supports of one’s life, as an
expression of one’s trust in God’s providential care. In dying, Jesus shares
His own body with others as the eucharistic bread which enlivens them.
In Jesus’ vision of the kingdom, unconditioned trust in God requires the
willingness to share with others on the basis of need and not of merit
only. Such unconditioned sharing transforms the kingdom into a com-
munity of “nuisances and nobodies” which reaches out in reconciling
love to the neediest and the most marginal. On Calvary, Jesus identifies
with the marginal by enduring ultimate personal marginalization, execu-
tion by ecclesiastical authorities as a sinner and blasphemer and by civil
authorities as a criminal. The kingdom demands mutual forgiveness as
the ultimate test of prayer. Jesus’ death on the cross out of love even for
those who betrayed, abandoned, denied, and murdered Him transforms
His final prayer in some versions of Luke, “Father, forgive them for they
do not know what they are doing,” into the ultimate measure of the
authentic worship of the Father.
By radicalizing the very ethical program which Jesus proclaimed as the
kingdom, the paschal mystery confronts believers as Jesus’ final and ulti-
mate embodiment of its meaning. One need not, therefore, choose be-
tween a Johannine and a synoptic account of the moral demands of dis-
cipleship. Both traditions articulate complementary insights into the way
in which Jesus saves us.
The paschal mystery includes more, however, than the passion. It also
includes both the resurrection and the sending of the divine Breath.
Moreover, as we have seen, apart from the mission of the Breath, the
resurrection remains incomplete. The resurrection marks the perfection
of Jesus’ transformation in the Breath. That transformation, however,
also reveals Him as the divine source of Her historical mission; for, in the
last analysis, only God can send God.
As we saw in volume one, in asserting that the last Adam became a
life-giving Breath, Paul the apostle meant among other things that His
resurrection marked the culmination of His human transformation in
the Breath of God. Paul also meant that anyone who has the Breath of
the risen Christ possesses divine, risen life.
Christological knowing, or practical assimilation to Jesus in the power
of His Breath, saves sinners by teaching them to define their religious
identities in the image of the risen Christ. Christological knowing pro-
longs the revelation of Jesus’ resurrection in space and time, because
through His resurrection appearances, Jesus stands eschatologically and,
therefore, historically revealed as the Breath’s efficacious source. More-
over because the Breath’s historical mission effects Christological know-
ing, its teleological trajectory also reveals the Breath’s source: namely, the
risen Christ to whom She conforms those who believe.
A metaphysics of experience also makes doctrinal sense of the Pauline
assertion that moral and religious transformation in God through practi-
cal faith culminates in bodily resurrection. In its account of personal
growth, that metaphysics blurs somewhat the distinction between ethics
and metaphysics. It does so by teaching that our finite human decisions,
including our moral choices, determine the kind of personal reality we
eventually become really and, therefore, metaphysically. The history of
our personal decisions defines our “essence” (i.e., what we eventually be-
come) not some idea reified as a principle of being. In other words, in a
world of self-defining, developing experiences, if one chooses to respond
to God in the way in which Jesus did, then one will surely become like
Him and will therefore eventually resemble Him in His risen glory.
Resurrection means total transformation in God after death. Jesus’ res-
urrection appearances revealed the total transformation of His humanity
in God after His death. The Breath’s action in our own lives functions as
a “downpayment” on our own resurrection because it begins a personal
and communal transformation in God which will reach its culmination
when we too experience personally and collectively a total transforma-
tion in God analogous to that which Jesus experienced. Despite the mys-
terious character of resurrection, we who believe hope for it in sure con-
fidence because we have already embarked down the road which leads to
risen life through our practical imitation of the risen one in the power of
His Breath.
Graced assimilation to Jesus also adopts us sinners into the family of
God. We know only adopted filiation because, unlike the second person
of the trinity, we human persons do not share by our natures in the social
life of the deity. Our adopted status also reflects the fact that our partici-
pation in divine life translates us from a state of sinful rupture with God
into a life-giving participation in the divine reality. Jesus, the divine Son
of God incarnate, never knew sin. In addition, our adopted status also
reflects the fact that we participate in divine life as human persons who
respond with human autonomy to the divine initiative, while Jesus, who
speaks and acts with divine autonomy, confronts us as the human experi-
ence of being a divine person and therefore as the sinless, prototypical
human. Finally, our adopted status results from the utter gratuity of grace,
from the fact that it comes to us as free gift and not as something due us
by nature.
I have been reflecting on the third way in which Jesus saves us, namely,
through the paschal mystery and through everything which it signifies.
In the paragraphs which follow, I shall ponder the fourth way in which
Jesus saves us: namely, through the abiding presence of the His divine
Breath in a sinful world.5
Pauline and Lukan Christology agree in ascribing the ultimate revela-
tion of God’s desire to save all people to the present action of Christ’s
Breath in a world transformed by His resurrection. As we have already
seen in earlier volumes, Jesus’ preaching quite plausibly included a uni-
versalist strain, even though He Himself confined Him ministry to “the
lost sheep of the house of Israel.” By a universalist strain, I mean that He
foresaw a day which would gather the Gentiles too into God’s reign. That
universalist strain also grounds Christian belief in God’s desire to save all
people. The action of the Breath, moreover, dramatizes the divine desire
to save. God withholds Her from no one who seeks Her saving light in
the obedience of faith.
Paul and Luke asserted the universality of salvation in different theo-
logical and pastoral contexts. Paul’s battle to incorporate Gentile Chris-
tians into the Church on the same footing as Jewish Christians context-
ualizes His proclamation of God’s universal saving will. A Lukan inter-
pretation of universal salvation reflects more the evangelist’s theology of
salvation history. In Luke’ vision, the age of the Breath marks the final
stage in that history, the eschatological stage which mediates between the
5. Cf. Thomas Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap., In the Likeness of Sinful Flesh: An Essay on the
Humanity of Christ (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993); John P. Galvan, “The Origin of
Faith in the Resurrection: Two Recent Perspectives,” Theological Studies, 49(1988),
pp. 25-44.
resurrection and the second coming. During the final age of salvation
any attempt to block the saving action of Christ’s Breath only spreads
Her saving illumination to more and more people. As a consequence,
Luke portrays the spread of the gospel generally and especially Paul’s
Gentile mission as largely the result of resistance to the gospel from those
who refuse to believe. The fact that Luke, like Paul, ministered to a pre-
dominantly Gentile community no doubt helped color his universalist
vision.
One can understand the universal saving consequences of the paschal
mystery intensively or extensively. Viewed intensively, universal salvation
includes every aspect of the human person, even the physical dimensions
of human experience. As Pauline theology evolves, especially in the let-
ters to the Ephesians and Colossians, the redemption of the body ex-
pands to include the entire physical cosmos.6
Christians long for the creation of a new heaven and a new earth. As
the book of Revelation insists, that longing flows from the woes of the
end time as we know it. Those woes result from both chance and cata-
clysm: from earthquake, flood, drought, and the spread of illness. The
woes of the end time also flow from the intransigent refusal of humans to
repent of their sinfulness. Prophetic conflict with Satan and with the
powers of evil which rule this world augment the sufferings of the saved.
Because Christian revelation includes the cross at its heart, the incarna-
tion reveals that God does not save finite, vulnerable humans from suf-
fering but through it. We find salvation by entering into the atonement
of Christ: by suffering natural evil as well as the consequences of sin with-
out sinning.
The longing for a new heaven and a new earth also springs from resur-
rection faith. Christian faith insists with the apostle Paul on the bodily
character of the resurrection. Bodies have environments. The risen body
differs from our physical bodies; one would, then, anticipate that those
who rise with Christ will exist in a proportionately different environ-
ment, one purified of the sin and suffering which characterizes our present
environments. Christians call such an environment purified of all sin,
suffering, and injustice “the new creation.”
An experiential interpretation of final resurrection respects the mystery
which attends faith in the risen Christ. Like the New Testament, it leaves
the shape of the world to come shrouded in the same vagueness as the
shape of Jesus’ risen body. We do not know clearly what precise form the
new creation will take; but we do know that it will participate in the same
mode of being as the risen Jesus.
6. Cf. John R. Sachs, S.J., “Apokatastasis in Patristic Theology,” Theological Studies,

54(1993), pp. 617-640; David M. Kelly, “‘Apokatastasis’ in the Early Church,”
Patristic and Byzantine Review, 9(1990), pp. 71-74.
We Christians long, then, for a world purified of sin, suffering, and

institutional injustice, for a world transformed by the face-to-face vision
of God. The book of Revelation portrays the new Jerusalem descending
from heaven as an narrative symbol of the fact that God must create the
future shape of things. We therefore leave its final definition in God’s
capable hands. For the present, we wait in hope to see what God will
eventually do. With the New Testament, we call the risen body “angelic”
as a way of indicating that it has a character compatible with existence in
perfect loving union with God in heaven. The nature of that character
remains, however, vague in this life.
In the preceding reflections, I have stressed the positive consequences
of salvation in Christ; but that salvation has negative consequences as
well. In Pauline soteriology, for example, Jesus saves believers from sin,
death, and the Law. The preceding reflections clarify the operational con-
sequences of these basic Pauline insights. Jesus saves us from the Law by
proclaiming an ethics of ideals which demands more than the Law did,
not less. He also saves us from the Law by sending His Breath to em-
power us to live that ethics of faith. The Breath of the risen Jesus func-
tions as the Law of the New Covenant. Salvation from the Law in the
power of the Breath necessarily entails salvation from sin, since the Breath
of Jesus teaches those who respond to Her how to live sinless lives in His
image. Jesus saves us from death by imparting now a share in His risen
life through the gift of the divine Breath. As we put on the mind of
Christ by living in Jesus’ image we advance our transformation in the
Breath of the risen Christ; and that transformation will culminate one
day in our resurrection, in our total transformation in God after death.
This section has pondered four ways in which Jesus saves us. In a con-
temporary context, the universal scope of salvation in Christ raises two
sets of doctrinal issues. First, the cosmic scope of salvation in Christ causes
one to coordinate Christological soteriology with evolutionary theory.
Second, the fact that God wills the salvation of all peoples forces one to
face the question of religious pluralism; and reflection on religious plu-
ralism raises the further question of how to approach the dialogue among
world religions in a Christological context. To these issues I turn in the
next section.
(III)
How, then, in the context of a metaphysics of experience, ought one to
interpret the cosmic dimensions of salvation in Christ? In order to an-
swer that doctrinal question, one must deal first with the evolutionary
Christology of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). Teilhard’s Christo-
logical thinking advanced in an interdisciplinary manner. It blended in-
sights from his scientific studies of human origins, from Maurice Blondel’s
philosophy of action, from Transcendental Thomism, and from Pauline

Christology.
Blondel discovered within activity a capacity for self-transcendence
which aspires to the infinite.7 Teilhard invoked the same insight as the
explanatory key to cosmic evolution. For Teilhard, the universe in its
evolutionary thrust drives toward personalization. It achieves this end
through the creation of different overlapping and interacting spheres of
activity. The roundness of the earth makes the emergence of these spheres
possible. The biosphere took evolutionary shape when life first swarmed
over the planet. As living things interacted and evolved within this living
planetary envelope, the biosphere developed into the noosphere. The
noosphere consists of conscious life. Its emergence created a second liv-
ing layer enveloping the planet earth. The evolution of consciousness
culminates in human social self-awareness.
Human consciousness, like organic life, evolves by growing in com-
plexity. In the process, shared consciousness acquires greater freedom and
thrusts toward an “Omega point” whose ultimate scope stands histori-
cally revealed in the glorification of the Word made flesh.8 For Teilhard,
then, Christ reveals both historically and eschatologically the Omega point
of natural evolution.
Like his friend and colleague Henri De Lubac, Teilhard believed that
one can distinguish in the abstract the natural from the supernatural or-
der of reality; but he also believed that we live concretely in a world trans-
formed by supernatural grace. The incarnate Word of God, therefore,
provides the world with its actual, concrete center. In other words, Teilhard
recognized the distinction between the physical, the psychic, and the su-
pernatural; but he saw all their radiating energies focused upon God in-
carnate. Teilhard did not hesitate to identify Christ as the “physical cen-
ter” of the universe. The action of divine grace advances Christogenesis,
or the historical evolution of the “fullness of Christ.”9
Despite occasional accusations to the contrary, Teilhard did not blind
himself to the problem of evil. He did, however, tend to understand evil
as the pain and suffering which necessarily accompany human progress
toward Omega. Evolutionary progress encompasses, then, the evil of dis-
7. Cf. James M. Somerville, Total Commitment: Blondel’s L’Action (Washington, DC:

Corpus Books, 1968); Henri Bouillard, Blondel and Christianity, translated by James
M. Somerville (Washington, DC: Corpus Books, 1969).
8. Cf. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, translated by Sir Julian
Huxley (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1961); Christopher F. Mooney, S.J., Teilhard
de Chardin and the Mystery of Christ (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1968), 17-73.
9. In Teilhard’s vision, Christogenesis endows eucharistic theology with both soteriological
and evolutionary significance. Through the transubstantiation of the eucharistic
elements, physical matter becomes the incarnate God in order to advance the work of
Christogenesis. Cf. Mooney, op.cit., 75-111.
order and of failure. The cross reveals that death itself marks a transfor-
mative moment in the total process of Christogenesis. Progress toward
Omega demands as a consequence not only the graced transformation of
our active capacity for life and development but also our negative capac-
ity for diminishment, suffering, and death. Teilhard called the latter the
“divinization of our passivities.”
In Teilhard’s evolving universe, the forces of life have the last word.
Resurrection establishes Jesus Christ as the cosmic center of the universe.
The risen Christ gives rise to the Church; and the Church in its turn
embodies a genetic phylum of divine love within the total cosmic pro-
cess, a phylum which draws humanity forward to Omega.
The Parousia will give final definition to the meaning of Omega. In the
meantime, the Church faces the challenge of synthesizing in conscious,
creative faith the natural energy which promotes an evolution suffused
with supernatural Christ-life. The graced evolution of the world trans-
forms noogenesis into Christogenesis. It effects the pleromization of the
universe in Christic life by drawing more and more persons and commu-
nities into divine union in the body of Christ. That union brings God-life
to completion, not by adding anything to God, but by accomplishing
the final transformation of the universe in God.10
As I have already indicated, Teilhard’s thought blends scientific, philo-
sophical, and theological elements. Subsequent critical reflection on his
evolutionary Christology has suggested the need to qualify all three com-
ponents in his thought.
As we have seen, Teilhard acknowledged the problem of evil and at-
tempted in some measure to deal with it. I am, however, inclined to agree
with Juan Luis Segundo when he faults Teilhard’s evolutionary theory
with excessive optimism and with a failure to take into sufficient account
the law of entropy.11 Evolution does not merely wind up; it also winds
down. Instead of an inexorable march toward the Omega point, the world
process also exemplifies regression and degradation.
Teilhard’s optimism roots itself in philosophical and theological soil.
As we have already see, Blondel’s philosophy of action projects into deci-
sive human acts the same kind of virtual infinity which Transcendental
Thomism discovers in the agent intellect.
All growth of necessity involves self-transcendence; but the experience
of self-transcendence need not spring from some a priori orientation to-
ward infinity, whether one locates that orientation in action or in the
intellect. A more sober and realistic analysis of human experience sug-
10. Ibid., pp. 156-99.

11. Cf. Juan Luis Segundo, A Evolutionary Approach to Jesus of Nazareth, edited and
translated by John Drury (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988).
gests rather that growth, including conscious human growth, follows fi-
nite needs and finite interests.
As we have seen, theological motives also informed Teilhard’s thought.
He found a theological corollary to Blondel’s analysis of action in the
Thomistic doctrine of a natural human desire for the beatific vision.
Teilhard’s friend and colleague, Henri de Lubac defended this Thomistic
thesis.12 In transcendental Thomism, the intellectual desire for union with
God results from the virtual infinity of the agent intellect, whose formal
object endows it with an a priori thrust toward Being. In Transcendental
Thomism, Being as such ultimately coincides with the triune God.
Teilhard placed humanity at the apex of the evolutionary process. He
also viewed humanity through the eyes of Blondel and de Lubac. He
therefore discovered within cosmic evolution a spontaneous thrust to-
ward God which Christogenesis supernaturalizes. These tacit philosophi-
cal and theological assumptions help explain Teilhard’s somewhat overly
optimistic portrait of cosmic evolution.
In my judgment, C.S. Peirce offers a more sober as well as a sounder
assessment of the forces which shape evolution. Besides teleology, Peirce
suggests that both chance and cataclysm mark the process of cosmic evo-
lution. Evolutionary chance takes the form of sporting, or random ge-
netic mutation. Cataclysmic environmental changes can eliminate entire
species. Cataclysms can also force other species to evolve by adapting to
changed environmental conditions. In other words, evolution need not
always exemplify teleology, or law. When, moreover, one includes the law
of entropy among the laws which guide evolution, then Teilhard’s sunny
depiction of the upward evolutionary thrust toward Omega gives way to
a somewhat darker but probably more accurate portrait of the world pro-
cess.13
In this context, I note that chaos theory poses a challenge to the Sec-
ond Law of Thermodynamics, often called the law of entropy. Entropy
demands the constant and inevitable winding down of the universe. Un-
impeachable as a rule of thermodynamics, entropy fails finally to describe
exhaustively organization and disorganization in nature. Randomness, as
Peirce suggested, breeds its own kind of order. Despite the law of en-
tropy, life and structure emerge in nature and produce irregular order
from pure disorder. Indeed, chaos theory would seem to validate a closer
relationship between chance and tendency, or law, than classical science
would allow.14
12. Cf. Henri de Lubac, Le mystère du surnaturel (Paris: Aubier, 1965).

13. Cf. Heinz Schürmann, Jesu ureigener Tod (Freiburg: Herder, 1975), pp. 121-155.
14. Cf. James Gleick, Nature’s Chaos, photographs by Eliot Porter (New York, NY:
Viking, 1990), pp. 34, 37.
Peirce’s evolutionary theory combined elements from Darwinism, Lama-

rckism, and cataclysmic evolution. In Darwinian theory, two natural pro-
cesses shape the trajectory of evolution: chance genetic variations and the
processes of natural selection. Natural selection directs the movement of
evolution by insuring the survival of the fittest. Since Darwinian evolu-
tion invokes chance sporting, Peirce calls it “tychasticism” from the Greek
word for chance (tychê).15
Besides chance, cataclysm, the play of brute forces in nature, can also
cause organic adaptation. Cataclysmic evolution shapes the course of evo-
lution when it puts some organisms at an advantage and others at a dis-
advantage. The cutting of the Grand Canyon, for example, isolated the
squirrels living on the north from those living on the south rim. Origi-
nally identical, the squirrels on the north rim have evolved differently
from those living on the south rim. A thousand feet higher than the south
rim, the north rim sees much more snow in winter. The whiteness of the
snow in winter made brown squirrels more vulnerable to predators. As a
consequence, the squirrels on the north rim have evolved a white mantle
on their shoulders for camouflage, a trait which their cousins on the south
rim have never developed. Cataclysmic evolution invokes physical neces-
sity. In Greek, the noun “anagkê ” means necessity. Peirce therefore dubbed
cataclysmic evolution “anancasticism.”
In Lamarckian theory, evolutionary change results from the striving of
individuals. Peirce confined this form of evolution to conscious, purpo-
sive striving; and, with hints from the fourth evangelist, he called this
kind of purposive evolution agapastic because, in order to move the world
process forward, purposive evolution must root itself in love (agapê). As
Peirce put it: “Love, recognizing germs of loveliness in the hateful, gradu-
ally warms it into life and makes it lovely.”16 Agapastic evolution renders
the evolutionary process consciously and aesthetically purposive. Peirce’s
agapastic evolution corresponds to Teilhard’s noogensis. Since, moreover,
Peirce derives the idea of agapastic evolution from the Beloved Disciple,
this form of evolution would remain open to Teilhard’s Christogenesis.
Tychasticism and ananchasticism together explain biogenesis.17
15. Cf. Elizabeth A. Johnson, C.S.J., “Does God Play Dice? Divine Providence and
Chance,” Theological Studies, 57(1996), pp. 3-18: J.M. Maldamé. O.P., “Le Christ et
l’univers. Dialogue entre la théologie et la cosmologie scientifique,” Angelicum,
74(1997), pp. 335-358.
16. Cf. Peirce, Collected Papers, 6.289.
17. Peirce looked upon conscious evolution which results from logical necessity as a
degenerate from of ananchastic evolution. True agapastic evolution occurs when an
individual adopts a new insight because of its spontaneous attractiveness. Communi-
ties, however, also evolve when they pass on shared insights to members who would
otherwise never have the insight. Sometimes, too sympathetic association with a
community will cause an individual to reach on his own some insight which that
community shares. Peirce, however, regarded the latter two forms of agapastic
The philosophy of experience developed in this study regards every

instance of spatio-temporal experience as radically finite. Organic growth
responds to finite needs and interests, not to some fixed a priori thrust
toward infinity. Human desires reflect and lead human histories. They do
not always lead it forward and upward. Nor do they inevitably spring
from some fixed essential orientation of spirit.
The conscious human capacity to convert naturally at an affective, in-
tellectual, moral, and socio-political level endows human experience with
an “obediential potency” for divine grace, because the human capacity to
act with natural responsibility automatically endows humans with the
capacity to respond in a responsible way to the gratuitous historical
self-revelation and self-donation of God, if and when it occurs. When
that self-revelation happens, however, humans encounter it as a pure and
unmerited gift over and above the gift of creation: in other words, as
supernatural. Natural creation prescinds in its processing from supernatural
revelation.
In the context of a metaphysics of experience, Christogenesis trans-
mutes biogenesis and noogenesis through the synergy of divine and hu-
man energy in graced human choices. Moreover, Christogenesis transval-
ues noogenesis by teaching finite humans to put on the mind of Christ
corporately and communally.
How, then, in an experiential context ought one to interpret the
“pleromization” of creation. As we saw in volume one, Pauline Christo-
logy conceives the “pleroma” in dynamic soteriological terms. Graced par-
ticipation in the ministry and reconciling death of Christ creates the
pleroma. As Christian communities suffer physical and moral evil with-
out sinning, they create environments of grace which advance the world’s
salvation toward its ultimate fulfillment in Christ. The Breath of Christ
also contributes to the saving fullness of redemption. Moreover, Her ac-
tion in the Christian community exemplifies the third way in which the
paschal mystery saves us.
The Breath of Jesus inspires justifying faith. She also comes in sanctifi-
cation, in order to teach us, in the myriad circumstances in which differ-
ent communities of disciples live out their lives, how to embody the same
excellence as Jesus did. Only the Breath of God can conform finite hu-
man decisions to those of Jesus because only the presence of God within
finite human hearts can teach them to love with the universality of divine
love. Left only to its natural resources, the human heart spontaneously
loves its own; but it does not spontaneously love the alien. It does not
spontaneously love enemies, as the American obsession with the legalized
evolution as degenerate. For a more detailed discussion of these and related issues, see:
Vincent C. Potter, S.J., Charles Peirce on Norms and Ideals (Worcester, MA: The
University of Massachusetts Press, 1967), pp. 171-190.
form of murder euphemistically called the death penalty illustrates all too
well. Even should the human mind conceive naturally the moral ideal of
universal human benevolence, without the healing, perfecting, and el-
evating presence of the divine Breath, the human heart will fail practi-
cally to live that ideal. Even with Her help, we still fail all too often.
The Breath’s charismatic activity creates the pleroma by creating the
Church’s shared faith consciousness. Converted Christian communities
of atoning love come to share faith consciousness through sharing their
memories, hopes, and lives.
That sharing engages all the charisms. Prophets and evangelists sum-
mon the Christian community to ongoing conversion. Gifts of prayer, of
healing, and of miracles create a felt sense of the living presence of the
risen Christ among His people. Teachers enable the Church to reappro-
priate in an ongoing way the saving events which give rise to it: Jesus’ life,
ministry, death, resurrection, and historical mission of the divine Breath. The
Church’s reappropriation of its story creates its present sense of identity.
Prophets and teachers help the Christian community understand more
clearly the future to which God calls it. Discerners facilitate the
community’s shared activity by distinguishing between sound and un-
sound doctrine and practice. Then the action gifts, like helping, adminis-
tration, and pastoral leadership mobilize the charisms of the entire com-
munity in order to transform its hopes for the future into actuality.
In creating the shared faith consciousness of the Church, the Breath of
Christ advances the pleroma, the fullness of salvation which the paschal
mystery effects. It does so by creating in this world environments of sav-
ing grace which anticipate, albeit imperfectly, the ultimate, sinless, wholly
life-giving, divine environment which the New Testament calls “a new
heaven and a new earth” and “the heavenly Jerusalem.”
Jesus, then, did not content Himself with leaving behind a religious
doctrine in the manner of other merely human founders of religions. He
sent the living reality of the divine Breath to inspire practical faith in
human hearts and to empower them by Her suasive enlightenment to
embody the mind of Christ corporately and personally. Breath-inspired
conformity to Christ begins personal and corporate resurrection. It cre-
ates environments of grace which advance the pleroma, the fullness of
salvation for which Christians long.
I turn now to the second set of doctrinal issues which the universal
scope of salvation in Christ raises. I refer, of course, to the way in which
Christianity views other world religions.
Echoing themes already considered above, the second Vatican council
correctly taught that God wills the salvation of all people. The council
also committed the Catholic Church to an ongoing dialogue with non-
Christian religions; and, in that context, the council acknowledged the
presence of both truth and holiness in religions other than Christianity.

(Nostra aetate, 1-2.) Does that mean, then, that people who do not con-
fess Christ can stand in a saving, life-giving relationship to God? If they
do, then what does that say about the normative claims of Christian rev-
elation?
The dialogue among the world religions has only taken its first tod-
dling steps; but already it has given us good reason to believe that all
major religions share a certain number of very general beliefs. They all
assert, for example, the existence of some supreme reality. They all teach
that the human mind can never encompass that reality in concepts and
images. One could expand the list further.18
Nevertheless, the world religions also differ profoundly in both doc-
trine and practice. Moreover, the theoretical and practical interpretation
of religious experience conditions how it evolves. Should other religions
contradict the saving truth which Jesus embodies concretely and norma-
tively, then they would lead away from God rather than to God.
Cultures colored by Confucianism tend, for example, to regard all reli-
gions as relative and as subordinate to morality. Confucian culture there-
fore inclines people to believe that as long as religions will promote rea-
18. In a fascinating summary of the results of an experiment in approaching the dialogue

among world religions via spirituality, Thomas Keating reports that those involved in
the dialogue agreed on the following doctrinal points:
1. The world religions bear witness to the experience of Ultimate Reality to which
they give various names: Brahman, Allah, Absolute, God, Great Spirit.
2. Ultimate Reality cannot be limited by any name or concept.
3. Ultimate Reality is the ground of infinite potentiality and actualization.
4. Faith is opening, accepting, and responding to Ultimate Reality. Faith in this
sense precedes every belief system.
5. The potential for human wholeness—or in other frames of reference, enlighten-
ment, salvation, transformation, blessedness, nirvana—is present in every human
person.
6. Ultimate Reality may be experienced not only through religious practices but also
through nature, art, human relationships, and service of others.
7. As long as the human condition is experienced as separate from Ultimate Reality,
it is subject to ignorance and illusion, weakness and suffering.
8. Disciplined practice is essential to the spiritual life; yet spiritual attainment is not
the result of one’s own efforts, but the result of the experience of oneness with Ultimate
Reality.
In addition, the participants in Keating’s dialogue agreed on the importance of eight
different religious practices. See: Thomas Keating, “Theological Issues In Meditative
Techniques,” The Way: Supplement 78 (Autumn, 1993), pp. 54-63. See also: F. Heiler,
“The History of Religions as a Preparation for the Cooperation of Religions” in The
History of Religions, edited by M. Eliade and J. Kitagawa (Chicago, IL: Chicago
University Press, 1959), pp. 142-153. For a discussion of theological issues raised by
the dialogue among world religions, see: Hans Küng, Josef van Ess, Heinrich von
Steitencron, Heinz Bechert, Christianity and World Religions: Paths to Dialogue
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1986).
sonably moral public lives, they are all leading in the same direction.
People whose attitudes reflect Confucian values tend, as a consequence,
to religious syncretism rather than to conversion. Conversion, however,
lies at the heart of Christian faith and practice. In other words, syncretis-
tic religions and Christianity differ profoundly in their fundamental moral
presuppositions. They will, therefore, inculcate very different religious
beliefs, attitudes, and practices.
Cultural and historical relativists question whether any particular his-
torical embodiment of religious faith can make normative claims on other
religious systems. When relativism roots itself in nominalistic presuppo-
sitions, as it often does in the west, it regards history as a collection of
valueless facts which subjective human sentiments endow with religious
meaning.
History, however, contains much more than valueless facts. The world
abounds in tendencies, in laws, and therefore in real “oughts.” We ought
to observe the laws of nature, because they operate with supreme indif-
ference to human survival. When we flout them, they can and do exact a
terrible price of us, as the world ecological crisis dramatizes all too well.
Empirical science studies and articulates natural laws. Science deals,
therefore, with more than bare facts. Science explains facts by laws, by
understanding the general tendencies in nature which make concrete
events intelligible. Incarnational religion creates the possibility of fixing
theistic beliefs empirically. One fixes beliefs empirically by studying the
personal, divine dynamism incarnate in Jesus Christ.
In Jesus Christ we encounter God incarnate. Other people, both men
and women, have founded religions; but, apart from Jesus, no other hu-
man religious founder confronts us as a divine person incarnate. No other
religious founder embodies a sinless humanity. The religious tendencies
embodied in Jesus provide, as a result, a unique and indispensable norm
for measuring the authenticity of all other religious beliefs and practices.
Jesus, precisely in His religious and moral uniqueness, confronts hu-
manity as an embodied religious ought, as the historically normative rev-
elation of who God is and of how humans ought to relate to such a God.
The incarnation, in virtue of its very embodied uniqueness measures the
saving significance of every other human response to God and therefore
enjoys a paradigmatic, universal normativity. As a result, the fact of the
incarnation makes inevitable the Christian claim that ultimately salva-
tion comes in no other name than that of Jesus.
If Jesus embodies the saving reality of God in normative ways, then
nothing which contradicts the revelation of God in Christ counts as reli-
giously authentic. By reverse logic, whatever conforms to the revelation
of God in Jesus Christ gives evidence of divine, saving inspiration, whether
or not it occurs in a Christian context.
The kind of normativity embodied in Jesus does not require that the
saved relive His life. The analogy of experience precludes that possibility.
The gospel instead challenges Christians to allow the Breath of Christ to
blow in lives and historical circumstances vastly different from first-century
Palestine. Nevertheless, the hypostatic union does establish Jesus as the
uniquely normative historical and eschatological paradigm of both di-
vine and human reality. Paradigmatic normativity functions analogously.
Faith in Jesus requires one to live and die for the same religious realities as
He but in different historical circumstances from those in which He lived.
Jesus reveals God sacramentally. That means that the incarnation con-
ceals the reality of God at the same time that it reveals it; for no finite,
sacramental revelation of God can ever disclose God exhaustively. If, how-
ever, Jesus does not reveal God exhaustively, then other historical revela-
tions of God can indeed occur. Moreover, every gracing of human expe-
rience has a sacramental revelatory character imperfectly analogous to
the personal revelation of God which occurs in Jesus. As a consequence,
every transformation of human experience in God through authentic re-
ligious faith both reveals and conceals the presence and reality of the God
in whom that transformation occurs.
Moreover, in asserting the paradigmatic normativity of Jesus in what
concerns human salvation, Christians need to remember that Jesus Him-
self taught His own disciples to honor authentic signs of religious faith
wherever they encounter it, even in those who do not belong to their
inner circle. The Jesus who said, “Whoever is not with Me is against Me”
also said, “Whoever is not against Me is with Me.” Christians need in
faith to recognize the normativity of both statements.
Some believe that unless Christianity abandons all claims to a norma-
tive revelation, it cannot enter into sincere dialogue with other religions.
In my judgment, the opposite holds true. Christianity can only enter
into sincere dialogue with other religions when it presents Christian be-
liefs accurately and truly; and, from the first, the shared faith of Chris-
tians has claimed that salvation comes to the world uniquely and norma-
tively through Jesus.
The hypostatic union makes that claim inevitable. In other religions,
one can encounter holy people who speak about God and trace paths
which lead toward God. Only in Christianity does one encounter God
Himself in human form speaking, acting, suffering, dying, rising, and
sending His Breath. I shall return to this point in a different context
when I reflect on Jesus’ priesthood.
Without a doubt, the success of dialogue among the world religions
demands that its members approach one another with mutual openness
and respect. Inter-religious dialogue needs to begin by searching for com-
mon ground: shared beliefs and shared practices. Only after establishing
common ground will those who truly embody different world religions
find it helpful to begin respectfully to explore their differences.
The normative revelatory claims which Christian faith makes for
incarnational religion makes Christianity different from other world reli-
gions. As a consequence, Christology will not provide a useful starting
point for inter-religious dialogue. Pneumatology, however, does offer a
more promising initial talking point. God breathed in ancient Judaism;
and the Breath of God, who breathes where She lists, can blow in any
religion. Hence, a search for the signs of Her presence in religions other
than Christianity will provide a more useful beginning for interreligious
dialogue than will Christology. To the extent that the Breath of God in-
spires genuine faith in non-Christians to that extent their religious expe-
rience reveals the reality of God really, symbolically, and sacramentally.
After all, Paul the apostle cited the religious faith of the non-Christian
Abraham as a paradigm for justifying Christian faith.19
19. Cf. Harold Wells, “The Holy Spirit and Theology of the Cross: Significance for
Dialogue,” Theological Studies, 53(1992), pp. 476-492; Francis X. Clooney, S.J., Paul
J. Griffiths, Charles Hallisey, and James Lane, “Catholic Theology and the Study of
Religion in South Asia,” Theological Studies, 48(1987), pp. 677-710; Friedrich Georg
Friedmann, “Christen und Juden: Postskriptum zu einer Korrespondenz mit Karl
Rahner,” Stimmen der Zeit, 213(1995), pp. 30- 36; Karl-Wolfgang Tröger, “Bibel und
Koran: Historische und theologische Gesichtspunkte für den christlich-muslimischen
Dialog” in Tradition und Translation: Zum Problem der interkulturellen Übersetzbarkeit
religiöser Phänomene, edited by Christoph Elsas et al. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
1994), pp. 422-434; Hans Küng, “Le Christ, la lumière, et les autre lumières: De la
problematique des religion mondiales et de l’éthos mondial,” Lumière et Vie, 44(1995),
pp. 33-43; Rene Gilbert, “The Church in Modern China,” Tripod, 15(1995), pp. 113-
120; Willem Berends, “African Traditional Healing Practices and the Christian
Community,” Missiology: An International Review, 21(1993), pp. 275-288; Adel
Theodor Khoury, “Islam, Theokratie und Toleranz,” Una Sancta: Zeitschrift für
ökumenische Begegnung, 45(1990), pp. 14-19; Christian van Nispen Tot Sevenaer,
“Chétiens et musulmans: De la confrontation a la rencontre,” Christus: Revue de
Formation Spirituelle, 150(1991), pp. 181-192; Guilio Basetti-Sani, “Autenticita della
missione profetica di Muhammed—un’ ipostesi de lavoro,” Studia Patavina, 36(1989),
pp. 121-127; Thomas Michel, “Christian-Muslim Dialogue in a Changing World,”
Theology Digest, 39(1992), pp. 303-332; Eugene Hillman, “Massai Religion and
Inculturation,” Louvain Studies, 17(1992), pp. 351-376; A.J.V. Chandrqakanthan,
“Emerging Trends in Asian Theology,” East Asian Pastoral Review, 27(1990), pp.
271-280; Edwin Mercando, “Emerging Images of the Asian Church,” Philippiniana
Sacra, 76(1991), pp.77-94; Raimond Panikkar, “A Christophany for Our Times,”
Theology Digest, 39(1992), pp.3-21; Kossi J.K. Tossou, “Chancen und Schwierigkeiten
der Inkulturation in Africa,” Theologisch-praktische Quarltalschrift, 139(1991), pp.
49-57; Gervais Mattam, “Jesus Christ: The Unique and Universal Guru,” Salesianum,
58(1996), pp. 487-513; Ukachucwu Chr. Manus, “African Christologies: The
Centre-Piece of African Christian theology,” Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft und
Religionswissenschaft, 82(1998), pp. 3-23; G. Altner et al., ed., Evangelische Theologie:
Jesus Christus zwischen Juden und Christen, 55(1995).
The fact, moreover, that all religions, including Christianity, offer only
a finite revelation of God means that they probably all have something to
teach one another about the divine reality and about how to approach it.
The sinfulness of every religious community also means that any genuine
expression of religious faith can also challenge inauthenticity in other
faiths. Gandhi the Hindu taught Christians more about Christian
non-violence than Christian militarists and war-mongers ever did.
In other words, if Christians approach other religions in repentant
self-confrontation and with a genuine desire to learn the truth, goodness,
and beauty which other religions incarnate, they can indeed sincerely
enter into dialogue with other faiths. They can, moreover, do so with a
humble desire to learn from those faiths; and Christians can do so with-
out abandoning any distinctively Christian beliefs, including belief in
the normativity of Christian revelation.20
The dialogue among world religions promises to raise to consciousness
the common ground shared by different religious faiths. It also promises
to increase that common ground. I personally deem it unlikely, however,
that the dialogue among the world religions will ever yield creedal and
disciplinary unanimity.21
20. In my judgment, John Hick misses this point badly. His attempt to reduce the
incarnation to a metaphor proclaims something other than the shared faith of
Christians and exemplifies well the deplorable habit of fixing one’s theological beliefs
through taste. Cf. John Hick, The Myth of God Incarnate (London: SCM Press, 1977);
The Metaphor of God Incarnate: Christology in a Pluralistic Age (Louisville, KY:
Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993). For a response to Hick, see: Brian Hebblethwaite,
The Incarnation: Collected Essays in Christology (London: Cambridge University Press,
1987). See also: Norman Anderson, The Mystery of the Incarnation (London: Hodder
& Stoughton, 1978).
I would also take exception to Paul Knitter’s suggestion that Christians can only
participate in the dialogue among the world religions by soft-pedaling Jesus’ normative
uniqueness. I find it difficult to believe that entering a dialogue with other religions
under such false pretenses could possibly foster mutual trust. On the contrary, it would
seriously undermine that trust, since the members of other religions would recognize
the pretence. Moreover, the success of Thomas Keating’s experiment in inter-religious
dialogue to which I referred above disproves the necessity of following Knitter’s
suggestion. Cf. Paul Knitter, No Other Name? A Critical Survey of Christian Attitudes
Toward the World Religions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1986).
For some Asian approaches to Christology, see: Peter C. Phan, “Jesus Christ with an
Asian Face,” Theological Studies, 57(1996), pp. 399-430.
21. For a discussion of these and related issues, see: John R. Stacer, S.J., “The Hope of a
World Citizen: Beyond National Individualism” in Beyond Individualism: Toward a
Retrieval of Moral Discourse in America, edited by Donald L. Gelpi, S.J. with an
afterword by Robert N. Bellah (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
1989), pp. 188-218. Cf. William Ernest Hocking, The Coming World Civilization
(New York, NY: Harper and Brothers, 1956), Living Religions and a World Faith (New
York, NY: Macmillan, 1940).
Nor do I find “anonymous Christianity” a useful rubric to invoke in

approaching interreligious dialogue.22 We finally have no good reason to
believe that deep down devout Hindus, Buddhists, or Muslims really be-
lieve in Christ. They may indeed have genuine religious faith which puts
them in a saving, life-giving relationship with God. That faith does not,
however, make them anonymously Christian. It does make them devoutly
Hindu, Buddhist, or Muslim.
What, then, can one realistically expect at this point from inter-religious
dialogue? That dialogue has already uncovered common ground uniting
all religious faiths. Further dialogue promises to enlarge the beliefs and
practices shared by different religious faiths. One can also expect that
dialogue will increase inter-religious collaboration and mutual tolerance.
More than that could conceivably come from inter-religious dialogue;
but, at this point in history, I personally deem it unlikely; but, as a con-
trite fallibilist, I know I could prove wrong.
Every religious tradition blends elements of sin and grace. If, however,
one can attain salvation as a Hindu, Buddhist, or Muslim, does Christian
faith bring any saving advantage? Indeed it does. It puts one in contact
with the Way, the Truth, and the Life, with the one person who embodies
with sinless perfection the way to salvation.
Given human sinfulness and the freedom of the human will, no one
can claim ultimate personal salvation as a certainty. Christians who claim
to know Jesus while refusing to imitate Him have good reason to tremble
before the judgment of God. Those, however, who live in the image of
Christ without knowing Him consciously have, as Matthew’s gospel as-
sures us, good reason to hope for ultimate salvation. The surest path to
salvation, however, consists in knowing Jesus by consciously imitating
Him; for then one walks the path which leads straight to the heavenly
mansions. Salvation, after all, involves more than getting from point A to
point B. It has a qualitative shape, a shape which only Jesus embodies
with sinless perfection.
Moreover, if the second person of the trinity stands historically revealed
as the spoken Word of God: as the one through whom the triune God
acts upon the world in order to create, save, or judge it, then all saving
grace enters the world through Him. Even when grace illumines
non-Christian hearts, it enters them through the same divine source. To
live in conscious saving contact with that source offers enormous graced
22. Rahner’s doctrine of the “supernatural existential” undergirds his espousal of the
anonymous Christianity of non-Christian religionists. That doctrine rests, however,
on an indefensible faculty psychology. It also demands that one regard non-Christians
as necessarily oriented to Christ by the fixed, universal, a priori structures of the human
spirit. All such a priori reasoning rests of a seriously flawed logical foundation. Cf.
Gelpi, The Turn to Experience in Contemporary Theology, pp. 97-107; Grace as
Transmuted Experience and Social Process, pp. 67-96.
advantages to real converts. I shall return to this point later in discussing

the mediatorial significance of Jesus’ priesthood.23
Conclusion: The Pragmatic Meaning of the Hypostatic Union

Contemporary Christologists debate the relationship between Christo-
logy and soteriology. Christology offers an account of the saving God
revealed in Jesus Christ. Soteriology propounds a doctrine of salvation.
Schillebeeckx derives Christology from soteriology. He does so because
his philosophical nominalism lacks the conceptual means to speak about
an encounter with the risen Christ. As a consequence, Schillebeeckx er-
roneously presents resurrection faith as an inferential conclusion drawn
from a subjective, graced experience of salvation.24 Panneberg regards
Christology and soteriology as inseparable. He, however, derives
soteriology from Christology because Christian faith must begin by con-
fronting the person and divinity of Jesus.25 Kasper defends a position closer
to Pannenberg. He views Christology as inherently soteriological.26
I myself endorse Kasper’s position. Pannenberg correctly perceives that
soteriology derives from a confrontation in faith with the Son of God
incarnate. Christology does not, however, give rise to a distinct theologi-
cal discipline called soteriology. Rather, Christology itself becomes
soteriological when one invokes pragmatic logic in order to clarify de-
ductively the meaning of faith in an incarnate God.
One clarifies deductively the doctrinal meaning of the hypostatic union
by grasping its practical, saving consequences. That clarification explains
the doctrine’s saving significance by yielding a sound insight into the
practical, moral conditions for advancing in Christological knowing. One
verifies a deductively clarified doctrinal account of the hypostatic union
by showing its ability to interpret the historical and eschatological revela-
tion of God in Christ. One also verifies it by living it.
When, therefore, one interprets the doctrine of the hypostatic union
with a pragmatic logic of consequences, the moral and religious demands
of discipleship which that logic articulates do not count as extrinsic cor-
ollaries to a purely theoretical faith. Instead, those practical saving conse-
quences spell out the theoretical meaning of the doctrine itself; for, in the
23. Cf. David Stindl-Rast, “Jesus als Wort Gottes in vergleichender religionspsychologischer
Sicht” in Die Frage nach Jesus (Cologne: Verlag Styria, 1973), pp. 9-67. This doctrinal
interpretation of trinity’s action upon creation makes sense of the Tridentine teaching
that all justifying grace comes to us through Christ. Christ communicates to us the
fruits of His passion by teaching us to die to sin as He did through the empowering
enlightenment of His Breath, our downpayment on the resurrection. (DS 1523, 1530,
1560)
24. Cf. Schillebeeckx, Jesus, pp. 346-397, 526-534.
25. Cf. Pannenberg, Jesus God and Man, pp. 38-49.
26. Cf. Kasper, Jesus The Christ, pp. 20-48.
last analysis, one can verify any religious doctrine, including the doctrine
of the hypostatic union, only by taking converted responsibility for its
practical consequences.
Those who believe in the hypostatic union recognize in Jesus the nor-
mative embodiment of divinity and humanity. If they really believe what
they profess to believe, they will also live in His image. If they profess to
believe in Jesus without living in His image, then they stand convicted of
the kind of religious hypocrisy which, as Jesus warned, excludes one from
the reign of God.
In this chapter, I have pondered what it means to put faith in Jesus as
savior. In the chapters which follow, I shall reflect on interrelated dimen-
sions of the saving ministry which reveals His person. In the next chap-
ter, I shall ponder what doctrinal theology has traditionally called the
prophetic character of Jesus’ ministry. As we shall see, doctrinal focus on
Jesus’ prophetic ministry examines in greater detail the doctrinal implica-
tions of one of the ways in which He saves us: namely, by proclaiming the
kingdom.
Chapter 12: Jesus the Prophet 415
Chapter 12
Jesus the Prophet
The preceding chapter began a doctrinal elucidation of faith in the hypo-
static union by exploring deductively its practical saving consequences.
This chapter ponders in greater doctrinal detail one of the ways in which
Jesus saves us: namely, by His ministry of teaching.
The Breath’s charismatic inspiration empowers prophets to speak in
God’s name. Jesus of Nazareth almost certainly regarded John the Bap-
tizer as a Breath-filled prophet and almost certainly claimed a similar
prophetic authority for Himself. At the same time, the gospels all assert
that Jesus speaks with more than prophetic authority. He confronts the
reader as messiah and Breath-baptizer, as God speaking and acting in
human form. The letter to the Hebrews, which contains the most ex-
tended reflection in the New Testament on Jesus’ priesthood, also medi-
tates at some length on His prophetic ministry. Hebrews argues that Jesus
as teacher speaks with a divine authority and with a clarity which tran-
scends any other human or angelic messenger from God.1
1. We do not know who wrote the letter to the Hebrews. Its content suggests that it
addresses a Jewish Christian community, possibly in Rome. Other scholars opine that
the letter addresses a predominantly Gentile audience; but, since the author views
Judaism as a danger to the faith, Hebrews may well address Jewish Christians. Its
literary form suggests a synagogue sermon. It reads like a homily with an epistolary
ending. The letter also presupposes extensive knowledge of the Old Testament and
some acquaintance with Jewish temple worship.
Some see in Heb 10:32-4 a reference to the persecution of Christians under Nero.
That suggests ca. 85 a.d. as a possible date of composition. If, however, the letter
postdates the destruction of Jerusalem in 70. a.d., it seems strange to find no mention
of that momentous event in a letter so focused on the theological significance of the
temple and its levitical priesthood.
Cf. NJBC, 60: 2-5; Harold W. Attridge, The Epistle to the Hebrews (Philadelphia, PA:
Fortress, 1989), pp. 35-48; Erich Grässer, An die Hebräer (2 vols.; Zürich: Benziger,
1990), pp. 41-69; Lyle O. Bristol, Hebrews: A Commentary (Valley Forge, PA: Judson,
1967), p.23; Philip Edecumbe Hughes, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews
(Grand Raids, MI: Eerdmans, 1977), pp. 30-1; F.F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Hebrews
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1964); Knut Backhaus, “Der Hebräerbrief und die
Paulus-Schule,” Biblische Zeitschrift, 37(1993), pp. 183-208; David A. Desilva,
“Despising Shame: A Critical Anthropological Investigation of the Epistle to the
Hebrews,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 113(1994), pp. 439-461; Ben Winterington,
“The Influence of Galatians on Hebrews,” New Testament Studies, 37(1991), pp.
146-152; Barnabas Lindars, “The Rhetorical Structure of Hebrews,” New Testament
Studies, 35(1989), pp. 382-406; Alan H. Cadwallader, “The Correction of the Text of
Hebrews Toward the LXX,” Novum Testamentum, 3(1992), pp. 257- 292. See also:
Franz Schneider, Jesus der Prophet (Göttingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht, 1973);
Rudolf Meyer, Der Prophet aus Galiläa: Studien zum Jesusbild der drei ersten Evangelien
(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftlische Buchgesellschaft, 1970).
This chapter divides into two parts. Part one presents the theological
interpretation of Jesus’ ministry of teaching developed in the letter to the
Hebrews. Part two reflects on the doctrinal implications of that ministry.
(I)
The letter to the Hebrews has no salutation. The author begins by allud-
ing to the “fragmentary” character of Old Testament revelation and to
the variety of ways (polytropôs) in which God spoke through the proph-
ets. “In these last days,” however, in the end time of salvation, God has
spoken to us “in His Son whom He made the heir of all things, through
whom He also made the created epochs (di’ hou kai epoiesen tous aionas).”
(Heb 1:1-2) That same Son creates the epochs continuously and provi-
dentially “by sustaining all things through His word of power.”2 (Heb
1:3; cf. Jn 1:3, Col 1:16) Let us try to understand the implications of
these initial bold Christological affirmations.
The letter contrasts the supreme dignity of God’s Son with the lesser
dignity of the prophets. The Son of God confronts us not as a mere spokes-
person for God but as the one through whom the Father created all things.
The Father, moreover, created more than one epoch through the Son.
The Greek noun “aionas” can mean epochs or worlds. Here it very likely
means both, since the continuous creation of the world extends physical
creation temporally. Its plural form suggests the difference between the
visible and invisible worlds, the earthly realm, on the one hand, and the
distant and different heavenly realms inhabited by the angels, on the other.
The plural also suggests the succession of historical eras. As we shall see,
this contrast between the human and angelic orders will assume impor-
tance as the argument of Hebrews unfolds. (Cf. Heb 1:4)
The Son who co-authored creation also inherits it. The Son’s inherit-
ance of the worlds apparently refers to His glorification after His passion
and to His installation in divine splendor at the Father’s right hand. (Heb
1:3) The Son’s inheritance of the worlds entails, then, His divine author-
ity over them. The incarnate Son’s inheritance of the worlds through His
glorification also connotes creation’s eventual participation in His risen
glory; for the glorified Son manifests in His risen humanity the divinity
He possessed before the world began. (Heb 1:14; cf. Rom 8:17)
Hebrews uses two metaphors to underscore the divine authority of the
Son who speaks to us, calling Him “the radiance of glory (apaugasma tes
doxes) and seal of His [God’s] being (character tes hypostaseos autou).” The
two metaphors underscore both the Son’s distinction from the Father
and His possession of the Father’s divinity.
2. Cf. NJBC, 60: 7-8; Bristol, op.cit., pp. 29-34; Hughes, op.cit., pp.35-49; Richard
Dormandy, “Hebrews 1:1-2 and the Parable of the Wicked Husbandmen, Expository
Times, 100(1989), pp. 371-375.
“Glory” designates the divine reality revealed in its splendor, beauty,

majesty, and holiness (Ex 24:16). As the radiance of that splendor the
Son partakes of its divine reality and excellence. Similarly, a seal repro-
duces the image carved in it. So too, the Son reproduces the very being
and reality of the Father. Distinct from the Father, the Son remains mys-
teriously one with Him.
In contrasting the Son’s message to us with the fragmentary message of
the prophets and with their diversity of expression, Hebrews implicitly
characterizes the Son’s message as the opposite. With the coming of Jesus,
we now listen to His one voice, not to many different kinds of voices.
Moreover, the Son proclaims not a fragmentary message but a full and
coherent one.3
The Son’s revelation also possesses an efficacy which the prophetic word
never possessed. The incarnate Son of God has “accomplished the purifi-
cation of sins (katharismon ton hamartiôn poesamenos).” Hebrews uses the
plural form of the noun sin (hamartiôn). Instead of personifying sin as a
force in the world by using the singular, the letter portrays the redemp-
tive death of Christ as washing away each sinful act committed by hu-
mans.
The prologue to Hebrews ends by introducing the first theme which
the letter will treat in detail: the Son’s divine superiority to all the angels.
Like the prophets, Biblical angels also bring messages from God to hu-
manity. Having discussed the superiority of Jesus’ ministry to the Old
Testament prophets, the author of Hebrews now makes it clear that Jesus
speaks with a divine authority which exceeds even that of any angelic
messenger.
The fact that Jesus has inherited the divine name of Lord places Him as
far above the angels in dignity as the reality which the divine name desig-
nates. (Heb 1:4) Not only does the Son’s superiority to the angels result
from his possession of the divine glory and being; but it also derives from
the fact that, as the Great High Priest of the heavenly sanctuary, He ef-
fects a universal redemption.4 (Heb 3:1 ff.)
3. Cf. NJBC, 60: 11-13; Attridge, op. cit., pp. 49-76; Grässer, An die Hebräer, I, pp. 70-97;
Bristol, op. cit., pp. 25-9; John P. Meier, “Structure and Theology in Hebrews 1.1-14,”
Biblica, 66(1985), pp. 168-189.
4. Hebrews cites a series of Old Testament texts to prove the Son’s superiority to the
angels. God called the Davidic king His Son but never used the title of an angel. (Heb
1:5; Ps 2:7; 2 Sam 7:14) As the messiah and heir to David, Jesus bears the title of Son
in a pre-eminent way. At the Son’s incarnation, “when [the Father] brought the
firstborn into the inhabited world”— at that time, the Father commanded all the angels
to worship Him. (Heb 1:6; cf. Dt 32:43; Ps 96:7) The Father regards angels as His
servants and messengers (Heb 1:7; cf. Ps 104:4); but He quite literally bestows upon
the Son an everlasting throne, gives Him the scepter of virtue, and anoints Him king
with the oil of gladness above all His enemies. (Heb 1:8-9); cf. Ps 45:6-7) As Lord, the
Son created the world and will continue to exist when the created world has vanished.
I shall reflect on Jesus’ priesthood in the chapter which follows. Here it

suffices to note that the author of Hebrews appeals to Jesus’ unique priest-
hood in order to justify the superior authority with which He speaks. As
we shall see, in Hebrews Jesus’ priesthood has a divine, heavenly charac-
ter which transcends any ritual order of priestly ministry on earth.
Hebrews underscores the Son’s superiority to the angels by contrasting
the message which God revealed in the Old Testament through the min-
istry of His angels with the superior message He has spoken in the end
time through His incarnate Son. If the lesser revelation made by angels
drew down divine retribution for its violation, how much more will the
message spoken personally by the Lord Himself! Moreover, the divine
authority of that message stands confirmed through the miraculous signs
wrought by its apostolic witnesses, through works of power accomplished
through the Divine Breath. (Heb 2:1-4)
Finally, Hebrews argues the incarnate Son’s superiority to the angels
from the fact that the Son rather than any angel effected a universal re-
demption. As a result of His redeeming death, the incarnate Son stands
revealed as the one who orders “the world to come (oikoumenen ten
mellousan).” Temporarily humiliated by taking to Himself a humanity
less perfect than angelic existence, the incarnate Son in virtue of the re-
demption He has decisively accomplished now exercises authority over
all existing reality. The final and full revelation of His universal sway will
(Heb 1:10-2; cf. Ps 102:25-7) The Father bids only the Son, not any angel, to exercise
divine authority by sitting as His right hand. In exalting the Son, moreover, the Father
gives Him victory over all His enemies. (Heb 1:13; Ps 109:1) By contrast, the Father
has made the angels into “ministering spirits” who serve those humans destined to share
in the Son’s glorious inheritance. (Heb 1:14)
Cf. Bristol, op. cit., pp. 34-41; Kenneth J. Thomas, “The Old Testament Citations in
Hebrews, New Testament Studies, 11(1964-1965), pp.303-325; George Howard,
“Hebrews and the Old Testament Quotations,” Novum Testamentum, 10(1968), pp.
208-216; John P. Meier, “Symmetry and Theology in Heb 1.5-14,” Biblica, 66(1985),
pp. 503-533; Harris Lachlan McNeill, The Christology of the Epistle to the Hebrews
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1914), pp. 10-14; D.W.B. Robinson, “The
Literary Structure of Hebrews 1:1-4, Australian Journal of Biblical Archaeology,
2(1972), pp. 178-186; Lala Kalyan Kuman Dey, The Intermediary World and Letters
of Perfection in Philo and Hebrews (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1975), pp. 127-154;
Erich Grässer, “Hebräer 1, 1-4: Ein exegetische Versuch” in Text und Situation:
Gesammelte Aufsätze zum Neuen Testament (Gütersloh: Gütersloh Verlagshaus Gert
Mohn, 1973), pp. 182-228; Graham Hughes, Hebrews and Hermeneutics: The Epistle
to the Hebrews as a New Testament Example of Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1979); Simon Kistermaker, The Psalm Citations in the
Epistle to the Hebrews (Amsterdam: Soest, 1961); Michael Bachmann, “‘Gesprochen
durch den Herrn’ (Hebr 2,3): Erwägungen zum Reden Gottes und Jesu im Hebräerbrief,”
Biblica, 70(1990), pp. 365-394; Christian Rose, “Verheissung und Erfüllung: Zum
Verständnis von Epaggêlia im Hebräerbrief,” Biblische Zeitschrift, 33:1 (1989), pp.
60-80 and 33:2(1989), pp. 178-191.
take place at the parousia; but the revelation of the glory of the risen one
makes that final revelation sure and certain. (Heb 2:5-9)
How ought one to interpret in a doctrinal context this witness of He-
brews to the authority which sanctions Jesus’ teaching? To this question I
turn in the section which follows.
(II)
The New Testament suggests that Jesus possessed, not just prophecy, but
the full spectrum of the Pauline gifts: gifts of prayer, discernment, heal-
ing, miracles, exorcism, and practical pastoral leadership. Jesus’ sinlessness
also entails that He possessed the perfection of theological hope, faith,
charity, and a faith-filled passion for a just social order. In other words,
Jesus, in His sinlessness, exemplified the perfect gracing of human expe-
rience.
All these graced endowments mean that even during His mortal minis-
try, Jesus confronts us as something more than a ordinary prophet. A
genuine prophet should ideally embody the word which he or she speaks
in God’s name. Jesus’ sinlessness enabled Him to embody God’s word to
humanity with a perfection which goes beyond anything one finds in
sin-tainted prophets or in any other sin-tainted human religious leader.
The paschal mystery transvalues even more the prophetic character of
Jesus’ teaching ministry. The risen Christ confronts the world not only as
one who received the divine Breath’s inspirations but as Her efficacious
source. The source of a divine reality must itself possess divinity.
The Breath’s historical mission by the risen Christ coincides with the
historical mission of the Church. Christians therefore experience the di-
vine Breath’s efficacious sending through their participation in the Church’s
mission by the risen Christ.
Viewed experientially, therefore, the Breath’s mission exhibits a three-fold
efficacy: historical, ecclesial, and charismatic. The Breath’s historical mis-
sion prolongs in space and time the efficacious, saving mission of God’s
incarnate Son. The risen Christ communicates the Breath initially to the
Church as a whole. The Breath creates the Church by teaching it to put
on the sanctifying mind of Christ through the sharing of the charisms.
The charisms also empower specific communities and specific individu-
als within the Church to advance its corporate mission. Let us begin to
probe the doctrinal implications of these initial insights.
The risen Christ sends the Church. That efficacious mission produces
in those who believe a gracious enlightenment which originates in the
divine Breath as its ultimate source within the Godhead. Moreover, this
enlightenment, which theologians traditionally and correctly call created
grace, has the divine Breath as its quasi-locus within the Godhead be-
cause She alone functions as an autonomous source of evaluative response
within the Godhead. Let us recall why.
The human person responds to the efficacious impulse of grace au-

tonomously. As a consequence, neither the Father nor the Son can pro-
vide the quasi-locus within God for the gracing of ordinary human expe-
rience. Both Father and Son function within the Godhead as eternal prin-
ciples of divine efficacy. Human experiences efficaciously transformed in
either the Father or the Son would, then, find themselves ruled effica-
ciously by God and would thereby cease to act with human autonomy.
Because they would develop with divine autonomy, such experiences
would exemplify human experiences of being a divine person. If, then,
human persons must welcome grace with personal human autonomy,
then the divine Breath, who lures human experience persuasively rather
than shapes it decisively, must function as the quasi-locus of their trans-
formation in God.
Ordinary prophets speak about a divine reality which they adore. In
the charismatic gracing of human experience, they retain their human
autonomy. Jeremiah speaks and acts as Jeremiah; Ezekiel speaks and acts
as Ezekiel; Balaam speaks and acts as Balaam. If virtue of their prophetic
inspiration, however, all speak in God’s name even though each speaks in
a finite, idiosyncratic, personal idiom.
In virtue of the hypostatic union, however, Jesus’ human experience
underwent a twofold gracing: both persuasive gracing in the divine Breath
and efficacious, obediential gracing in the second person of the trinity.
Jesus experienced persuasive gracing by the divine Breath because even
under grace He responded to Her anointing and illumination with a con-
ditioned, finite, human freedom. The efficacious, obediential gracing of
Jesus’ human experience in the second person of the trinity transformed
it into the human experience of being a divine person. The efficacious,
obediential gracing of a human experience in the Logos also enables a
divine person to speak to us with human lips. Jesus does not just speak
for God, as ordinary prophets do. He speaks personally as God. In other
words, the hypostatic union endows His message with an authority and
normativity which goes beyond that of other creatures endowed with
prophetic enlightenment.
An experiential construct of the hypostatic union can, then, interpret
within an inferential, doctrinal context the distinction which the letter to
the Hebrews draws between Jesus’ unique, divine, magisterial authority,
on the one hand, and the lesser authority of ordinary prophets or angels,
on the other.
Jesus’ sinlessness causes Him to embody perfectly the word He pro-
claims. In dealing with sinful humans, one can on occasion doubt whether
they really believe or mean what they say. Jesus’ sinlessness makes any
such doubt impossible. Jesus means what He says because He embodies
in sinless perfection the saving word He speaks. The Son’s obediential
relationship to the Father and to the Breath within the Godhead thus
transforms Him in His human incarnation into God’s spoken Word, into
the one through whom both the Father and the Breath act upon and
speak to a sinful world with saving truth.
Jesus confronts us as God’s spoken word in yet another sense. The sym-
bolic structure of both the divine and human experience makes Jesus into
an embodied divine communication in the technical sense in which I
have defined the term “communication.” By a “communication” I mean
the embodied expression of an evaluative response. As God’s spoken Word,
as a humanly embodied divine communication, Jesus of necessity reveals
to us simultaneously both the Father and the Breath. Let us recall why
this is so.
The Father, as we have seen, functions within the trinity as an aborigi-
nal source of creative efficacy. The Son’s efficacious, historical mission by
the Father reveals that within the Godhead the Father generates the Son
efficaciously. With the Son He co-spirates the Breath efficaciously as Her
historical mission also reveals; for the Father sends the Breath through
His glorified, incarnate Son. Because the Father functions within the trinity
as the aboriginal, efficacious source of all, we attribute the act of creation
in a special way to the Father even though the entire Godhead acts through
the Son in the ongoing creation of the world.
Since the Father functions as a source of creative efficacy within the
Godhead, Jesus reveals the Father to us obedientially through what he
says and does, as the fourth evangelist saw clearly. Jesus’ efficacious acts of
speech and of practical choice therefore embody concretely the Father’s
efficacious, saving will.
The Breath of God interprets graciously to Jesus His obediential rela-
tionship to the Father. That means that She stands historically revealed
within the Godhead as the cognitive link between the Father and the
Son, as the mind of God. For that reason we attribute divine enlighten-
ment to the Holy Breath even though all three divine persons act is grac-
ing us. As the spoken Word of God Jesus, then, reveals the divine Breath
to us cognitively, by the way in which He responds evaluatively to the
world, by the shape of His human, religious vision.
As signs, communications divide into indices, icons, and linguistic sym-
bols. An index symbolizes through physical action. For example, weather
vanes, hour glasses, sun dials, thermometers, scales, and other mechani-
cal instruments of measurement all communicate information indexically.
Icons communicate by resemblance. Portraits, for example, tell us what
people look like by resembling them. Maps symbolize the lay of the land
by reproducing it to scale. Symbols communicate through speech acts:
through genre, method, definition, grammar, and syntax. They subdi-
vide into intuitive communications and inferential communications.
Because the divine Breath inspired Jesus’ religious self-awareness, his

obediential response to Her illumination makes His human mind, His
religious vision, into a finite, created icon of the divine mind, of the
divine Breath Herself, in Her saving intentions toward the world. Jesus
communicated His religious vision to others in words and in symbolic
gestures; but His human mind itself, the total spectrum of human evalu-
ative responses which those symbolic acts expressed and signified, revealed
the reality of the divine mind iconically. Better than any other human
mind, the human mind of Jesus resembles how God responds evaluatively
to a sinful world. More perfectly than any other human mind, the mind
of Jesus shows us how God feels, understands, perceives, and judges. Since
the divine Breath functions as the source of evaluative response within
the Godhead, the evaluative shape of Jesus’ mind, despite its finitude,
agrees in every particular with the way in which the divine Breath per-
ceives the world and God in their relationship to one another. It there-
fore reveals Her normatively and paradigmatically, but sacramentally and
therefore not exhaustively.
The divine Breath in giving Herself to the Son within the trinity con-
ceives the Word which He embodies. As a consequence, Gaius Marius
Victorinus had the right of it when he suggested that we can imagine the
Breath of God as the maternal principle within the Godhead. (Gaius
Marius Victorinus, Against Arius, II. i. 58. 11-36) She conceives eternally
the divine Word efficaciously communicated to us in Jesus.
Jesus, therefore, reveals the familial character of the relations of the
divine persons to one another within the trinity. He reveals obedientially
the Father who generates Him and sends Him into the World; and by
His religious vision He reveals the feminine wisdom of God, the divine
Mother, the Holy Breath, the heavenly Sophia.5
As the iconic sacramental revealer of the divine Breath, as the most
perfect human embodiment of the mind of God, Jesus confronts us then
as much more than a prophet. His religious vision measures the authen-
5. Cf. Gelpi, The Divine Mother, pp. 215-238; Ives Congar, Elizabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza
and Elizabeth Johnson have all argued for the legitimacy of imagining the third person
of the trinity as feminine. None of them, however, has attempted to develop this insight
in the light of an experiential metaphysics of symbol. Any attempt to transform
devotion to the divine Sophia into a goddess cult isolated from any relationship to
Father and Son moves in a heterodox direction. Cf. Ives Congar, O.P. I Believe in the
Holy Spirit, translated by Geoffrey Chapman (3 vols.; New York, NY: Seabury, 1983),
III, pp. 155-164; Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist
Theological Discourse (New York, NY: Crossroad, 1992); Elizabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza,
Jesus: Miriam’s Child and Sophia’s Prophet: Critical Issues in Feminist Christology (New
York, NY: Continuum, 1994). See also: Elizabeth A. Johnson, “Jesus the Wisdom of
God: A Non-Biblical Basis for a Non-androcentric Christology,”Ephemerides Theologicae
Lovaniensis, 61(1985), pp. 48-72.
ticity of all other prophetic utterances because no other prophetic vision

expresses the mind of God as perfectly as His.
His religious vision also measures the authenticity of all religious teach-
ing. Doctrines which contradict His human mind contradict the mind of
God. As we shall see in the next chapter, some of the theological interpre-
tations of Christian priesthood contradict the priestly reality embodied
in Jesus. To that extent, therefore, those doctrines qualify as heterodox.
Jesus’ religious vision also raises to human consciousness His unique
experience of sinless living. His teachings, therefore, articulate the kind
of obediential relationship to God which human life ought to embody.
As a consequence, Jesus’ religious vision also measures the authenticity of
religious discipline and practice. Institutions which contradict His mind
embody sin. Disciplines which contradict His mind inculcate sin.
Jesus, therefore, confronts us not just as a prophet but as much more
than a prophet because, as savior, He functions as the great high priest of
the new covenant, as the unique mediator between God and humanity in
virtue of the hypostatic union. I shall reflect on the relationship of Jesus’
priesthood to His magisterial authority in the chapter which follows. Before
doing so, however, another aspect of Jesus’ ministry of teaching needs
doctrinal elaboration: namely, the relationship between His teaching and
His miracles.
By a miracle I mean an event occurring in a religious context which so
baffles any attempt to explain it by finite, created causes that it invites
ascription to God as its efficacious causal source. Jesus performed more
than one such act in the course of His public ministry. Moreover, as we
have seen, Jesus Himself seems to have viewed His healings and exor-
cisms as signs of the arrival of the messianic age in His very person and
ministry. As signs of the advent of messianic times, Jesus’ miracles and
exorcisms would have lent divine sanction to His ministry of proclama-
tion. How, then, ought one to interpret doctrinally these historical claims.
The first Vatican council presented Jesus’ miracles as “very certain signs
of divine revelation adapted to the intelligence of all (divinae revelationis
signa sunt certissima et omnium intelligentiae accommodata).” (DS 3009)
They render divine revelation “credible through external signs (externis
signis credibilem) (Ds 3033) One can know with “certainty (certo cognosi)”
that miracles happen and that they offer “suitable evidence (rite probari)
of the divine origin of Christian revelation.”6 (DS 3034)
In presenting miracles as signs accommodated to the intelligence of all,
Vatican I denied that only scientific experts can recognize when a miracle
has happened. That denial does not rule out the scientific investigation
6. Cf. Klaus Schaz, Vaticanum I 1869-1870 (3 vols; Pederborn Ferdinand Schöningh,

1993), II, pp. 81-94; Dom Cuthbert Butler, The Vatican Council (2 vols; New York,
NY: Longmans Green & Co., 1930).
of miraculous events, an investigation which Church leaders have tradi-

tionally encouraged. Instead, Vatican I taught that, when miracles hap-
pen, ordinary folks can recognize the fact without being informed of it
by some authoritative academic elite.
In so speaking, the council had the miracles of Jesus in mind. The
gospels tell us that Jesus’ exorcisms and miraculous healings astonished
the ordinary people who witnessed them. We have no serious reason to
doubt that astonishment; nor have we any reason to doubt that Jesus
conducted a miraculous ministry of faith healing.
Very likely, Jesus worked miracles and told parables in part for the same
purpose. His healings and exorcisms certainly expressed His compassion
for human misery and bondage; but they clearly blew the minds of those
who witnessed them. As we have seen elsewhere, parabolic narratives seek
an analogous narrative purpose. Parabolic narratives subvert a familiar
world as a way of inviting people to imagine a world transformed. The
surprising and often shocking events in Jesus’ parables invited His hear-
ers to open their hearts to the in-breaking of God’s reign already happen-
ing in His person and ministry. His miracles and exorcisms served an
analogous pastoral purpose. Jesus did things which surpassed the capac-
ity of ordinary mortals. He healed miraculously and cast out demons
with a simple command. His discombobulating actions like His
discombobulating stories shattered the tyranny of the familiar and in-
vited faith in the divine origin of Jesus’ mission and message.
Vatican I describes miracles as “very certain (certissima) signs of divine
revelation.” (DS 3009) Since certitude characterizes beliefs rather than
events, the council is portraying miracles as events which invite a certain
kind of interpretation. In effect, the council is saying that those events
qualify as miraculous whose extraordinary character gives good reason
for attributing them to a divine, transcendent source.
In the late nineteen sixties and early seventies, I tended to approach
miracles with a demythologizing, Bultmanian skepticism. I persisted in
this vain, academic posturing until I found myself confronted with two
certified miracles in the charismatic prayer community at Loyola Univer-
sity in New Orleans. One miracle involved the restoration of a withered
optic nerve; the other, the reconstruction of a deteriorated hip bone. In
both cases, the attending physicians testified that the cures defied any
medical explanation. I had imbibed enough Peircean fallibilism at that
point to realize that I would have to take my Bultmanian skepticism
about miracles back to the drawing board.
I also began to suspect that skepticism about the very possibility of
miracles can easily transform itself into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The
very occurrence of miracles would seem to require an expectant belief
that they really can happen. Certainly, in the gospels, Jesus again and
again assures those whom He cures miraculously that their faith has made
the healing possible. At Nazareth, Jesus seems to have found skepticism a
barrier to His ministry of faith healing.
One should not confuse faith-expectancy with either wish-fulfillment
or credulity. Just wanting a miracle to occur won’t make it happen. Nor
does an expectant faith preclude sober investigation into apparently mi-
raculous events in an attempt to dispel naive credulity or unmask obvi-
ous frauds.
The suasive force of a miraculous event presupposes, then, an openness
of heart and of mind to the possibility that a miracle can in fact happen.
My experience in charismatic prayer groups has convinced me that the
higher the faith expectancy the more likely the actual occurrence of faith
healing, even of a miraculous healing. When miracles do occur in such a
context, then they exert a powerful fascination on the human mind and
heart and do indeed invite religious faith, without, however, compelling
it.
Vatican I calls miracles “very certain signs.” “Very certain” falls shy of
absolutely certain. Like all finite human events which reveal the reality of
God, miracles exhibit a sacramental character in the broadest sense of
“sacrament.” By that I mean that they partially conceal the divine reality
which they disclose.
The sacramental character of a miracle endows it with a certain amount
of ambivalence. Miracles may invite the free assent of religious faith; but
they do not coerce it. Certainly, Jesus’ miracles and exorcisms did not
persuade everyone in first-century Palestine of the divine origin of His
ministry and message.
In rebuking Breath-blasphemy, however, Jesus warned His contempo-
raries that skepticism has its limits and that it can betray a sinful lack of
repentance which closes the heart to the divine Breath’s saving enlighten-
ment. Jesus’ rebuke also implies that miracles will ultimately evoke reli-
gious assent when the divine Breath illumines their revelatory signifi-
cance.
Moreover, all the gospels further concede the revelatory ambivalence of
Jesus’ miracles and exorcisms by portraying them as proleptic
foreshadowings of the paschal mystery; for, if Jesus’ mighty works only
anticipate the full revelation of His divinity in the paschal mystery, then,
in the last analysis, the paschal mystery itself endows Jesus’ miracles with
their ultimate revelatory sanction, not vice versa.
For the believing Christian, then, faith in the paschal mystery provides
the ultimate context for understanding the saving significance of Jesus’
miracles. The four evangelists grasped this principle well. They therefore
used different narrative techniques for portraying Jesus’ miracles and ex-
orcisms as anticipations of the religious healing and deliverance which
the risen Christ would effect through Breath-baptism. As Breath-baptizer,

Jesus, by inspiring resurrection faith, delivers those who believe in Him
from bondage to Satan and from the paralysis of sin. He who healed the
blind during His earthly ministry, once risen, opens the human heart to
assent to the good news in the power of His Breath. By that same Breath,
He who healed the deaf and dumb empowers His disciples to hear and to
proclaim the gospel and to serve one another faithfully in His image. He
who raised the dead by the gift of His Breath imparts risen life to those
who confess His Lordship in shared bapismal faith.
One must say the same for Jesus’ prophecies, which Vatican I also cites
as divine confirmations of Jesus ministry. (DS 3009) Like Jesus’ miracles,
Jesus’ prophecies derive their ultimate authority and suasive power from
the paschal mystery. During His ministry, Jesus predicted the destruction
of Jerusalem and of its temple. He very probably predicted His betrayal
by Judas, Peter’s denial, and the terrified dispersal of His disciples after
His arrest. He certainly anticipated, interiorized, and predicted His own
death.
Such predictions manifested an extraordinary gift of discernment. From
what one can glean from history about the political situation in
first-century Palestine, one can plausibly surmise that anyone who read
the signs of the times realistically might have foreseen that Israel had
embarked on a collision course with the Roman empire and that the
collision would probably end as tragically as had resistance to the
Babylonian invasion. Historical memories and shrewd contemporary
political insight could conceivably have fed Jesus’ prediction of the fall
and Jerusalem and the destruction of its temple. Similarly, Jesus’ predic-
tion of His own tragic death might well have contained a healthy dose of
political realism, especially as He pondered His own career in the light of
the Baptizer’s martyrdom. Jesus’ anticipation of betrayal, abandonment,
and denial might well have expressed in part an accurate reading of the
human weakness of those who followed Him. A gift of prophecy, how-
ever, would have focused and formulated all such warnings and predic-
tions.
Reinterpreted in the light of the paschal mystery, moreover, these proph-
ecies and their fulfillment take on new revelatory significance. As the
prophetic utterances of God’s incarnate Son, they claim the minds and
hearts of believers with a new kind of authority which goes beyond ordi-
nary human prophecy.7
7. Cf. Meier, A Marginal Jew, II, pp. 509-645; Colin Brown, Miracles and the Critical
Mind (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984); Ernst and Marie Luise Keller, Der Streit
um die Wunder (Gütersloh: Gert Mohn, 1968); Robert A.H. Larmer, Water into Wine?
An Investigation of the Concept of Miracle (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press,
1988); Ulrich Mann, Das Wunderbare: Wunder—Segen und Engel (Gütersloh: Gerd
Mohn, 1979); Bernhard Wenish, Geschicte oder Gesnichete? Theologie des Wunders
In this chapter I have considered some doctrinal implications of Jesus’

ministry of proclamation and of the miraculous signs which confirmed
it. In the chapters which follow, I shall invoke this incarnational norm in
assessing both Christian priesthood, on the one hand, and the institu-
tionalization of religious and of secular authority, on the other. I begin
with the question of priesthood.
(Salzburg: Verlag St. Peter, 1981); Richard Swinburn, The Concept of Miracle (London:
Macmillan, 1970); Louis Monden, Signs and Wonders: A Study of the Miraculous
Element in Religion (New York, NY: Desclée Company, 1966); C.D.F. Moule, ed.,
Miracles (London: A.R. Mowbray & Co Ltd., 1965); Ralph M. McInerny, Miracles:
A Catholic View (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Division, 1986);
R.M. Burns, The Great Debate on Miracles from Joseph Glanville to David Hume
(London: Associated University Press, 1981).
Chapter 13
Jesus the Priest
In virtue of the hypostatic union, Jesus confronts the world with a unique
magisterial authority in religious matters. The last chapter dealt doctri-
nally with that authority.
This chapter deals with Jesus’ priesthood. As we have already seen, the
letter to the Hebrews discovered a close connection between Jesus’ priestly
and prophetic ministries. The following reflections examine that connec-
tion; but they focus doctrinally on the sense in which Jesus’ ministry
exhibits priestly characteristics. Since, moreover, the letter to the Hebrews
provides the most developed sacerdotal Christology in the entire New
Testament, of necessity, this chapter undertakes a doctrinal interpreta-
tion of that Christology.
Like the last chapter, therefore, this one divides into two parts. Part one
analyzes the account of Jesus’ priesthood presented in the letter to the He-
brews. Part two then interprets the doctrinal significance of a New Testament
sacerdotal Christology in the light of a metaphysics of experience.
(I)
Jesus belonged to the tribe of Judah, not to the tribe of Levi. He never
functioned during His ministry as a levitical priest. We have no historical
evidence that He ever ordained anyone. When He challenged the high
priestly authorities in Jerusalem, He did so as a layman. When Jesus par-
ticipated in Jewish worship, He did so as a layman. People regarded Him
as a teacher (rabbi); but Jesus never studied with the great rabbis in Jerusa-
lem. He derived His authority to teach, not from formal membership in
the rabbinate, but from His own sense of personal religious mission and
charismatic empowerment.
Nevertheless, the letter to the Hebrews portrays Jesus as the great high
priest of the new covenant. The author of Hebrews develops this sacerdo-
tal Christology in a series of comparisons. Hebrews proclaims that: 1) As
great high priest of the new covenant, Jesus surpasses and replaces Moses
as a mediator between humanity and God. 2) As great high priest of the
new covenant, Jesus surpasses and replaces the levitical priesthood. 3)
Because Jesus’ sacrificial death and resurrection replace and surpass the
animal sacrifices of the old Law, the new covenant in Christ ushers in a
new way of worshipping, one which replaces Jewish temple worship.
In the course of what follows, I shall consider each of these compari-
sons in turn. First, however, the reader probably needs to ponder the
Chapter 13: Jesus the Priest 429
problem of access which the letter to the Hebrews poses to the contem-
porary reader.
The letter to the Hebrews poses a problem of access analogous to that
posed by the book of Revelation. Both books of the New Testament baffle
contemporary Christians for similar reasons. Both presuppose a detailed
familiarity with Old Testament patterns of thought which exceeds any-
thing which most contemporary readers bring to the texts of the New
Testament. Both books of the New Testament employ a dated rhetoric
which renders their texts opaque to today’s readers of the Bible. Revela-
tion invokes the deliberately arcane and richly symbolic narrative imag-
ery of Jewish apocalyptic. The author of Hebrews thinks and argues like
a first century rabbi. His mind moves in unfamiliar allegorical and
midrashic1 patterns of thought which easily baffle the popular contem-
porary mind.2
As in the case of Revelation, however, Hebrews repays careful contem-
porary study. As we saw in volume one, more than any other book in the
New Testament, Revelation ponders the political and economic conse-
quences of faith in the risen Christ. I shall examine the doctrinal implica-
tions of Christian apocalyptic Christology in the following chapter. Here
I focus instead on the sacerdotal Christology of Hebrews. As we shall see,
the Christology of Hebrews for a variety of reasons which I shall examine
later in this chapter, challenges profoundly contemporary clericalized in-
terpretations of Church leadership and of Church polity.
I summarized in the preceding chapter Hebrews’ reflections on Jesus’
prophetic ministry. That summary illustrates the problem of access to
which I allude. Even though in the early nineties popular religious imagi-
nation in the United States exhibited a faddish fascination with angels,
most American readers find the angelology of the opening chapters of
Hebrews tough sledding. The author takes angelic communications with
the deity far more seriously than most post-Enlightenment Christians.
The Priesthood of Jesus Christ in Hebrews

The analysis of Hebrews which follows focuses on the letter’s sacerdotal
Christology. As I have already indicated, that Christology offers the most
1. Rabbinic midrash sought to apply a familiar text of the Torah to the lives of people.
Some forms of midrash dealt with practical precepts of the Law. Narrative forms of
midrash applied stories from the Bible to contemporary situations by reconstructing
the original story imaginatively. In other words, midrashic narrative retold a familiar
story with variations in the narrative detail which related it to the story teller’s audience.
The retelling of the encounter between Abraham and Melchizedek in Hebrews
illustrates Christian use of narrative midrash. (Heb 7:1-28)
2. Cf. C. Spicq, O.P., “Le philonisme de l’épitre aux Hébreux,” Revue Biblique, 56(1949),
pp. 542-572; 57(1950), pp. 212-242; Neville Clarke, “Reading the Book 2. The Letter
to the Hebrews,” Expository Times, 108(1996), pp. 37-40.
detailed theological reflection in the entire New Testament on the mean-

ing of Christian priesthood. Moreover, the inclusion of Hebrews in the
canon of the New Testament endows its theology of priesthood with spe-
cial authoritative sanction; for any contemporary theology of Christian
priesthood ought to interpret to believing Christians of our day the mean-
ing of the New Testament witness.
I begin reflection on Hebrews, then, by focusing on the first of its
Christological comparisons. Hebrews begins its meditation on Jesus’ priest-
hood by asserting that Jesus, the great high priest of the new covenant
replaces Moses as a mediator between God and humanity.
“By God’s grace, He tasted death for all (chariti Theou hyper panto geusetai
thanatou).” (Heb 2:9) If one accepts this reading of verse nine of the
second chapter of Hebrews, it asserts that Jesus’ death reveals a universal
free gift of God.3 It manifests the Father’s universal, saving intentions.
The Father “by whom and for whom all things exist” willed the Son’s
sufferings. They, however, transform Him into the perfect savior. They
insure a total saving solidarity uniting Jesus to those whom He redeems.
“The sanctifier and those being sanctified all form a single reality (ho te
hagiazon de hoi hagiazomenoi ex henos pantes).” The phrase “ex henos”
probably means “coming from the same stock,” as the statement which
follows suggests: “That is why He is not ashamed to call them brothers.”
The phrase “ex henos,” however, also asserts something stronger: namely,
the profound unity and solidarity with humanity which Jesus’ experience
of a shameful death effected. It binds Jesus to suffering sinners as sancti-
fier to sanctified.
We find here the echo of a familiar Pauline theme: that on Calvary
Jesus died both morally and physically. As a moral act, His free submis-
sion to death expressed His perfect death to sin. Those united to Him in
sinless faith participate in that same death and through His Breath’s sav-
ing illumination experience its sanctifying consequences. Indeed, the very
process of sanctification together with the hope for glory which it in-
spires transforms a once sinful humanity into Jesus’ holy family.4 (Heb
2:10-13; cf. Heb 10:4-10)
Invoking a bold and daring metaphor. Hebrews proclaims that Jesus’
very execution as a criminal at the hands of the temple priests and of
Pilate transformed Him into the Great High Priest of the new covenant.
(Heb 2:17) The metaphor changes profoundly the very meaning of priest-
3. In some manuscript traditions, verse nine reads: “Apart from God (choris Theou), He
tasted death for all.” If one accepts this phrasing as the more difficult reading, then the
verse could assert that Jesus redeemed us by dying in apparent abandonment by God.
(Cf. Mk 15:34) It could also mean that Jesus suffered in virtue of His humanity as
opposed to His divinity.
4. Cf. Alan C. Mitchell, S.J., “The Use of Prepein and Rhetorical Propriety in Hebrews
2:10,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 54(1992), pp. 681-701.
hood, because the author of Hebrews makes the unique revelatory event
which we call the paschal mystery redefine what Christian priesthood
ought to signify.
The ancestral priesthood of the clan of Levi set one apart from other
clans of Judah. Enlisted in support of the Davidic monarchy, the temple
priesthood in Jerusalem underwent, as we have seen, increasing politiciza-
tion as it evolved. By Jesus’ time, the aristocratic temple priests func-
tioned as a sacral power elite separated from the people both religiously
and economically: religiously by privileged links to the sacred and eco-
nomically by wealth. Roman collaborators, temple priests who endorsed
the Hellenization of Jewish worship also represented the scandal of reli-
gious compromise with paganism.
In contrast to the temple priests, Jesus’ priesthood in Hebrews identi-
fies Him totally with the common people; it does not set Him apart in
some arcane sacral sphere. The temple priests of Jesus’ day had joined the
aristocracy and conspired with the Roman oppressors of Israel in reduc-
ing God’s people to grinding, even degrading poverty. Jesus, the high
priest of the new covenant, identifies, by contrast, with the dregs of hu-
manity: with the lowest classes, even with the expendables, even with the
criminal class. Finally, Jesus, the high priest of the new covenant, replaces
the religiously compromised worship of the temple aristocracy with au-
thentic, sinless worship of the Father. Instead of coveting political power
in the manner of Annas and Caiphas, the high priest of the new covenant
comes to the office through an experience of political powerlessness. Para-
doxically, that very act of self-abasement establishes His universal divine
authority.5
Jesus the High Priest of the new covenant did not identify with an
angelic mode of existence; instead He took to Himself “descent from
Abraham.” (Heb 2:16) The letter to the Hebrews, however, portrays Jesus’
Jewish descent, not in narrowly ethnic terms, but as having universal
human and redemptive significance. As a child of Abraham, Jesus shares
the vulnerable lot of every human. His priestly solidarity with humanity
manifests itself in His submission to the same kinds of temptations as
every other human being. Temptation and suffering schooled Him in
compassion, so that as High Priest of the new covenant He could empa-
thize perfectly with a suffering humanity.6 (Heb 2:17-8)
Besides rooting itself empathetically and compassionately in the trag-
edy of universal human suffering, Jesus’ priesthood also manifests itself
in the saving efficacy of His death. That efficacy takes two forms: 1)
5. Cf. Albert Vanhoye, Prètres anciens, prètre nouveau selon le Nouveau Testament (Paris:
Editions du Seuil, 1980), pp. 15-108; Didier Gonneaud, “Dans le sacerdoce d’Israel,
le ministère de Jésus,” Nouvell Revue Théologique, 120(1998), pp. 18-31.
6. Cf. Albert Vanhoye, La structure litteraire de l’Epitre aux Hébreux (Paris: Desclée de
Brouwer, 1976), pp. 12-85.
Jesus’ death atones for sin by establishing a new bond of life between God
and humanity. (Heb 2:17) 2) In addition, Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross
breaks not only the power of death itself but also the devil’s power over
death. These two aspects of Jesus’ saving sacrifice have an intimate con-
nection with one another.
Hellenistic Judaism held that the devil, not God, stood responsible for
death by bringing sin into the world. (Wis 1:13, 2:23-4) Jesus by dying
in obedience to the Father dies to sin and destroys its power; and by
rising Jesus frees humanity from the bondage of living in fear of death.
The paschal mystery thus undoes the devil’s work by wresting from Satan’s
hands his chief weapons against humanity: namely, the fear of death and
sin. (Heb 2:15)
After these preliminary clarifications, Hebrews next advances its theol-
ogy of Christ’s priesthood by arguing the three interrelated theses enun-
ciated above: 1) As High Priest in the order of Melchizedek, Jesus’ priest-
hood outranks Moses’s mediatorial service. 2) Jesus’ priesthood both sur-
passes and replaces the levitical priesthood. 3) New covenant worship
surpasses and replaces old covenant worship because Christ’s sacrifice of
Himself on the cross surpasses and replaces the temple sacrifices offered
under Mosaic law.
The author of Hebrews has argued in 2:14-18, that Jesus’ compassion-
ate priestly identification with humanity in its suffering and temptation
has transformed the human race into His family. The brothers and sisters
of Jesus all enjoy the same “heavenly calling (kleseos epourianiou)” as He,
a vocation which comes from God and leads to God. The possession of
such an intimate relationship with the Lord should, then, motivate the
holy members of His family to concentrate their minds upon Him, “the
apostle (apostolon) and high priest (archierea) of our confession.”
No other verse in the entire New Testament calls Jesus an apostle. The
term recalls the opening verses of Hebrews and designates Jesus not only
as God’s messenger, but as God’s supreme and culminating messenger to
humanity. The term “apostle” also suggests the continuity which links
Jesus’ ministry to that of the apostles whom He sends and empowers by
the gift of His Breath. (Heb 1:1-2; 2:3-4) The apostolic character of Jesus’
priesthood also makes it prophetic. The phrase “our confession” of Christ
as apostle and high priest implicitly alludes to the baptismal confession
of the faith common to all Christians. That baptismal profession of faith
motivates the day-to-day confession of Christ.7
As God’s messenger and high priest, Jesus resembles Moses. He also
resembles Moses in His fidelity to God. Each founds a different “house-
hold (oikos).” God Himself providentially built up both the household of
7. Cf. NJBC, 60: 14-18; Attridge, op. cit., pp. 63-103; Grässer, An die Hebräer, I, pp. 98-
151; Bristol, op.cit., pp. 41-54; Hughes, op.cit., pp. 50-124; Bruce, op.cit., pp. 1-53.
Moses and that of Christ. Nevertheless, in the plan of providence, Jesus’

household supplants that of Moses.
Hebrews dramatizes the superiority of Jesus’ household by contrasting
it with that of Moses. Christ outshines Moses in glory just as the one who
builds a house deserves greater honor than the house itself. Moses, more-
over, functioned as God’s servant in his household, while Christ heads
the Christian household as God’s own Son. He therefore rules as the
master and steward of His household; He does not serve as a slave within
it. As God’s servant Moses prophesied the saving reality which Christ
brings, while the members of the household of Christ look forward in
confident hope to sharing in their master’s divine glory.8 (Heb 3:1-6)
8. In the exhortatory section of the letter, the author of Hebrews returns to the theme of
God’s house. The Christian community should rest confident of its access to the
heavenly sanctuary because Christ, the great high priest of the new covenant, presides
over all the house of God. Here the phrase “house of God” would seem to connote the
Christian community as God’s house or temple of worship. In 3:6, the author of
Hebrews has already identified the Christian community as the house of God over
which Christ presides as faithful Son. The author had also insisted on the superiority
of the house of Christ to that of Moses. The community’s sanctification through Christ
transforms it into God’s house.
Hence, the author of Hebrews exhorts the community to come into the presence of
God with “a heart sprinkled clean of evil conscience and a body washed with pure
water.” (Heb 10:22) The reference to water recalls the ritual cleansing with water
effected by the levitical high priest but almost certainly points to Christian baptism as
the efficacious fulfillment of earlier symbolic purifications. If so, then, the author is
portraying the sanctifying transformation of the Christian community into God’s
house as the result of baptism. The author is also depicting baptism as the rite which
mediates to believers the saving, sanctifying effects of Christ’s atoning sacrifice. The
exhortation to remain faithful to community gatherings (Heb 10:25) also suggests that
entering into the heavenly Holy of Holies includes the Christian eucharist as well; for
the eucharist recalls and makes present Christ’s saving sacrifice.
As at other points in this letter’s argument, it makes sense to contrast the religious
vision of Hebrews with a strict Platonic understanding of religious typology. The
author of Hebrews speaks more like a Christian sacramentalist and eschatologist than
like a Platonist. Here and now, in this world, the experience of corporate and personal
sanctification and of shared worship gives the Christian community present access to
the heavenly sanctuary where dwells their great High Priest. This world and the world
to come fuse in a dynamic, eschatological, sacramental reality instead of living in
essential separation as a strict Platonic dualism of time and eternity would suggest.
The author also warns the community that those who sin seriously separate
themselves from divine forgiveness and transform themselves into the objects of divine
judgment and condemnation. The author seems particularly concerned about the sin
of apostasy and describes it as the act of “ having trampled on the Son of God and having
regarded the blood of the covenant in which one is sanctified as profane and having
insulted the Breath of grace.” (Heb 10:29) Trampling on the Son of God puts one in
the same category as those who crucified Him. Instead of letting the atoning blood of
Christ complete the process of sanctification, apostates treat it with contempt. With
equal pride they contemn the divine Breath of the risen Christ, for She seeks to effect
Membership in the more glorious household of Christ should teach

Christians to learn from the mistakes made by the members of Moses’
household. They tested God in the desert and thereby forfeited their en-
try into the land which promised rest from their desert wanderings. Chris-
tians, however, long for a different and vastly superior place of rest: through
Christ they long for a share in the eternal rest of God. Partakers in a
common call, they also partake in Christ. They participate in His saving
work and in His heavenly status and reality.9 (Hb 3:14)
In this context, the author of Hebrews cites Ps 94, which rebukes the
sins of the Israelites during their desert sojourn: “Today, when your hear
His voice, harden not your hearts as did your ancestors in the wilder-
ness....” (Ps 95:7) For the Christian the “today” to which the psalm refers
encompasses the entire end time. The eschaton began with the first com-
ing of Christ, and it will culminate in universal resurrection.10 (Heb
3:7-4:11)
I have considered the first Christological comparison in Hebrews. In it
the author of Hebrews asserts that Jesus’ priesthood of identification with
the tragedy and alienation of the human condition endows Him with a
divine authority which exceeds that of any other messenger from God to
humanity, whether human or angelic. Jesus also replaces Moses as the
mediator of God’s covenant. In this first comparison, the author of He-
brews makes good his earlier promise to link Jesus’ priesthood and His
ministry of proclamation. Both have a mediatorial and therefore a priestly
character. Teaching, after all, constituted one of the traditional responsi-
bilities of the levitical priesthood.
The second comparison develops further Jesus’ sacerdotal superiority
by comparing His priesthood and the levitical priesthood. To this second
comparison I turn in the paragraphs which follow.
The author of Hebrews begins the second comparison by asserting that
Jesus Christ has preceded into heaven those who believe. There He abides
on high as the great high priest of the new covenant. First, however, He
plumbed the depths of human weakness. He underwent every kind of
human temptation, but without sinning. Moreover, Jesus’ sinlessness
makes Him into a completely accessible intercessor before God.
their sanctification. Those, however, who contemn divine forgiveness will discover to
their sorrow that “it is dreadful to fall into the hands of the living God.” (Heb 10:30)
Cf. NJBC, 60: 60-61; Attridge, op. cit., pp. 283-293; Dey, op. cit., pp. 155-158;
Bristol, op.cit., pp. 107-39; Vanhoye, La structure literaire, pp. 115-82, Prètres anciens,
pp. 236-63; R. Williamson, “The Eucharist and the Epistle to the Hebrews,” New
Testament Studies, 21(1974-1975), pp. 300-312.
9. Cf. Enrique Nardone, “Partakers in Christ (Hebrews 3.14),” New Testament Studies,
37(1991), pp. 456-472.
10. Cf. Otfried Hofius, Katapausis: Die Vorstellung vom endzeitlichen Ruheort im
Hebräerbrief (Tübingen: Mohr, 1970); Scott C. Layton, “Christ Over His House
(Hebrews 3.6) and Hebrews,” New Testament Studies, 37(1991), pp. 473-477.
As we have already seen, Jesus’ sufferings create a deep bond of solidar-

ity between Him and suffering humanity. Sin, however, divides sinful
humans from God and from one another. Jesus’ sinlessness, therefore,
transforms Him into the perfect mediator. Perfectly united to God, the
sinless Jesus has nothing to divide Him even from a sinful humanity.
Seated now upon a divine throne, on “a throne of grace,” (Heb 4:16)
Jesus’ sinlessness makes Him completely approachable. The saving re-
demption which He has wrought by dying and rising has revealed the
divine throne on which He sits as the source of grace and forgiveness.
(Cf. Heb 8:1, 12:2) For that reason, those who call upon Him in need
can do so in the confidence of experiencing His grace (charin) and mercy
(eleos).11 (Heb 4:14-16)
11. Cf. NJBC, 60: 19-28; Attridge, op. cit., pp. 104-136; Grässer, An die Hebräer, I, pp.
156-197; Bristol, op.cit., pp.55-70; Hughes, op.cit., pp. 125-68; Vanhoye, Prètres
anciens, pp. 109-30; Gerhard Friedrich, “Das Lied vom Hohenbpriester im
Zusammenhang von Heb 4, 14-5, 10,” Theologische Zeitschrift, 18(1962), pp. 95-115;
Dey, op. cit., pp. 215-266.
The exhortatory conclusion of Hebrews returns at least implicitly to the theme of
Jesus’ sinlessness when it portrays Him as the “pioneer and perfecter” of faith. After a
long catalogue of figures from the Old Testament who suffered for their faith and even
went to death rather than renounce it (Heb 11:1-40), Hebrews cites Jesus as the
supreme and culminating example of fidelity to God even unto death. He freely
accepted the shame, torture, and torment of the cross. Moreover, in doing so He
showed Himself “pioneer (archegon) and perfecter (teleoten) of faith (tes pisteos).” (Heb
12:2-3)
As the pioneer of faith Jesus confronts the community as its model. Like Him they
must face unflinchingly any suffering which threatens for the sake of sharing His joy
through union with Him and the Father in heaven. The community has not yet faced
martyrdom. As a consequence, God is asking less of them than He did of His own Son.
(Heb 12:4)
The Son of God’s trust in the Father’s vindication as He hung on the cross, through
its sinless perfection, confronts the believer as the supreme human act of trust. (Cf. Heb
4:15) In this sense Jesus perfects human faith in God.
“Perfecter of faith,” however, probably also has an active connotation: the perfect,
sinless self-offering of the Son on the cross effects the Christian’s sanctification in faith.
Hence, by sending the sanctifying Breath to transform the Church in faith, Christ
brings the faith of the Church to completion, to perfection. Jesus’ faith, then, exceeds
the faith of believers by empowering their faith.
Cf. NJBC, 60: 67; Attridge, op. cit., pp. 353-358; Elizabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza,
“Der Anführer und Vollender unseres Glaubens: Zum theolgischen Verständnis dees
Hebräerbriefs” in Gestalt und Anspruch des Neuen Testaments, edited by J. Schreiner and
G. Dantzberg (Würtzburg: Echter, 1969), pp. 262-281; Robert L. Brawley “Discursive
Structure and the Unseen in Hebrews 2:8 and 11:1: A Neglected Aspect of the
Context,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 55(1993), pp. 81-98; Dennis Hamm, S.J.,
“Faith in the Epistle to the Hebrews,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 52(1990), pp.
270-291; Thomas Söding, “Zuversicht und Geduld im schauen auf Jesus: Zum
Glaubensbegriff des Hebräerbriefs,”Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft,
82(1991), pp. 214-241; Albert Vanhoye, “Le teleôsis de Christ: point capital de la
Christologie sacerdotale d’Hébreux,” New Testament Studies, 42(1996), pp. 321-338.
In the exhortation which closes Hebrews, the author returns to the

theme of accessibility. Sanctified by the blood of Christ, the Christian
community needs to recall that the divine forgiveness effected by Jesus’
single saving sacrifice gives them the right to enter into the same heav-
enly Holy of Holies where He now dwells. Since only the high priest
could enter the Holy of Holies in Jerusalem, Hebrews is portraying the
Christian community as participants in Jesus’ own high priesthood. Un-
der the new covenant, believers no longer need a merely human priest
who enters into the presence of God in their name: instead, all believers
have immediate access to God in Jesus, the divine high priest. (Heb 10:19)
A Christian’s access to the heavenly Holy of Holies has a double mean-
ing. It implies the present access to God which the Christian community
possesses, as the living house, or temple, of God. (Heb 10:21; 3:6) One
senses, however another meaning. Jesus Himself entered the heavenly
sanctuary through the sacrifice of His life: He entered “through the cur-
tain (dia tou katapetasmatos), that is, the flesh (tout’ estin tes sarkos).” Here
the term “flesh” has the negative connotations of weakness and vulner-
ability. As the curtain in the temple kept the holy of holies hidden from
sight, so the flesh of Christ, especially in His humiliation and crucifixion,
obscured His divinity until its full revelation through His glorification.
Finally, Christ entered the heavenly sanctuary precisely by laying down
His life and therefore did so “through the flesh.” Entering into the heav-
enly sanctuary connotes, therefore, the willingness to lay down one’s life
for the faith, if need be, in imitation of the crucified. Martyrdom, more-
over, culminates in one’s being ushered into the presence of Christ in the
eternal Holy of Holies.12 (Heb 10:21-4)
On the basis of this understanding of Jesus’ mediatorial activity, the
author of Hebrews contrasts further Jesus’ priesthood with the levitical
high priesthood. He begins by recalling some of the levitical priests’ tra-
ditional liturgical functions.
The levitical priest, like Aaron, existed as a result of a divine vocation,
a divine call. The levitical high priest offered gifts and sacrifices for sins.
A sinful man himself, the high priest could compassionate with the people’s
weakness and sinfulness and so perform this sacrifice with due empathy
(metriopathein).13 (Heb 5:1-4)
The priesthood of Christ parallels and surpasses that of the levitical
priesthood in each of these descriptive traits. Jesus has a more perfect
calling than the levitical priest. God called the tribe of Levi collectively to
priestly ministry; but the Father Himself called Jesus personally to the
priesthood in two messianic psalms. Ps 2:7b asserts: “Your are my son,
12. Cf. NJBC, 60: 69-61; Attridge, op. cit., pp. 283-291.
13. The term “metriopathein” has Stoic overtones and connotes a measured emotional
response: something between unbridled passion and lack of feeling.
today I have begotten you”; while Ps 110:4 proclaims: “You are a priest
forever after the order of Melchizedek.” The author of the letter treats
these psalm verses as the very words of the Father. In fact, they do de-
velop theologically Jesus’ messianic commissioning by the Father in the
synoptic gospels. Jesus, the high priest of the new covenant, empathizes
more perfectly with human weakness and suffering than did the levitical
high priest. He does so by His reconciling death on the cross.
The author of Hebrews makes much of the fact that Jesus’ messianic
priesthood fulfills that of Melchizedek. The author will argue in chapter
seven that the priesthood of Melchizedek, whose offering of bread and
wine in Gen 14:18 foreshadows the eucharist, holds a higher dignity than
the levitical priesthood which descended from Abraham. Here, in chap-
ter five, the author indicates the reason for that greater dignity. Jesus
possesses His priesthood in virtue of being the Son of God incarnate,
sent by the Father to effect the universal reconciliation of sinners. The
Father’s act in raising Jesus from the dead manifests both His divine sonship
and His eternal priesthood according to the order of Melchizedek. (Heb
5:9-10)
Despite His supreme dignity as Son, Jesus, “learned obedience through
what He suffered.” (Heb 5:8) Indeed, his obedience even to death mani-
fested the sinless perfection of His obedience. (Heb 5:9, cf. 4:15, 10:4-10)
Like the levitical priest, therefore, Jesus could empathize completely with
those for whom He offered the supremely efficacious sacrifice of atone-
ment. Indeed, Jesus’ atoning sacrifice far surpasses the efficacy of the sac-
rificial intercessions offered to God by the levitical high priests on the
day of Atonement.
During His days in the flesh He offered prayers and supplications with
loud cries and tears to the one who had power to save Him; and He was
heard because of His reverence. (Heb 5:7)
The author of Hebrews is probably alluding the Jesus’ prayer for deliver-
ance addressed to the Father in the garden of Gethsemani. That prayer
ends with His total submission to the divine will, should the Father re-
quire Him to die. (Cf. Mk 14:36) That submission, the perfection of His
sinless obedience even unto death, endows His intercession with saving
efficacy.
“He was heard because of His reverence.” The Father answers Jesus’
prayer, not by sparing Him the cross, but by raising Him to glory after
the passion. Moreover, this act of the Father fulfills the two Messianic
verses from the psalms cited in 5:5-6. (Ps 2:7 and 110:4) Hebrews there-
fore portrays their fulfillment as the equivalent of their formal proclama-
tion by the Father to the Son. The resurrection, therefore, manifests Jesus
as divine Son of God. It also proclaims Him as universal high priest of

the order of Melchizedek.14
Invoking Biblical typology, Hebrews uses midrash in order to portray
Mechizedek as a foreshadowing of Jesus’ incarnational priesthood. A king
of righteousness and of peace, Melchizedek appears in Genesis without
human ancestors of any kind. Like the Son of God, therefore, his life
neither begins nor ends but (symbolically and rhetorically) abides for-
ever. The righteousness and messianic peace which Jesus brings fulfills
what Melchizedek typifies as does His eternal existence as Son of God.
Invoking narrative midrash, the author of Hebrews discovers the supe-
riority of Mechizedek’s priesthood to the levitical revealed in fact that, in
the story of the encounter between Abraham and Melchizedek in Gen-
esis (Gen 14:17-24), Abraham paid tribute to Melchizedek. By thus sub-
ordinating himself, Abraham acknowledged the superiority of
Melchizedek’s priesthood to the levitical priests whom Abraham would
engender. Levi, present in the loins of Abraham, ceded pride of place to
Melchizedek through Abraham’s act of homage.15 (Heb 7:4-10)
14. Cf. Vanhoye, La structure litteraire, pp. 86-113; Prètres anciens, pp. 130-66; P.
Andriessen and A. Lenglet, “Quelques passages difficiles de l’Épitre aux Hébreux (5,
7. 11; 10, 20; 12,2),” Biblica, 51(1970), pp. 207-220. In a brief exhortatory interlude,
the author of Hebrews avows his intention to offer reflections about Christ which
transcend basic catechesis. (Heb 5:11-6:2) He laments the sad state of those who
received a share in the Holy Breath and then apostatized. They cannot be reconciled
a second time, “since they crucify the Son of God willfully and hold Him up to
contempt.” (Heb 6:6) Those who persevere in faith, however, have solid reason to
hope. They have an “anchor” for their souls in Jesus, the eternal High Priest of the order
of Melchizedek. They know Him as a “precursor for us,” the one who has entered into
the heavenly sanctuary before us in order to make our own entry possible. He has
penetrated beyond the veil of the Holy of Holies in the temple of heaven and thus
brought His atoning sacrifice on the cross to its efficacious, redemptive climax. (Heb
6:19-20) Cf. Bristol, op.cit., pp. 71-94.
15. Cf. NJBC, 60: 38-39; Attridge, op. cit., pp. 137-154; Grässer, An die Hebräer, I, pp.
240- 314, II, pp. 7-35; Shinya Nomoto, “Herkunft und Struktur der Hohenpriester-
vorstellung im Hebräerbrief,” Novum Testamentum, 10(1968), pp. 10-25; Egon
Brandenburger, “Text un Vorlagen von Hebr. V, 7-10,” Novum Testamentum,
11(1969), pp. 190-224; Bruce Demarest, A History of Interpretation of Hebrews 7, 1-10
from the Reformation to the Present (Tübingen: Mohr, 1976); Dey, op. cit., pp. 185-214;
Erich Grässer, Die Glaube im Hebrœerbrief (Marburg: N.G. Elwert, 1965), esp.
198-219; Fred L. Horton, Jr., The Melchizedek Tradition: A Critical Examination of the
Sources to the Fifth Century and in the Epistle to the Hebrews (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1976); Gottfried Schulle, “Erwägunen zur Hohepriesterlehre des
Hebräerbriefs,” Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 46(1955), pp.
81-109; Jerome H. Neyrey, S.J., “‘Without Beginning of Days or End of Life’
(Hebrews 7:3): Topos for a True Deity,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 53(1991), pp.
439-455; Gareth Lee Cocerill, “Mechizedek or ‘King of Righteousness,’” Evangelical
Quarterly, 63(1991), pp. 305-312; Mikeal Parsons, “Son and High Priest: A Study in
the Christology of Hebrews,” Evangelical Quarterly, 60(1988), pp. 195-216.
A second midrashic “argument” confirms the superiority of Jesus’s priest-

hood to the levitical. The fact that the Old Testament speaks of the mes-
siah as “priest of the order of Melchizedek” and not as a priest of the order
of Aaron or Levi means that with the coming of the messiah, His priest-
hood, which descends from Melchizedek, replaces the levitical priesthood,
just as the new covenant which He seals by His own blood replaces the
old covenant.
Priestly ministry flows from a covenant. Since the new covenant abro-
gates the old, it also abrogates the priesthood of the old covenant. In-
deed, God made a point of having His Son descend, not from the tribe of
Levi but from the tribe of Judah, which had no official priestly responsi-
bilities under the old covenant. God did this in order to manifest the
novelty and superiority of the priesthood which Jesus brings. (Heb
7:11-14)
Hebrews’ third argument for the superiority of Jesus’ priesthood to that
of Levi appeals to the former’s eternity and efficacy. Jesus’ indestructible
risen life guarantees both the eternity and efficacy of His priesthood. The
author of Hebrews dismisses the office of the levitical priest as “weak and
useless” like the Law from which it sprang. That Law “perfected no one.”
Hence, the priestly functions it sanctioned suffered from the same impo-
tence. (Heb 7:11) The priesthood of Jesus, however, does possess saving
efficacy and therefore gives a better hope, a hope which enables one to
draw near to God. (Heb 7:15-9)
We draw near to God through the intercessory efficacy of Jesus’ priest-
hood, “for He can save completely those who draw near to God through
Him, living always [as He does] to make intercession for them.” (Heb
7:25) The efficacy of Jesus’ priesthood also insures the completeness of
the salvation He brings. It saves one totally. Its perpetuity grounds the
“better hope” it gives, since one knows that at every moment of time the
glorified Jesus sits beside the Father pleading eternally for us. The salva-
tion which Jesus brings also imparts a share in incorruptible life.
The perpetuity and efficacy of Christ’s priesthood entails its total suffi-
ciency. It makes a succession of priests under the new covenant wholly
unnecessary. Levitical priests were born and died in a temporal succes-
sion. Because the resurrection makes Jesus priest “for ever in the order of
Melchizedek,” Christians need no other priest but Him. (Heb 7:23-4) In
replacing the ancestral levitical priesthood with an eternal priesthood,
Jesus also abolishes the former once and for all.
Moreover, in Ps 110:4, God Himself testifies to the perpetuity of Jesus’
priesthood. God, however, gave no such guarantee to the ephemeral
levitical priesthood, since He had destined it to perish when the High
Priest of the new covenant arrived. The new covenant too replaces the
old as the guarantee of our hope for salvation in Christ. (Heb 7:20-22)
The author ends this section of the letter with a fourth argument for
the superiority of Jesus’ priesthood: namely, its sinless perfection. Under
the old law, levitical priests offered the sacrifice of atonement not only for
the people but for themselves. The author of Hebrews argues that the
very liturgical structure of levitical worship dramatizes its impotency. The
daily repetition of levitical sacrifices betrays its inability to put a decisive
end to sin. Jesus, by contrast, offered an utterly sinless sacrifice and did so
once and for all. The sinlessness of Jesus’ sacrifice ensures its enduring
efficacy. So does its eschatological scope. Jesus’ single sacrifice culminated
in His eternal exaltation “above the heavens,” to a perfect, eternal, sinless
realm beyond the power and influence of sinners.
Hebrews here alludes to the Mishnah requirement that the levitical
high priest separate himself from others for a week before offering the
sacrifice of atonement. Through the exaltation which constitutes Jesus
High Priest of the new covenant, the incarnate Son of God lives in per-
petual separation from sinful influence and can therefore intercede per-
petually before God for sinners.
The sinfulness of the levitical priests insured the imperfection of their
sacrifices, which therefore needed constant repetition. By reverse logic,
the sinlessness of Christ’s sacrifice insures its perfection: both its perfect
efficacy and its perfect sufficiency. Having offered it once, Jesus need not
offer it again. It abides as a perpetual intercession for sinners.16 (Heb 7:26-8;
cf. Heb 10:4-10)
I have considered the second comparison which gives rhetorical struc-
ture to the sacerdotal Christology of Hebrews. In it the author argues
that Jesus, the messianic priest of the order of Melchizedek, surpasses and
replaces the levitical priesthood through the eternity, efficacy,
all-sufficiency, and sinlessness of His single sacrifice. In the paragraphs
which follows I shall ponder the third comparison. It asserts that the new
covenant in Christ ushers in a new age of worship which replaces the
worship offered in the temple in Jerusalem.17
As we have just seen, the fact that Jesus exercises His priesthood in
glorified exaltation at the Father’s right hand dramatizes its eschatological
16. Cf. NJBC, 60: 38-43; Attridge, op. cit., pp. 198-215; Grässer, An die Hebräer, II, pp.
35- 65; Bristol, op.cit., pp. 94-105; Hughes, op.cit., pp. 54-160; Vanhoye, Prètres
anciens, pp. 167- 93; Franz Laub, “Ein für allemal hineigegangen in das Allerheiligste’
(Hbr 9,12)—Zum Verstœndnis des Kreuzetodes im Hebräerbrief,” Biblische Zeitschrift,
35(1991), pp. 65-85; T.J. Finney, “A Proposed Reconstruction of Hebrews 7.28a in
P46,” New Testament Studies, 40(1994), pp. 472-473.
17. Cf. Jerome Smith, O.P., A Priest Forever (London: Sheed and Ward, 1969); Richard
D. Nelson, Raising Up a Faithful Priest: Community and Priesthood in Biblical Theology
(Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), pp. 141-168; Dorothy Soelle,
Christ the Representative: An Essay in Theology after the”Death of God” (Philadelphia, PA:
Fortress, 1967).
character. In the course of the third comparison, the author of Hebrews

describes the heavenly liturgy over which Jesus presides as the perfect
pattern and prototype of temple worship in Jerusalem. The prototype
qualifies as reality; its earthly copy, as an inferior imitation.
Some commentators discover in this comparison Platonic influences.
The author of Hebrews does indeed recognize a superior, invisible spiri-
tual realm as the pattern for earthly reality. He derives the idea, however,
not from Plato but from Ex 25:40, where Moses patterns the meeting
tent which housed the arc of the covenant on a heavenly prototype re-
vealed to Him by God. (Heb 8:5)
Like Plato, the author of Hebrews also believes that the unseen order
surpasses the created world in perfection. (Heb 9:11) Throughout the
letter, however, he portrays the difference, not in dualistic, Platonic, meta-
physical terms, but in historical, eschatological terms, as the imperfec-
tion of a type which foreshadows the ultimate eschatological revelation
of a heavenly reality. Eschatological thinking dominates, not Greek meta-
physics.
Similarly, the author of Hebrews portrays the atoning sacrifice of Jesus
as beginning in time but as culminating in eternity. It began on the cross
but found completion in the resurrection, which transforms Jesus forever
into the eternal High Priest of the new covenant. From heaven, Jesus’
priestly intercession continues to effect the salvation of believers on earth.
That salvation His sacrificial death accomplished once and for all.
In other words, the third comparison contrasts the realms of time and
eternity; but the dynamic, historical, and eschatological way in which the
author portrays Jesus’ saving activity in the heavenly realm prevents his
vision from qualifying as philosophical Platonism. In Platonic philoso-
phy the transcendent forms of things exhibit no such activity as Hebrews
attributes to the glorified Christ. They do not save, intercede, or transform.
Essentially immutable, they merely serve as the unchanging intelligibilities in
which the mutable world participates. Moreover, the eschatological age blurs
the essentialistic, Platonic distinction between time and eternity by giving
Christians on earth present access to heavenly realities.18
How, then, does the paschal mystery fulfill ancient Hebrew worship?
Moses constructed the first Tent of Meeting according to the heavenly
pattern revealed to him atop Mt. Sinai. As a consequence, both the Mo-
saic Tent of Meeting and the sacrifices conducted in it only amount to a
“pattern and shadow of heavenly realities.” So indeed does any ritual sac-
rifice offered to God on earth. (Heb 8:4-5) For that very reason, Jesus the
18. Cf. Aelred Cody, O.S.B., Heavenly Sanctuary and Liturgy in the Epistle to the Hebrews:
The Achievement of Salvation in the Epistle’s Perspectives (St. Meinrad, IN: Grail, 1960);
James Swetman, S.J., “Christology and Eucharist in the Epistle to the Hebrews,”
Biblica, 70(1989), pp. 74-95.
layman by His Davidic descent was providentially prevented from offer-

ing ritual sacrifices on earth. (Heb 8:4, cf. 7:13-4)
Through the paschal mystery, however, Jesus has entered once and for
all into “the true tent of meeting,” the very heavenly reality revealed to
Moses on Sinai as the pattern for the physical tent which he constructed.
No human created that heavenly tent; only “the Lord” did. The title “the
Lord” occurs here in a citation of the Septuagint translation of Num
24:6. The title, therefore, would seem to refer in this context to the Fa-
ther who created the heavenly tent and who established Jesus in it as “the
minister of the sanctuary (ton harion leitourgos)” by exalting Him in glory
to sit as His right hand. (Heb 8:1-3) Hebrews, however, has already made
it clear that the Father creates through the Son who therefore exists prior
to creation. (Heb 1:2-3)
The author of Hebrews now regards the superiority of Jesus’ priest-
hood to the levitical as proven; and in the passages which follow, his
argument rises to its rhetorical climax. The superiority of Jesus’ priest-
hood flows simultaneously from the fact that both the sacrifice of His
death and the covenant which it seals surpass anything which Old Testa-
ment faith and worship has to offer. In developing these ideas Hebrews
offers two arguments in support of the new covenant’s superiority. First,
the new covenant holds better promises than the old. Second, the imper-
fection of the old covenant ensured its eventual disappearance and re-
quired its replacement by a new and more perfect covenant, as, indeed,
Jeremiah prophesied. (Heb 8:6-13; Jer 31:31-4) The author of Hebrews
illustrates both these points by contrasting in considerable rhetorical de-
tail the Jewish sacrifice of atonement with Jesus’ atoning death and sav-
ing glorification.
Once a year and only once, the High Priest and he alone could enter
the Holy of Holies in order to offer the sacrifice of atonement. (Heb
9:11) The levitical High Priest would sprinkle the people first with the
blood of goats and bulls and then with the ashes of a heifer mixed with
water. Then he would enter the Holy of Holies to sprinkle some of the
same blood on the Mercy Seat, which symbolized God’s presence among
His people. (Cf. Num 19:9, 14-21) Sprinkling with heifer’s ashes cleansed
from defilement. The sprinkling of blood, as we have seen, symbolized
the new bond of life which the sacrifice of atonement created between
God and Israel, despite its sins of the past year. (Heb 9:12-13)
According to Hebrews, the levitical sacrifice of atonement did nothing
to change the inner selves of those who participated in it, because the
rules of the Law concerned outward things and lacked the power to trans-
form human hearts in the way in which the new covenant does. Needless
to say, a devout first-century Jew would not have regarded the temple
sacrifices as inefficacious. One hears, however, in this passage of Hebrews
another echo of Pauline theology. The single sanctifying sacrifice of Christ

through the gift of God’s Breath, which it mediates, gives one strength to
avoid sin and to grow in sanctification with a power which transcends
utterly anything which the old Law accomplished.19 (Heb 10:1-4)
Three things manifest the superiority of the new covenant and its sac-
rifice. First, Jesus, the priest and victim of the new covenant, offered Him-
self through the power of the eternal Breath. (Heb 9:10, 13-4) His death
therefore possesses the power to purify the inner self from “dead actions
so that we may serve the living God.” Second, Christ has entered the
heavenly, uncreated Holy of Holies. That heavenly sanctuary, in virtue of
its not having been created, surpasses in perfection the inner sanctum of
the Mosaic Tent of Meeting. (Heb 9:11) Third, Jesus has entered the
heavenly sanctuary carrying, not animal blood, but His own blood by
which He has won for repentant sinners an eternal redemption.20 (Heb
9:12-3)
Some interpreters deny that the eternal Breath which inspired Jesus’
sacrifice designates the Holy Breath.21 They see in the term pneuma a tacit
contrast between the realm of eternal spirit and the visible, earthly realm
19. In the exhortatory section of Hebrews, the author further develops his atonement
Christology. On the day of Atonement, the high priest burned the bodies of the
sacrificed animals outside the precincts of the Hebrews’ camp; an act which foreshad-
owed Jesus’ dying for us as a degraded outcast. His degrading death reveals the
inevitability of death for all humans and that abiding life lies only in the world to come.
Through Christ, then, the community should offer praise to God by acknowledging His
name, cultivating good works, and sharing what they possess in common. (Heb 13:11-6)
The prayer which closes the letter portrays Jesus as the one whom the God of peace
brought back from the dead. (Heb 13:20) Through the death and resurrection of Jesus,
God has made peace between Himself and humanity; for Jesus’ death and resurrection
fulfill the prophecy of Zech 9:11. Zechariah had promised the coming of one who
becomes “the great Shepherd of the sheep by the blood which sealed an eternal
covenant.” Having sealed the new covenant in the paschal mystery, Jesus continues to
function as the good and great shepherd of His flock by inspiring in Christians the
willingness to do the will of God in every circumstance. In this way, through Jesus
Christ God makes believers acceptable to Himself. (Heb 13:20-1) (Cf. Bristol, op.cit.,
pp. 169-90; Vanhoye, La structure litteraire, pp. 194-224; Hughes, op.cit., pp. 277-
594); Gabriella Berenyi, “La portée de dia touto en Hé 9, 15,” Biblica, 69(1988), pp.
108-112.
20. The exhortation which closes Hebrews further develops the saving significance of
Jesus’ blood. In the eschatological age, Christians have entered into the very presence
of “Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and of a sprinkling of blood which speaks
more eloquently than Abel’s.” (Heb 12:24) Abel’s blood cried out to God for
retribution against his brother and murderer. (Gen 4:10) Jesus’ blood cries out to God
for the universal forgiveness of repentant sinners in a way which not only blots out sin
but effects human sanctification. (Cf. Heb 10:11-8; Bristol, op.cit., pp. 141-67) With
the help of the Lord Jesus, Christians should, moreover, fear nothing which mere
humans can do to them, for His fidelity and forgiveness lasts forever. “Jesus Christ is
the same yesterday and today and forever.” (Heb 13:6-8)
21. Cf. NJBC, 60:53.
to which Hebrews called attention elsewhere. Even if one concedes the

contrast, however, it need not rule out a reference to the Holy Breath of
God, who as divine would also belong to the eternal realm. Moreover,
like the apostle Paul, the author of Hebrews recognizes that the enlight-
enment of the Holy Breath empowers one to respond to the new cov-
enant. (Heb 6:4) Might not the same author be suggesting here that the
same Breath empowered Jesus’ sinless sealing of the covenant?22
In Hebrews, Jesus functions as mediator of the new and more effica-
cious covenant because His death cancels the sins of the earlier covenant.
(Heb 9:16) In proof of this assertion, the author of Hebrews constructs a
rhetorical legal “argument.” He urges that a last will and testament re-
quires the death of the testator before it binds anyone legally. The same
condition applies to the new covenant. It could not take effect until the
one who made it had first died. (Heb 9:16-7)
The author of Hebrews builds his rhetorical “argument” on a pun. The
Greek term “diathêkê ” can mean either a covenant or a testament, as in a
“last will and testament.” (Cf. Heb 9:15) One cannot logically inter-
change the two terms; but the author of Hebrews here argues rhetorically
as though one could. While the argument limps, the central theological
point the author is making remains clear: sealing the new covenant de-
manded the death of Jesus.
Reverting to typological thinking, the author argues that the slaughter
of the animals whose blood the Hebrews used in their sacrifices provided
only earthly copies of the more perfect heavenly reality accomplished
through Jesus’ single sacrifice on the cross.23 (Heb 9:18-23; cf. 7:2- 3) In
contrast to the inefficacious animal sacrifices, Jesus’ death ushers in the
eschatological age.
The author of Hebrews observes enigmatically apropos of the Hebrew
rites of purification:
It was, then, necessary that the copies of heavenly things be purified by

these things, but the heavenly things themselves [would need to be puri-
fied] by better sacrifices than those. (Heb 9:23)
22. Cf. Otfried Hofius, Der Vorhang von dem Thron Gottes (Tübingen: Mohr, 1972).
23. Some commentators find this legal argument so implausible and indefensible that
they portray verses 18-22 as deriving from the argument of the entire letter up to this
point. I do not find the suggestion convincing. The author of Hebrews strikes me as
less concerned with legal technicalities and more concerned to use legal language
metaphorically and rhetorically in order to insist on the redemptive efficacy of Christ’s
death. In describing Melchizedek as eternal (Heb 7:2-3) the author has already proven
his ability to develop from Old Testament texts rationally implausible interpretations
of their meaning. In the present instance, it makes more sense finally to take the author
at his word and see him as interpreting the new covenant as Christ’s dying testament to us.
The metaphor finds theological justification in the Pauline notion that the justification
through faith mediated by Christian baptism makes believers into co-heirs with Christ.
Exegetes puzzle over what the purification of “the heavenly things them-
selves” with “better sacrifices” might mean. Under the presupposition
that heavenly things themselves need no purification, some have sug-
gested that here purification means consecration and not purification
from sin. Others deem that such an interpretation does violence to the
text and find instead a reference to Job 15:15: “Behold, God puts no trust in
His holy ones, and the heavens are not clean in His sight.” The text in Job
probably alludes to the existence of evil principalities and powers.
Exegetes also puzzle over the use of the plural in the noun “sacrifices
(thysias),” since Hebrews recognizes only one heavenly sacrifice: namely,
that of Christ. The plural form could suggest a hypothetical generaliza-
tion about the nature of heavenly things. Since the Mosaic rites of puri-
fication imitate superior heavenly realities, those heavenly realities would in
principle need other and better kinds of purification. In fact, the heavens
received their purification when Christ entered them once and for all.
If, moreover, the actual purification of the heavens does refer to the
risen Christ’s decisive triumph over the evil principalities and powers who
dwell “in the heavenly places,” then, the author of Hebrews is also assert-
ing that the final eschatological triumph over evil requires more effica-
cious sacrifices than Mosaic rituals. In the end, only the single, supremely
efficacious self-sacrifice of the Son of God effected the necessary purification.
Christ, through His redemptive death and glorification has entered
once and for all, not into a manufactured sanctuary, but into heaven
itself. He stands face to face with God. He has entered heaven on our
behalf, as our redeemer and intercessor before the Father. (Heb 9:24)
Unlike the levitical high priest who had to offer the sacrifice of atone-
ment again and again using alien blood, Christ has done away with sin by
shedding His own blood once and for all and by shedding it for the sake
of others. In so suffering, Christ stands historically revealed as the suffer-
ing servant of God. (Cf. Is 53:12) Innocent of all sin, He wins pardon for
the people by willingly suffering death in their stead.
Moreover, Jesus’ death “once and for all (hapax),” begins the final
eschatological age which His second coming will bring to completion.
Having died once, Christ will not die again. By His death and glorifica-
tion He has dealt decisively with sin at a single stroke. When He comes
again, He will not suffer a second time but will reward with salvation
those who look forward to His final manifestation.24 (Heb 9:25-8)
78- 200; Hughes. op.cit., pp. 161-276; Vanhoye, Prètres anciens, pp. 194-235; Franz
Laub, Bekenntnis und Auslegung: Die paränetische Funktion der Christologie im
Hebräerbrief (Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 1980); Marie E.Isaacs, “Hebrews
13.9-16 Revisited,” New Testament Studies, 43(1997), pp. 268-284.
The Argument Summarized
The author of Hebrews closes the expository section of the letter by sum-
marizing some of its key insights. The summary makes four assertions: 1)
The Law only foreshadowed the saving reality of Christ. 2) The repeated
sacrifices of the old Law dramatize their intercessory inefficacy. 3) Jesus’
enthronement at the right hand of God manifests the superiority of the
new covenant. 4) The single sacrifice of the new covenant forgives sins
once and for all. Let us consider each of these summary points in turn.
As a foreshadowing (skia) of the realities accomplished in Christ, the
Law was not “the [true] form (tê eikona) of what occurred.” Here the
term “form (eikona)” contrasts with the term “shadow (skia)” as reality
contrasts with its imperfect, shadowy anticipation. The law and the re-
peated sacrifices it sanctioned had no power to accomplish what Christ’s
single sacrifice has done: viz, the perfecting of those who draw near to
share in His sacrifice. (Heb 10:1)
The very fact that the law required repeated sacrifices manifests that
the levitical sacrifice of atonement had no power to keep people from
sinning. If it had, after a single sacrifice, all sin consciousness would have
disappeared. Instead, the levitical sacrifices recalled the sins of the He-
brews year after year.25 (Heb 10:1-3)
The one sacrifice of Christ and His ensuing glorification has by con-
trast endowed Him with universal, divine, messianic authority. Enthroned
at God’s right hand, Jesus now awaits the inevitable and final submission
of all His enemies under His feet. The image of enthronement alludes to
Ps 110:1, the same coronation psalm which proclaims the Davidic king a
priest of the order of Melchizedek, (Ps 110:4; cf. Ps 1:3, 8:1, 12:2) Some
25. The phrase, “but in them [i.e., the sacrifices under the Law] the remembrance of sin
[occurred] year after year,” (Heb 10:3) suffers from a certain ambiguity. On the one
hand, it could mean that the Hebrew people each year recalled the sins of the preceding
year on the day of atonement. On the other hand, the phrase could mean that year after
year the inefficacious sacrifice of atonement only served to remind God of the
cumulative guilt of Israel. I find both meanings plausible. Perhaps the author intended
both.
In confirmation of this argument, the author cites Ps 40:6-8:
Sacrifices and oblations you have not desired, but you have prepared a body
for me; in holocausts and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure. Then I
said, “See, I have come to do your will, O God,” as it is written of me in the
scroll of the book.
Because of Israel’s cumulative sinfulness, its sacrifices lacked any power to please
God. Only the incarnation of the Son of God and His perfect obedience, even unto
death, had that power. For that reason, the death of Christ abolishes once and for all
the need for levitical sacrifices. (Heb 10:5-10) Cf. Karen H. Jobes, “Rhetorical
Achievement in the Hebrews 10 ‘Misquote’ of Psalm 40,” Biblica, 72(1992), pp.
387-396.
have also found a possible allusion to 2 Sam 7:18, where David asks
God’s blessing on all His posterity, although the latter reference seems
more dubious.
“For by a single offering He has perfected (tetoleioken) once and for all
in perpetuity those who are being sanctified (tous hagiazomenous).” The
use of the perfect tense in the verb “tetoleioken” connotes finality: by one
single sacrifice Christ has decisively accomplished the salvation of His
saints. His enthronement at the right hand of God ensures the perpetuity
of His single sacrifice’s saving consequences. The present passive parti-
ciple “hagiazoumenous” suggests that the sanctifying effects of Jesus’ single
sacrifice extend through time and accomplish the present, ongoing sanc-
tification of believers.
In Heb 8:8-12, the author has already cited in full Jeremiah’s prophecy
of a new covenant. Now the author recalls verses from that citation and
ponders their fulfillment in Christ. In recalling Jeremiah’s words, the au-
thor calls attention to their Breath-inspired character. The author prob-
ably does so as a way of alluding to the Breath-inspired character of the
new covenant in Christ. The sanctifying action of the enthroned Christ
seals in the hearts of believers the new covenant promised by Jeremiah.
(Heb 10:15-7)
Having cited the words of Jeremiah, “I will remember their sins and
misdeeds no more.” (Heb 10:17; Jer 8:12), the author of Hebrews ends
the doctrinal section of the letter with the statement: “Where there is
forgiveness of these [offenses], there is no longer offering for sin.” (Heb
10:18) The divine forgiveness revealed in the single saving sacrifice of
Christ explains why God no longer calls the sins of believers to mind: He
has forgiven them definitively, once and for all.26
200-238; Hughes, op. cit., pp.125-404; Ulrich Luck, “Himmlisches und irdisches
Geschen im Hebräerbrief” in Charis kai Sophia: Festschrift für Karl Heinrich Rengstorf
(Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1964), pp. 192-215; David M. Hay, Glory at the Right Hand: Psalm
110 and Early Christianity (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1973); Floyd V. Filson,
“Yesterday”: A Study of Hebrews in the Light of Chapter 13 (Napierville, IL: Allenson,
1967); Mathias Rissi, Die Theologie des Hebräerbriefs (Tübingen: Mohr, 1987); George
H. Guthrie, The Structure of Hebrews: A Text-Linguistic Analysis (Leiden: E.J. Brill,
1994); William R.G. Loader, Sohn und Hohepriester: Eine traditionsgeschichtliche
Untersuchung aur Christologie des Hebräerbriefs (Neukirchen-en-Vluyn: Neukirchener
Verlag, 1981); Léopold Sabourin, Priesthood: A Comparative Study (Leiden: E.J. Brill,
1973); Andreas Stadelmann, “Zum Christologie des Hebräerbriefs in der neueren
Diskussion” in Theologische Berichete 2, edited by Josef Pfammatter et al. (Zürich:
Benziger, 1973), pp. 135-221; James Swetman, Jesus and Isaac: A Study of the Epistle
to the Hebrews in the Light of the Aquedah (Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1981);
Heinrich Zimmermann, Das Bekenntnis der Hoffnung: Tradition und Redaktion im
Hebräerbrief (Cologne: Peter Hanstein Verlag, 1977); Die Hohepriester Christologie des
Hebräerbriefs (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1964); Lucas F. Mateo-Seco, “Muerte de
Christo y Theologia de la Cruz” in Cristo Hijo de Diós y Redentór del Hombre, edited
In this section I have summarized the sacerdotal Christology of the

letter to the Hebrews. In the section which follows, I shall propose a
doctrinal interpretation of the sacerdotal Christology of the letter to the
Hebrews. Moreover, I shall formulate that interpretation in the light of
the metaphysics of experience developed in this study.
(II)
This section of the present chapter elaborates a doctrinal account of Jesus’
priesthood. It reflects on the message of Hebrews in the light of the meta-
physics of experience developed in this volume. It also invokes a prag-
matic logic of consequences in order to clarify the saving significance of
the experiential construct of the hypostatic union and of the trinity pro-
posed in this section. I begin these doctrinal reflections by contextualizing
historically the sacerdotal Christology of the letter to the Hebrews.
My remarks in this section fall into three parts. First, I contextualize
the argument of Hebrews. Second, I flesh out some of its propositions
with insights from the rest of the New Testament. Third, I reflect doctri-
nally on Christological sacerdotalism in the light of a metaphysics of ex-
perience.
Among the first Christians, Hellenists, like those expelled from Jerusa-
lem in Acts, occupied the extreme theological left. Originally Jewish
Christians with ties to the Diaspora (Cf. Acts 6:8-8:3), the Hellenists
looked upon the Christ event as such a radically new beginning in salva-
tion history that it replaced and abrogated its temple, its feasts, and its
priesthood. The letter to the Hebrews emerged from a similar theological
mind-set.27
The Hellenists developed a prophetic strain in Jesus’ own preaching:
namely, His denunciation of abuses in temple worship. Viewing Jesus’
confrontation with the temple priesthood from the other side of the pas-
chal mystery, however, the Hellenists radicalized this dimension of Jesus’
preaching. In contextualizing Hellenistic theology historically, one needs,
then, first of all to situate it with respect to Jesus’ own denunciation of
abuses in temple worship.
During His mortal ministry, Jesus Himself stood in an adversarial, pro-
phetic relationship with the temple priesthood in Jerusalem. He did not,
however, like the author of Hebrews, declare the levitical priesthood null
and void. Instead, Jesus called for the radical reform of a politically com-
promised, clericalized priestly caste.
by Lucas Matéo-Seco (Pamplona: Ediciones Universidad Navarra, 1982), pp. 699-747;
Norbert Hugede, Le sacerdoce du Fils (Paris: Fischbacher, 1983); André Fueillet, The
Priesthood of Christ and His Ministers, translated by Matthew J. O’Connell (New York,
NY: Doubleday, 1975).
27. Cf. Raymond E. Brown and John P. Meier, Antioch and Rome: New Testament Cradles
of Catholic Christianity (Ramsey, NJ: Paulist, 1982), pp. 6-8.
Jesus made His nearest approach to the position taken in Hebrews when
He foretold the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. That destruction
would in fact eliminate the temple priesthood as a force and presence in
Jewish religion. After the fall of Jerusalem in 70 a.d. and the subsequent
destruction of the temple, Pharisaism and the rabbinate would assume
the reins of Jewish religious leadership.
On what issues did Jesus distance Himself from the temple priesthood?
In cleansing the temple, Jesus denounced the rich, aristocratic priests’ use
of the temple in order to fill their already brimming coffers at the expense
of the poor. Priestly greed violated a fundamental demand of life in God’s
kingdom. Submission to God’s reign requires the renunciation of accu-
mulated wealth and the free sharing of one’s physical possessions with the
poor and the marginal.
Jesus also demanded that those in positions of leadership in the new
Israel which He was founding must serve others humbly in His image.
The messianic reversal of values which He proclaimed transformed the
rich and powerful into the willing slaves of the rest of the community at
the same time that it elevated the lowest and most despised to the places
of highest importance. Such sentiments contrasted sharply with the ex-
ploitative conduct of the aristocratic priestly elite in Jerusalem.
In addition, Jesus denounced the hypocrisy of the temple priests for
pretending to give religious leadership to Israel while ignoring the sum-
mons to repentance which both John the Baptizer and Jesus Himself an-
nounced. Finally, Jesus also rebuked the skeptical Sadducees for doubt-
ing the resurrection. Instead of giving a sound witness to faith, their skep-
ticism undermined confidence in God’s saving power.
The temple priests, for their part, seem to have understood well the
muted messianic claims which Jesus made symbolically in His triumphal
entry into Jerusalem. Having understood them, however, the priests also
rejected them.
What we can reconstruct historically about Jesus’ relationship to the
levitical priesthood provides, then, no warranty whatever for calling an
anticlericalistic, lay prophet a priest. As we have seen, the letter to the
Hebrews twice insists that Jesus belonged to the tribe of David, not to
the tribe of Levi and that He never functioned as a levitical priest during
His mortal ministry. Hebrews regards Jesus’ lay status and membership
in the tribe of David as providentially arranged by God with a view to
creating a totally new kind of messianic priesthood.
Hebrews finds Jesus’ messianic priesthood foreshadowed in the figure
of Melchizedek. Since Melchizedek functioned as both priest and king,
by tracing Jesus’ priesthood to the line of Melchizedek, the author of
Hebrews characterizes Jesus as a messianic priest, as both priest and mes-
siah. I shall reflect on Jesus’ messianic dignity in the section which fol-
lows. Here I focus on His priesthood.
Although the author of Hebrews uses a fanciful Biblical typology in
order to compare Jesus and Melchizedek, his argument for the priestly
character of Jesus’ ministry rests on a much more solid doctrinal founda-
tion than that comparison. Hebrews correctly argues that the utter unique-
ness of the incarnation and of the paschal mystery so redefines the mean-
ing of priesthood as to invalidate and supersede any merely human order
of ritual priests.
The letter to the Hebrews correctly grounds its theology of Christ’s
priesthood first of all in the incarnation. Priests mediate between God
and humanity. Until God personally entered history by taking to himself
a complete human experience, the levitical priesthood performed a legiti-
mate though often comparatively ineffectual function in salvation his-
tory. The incarnation of the Son of God, however, makes the saving real-
ity of God immediately and personally present in human form. Jesus
therefore supersedes all other merely human mediators, including Moses.
The incarnation also radically changes the character of priesthood. The
priesthood of the tribe of Levi, like all other priestly castes, separated its
members from the people and endowed them with a special sacral aura
and authority. Traditional forms of priesthood presuppose and re-enforce
a sharp distinction between the sacred and the profane. A priesthood
grounded in the incarnation, however, abolishes the distinction and sanc-
tifies the profane.
Jesus exercises, not a priesthood of sacral separation, but a priesthood
of total identification with humanity. By taking to Himself His own hu-
man experience, the Son of God identifies totally and permanently with
those whom He had come to save, even with the basest and most mar-
ginal.
Moreover, because the incarnation recreates humanity by rendering it
sinless, Jesus confronts a sinful world as a completely accessible priest.
Sin not only deforms humanity; it separates people from God and from
one another. The sinless Son of God experienced the separation which
the sins of others create. He experienced that separation most poignantly,
tragically, and violently on Calvary. His own sinlessness, however, kept
Him from creating barriers between Himself and others.
As we have seen in other contexts, during Jesus’ mortal ministry, His
sinlessness expanded His human heart to welcome everyone into the house-
hold of God: the poor, the marginal, the degraded, even the expendable.
He loved sinners. He even loved His enemies. During His mortal minis-
try, Jesus seems also to have envisaged the day when the new Israel which
He was beginning would include the Gentiles in its saving embrace.
This universalist strain in Jesus’ preaching and ministry takes on new

connotations in the light of the paschal mystery. The paschal mystery
ends the kenosis, the period of history during which God acted and suf-
fered within the limits of human experience. The risen Christ acts with
saving universality, dispensing the divine Breath to any who approach
Him in faith.
Jesus, therefore, exercises not only a priesthood of total identification
with humanity but a priesthood of total accessibility. No clerical barriers
separate Him from those He comes to save. His glorification only en-
hances His accessibility by making Him the efficacious source of a uni-
versal salvation.
Like many a pilgrim to the Holy Land, I experienced this truth stand-
ing on the soil of Israel. One day as I rejoiced in the opportunity to visit
the very land where Jesus had lived, ministered, died, and risen, a clear
and mildly ironic word came to me in prayer: “You did not have to come
here in order to find Me.” I felt gently rebuked.
The author of Hebrews saw clearly and correctly that the incarnation
culminates in the paschal mystery. The paschal mystery in turn discloses
the incarnation by revealing Jesus as the Breath-baptizer, as the source of
divine life and therefore as divine. Taken together, Calvary, resurrection,
and the mission of the Breath endow the paschal mystery with a saving
efficacy which transcends any merely ritual sacrifice. In other words, by
revealing the incarnation, the paschal mystery so redefines the meaning
of priestly mediation as to make all other priestly traditions superfluous
by comparison.
Jesus Himself looked upon His own death as a sacrifice. In His eucha-
ristic words He assimilated His blood to the blood used in sealing and
renewing the covenant. In effect, then, He expressed His trust that the
Father would use His death in order to deepen His disciples’ covenant
commitment and in order to establish a new bond of life between hu-
manity and God. The rite of atonement renewed the covenant by restor-
ing the bond of life between God and Israel. In alluding to His covenant
blood, therefore, Jesus implicitly compared His death to an atoning, rec-
onciling sacrifice.
On the cross, moreover, Jesus died to sin. All the coercive violence of
the Satanic principalities and powers of this world did nothing to dimin-
ish His loving obedience to the Father. The cross also gives new meaning
to Jesus’ priesthood of identification. The incarnate Son of God not only
took to himself His own human experience and thus shared the lot of
every other human; but by dying the death of a criminal He identified
totally with the dregs of humanity. He also transformed apparent death
and defeat into the supreme expression of divine saving love.
Redemptive suffering lies, therefore, at the heart of Christian priest-

hood. Through it, those who share in Christ’s priesthood mediate God to
the world by participating in and extending the atoning love of Christ
into the darkest and most sinful corners of a very dark and sinful world.
I shall return to this point later in other contexts.
The resurrection and mission of the Breath also transform the meaning
and efficacy of priestly service. The resurrection reveals Jesus’ divine au-
thority over the powers, while the Breath of the risen Christ comes to
empower humans to live the same kind of sinless life as Jesus did. More-
over, both the resurrection and the arrival of the Breath endow human
experience with a new kind of transcendence. The resurrection reveals
the goal of the process of graced transformation which Breath-baptism
begins.
The paschal mystery therefore also endows Jesus’ priesthood with yet
another kind of accessibility: accessibility to life with Christ in God. The
paschal mystery creates present sacramental accessibility to Jesus as well.
Baptism inaugurates the life-long experience of Christological knowing.
The eucharist advances that knowing by uniting one to Christ in the
experience of shared, Breath-filled worship which renews the new cov-
enant in Christ.
In other words, taken together both the incarnation and the paschal
mystery justify calling Jesus’ ministry “priestly,” not because Jesus func-
tioned like an ordinary priest, but because the incarnation, death, and
glorification of God’s Son together with His mission of His Breath con-
stitute a unique and privileged mediation of God to the world, a media-
tion which supersedes any merely ritual human act of priestly mediation.
An experiential construct of the trinity and of the hypostatic union
provides a sound doctrinal interpretation of these fundamental New Tes-
tament insights into the meaning and scope of Christian priesthood. In
an experiential construct of the trinity, the second person confronts be-
lievers as the spoken Word of God, as a divine communication, in virtue
of His obediential relationship to both the Father and the Breath. His
obediential relationship to the other divine persons does not in any way
call into question His co-equality with Them. Rather, it transforms Him
into the one through whom both the Father and the Breath act effica-
ciously upon creation. In the incarnation, They act through the Son in
order to save and redeem humanity by setting sinners in a life-giving
relationship with the entire Godhead.
The efficacious, obediential transformation of a human experience in
the second person of the trinity effects the incarnation. In the incarna-
tion, Jesus confronts the world as the finite, developing human experi-
ence of being a divine person. In Jesus’ human actions, the Son of God
acts. When Jesus speaks, a divine person speaks. When Jesus heals, the
very Son of God heals. When Jesus exorcises, a divine person exorcises.
When Jesus suffers and dies, the very Son of God suffers and dies.
As I have already suggested in other contexts, the paschal mystery ends
the period of the kenosis, that span of history when the Son of God acted
and suffered strictly within the limits of the human. The risen Christ
confronted those who saw Him with a humanity so transformed in God
that it functioned thereafter as the human channel of the divine Breath.
As Breath-baptizer, the glorified humanity of Jesus functions as the me-
diatorial source of a universal salvation. The gift of the divine Breath
saves us by drawing us into loving union with the supremely loving, so-
cial reality of the triune God.
As we have already seen, the paschal mystery discloses the very social
life of the deity: namely, the processions, self-emptying, and, mutual
self-donation of the divine persons. In disclosing the social life of the
triune God, the paschal mystery simultaneously reveals to us something
perpetually true about the way the triune God relates efficaciously to the
world: namely, the other members of the divine triad always act through
the second person of the trinity in dealing with created reality. The New
Testament inferred this truth quickly and correctly when it proclaimed
that the God who acted through Jesus to save the world also acted through
Him in creating the world and will act through Him in judging it.
Viewed experientially, therefore, the incarnate Son’s obediential rela-
tionship to the Father and to the Breath within the social life of the
Godhead transforms Him into the universal mediator, into the one
through whom they effect and communicate with created reality. Since,
however, mediation between God and the world defines the very consti-
tutive purpose of priesthood, in revealing the Son’s obediential relation-
ship to the Father and to the Breath, the incarnation also reveals His
unique and universal priesthood.
These insights also interpret the way in which we sinners experience
the divine Breath’s illumination. Theologians have traditionally called that
illumination “created grace.” The tern “created grace” designates the dif-
ference which a saving relationship with God makes in the growth of a
finite, developing human experience. Created grace differs from uncreated
grace, i.e., from the divine reality which functions as the source of saving
grace.
When, therefore, we sinners experience graced enlightenment, we do
not experience the mind of God directly. The mediated character of sav-
ing grace rules out any ontologistic interpretation of the enlightenment
of faith. We have no direct access to the ideas in the mind of God either
naturally of through the gracing of human experience.
Of course, all graced enlightenment has its origins in the divine Breath,
since She functions within the deity as the divine mind, as the origin of
God’s saving wisdom. Her enlightenment always reaches us, however,

through the mediation of the second person of the trinity, through His
efficacious communicative touch within prayer. The Church’s corporate,
efficacious mission by the risen Christ mediates to it the graced illumina-
tion of the Breath in a manner analogous to the way in which Jesus’
efficacious mission by the Father mediated to Him messianic enlighten-
ment and empowerment.
In a metaphysics of experience, decision creates the social links among
experiences. For us to experience anything, that reality needs first to act
upon us efficaciously and decisively. We cannot see anything until light
rays strike the retina of our eyes. We cannot feel anything which does not
touch us in some way. Because the divine Breath functions within the
Godhead as the eternal source of evaluation rather than as an eternal
source of decision, for Her to touch us decisively, She must do so through
the Son’s efficacious mediation. She acted through the Son’s efficacious
mediation in illumining those who saw the risen Christ. She continues to
act through His efficacious mediation in the gracing of every human ex-
perience.
Whenever, therefore, we experience created grace, we know ourselves
as touched efficaciously by God. Sometimes others mediate that touch
through their witness of faith. When that happens, however, we sense
that the person who witnesses stands in relationship to a deity who in-
vites us into a similar relationship. Sometimes too the divine touch reaches
us directly in the solitude of prayer. Sometimes it breaks into experience
suddenly and unexpectedly. However it occurs, that divine touch never
coerces us, never functions mechanically. It lures us lovingly with a graced
insight which takes its origin within the Godhead from the divine Breath,
who, as the divine mind, inspires the deity’s every saving purpose and
who serves in the Godhead as the quasi-locus of our graced transforma-
tion.
In powerful experiences of created grace, experiences which Ignatius of
Loyola called “consolation with out cause,” we know simultaneously the
efficacious touch of God and where it leads and invites us. Other less
dramatic graced transformations of experience require a “lingering out
sweet skill,” the gradual incremental gracing of a human experience
through alternative experiences of light and darkness, of consolation and
desolation. That alternation yields a progressive insight into the direction
in which the divine touch points and invites.28
The mediated character of graced experience entails that it yields no
immediate access to the divine mind. The light of created grace always
results from the saving touch of the divine mediator, of Jesus, the incar-
28. Cf. The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, translated by Louis J. Puhl, S.J.
(Chicago, IL: Loyola University Press, 1951), 313-344.
nate Word of God and great high priest of the new covenant. Put in the
more technical language of a metaphysics of experience, we always expe-
rience created grace, not as a divine interpretative symbol, but as a divine
communication. In the gracing of human experience the incarnate Word
functions as the communicator, the divine Breath as the interpretative
symbol whom He communicates. Created grace embodies our interpre-
tative and decisive response in justifying faith to the divine mediator’s
touch.29
As a consequence, we humans can on occasion misinterpret what the
Son of God seeks to communicate to us, just as we can misinterpret what
other humans try to communicate to us. For that reason, one needs to
29. I am suggesting in this argument, that when one interprets Jesus’ incarnational
priesthood in the light of a metaphysics of experience, it raises simultaneously
Christological, trinitarian, and anthropological issues. It raises these issues simulta-
neously because any theological interpretation of how we communicate with the
Christian God needs to give an account of the God who communicates, the incarnational
medium through which God communicates with us, and the way in which humans
experience and interpret that communication.
We face here a complex and thorny set of issues. In his excellent study, Christ and
the Spirit: Spirit Christology in Trinitarian Perspective (New York, NY: Oxford
University Press, 1994), Ralph Del Colle argues correctly and persuasively that
Augustinian trinitarian theology fails finally to coordinate adequately trinitarian and
Christological doctrine in a way which does justice to the New Testament witness to
God’s saving activity. In classic Augustinian trinitarian theology, except during the
incarnation, the trinity acts upon creation through the divine substance, the dynamic
principle of activity common to all three divine persons. In effect, such a theory rules
out in principle the ability of the Holy Spirit to act personally in the gracing of
experience.
Del Colle proposes a contemporary doctrinal reappropriation of Irenaeus’s meta-
phor of the two hands of God. According to Irenaeus, the Father acts upon creation
through two different divine channels, the Son and the Breath, who each act as one of
the “hands” of the Father.
I suggested above that history provides the laboratory for testing theological
hypotheses. It has already begun to test the doctrine of a two-handed God. Very early
in the evolution of trinitarian theology, the following question arose: If God acts with
two hands, do both hands do the same thing or does one do what the other does not
do? The second of these responses led in the direction of subordinationism by
suggesting that the Son does more than the Breath but less than the Father.
The Arian controversy therefore taught orthodox theologians to hold that when the
deity acts on creation, all three persons must act simultaneously or else forfeit their
divine co-equality. Augustine subsequently explained the divine co-activity by appeal-
ing to a divine substance common to all three persons, which functioned as the joint
source of all actions ad extra, i.e., aimed at creation. I have already suggested that one
can better interpret the metaphor of the two hands of God with doctrinal orthodoxy
if one portrays Jesus as the efficacious mediator of the Breath and Her as His mediation.
She conceives within the Godhead the saving enlightenment which the efficacious
touch of the second person of the trinity communicates to us with persuasive efficacy.
Moreover, the divine Breath functions as the quasi-locus within the Godhead for the
gracing of all human persons and of the communities they constitute.
take care to understand the Word of God correctly both by meditating

on His historical revelation in Christ and by carefully discerning the
movements of divine grace from other natural or sinful impulses. When
we misinterpret the Word God speaks to us in Christ, we run serious risk
of deviating from the divine will. When we recognize that misunder-
standing and persist in that deviation, we do in fact sin.
We sinful Christians can, moreover, institutionalize misunderstandings
of the Word spoken to us in Jesus Christ. Institutions give social sanction
to habitual patterns of human behavior. Sinful institutions sanction sin-
ful forms of behavior. Institutions, moreover, do not stand outside of
experience but inside of it to the extent that they shape us as experiences.
When institutions impinge on experience, they shape it both decisively
and persuasively. Sometimes they seek to shape experience coercively.
Institutionalized misunderstandings of the incarnate Word function, there-
fore, as a perennial example of concupiscence because baptized Chris-
tians experience them as distinct from their personal sins and yet as com-
ing from sin and leading to sin.
Over the centuries, Christian priesthood has received a variety of inter-
pretations and has taken a variety of institutional shapes. Not all these
interpretations agree. Some contradict one another. Hence, not all of
them can in fact co-exist socially with consistency. When institutions
point in contradictory directions, the need to distinguish between sinful
and sinless institutional impulses takes on heightened importance be-
cause a serious mistake could end by separating one from God.
In what concerns a sound doctrinal understanding of Christian priest-
hood, the letter to the Hebrews, as one of the canonical documents of the
New Testament, provides helpful norms for distinguishing sound from
unsound sacerdotal doctrine and innocent from sinful institutionalizations
of priestly ministry. Let us, then, begin to reflect on the doctrinal evolu-
tion of the Christian priesthood in the light of the insights into its pur-
pose and reality enunciated in Hebrews.
The author of the letter to the Hebrews predicates the superiority of
the new covenant to the old on the fact that the new covenant makes
better promises than the old. The Sinai covenant promised happiness
and prosperity in this life to the people of Israel; the new covenant prom-
ises life forever with God in heaven.
If the new covenant promises more, it also demands more. As Matthew
the evangelist saw, Christian discipleship replaces the negative commands
of the old Law with the ideals of the kingdom. Those ideals demand
more, not less, of human generosity.
Breath-baptism also endows the new covenant with a saving efficacy.
As both Paul the apostle and the author of Hebrews saw, laws written on
stone do not change human hearts and consciences; but receptivity to the
Breath of Christ does. Finally, the new covenant possesses a greater inter-
cessory efficacy because of the power with which the name of Jesus en-
dows intercessory prayer.
Because Jesus’ priesthood embodies the new covenant, it also incar-
nates that covenant’s fundamental moral demands. The vision of the king-
dom defines those demands. The kingdom envisioned an egalitarian com-
munity of mutual service. Priesthood in such a community differs there-
fore from ancestral and aristocratic institutionalizations of priestly minis-
try. Like all other priestly castes, the levitical priesthood marked one out
as the member of a religious elite. Jesus, by contrast, shares His priest-
hood with all those to whom He sends His Breath. The priesthood of
Jesus thus transforms the Church into the priestly people of God. All
Christians therefore participate in Jesus’ mediation of God to the world
by sharing in His Breath.
The people of God share corporately and fundamentally in Jesus’ priestly
ministry through shared growth in Christological knowing. Assimilation
to Jesus in the power of His Breath draws one into Jesus’ atoning sacrifice
by teaching weak and sinful humans to suffer, without sinning, both
human vulnerability and the consequences of sin. For that reason, every
eucharistic covenant renewal has a sacrificial character because in recall-
ing the atoning death of Christ, the Christian community recommits
itself to love a sinful world with the sinless, atoning love of Christ.30
Nowhere does the New Testament portray the leaders of the Christian
community as quasi-levitical cult priests. Hebrews, for example, offers
the most extensive reflections in the whole New Testament on the mean-
ing of Christian priesthood; and Hebrews insists over and over that the
utter uniqueness of a priesthood rooted in the incarnation of God and in
the paschal mystery makes every other kind of cultic priesthood superflu-
ous.
This study uses pragmatic logic in order to understand the meaning of
a doctrine of faith by articulating its practical consequences. Faith in the
unique priesthood of Jesus has as one of its important negative conse-
quences the unconditioned repudiation of the sin of clericalism. Let us
try to understand why.
Anyone commits the sin of clericalism who uses religious authority in
order to take advantage of others, to manipulate others, or to oppress
them in any way. The gospels tell us that the chief priests whom Jesus
confronted committed this sin. When Jesus rebuked their clericalism,
they responded by engineering His legal assassination.
The resurrection reverses the judgment passed on Jesus by Pilate and
by the temple priesthood. The resurrection therefore also endows with
30. Cf. Gelpi, Committed Worship, II, pp. 198-253.

divine sanction Jesus’ denunciation of the sin of clericalism together with

its concomitant sin of deicide.
At the heart of Christian revelation, therefore, lies an unequivocal di-
vine condemnation of all institutionalized expressions of clericalism as
the worst kind of sinful religious hypocrisy. One would like to believe
that clericalism could never take root in a religious community founded
on the unequivocal divine repudiation of clericalism. Unfortunately, how-
ever, history tells a very different story.
As I have already indicated, we possess no historical evidence which
suggests that Jesus, the lay prophet, ordained anyone. The principle of
multiple attestation makes it virtually certain that He chose the Twelve
and associated them with Him in His ministry; but those actions count
as prophetic gestures rather than as an ordination. (Mk 3:16-19; Mt
10:1-5; Lk 6:13-16; Acts 1:13; Jn 6:67; 1 Cor 15:5) During Jesus’ minis-
try the Twelve functioned symbolically as the patriarchs of the new Israel
which He was founding. Israel did not have Twelve matriarchs. Since,
then, historical precedent forced Jesus to choose only men, His act says
nothing about the gender exclusiveness of Church leadership structures.
Jesus headed a renewal movement within Palestinian Judaism which only
after Pentecost evolved into a Church. I deem it only possible that Jesus
promised the Twelve that they would exercise judicial authority in His
new Israel, since these texts could reflect the situation of the post-Easter
Church. Hence, the historical evidence that Jesus made such a promise
remains tenuous. (Mt 19:27-29; Lk 22:16) In a very attenuated sense,
then, the choice of the Twelve did give a very rudimentary but far from
definitive leadership structure to the new Israel.
Nor does Jesus’ command at Luke’s last supper—”Do this in memory
of Me”—count as an ordination. (Lk 22:19) The command sanctions
Christian eucharistic celebrations; but it ordains no one specific to pre-
side at them.
In Acts the disciples elect a replacement for Judas (Acts 1:12-26); but
at the subsequent death of the apostles we find no attempt to replace
them or to perpetuate the Twelve as an ecclesiastical institution. The
apostles functioned as the leaders of the first Christians. The Twelve be-
came apostles in the strict sense when they saw the risen Christ; but oth-
ers also functioned as apostles. The apostles consisted of those who saw
the risen Christ and whom He commissioned to testify to Him publicly.
Their authority derived from their encounter with the risen Christ and
from the fact that they actually founded local churches. The Twelve num-
bered among the apostles but so did others as well, like the apostle Paul.
The latter testifies to an apparition of the risen Christ to five hundred
people at one time. We have no idea how many of them functioned as
apostolic witnesses or how many women disciples numbered among them.
John’s gospel portrays Mary Magdalene as an apostle to the apostles; and

she may well have numbered as a member of the original apostolic col-
lege. (Jn 20:27-28)
The presbyterate, led by overseers (episkopoi), succeeded the apostles
collectively and functionally as Church leaders. Very early the laying on
of hands, which served a variety of ritual purposes, emerged as a way of
designating Church leaders. (2 Tm 1:8) This practice eventually evolved
into the rite of ordination. The first presbyterate probably included mar-
ried couples who presided over house churches. Rich widows may have
presided over churches which met in their houses, since they normally
performed the same hospitable acts as their husbands.31
The monepiskopos, a single bishop presiding like a parish priest over a
local church, took shape in the second century. Women deacons served
under the bishop at a time when the diaconate had more ecclesial promi-
nence and importance than the presbyterate; for until the fourth century,
presbyters served more as church elders rather than as eucharistic priests
and pastors in the current understanding of that term. With the rapid
expansion of the Church in the fourth century, presbyters began to repre-
sent the bishop by presiding at eucharists; and that practice, as it evolved,
eventually transformed them into parish priests and bishops into Church
administrators.
As the Papal Biblical Commission appointed by Paul VI reported in
1967, nothing in the New Testament warrants excluding women from
ordination. The conciliar document Dei verbum teaches that Church tra-
dition ought to hand on the New Testament faithfully. An examination
of Christian tradition suggests that the impulse to exclude women from
the clergy took shape in the fourth century; and that the impulse parallels
the growing clericalization of the episcopate. In other words, it exempli-
fies a disciplinary abuse rather than the faithful handing on of the tradi-
tion.
In the Latin church, the clericalism which arose in the fourth century
consolidated itself institutionally during the middle ages. It continues
today to mar the life of the Church, to undermine its credibility and that
of its leaders, and to oppress people sinfully and hypocritically in the
name of Jesus Christ, the divine anticlericalist.
When people sin, they usually find ways of convincing themselves of
the permissibility of their sinful ways. Jesus correctly called the pious
rationalization of sin hypocrisy. Clericalism, which may in fact exemplify
the most systematic institutionalization of sinful hypocrisy in the Church,
also generated its hypocritical pseudo-justifications.
31. Cf. Elizabeth Meier Tetlow, Women and Ministry in the New Testament: Called to
Serve (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1980).
The rationalization of clericalism poses as theology; but in fact it counts

as ideology rather than theology. Ideologies rationalize institutional in-
justice. Religious ideologies rationalize religious injustice and compound
that sin with the sin of hypocrisy.
In Committed Worship I summarized and documented the development
of ordained leadership in the Christian Church. I shall not, therefore,
repeat that summary and documentation here. We need, however, to face
some of the issues which that history raises.32
Strains in the fourth-century theological movement called “sacerdotal-
ism” rationalized an initial clericalization of the episcopacy. Sacerdotalism
emerged from the struggle between the episcopacy and the empire. It
sought to provide a clear rationale for keeping the emperor’s meddling
hands out of Church affairs. In that quest it failed; for in the eastern
empire the emperor so engaged himself in Church administration as to
earn in time the florid title “the thirteenth apostle.”
As the emperor transformed bishops into imperial judges and civil func-
tionaries, sacerdotalism also sought to remind those same bishops of the
sacredness of their calling. It also warned them against allowing imperial
power to corrupt them morally as it had already corrupted many other
imperial bureaucrats.
Sacerdotalism did well to try, though not successfully in the eastern
church, to maintain the separation between Church and state. It also did
well to hold up high religious and moral standards to bishops. It did well
to discern a qualitative difference between the priesthood of the ordained
and the priesthood of the rest of the believers. That difference results,
however, from the qualitative difference among the charisms, not from
any resemblance of Christian priesthood to the priesthood of Annas and
Caiphas.
Sacerdotalism erred when it invoked Old Testament prototypes in or-
der to rethink the meaning of the episcopacy. As the emperor politicized
the episcopacy, sacerdotalism began portraying bishops as the Christian
equivalent of those other earlier political clients of the Roman empire,
the levitical priests in Jerusalem.
As I have already indicated, the second Vatican council correctly teaches
that Christian tradition should hand on the New Testament witness. (Dei
verbum, 7-26) Sacerdotalism did not hand on the theology of priesthood
articulated in the letter to the Hebrews. Instead, sacerdotalism replaced
that theology with something else. It transformed bishops from the ser-
vant leaders of God’s priestly people into the quasi-levitical priests of the
new covenant. It thus replaced Jesus’ priesthood of identification with a
clericalized priesthood of sacral separation.

Fourth-century sacerdotalism understood episcopal authority as the

ecclesial counterpart of imperial authority. Sacerdotalism portrayed bishop
and emperor as both participating immediately in divine authority. The
emperor participated in divine authority in the secular realm, while bish-
ops participated directly in divine authority in the religious realm. This
line of thinking led with logical inevitability to patterning Church struc-
tures on imperial institutions and, during the middle ages, Christian lead-
ership on the mores of Gentile kings.
In other words, through its very struggle to assert its independence of
political manipulation, the fourth-century episcopacy found its
self-understanding increasingly politicized. Not all bishops yielded to the
allure of clericalism. Some suffered terribly in resisting the empire. Still,
the temptation to conceive ecclesiastical structures as the spiritual equiva-
lent of imperial institutions persisted.33
Another ideology helped rationalize the sin of Christian clericalism:
namely, hierarchicalism. A sixth-century Platonizing monk first formu-
lated this particular religious ideology. We know him as Pseudo-Dionysius
because he wrote under the pseudonymous name of Dionysius the
Aeropagite, whom Paul the apostle converted. (Acts 17:34)
A convinced Platonist, Pseudo-Dionysius believed that the Church on
earth must participate in the order of heaven. He found nine choirs of
angels in the Bible. He divided them by three and arranged the resulting
three groups of three choirs into a pattern which he called a hierarchy. He
defined a hierarchy as “a eternal, established principle of order.” More-
over, over the centuries, clericalizing ideologies have tended to portray
Church institutions as essentially fixed, unchanged, and unchangeable,
despite the manifest historical fact that they have evolved and will con-
tinue to evolve.
Pseudo-Dionysius’s angels diminished in spiritual acumen as one de-
scends the angelic hierarchical ladder. Moreover, Pseudo-Dionysius imag-
ined that grace must trickle down all nine angelic hierarchies before it
can enter the Church. Hierarchicalism projects analogous structures into
the institutional Church.
Pseudo-Dionysius arranged the Church on earth into two hierarchies
which imitate the order of the angelic hierarchies. The clerical hierarchy
contains first the bishop, then priests, and finally deacons. The lay hierar-
chy contains first religious, then lay people, and finally catechumens.
33. For a discussion of sacerdotalism, see: Gelpi, Committed Worship, II, pp. 86 ff. See
also: Kenan B. Osborne, O.F.M., Priesthood: A History of the Ordained Ministry in the
Roman Catholic Church (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1988); Nathan Mitchell, O.S.B.,
Mission and History: History and Theology in the Sacrament of Order (Collegeville, MN:
The Liturgical Press, 1982); Bernard Cook, Ministry to Word and Sacrament: History
and Theology (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1976).
Because the operation of the ecclesiastical hierarchies imitates the an-

gelic hierarchies, all motion in the Church trickles down from bishop to
priest and from priest to deacon. It then trickles down into the lay hierar-
chy. Religious, whose vows endow them with quasi-clerical elevation over
the laity, benefit first from the clerical mediation of divine grace. They
communicate it to the laity who in turn communicate it to the catechu-
mens.
By the time Pseudo-Dionysius wrote, the catechumenate had ceased
for all practical purposes to exist. As a consequence, the laity found them-
selves on the bottom rung of the hierarchical ladder. Over the centuries,
Pseudo-Dionysius’s hierarchical trickle-down theory of grace helped ra-
tionalize the reduction of the laity to total passivity within the Church.
Eventually, it transformed them into “Pray, pay, and obey” Catholics.
Hierarchicalism endorsed and re-enforced the clericalized priesthood
of separation which sacerdotalism had begun to rationalize ideologically.
Hierarchicalism also provided a rationale for the abuse of authority in the
Church by demanding that the Church grow always from the top down.
The medieval Latin Church used this hierarchical ideology in system-
atically clericalizing ecclesiastical structures. The process of clericalization
reflected in part a serious misunderstanding. The sixth century monk
who first imagined the Church as a trickle-down hierarchical structure
wrote, as I have already indicated, under the pseudonym of Dionysius
the Aeropagite, whom Paul the apostle converted in the first century. The
pseudonym betrayed medieval churchmen and schoolmen alike into ac-
cepting Pseud-Dionysius’s quaint and misguided account of Church or-
der as a description of first-century ecclesiastical discipline.34
Both sacerdotalism and hierarchicalism survive as clerical ideologies.
They both played a significant role in the debates of Vatican II, and they
continue to confuse that council’s implementation.35 During the papacy
of John Paul II, the Latin church has witnessed their systematic
re-institutionalization. Their survival and even enthusiastic cultivation
34. Cf. Gelpi, Committed Worship, II, pp. 89 ff. See also: Jean Colson, Ministre de Jésus-
Christ ou sacerdoce de l’évangile (Paris: Beauchesne et ses Fils, 1966); Albert Houssiau
and Jean-Pierrre Mondet, Le sacerdoce du Christ et de ses serviteurs selon les pères de l’église
(Louvain-le-neuve: Centre d’Histoire des Religions, 1990); Thomas F. Torrence, The
Mediation of Christ (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1992); William J. Carroll,
“Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite: 1960-80,” Patristic and Byzantine Review, 1(1982),
pp. 225-234; Yves Congar, O.P., L’écclesiologie du haut moyen âge: De Saint Gregoire
le Grand à la décision entre Byzance et Rome (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1968); Jean Marie
Roger Tillard, L’évêque du Rome (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1982).
35. Cf. Giuseppe Alberigo, Jean-Pierre Jossa, and Joseph A. Komonchak, The Reception
of Vatican II (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1987); Penny
Lernoux, People of God: The Struggle for World Catholicism (New York, NY: Penguin,
1989).
by clericalists requires that one confront the sin of clericalism as a doctri-

nal as well as a moral abuse. In fact, the second Vatican council sought to
declericalize ordained Church leadership. Vatican II did so by rejecting
in principle some of the least acceptable aspects of hierarchicalism.
Like sacerdotalism, hierarchicalism has some virtue to it. It correctly
recognizes that a world-wide Church needs to operate according to a
principle of subsidiarity; but it distorts a subsidiarity of responsibility
into blatant authoritarianism. In a sound understanding of Church
subsidiarity, the college of bishops has the primary responsibility for public
Church leadership, for formulating doctrinal consensus, and for presid-
ing over the Church’s pastoral needs. Priests assist the bishops in their
discharge of those responsibilities. All baptized Christians share responsi-
bility for seeing to the Church’s common good; but in deciding corpo-
rately how best to achieve the common good the buck stops with the
episcopacy. The bishop of Rome has a special responsibility of promoting
unity among the bishops while fulfilling his episcopal and patriarchal
responsibilities in a manner which allows the rest of the episcopal college
to see in him a mirror image of themselves.
A healthy Church grows not primarily from the top down, but prima-
rily from the bottom up, even though a sound understanding of Church
order must preserve the right and responsibility of Church leaders to
challenge the Christian community when it fails to live the gospel in
some significant way. The contemporary Roman church needs to repent
institutionally of clericalism and to relearn that truth. It also needs to
relearn a truth which the orthodox church never forgot: namely, the re-
ception of official Church teaching by the people of God gives it final
sanction. When official Church teaching ignores the non-reception of a
particular doctrine it breeds confusion by repeating an already discred-
ited teaching and betrays its clericalistic bias. The Latin tradition under-
stands doctrinal reception hierarchically and clericalistically as joint re-
ception by the pope and bishops only. The orthodox Church correctly
extends reception to include the people of God.
A small minority of conservative Integralists at Vatican II defended a
hierarchical, monarchical vision of the Church; but the great majority of
the bishops repudiated the unvarnished monarchical authoritarianism
which the Integralists defended. The council recognized the need for
subsidiarity in the Church. In the ecclesiology of Vatican II, the ordained
leaders of the Church do not function as the only channel of divine grace
to the laity. Nor do the laity relate to the ordained in an attitude of supine
and infantile passivity. The laity do not need to wait for the ordained to
tell them what to do. On the contrary, through example and through
gospel proclamation (which includes sacramental ministry), the ordained
seek to turn the laity to the Breath of Christ so that She by Her sanctify-
ing and charismatic inspirations can teach them how to serve one an-
other and the world. The ordained do not stand over the Church so much
as within it. They do not wield power over the Church but function
publicly and responsibly as the servants of the servants of God.36
Vatican II also rejected a hierarchical interpretation of religious life.
Instead of portraying religious as standing on a higher rung of spiritual
perfection than the laity, Vatican II portrayed religious life as one way of
going about both lay and ordained ministry. (Lumen gentium, 43)
Vatican II significantly advanced the work of correcting the doctrinal
errors of hierarchicalism; but it did not go far enough. The council con-
tinued to use the term “hierarchical” even though it rejected the sub-
stance of trickle-down hierarchicalism. Moreover, Vatican II also explic-
itly invoked fourth-century sacerdotalism in justifying the sacramental
character of the episcopacy. (Lumen gentium, 21) In my judgment, one
can indeed justify the sacramental character of the episcopal consecra-
tion; but one can do it on sounder theological terms than fourth-century
sacerdotalism.37
The Church will never purge itself fully of the sin of clericalism until it
purges its teaching of the ideologies which rationalize the institutional-
ization of clericalism. In order to do that, we Catholics need to revise our
popular theological understanding of Christian priesthood. That revi-
sion should advance in four steps.
First, we Catholics need to reclaim the theology of priesthood articu-
lated in the letter to the Hebrews and to reject the erroneous aspects of
the ideologies of sacerdotalism and hierarchicalism which supplanted it.
By that I mean we need to replace a sacral priesthood of clericalized sepa-
ration with a truly Christian priesthood of identification with humanity,
especially with the poor, the marginal, the suffering, the degraded, the
expendable. No other exercise of priestly ministry imitates that of Jesus.38
Similarly, we need to replace hierarchicalism with a predominantly
trickle-up version of Church subsidiarity. That transformation of ecclesial
self-understanding will require a further democratization of Church struc-
tures. It will require the clear formulation of an adequate bill of rights in
the Church. It will demand canonical procedures which ensure that prob-
lem solving in the Church takes place as much as possible at a local level.
Ending hierarchicalism will make necessary the formulation and enforce-
ment of adequate procedures for due process in resolving Church dis-
putes. Those processes need to respect the legitimate human and Chris-
36. For an analysis of the ecclesial visions which clashed at Vatican II, see: Gelpi,
Committed Worship, I, pp. 120-124.
37. Ibid., II, pp. 98-132.
38. Cf. Julien K. Mawule, Humanité et autorité du Christ-prètre: une approche exegetico-
théologique de Hé 2,5-18; 3,1-6 et 4.15-5,10 (Rome: Insititue Salesiano Pio IX, 1985).
tian rights of all concerned. Finally, the eclipse of hierarchicalism will

demand a strengthening of existing checks and balances in the world-wide
governance of the Church and will probably require the creation of oth-
ers. Finally, since the term “hierarchicalism” will probably always con-
note authoritarianism, we also, in my judgment, need to consign the
term “hierarchical” to the dust heap of failed religious concepts.39
Second, we Catholics need to replace clericalized patterns of thinking
with the clear and frank recognition that both the ordained and the lay
members of the Church participate in the priesthood of the Church as a
whole. Only the Church as a whole participates immediately in the priest-
hood of Jesus. When the risen Christ sent the Breath to create the Church
on Pentecost by an outpouring of the charisms, He did not send Her
only to the Twelve. She came to the whole community of disciples which
numbered at least one woman among them. Because the Breath first makes
the risen Christ present and active in the Church as a whole, the Church
as a whole participates causally in the priesthood of Christ prior to any of
its members. Both the baptized and the ordained acquire a priestly status
by participation in a priestly community. As a consequence, the Church
as a whole must mediate Christ to the world by entering into the saving
atonement which He began. The entire Church mediates the Breath to
her members. In the same way, men and women in the Church, whether
ordained or not, share in the priesthood of Christ by sharing in the priestly
mission of the universal Church.
Third, we need to recognize the charismatic basis of Church authority,
including the authority of the ordained. Anyone who exercises a charis-
matic ministry in the Church does so in virtue of his or her charismatic
competence to do so. Mother Teresa spoke and acted with authority within
the limits of her charismatic call to serve the poorest of the poor. Karl
Rahner spoke with theological authority in virtue of his charismatic com-
petence to teach.
Official Church leaders must also speak and act within the limits of
their charismatic competence. The charism of the ordained calls them to
corporate, public responsibility for securing the common good of the
Church as a whole and of regional and local churches and communities.
The ordained also have a special responsibility to hand on intact the ap-
ostolic witness without distortion and without replacing it with some-
thing else. Religious priests and lay religious minister especially to those
39. Cf. Leonardo Boff, Church: Charism and Power: Liberation Theology and the
Institutional Church (New York, NY: Crossroad, 1985) Boff correctly censures sinful
clerical abuses of power in the Catholic Church; but his prophetic denunciation tends,
in my judgment, to degenerate into an anarchical anti-institutionalism. We need to
reform Church institutions, not ignore or abolish them. Only the institutionalization
of sin requires abolition.
who fall through the cracks of diocesan structures. Lay apostles have a
special responsibility for Christianizing secular society. In their ministry,
priests and laity, whether religious or not, all speak and act with the au-
thority of their special charisms.
Fourth, we need to acknowledge that individuals within the Church
participate in its corporate priesthood in virtue of the particular charis-
matic calling which the Breath of Christ imparts to them. In other words,
we need to set aside the sacerdotalist and hierarchicalist assumption that
the ordained mediate the priesthood of Christ to the rest of the Church.
Rather the priesthood of the Church as a whole, its empowerment by the
Breath to mediate Christ to the world, mediates to both ordained and lay
Christians a share in Christ’s priesthood. Each particular charism speci-
fies how each member of the Church goes about exercising that priest-
hood in practice.
Any Christian, ordained or not, can commit the sin of clericalism. One
commits the sin of clericalism whenever one abuses religious authority in
order to oppress rather than to serve others. Because the ordained enjoy
special public responsibility for leading the Church, they, however, prob-
ably find themselves more often tempted to commit this sin than lay
Christians. In the last analysis, however, anyone in a position of public
leadership in the Church, whether ordained or not, can commit the sin
of clericalism.
Besides discouraging clericalistic behavior, especially in its leaders, the
Church also needs to declericalize its institutions. An institution, as we
have already seen, does not exist apart from the people who make it up.
An institution comes into being whenever groups of people act in identi-
fiable and socially sanctioned ways. One declericalizes the Church, then,
by withdrawing official sanction from hitherto sanctioned oppressive re-
ligious behavior and by calling to repentant accountability those who
engage in such behavior.
The second Vatican council correctly teaches that rights and duties in
the Church have charismatic grounding. In other words, the council as-
serts that anyone who has the gifts and competence to serve others in the
Church has a right to do so, while the Church has a duty to recognize
that right. (Apostolicam actuositatem, 3)
Barring Christians from the exercise of charisms which they actually
have received oppresses them. That means that anyone who has the gifts
to serve in a position of public leadership in the Church has a corre-
sponding right to expect the Church to recognize those gifts and give
them official scope for their exercise irregardless of their sex or marital
status.
In my judgment, both the historical record and the sinfully corrosive
influence of institutionalized clericalism from the fourth century to the
present render extremely dubious any attempt to invoke the uniformity

or even the alleged infallibility of tradition in order to exclude women
from ordained leadership. Rather than expressing the inspiration of the
divine Breath, who conforms Christians to Jesus, the divine anti-clericalist,
the rise of clericalism together with its multiple ideological pseudo-ra-
tionalizations institutionalize human sinfulness. Should not Catholics,
then, take seriously the all too real possibility that the exclusion of the
charismatically competent from ordained leadership institutionalizes, not
some divine imperative, but the sins of sexism and of clericalism?
The ordained lapse into clericalism when they act with hierarchical
authoritarianism. The authoritarian attempt to cut off prematurely the
legitimate discussion of disputed theological questions counts as sinful
and hypocritical clericalism. The use of episcopal appointments in order
to impose a particular ideology, especially a hierarchical ideology on the
Church as a whole, counts as the sin of clericalism. Church leaders have
the responsibility to dispute any doctrine in the Church which contra-
dicts its shared faith; but the punitive silencing of teachers without due
process counts as clericalism. For the Vatican curia to usurp the authority
of episcopal conferences counts as clericalism.
Clericalism undermines Church authority through abuse. Church lead-
ers cannot credibly summon secular authorities to respect the rights of
citizens and at the same time that they violate those same rights in deal-
ing with members of the Christian community. Church leaders cannot
credibly denounce sexism as a sin in secular society but hypocritically
accord it divine sanction in the Church. Though clericalists may try to
inculcate a double standard of morality, I find it difficult to believe that
God does. Double moral standards exemplify the kind of hypocrisy which
Jesus denounced unrelentingly. Nor can the ordained expect believers to
find Christ in their priestly ministry if they take Annas and Caiphas as
their role models.
The ordained also lapse into clericalism when they allow status and
privilege to separate them from the rest of humanity instead of imitating
Jesus’ priesthood of identification with the poor, the sinner, the mar-
ginal, the degraded, the expendable, the sinful. If necessary, the ordained
must even lay down their lives for those they serve, as did Oscar Romero
and the martyrs of the University of Central America, and as have count-
less Church leaders in other ages and lands. Too often, however, prepara-
tion for ordination socializes candidates for Church leadership into
clericalized, classist expectations and patterns or behavior. When prepa-
ration for ministry clericalized candidates for ordination, it turns them
into pious, “Pharisaical” hypocrites.
The preceding account of Jesus’ priesthood should, I believe, clarify
the intimate connection between His priestly and His prophetic minis-
tries. The hypostatic union makes Jesus’ prophetic ministry priestly by

transforming it into a privileged historical mediation of God. Jesus’ proc-
lamation of the kingdom makes His priesthood prophetic by undercut-
ting priestly clericalism. The incarnation reveals God as intransigently
anti-clericalist.
In the final chapter of this section, I shall reflect on two other related
aspects of Jesus’ ministry: His messianic dignity and His judicial author-
ity. As we shall see, both of these aspects of Jesus’ saving ministry also
flow from the hypostatic union. In addition, both engage His confronta-
tion with the principalities and powers of this world.
Chapter 14: Jesus, Messiah and Judge 469
Chapter 14
Jesus, Messiah and Judge
The Roman empire judged, condemned, and executed Jesus as a political
rebel and subversive. His disciples, however, proclaimed that His resur-
rection had reversed the judgment of both the temple and Rome, had
confirmed Jesus’ messianic authority, and had revealed Him as the
eschatological Son of Man divinely appointed to pass judgment upon the
kingdoms of this world. (Dan 7:13-14)
This chapter examines Jesus’ divine messianic and judicial authority. It
considers how those two aspects of His saving ministry set Him in direct
conflict with the kingdom of Satan as it takes institutional embodiment
in the principalities and powers of this world.
This chapter divides, then, into two parts. Part one ponders Jesus’ rela-
tionship to the messianism of His day. It then examines the way in which
the paschal mystery redefines the doctrinal meaning of Jesus’ messianic
dignity. Part two reflects on Jesus’ trial and condemnation by secular and
religious authority. It then probes the doctrinal implications of Jesus’ el-
evation through the paschal mystery to the dignity and authority of uni-
versal eschatological judge. Of necessity, then, section two will also re-
flect doctrinally on New Testament apocalyptic Christology.
(I)
We can take it as extremely probable, even certain, that Jesus of Nazareth
rejected secular, Davidic messianism. An apostolic church which pro-
claimed Jesus the Davidic messiah would hardly have recalled in its gos-
pels Jesus’ own refusal to play the Davidic messiah unless Jesus had in fact
eschewed the role.
We can also hazard a guess as to the reason why Jesus refused to don the
crown of a Davidic warrior king and battle the Roman empire in the
manner of another Judas Maccabaeus: namely, the use of military force
in order to establish God’s reign on earth contradicted some of the
kingdom’s most fundamental moral demands. The reign of God which
Jesus proclaimed founds the kingdom on authentic worship of the Fa-
ther. Moreover, it requires, as we have seen, mutual forgiveness and love
of enemies as the test of the authenticity of prayer. The kingdom does
indeed commit one to non-violent resistance to institutionalized evil and
oppression; but it refuses to establish God’s reign on earth through the
use of force and oppression. Had Jesus yielded to pressures to proclaim
Himself a Davidic warrior king, He would have contradicted the very
religious realities for which He stood and died.
One may, however, make a plausible case for the fact that Jesus did in
fact make qualified messianic claims. He certainly proclaimed God’s reign;
and He very probably believed that God’s reign was already arriving both
in His person and in His ministry of proclamation, healing, and exor-
cism. Moreover, the gospels make it at least plausible to suppose that
Jesus recognized in His own ministry signs that the messianic age had
arrived. (Mt 11:2-5; Lk 7:18-22)
Quite plausibly too, Jesus orchestrated His triumphal entry into Jerusa-
lem in a way which fulfilled the prophecy of Zechariah 9:9-10. If so,
then, in so staging the triumphal entry, He performed a prophetic ges-
ture in which He presented Himself as a different kind of messiah from
the war-like David. By entering the holy city astride a colt or donkey
instead of a war-horse, Jesus, not without a touch of peasant irony, acted
the part of a humble messiah and a man of peace, not that of a warlike Davidic
king. Jesus’ cleansing of the temple also made implicit messianic claims.
Jesus certainly suffered crucifixion as a messianic pretender. Only in
the paschal mystery, however, does He stand finally and fully revealed as
the messiah, the anointed one. The Breath of God anointed Jesus during
His ministry; but in His resurrection appearances Jesus confronted His
astonished disciples as “a life-giving Breath,” as a personal source of the
very Breath of God and of the divine life which She imparts. The risen
Christ’s gift and mission of the divine Breath reveals, therefore, that Jesus’
possesses Her, not as an ordinary prophet or anointed human leader, but
in eschatological plentitude, as Her personal divine source. That revela-
tion manifests Jesus’ personal divinity. It simultaneously reveals His mes-
sianic dignity by manifesting His divine messianic authority. That revela-
tion, however, radically redefines the very meaning of the “messiah,” the
“anointed one.”
The paschal mystery reveals and defines Jesus’ messianic dignity in two
ways. First, it reveals the hypostatic union; and, second, the hypostatic
union defines once and for all what intertestamental Jewish messianism
ought to have meant.
The resurrection reveals the personal divine authority with which Jesus
speaks and acts. Hence, by revealing the hypostatic union, the paschal
mystery also manifests retrospectively that Jesus conducted His mortal
ministry with unimpeachable divine authority. Because in the person of
Jesus, God speaks to us in human form, Jesus’ redefinition of the mean-
ing of messianism during His mortal ministry discloses to us God’s own
understanding of the providential saving role which God intended the
messiah to play in the history of salvation.
By revealing God’s own attitudes toward intertestamental Jewish
messianism, the paschal mystery purifies messianic hope of any sinful,
violent, or elitist elements which originally distorted it. By endowing the
crucified and risen Jesus with a divine, messianic authority, the hypo-
static union places Him above all the principalities, powers, and king-
doms of this world. At the same time that the incarnation reveals and
redefines Jesus’ “royal” authority, it simultaneously condemns the injus-
tice of the temple priests and of Pilate for crucifying the innocent Son of
God. The resurrection thus reverses the judgment passed upon Jesus by
the ecclesiastical and secular powers of this world. It unmasks that judg-
ment as both sinful and Satanic. In the light of the paschal mystery, there-
fore, those who condemned Jesus themselves stand condemned before
the tribunal of God. All four gospels make this same narrative point some-
what differently.
The paschal mystery, therefore, endows the term “messiah” with a tran-
scendent meaning which exceeds and heals the violent human hopes which
informed Davidic messianism. The paschal mystery heals the violence of
Davidic messianism by revealing the messiah as the suffering servant of
God whose innocent death atones for sin and whose sinless commitment
to suffer sin without sinning reconciles humanity to God. It also reveals
the messianic Son of God as the Word of God incarnate. In other words,
as a consequence of the hypostatic union, every aspect of Jesus’ saving
ministry illumines every other because the hypostatic union redefines
them all and endows them all with unique saving significance.
As in the case of Jesus’ prophetic and priestly ministry, then, His per-
son, His ministry, His death, His resurrection, and His mission of the
Breath all combine in order to redefine the meaning of the term “mes-
siah,” or “anointed one.” Jesus’ anointing by the Breath of God manifests
that He alone possesses Her in eschatological abundance because He alone
sends Her with and from the Father to create the eschatological age. That
sending reveals the eternal fact that the mutual love of Father and Son
“spirate”1 the divine Breath within the Godhead. The hypostatic union
lends divine sanction to that historical and eschatological redefinition of
messianic authority.
Indeed, the hypostatic union makes it clear that in invoking Old Testa-
ment categories in order to understand the paschal mystery, the first
Christians did not in fact project onto divine revelation a meaning de-
rived from the past, as Schillebeeckx’s nominalism leads Him at times to
suggest. Rather, the eschatological newness of the incarnation redefined
the saving meaning of the Law, of the prophets, of messianic hope, and of
salvation itself.2
1. The term “spiration” derives from medieval trinitarian theology which invoked it as a
technical term for the divine Breath’s procession within the trinity.
2. Cf. P. Beskow, Rex Gloriae: The Kingship of Christ in the Early Church (Stockholm:
Almquist & Wiksell, 1962).
All feminist theologians correctly deplore the Church’s sexist discrimi-

nation against women. Many correctly deplore sexism as irreconcilable
with the radically egalitarian vision of the kingdom which Jesus embod-
ied and proclaimed; and they argue that despite the sexism of the institu-
tional Church, women can still find salvation in Christianity. In some of
its expressions, African-American womanist theology downplays the male-
ness of Jesus and depicts Him as the savior who freely suffered in its
extremest form the tragedy of the human condition. Radical feminists
have, however, charged that Christians worship the maleness of Jesus and
that women must look for salvation in some other form of religion.3
Besides giving evidence of proceeding on occasion from a reverse sex-
ism as deplorable as sexist discrimination against women, the charge that
Christians worship masculinity misrepresents the truth about Christian
faith. Christians do not adore and have never adored any creature, whether
male or female. Christians adore the divine person of the second person
of the trinity and the divine reality of the other persons He reveals. Di-
vine persons have no sex.
Nor should one interpret the incarnation as the deification of male-
ness. First of all, such an interpretation commits the essence fallacy. It
assumes that the incarnation consisted in the union between the second
person of the trinity and the essence of masculinity. In fact the incarna-
tion exemplifies an historical and eschatological process. In the incarna-
tion, the second person of the trinity appropriated a developing human
experience, whose full development culminated in resurrection. In addi-
tion, such an interpretation of the incarnation ignores the “angelic” char-
acter of the risen body. In endorsing Pharisaical belief in the angelic char-
acter of the risen body, Jesus proclaimed that resurrection transforms
human bodies as we know them in ways which cause them to transcend
all gender difference. He rebuked the crude imaginings of the Sadducees
who spoke of copulation in heaven. (Mk 1:18-27; Mt 22:23-33; Lk
21:27-40) The New Testament leaves the precise nature of the risen body
vague; but its “angelic” character does make sexual identity irrelevant. In
other words, not only does the union of the second person of the trinity
with a developing human experience exemplify an historical and
eschatological process; but that process culminates in a transformation
which places Jesus’ humanity beyond all gender difference.4
3. For a summary of feminist Christological reflections, see: William M. Thompson, The
Jesus Debate: A Survey and Synthesis (New York, NY: Paulist, 1985), pp. 375-382; see
also, Jaquelin Grant, White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christo-
logy and Womanist Response (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1989); Elizabeth
Schüssler-Fiorenza, “Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation,” Harvard theological
Review,90(1997), pp. 343-358.
4. I note in passing that the position developed in these volumes can enter into dialogue
with other feminist concerns. Like feminist theology it focuses on experience; and it
Moreover, the supreme perfection of the three divine persons redefines

and qualifies any images or concepts which we may apply analogously to
Them. Those images reveal to us something true about God; but they
point to a divine reality which infinitely transcends the images them-
selves. Only a person who has failed to think about the divine reality with
any depth would apply finite images or concepts to God literally. If or
when the literal application of created images to God occurs, it expresses
muddled thinking and human confusion, not the shared faith of Chris-
tians.
In other words, even though Jesus walked this earth as a male, the
transformation of humanity which the resurrection effects places even
His humanity beyond sexual distinctions as we know them. Anyone who
would regard Jesus’ glorified humanity as male would commit the same
theological blunder which Jesus rebuked in the Sadducees: they would
fail to recognize that resurrection transforms the human body in ways
which place it beyond our present experience of gender and of gender
differences. The New Testament leaves us in the dark concerning the
precise character of the risen body; but it leaves no doubt that risen bod-
ies will differ radically from the bodies we construct according to genetic
codes.
Nevertheless, anyone who deplores the sin of sexism can, in my judg-
ment, find saving significance in the very maleness of Jesus. That saving
significance does not consist in the divinization of Jesus’ masculinity but
in the fact that in the incarnation God died in the flesh to all forms of
human sin, including the most common embodiments of sexist bigotry.
Sexism of any kind dehumanizes those who practice it. Institutional-
ized sexism, for example, ordinarily takes the bigoted form of degrading
women and of discriminating unjustly against them. As a consequence,
the male of the species usually succumbs to destructive sexist attitudes
more easily and more frequently than women. The latter tend to interior-
ize institutionalized sexism as self-hatred rather than hatred for others,
although the phenomenon of reverse-sexism shows that they, like males,
experience no exemption from the destructive effects of original sin and
concupiscence. The mere possession of a masculine gender does not, of
offers a more systematic construct of experience than feminists have to date produced.
Like feminists, this Christology takes embodiment very seriously and portrays the body
philosophically as the immediate spatio-temporal environment from which the person
emerges. The position espoused in these pages endorses the feminist critique of dualism
and of hierarchicalism; and, by endorsing an experiential metaphysics of community,
it also takes into account feminist concern with mutuality and social location. [Cf.
Susan A. Ross, “Feminist Theology: A Review of the Literature,” Theological Studies
56(1955), pp. 327-341.] I have, moreover, developed all these positions by drawing on
the insights of American philosophers of the male persuasion. That fact leaves me
doubting the gender specific character of all of the preceding feminist themes.
course, automatically make one a sexist; but the personal interiorization

of institutional forms of sexist bigotry does, whether it occurs in secular
society or in the churches.
In Jesus’ vision of the kingdom, men and woman both share the same
dignity as disciples and relate as equals, as members of the same divine
family, as people on the same social footing, as sisters and brothers in the
Lord. As in the case of Mary, Jesus encouraged woman to “choose the
better portion” by living like any other disciple. Jesus even scandalized
His contemporaries by including women in His traveling entourage of
close disciples. He gratefully accepted the monetary support of Mary
Magdalene and of other well-to-do women who joined the inner circle of
His disciples, to the scandal of Jesus’ own contemporaries. The kingdom,
therefore, challenges both women and men to claim their full dignity as
children of God in repentant mutual forgiveness and mutual reconcilia-
tion. In other words, it calls for an end to the battle of the sexes, which
some expressions of feminism seem bent on perpetuating.
As we have seen, the incarnate Son of God recreated and restored hu-
manity through a lifetime of sinless living. In the process, He also recre-
ated and redefined the meaning of masculinity by dying to male ma-
chismo with its arrogant swagger and penchant for violence. In dying to
sexism as a male and by sending His Breath to teach all people to put on
His mind, Jesus also called into existence a community of faith which
embodies His sinless vision, including its repudiation of sexism. When,
therefore, the Christian community acquiesces in and sanctions either
sexism or reverse sexism, it gives serious scandal by its rank religious hy-
pocrisy; for it proclaims one religious reality while embodying its contra-
diction.
Jesus not only subverts a stereotypical understanding of macho mascu-
linity, but He also subverts any traditional understanding of a king. Jesus
proclaimed, as John Dominic Crossan has felicitously phrased it, “a king-
dom of nuisances and nobodies.”
The kingdom of God effects the messianic reversal of values. The king-
dom transforms the rich and the powerful into the slaves of the poor and
disenfranchised, and it elevates the slaves, the marginal, the poor, the
degraded, the expendable to the status of those most honored and cared
for. Leaders in God’s kingdom must renounce the ways of “Gentile kings”
who oppress those they rule by lording it over them. Instead, leaders in
God’s kingdom must imitate the loving self-abasement of God which
they contemplate in a crucified messiah. The kingdoms of this world
crave power and wealth; and they wrest it violently from others. Jesus
proclaims a classless kingdom of mutual forgiveness, of non-violent atoning
love, and of gratuitous sharing with all, especially with those in greatest
need.
The cross subverts most radically the traditional meaning of the term
“king.” The charge on Jesus’ cross read “Jesus of Nazareth: the King of
the Jews.” As the Beloved Disciple with his habitual irony saw, even in
executing Jesus unjustly as a criminal, the Roman governor and official
representative of the empire in Palestine nevertheless officially proclaimed
the true messiah. The true messiah confronts the world as the crucified
God. Moreover, as the Beloved Disciple also saw, the atoning love which
Jesus embodied on the cross demonstrated finally and unequivocally the
other-worldly character of the kingdom of God.
Besides the crucifixion, the resurrection and sending of the Breath also
subvert the traditional meaning of “king.” They reveal the divine charac-
ter of Jesus’ authority and person at the same time that they manifest the
full scope of His atoning love. In His revelation as divine, Jesus responds
to the crime of deicide, not with violent retaliation, but by sending His
Breath in forgiveness so that She might take away the sins of the world.
She does so, moreover, precisely by teaching humans to embrace the sinless,
topsy-turvy values and ideals of God’s kingdom.
For all these reasons, in dealing with Jesus’ messianic dignity, I tend to
oppose the replacement of the traditional title “king” with the more ab-
stract and allegedly gender-inclusive term “sovereign.” Those who pro-
mote such verbal gymnastics may be acting out of good intentions; but,
in my judgment, they give evidence of missing the tensive symbolic rich-
ness and broadly subversive character of proclaiming the crucified crimi-
nal who proclaimed God’s egalitarian reign the real king of the universe.
Properly understood as a Christological term the title “king” in its appli-
cation to the Crucified says everything which “sovereign” intends to say
about gender inclusiveness. In fact, the term “king” when re-interpreted
in the light of the incarnation says even more by addressing broader and
more universal justice issues which include but go beyond sexism.
Faith in Jesus the messiah, therefore, sets one in prophetic opposition
to any human institution which contradicts the moral demands of life in
the kingdom. Indeed, faith in the divine kingship of an executed crimi-
nal transforms Christianity, when systematically lived, into a politically,
economically, and culturally subversive movement. Never in the entire
course of human history has any cultural, economic, or political arrange-
ment of society which humanity conceived on its own ever even approxi-
mated the kingdom of God which Jesus proclaimed and embodied both
in His ministry and in the paschal mystery. It takes a universalizing,
grace-inspired, forgining, divine love to create the kingdom, a love which
human nature, left to itself finds impossible.
When, therefore, the Church betrays the kingdom by institutionaliz-
ing sexism and other forms of oppression, like the medieval benefice sys-
tem, it embodies a crude religious hypocrisy which belies its verbal pro-
fessions of faith. Jesus repudiated sexism, and He excoriated hypocrisy. In

the present context, however, it perhaps suffices to note that medieval
artists spoke a prophetic word when, among the heads of those roasting
in hellfire, they included several wearing miters, and an occasional papal
tiara.
In the final chapter of this study, I shall analyze some of the forces in
the United States which, by gospel standards qualify as antichrist. Before
reflecting on the ways in which commitment to Jesus Christ in faith trans-
forms the moral dimensions of natural conversion, however, I need to
explore one final dimension of Jesus’ saving ministry: namely, His activ-
ity as eschatological judge. As we shall see, Jesus’ judicial authority also
sets Him in irreconcilable opposition to the oppressive kingdoms of this
world.5
(II)
The power elites of Jesus’ day, both religious and secular, judged Him
dangerous, subversive, and intolerable. They therefore conspired to bring
about His legal assassination. As we have just seen in the preceding sec-
tion of this chapter, the first Christians proclaimed that the paschal mys-
tery had reversed that human judgment of condemnation and had vindi-
cated everything which Jesus proclaimed and embodied. In addition,
kerygmatic Christology very quickly discovered in the paschal mystery a
revelation of Jesus’ universal, apocalyptic, judicial authority.
The letters to the Thessalonians furnish us with the earliest Christo-
logical reflections we possess. In them, Paul teaches that, as Lord and
5. Cf. Christian Duquoc, Messianism de Jésus et discretion du Dieu (Geneva: Labor et Fides,
1984); Peter Stuhlmacher, Jesus von Nazareth Christus des Glaubens (Stuttgart: Calwer
Verlag, 1988); Martinus de Jonge, Jesus, the Servant Messiah (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1991); Margaret Barker, The Great Angel: A Study of Israel’s Second
God (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992); Otto Betz, Jesus der Messias
Israels: Aufsätze zur biblischen Theologie (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohn, 1987); Arthur W.
Kac, The Messianic Hope: A Divine Solution for the Human Problem (Baltimore, MD:
Reese Press, 1975); Walter Kasper, ed., Christologische Schwerpunkte (Düsseldorf:
Patmos Verlag, 1980); George A. Riggan, Messianic Theology and Christian Faith
(Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1967); James H. Charlesworth, ed., The Messiah:
Developments in Earliest Judaism and Christianity (Minneapolis, MI: Fortress, 1992);
Ralph Patai, The Messiah Texts (Detroit, IL: Wayne State University Press, 1979);
Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York, NY: Schocken Books,
1971); Edouard Massaux, La venue du messie: messianisme et eschatologie (Paris: Desclée
de Brouwer, 1962); Joseph Klausner, The Messianic Idea in Israel from Its Beginning to
the Completion of the Mishnah, translated by W.F. Stinespring (New York, NY:
Macmillan, 1955); Nathan Peter Levinson, Der Messias (Stuttgart: Kreuz Verlag,
1994); S. Mowinckel, He That Cometh, translated by G.W. Anderson (New York, NY:
Abingdon, 1954); J.C. O’Neill, Who Did Jesus Think He Was? (New York, NY: E.J.
Brill, 1995); D. Lauenstein, Der Messias: Eine biblische Untersuchung (Stuttgart: Verlag
Urachhaus, 1971).
messiah, the crucified and risen Jesus will one day return to judge the
entire world. The Book of Revelation closes the New Testament. It proph-
ecies the Lamb’s ultimate victory over Rome and over Satan in all his
human and institutional embodiments. How, then, ought one to inter-
pret doctrinally New Testament apocalyptic Christology?
Final judgment belongs to God alone. The proclamation of Jesus as the
one who passes final judgment on the world implies therefore His divin-
ity. In other words, from a doctrinal standpoint, the hypostatic union
grounds Jesus’ judicial authority just as it grounds and explains every
other aspect of His saving work.
As we have seen, the hypostatic union reveals the second person of the
trinity as the spoken Word of God. In Jesus God Himself proclaims to a
sinful humanity the way of salvation. That proclamation embodies God’s
saving intentions. It reveals to us iconically the very mind of God. As
universal, divine judge, Jesus will one day call the world to accounting
for its response to the message of salvation which He personally pro-
claimed, embodied, mediated, and sanctioned with divine messianic and
priestly authority.
The fourth gospel tells us that the incarnation begins the final judg-
ment, because humanity stands collectively and individually accountable
to God for the way in which it responds to the divine love incarnate in
Jesus. The incarnation, however, only begins God’s final, eschatological
struggle with the forces of evil and sin. Empowered by the Breath of the
risen Christ, the Church prolongs collectively the prophetic mission of
Jesus. Like Him the Church demands that humanity hear and respond to
the saving Word which Jesus embodies and communicates. Since, more-
over the risen Christ acts wherever His Breath does, through the mission
of the community which He founds, the risen Christ Himself prolongs
historically in space and time the divine judgment begun in His ministry
and divinely sanctioned in the paschal mystery.
Judgment, then, is already happening here and now in the choices which
humanity makes for or against the incarnate God. Those who respond to
the Breath of God by choices which conform them to Christ have no
reason to fear His final judgment of condemnation. On the contrary,
they long for ultimate vindication before His throne of grace. Only those
need fear divine retribution whose personal and collective choices trans-
form them into Anti-Christ.6
The universal scope of the salvation proclaimed in Christ endows the
divine struggle against sin and evil which the incarnation begins with
cosmic dimensions. Because God seeks to save all people, all will one day
6. Cf. Marie-Louise Gubler, “Die Auferstehung der Toten und das Weltgericht: Zur
Entstehung der Neutestamentliche Centralbotschaft,” Diakonia: Internationale
Zeitschrift fuer die Praxis der Kirche, 27(1966), pp. 150-161.
answer to God for the way in which they have responded to the Breath of
the risen Christ.
More than individuals will answer to the divine judge. Institutions will
also stand accountable because in the last analysis institutions simply con-
sist in people acting in socially sanctioned ways. Like personal choices,
institutional choices and sanctions can embody the same saving reality as
Jesus. They can also prescind from that reality; and they can contradict it
sinfully.
Natural institutions prescind from the historical self-revelation of God.
They sanction legitimate concerns and values, but they confine their scope
to this-worldly goods. Like individuals, however, they exhibit radical vul-
nerability to the forces of original sin and concupiscence.
Marriage and the family, for example, exemplify two of the most an-
cient of all natural human institutions. It would be hard, however, to find
two institutions more vitiated by human sinfulness. How many crimes of
violence occur in the family! In this country, child abuse, substance abuse,
sexism, divorce, the feminization of poverty, physical violence and capi-
talist exploitation all combine to infect and corrupt familial relationships.
Perhaps even more than individuals, natural institutions find it very
difficult to preserve their natural innocence. The institutionalized forces
of sin and oppression distort, warp, and manipulate natural institutions
to sinful ends. Those same forces corrupt even religious institutions, which
have graced resources for resisting sinful contagion. Natural institutions
which eschew those resources succumb to sinful institutional pressures
even more readily.
As we have seen, during the last age of salvation, Christians do not
experience the future simply as a complex of alluring but inefficacious
possibilities. Christian hope perceives the future as a reality, as the saving
approach of God in the Breath of the risen Christ. The incarnation re-
veals that the God of the future always draws near to humanity through
Christ, through the Word spoken in Jesus, in the enfleshed second per-
son of the trinity. Even now both the Father and the Word continue to do
so in the gift of His Breath.
Christian apocalyptic longing does more, then, than dream nightmar-
ish and unrealistic dreams. Christian apocalyptic longing expresses Chris-
tian hope; and Christian hope discerns the shape of the future through
sensitivity to the present saving action of the God who is our future.
Nevertheless, Christian apocalyptic does well to portray the last age of
salvation as a cosmic struggle between the God of the future and the
embodied, institutionalized forces of evil. The first and last gospels both
insist with special rhetorical emphasis on the reality and inevitability of
that struggle. Both gospels proclaim that in a sinful world conflict be-
tween Christ and Anti-Christ defines the way in which Christian revela-
tion inevitably happens.
Christian visions of the end time do not offer newspaper accounts of
the end of the world. They do express radical confidence and trust that
the finite human forces of evil and sin, even in their most corrupt and
corrupting institutional embodiments, can never finally triumph over a
saving God. Christian visions of the end time proclaim in the face of
institutional monuments to human greed, hypocrisy, lies, violence, and
oppression that their power, compared to the divine power revealed in
the resurrection of Jesus, pales to insignificance. The final victory no more
lies with them than it did with Pilate and the chief priests in Jesus’ day.
Even if the forces of Anti-Christ do their worst, even if they slaughter and
oppress the saints of God, the saints, in and through their innocent suf-
fering and oppression, claim the victory because their sinless suffering
conforms them to the redeeming and victorious Christ.
In the very starkness of the contrast which it draws between the forces
of light and the forces of darkness, Christian apocalyptic makes another
important doctrinal point: namely, those who do not actively oppose the
forces of Anti-Christ will soon find themselves co-opted and corrupted
by them. The Christian victory through suffering has nothing to do with
supine passivity in the face of evil. It requires one instead to confront the
forces of darkness prophetically and non-violently. The forces of light
must confront the forces of evil both actively and non-violently, because
those who oppose sinful violence with sinful violence do not oppose the
Anti-Christ. Instead, by endorsing the tactics of Satan, they join forces
with the prince of darkness.
The Christian struggle against the principalities and powers breeds
eschatological longing. Those who confront the Satanic beasts of sin, vio-
lence, and oppression in all of their personal and institutional incarna-
tions stand face-to-face with the mystery of iniquity. In that confronta-
tion, they long with all their hearts for the vindication of Christ’s cause.
They cry out to God for the crucifixions to end: Maranatha, come, Lord
Jesus.
In longing for the ultimate dawning of salvation, Christians crave a
world purified of sin, of oppression, of sinful dissent, and of injustice.
They therefore long for a universe which even graced human striving can
never create.
Christians do not prolong Christ’s prophetic announcement of God’s
reign because they hope to succeed better in that proclamation than He.
Christian apocalyptic hope promises not success but salvation. It antici-
pates the cross; and it does not shrink from it. The environments of sav-
ing grace which the Church provides people on pilgrimage into God
offer oases of life, of love, of reconciliation, of healing, and of hope in a
desert of death, violence, hatred, war, and despair. They create the Pauline
plerôma.
Because, however, even the most life-giving graced human environ-
ments fall far short of the fullness of salvation, Christians long for the
second coming of Christ and for the descent of the heavenly Jerusalem.
They recognize that only the God who promises and is in fact effecting
salvation in Christ can save the world finally and completely. Ultimate
salvation requires that God create a total environment of grace very dif-
ferent from this graced yet sinful world.
The vision of the new Jerusalem which closes the book of Revelation
enunciates the last word which sacred scripture speaks to us about the
dawning future. That vision tells us that our saving God will transform
the human race into a living temple suffused with divine light. With
good reason, the image suggests that in the end only the reality of the
triune God can provide the sinless environment of grace for which the
saints still embattled with the forces of Anti-Christ long.
Those, then, who enter into the compassionate atonement of Christ,
those who suffer this world of sin and oppression without sinning con-
quer human sin and fragmentation with a consent to divine beauty in-
carnate; and that consent prepares them to share finally in the mutual
consent of love which unifies the social life of the triune God.
Humanity must answer personally and collectively to God for its re-
sponse to the Word spoken to it in Christ. Moreover, as the one through
whom the Father and Breath act whenever They act upon creation, Jesus
Himself will demand that response. For that reason He confronts the
world as the apocalyptic Son of Man, as the one divinely appointed to
pass judgment on the human race and on its institutions.
God saves the world by evoking from human hearts consent to the
divine excellence incarnate in Jesus. Salvation therefore requires consent
to the moral demands of life in the kingdom. Those who embody the
kingdom die united to God through the Breath-inspired love of Christ.
Those who set themselves in irreconcilable opposition to God’s kingdom
walk the path to perdition. The mediocre try to waffle. The diversity of
possible human moral responses to the will of God embodied in Jesus
thus makes inevitable doctrinal faith in heaven, purgatory, and hell. Viewed
experientially, heaven, purgatory, and hell all function as limit concepts.
Hell, for example, foresees the ultimate consummation of lives lived in
grossly sinful contradiction of God’s saving will. The doctrine of hell
simply takes to its logical moral conclusion a pattern of evil like that
incarnate in Nazism or in American racist bigotry. The inhabitants of
hell must choose to dwell there by pitting themselves in irreconcilable
opposition to the God revealed in Jesus Christ. Anyone who would make
that terrible option would experience the approach of divine holiness,
not as a healing, saving event, but as a hideously terrifying threat to ev-

erything which they have chosen to incarnate. Moreover, by opposing
God’s saving initiatives, the tenants of hell also live in complete vulner-
ability to all the tormenting forces of evil which, like them, refuse the
offer of divine forgiveness and reconciliation. If the gates of hell do have
locks, the key probably turns from the inside.
Heaven designates the ultimate consummation of Christological know-
ing, of practical assimilation to Jesus in the power of His Breath. Since we
know the God incarnate in Jesus by loving both Him and those whom
He loves, those who choose to live in heaven will experience that love
brought to its perfect consummation. Pauline apocalyptic and the book
of Revelation both agree on this point. When the knowing which is lov-
ing reaches perfection, theologians traditionally call that experience “the
beatific vision.” (DS 1000-1001)
The idea of purgatory results from Christian reflection on the ultimate
fate of the mediocre. The doctrine of purgatory predicts that those who
die in fundamental union with God but still attached to small, sinful
idols must experience the final purgation of all sinful dissent before they
can enjoy perfect loving union with God in heaven. The fire of divine
holiness must still purify their hearts, minds, and consciences. (Cf. DS
1546, 1582, 1820)
The doctrinal repudiation of the vindictive God popularized by atone-
ment Christology requires also that one purge one’s doctrinal account of
hell and of purgatory of any hint of divine vindictiveness. The God who
suffered compassionately with the crucified Son of God on Calvary takes
no pleasure in tormenting others, not even sinners. In the end, those who
choose sin and reject God’s offer of reconciling forgiveness torment them-
selves with the destructive consequences of their own choices. Moreover,
the unrepentant sinner quite correctly and realistically experiences the
approach of divine holiness, beauty, goodness, and truth as a threatening
and terrifying judgment.
Will anybody go to hell? Will everyone finally go the heaven? In the
past, theologians of predestination cheerfully consigned large segments
of humanity to eternal barbecuing by a vengeful God. Nowadays, theolo-
gians show renewed interest in apokatastasis, i.e., in the belief that the
God who wills the salvation of all will one day get His way, if not in this
life then in the next.7
In fact, theologians who presume to pass judgment on the final state of
anyone go beyond the historical revelation which we have received; for
that revelation says nothing finally about who will in fact enjoy ultimate
salvation. The revelation of God in Christ does warn that people can by
7. Cf. John R. Sachs, “Current Eschatology: Universal Salvation and the Problem of
Hell,” Theological Studies, 52(June, 1991), pp. 227-254.
their own free choice put themselves in hell; but it does not tell us whether
any have so chosen or if anyone will choose that kind of ultimate moral
self-destruction.
Worse still, those theologians who try to insure either the salvation of
all or the damnation of some violate a fundamental moral precept of the
new covenant in Christ: “Do not judge, and you will not be judged.”
Judgment lies, finally, with Jesus, with the divine Son of Man. Instead of
talking about things of which they finally know nothing, theologians
would do better to leave final judgment in His all too capable hands. Like
Job, they would do well to repent of prating about matters beyond their
scope and sit with their fingers on sealed and silent lips.
Those who leave judgment in divine hands by that act of trust pro-
claim Jesus the Lord of history. The incarnate God presides over human
emergence with the saving power to transform even repented sin into
grace. We know too that Jesus yearns to keep even the least of God’s little
ones from perishing. Whether they will in the end cooperate remains an
open question because it engages human freedom.
The reflections on doctrinal Christology developed in this second vol-
ume have examined two interrelated issues. They have pondered how the
hypostatic union grounds and unites Jesus’ saving ministry; and, in the
process, these doctrinal considerations have clarified in an initial way the
relationship of doctrinal Christology to practical Christology. I therefore
conclude these reflections with a few final observations on these two in-
terrelated themes: namely, the unity of Jesus’ saving ministry and the
relationship between doctrinal and practical theology.
I have argued in this doctrinal section that a foundational Christology
authenticates Chalcedonian Christology. I have also defended the posi-
tion that a realistic, triadic, social metaphysics of experience makes
Chalcedonian Christology thinkable in a contemporary North American
context. Such a metaphysics avoids the philosophical blunders which have
marred Christological thinking in the past. Too often those blunders have
betrayed theologians into confounding mystery with logical contradiction.
I have suggested that the operations which structure inferential think-
ing require one to approach doctrinal Christology with a Peircean rela-
tional logic of consequences. That logic blurs the traditional distinction
between the doctrine of Jesus’ person and the doctrine of His saving min-
istry because it requires that one clarify the meaning of the hypostatic
union by understanding its saving consequences. Jesus’ ministry, death,
resurrection, and mission of the Breath embody and reveal the hypostatic
union’s saving consequences. The symbolic structure of experience also
blurs the distinction between Jesus’ person and ministry because it de-
mands that one recognize that Jesus’ ministry reveals His person sym-
bolically at the same time that His person endows His ministry with
saving significance and divine authority.
As we have seen, Jesus’ saving ministry has both an historical and an

eschatological dimension, because the paschal mystery, which begins the
final age of salvation, reveals the full saving significance of Jesus’ histori-
cal, mortal ministry. By endowing Jesus’ ministry with divine saving sanc-
tion, the paschal mystery brings that ministry to its ultimate personal
embodiment, an embodiment which so unites the divine and the human
as to blur any distinction between time and eternity, between this world
and the next. At the same time, Jesus’ mortal ministry, His proclamation
of the reign of God, endows the paschal mystery with practical meaning.
Together, then, both Jesus’ ministry and the paschal mystery reveal to us
how in practice a saving God relates to a sinful humanity and how hu-
manity ought to relate to God.
A metaphysics of experience allows one to overcome the dualistic sun-
dering of time and eternity. It portrays the triune God as an eternal pro-
cess which comprehends and environs the spatio-temporal process. By
acknowledging the reality of religious experience, that metaphysics dis-
covers eschatological significance and reality in the encounter with the
Breath of the risen Christ who transforms the triune God into the future
of all believers. We experience Christ’s Breath as a personal, divine vector
proceeding from and leading us into the social reality of the triune God.
When one develops Christological doctrine by invoking pragmatic logic,
the doctrine of the hypostatic union unifies one’s account of Jesus’ saving
ministry. Jesus confronts us as savior, prophet, priest, messiah, and judge
because in the paschal mystery He confronts us as God incarnate, as the
human experience of being a divine person.
Because, moreover, the hypostatic union both unifies and redefines the
soteriological significance of every aspect of Jesus’ ministry, each facet of
His saving work both illumines and informs every other. His ministry of
proclamation endows His priesthood, kingship, and judicial ministry with
prophetic meaning. His priesthood endows His ministry of preaching as
well as His messianic and judicial authority with sacerdotal, mediatorial sig-
nificance. His royal authority makes his prophetic ministry, His priesthood,
and his judicial authority messianic. His authority as Son of man suffuses his
prophetic ministry, His priesthood, and His messianic authority with
eschatological significance and judicial authority. Finally, because Jesus con-
fronts us as the human experience of being a divine person, every aspect of
His ministry has ultimate and normative saving significance.8
8. Cf. T.F. Glassen, Jesus and the End of the World (Edinburgh: Saint Andrews Press, 1980:
G.C. Berkouwer, The Return of Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1972); V.
Norskov Olsen, ed., The Advent Hope in Scripture and History (Washington, D.C.:
Review and Herald Publishing Assn., 1987); John A.T. Robinson, Jesus and His
Coming: The Emergence of a Doctrine (New York, NY: Abingdon, 1957); Johannes
Timmermann, Nachapostolisches Parusiedenken (Munich: Max Hüber Verlag, 1968);
Jean-Marie Glé, “Le retour de l’eschatologie,” Recherches de Science Religieuse, 84(1996),
pp. 219-251.
The unity of Jesus’ saving ministry also throws light on the second
issue which I raised above: namely, the relationship between doctrinal
and practical theology. Let us try to understand why.
As I have just indicated, the hypostatic union endows the person and
ministry of Jesus with universal saving significance at the same time that
it establishes Him as a normative, though not exhaustive, revelation of
how a saving God relates to a sinful humanity and how that same God
desires humanity to respond to the divine offer of salvation. This
soteriological insight holds the key to understanding the relationship be-
tween doctrinal and practical Christology.
Christological doctrine offers an inferential interpretation of Christo-
logical knowing, i.e., of that knowledge of Jesus’ person and saving mis-
sion which results from practical assimilation to Him in the power of His
Breath. Authentication of Christological doctrine must, as a consequence,
pass a double test. Since Christological knowing assimilates believers to
an historical reality, they need to interpret that reality correctly; for one
who does not know what kind of human reality Jesus embodied cannot
judge whether or not one is or is not living like Him.
The inherently practical character of Christological knowing, however,
also demands that one authenticate a Christological doctrine not just
historically and eschatologically but also practically, by living out its sav-
ing consequences. Christological knowing, however, transvalues in faith
the four forms of secular conversion. Sound Christological doctrine ought,
therefore, to promote the graced transvaluation in faith of all the natural
forms of conversion. By the same token, unsound Christological doc-
trine will tend to subvert or even to annul integral conversion to Christ.
The ongoing authentication of Christological doctrine demands there-
fore a constant interplay between two critical processes: 1) reflection of
the meaning of the hypostatic union guided by a pragmatic logic of con-
sequences and 2) the actual living out of the saving practical consequences
of doctrinal Christological faith. Those practical consequences define the
speculative meaning of belief in the hypostatic union. As we shall see in
greater detail in the following section, practical Christology reflects on
the deliberative processes which guide the lived authentication of Christo-
logical doctrines.
Practical Christology engages two interrelated realms of moral delib-
eration. They correspond to the two kinds of moral conversion. The graced
transvaluation of personal moral conversion requires that Christological
knowing engage human interpersonal relationships. The graced trans-
valuation of socio-political conversion demands that Christological know-
ing also engage public morality and the corporate search for the common
good.
The prophetic, messianic, and judicial aspects of Jesus’ saving ministry

especially require Christological knowing to engage both forms of moral
conversion. Let us try to understand why.
As we have seen above, Jesus’ prophetic ministry requires Christians to
see in the kingdom a human incarnation of the saving mind of God. The
vision of the kingdom which Jesus proclaimed and embodied both in His
ministry and in the paschal mystery makes it clear that Christians can
finally encounter God only in community. Commitment to the king-
dom incorporates one into a universal community of sharing, faith, wor-
ship, and mutual forgiveness which seeks to embrace the entire human
race by excluding no one from concern. Sharing authenticates faith and
trust in God; mutual forgiveness authenticates worship. Love of enemies
authenticates mutual forgiveness. Both faith sharing and mutual forgive-
ness engage human interpersonal relationships and necessitate their trans-
valuation in faith. In other words, Jesus’ prophetic ministry requires the
graced transvaluation of personal moral conversion.
The messianic and judicial dimensions of Jesus’ saving ministry both
require socio-political conversion because as messiah and final judge Jesus
enters into conflict with the Satanic kingdoms of this world and with all
personal and institutional embodiments of religious hypocrisy. Inevita-
bly, then, those whom the Breath of the risen Christ inspires to live in
His image must in their own day confront with prophetic non-violence
the evil principalities and powers of this world. Those who can oppose
institutional oppression but refuse to do so conspire with it. They sin by
omission. Those who live a privatized faith have not yet understood fully
who Jesus is; and, to the extent that they do not know Jesus, to that
extent they fail to imitate Him. In other words, because Jesus’ messianic
and judicial ministries set Him at odds with the principalities and powers
of this world, commitment to Him in faith makes socio-political conver-
sion morally inevitable for those who claim to follow Him.
Relevance to the RCIA

In the preceding chapters I have reflected doctrinally on how Jesus’ min-
istry as savior, prophet, priest, king, and judge all reveal the mystery of
the incarnate God. The incarnation, Jesus’ life and ministry, and the pas-
chal mystery all combine to endow foundational Christology with mor-
ally revolutionary and socially subversive meaning. These doctrinal re-
flections have, then, important implications for the RCIA.
The too often distorted intellectualism of the Catholic tradition in the
West can and often does skew the catechesis given to neophytes in the
restored catechumenate. One hears complaints that the RCIA frequently
amounts to “a bunch of lectures and a bath.”
The RCIA succeeds only when those conducting it focus on the con-
version process through which converts are passing. All instruction given
to catechumens, including doctrinal instruction, should, then, seek to
advance their lived progress in an integral, five-fold conversion. As a con-
sequence, in a successful RCIA, those conducting it need to tailor all
instruction, including doctrinal instruction, to each catechumen’s per-
sonal conversion needs. The conversion needs of candidates must dictate
the length of preparation for initiation. It cannot be legislated a priori or
in advance.
Successful doctrinal instruction challenges people to live practically the
consequences of the doctrines which they proclaim with their lips. Cat-
echists need, therefore, to avoid a purely speculative approach to Chris-
tian doctrine. When Christian teachers fail to spell out the practical con-
sequences of doctrines like the incarnation and the trinity, they leave
their theoretical meaning shrouded in unintelligible vagueness and ob-
scurity, for a doctrine’s practical saving consequences give it its full specu-
lative meaning.
Accordingly, in this doctrinal section I have consistently applied a prag-
matic logic of consequences to belief in the hypostatic union and in the
saving work of Jesus Christ. I have done so in the hope that those who
draw upon this study in order to devise a catechesis which meets the
personal needs of each catechumen will themselves use a similar logic in
explaining Christological doctrine to converts; for only concern with the
practical meaning of Christian doctrine will advance the ongoing con-
version of adult Christians.
These doctrinal reflections have also tried to exemplify another impor-
tant methodological imperative: namely, the need to coordinate the in-
tuitive and inferential expressions of Christian faith. In the earlier sec-
tions of this study, I have described the way in which commitment to
Jesus Christ transforms the hopes of the human heart and the imagina-
tive perceptions of religious realities. Kerygmatic and apocalyptic Christo-
logy explore the intuitive dimensions of Christian hope. Narrative Christo-
logy ponders the affective and intuitive dimensions of Christian faith.
In developing a doctrinal Christology, I have accordingly offered a ra-
tional, inferential interpretation of fundamental issues raised by
kerygmatic, apocalyptic, and narrative Christology. Every popular doc-
trinal Christological catechesis ought to do the same. It should help people
to understand the doctrinal implications of the New Testament witness
to Jesus. The catechetical integration of the inferential and intuitive di-
mensions of faith not only insures that head and heart agree about God,
but it also provides a powerful antidote to fundamentalism by demand-
ing critical, rational reflection on the actual meaning of Christian faith.
Finally, the integration of the rational and imaginative dimensions of
faith also teaches converts that, when they gather to worship, they need
not leave their brains parked outside beside their automobiles.
The final section of this study deals with practical Christology as such.
In it I shall reflect on the way in which commitment to Jesus Christ in
faith transvalues the two forms of moral conversion. In treating personal
moral conversion, I shall show how commitment in faith to Jesus Christ
heals and transforms disordered human passions. In dealing with
socio-political conversion, I shall show how Christian conversion prom-
ises to liberate the United States from economic, social, and political op-
pression. These two final chapters complete, then, this foundational and
doctrinal account of the practical consequences of belief in the hypo-
static union. The final chapter completes the inculturation of that ac-
count in a United States context.
488 Part 3: Practical Christology
Part 3
Practical Christology
Chapter 15
To Love As Jesus Loved
A foundational Christology considers the ways in which commitment in
faith to Jesus Christ as the normative, historical self-revelation of God
transforms affective, intellectual, moral, and socio-political conversion.
I have so far examined how Christological knowing transforms two of
those conversion experiences. I have pondered how practical assimilation
to Jesus in the power of His Breath transforms affective conversion into
Christian hope; and I have examined how faith in Jesus Christ transval-
ues intellectual conversion’s intuitive and inferential grasp of religious
realities into theological faith.
Together Christian faith and hope ground and motivate practical
Christology; for, as we have seen, both Christian faith and Christian hope
have an inherently practical character. Narrative theology gives imagina-
tive expression to Christian faith; and in the course of doing so, it clari-
fies the practical meaning of the Christological knowing to which Chris-
tian hope aspires. Doctrinal Christology reflects inferentially and practi-
cally on the meaning of Christian hope and on the intuitive dimensions
of Christian faith. Doctrinal Christology therefore uses a pragmatic logic
of consequences in order to endow the insights of narrative Christology
with logical precision and ethical meaning. Practical Christology as such
applies all these graced insights to the actual practice of Christological
knowing. The practice of Christological knowing engages moral delib-
eration.1
Prudential thinking takes the logical form of moral deliberation. The
deliberating mind thinks disjunctively. It weighs mutually exclusive op-
tions in the light of relevant realities, facts, norms, and aims.
All deliberation targets decision. Humans make two basic kinds of de-
cisions. Some decisions fix beliefs and attitudes. Others respond to social
and environmental challenges and stimuli.
Not all human deliberations have a moral character. One can, for ex-
ample, weigh the advantages or disadvantages of different explanatory
hypotheses. When painters do different preliminary sketches for a paint-
ing, they deliberate about the effectiveness of different modes of aesthetic
1. Cf. R. Garcia de Haro, “Cristo y la Sabidura Moral” in Cristo Hijo de Dios y Redentor
del Hombre, pp. 177-212.
Chapter 15: To Love As Jesus Loved 489
expression. Engineers deliberate about the relative efficiency of compet-

ing structural designs.
Prudential deliberation takes on a moral character when it invokes norms
which make ultimate and absolute claims. Something claims one ulti-
mately when one consents to it as a reality not only worth living for but,
if necessary, worth dying for. Ultimate realities, values, and ideals—like
truth, justice, beauty—set life’s long-term goals. They endow human liv-
ing with responsible purpose. Absolute realities, values, and ideals make
claims upon human choice in every circumstance. I cannot, for example,
imagine any circumstance which would justify the drive-by shooting of
innocent bystanders.
Moral deliberation concerns itself with both the motives and the con-
sequences of concrete options. Moral reasoning deals with motives be-
cause doing the right deed for the wrong reason corrupts the conscience
as effectively as overtly vicious social behavior. A teacher, for example,
who disseminates truth out of pride or vanity performs a useful service to
others but at the price of becoming a pedant and an ass. The fawning
Uriah Heep transforms seeming expressions of humility into rank hypoc-
risy and ambition.
Moral reasoning also deals with the consequences of human choices.
Human persons seek to fulfill analogous needs in community. As a con-
sequence, responsible moral choices must answer for the good or ill which
they freely visit upon others. Evil deliberately inflicted on other persons
violates their rights. Evil deliberately inflicted on society violates the com-
mon good. Practical benevolence toward both individual persons and
communities counts as virtue.
This final section of volume three examines how Christological hope
and faith transvalue prudential moral deliberation. It therefore completes
the account of the Christian conscience developed in volumes one and
two. As we have seen, moral deliberation makes prudential thinking so-
cially responsible. Moral conversion comes in two forms: personal moral
conversion and socio-political conversion. These two conversions deal
ethically with different but interrelated realms of social intercourse. Per-
sonal moral conversion focuses on human interpersonal relationships.
Socio-political conversion deals with public morality, with the quest for a
just social order.
Personal and public morality differ in identifiable ways. When, for ex-
ample, people stand in an interpersonal relationship to one another they
relate with concrete immediacy. They know one another’s names and faces.
The way they treat one another yields immediate satisfaction or causes
immediate pain. Humans manage interpersonal relationships more easily
than they manage large, impersonal institutions chiefly because interper-
sonal relationships involve a limited number of people and lack the bu-
reaucratic complexity and the anonymity of large institutions. When prob-

lems arise in interpersonal relationships, one can often enough talk things
through with those involved and achieve both mutual understanding and
mutual satisfaction. The resolution of personal moral conflicts presup-
poses, of course, good will on the part of all concerned.
As we have seen, institutions come into existence when persons relate
to one another in identifiable and publicly sanctioned ways. Even the
most intimate personal relationships yield to institutionalization. Differ-
ent cultures, for instance, institutionalize the family differently. The mem-
bers of a Confucian family relate differently from the way in which the
members of an American middle-class family do. Similarly, in some cul-
tures uncles have the right to discipline nieces and nephews; in others,
not. As institutions grow in size, they take on an increasingly impersonal
character. The immediacy of human interpersonal relationships counts
for nothing when the CEOs of great corporations make decisions which
affect the lives of countless people whom they have never met and never
will meet.
In interpersonal relationships, one can assign responsibility for human
decisions with relative ease because those decisions have an immediate
impact on others. One finds it more difficult, however, to assign respon-
sibility for decisions which filter through complex bureaucratic struc-
tures. In Japan, for example, corporate decision making ensures that no
one will lose face through bad decisions. Making everyone responsible
for a failed policy precludes pointing a finger of blame at any single indi-
vidual. In a culture of shame, if corporate decisions turn sour, everyone
still saves face.
While interpersonal relationships yield immediate satisfaction or im-
mediate pain, bureaucratic delays in large institutions tend to prolong
the time between taking a decision and experiencing its consequences.
The delay heightens the risk of injustice. Faithful service which must
wait for its reward may never receive it. Fraud and mismanagement take
time to come to light.
While humans manage interpersonal relationships with comparative
ease, the anonymity, diffused responsibility, and complexity of large, im-
personal institutions make them more difficult to control. Interpersonal
and public morality also differ in the kinds of moral dilemmas each poses.
They therefore differ as well in the kind of information one needs and in
the norms one invokes in resolving those dilemmas. Personal inquiry, for
example, usually suffices to provide the factual information one needs in
order to resolve interpersonal moral challenges; but one needs accurate
social analysis of complex institutional processes in order to resolve ques-
tions of public morality. In questions of interpersonal morality, a sound
insight into personal rights and duties ordinarily suffices. In resolving
questions of public morality, however, one measures the morality of hu-

man choices by the common good. One secures the common good by
creating a situation in which all the members of society can contribute to
and profit from its benefits with reasonable fairness and adequacy. Insti-
tutional reform requires, then, social analysis, the re-organization of in-
stitutional patterns of behavior, the collaboration of large groups of people,
strategic planning, and the successful implementation of strategies for
institutional change.
The distinction between interpersonal and public morality makes it
possible for a person to experience personal moral conversion without
converting socio-politically, and vice versa. In individualistic America,
for instance, one constantly encounters people who seem committed to
living responsible lives at an interpersonal level but who find it difficult
even to understand questions of public morality. One also encounters
social activists whose zeal for the commonweal causes them to neglect
family and other interpersonal responsibilities.
If interpersonal and public morality differ, they also stand in an inti-
mate relationship to one another. Public morality needs to take into ac-
count the personal rights and duties which large, impersonal institutions
violate. Large, social institutions also condition the way in which persons
relate at an interpersonal level.
The interrelation between personal and public morality insures that
one cannot live a fully responsible moral life unless one undergoes both
kinds of moral conversion. Lack of concern with social injustice will in-
evitably cause one to act irresponsibly at an interpersonal level as well.
One, for instance, who grows up in a racist society like ours will treat the
members of other races unjustly unless one comes to terms with one’s
socially acquired bigotry. Similarly, one cannot show genuine concern for
the common good unless one also respects the claims of personal rights
and duties. Executives, for example, who contemn the personal rights of
subordinates and of the constituencies whom they serve will surely for-
mulate and enforce socially irresponsible, unjust, and disgraceful public
policies.
The present chapter deals with the ways in which Christological know-
ing transforms personal moral conversion. As we have seen, the graced
transvaluation of affective conversion gives rise to the theological virtue
of hope; and the graced transvaluation of intellectual conversion in both
its intuitive and inferential expressions gives rise to the theological virtue
of faith. In an analogous way, the graced transvaluation of personal moral
conversion gives rise to the theological virtue of charity.
Because deliberative thinking culminates in decision it exhibits an un-
avoidable concreteness. Decision, after all, makes experience this rather
than that. In the end, therefore, one learns about charity in the same way
in which one learns about all natural virtue: namely, by living it. Charity,
of course, demands graced living empowered by the Breath of Christ.
A theoretical account of the way in which Christological knowing trans-
values personal moral conversion cannot deal with the living of charity in
all of its concreteness. That account can, however, ponder some of the
typical moral challenges of graced, interpersonal living in Jesus’ image. It
can also describe the over-all way in which commitment to Christ re-
quires one to approach the concrete resolution of such challenges. Build-
ing on the seminal work of Roberto Unger, I shall in the present chapter
argue that in effecting the graced transvaluation of personal moral con-
version Christian charity heals disordered human passion.
As we have already seen in other contexts, the construct of experience
defended in this study regards human affectivity as cognitive, as a way of
perceiving and judging reality. By passion, I mean, with Unger, the affec-
tive perception of human interpersonal relationships. Since personal moral
conversion deals responsibly with interpersonal relationships, it must,
then, deliberate about human passions. By the same token, when charity
graciously transforms natural human interpersonal relationships in con-
scious faith and hope, it too necessarily engages human passions.
This chapter divides into three parts. Part one reflects on the role of
passion in human interpersonal relationships. Part two examines some
common disordered passions. Part three shows how Christian charity heals
disordered passions by transvaluing them in justifying faith.
(I)
Human affections divide into emotions and passions. We react emotion-
ally to things. We react passionately to persons. Interpersonal morality
deals with human interpersonal relationships. Passion raises such rela-
tionships to appreciative consciousness.2
Human Passion
As we have seen in other contexts, human affections both perceive and
judge reality. When we perceive reality affectively we react to it in a pre-
liminary way either sympathetically or negatively. The sympathetic affec-
tions—admiration, appreciation, desire, etc.—perceive the tendencies in
persons and in things as benign. The negative affections—rage, fear, guilt,
shame etc.—perceive the tendencies in persons and in things as threaten-
ing and potentially destructive. Realistic negative affections make an im-
portant positive contribution to human affectivity; but we call such feel-
2. As I have already indicated, these reflections on the passions derive from the ground-
breaking insights of Roberto Unger. Cf. Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Passion: An Essay
in Personality (New York, NY: Free Press, 1984); J.J. Mueller, Faith and Appreciative
Consciousness: The Cultural Theology of Bernard Meland (Washington, DC: University
Press of America, 1981).
ings negative because they function cognitively like the intuitive equiva-
lent of a logical “not.”
Initial affective perceptions tend to generate imaginative reflection on
attractive or threatening realities. If one finds oneself drawn to some per-
son or thing, one usually begins to dream about how one might enjoy the
relationship or reality in question. If one finds persons or situations threat-
ening, one ordinarily begins to imagine all the ways in which they might
harm oneself and others. One also dreams either of escape or of victory
after combat.
Affective judgments of feeling terminate intuitive reflection on reality.
In other words, initial affective perceptions of reality function as the in-
tuitive equivalent of inferential hypotheses, while final intuitive judg-
ments of feeling function as the intuitive equivalent of inferential induc-
tions. The creative imagination functions as the intuitive equivalent of
inferential deduction.
Prudential judgments of feeling have a practical, prudential, aesthetic,
or discerning character. We deliberate practically about the most efficient
strategy for getting a job done. We deliberate speculatively about the best
hypothesis to adopt. We deliberate aesthetically about the best way to
express a beautiful perception. We deliberate prudentially about ques-
tions of personal and public morality. We discern when prayer and recep-
tivity to the Breath’s inspirations inform one’s deliberations.
Humans live willy nilly in social relationship to one another even when
those relationships take on a negative, or hostile, character. Human fini-
tude entails human need. Every human person needs food, drink, cloth-
ing, shelter, education, employment; and even the most self-reliant de-
pend extensively on others in order to acquire and enjoy these goods.
Social solidarity makes people mutually interdependent; and mutual
interdependence makes humans vulnerable. Disordered human passions
exploit human vulnerability for the sake of selfish satisfaction. In exploit-
ing others, one runs roughshod over their needs and thus violates their
rights; for a right consists of a personal need which makes claims upon
another’s conscience. Well ordered human passions, by contrast, respect
the rights and dignity of other persons as persons.
Human passions have instinctive roots. The slapped neonate does not
need to learn how to vent personal rage through tears. The infant re-
sponds affectively to pain with instinctive fear and hostility. Sexual matu-
ration creates the capacity for romantic love and erotic passion.
Despite its instinctive roots, however, human passion evolves as hu-
mans learn to interrelate socially. The way one relates socially therefore
builds into the personality habitual ways of responding passionately to
other persons. As the natural passion of love evolves, for example, the
mutual affection which binds together the members of the same family
changes into peer friendships. In adolescence, friendship matures into

romantic love.
One relates passionately not only to other persons but to oneself. Pas-
sionate self-perceptions shape one’s personal self image. They either fos-
ter or inhibit healthy self-development.
The instinctive character of passion insures that passionate human de-
velopment engages both the conscious and the unconscious mind. As a
consequence, conscious disorder in one’s passionate relationships often
roots itself partially in unconscious passions.
Unconscious disorder in one’s passions frequently engages the negative
affections: shame, fear, anger, guilt. The passion of shame expresses
self-hatred. The passion of fear perceives another as threatening and as
more powerful than oneself. The passion of anger perceives another as
threatening but as conquerable. The passion of guilt rues personal re-
sponsibility for morally irresponsible or sinful choices.
The systematic repression of negative passions prevents one from per-
ceiving reality, especially interpersonal reality, realistically. As unconscious
shame, rage, fear, and guilt accumulate, one gradually loses the ability to
respond to persons and to things for what they embody or exemplify.
Instead, one projects onto them the painful negative characteristics of
persons and of events from out of one’s past. One who has never dealt
with personal resentment toward one’s father will tend, for example, to
react negatively to anyone who resembles a father figure, however benign
the father-figure may in fact prove.
Clinical psychology discovers a predictable pattern of dysfunction which
results from the systematic repression of negative affections and passions.
“Nervousness” characterizes the first state of dysfunction. One over-reacts
to annoying stimuli. A chance remark may, for example, cause one to
“bite another’s head off.” Failure to deal with “nervousness” tends to give
rise to more serious personality dysfunctions: compulsions, addictions,
and other costly forms of emotional rigidity. A third level of dysfunction
takes the shape of outbursts of violent, destructive, and anti-social behav-
ior. Beyond social violence lies “insanity.” The insane have reached such a
state of unconscious emotional and passionate disorder that they can no
longer react to the world as they find it. Their extreme delusional state
requires hospitalization. Beyond insanity lies despair and suicide.3
If the systematic suppression of the negative passions produces system-
atic affective dysfunction, then the development of a healthy affectivity
requires the conscious integration of negative passions and emotions into
one’s personality. Healthy negative responses perceive potentially destruc-
tive persons and situations realistically and respond to them in an appro-
3. Cf. Karl Menninger, Martin Mayman, and Paul Pruyser, The Vital Balance: The Life
Process in Mental Health and Illness (new York, NY: Viking, 1963).
priate and life-giving manner. One ought to rue one’s mistakes and sins
and mend one’s ways. Righteous anger ought to motivate the struggle
against both personal and institutional injustice. One ought to approach
unavoidable and potentially dangerous situations with appropriate cau-
tion. We should fear nuclear holocaust and environmental catastrophe
and see to it that neither ever happens.
Human passions have unconscious roots, some instinctive, others
learned; but the passions function consciously, as persons interrelate out
of mutual attraction and mutual hostility. The fact that the passions bridge
conscious and unconscious human behavior means that what begins as
neurosis can end as immorality. Unconscious disorder in one’s passionate
life can lead one to make deliberately irresponsible and humanly destruc-
tive choices. Neurotic fear or rage can, for example, cause one to lash out
viciously at those who threaten one even when they do so unintention-
ally. The unconscious roots of one’s actions may mitigate one’s responsi-
bility for performing the vicious acts which violate one’s conscience; but
humanly irresponsible and destructive choices, when taken freely and
consciously, have a moral character.
Moreover, disordered passion distorts the conscience itself. Scholastic
philosophy tended to portray the judgment of conscience as the act of a
dispassionate spiritual intellect measuring the responsibility or irrespon-
sibility of human choices. When one reflects, however, on the way in
which the conscience actually works, it becomes apparent that human
affections and passions lend it judgmental shape. No abstract rational
inference, no abstract moral maxim can tell one how to deal concretely
with conflicted moral situations of any complexity. Moral thinking ad-
vances prudentially and therefore intuitively. One must feel one’s way to
an affective perception of the moral response appropriate to specific situ-
ations. One feels interpersonal relationships passionately.
Judgments of conscience express judgments of feeling. The passions
perceive interpersonal relationships. Hence, judgments of conscience con-
cerning questions of interpersonal morality both engage and express hu-
man passion. Disordered passions, therefore, introduce disorder into the
conscience’s own judgments about interpersonal relationships. A Don
Juan who cultivates lustful passions will find it difficult to relate to women
as anything but sex objects. One schooled in the ways of gang violence
will find it all too easy to “waste” other people. Dysfunctional family
relationships tend to perpetuate and reproduce themselves.
Disordered passion sets the conscience at odds with itself. As we have
seen, the morally converted conscience stands committed to conforming
personal conduct to ideals, principles, and realities which claim it ulti-
mately and absolutely. As we have also seen, the ultimacy of moral claims
demands that one stand willing not only to live by them but even to die
for them, if necessary. The absoluteness of moral claims means that they
claim us in all circumstances.
In interpersonal morality, the moral rights of others impose correspond-
ing moral duties on the human conscience. By a moral right I mean a
human need which mutually interdependent persons legitimately expect
others to respect and to help fulfill. In respecting the rights of others, one
deals with them responsibly as persons. Disordered passions, however,
like vindictiveness, greed, lust, or envy prevent one from dealing with
other persons as persons. Hatred leads one to disregard the needs and
rights of those one despises. Greed values personal wealth more than the
sufferings and wants of those one exploits. Lust uses others selfishly for
personal carnal gratification. Envy begrudges others legitimate growth,
legitimate achievement, and the legitimate fulfillment of their needs.
Ethical judgments which proceed from disordered passions distort the
conscience by contradicting the ultimate and absolute ideals, principles,
and realities to which one stands responsibly committed. That contradic-
tion sets the conscience at odds with itself. As a consequence, those who
violate the rights of others by yielding to disordered passionate impulses
typically feel the need to rationalize their behavior through self-deception.
As a young white boy in New Orleans, for example, I, like other racists,
learned to convince myself that the racial inferiority of African Ameri-
cans justifies reducing them to second-class citizenship and that African
Americans themselves prefer things that way. Sexists delude themselves
into believing that nature itself, or the unchanging will of God, or even
divine revelation has subjected women socially, politically, economically,
and educationally to men. The self-deception which rationalizes yielding
to disordered passions compounds blatant malice with the kind of hy-
pocrisy which Jesus seems never to have tired of denouncing.
This section has considered the nature of passion, its evolution, its dys-
functions, and the way in which disordered passions skew judgments of
conscience and breed moral hypocrisy. The section which follows exam-
ines some of the specific disorders which mar human passion and render
it potentially vicious.
(II)
Disordered passions distort one’s perception of oneself and of other per-
sons. Viciously disordered passions prevent one from relating to persons
as persons.
Disordered Passion
Sometimes one disordered passion breeds another. Despair offers a good
example of a seminal passionate disorder. Prolonged pain, frustration,
failure, and oppression sow the seeds of despair. Despair stifles the cre-
ative imagination. It blinds one to realistic possibilities of growth in one-

self and in others. Those who despair cease to believe in the possibility
escaping the evils which beset them.4 Despair comes in degrees. It can
take the form of fatalism, a supine acquiescence in the painful given by
shamefully interiorizing injustice, bigotry, and oppression. It breeds
self-pity. It isolates one from the agents of creative change. In its extremest
forms despair breeds a loathing for life itself and a fascination with sui-
cide. William James would have recognized in despair a form of
soul-sickness.5 The despairing feel trapped in a situation of pain and op-
pression from which they feel they can never extricate themselves. Some-
times the entrapment has psychological roots: neurotic compulsion im-
prisons one in self-destructive patterns of behavior. Sometimes the en-
trapment takes social and institutional shape. One thinks, for example,
of the fatalism which so often dogs the permanent underclasses. The de-
spairing need others to hope for them.6 Because despair isolates one from
and blinds one to the means of extricating oneself from pain and oppres-
sion, the hope and imagination of others need to pierce the dark curtain
in which despair shrouds the human heart.
Despair can fuel hatred. We hate our enemies and oppressors when we
despair of changing them into friends and benefactors. When despair
leads to suicide, it embodies the ultimate in self-hatred.
Despair has other consequences. It can, for example, erode the very
foundations of moral commitment: the despairing find it hard to believe
in anything or anyone worth living for. Despair also breeds fear as one
faces a future fraught with loathing and pain. When despair blends with
shame, one ceases to believe in the very possibility of one’s own loveability.
When despair fuses with guilt, past sins and failures loom as unforgivable
barriers between oneself and those one has wounded.
The passion of pride blinds one to the fact of one’s dependence on
other people. Pride cometh before a fall. As one yields to the illusion of
quasi-divine self-sufficiency, one enters into a dangerous state of
ego-inflation. The inflated ego loses touch with its limitations and with
its unconscious destructive tendencies. The prideful illusion of omnipo-
tence betrays one into manipulating other persons as impersonal means
to one’s own selfish ends. Blind to their own limitations, the proud can
easily overreach themselves, sometimes with disastrous consequences to
themselves and others. Think of Adolf Hitler. Think of right-wing para-
4. Cf. William Lynch, Images of Hope (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press,
1974).
5. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Garden City, NY: Doubleday),
pp. 121-154.
6. Cf. Menninger, et al., The Vital Balance, pp. 357-420.
military units who dynamite inhabited federal buildings and day care
centers.7
Often vanity sows the seeds of pride. Vanity breeds disorder in self-love.
It craves the praise of others. The vain form such a high opinion of them-
selves that they cannot recognize excellence in other people or appreciate
the achievements of others. The inability to appreciate other persons leads
one to disparage them unjustly and, of course, to one’s own advantage.
Pride differs from vanity in the social isolation it breeds. The vain thrive
on the adulation of others. The proud view others with the eyes of con-
tempt. They isolate themselves in positions of power in order to lord it
over the weak. The proud crave power over others; and they use it ruth-
lessly in order to maintain themselves in power.
Greed values possessions more than people. It exploits others as a means
to amassing wealth. Greed and gluttony go hand in hand. Those who
crave the lifestyles of the wealthy and famous usually covet as well the
self-indulgent pleasures which virtually limitless supplies of money can
buy. Television programs like “The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”
portray pride, greed, and gluttony as virtues and luxuries as pseudo-neces-
sities.
Greed spawns contempt for the poor. Indeed, during the Reagan era of
“trickle-down economics,” only one thing ever trickled down to the poor
and to the homeless from those amassing obscene fortunes with govern-
mental sanction: namely, the contempt of the rich for those weaklings
who had never “made it.” In the nineteen nineties, die-hard proponents
of Reaganomics formalized the contempt by cynically declaring poverty
a moral rather than an economic problem. Right-wing think tanks
spawned this particular blinding “insight” along with other ideological
slogans which scapegoated the poor as an excuse for ignoring them.
In post-Reagan America, the Contract with America transformed con-
tempt for the poor into a wholesale assault upon them. The Contract
sought to destroy the federal safety net for the American poor without
necessarily replacing it with anything. At the same time it promoted
massive tax breaks for the rich. So called “welfare reform” enacted during
the Clinton administration swells the ranks of the unemployed poor by
eliminating the needy from welfare rolls and leaving them to drift in a sea
of upper-class indifference and predatory capitalism. It takes no crystal
ball to foresee the consequences of such policies: spreading hunger among
the American poor, brain-damaged children, and the growth of a perma-
nent underclass. The unbridled capitalism of schemes like the Contract
dramatizes all too well, that greed fuels class warfare, as the poor and
disadvantaged simmer with rage at the heartless indifference and gross
moral irresponsibility of the gluttonous rich.
7. Cf. Edward F. Edinger, Ego and Archetype (Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1972), pp. 3-104.
Lust reduces other persons to mere sex objects, to an impersonal means

for satisfying one’s selfish and irresponsible desire for genital pleasure. In
fact, one can use genital sex in order to express a wide gamut of disor-
dered passions: violent hatred, macho sexism, misogyny, contempt, the
desire to degrade and to be degraded. Whatever its passionate motive,
lust leaves genital sex untouched by either genuine love or responsible
personal commitment.
Not all anger qualifies as vicious. We respond angrily in threatening
situations which we believe we can dominate or manage. Situations of
personal or institutional injustice ought, for example, to evoke from us
righteous anger. Anger, however, becomes vicious when it transforms it-
self into vindictive hatred of other persons.
One can feel anger toward a person one loves. When that happens the
love one feels keeps one sensitive to that person’s redeeming traits despite
the faults or failings which happen to evoke one’s temporary wrath. Vin-
dictive hatred, by contrast, blinds one to any redeeming traits in one’s
enemy. One who hates views the enemy with sneering contempt and
with the desire for pitiless retribution. The rationalization of hatred re-
quires that one dismiss any alleged virtues in one’s enemy as hypocrisy or
illusion. Hatred precludes communication among enemies and predis-
poses them to resolve their conflict violently. Hatred festers in the heart
until one’s enemy lies prostrate or destroyed. Hatred takes institutional
shape in war and in the death penalty.
Envy expresses a kind of hatred. One tends spontaneously to hate those
who threaten one’s own well-being or the well-being of those one loves.
The envious hate others for possessing what the envious themselves lack:
possessions, success, virtue, talent, genius. The movie Amadeus drama-
tized the lethal potential of envy. Instead of rejoicing in the gifts and
good fortune of others, the envious connive to undermine and destroy
those more fortunate or gifted than they.
If envy sets one in enmity against others more advantaged than oneself,
the passion of sloth blinds one to one’s own giftedness. That blindness
stifles gratitude and the willingness to develop one’s gifts for the benefit
of others. Sloth feeds on a negative self-image and has kinship with shame.
Ordinarily, the slothful fail morally, not so much by committing morally
vicious acts, but by omission, by failing to grow in morally responsible
ways.
Pride, greed, gluttony, lust, hatred, envy, and sloth—the seven capital
sins all embody disordered human passions. Moreover, they all have this
in common: they all distort one’s affective perception of one’s personal
relationship to others in such a way as to prevent one from relating to
other persons as persons and by blinding one to their legitimate rights
and needs. Disordered passions can also cause one to violate one’s own
person. If disordered passions do not spring from despair, they often breed
it in oneself or in others.
I have proposed an anatomy of human passion and have examined the
ways in which disordered passions vitiate human interpersonal relation-
ships. In the section which follows, I shall reflect on the way in which
commitment to Jesus Christ in faith heals disordered, destructive pas-
sions by replacing them with the life-giving passions of hope, of faith,
and especially of charity.
(III)
At the end of the second volume of this study, I reflected on the ways in
which imaginative thinking lends dynamic shape to the Christian con-
science. The time has come to complete that portrait of the Christian
conscience by reflecting more explicitly on the way in which commit-
ment to the figure of Jesus as the normative, historical, personal revela-
tion of God endows Christian moral thinking with its distinctive brand
of normativity. The account of the Christian conscience which follows
both endorses and develops the important, seminal insights of William
C. Spohn.8
As we have already seen, those who question whether the concrete life
of a particular historical individual can make normative moral claims
often implicitly view both persons and history with nominalistic eyes. In
denying normativity to the concrete and particular, they implicitly equate
it with a valueless fact. In the ethically and religiously barren world of
conceptual nominalism, human subjectivity must endow valueless facts
with both meaning and normativity; but the alleged objectivity of ratio-
nal knowledge combines with the alleged relativity and subjectivity of
moral judgment and of feeling in order to deprive the objects of knowl-
edge of any realistic claim to normativity.
Charles Sanders Peirce correctly viewed the development of post-Car-
tesian European philosophy as discordant variations on the same nomi-
nalistic theme. 9 In my judgment, neither deconstructionism nor
post-modern skepticism relieve the discord, since they too tend to exem-
plify a species of conceptual nominalism.10 With Peirce, however, one
8. Cf. William C. Spohn, “Jesus and Ethics,” Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society
of America (1994) 49:40-57; “Jesus and Christian Ethics,” Theological Studies, 56(1995),
pp. 92-107; “Spirituality and Ethics: Exploring the Connections,” Theological Studies,
58(1997), pp. 109-123.
9. C.S. Peirce, Collected Papers, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (8 vols.;
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 1. 15-27.
10. Classical nominalism denied the reality of all universals and equated them with
concrete spoken words repeatedly applied to concrete sensible objects. Conceptual
nominalism denies real generality in things but discovers it in the subjective universal
conceptions of the mind. In conceptual nominalism, the mind imposes universality on
surd and unintelligible concrete sensibles.
can transcend the fallacies of nominalism by recognizing that the human

mind perceives laws, real tendencies in things. The human mind does so
both inferentially and intuitively. Moreover, in the metaphysics of expe-
rience defended in this pages, persons embody complex tendencies and
therefore exemplify norms of conduct. Some people, of course, embody
nobler moral and religious norms than others. Others incarnate immoral
or sinful norms. Others still exemplify heroic virtue or utter depravity.
Moreover, precisely because humans embody general modes of acting,
personal and group conduct does in fact give to others either good or bad
example. It does so by exemplifying virtuous or vicious habits of activity
which others can imitate. For the same reason, human learning exhibits a
mimetic character: humans often learn through imitating the behavior of
others for better or for worse. Moral education thrives on the good ex-
ample of others because ordinarily humans need to see ideals embodied
and lived before they take them seriously, especially if fidelity to the ide-
als in question requires sacrifice.11
Two additional traits endow the human tendencies embodied in Jesus
with unique and universal normativity in religious matters: His sinlessness
and the fact that His human mind confronts us as a perfect, created,
sacramental icon of the divine mind. Both Jesus’ sinlessness and His mind’s
iconic revelation of God’s saving intentions to humanity presuppose and
flow from His personal divinity. Deny the hypostatic union and the his-
tory of Jesus loses any claim to any unique or universal normativity. In-
stead, his religious vision degenerates into the utopian dream of an ob-
scure, failed, first-century, peasant prophet. Confess the hypostatic union;
and the uniqueness of Jesus’ historical experience, which expressed itself
in the sinless fidelity with which He announced God’s saving intentions
to humanity, make normative claims on every human person. They also
exemplify the way in which God Himself would have us relate in faith to
Him and to one another.
If the historical figure of Jesus makes normative religious and moral
claims upon every human conscience, the application of that norm to
one’s own ethical situation requires an analogical imagination. A falla-
cious univocal approach to the religious and moral normativity which
Jesus embodies would require that each Christian literally relive His life.
No one, of course, can do that; but the analogical Christian imagination
11. For a more detailed discussion of these issues, see: Donald L. Gelpi, S.J., The Turn
to Experience in Contemporary Theology (New York, NY: Paulist, 1994). I disagree with
René Girard’s contention that mimesis always results in competition and conflict.
Humans also experience collaborative mimesis. Think, for example, of a creative loving
relationship between a teacher and a pupil. Cf. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred,
translated by Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1972).
can, as Spohn has correctly argued, discover in the person of Jesus a para-
digmatic normativity.12
Instead of trying to deduce right and wrong from universal moral prin-
ciples, analogical moral thinking uses the example of Jesus in order to
illumine problematic moral challenges and situations. Ethical paradigms
do not dictate specific decisions; but they do orient the conscience in a
direction which allows it to bring questionable and challenging situa-
tions to moral resolution.
The paradigmatic example of Jesus teaches believers how to relate ha-
bitually to God and to others; but it does not tell one what concretely to
do. One therefore begins the discernment process by using the example
of Jesus in order to determine which aspects of a problematic situation
count as religiously or morally significant. In other words, personal iden-
tification with the person of Jesus and with the cause which He both
proclaimed and embodied focuses one’s conscientious perceptions of what
counts as ethically important.
In confronting a situation of injustice, for example, identification with
the mind of Jesus teaches one instinctively to view matters through the
eyes of the victims rather than through the lens of power or of mere
expediency. In dealing with conflicts, identification with Jesus’ view of
reality teaches one to choose non-violent rather than violent solutions,
negotiated reconciliation rather than vindictive retaliation. Similarly,
unconditioned trust in God in Jesus’ image enables one to adopt faith as
the context for moral decision making; and insertion into the family of
God which Jesus begins forms the conscience in responsible dialogue
with other charismatically gifted believers. Identification with the Father’s
universal love and forgiveness inclines one to prefer the more universal
good to the more particular and restricted good. In all these ways com-
mitment to the paradigmatic figure of Jesus conditions the Christian
conscience’s sense of what counts as morally important.
Besides allowing one to identify the ethically significant elements in a
specific moral situation, commitment to the moral demands of life in the
kingdom supplies the Christian conscience with a litmus for testing the
motives behind different moral options. Trust in God in the image of
Jesus has, for example, specific moral consequences. It demands the will-
ingness to share one’s bread, the physical supports of one’s life with the
poor, the needy, the marginal, the expendable. It therefore requires the
willingness to collaborate in the creation of a radically egalitarian com-
munity of sharing and of faith, a community in which the neediest re-
ceive the greatest honor and attention, while those who lead the commu-
nity in any way relate to it and to its members in self-effacing and humble
12. See also: Alfons Auer, “Die Aktualität der sittlicher Botschaft Jesu” in Die Frage nach
Jesus, pp. 271-363.
service. Involvement in such a community poses a decisive moral chal-

lenge to selfish egotism, to natural or sinful self-reliance, to greed, to
arrogance, to social indifference to the fate of others, to classism, to rac-
ism, to sexism, and to any other “ism” which fragments both secular and
ecclesial society.
Similarly, the mutual sharing in the family of God which Jesus began
must also express the same unconditioned forgiveness which Jesus em-
bodied in His ministry and in the paschal mystery. That forgiveness com-
mits Christians to a universalized love which excludes no one in principle
and which even includes one’s enemies. Christian forgiveness commits
one to imitating Jesus’ non-violent prophetic resistance to injustice, to
oppression, and to all forms of religious hypocrisy. Such a commitment
calls into moral question violence of heart and of action, envy, hatred,
social and political apathy.
Finally, identification with the paradigmatic figure of Jesus endows one
with a moral identity. One must choose the more Christlike path in re-
solving any question of conscience. Paul the apostle here set the example:
he habitually exhorted his converts to imitate him in his own imitation
of Christ. Putting on the mind of Christ demands more than consent to
the religious and moral ideals which Jesus proclaimed and lived. It also
inculcates His attitudes of heart, His imaginative perception of reality.
Jesus’ religious vision and His attitudes stand, moreover, in an intimate
relationship to one another. His humility and self-effacement express His
obediential reverence for the Father. His compassion encompasses the
poor, the marginal, the suffering, the expendable. His universal love and
forgiveness imitates the Father’s own saving attitudes toward humanity.
Acquiring Jesus’ moral and religious attitudes predisposes one to resolve
personal moral challenges as He would have. His habitual pattern of liv-
ing and of relating to others models the sinless way to respond to per-
sonal human rights and needs, even though it does not dictate what con-
cretely to do in any given circumstance. As a consequence, the salvation
which Jesus proclaims reverences human freedom and takes it with utter
seriousness.
Every human self must choose the kind of self it desires to exemplify.
One makes those self-defining choices, of course, in collaboration and
conflict with other persons; but the Christian conscience discovers in the
sinless example of Jesus the kind of humanity which God desires all people
to embody. As we have seen, Jesus’ sinlessness makes Him more perfectly
human than the rest of us. Through the sum total of Jesus’ human choices,
the hypostatic union recreates physically a sinless humanity in the midst
of a sinful world. The incarnation of God thus redefines both concretely
and normatively the meaning of “human.” It does so concretely because
no other human embodies the human experience of being a divine per-
son. It does so normatively by exemplifying the kinds of habits and dis-

positions which make for sinless living. In other words, the incarnation
reveals in a unique and normative way the kind of human experience
God wants every human person to become. Inevitably therefore, Chris-
tian morality has a inherently Christlike character because it demands
the imitation of Jesus and therefore exemplifies Christological knowing.
As the pattern of Jesus’ life illumines the pattern of our own living, as
we allow His Breath to teach us who He is through practical assimilation
to Him, the story of Jesus intersects with our personal story and reshapes
it toward ends which bind us to God in the same kind of filial relation-
ship which He embodied. The intersection of our stories with Jesus’ story
thus endows the history of each believer and of every Christian commu-
nity both with a transcendent, ultimate purpose and with a present prac-
tical agenda. Those who live for God and into God live with transcen-
dent purpose. For those who confess the divinity of Jesus, however, living
for and into God commits one to making the divine reign on earth into
a present lived reality. In all these ways, Christological knowing defines
Christian identity.
The perception, motivation, and identity of the Christian conscience
function as norms which one can apply again and again to different kinds
of moral situations, as the life story of individual Christians and of Chris-
tian communities intersect with the paradigmatic story of Jesus Christ.
The repeated applicability makes these norms a practical method for re-
solving the Christian conscience. In what follows, I shall reflect on how
one applies these norms within Christian ethical deliberation.
I argued at the end of the second volume of this study that commit-
ment to Jesus Christ in practical faith dedicates the Christian conscience
to a melioristic ethics of ideals. The challenge of such an ethic lies in the
imaginative and discerning construction of a moral bridge. That bridge
links the ideal which Jesus embodied and to which He summons us per-
sonally and collectively to the natural and sinful realities which the gos-
pel challenges us to transform.
As we saw at the end of volume two, an ethics of ideals demands that
the conscience never compromise or lie to itself about the ideals to which
it stands committed. The Christian conscience must bend natural and
sinful reality to the ideal of the kingdom, not that ideal to natural and
sinful reality.
Dealing realistically with reality requires, however, a genuine apprecia-
tion of the truth, goodness, and beauty already ingredient in persons and
in morally conflicted situations. That appreciation presupposes a prior
and ongoing repentant confrontation with the threatening aspects of moral
conflicts; for only that kind of repentant self-confrontation frees the heart
to see reality with realistic appreciation.
Repentant self-confrontation also frees the heart from self-righteous

perfectionism. It forces a compassionate, realistic assessment of one’s own
limitations and sinfulness and of the sinfulness and limitations of others.
A genuine appreciation of the ideals to which the kingdom commits one
requires that one deal compassionately with human limitation and sin.
Building a bridge from the Christian ideal to natural and sinful reality
advances in stages. The Christian conscience first derives from the ideal
of the kingdom principles which apply to the morally significant aspects
of the conflicted ethical situation which it confronts. From principles, it
derives policies; and from policies, strategies. By these stages the Chris-
tian conscience moves discerningly and prayerfully to a felt sense of how
best to advance morally conflicted situations the next possible step to-
ward the ideal of the kingdom.
The United States bishops’ pastoral letter Economic Justice for All illus-
trates admirably the workings of the Christian conscience. The letter be-
gins with a positive appreciation of the achievements of the Unites States
economy. After noting morally significant problems in the contemporary
economic situation, the bishops meditate on the way in which the ideal
of the kingdom throws moral light on those problems. From the ideal of
the kingdom, the bishops then derive principles to guide future economic
policy. Among those norms they stress the principle of preferential op-
tion for the poor. By applying the same norms to an economy suffering
from the gross injustices of “trickle-down” economics, the bishops for-
mulate flexible policies which promise to rectify those injustices. In the
end, however, the bishops leave it to the discerning deliberations of Ameri-
can Christians to devise personal and institutional strategies which will
transform policies into realities.
Economic Justice for All deals with problems of public morality. In re-
solving questions of interpersonal morality, the conscience faces a differ-
ent set of challenges. As the process of Christological knowing transforms
and transvalues personal moral conversion, the theological passions of
hope, faith, and charity heal, perfect, and elevate disordered natural pas-
sions. Let us reflect in more detail on how that occurs.
The Theological Passions

Thomistic theology portrayed Christian hope, faith, and love as virtues
of the spiritual soul. (Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I-II, qq. vi-x,
lxii) Unfortunately, this theological interpretation of the three religious
attitudes to which Paul alludes in 1 Cor 13:13 rests on an indefensible
operational dualism. Aquinas Platonized Aristotle’s philosophical account
of the human soul by arguing for its essential immortality. The Angelic
Doctor portrayed the human soul as the form of the body but as essen-
tially spiritual because endowed with two purely spiritual powers of op-
eration: the intellect and the will. Since Aquinas also assumed that only
the spiritual powers of the soul oriented it to God, hope, faith, and love
all had to reside in either the intellect or the will. The Angelic Doctor
correlated faith easily enough with the spiritual intellect. He located both
hope and love in the spiritual will.
More recently, Roberto Unger has suggested that we view theological
hope, faith, and love as passions of the soul.13 The metaphysics of experi-
ence which I have developed in this and in other foundational studies
tends to support Unger’s suggestion. That metaphysics avoids the falla-
cies of philosophical dualism by eschewing essentialism and by conceiv-
ing all reality as relational. By rejecting essentialism, a metaphysics of
experience avoids specifically the dualistic concepts of “matter” and of
“spirit” which have traditionally dogged and distorted Christian theo-
logical thinking. Three kinds of relationships structure the higher forms
of experience: conceptual relations, or intentions; factual relations, or
decisions; and habitual relations, or tendencies. Autonomously function-
ing tendencies count as selves. Self-conscious selves capable of respon-
sible activity count as persons. Decision fixes beliefs and attitudes and
creates environmental and social relationships among persons, while in-
tentional relations make persons present to themselves and to their world.
A foundational analysis of the gracing of the natural forms of conver-
sion discovers an intuitive, passionate element in theological hope, in
theological faith, and in theological love. Hope as we have seen dwells
primarily at an affective level. Theological hope heals, perfects, and el-
evates natural human hopes by making God their future and by insuring
that humans hope for the same realities which God does. The God re-
vealed in Jesus, however, wills the establishment of His reign on earth as
in heaven through the creation of faith-filled communities of sharing,
mutual forgiveness, and worship. Inevitably, then Christian hope em-
bodies a deeply affective perception of one’s interpersonal relationship
with God and with other persons. It therefore qualifies as a passion. Be-
cause it comes from God and leads to God, Christian hope also qualifies
as a theological passion. The theological passion of hope motivates the
graced acts of hope which infuse the theological virtue of hope.
Christian faith too has a passionate dimension. Theological faith heals,
perfects, and elevates human beliefs by conforming them to the norma-
tive historical revelation of God which we have received in Christ Jesus
and in His illuminating Breath. Belief, however, comes, as we have seen
in two forms: intuition and inference. Intuitive beliefs engage human
affective perceptions and judgment. Because Christian faith believes in a
tri-personal God and in the human community of faith which proceeds
from the historical revelation of that God, like hope faith grasps and
13. Cf. Unger, Passion, pp. 220-237.
grapples with affectively complex interpersonal relationships. As the af-

fective grasp of interpersonal relationships, faith, like hope, qualifies as a
passion. Its focus on divine things makes it theological. The theological
passion of faith motivates the graced acts of faith which infuse the theo-
logical virtue of faith.
The theological virtue of charity also engages the human heart. Hypo-
thetical thinking engages the intuitive mind; but deductive and induc-
tive inference proceed dispassionately according to the rules of logic, even
though rational thought never loses affective connotations. All other forms
of human knowing engage the imagination and the affections directly.
When we love other persons we perceive them with affective benevolence
and act toward them in ways which embody that benevolence. Christian
love finds its motive and ultimate object in God and in those persons
whom God loves. The God of Jesus Christ loves with an all-encompassing
universal benevolence. As the affective perception of human interper-
sonal relationships, Christian love counts as a human passion. Its focus
on God makes it into a theological passion. The theological passion of
love motivates the graced acts of love which infuse the theological virtue
of charity.
The three theological passions of hope, faith, and love heal the disor-
dered passions of the human heart by elevating them to God and by
perfecting them through universalization.
Hope heals the human heart of despair by anchoring affective percep-
tions of the future in the experience of the Breath of the risen Christ,
whose saving empowerment transforms the triune God into humanity’s
future. The paschal mystery gives Christian hope its ultimate object: per-
fect loving union with God in the life to come. Jesus’ proclamation of the
kingdom gives Christian hope its proximate object. Christians long proxi-
mately for the establishment of God’s reign on earth through the recon-
ciliation of all people to one another in God, in Christ, and in Their
forgiving Breath.
By committing the human heart to the practical establishment of God’s
reign on earth, Christian hope mounts a frontal assault on the causes of
despair: pain, frustration, failure, oppression. It inserts those tempted to
despair into a healing community of hope. When personal hopes dwindle,
the shared hopes and longings of the Christian community have the power
to nurture hope and longing in the despondent.
Despair stifles the imagination. Christian hope, by contrast challenges
the human imagination to allow God’s Breath to expand it to embrace
the dawning reality of our future in Christ.
Despair blinds one to personal possibilities of growth in oneself and in
others. Christian hope heals the blindness of despair through initial and
ongoing repentance; and it challenges Christians to acknowledge and
develop their gifts under the empowering charismatic enlightenment of

Jesus’ Breath. Christian hope thus transforms sloth, fatalism, self-pity,
and despairing self-isolation into active service of God and of others in
Jesus’ name and image. Repentance and the Christian hope which spring
from it also demand that the followers of Jesus take realistic steps to over-
come the emotional and social entrapment which breed discouragement
and despair.
Finally, Christian hope universalizes the natural aspirations of the hu-
man heart by teaching it to hope the best for all people. Left to its own
resources, natural hopes content themselves with wishing only one’s own
well. Natural hopes ordinarily leave out enemies, aliens, and strangers.
A passionate commitment to God and to others in faith heals the hypo-
critical moral and religious rationalizations which disordered passion in-
spires. As we have seen, when disordered passion skews moral delibera-
tion, it distorts and violates the conscience at the same time that it moti-
vates the pseudo-rationalization of those violations.
Christian faith, by contrast, demands that one consent with all one’s
heart to the truth about God revealed in Jesus and in His Breath. As
Christians we see ourselves and others truly when we view both with
Jesus’ own compassionate eyes. We see one another truly when we forgive
one another with the forgiveness of Christ. That forgiveness recognizes in
every human person the capacity to repent of past sins and failings. Graced
repentance creates a new capacity to live for and in God and to serve
others in Jesus’ image. As a consequence, Christian faith will not tolerate
the hypocritical rationalization of sin, injustice, and immorality.
The theological passion of Christian love heals all the other passionate
disorders by expanding the human heart to embrace the triune God and
the entire human family. Christian love also replaces all seven deadly sins
with charitable benevolence toward all.
In the late sixties, situation ethics attempted to sentimentalize Chris-
tian charity by depriving it of all content.14 In point of fact the love of
charity demands very specific moral commitments. One finds those moral
commitments enunciated in Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom and
embodied in the paschal mystery.
Commitment to the kingdom teaches the human heart to love as Jesus
loved. The synergy of divine and human energy in Jesus universalized
His love for others. That synergy expanded His heart to include not only
the poor, the marginal, the alien, and the expendable but even His own
enemies.
Jesus loved not just theoretically but practically. Christian love begins
with practical concern to meet the basic physical needs of all people. It
creates a community of sharing in which the least members of human
14. See: Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1966).
society receive the greatest care, concern, and honor and in which the
great and powerful serve the rest. The synoptic gospels, which best pre-
serve Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom, all testify to these practical
demands of Christian love. Moreover, as we have seen, the synoptics enun-
ciate more clearly than the Johannine tradition the universal demands of
Christian charity.
As we have seen in another context, however, the gospel of John com-
pletes a pragmatic portrait of the meaning of Christian charity by discov-
ering in the paschal mystery the supreme expression of God’s love for
sinful humans. As John’s Jesus hangs upon the cross, He confronts the
world as the divine bridegroom, as the supreme human embodiment of
God’s reconciling, forgiving love. Moreover, in Johannine theology, the
paschal mystery endows the new commandment—”Love one another as
I have loved you”—with its concrete meaning. All the gospels, of course,
portray Jesus as having loved even unto death. John, however, under-
scores this point in a special way.
As we have seen, the paschal mystery radicalizes the love which Jesus
lived and proclaimed. The cross radicalizes Jesus’ love of the Father by the
totality of His self-donation into the Father’s hands. It radicalizes Jesus
love of His own disciples by transforming it into a love even unto death.
Finally, it radicalizes Jesus’ love of His enemies by revealing the uncondi-
tioned character of God’s offer of forgiveness to a sinful humanity. It
radicalizes Jesus’ compassion for the suffering through His personal em-
brace of extremest suffering. The resurrection reveals the radical charac-
ter of the divine love because, instead of retaliating vindictively to His
murder, betrayal, denial, and abandonment on Calvary, the risen Christ
sends in the Father’s name the sin-forgiving Breath who transforms us in
His image.
Christian charity heals disordered human pride by replacing sinful
self-reliance and the illusion of human self-sufficiency with unconditioned
reliance on and trust in God. It replaces prideful ego-inflation with re-
pentant self-confrontation before God. Repentance sensitizes the heart
to both its limitations and its sinfulness.
Life in the kingdom also demands the renunciation of power over oth-
ers for the humble service of the least of Jesus’ sisters and brothers. Char-
ity replaces greed for power with authentic worship of Jesus’ Father in
mutual reconciliation and forgiveness. It breaks down the sinful
self-isolation in which pride imprisons the human heart by inserting one
into a repenting faith community of mutual and practical service. Humble,
mutual service in Jesus’ image begets humility.
A charity rooted in repentant self-confrontation also heals the lesser
sinful passion of vanity by demanding that one acknowledge the truth
about oneself and others before God: the truth about human limitations
and malice, the truth about personal value and achievement. By demand-
ing that one always attend to the needs of others, charity schools the
heart to recognize their true worth. Those who love truly in Jesus’ name
find joy in the excellence of God and in the excellence of those whom
God loves. Realistic self-esteem and appreciation of the gifts of others
also inculcates humility.
Christian charity makes a frontal assault on human greed. The greedy
value wealth and personal possessions more than people. Christianity re-
pudiates the sinful amassing of wealth as a form of idolatry. Idols possess
us, not we them. In what concerns physical possessions, we cannot claim
to own them until we have the freedom to part with them. Until then,
the things we cling to own us. Idols also demand human sacrifice; and
the greedy rich cheerfully sacrifice the lives of the poor and needy to their
own bloated fortunes and self-indulgent pleasures.
Charity demands that one choose between God and mammon by valu-
ing people more than wealth or personal possessions. The practical de-
mands of life in the kingdom require the renunciation of wealth and the
transformation of labor into service. One labors in order to keep from
burdening others and in order to have something to share with those in
greatest need.
Charity also heals the contempt in which the rich and advantaged of-
ten hold the poor. It requires that the neediest and most marginal mem-
bers of the community receive the greatest care, concern, and honor. It
discourages class warfare by creating a radically egalitarian community
which cares for the needs of all, especially for those in greatest need.
Finally, charity replaces gluttonous self-indulgence with active concern
for the needs of others. The concreteness of love demands that charity
express itself in deeds and not just in words.
The lustful use other people as sex objects. In Committed Worship I
argued that the four forms of natural conversion heal sexuality by hu-
manizing it and by transforming it into chaste marital love. The love of
charity heals disordered sexual desires by endowing marital love with sac-
ramental, religious significance. It transforms marriage into a solemn com-
mitment taken before God and transforms the Christian family into a
realm of grace which nurtures initial and ongoing conversion in all its
members. I shall not repeat these insights in detail here. Instead, I refer
the reader to the pertinent passages in Committed Worship.15
Charity heals hatred through forgiveness in the name and image of
Jesus. While hatred divides people from one another and encourages vio-
lence by destroying communication among enemies, the practical de-
mands of Christian love reconcile enemies and teach them to love one
another. Reconciliation teaches one to look for the best in people rather
than to maximize their faults in enmity. Charity also heals the hatred
called envy by teaching one to rejoice in the success, good fortune, and
excellence of others.
Christian charity also inculcates well-ordered self-love. Christians seek
to love their neighbors as they love themselves. Well-ordered self-love
undoes the shame and self-hatred which motivate the slothful neglect of
one’s own talents. The charismatic inspirations of the divine Breath trans-
form the responsible development of personal gifts into charismatic ser-
vice to the Christian and to the human community.
The preceding reflections enable one to contextualize the therapeutic
Christology of Sebastian Moore.16 Moore has drawn on Jungian arche-
typal theory in order to develop a relational Christology which probes
the ways in which confrontation with Christ promotes psychic healing.
Moore portrays the crucified Jesus as symbolizing psychologically that
aspect of the unconscious self which one continues to crucify by refusing
to bring it to healing awareness. Confrontation with the crucified savior
empowers one to face the dark, shadow side of the self. That confronta-
tion unmasks the final unreality of one’s sinfulness and creates the possi-
bility of resurrection through psychic integration. Through resurrection
Christian sorrow acquires a transcendent, eschatological character.
For Moore faith in the crucified Jesus demands that one die to all nar-
cissistic self-preoccupation and self-idolatry. That death to one’s sinful
and neurotic self allows one to rise to a discovery of one’s true self in the
experience of loving self-transcendence. Jesus, therefore, begins a new
phase of religious history which reveals Him as the God who lives within
us.
Given the individualistic, therapeutic caste of culture in the United
States, it comes as no surprise that Moore’s therapeutic Christology
emerged from theological reflection in this country. A therapeutic ap-
proach to Christology, however, runs certain risks. It tends to portray
Christological faith as a facet of the therapeutic process. Somewhat like
Schillebeeckx, for example, Moore seems to ground faith in the risen
Christ in the subjective experience of psychic healing in faith.
Schillebeeckx, as we have seen, grounds it the subjective experience of
salvation.
A foundational Christology demonstrates its adequacy by its ability to
deal with the issues raised by more partial approaches to Christological
faith. The foundational Christology developed in this study roots Christo-
logical faith as such in the person and ministry of Jesus when understood
in the light of the paschal mystery. The apostles’ encounter with the risen
Christ motivated the Christological faith which they proclaimed, the
16. Cf. Sebastian Moore, The Crucified Jesus Is No Stranger (New York, NY: Cossroad,
1977); The Fire and the Rose Are One (New York, NY: Seabury, 1980).
personal conversion to Christ which they experienced, and the summons

to a similar conversion to which they invited others.
With Moore, however, a foundational Christology acknowledges a thera-
peutic dimension to Christological knowing. Repentant self-confrontation
in response to God’s historical self-revelation in Jesus and in His Breath
does demand confrontation with one’s dark and sinful shadow self. It
does open the human heart to the Breath’s healing touch.
A foundational Christology would, however, also insist that conversion
to Christ requires more than therapeutic healing. It engages the entire
self: not just feeling and imagination, but also inferential reasoning and
the deliberations of the human conscience. Conversion transforms a self
environmentally rooted and socially engaged.
The practical Christology developed in the present chapter also makes
it clearer than Moore does that the healing of disordered passions engages
not just the unconscious psyche but also the moral rectification of con-
scious attitudes. Disordered passions wound the psyche; but they also set
the conscience at odds with itself. As a consequence, putting on the mind
of Christ involves simultaneous growth in hope, faith, and love. It also
demands growth in the passionate Christian search for a just social order.
To this last question I turn in the final chapter of this volume.

In the present chapter I have sketched the ways in which commitment in
practical faith in Jesus Christ transforms personal moral conversion. I
have argued that personal morality deals with human interpersonal rela-
tionships. Since passion raises those relationships to consciousness, the
gracing of natural moral conversion requires the healing of disordered
human passions.
In a theological treatise like this, one must perforce consider passion
abstractly. The experience of initial and ongoing conversion, however,
demands that one face the concrete disorders in one’s personal relation-
ships, the neglect or violation of the rights of others of which one stands
convicted. Natural moral conversion demands that one re-order one’s
concrete passionate human relationships in the light of justice and pru-
dence. Christian charity demands that one reorder those same concrete
passionate relationships in the light of the kingdom and of the paschal
mystery.
Disordered passions like pride, vanity, greed, lust, hatred, gluttony, envy,
and sloth become sin through concrete embodiment in acts which wound,
violate, neglect, or manipulate living persons. Initial and ongoing con-
version together demand that one repent of all such evil actions and of
the habits which motivate them.
Re-evaluating one’s concrete personal relationships through prayer and

counseling poses a fundamental moral challenge to all converting Chris-
tians. It includes those experiencing the RCIA. It also includes initiated
Christians who ought to be responding to the demands of ongoing con-
version to Christ.
Re-evaluating one’s concrete social responsibilities constitutes the sec-
ond challenge which confronts all converting Christians. As I have just
indicated, I shall address this second challenge in the chapter which fol-
lows.
Chapter 16
To Serve As Jesus Served
In the last chapter I reflected on the ways in which commitment to Jesus
Christ in faith transforms personal moral conversion. I pondered the dif-
ference and relationship between personal moral conversion and
socio-political conversion. I argued that, since personal moral conversion
deals with interpersonal relationships, it demands the healing of disor-
dered passions. With Roberto Unger, I defined passion as the affective
perception of human interpersonal relationships. I then examined how
the theological passions of hope, faith, and love have the capacity to heal
those disordered passions which motivate the seven deadly sins.
The present chapter deals with the second form of moral conversion:
socio-political conversion. Those converted socio-politically commit them-
selves to collaborating with others in order to bring about a just social
order. Socio-political converts invoke prudential reasoning in order to
devise collaborative strategies for securing the common good. The com-
mon good requires that all persons have reasonable access to benefiting
from the goods available in human society. The common good also se-
cures for all a reasonable ability to contribute to shared social benefits. As
we saw in the preceding section, confession of Jesus’ priestly, messianic,
and judicial authority necessarily pits one in prophetic, non-violent op-
position to institutional violence and injustice.
Commitment to Jesus Christ transforms socio-political conversion into
the Christian search for a just social order. Socio-political conversion uses
natural, deliberative reason in its prudential search for the common good.
The Christian search for a just social order, however, advances in faith. It
therefore measures the justice or injustice of human institutions by the
extent to which they embody or contradict the mind of Christ. As a con-
sequence, the Christian conscience can call no society just until it em-
bodies the vision of the kingdom.
As we have already seen, the kingdom has a utopian character. It calls
for the creation of a radically egalitarian society in which the rich and
powerful serve others in the image of Jesus, the servant messiah. It de-
mands the free sharing of the physical supports of life as an expression of
mutual forgiveness and reconciliation in God. It founds society, not on
power politics, but on the authentic worship of the God whom Jesus
reveals by his ministry, death, resurrection, and mission of the Breath.
Authentic Christian worship roots itself in love of enemies and in
non-violent, prophetic resistance to all forms of sinful oppression.
Chapter 16: To Serve As Jesus Served 515
When the vision of the kingdom measures human interpersonal rela-

tionships, it infuses the theological passion of charity into the human
heart. When the vision of the kingdom measures the morality of social
institutions, it gives theological meaning to a shared Christian passion
for social justice.
No society counts as just unless its institutions embody the order which
God wills it to have. As we saw in pondering Jesus’ prophetic ministry,
His sinless religious vision confronts sinful humanity as a perfect created
icon of the divine mind. In matters of public morality, then, Jesus’ reli-
gious vision reveals to us the kind of order God wills human institutions,
both ecclesiastical and secular, to instill and incorporate. The vision of
the kingdom thus coincides with the Christian ideal of justice. It passes
judgment on all human institutions, both secular and ecclesiastical.
No human society, including the Christian Church, has ever perfectly
embodied the vision of the kingdom. Cynicism tempts one, then to mount
an initially plausible argument that the utopian character of the kingdom
makes it unrealistic and unrealizable. If no human society has ever suc-
ceeded in realizing the ideal of the kingdom perfectly, then why even try?
How might one respond to such an argument?
First of all, while sin mars the human attempt to bring the vision of the
kingdom to concrete embodiment, some Christian communities do suc-
cessfully embody it, albeit imperfectly. Many Christian families, religious
communities, and churches strive successfully to incarnate the mind of
Christ. Moreover, they succeed so well in incarnating the ideals of the
kingdom that they do reveal it practically and sacramentally to others.
That revelation attracts converts to the Church through the divine excel-
lence which it incarnates; and, by motivating initial and ongoing conver-
sion, that revelation transforms those whom it attracts into active, new
members who benefit from and contribute to the shared life of the Chris-
tian community.
Jesus Himself believed that the kingdom had arrived in His person and
ministry. At the same time, He looked to its ultimate and final
eschatological fulfillment in the future. The eschatological character of
the kingdom means that, though already incipiently here , it has yet to
arrive finally and fully and will not do so until the second coming.
Second, a utopian ethics of ideals fits a world of developing experi-
ences. Without ideals to live for, the human heart succumbs to cynicism,
selfishness, and despair. Without vision the people perish. The beautiful
ideals which lure moral conduct give meaning and direction to human
living at the same time that they stand in judgment over its vice and
sinfulness. Without religious and moral ideals the conscience flounders
in crudely pragmatic disorientation and lacks any ultimate direction or
norms for choosing. United States politics in the nineties exemplifies well
the disorienting consequences of the moral cynicism systematically in-

culcated by our national leaders during the Reagan era.
Third, the ideal of the kingdom calls the conscience beyond crudely
pragmatic considerations and norms. The vision of the kingdom claims
the conscience absolutely and ultimately. Jesus regarded the reign of God
important enough not only to live for but even to die for; and He re-
quired His disciples to sacrifice anything for the sake of the kingdom.
Because He discovered in the kingdom God’s saving will for humanity,
He also recognized its moral absoluteness. Jesus did not seem to believe
that the Father required Him to succeed in converting His contemporar-
ies to the obedience of faith; but He did believe that the Father required
Him to die, if necessary, for the truth which He proclaimed and incar-
nated.
Jesus’ disciples can live consistently only if they relate to the kingdom
as He did. Jesus both lived and died for it. The kingdom therefore claims
Jesus’ disciples as ultimately and absolutely as it claimed Him. One pro-
claims and seeks to embody the kingdom, not because that prophetic
witness guarantees worldly success, but because God wills it. The king-
dom therefore challenges the conscience to lived fidelity to its demands
in all the circumstances of life. Moreover, like Jesus, His Breath-filled
disciples stand corporately committed to proclaiming and embodying
Jesus’ religious vision, even though that apostolic endeavor sets their very
lives in jeopardy.
Fourth, in the preceding chapter I argued with William Spohn that the
habitual attitudes which Jesus incarnated teach the Christian’s heart how
to respond morally to the world’s sinfulness even though they leave one
free to decide concretely what to do in any given circumstance. Jesus’
refusal to water down His prophetic message even in the face of a cruel
death by torture defines paradigmatically the way in which His disciples
must also relate to the kingdom. Like Jesus they too may face defeat and
death for bearing witness to the kind of justice which God desires human
institutions to embody. Like Oscar Romero and the martyrs of the UCA,
like the martyrs of Rwanda, Jesus’ disciples know that they will be judged
by their unswerving fidelity to God’s will for this world. As a consequence,
a melioristic Christian ethics of ideals requires that the disciples of Jesus
never tire of doing good. Despite reversals, failure, and setbacks, they
must persist in supporting the principles, policies, and strategies which
advance an unjust world the next possible step toward the ideal of divine
justice to which the kingdom summons it.
This chapter examines the socio-political dimensions of commitment
to Jesus Christ. It divides into three parts. The first part reflects on the
challenge posed to the Christian conscience by liberation Christology.
The second part reflects on the sinful obstacles to Christian socio-political
conversion which infect culture in the United States. The third part of
this chapter examines some of the major institutional injustices on which
Christians in the United States who are converting socio-politically need
to reflect. It also suggests a practical, pastoral strategy for challenging
converts to life-long commitment to the Christian search for a just social
order.
(I)
Liberation theology attempts to respond to two major challenges issued
by the second Vatican council. Vatican II called for inculturated evange-
lization. The council also called for a renewal of the apostolate of the
laity. In what follows, I shall reflect on the relationship of each of these
challenges to the emergence of liberation theology.
The Challenge of Liberation Christology

Vatican Council II called for inculturated evangelization. Inculturated
evangelization, as we have seen, wrestles with three interrelated issues: 1)
How does one incarnate the gospel in the symbols of a particular culture?
2) How does the gospel challenge the sinfulness of that culture? 3) What
gift does such a particular inculturated living of the gospel have to give to
the world Church, and what has it to learn from the world Church?
Inculturated evangelization presupposes an inculturated theology. In
calling for the former, the second Vatican council implicitly called for the
latter as well. Catholic liberation theology began as the attempt of Latin
American theologians to develop a inculturated theology which speaks to
the religious needs of the masses of the suffering and oppressed people in
the Third Word. That same theology challenges the Church and secular
society to undo the injustices which cause that suffering.
Inculturated evangelization and the Christian search for a just social
order have, then, an intimate and necessary relationship to one another.
One cannot inculturate the gospel successfully unless one’s embodiment
of Christian faith challenges and transforms the sinful social structures
which corrupt human society.
The church in the United States has produced two theologies of libera-
tion: black liberation theology and feminism. More recently both the
Hispanic and the native American communities have begun to find their
distinctive theological voice.
Martin Luther King laid the remote foundations for black liberation
theology,1 although the movement postdates King’s martyrdom. Simulta-
neously and independently of theological developments in Latin America,
1. For a representative sample of King’s writings, see: James M. Washington, ed., A

Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King (San Francisco, CA:
Harper & Row, 1986).
Protestant black liberation theology arose in the United States as a strat-

egy by African-American ministers to assert their theological leadership
of the Black Power movement.
The Vatican has only discovered feminism in the latter part of the twen-
tieth century; but American feminism spreads its roots back into the nine-
teenth century. It began among women abolitionists who realized that
they were fighting for rights for slaves which they themselves did not
enjoy. The first phase of feminist political activity culminated in securing
the vote for women. Contemporary feminism and womanism raise a
broader set of justice issues. When feminist and womanist thinkers cri-
tique the sexism of the churches, their thought inevitably takes on a theo-
logical caste.
With time liberation theologians in Latin America and in the United
States have entered into a fruitful dialogue with one another. Latin
liberationists have added racism and sexism to their list of indigenous
injustices. Black and feminist liberationists have learned to examine more
closely the economic and political roots of racial and sexual oppression in
the United States.
Vatican council II issued another challenge which helped motivate the
rise of liberation theology. It entrusted to Christian laity the chief respon-
sibility for Christianizing secular social structures. In Gaudium et spes,
moreover, the council placed the search for social justice at the heart of
the lay apostolate.
Gaudium et spes stands within a long tradition of official Catholic so-
cial teaching, which in modern times began with Leo XIII’s encyclical
Rerum novarum, issued in 1891. (DS 3265- 3271) Forty years later, Pius
XI updated the teachings of Rerum novarum with another major social
encyclical: Quadragesimo anno. (DS 3725-3743) Prior to Vatican II, Pope
John XXIII further developed Catholic social teaching with his two mas-
terful encyclicals: Mater et magistra and Pacem in terris. John XXIII ap-
plied Catholic teaching on the common good to international politics
and economics. He argued that one should employ a sliding scale in or-
der to measure the rights of people to contribute to and share in the
benefits of society. The more goods society produces, the greater the share
to which each of its members has a right.2
2. Cf. Andrew Christiansen, S.J., “The Common Good and the Politics of Self-Interest:
A Catholic Contribution to the Practice of Citizenship” in Beyond Individualism:
Toward a Retrieval of Moral Discourse in America, edited by Donald L. Gelpi, S.J. with
an afterword by Robert N. Bellah (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
1989), pp. 54-86. See also: Joseph Gremillion, ed., The Gospel of Peace and Justice:
Catholic Social Teaching Since Pope John (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1976); David J.
O’Brien and Thomas A. Shannon, eds., Catholic Documents on Peace, Justice, and
Liberation (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977).
Gaudium et spes summarized and developed Catholic social teaching

and applied it to specific realms of society: culture, economics, politics,
and the fostering of world peace. In issuing this document Vatican II
clarified what it meant by the Christianization of secular society. The
document also committed the Catholic community as a whole to the
struggle for international peace and justice. Among Catholics liberation
theology emerged in response to that challenge.
It only took time, of course, before liberation theologians expanded
the concern with justice to include injustice in Church institutions.3 Vati-
can II’s vindication of responsible freedom of conscience in Dignitatis
humanae also fueled to responsible criticisms of ecclesiastical injustice.
Among Latin American liberation theologians, Leonardo Boff, Jon
Sobrino, and Juan Luis Segundo have all constructed liberation Christo-
logies. Of the three, Sobrino has succeeded the best, in my judgment.
A common theme runs through all three of these liberation Christo-
logies: they all give a political reading to Jesus’ proclamation of the king-
dom. By underscoring both the prophetic character of Jesus’ message and
by insisting on its economic and political consequences, Latin liberation
Christology has summoned the Church and the world to confront the
stark fact that we live in a world in which eight hundred million people
are starving to death.4
In my judgment Latin American liberation theology poses its most radi-
cal challenge to Christology when it claims that one can understand the
person of Jesus only through the eyes of the poor, the suffering, and the
oppressed. The idea of Christological knowing developed in these vol-
3. Cf. Leonardo Boff, Church, Charism, and Power: Liberation Theology and the Institu-
tional Church, translated by John W. Dreckmeier (New York, NY: Crossroad, 1985).
4. Cf. Leonardo Boff, Jesus Christ Liberator: A Critical Theology for Our Time, translated
by Patrick Hughes (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1979); Passion of Christ, Passion of the
World: The Facts, Their Interpretation, and Their Meaning Yesterday and Today,
translated by Robert R. Barr (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1987); Jon Sobrino, Christology
at the Crossroads: A Latin American Approach, translated by John Drury (Maryknoll,
NY: Orbis, 1978); Jesus in Latin America (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1982; Jesus the
Liberator: A Historical-Theological View, translated by Paul Burns and Francis
McDonaugh (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1994); Juan Luis Segundo, Faith and Ideologies,
translated by John Drury (New York, NY: Orbis, 1982; The Historical Jesus of the
Synoptics, translated by John Drury (New York, NY: Orbis, 1985); The Humanistic
Christology of Saint Paul, translated by John Drury (New York, NY: Orbis, 1986); The
Christ of the Ignatian Exercises, edited and translated by John Drury (New York, NY:
Orbis, 1987); An Evolutionary Approach to Jesus of Nazareth edited and translated by
John Drury (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988). Black liberation theology has produced:
Albert Cleage, Jr., The Black Messiah (New York, NY: Sheed and Ward, 1968). For a
survey of feminist Christology, see: Jaquelyn Grant, White Woman’s Christ and Black
Woman’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and a Womanist Response (Atlanta, GA: Scholars
Press, 1989); Thomas L. Schubeck, S.J., “Ethics and Liberation Theology,” Theological
Studies, 56(1995), pp. 107- 121.
umes lends foundational sanction to such a suggestion. Jesus Himself

came from the ranks of the poor. He stood socially just above the de-
graded class. He not only sided with the poor, the marginal, and the
oppressed; but He also promoted them to a privileged status in the king-
dom of God. Since Jesus saw reality through the eyes of the poor, so must
any disciple who aspires to living in His image.
If liberation Christology poses the moral challenge of opting preferen-
tially for the poor and of viewing the world through the eyes of oppressed
and marginal people of this world, it poses a theological challenge as well.
Latin American liberation Christology responds theologically to that chal-
lenge by underscoring the prophetic dimension of Jesus’ ministry as well
as its implications for contemporary institutional reform.
A foundational Christology endorses this strategy but attempts to move
beyond it by using pragmatic logic in order to spell out the practical
moral consequences of Christological doctrine. Latin liberation theology’s
failure to date to transcend the Kantian dichotomy between thought and
action has left it vague concerning the relationship between orthodoxy
and orthopraxis. As a consequence, liberation Christologies emanating
from Latin America have tended to date to give only short shrift to doc-
trinal Christology and to overlook its practical, moral implications.5
In attempting to articulate a Christology which spells out the economi-
cally, politically, and socially revolutionary aspects of Jesus’ person and
teaching, theologians in the Third World and in the United States find
themselves facing very different situations. That difference requires cor-
responding inculturated shifts in theological focus and emphasis.
In the Third World the majority of the population languishes in pov-
erty and marginality. In the more socially mobile United States, minority
groups live in poverty, although racism and Reaganomics may have suc-
ceeded, temporarily at least, in creating a permanent underclass.
Latin liberation theology attempts quite rightly to voice the prophetic
cry of the starving and the illiterate. Unless members of the middle and
upper classes espouse the cause of the illiterate poor, they perish in silent
anonymity.
The situation stands somewhat differently in the United States. The
number of illiterates in this country is in fact increasing.6 Nevertheless, in
the United States, oppressed minorities—African Americans, women,
Hispanics, and native Americans—retain the capacity to speak publicly
for themselves. As a product of middle class America, I would regard it as
presumptuous even to attempt to speak for any oppressed minority in
this country; and, I suspect, those same minorities would view me with
5. For a more detailed discussion of these issues, see: Donald L. Gelpi, S.J., The Turn To
Experience in Contemporary Theology (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1994), pp. 24-51.
6. Cf. Jonathan Kozol, Illiterate America (New York, NY: Penguin, 1985).
similar eyes. When the oppressed have the capacity to speak for them-
selves, sympathetic outsiders can only second what they have to say on
their own behalf.
It makes sense in a Third World context to portray Jesus primarily as a
liberator. When the majority of the population languish in economic and
political bondage, the freedom which the gospel of Jesus promises speaks
directly and eloquently to the legitimate human and religious longings of
most people.
In my judgment, however, the Church in the First World needs to hear
a different kind of Christological message. Those who benefit from an
affluence which breeds hunger and poverty in the Third World need to
hear not so much a message of liberation as one of conversion. It does not
take a great deal of insight to understand why: until First-World Chris-
tians repent of the corrupting influences of a predatory, capitalistic mate-
rialism and commit themselves instead to gospel living, until they tran-
scend self-serving classist prejudices, until they face the lethal consequences
of institutional policies with which they more or less consciously con-
nive, they will never acquire the ability to see reality through the eyes of
the poor. Until they see with the eyes of the poor, however, they will
never see reality with the eyes of Jesus Christ. Nor, therefore, will they
understand the person of Jesus and His message. Those who do not un-
derstand Jesus cannot consciously imitate Him. Those who fail to imitate
Him cannot advance in Christological knowing. Conversion, then, rather
than liberation provides the leitmotif of the following reflections on the
Christian search for justice.
(II)
People in the United States find it hard to convert politically. About half
the population never even bothers to vote. Two obvious factors militate
against socio-political conversion in the contemporary United States: the
erosion of democratic government during the Cold War and the indi-
vidualism which infects popular moral perceptions.
Original Sin American Style

No one ever wins a war, not even a Cold War. One might vanquish an-
other nation militarily; but one achieves victory at the high price of cor-
porate ethical compromise and corruption. By the norms of just war
theory, no nation has ever fought a just war. Even if the nation in ques-
tion had a right to go to war, the insane violence of warfare with moral
inevitability betrays warring nations into serious violations of human rights
in the course of waging the war. This has in fact happened in every war;
and it happened to the United States during World War II.
After Pearl Harbor, the United States declared war in order to defend
itself against Japanese aggression. It declared war on the Axis powers in
Europe in order to defend democracy against totalitarianism. The people

of this country correctly deplore the Nazi holocaust. We tried our van-
quished German enemies for their war crimes; but after the war we con-
veniently closed our eyes to the war crimes which we ourselves had per-
petrated.
The fire bombings of Dresden and of Tokyo and the atomic bombing
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki all qualify as crimes against humanity. The
Nazis first gassed innocent civilians and then burned their dead bodies.
The United States incinerated thousands of innocent civilians alive.
When the United States entered the second World War, its govern-
ment recognized the grievous immorality of carpet bombing. Both the
national government and the air force therefore adopted what under the
circumstances of war qualifies as a fairly responsible military policy, when
judged by the standards of just war theory. They restricted air raids to the
precision bombing of military targets.
War, however, corrupted our national conscience with a desire for piti-
less vengeance. By the end of the war, the United States government had
replaced its policy of precision bombing with indiscriminate carpet bomb-
ing. The fire-bombings of Dresden and of Tokyo prepared the way for
two other American-sponsored holocausts: Hiroshima and Nagasaki.7
As we view the world from the devastation left at the end of the Cold
War, we can perhaps begin as a nation to view the creation and use of the
atomic bomb by the United States government as one of the hideous war
crimes of the twentieth century. The atomic bomb incinerated 400,000
civilians and very probably prolonged World War II by blinding our leaders
to Japan’s readiness for a negotiated peace. Once we had developed the
bomb, we could have tried first to persuade the Japanese to surrender
without actually dropping the bomb on inhabited cities. We could, for
example, have exploded the bomb publicly on an unpopulated target.
We chose not to. Racism and the desire for revenge against the Japanese
seem to have motivated in part the United States government to commit
two needless acts of mass murder.8 At the time, only the papacy coura-
geously denounced the immorality of what the United States had done.
Morally corrupted by the violence of war, the vengeful people of this
nation only applauded and, unrepentant, on the whole continue to do
so.
The development and use of atomic weapons by this country set the
stage for the Cold War. Our experts erred in their judgment of the amount
of time it would take for the Russians to develop their own atomic bomb.
The first Russian atomic test in August, 1949 began the arms race.
7. Cf. Stewart L. Udall, The Myths of August: A Personal Exploration of Our Tragic Cold
War Affair with the Atom (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1994), pp. 49-82.
8. Ibid., pp. 58-125.
As the Cold War intensified, the United States became obsessed with a
policy of national security. A policy of national security empowered the
United States government to do anything it needed to do in order to
survive the Cold War and to secure “the national interest.” From a moral
standpoint “defending the national interest” bore a striking resemblance
to the doctrine of Lebensraum which justified Nazi aggression in Europe.9
Having declared war in order to keep the world safe for democracy, the
United States very soon thereafter found itself following policies not that
ethically far removed from Hitler’s. We canonized as justified any action
which would secure an advantage for us in the struggle for world power:
the support of oppressive military and totalitarian governments who paid
lip service to anti-communism, the internal subversion of legitimate,
democratically elected governments, the training of terrorist death squads.
The Cold War killed Americans. After Japan, more citizens died of the
atomic bomb in the United States than in any other nation. The Atomic
Energy Commission (AEC), which played a key role in directing the Cold
War, invoked “national security” in order to classify and therefore to keep
from public disclosure the policies which claimed these American lives as
well as the legal evidence which would have convicted the AEC in court
of supporting criminal policies.
The AEC did nothing to protect the lives of hundreds of Navajo ura-
nium miners daily exposed to lethal toxic doses of radiation, even though
the AEC knew well the fatal consequences of its inaction. The AEC also
successfully manipulated the courts in order to insure that the families of
the miners whom their policies had equivalently murdered never received
any just compensation for the tragic and needless deaths of their loved
ones. The AEC used similar criminal tactics to conceal from those living
downwind from atmospheric atomic testing the fatal consequences of
dwelling in lethally toxic environments.10
At the beginning of the Cold War, John Foster Dulles, then Secretary
of State, and Alan Dulles, Director of the CIA, decided that in order to
save democracy they had to subvert it.11 By that they meant that the gov-
ernmental institutions which directed the Cold War had to place them-
selves beyond the normal checks and balances of the American demo-
cratic system. The Dulles brothers gave decisive shape to the policies and
institutions which waged the Cold War.
Like the AEC, both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the
National Security Council (NSC) classified the damning evidence of the
numerous crimes they committed, all in the name of “national security.”
9. Cf. José Comblin, The Church and the National Security State (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis,
1979).
10. Ibid., pp. 217-249.
11. Cf. David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York, NY: Fawcett-Columbine, 1993).
They thus transformed themselves into a government within a govern-

ment, a free standing and powerful bureaucracy accountable to no one.
During the Iran-Contra affair, the tip of this iceberg floated briefly into
view.
Democracy can survive only when elected leaders know the truth about
government policies. Those same leaders also need access to factual infor-
mation about the implementation of those policies. The classification of
information by the AEC, CIA, and NSC denied the members of Con-
gress that knowledge. In this way, the Cold War created a government
within our national government whose immoral polices and actions suc-
cessfully defied congressional review and legal prosecution because the
very perpetrators of the crimes in question saw to it that all incriminating
evidence remained classified and therefore inaccessible to other branches
of government.
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Inevitably, the lies
and deceptions which such government agencies systematically pursued
eroded the credibility of the democratic process in this country. The offi-
cial lies simultaneously motivated the mounting political apathy in which
the majority of Americans now seem to languish.12
The Cold War corrupted more than one government agency. It also
corrupted the presidency. The Cold War saw the rise of “the imperial
presidency” which arrogated to itself, again in the name of “national se-
curity,” the right to declare war for all practical purposes without the
advice and consent of Congress. During the Cold War one American
president after another spent billions of tax dollars fighting secret “para-
military” operations which amounted to undeclared wars. After 1947,
the United States waged fairly continuous secret and undeclared wars on
virtually every continent on the planet.13
The war protests of the sixties expressed the widespread public percep-
tion that the carnage in Vietnam was not in fact securing the “national
interest.” The double talk which this nation’s military and political lead-
ers used in order to prolong that carnage further eroded governmental
credibility in the eyes of most American voters.14
12. Cf. Daniel K. Inouye and Lee H. Hamilton, Report of the Congressional Committees
Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, With the Minority View (New York, NY: Random
House. 1988); Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The CIA and American Democracy (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1989); Steward L. Udall, op.cit.; Hedrick Smith, The Power
Game: How Washington Works (New York, NY: Ballentine Books, 1989); William
Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy: New Edition (New York,
NY: Norton, 1984).
13. Cf. John Prados, Presidents’ Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations from
World War II through Iranscam (New York, NY: Quill, 1986); Halberstam, op. cit.
14. Cf. Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (Harrisberg, VA: R.R. Donnelley & Sons
Company, 1984).
The Cold War also created the military-industrial complex which con-
tinues to undermine the economy of the country. An entrenched
military-industrial complex also helped transform our foreign policy.
Americans like to think of our nation as generous toward others. After
World War II, the Marshall plan created a popular perception of the United
States as a philanthropic nation which extends a helping hand of friend-
ship even to its enemies. The movie The Mouse That Roared parodied this
perception. In it a miniature and backward kingdom declared war on the
United States with medieval weapons so that after surrendering it could
receive unlimited financial aid.
The economic reconstruction of Europe and of Japan which the Marshall
plan helped accomplish did not, however, express pure altruism. Our
nation gave massive foreign aid to many countries devastated by World
War II because American business demanded foreign markets. We gave
aid selectively. We chose not to aid Russia.
Whatever the humanitarian motives of the Marshall Plan, the arms
race which the Cold War fueled transformed the United States into one
of the major arms merchants of the world. No matter how oppressive a
given government, during the Cold War, it benefitted from United States
military aid as long as it officially opposed the USSR. The arms which
this nation supplied gave oppressive, dictatorial regimes ample means to
impose themselves on their victim populations and to prison, torture,
and murder victims. Sometimes the United States trained the torturers
and death squads.15
Under the Reagan administration, the acceleration of the arms race
together with unrestrained military spending helped bring about the col-
lapse of the Russian economy; but it came close to torpedoing our own
economy as well. It saddled the American tax payer with a crushing na-
tional debt.In lavishing trillions of dollars on the development and test-
ing of weapons which threatened and continue to threaten human sur-
vival on this plant, our national leaders ignored the warning of Dwight
Eisenhower that, money pumped into the military-industrial complex,
would not help make life more humane, especially not for the poor and
oppressed. During the Clinton administration, a Republican Congress
used the national debt which right-wing politics had created as a shallow
excuse to declare war on all federal entitlement programs which benefit
the poor.
The hungry citizens of nations which benefitted from American arms
shipments found all too tragically that they could not eat bombs. Neither
15. Cf. Frances Moore Lappé, Rachel Schurman, and Kevin Danaher, Betraying the
National Interest: How U.S. Foreign Aid Threatens Global Security by Undermining the
Political and Economic Stability of the Third World (New York, NY: Grove Press, 1987),
pp. 27-55.
could American citizens. One suspects that the tax revolt in this country
has resulted in no small measure from the fact that Americans benefit so
little from the tax dollars they spend. As a student of mine from Ger-
many once put it: “At least in democratic socialist countries in Europe
people get something for the taxes they pay. In capitalist America, they
get practically nothing.”
The Cold War seriously eroded democratic government in the United
States by undermining both the national Constitution and the confi-
dence which Americans place in their elected leaders. Moreover, the lies,
the secrecy, the violence, and the cynicism reached a high water mark
during the Reagan-Bush administration.16
The morally corrosive effect of both hot and cold wars upon the corpo-
rate conscience of this nation dramatizes all too well the ethical bank-
ruptcy of one of our most cherished national myths: namely, the myth of
redemptive violence. That myth teaches the people of the United States
to believe that violent opposition to injustice can create a just social or-
der. Virtually every Hollywood western inculcates the myth of redemp-
tive violence. TV violence brings the myth right into peoples’ parlors.
Presidents with sagging popularity polls invoke the myth to improve their
ratings by declaring war on nations they can easily conquer.17
Jesus Christ, however, proclaimed and embodied redemptive suffering
and in God’s name denounced the illusion of redemptive violence. Judged
in the light of the gospel, therefore, the myth of redemptive violence
counts as sinful, ideological double talk. History supports the judgment.
Those who ascribe to the myth of redemptive violence embody in their
aggressive and often murderous acts the very evil which they condemn.
The divine judgment pronounced on Calvary unmasks the myth of re-
demptive violence as Anti-Christ.
The Cold War has had a seriously corrosive effect on American politi-
cal attitudes; but other factors in our recent national life have also under-
mined the credibility of government. The work of Political Action Com-
mittees (PACs) and of powerful partisan lobbies against the common
good, lobbies like the National Rifle Association, have re-enforced the
popular impression that in the United States we have indeed the best
politicians which money can buy. The reluctance of the congress to pass
significant election reforms by curbing the power of PACs and of other
monied lobbies leaves the electorate with the unavoidable sense that our
elected officials care more about their own vested interests than about the
genuine good of the American people.
16. Cf. Haynes Johnson, Sleepwalking Through History: American During the Reagan Years
(New York, NY: Doubleday, 1992).
17. Cf. Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment in a World of Domination
(Minneapolis, MI: Fortress, 1984), pp. 13-32.
Another force within contemporary American society contributes to

political apathy and to the lack of socio-political conversion among the
citizens of this nation. I refer, of course, to the morally corrosive conse-
quences of the ideology of individualism. By an ideology I mean a pseudo-
rationalization of institutional injustice which parades as self-evident truth.
Individualism functions as an ideology of isolation. It systematically
discourages people from taking morally responsible, corporate action to
rectify institutional injustice. It does so by teaching them to think of
themselves as isolated, unrelated individuals incapable of collaborating
with others in order to effect institutional reform. As an ideology of iso-
lation individualism lends massive re-enforcement to the injustices of the
status quo. It also provides a fatalistic pseudo- rationalization for political
apathy in the United States.
Besides encouraging the injustices of the status quo, individualism also
systematically corrupts the consciences of those who espouse it. In the
United States, utilitarian individualism flourishes in the business and
political communities.18 Expressive individualism thrives in the academy
and in private life.19
Utilitarian individualism propounds the doctrine that one can justify
anything one needs to do in order to “get ahead.” Getting ahead means
getting richer and corralling more personal and economic power.
Expressive individualism teaches people to believe that they possess an
inner core within themselves which they must never sacrifice to others.
When therefore others encroach on this “core self,” one must sever all
connection to them.20 The new left of the sixties popularized an ethos of
expressive individualism by encouraging people to “do their own thing.”
Individualism teaches people in this country to come of age by sever-
ing connections with the communities of faith and of value which have
nurtured them. Healthy coming of age actually happens in community
and commits one to taking adult responsibility for the communities to
which one belongs.
Individualistic self-isolation feeds Americans’ neurotic “nervousness”
and obsession with their own psyches. The search for deliverance from
emotional conflicts through therapy only compounds the problem, how-
ever, because therapy in this country tends to presuppose and therefore
to re-enforce an individualistic ethos.
18. Cf. Hedrick Smith, The Power Game: How Washington Works (New York, NY:
Ballentine, 1987); Robert Lekachman, Visions and Nightmares: America After Reagan
(New York, NY: Collier, 1987).
19. Cf. Robert N. Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in
American Life (Berkeley, CA: University of Californian Press, 1985).
20. In Endless Seeker: The Religious Quest of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Lanham, MD:
University Press of America, 1991), I studied the creation of an American ethic of
expressive individualism and its capacity to isolate one in sad and destructive ways.
Individualism fuels the divorce rate in the United States by betraying

young people into the moral impasse of seeking total intimacy in mar-
riage while at the same time withholding from their spouses access to the
“core self ” which they jealously protect from commitment to others. Too
often the serious erosion of family life encourages further loosening of
moral commitment among the worst victims of divorce: namely, the chil-
dren of divorced parents.
Individualism privatizes religion. In the United States, the legal separa-
tion of Church and state frequently degenerates into a moral segregation
between religion and morality, on the one hand, and public policy, on
the other. When religion and conscience abdicate their responsibilities
for shaping public policy, the ruthless immorality of utilitarian individu-
alism then replaces them. In its most ego-centric expression American
religion expresses crude self-idolatry and narcissism. Much New Age reli-
gion exemplifies this aberration. Moreover, as the culture unravels, the
main line Churches can all too often proclaim a privatized pietistic fun-
damentalism.
Consumerism, capitalism, and individualism make willing bedfellows.
The combination strikes at the heart of the moral demands of gospel
living.21
Utilitarian individualism makes the American practice of capitalism
cutthroat and ruthless. In the United States, the business community
tends to give top priority to turning a profit, second priority to the qual-
ity of the product, and last priority to its employees. One finds excep-
tions to this pattern but not often enough. The American system not
only sacrifices human lives to institutional greed but in the end makes for
poor business practice.
Capitalistic greed also corrupts and trivializes the media which seem to
lapse occasionally into responsible journalism.22 Capitalistic greed moti-
vated Reaganomics; and in 1995 the same morally disastrous economic
policies took shape in the unilateral “Contract with America.” I call the
contract unilateral because those who drew it up never consulted the
American people. They got their ideas instead from right-wing “think
tanks” established with the specific purpose of dismantling the Great
Society and the New Deal.
Ronald Reagan’s promise to “get government off the backs of Ameri-
cans” pandered to the individualistic selfishness of the middle class and
successfully persuaded them to align themselves with the rich against the
poor. In practice, getting the government off people’s backs meant tax
21. Cf. John Francis Kavanaugh, Following Christ in a Consumer Society: The Spirituality
of Cultural Resistance (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1981).
22. Cf. David Halberstam, The Powers That Be (New York, NY: Dell, 1979); Joseph E.
Persico, Edward R. Murrow: An American Original (New York, NY: Dell, 1988).
breaks for the wealthy and corporate welfare for big business; but it meant
ruthless capitalism for everyone else. Reaganomics produced a shrinking
middle class. A few members of the middle class got rich, but more qui-
etly slipped into poverty. While piously and hypocritically mouthing cli-
ches about “family values” the Reagan-Bush administrations systemati-
cally pursued economic policies which increased economic pressures on
the American family and thus seriously eroded family life. The Contract
with America sought to replace the federal safety net for the poor with
block grants of federal funds to the states, who might or might not use
the money to support the poor. It generated the welfare law which Presi-
dent Clinton signed and under which the poor have subsequently lan-
guished.23
To date the welfare bill has marked the most successful assault on fed-
eral entitlement programs launched by the Republican right wing after
Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory over Barry Goldwater. According to
the Congressional Budget Office, this so-called “reform” legislation fell
$13 billion short in the funding needed to put welfare families to work
and $1.4 billion short of sufficient funding for the child care needed by
welfare families alone, not to mention those who work. The law elimi-
nated aid to families with dependent children. It limited receipt of wel-
fare to five years in a lifetime and allowed states to set even stricter limits.
The law allowed states to deny benefits to children born to a party receiv-
ing welfare assistance at the time of birth. The law permitted states to
deny welfare to unwed mothers under eighteen years of age. The law
required states to reduce by 25% their welfare caseload within a year or
forfeit its federal block grant. The law did not require states to provide
child-care assistance. The law required states to maintain welfare funding
at a minimum. States had to submit their plan for welfare reform by July
1, 1997 and every two years thereafter.
Until repealed, this so-called welfare “reform” will certainly augment
hunger in the United States. The bill called for across-the-board cuts in
food stamp benefits. By 2002, the average food stamp benefit would shrink
from 80 cents per person per meal to 66 cents. By 1998, very poor fami-
lies with annual incomes below half the poverty line ($6,250 for a family
of three) will probably lose an average of $656 per year in food stamp
benefits. States can enforce a single set of eligibility and work require-
ments for the reception of food stamps, cash assistance, and other welfare
programs. These requirements would affect 40% of the states’ food stamp
caseload and would result in substantial variation in the conferring of
food stamp benefits from state to state. The welfare law limited to three
months the period in which childless, able-bodied people from eighteen
23. Cf. Robert Lekachman, Greed Is Not Enough: Reaganomics (New York, NY: Pantheon,
1982).
to fifty years of age could qualify for food stamps during periods of un-
employment. Beginning April 1, 1997, legal, non-citizen immigrants
ceased to qualify for food stamp assistance. Finally in the case of undocu-
mented immigrants and of certain legal immigrants, the welfare law al-
lowed states to deny to pregnant and nursing mothers and to small in-
fants the assistance available through the Special Supplemental Nutrition
Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). In other words, by
scapegoating welfare recipients, the legislation enacted policies calculated
to increase poverty, hunger, infant mortality, and the number of small
children brain damaged for lack of sufficient nourishment.24
Public debate over universal health care during the Clinton adminis-
tration care dramatized the extent to which individualistic presupposi-
tions corrupt the conscience of this nation. No one disputed that one of
the most affluent nations in the world has failed to provide adequate
health care for a significant number of its citizens. No one who studied
the matter seriously questioned that the government of this nation has a
serious responsibility to adjust the present system of health care. In pub-
lic discussions of this issue, however, one never heard the media asking
whether proposed adjustments would benefit the nation as a whole. In-
stead, the media focused narrowly on the sacrifices which the adjust-
ments would demand of individuals or of vested interests. As a conse-
quence, the discussion never got around to the key question: what kind
of health care program would best serve all American citizens?
American law and jurisprudence also rest on individualistic presuppo-
sitions. Our constitution rests on the social contract theory of the En-
lightenment. As Roberto Unger and others have shown, the Enlighten-
ment viewed society as a collection of atomic individuals much in the
way in which it portrayed sensations nominalistically as the atomic build-
ing blocks of knowledge.
The Enlightenment also portrayed morality as the satisfaction of indi-
vidual desire. Since Enlightenment philosophy also tended to regard de-
sire as purely subjective and irrational, it looked to universal rational prin-
ciples to curb irrational, personal desires.
In a liberal Enlightenment ethic, then, private, atomic individuals de-
termine the ends of personal and corporate action. Since the sharing of
ends, however, expresses the accidental convergence of capricious, wholly
subjective, individual preferences, the common good ceases to make any
moral claims; and legislation degenerates into a pragmatic compromise
among individuals and vested interests.
24. See: Lynette Engelhardt, The 1996 Welfare Law (Silver Spring, MD: Bread for the
World, 1996).
In Enlightenment legal theory, the universal principles which seek to

curb the selfishness of desire take institutional form in laws which sup-
posedly apply uniformly and impersonally to all. Because, however, in
such a philosophical system, laws and rules can only pose a threat to one’s
individual desires, Enlightenment political theory propagated the idea
that small government means good government. In social contract theory,
a right almost always means freedom from interference, especially from
interference by institutional authority. As a consequence, on the lips of
people in the United States, the term “right” loses any connotation of
responsibility for others or for the commonweal. Inevitably, then, the
defence of individual rights degenerates into a pseudo-rationalization for
the ruthless pursuit of unenlightened self-interest.
Finally, in an Enlightenment political ethic, social institutions express
accidental, freely constructed, and often fragile social relationships. Insti-
tutions created for no other purpose than to serve individual self-interest
make no moral claims on the conscience. The individuals who created
them dismantle them as soon as they become inconvenient or unprofit-
able. In such a moral and legal system, the transitory and artificial char-
acter of social relationship endows even basic institutions like the family
with enormous fragility.
Because it rests on the dualistic fallacies of Enlightenment rationalism,
the legal system in the United States finds itself confronting a number of
unresolvable antinomies. Instead of viewing laws as rules which seek to
secure the common good of all, jurisprudence in the United States tends
to struggle with the dilemma of reconciling the rule of law with the irre-
sponsible and capricious freedom of atomic individuals. In the adjudica-
tion of conflicts, the courts seek to regulate human behavior according to
universal rules; but in reality the resolution of conflicts too often degen-
erates into the somewhat arbitrary balancing of conflicting self-interests.
The laws proclaim everyone equal; but the toleration of significant class
differences too often means that the rich and powerful use their ample
resources to circumvent the law, whose harshness then vents itself on the
poor and on the underclass. The wealthy and the powerful use technol-
ogy to manipulate social consciousness in order to accomplish crudely
self-serving ends.25
I have been reflecting on some of forces which make it difficult for
people in this culture to convert to responsible living at the level of pub-
lic morality. I have named and examined two forces: 1) erosion of public
confidence in the structures of government which resulted from the lies,
cynicism, and violence of the Cold War and 2) the individualistic caste of
popular mores, which makes it difficult for people in this country to
25. For a detailed discussion of these and other issues, see: Roberto Mangabeira Unger,
Knowledge and Politics (New York, NY: Free Press, 1984).
understand the meaning of the common good and even harder to com-
mit themselves to it.
Fortunately, however, our culture contains resources for countering both
of these corrosive influences. Recently, Cornel West has argued, correctly
in my judgment, that the pragmatic tradition of in the United States
offers resources of mounting and sustaining ongoing public discourse
concerning the commonweal and the fate of our republic.26 While one
might choose to disagree with this or that aspect of West’s historical argu-
ment, he has put his finger on an important resource within the Ameri-
can tradition for revitalizing values discourse on public issues. In The
Good Society, Robert N. Bellah and the Habits of the Heart team have
advanced that discourse in significant ways. They have proposed con-
crete measures for reforming tottering American institutions.27
The John Courtney Murray Group has suggested other such resources.
One can trace the development of a prophetic tradition within American
philosophy and theology. That strain has consistently protested the cor-
rosive influence of individualism on American mores. That same tradi-
tion summons this nation to communal loyalty and to mutual commit-
ment in community. Jonathan Edwards, Orestes Brownson, Francis Elling-
wood Abbot, Charles Sanders Peirce, Josiah Royce, William Ernest Hock-
ing, John A. Ryan, John Courtney Murray, Walter Rauschenbusch, Mar-
tin Luther King, and H. Richard Niebuhr have all made significant con-
tributions to the development of this tradition. One can extend the list
even further.28
In every modern society, one of three institutions tends to dominate
the culture: the political system, the economic system, or the Church. In
contemporary Iran, the Church dominates. In mainland China, politics
dominates. In the United States the economy dominates.
It will take an influential institution to counteract the morally corro-
sive political and economic influences of individualism, capitalism, con-
sumerism, and the Cold War. In the United States, the churches give
most evidence of passionate commitment to concern for the common
good.
A recent study of contemporary religious lobbies in Washington has
documented the fact that they make a significant contribution to the
legislative process by voicing the legitimate concerns of large numbers of
citizens which would otherwise go neglected by Congress. The more lib-
26. Cf. Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism
(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
27. Cf. Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and
Stephen M. Tipton, The Good Society (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991).
28. Cf. Donald L. Gelpi, ed., Beyond Individualism: Toward a Retrieval of Moral Discourse
in America (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989).
eral church-based lobbies, like Bread for the World, serve as an effective
voice for the poor, the hungry, and the homeless in this country and
abroad.29 Despite the unfortunate spread of single-issue politics among
some members of the Catholic episcopacy, the National Conference of
Catholic Bishops continues a successful advocacy in Washington for a
variety of moral concerns affecting the common good. Their pastoral
letters The Challenge of Peace and Economic Justice for All publicly criti-
cized two of the morally corrupt policies propounded by the Reagan ad-
ministration: the belief that one could win an atomic war and Reagan-
omics. In my limited judgment, if the political conversion of the Ameri-
can electorate is going to happen, that conversion must begin in the
churches.
We find ourselves in the infancy of the RCIA; but it has already proved
its power to transform not just individuals but even parishes whose lead-
ers take it seriously and whose baptized members show openness to in-
volvement in the kind of corporate conversion which the RCIA seeks to
inculcate. An RCIA program which would seriously challenge both con-
verts and cradle Christians to political conversion could, over the long
haul, make a significant contribution to conscientizing the people of this
country by helping to shore up this nation’s faltering commitment to
liberty and justice for all.
So far in this chapter I have reflected on the challenge posed to the
Church and to society by liberation Christology. I have also reflected on
some of the major obstacles to conversion in United States culture. I have
suggested that the Churches must take the lead in summoning the people
of this nation to socio-political conversion; and I have suggested one pos-
sible way of institutionalizing that summons within the Church.
In the section which follows, I shall attempt to present a realistic and
practical pastoral strategy for conscientizing Americans to face some of
the important national and international challenges to public morality
which we as a nation face.
(III)
In this section I shall first reflect on the moral necessity of socio-political
conversion from two interrelated theological standpoints. First, I shall
argue from the moral exigencies of Christological knowing. Second, I
shall argue from the forms and dynamics of the conversion process. Fi-
nally, I shall explore a concrete pastoral strategy for facilitating socio-
political conversion.
29. Cf. Allen D. Hertzke, Representing God in Washington: The Role of Religious Lobbies
in American Polity (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1988)
The Necessity for Socio-Political Conversion
Christologies which overemphasize the divinity of Jesus tend to obscure
the fact that Christians worship as divine someone who was executed as a
religious blasphemer and as political subversive. Jesus preached a pro-
phetic, religious doctrine. He denounced institutional injustice and the
hypocrisy of religious leaders who connived in that injustice; but He also
repudiated armed insurrection as a viable solution to injustice. One should
not, however, underestimate the subversive implications of the kingdom
of God which He proclaimed.
In proclaiming the kingdom, Jesus stood unequivocally with the poor,
the marginal, the oppressed, and the expendable. In standing with them,
He also stood unequivocally opposed to the persons and institutions which
impoverish, marginalize, suppress, and banish God’s little ones: the Ro-
man empire, the client Jewish aristocracy, and the client priesthood in
Jerusalem.
His ministry targeted Palestinian Jews. He seems to have dreamed of
bringing Israel to a pitch of religious conversion and commitment which
would transform it into God’s instrument for effecting a universal salva-
tion. In the course of doing that, Jesus summoned the religious, political,
economic, and social powers of Israel to both personal and corporate
repentance.
Jesus challenged the rich to renounce their wealth and take a stand
with and for the poor. He challenged the powerful to renounce the use of
coercive violence and to stand with and for the weak. He also encouraged
the victims of institutional violence to oppose the violent with an imagi-
native, non-violent resistance which challenged their very oppressors to
repent and believe the good news which Jesus proclaimed and incarnated.
The chief priests and Herodians seem to have recognized all too well
the revolutionary implications of Jesus’ religious doctrine. We find evi-
dence in the gospels that Herod would have liked to arrest Jesus. In the
end, the temple priesthood used legal assassination in an attempt to dis-
credit and silence Him. By destroying Jesus they also, no doubt, hoped to
destroy the movement which He headed. The Roman governor aided
and abetted the priests in their murderous plot.
The resurrection of Jesus reversed the decisions which sanctioned His
execution. By revealing Jesus as the source of the divine Breath, the resur-
rection manifested His divinity. It also vindicated the fact that when He
proclaimed the kingdom, Jesus spoke with divine authority. The resur-
rection reveals, therefore, that, in a world marred by religious hypocrisy
and by institutional violence and oppression, the triune God stands with
the poor, the marginal, the oppressed, and the expendable. God, there-
fore, stands just as intransigently opposed to the oppressive, exploitative
principalities and powers of this world.
The resurrection not only endows Jesus’ subversive religious vision with
divine authority; but it also makes the willingness to take one’s stand
publicly with Jesus the condition for sharing in His resurrection. Of all
the evangelists, Luke, perhaps makes this point clearest of all. The par-
able about the rich man and Lazarus teaches that the rich and powerful
who ignore the poor and the disenfranchised close their hearts to resur-
rection faith and court eternal damnation. Those, by contrast, who stand
with Jesus commit themselves in solidarity with the poor, the suffering,
the marginal, and the oppressed. (Lk 16(19-31)
The risen Christ sends His divine Breath in order to inspire His dis-
ciples to prolong His mission. Anyone who claims to follow Jesus must,
therefore, live in His image. The Church as a whole as well as the indi-
viduals who compose it have, therefore, the serious obligation before God
to proclaim to the principalities and powers of this world the same radi-
cal gospel which Jesus proclaimed and for which He sacrificed His life. In
other words, the practical exigencies of Christological knowing, of moral
assimilation to Jesus in the power of His Breath, demands the graced
transformation of the corporate human search for a just social order.
Hence, Christological knowing also demands the gracing of socio-political
conversion which authenticates that search.
Jesus alone possessed the divine Breath in its plentitude. As Paul the
apostle saw clearly, however, the divine Breath which dwelt personally in
Jesus diffused Herself through the Christian community as a whole in
order to transform it into the body of Christ: into His hands, His tongues,
His human instruments for prolonging His own prophetic mission in
human history. In the Acts of the Apostles Luke portrays the arrival of
the charism-dispensing Breath as the creation of just such a prophetic
community.
The Breath’s charisms define the way in which different members of
the Christian community contribute to the Church’s corporate prolon-
gation of Jesus’ prophetic mission: through prayer, through discernment,
through teaching, through prophetic witness, through healing the corpo-
rate hurts of the human family and of the body politic, through pastoral
leadership, or through some combination of charisms.
The gospel challenges not just individuals but the entire Christian com-
munity to stand corporately against all forms of institutional injustice
and of institutionalized religious hypocrisy. As a consequence, the Church
betrays the mission it receives from Jesus and suppresses His Breath every
time it settles for privatized religious ministry and living; for privatized
religion silences the gospel’s challenge to institutional sin and implicitly
conspires with sinful oppression by refusing to challenge it.
Besides the preceding argument for the necessity of socio-political con-
version based on an insight into the practical exigencies of Christological
knowing, one can also mount an argument based on an insight into the
dynamics and counterdynamics of Christian conversion.
As we have seen, the total process of conversion blends five forms of
conversion: affective, intellectual, personal moral, socio-political, and
Christian. In each realm of conversion one takes responsibility for one’s
personal development in some identifiable realm of human experience.
The affectively converted take responsibility for cultivating healthy emo-
tional responses. The intellectually converted take responsibility for the
truth or falsity of intuitive and inferential beliefs and for the adequacy or
inadequacy of the frames of reference in which one reaches those beliefs.
Those who convert at a personal moral level take responsibility for re-
specting interpersonal rights and duties. Those who convert socio-politi-
cally commit themselves to constructing a social order which insures the
common good. Christian converts commit themselves to Christological
knowing: viz. to life-long, practical assimilation to Jesus in the power of
His Breath.
In addition to the five forms of conversion, one can identify seven dy-
namics within the total process of conversion. As we have seen, a dy-
namic of conversion describes the way in which one kind of conversion
re-enforces other conversions. 1) Affective conversion, for example, ani-
mates the other conversions by suffusing them with enthusiasm, emo-
tional health, affective flexibility, and imaginative creativity. 2) Intellec-
tual conversion orders itself and the other forms of conversion by yield-
ing a sound insight into their character and dynamics. 3) Both forms of
moral conversion—personal and socio-political—help orient the other
forms of conversion to values and realities which make absolute and ulti-
mate claims. 4) The four forms of personal conversion—affective, intel-
lectual, personal moral, and Christian—help authenticate socio-political
conversion by supplying norms which unmask social injustice. 5)
Socio-political conversion deprivatizes the other forms of conversion by
demanding that one confront the victims and perpetrators of injustice
and by committing one actively to some cause of universal human moral
import. 6) Initial Christian conversion mediates between affective and
moral conversion by demanding that the conscience acknowledge the
moral claims of Christian revelation. 7) Ongoing Christian conversion
transvalues the four forms of ongoing conversion by ensuring that they
advance in justifying faith.30
The presence of seven dynamics within conversion implies seven in-
versely corresponding counterdynamics. A counterdynamic within con-
version describes the way in which the absence of conversion tends to
subvert other forms of conversion. The absence of conversion within some
30. For a more detailed discussion of the forms, dynamics, and counterdynamics of
conversion, see: Donald L. Gelpi, S.J., Committed Worship, I, pp. 3-181.
realm of experience subverts another kind of conversion when it causes

one to act irresponsibly in some realm of experience in which one has
previously decided to act responsibly.
I shall not discuss here all the counterdynamics which can mar the
integrity of conversion. Here I focus exclusively on the way in which the
absence of socio-political conversion undermines affective, intellectual,
personal moral, and Christian conversion.
If the presence of socio-political conversion deprivatizes the other four
forms of conversion, then its absence has the opposite effect. Its absence
causes one to live a privatized affective, intellectual, personal moral, or
Christian life. In the process, the lack of socio-political conversion be-
trays those personally converted into acting at cross-purposes with them-
selves. When human choices contradict the commitment one has made
in converting at a personal level, they suffuse one’s life with inauthenticity
and hypocrisy.
Affective conversion demands that one face and deal with neuroses and
psychoses which prevent healthy emotional development. In order to live
a healthy affective life, however, one must deal with more than one’s own
psyche. Different social systems institutionalize different kinds of neuro-
sis. Some systems can even breed group psychosis. All forms of institu-
tionalized social bigotry seem, for example, to have roots in emotional
disorders of one form or another. Institutional bigotry not only expresses
those disorders but also inculcates them. Those who try to cultivate emo-
tional health while ignoring the ways in which their social environments
instil and inculcate neurosis or even psychosis will with moral inevitabil-
ity succumb to the emotionally unhealthy forces which shape human
behavior, often unconsciously or with only a vague sense of the impact of
institutionalized neuroses.
Similarly, the intellectually converted who commit themselves to the
search for truth without coming to terms with the obfuscating ideolo-
gies, prejudices, and erroneous beliefs which mar every human culture
will soon find themselves lying to both themselves and others. Think of
the lies spawned by transnational capitalism. Think of the distortions of
the American conscience wrought by individualism and governmental
concern for “preserving the national interest.” Given the widespread im-
pact of modern communications media, error poses a less serious threat
to someone committed to the truth than do the lies systematically popu-
larized and enforced by powerful vested interests.
Those who decide to respect the rights of others at an interpersonal
level but refuse to commit themselves to the fight for social justice will
soon find themselves pressured by the injustices embodied in the institu-
tions in which they serve to violate the personal rights of others and to
ignore their own personal duties toward other persons. Corrupt institu-
tions do not lie outside of human subjective experience, as Enlighten-

ment individualism would have one believe. They stand within the expe-
rience of persons and of groups and shape that experience decisively. Unjust
institutions shape human social experience to immoral and sometimes
criminal ends. Think of the Boesky and Milkin junk-bond scams.31
Finally, those who refuse to convert socio-politically will also system-
atically ignore fundamental moral demands of Christian conversion. By
failing to identify with the poor, the marginal, the oppressed, and the
expendable, they will inevitably misunderstand both the message and
person of Jesus. In proclaiming Him they will replace both His person
and message with something else. Their “gentle Jesus meek and mild”
will bear little resemblance to the prophetic Jesus of the gospels. By refus-
ing to see reality through the eyes of the poor, privatized Christians inevi-
tably fail to see reality through Jesus’ own eyes; and just as inevitably their
practice of religion will degenerate into the kind of hypocrisy which Jesus
denounced with prophetic intransigence.
No one escapes the corrosive influences of corrupt social institutions.
The aberrations of expressive individualism, for example, thrive in the
religious left; and that same individualistic ethos easily inclines people on
the left to support abortion on demand. The left all to easily replaces
genuine morality with a shallow concern for political correctness. Never-
theless, the so-called “Christian” religious right in the United States poses
a special case in part because wealth gives it power. Right-wing “Chris-
tianity” dramatizes all too well how effectively popular ideologies like
individualism, capitalism, and militarism betray the uncritical religious
conscience into confusing genuine socio-political conversion with irre-
sponsible political activism.
The fundamentalism of the religious right leaves it particularly vulner-
able to manipulation by self-serving political, economic, and social insti-
tutions. The fundamentalistic mind has yet to undergo intellectual con-
version. It believes naively that it can have truth handed to it on a platter.
Habituated to reading irrational prejudices into Biblical and other reli-
gious texts which in fact say something quite different, the religious fun-
damentalist finds it easy to invoke proof-texting in the pseudo-religious
rationalization of institutionally inculcated sexism, racism, classism.
As a result, the political causes which the “Christian” right often es-
pouses have nothing to do with Christianity and in fact contradict the
kingdom of God which Jesus proclaimed. Think of right-wing Chris-
tians who oppose federally funded school breakfasts and lunches in the
name of “family values.” Economically ignorant and trapped in middle-
class and upper-class assumptions, these self-styled Christians fail to rec-
ognize that one in five children in the United States lacks proper nourish-
31. Cf. James B. Stewart, Den of Thieves (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1991).
ment. Those who insist that a child eat breakfast “in the family” when the
family in question cannot put food on the table condemn the child in
question to malnutrition. Worse still, they do so in the name of the gos-
pel of Jesus Christ.
The follies of the religious right do not stop with opposition to the
federal funding of school nutrition programs. They include the
pseudo-religious rationalization of militarism, racism, sexism, and other
“isms” systematically inculcated by secular culture in the United States.
As a result, the political religious right exemplifies perhaps more than any
other religious group the kind of “pharisaical” hypocrisy which Jesus de-
nounced in His own day.
Political conversion demands more than active political involvement.
It demands critical ethical commitment to the common good. A
faith-inspired political conversion demands a political activism which
advances the cause of the poor, the marginal, and the oppressed. In prac-
tice, the political activism of the fundamentalistic religious right too of-
ten replaces dedication to public morality and to gospel values with
knee-jerk support for popular but oppressive ideologies.
Facilitating Socio-Political Conversion

One converts socio-politically as a Christian when one accepts Jesus’ vi-
sion of the kingdom as the Christian definition of the meaning of a just
social order. That commitment distances one from the immorality of
both the political left and the political right. When one dedicates oneself
to the kingdom, one simultaneously commits oneself to collaborating
with others in order to advance human institutions toward the realiza-
tion of that vision. One therefore fosters socio-political conversion in the
first instance by helping initial and ongoing converts to understand how
the kingdom calls into question institutionalized human injustice. One
fosters the same kind of conversion by challenging them to build God’s
just reign on earth.
In my judgment, in what concerns socio-political conversion, it does
not matter which kind of injustice one focuses on initially, as long as it
has universal human import. The scandal of world hunger offers a good
example of what I mean. The gospel challenges Christians to create a
community which shares in faith the physical supports of life and which
reaches out actively to those in greatest physical need. When one casts
the lens of the gospel upon the fact that we live in a world in which eight
hundred million people go hungry, then one must recognize in the fact
of world hunger a massive and Satanic institutionalization of injustice.
Bread for the World, a church-based, bipartisan, ecumenical lobby in
Washington seeks to move through Congress legislation which alleviates
hunger in this country and abroad. It offers in my judgment a pastorally
sound and effective strategy for involving people in the struggle against
global injustice. The strategy has a triple thrust: prayer, practical com-
mitment to a some measure of political activism, and self-education. Each
aspect of this strategy re-enforces the others.
1) Prayer: One must commit oneself to praying regularly for a new
economic and political world order in which all people will have enough
to eat. One must pray also for the commitment and generosity to involve
oneself in the fight against hunger. Prayer provides the context of faith
for both political commitment and self-education.
2) Political Activism: Bread for the World correctly recognizes that
socio-political conversion demands more than almsgiving, or personal
charity.32 It requires one to acknowledge that injustices result from the
morally flawed policies of morally flawed institutions. Bread for the World
asks its members to commit themselves to do something on a monthly
basis to transform those same morally flawed policies into morally sound
ones. Concretely, Bread for the World asks its members to write their
senators and representatives in Washington regularly in order to move
effective anti-hunger legislation through Congress. Ordinarily, the letter
writing takes less than an hour.
Those who choose can, of course, devote more time to anti-hunger
activism; but for minimal involvement about an hour a month suffices. I
personally find it hard to believe that, however busy one’s schedule, one
cannot find the time to give an hour a month to doing something about
world hunger. It also helps to sustain regular commitment to the simple
act of letter writing to know that every posted lobbying letter saves at
least one human life.
The letter writing also works. Virtually, every year Bread for the World
scores some significant legislative victories. Helping produce those victo-
ries also helps restore confidence in the democratic process.
3) Self-education: If prayer provides the context of faith for political
activism, active political commitment provides the realistic context for
the third thrust of Bread for the World’s political war against hunger:
namely, educating oneself and others to the causes of world hunger. In-
telligent activism requires that one understand the structural injustices
which cause eight hundred million people to go hungry; for until one
understands the roots of institutional injustice one has no handle on rec-
tifying the situation.
In what follows, I shall first describe the emergence of world hunger as
a global issue. Then I shall call attention to institutional structures which
perpetuate it.
32. Cf. Arthur Simon, Christian Faith and Public Policy: No Grounds for Divorce (Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1987).
The world began to take note of the problem of world hunger during
the food crisis which spanned the years 1972 to 1975. A number of fac-
tors conspired to produce the crisis. By 1970 the world’s grain stocks had
peaked at over 191 million tons. Such surpluses drive grain prices down.
Producers usually respond to this economic challenge by cutbacks in pro-
duction which then drive prices back up. This the food and fertilizer
industries did toward the end of the 1960’s. After 1970 grain production
fell by an estimated twenty million tons. Major crop failures in the early
1970s made food supplies even scarcer.
Bad weather played its part in the food crisis of the early seventies. A
particularly harsh winter and dry summer devastated the Soviet Union’s
wheat crop. Severe drought gripped Argentina and Australia. India’s mon-
soon failed to deliver enough moisture, while typhoons devastated the
Philippines.
At the same time, over-fishing in the Atlantic Ocean and off the coast
of Peru caused a severe drop in available food fish like anchovy, herring,
halibut, cod, and haddock. Fish supplies much of the protein for Japa-
nese and Soviet tables. The increased demand for food to replace the
evanescent fish put even greater strains on the world’s grain supply. Grain
prices soared. The demand for fertilizer soon outran the available sup-
plies.
At the same time the OPEC nations decided to raise the price of oil by
three dollars a barrel. Since the grain and fertilizer industries depend on
fuel for production, higher fuel prices meant higher food prices. As a
consequence, poorer nations could not compete in the world food mar-
ket. Their inability to buy food brought hunger and starvation to their
people.33
The food crisis of the early seventies made all the nations aware of the
fact of world hunger. Subsequent analysis of this persistent, tragic prob-
lem reveals that it results from a variety of interwoven and complex causes.
The poor throughout the world go hungry. They especially confront
the prospect of death by starvation. Among the poor children suffer most.
Infant mortality, therefore, provides a good index of the extent of hunger
in any given region of the earth.
We find the highest infant mortality in countries which exhibit low
incomes, limited education, high birth rates, and lack of political and
economic power. UNICEF estimates that a child dies of hunger or of
hunger related causes about every two seconds. By the end of the
Reagan-Bush years, thanks in no small part to Reaganomics, every fifth
child in the United States went to bed hungry. Despite some success in
33. Cf. Suzanne C. Toton, World Hunger: The Responsibility of Christian Education
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1982), pp. 3-5.
reducing infant mortality in the United States, an infant born in Hong

Kong still has a better chance of surviving than one born in the States.
The federal safety net offers the poor of this nation their principal in-
stitutional defense against degrading poverty. Its abolition would leave
them for all practical purposes institutionally defenseless in a ruthlessly
predatory capitalistic economy.
Rapid growth in the world’s population has in recent history outstripped
and canceled increases in food production. It took humanity more than a
million years to reach a population of one billion. In only one hundred
and twenty years, the total number of people reached two billion. In
thirty-two years, three billion. In fifteen years, four billion. According to
early estimates, by the year 2000 the world’s population should by present
standards exceed six billion. More recent surveys indicate that world popu-
lation is in fact stabilizing. Population increases can, however, contribute
to the world food crisis; but they never tell the whole story. World hunger
results from other factors as well.34
By the seventeenth century, Portugal, Spain, Holland, Britain, and
France had all developed extensive colonial empires in the new world, in
Asia, and in parts of Africa. At first, these empires sought to protect inter-
national trade routes, as colonizing Europeans lost no time in appropri-
ating the land of indigenous peasants while enslaving them either really
or virtually. The colonizers extracted and exported precious metals; and
they exploited other natural resources of the lands they colonized in or-
der to fill their own personal and national coffers. The first phase of colo-
nial dependence lasted from 1500 a.d until about 1850 a.d.
The industrial revolution inaugurated the second stage in colonial de-
pendence. It lasted roughly from the middle of the nineteenth century
until the end of World War II. While the economies of the major indus-
trial nations grew, economic expansion in pre-capitalist countries mani-
fested irregular and unsystematic development. Often the economic ex-
pansion which occurred represented only windfall gains. The colonizing
countries continued to seize and consume a significant part of the eco-
nomic resources of the lands they colonized. They created centralized
economic bureaucracies. The European scramble for Africa occurred in
the second phase of colonization.35 During this same period of time, the
leaders of pre-capitalist countries manifested no sustained interest in fos-
tering healthy, indigenous economies.
34. Cf. J. Bryan Hehir, “Population and Poverty: Exploring the Relationship,” in The
Causes of World Hunger, edited by William Byron (New York, NY: Paulist, 1982), pp.
207-219.
35. Cf. Thomas Packenham, The Scramble for Africa: White Man’s Conquest of the Dark
Continent from 1876 to 1912 (New York, NY: Avon Books, 1991).
The third phase of colonization, called neo-colonialism, has occurred

since 1945 a.d. It has resulted from the internationalization of capitalism
through the rise of transnational corporations. In the first two phases of
colonial exploitation military conquest and political domination paved
the way for economic exploitation of colonized lands. The final stage of
colonization, has seen the collapse of the old European empires and the
rise of the United States as a major military and economic superpower.
Neocolonialism relies primarily on economic means to subjugate devel-
oping nations to the industrialized First-World nations.36
The emergence of transnational corporations (TNCs) has resulted from
the aggressive need of a capitalist economy to develop foreign markets.
The new global economic managers tend to present themselves as har-
bingers of world peace. They often predict that with time the nation
states, which have afflicted the world with one war after another, will
wither away. The TNCs promise to bring about planetary peace through
the creation of a world shopping center. They also tend to demand that
their employees place loyalty to the corporation above national allegiance.
The economic policies of transnational corporations too often belie
this idyllic, self-promoting rhetoric. In Third-World countries they often
undermine the local economy by buying up successful local businesses
and by drawing off the best business talent with higher wages. The trans-
fer of technologies from the First World to the Third which the
transnational promote frequently seeks to maximize their own profits
rather than meet the needs for technological development in the host
nation.
Besides often undermining the host nation’s indigenous economy, the
transnationals perpetuate the economic dependence of the Third World
on the First. Not infrequently their control of arable land prevents the
production of food for the people of the country which hosts them. They
have on occasion used advertising in order to create an artificial desire for
junk food in undernourished populations.37
Toward the end of World War II, the industrial nations created three
organizations to regulate the international economy: The International
Monetary Fund (IMF), The World Bank, and The General Agreement
on Trades and Tariffs (GATT). Created and controlled by the industrial
nations, these organizations have consistently pursued policies which ben-
efit the First World more than the developing nations. GATT, for ex-
ample, often imposes higher tariffs on Third-World nations or requires
36. Cf. John R. Neuhaus, “The Colonial Legacy: From Guilt to Responsibility,” in The
Causes of World Hunger, pp. 64-80; Toton, op. cit., pp. 21-24.
37. Cf. Richard J. Barnet and Ronald Mueller, Global Reach: The Power of the Multina-
tional Corporations (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1974); Toton, op.cit., pp.
52-61.
trade quotas of them which it does not require of developed nations.

Many Third-World nations find themselves hopelessly indebted to the
IMF and to the World Bank.38
As we have already seen, during the Cold War, U.S. foreign aid took on
an increasingly military character. Often enough during the Cold War,
food sent to nations with marginally surviving populations served army
messes rather than fed the starving. Even what looked like humanitarian
aid responded more to marketing needs in the United States than to the
actual development needs of the recipient nation. Food aid which under-
cuts local markets in the Third World tends to exacerbate hunger abroad
by subverting indigenous agriculture.39
The use of modern technology to exploit and degrade the environment
also contributes to world hunger when it leads to soil loss, converts agri-
cultural lands to non-agricultural uses, produces uncontrollable flood-
ing, and promotes saharafication. Transnational corporations have not
infrequently transferred factories from the First to the Third World not
simply because they can pay sweatshop wages to ununionized popula-
tions but also because they can pollute the environment with impunity.40
Women in the Third World produce the bulk of food but often get to
share in it last. The eighties also witnessed the growing feminization of
poverty in the United States. Women and children in the United States
occupy on the whole a lower economic bracket than white American
males. The social anatomy of poverty reveals, then, that sexism functions
as one form of oppression within another. Divorce also fosters the femi-
nization of poverty. Divorced wives, who often must rear children as single
parents, almost always descend the economic ladder after separation from
their former husbands.41
The popular imagination links extreme hunger to natural disasters. The
expansion of deserts, flooding, destructive storms, droughts—cataclysms
such as these can and do contribute to food shortages and hunger; but
they almost never tell the whole story. More frequently, disasters of na-
ture lead to mass starvation when combined with the human folly of war.
Civil war in the horn of Africa has dramatized all too vividly the lethal
combination of drought and warfare.
Wars disrupt and displace large segments of the population. Often
enough fleeing refugees find themselves separated from the land on which
they grow the food which they eat. Without the means of sustenance
38. Cf. Toton, op.cit., pp. 38-51.

39. Cf. Lappé et al., Betraying the National Interest (New York, NY: Grove Press, 1987).
40. Cf. Arthur Simon, Bread for the World (New York, NY: Paulist, 1984), pp. 55-64.
41. Cf. Barbara C. Gelpi, Nancy C.M. Hartsock, Clare C. Novak, and Myra H. Strober,
eds. Women and Poverty (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1986); Angela
Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York, NY: Random House, 1983).
they often face death by starvation and disease in squalid refugee camps.
Refugees who never cross national boundaries suffer the most, because
they do not qualify legally for humanitarian international aid.
The violence of war also disrupts the transport of food to starving refu-
gees; unless prevented, greedy and unscrupulous black marketeers line
their pockets by selling food donated in charity to feed the hungry.42
Bigotry of all sorts breeds hunger. In the United States racism has trans-
formed large segments of the African American population into a perma-
nent underclass.43 Until visionary leadership in South Africa ended the
reign of apartheid in that country, racial segregation left thousands of
black people starving. In Sudan’s prolonged civil strife, the Muslim north
has tried systematically to effect the genocide of the Christian south
through violence and systematic starvation. In Rwanda tribal hatred
motivated both genocide and hunger among the refugees who fled mass
assassination.
If the human race had the shared will, it actually possesses the resources
to end world hunger. We are in fact producing enough food to feed ev-
eryone. The fact that world hunger persists means that in practice the
nations of the world prefer to let people starve.44
An analysis of the causes of world hunger illustrates why it matters
little to which cause one chooses to commit oneself in converting socio-
politically provided that the cause in question has universal human im-
port. The structures of human oppression so intermesh that reflective
opposition to one major source of universal human oppression leads to a
confrontation with the others as well.
One cannot, for example, espouse the cause of women’s rights without
confronting the feminization of poverty and of hunger. One cannot dedi-
cate oneself to nuclear disarmament without confronting the economic
consequences of the Cold War. One cannot promote the preservation of
the environment without confronting the predatory dimensions of world
capitalism. One cannot stand in opposition to bigotry without confront-
ing the economic and political structures of oppression which bigotry
inspires. One cannot seek to alleviate the suffering of refugees without
opposing the wars which create refugees and the greed and hatred which
inspire those wars.
42. Cf. Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, War Against the Poor: Low-Intensity Conflict and Christian
Faith (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1989); Eileen Egan, “Refugees: The Uprooting of
Peoples as a Cause of Hunger,” in The Causes of World Hunger, pp.173-195.
43. Cf. Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in
Race, Politics, Economics, and Society (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1983); Jack
Nelson-Pallmeyer, op.cit.
44. Cf. Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins, World Hunger: Twelve Myths (New
York, NY: Grove Press, 1986).
In reflecting on the dynamic structure of Christian hope, we saw that

Christian apocalyptic politicizes Christian hope by teaching the Church
as a whole to stand in prophetic, non-violent opposition to the princi-
palities and powers of this world. Those oppressive powers embody the
Anti-Christ. In the first century, the prophetic author of Revelation cor-
rectly identified the Roman empire with the kingdom of Satan; but sin
and oppression take other forms besides Roman imperial oppression.
In our own day, the forces which conspire to cause the starvation of
eight hundred million people contradict the kingdom at every point.
1) The kingdom requires that we share our bread and the other physi-
cal sources of life freely with one another. The forces which cause world
hunger concentrate wealth and the sources of production in the hands of
a greedy few.
2) The kingdom requires that we seek to break down the barriers which
divide people from one another by creating a universal community of
mutual service. The forces which create world hunger feed upon and
re-enforce racial, sexual, ethnic, class, and national bigotries.
3) The kingdom requires the rich to enslave themselves freely to the
poor. The forces which create world hunger enslave the poor to the rich.
They keep Third-World nations in oppressive economic bondage to the
First World.
4) The kingdom teaches us to create safe environments where people
can live and grow together in community; and the paschal mystery teaches
us to long for a new heaven and a new earth, purged of human sin, divi-
sion, and injustice. The forces which cause world hunger sinfully exploit
and degrade human environments.
5) The kingdom demands the renunciation of violence and mutual
reconciliation through forgiveness. The forces which cause world hunger
themselves feed on war, violence, and militarism.
Those who do not stand with Jesus stand against Him. Those who
stand against Him aline themselves with the forces of Anti-Christ. Those,
therefore, who commit themselves to life in God’s kingdom must, as Jesus
did, denounce the principalities and powers of this world and declare
non-violent war on the kingdom of Satan. Opposition to the kingdom of
Satan commits one to replacing it with God’s just kingdom; and that
commitment inspires an ongoing socio-political conversion thoroughly
informed by faith.
To cynics, Christian commitment to ending world hunger and to con-
structing a just world of peace will probably sound like jousting with
windmills. The Christian conscience needs, however, to approach every
moral issue, including one as complex as world hunger, with sober real-
ism. As we have already seen, a melioristic Christian idealism requires
that in dealing with any moral dilemma, one must first come to clarity
about both ultimate and proximate goals. In what concerns world hun-
ger, the demands of life in the kingdom require that we aspire to its final
elimination. With the elimination of hunger as an ultimate goal, the
Christian conscience must then identify the realistic conditions for ad-
vancing progressively toward that ultimate goal. Transforming those con-
ditions into realities supplies the conscience with its proximate goals.
In The Cruel Choice Denis Goulet has argued persuasively that three
strategic principles need to undergird an ethics of global economic devel-
opment: 1) Human beings must first have before than can live. Without
the resources to live a humane life, people cannot in fact live it. 2) The
nations of the world need to act in global solidarity to foster the eco-
nomic development of the Third World. 3) We need broad popular par-
ticipation in setting the policies which advance economic development
and which promise to end world hunger and poverty. The oppressed know
best what they need to do in the short run in order to begin to extricate
themselves from poverty and hunger. Hence, we need to formulate and
revise global development policies in close dialogue with those whose
lives those policies will most affect.45
No one underestimates the enormity of the task with which the war
against starvation confronts us. Winning that war will require a flexible
global strategy, world financing, and a global pool of skilled planners and
facilitators.46 Hence, the final elimination of world hunger necessitates
the creation of a new international economic order in which all the na-
tions of the world, including the economically developing nations, have
an effective voice in setting international economic policies.47
The elimination of world hunger will demand some sacrifices of afflu-
ent, First-World countries. Here one needs to distinguish three different
kinds of human needs: 1) necessities, 2) enhancements, and 3) luxuries.
The necessities of life insure bare physical survival and minimal human
development: food, clothing, shelter, physical and cultural education,
mutual protection. Enhancements make human life humane: they foster
health, growth, creativity, maturity, balance, appreciation, insight. Luxu-
ries do not improve the quality of life as do enhancements. Instead luxu-
ries symbolize and re-enforce superior social status.48
45. Cf. Denis Goulet, The Cruel Choice: A New Concept in the Theory of Development (New
York, NY: Atheneum, 1971), pp. 123-148. See also: Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph
Collins, World Hunger: Twelve Myths (New York, NY: Grove Press, 1986).
46. Ibid., pp. 282-289.
47. Cf. Peter J. Henriot, S.J., “Restructuring the International Economic Order,” in
Multinational Managers and Poverty in the Third Word, edited by Lee A. Tavis (Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), pp. 11-50; Pierre Gibert, S.J., ed.,
Recherches de Science Religieuse: Le Christianisme dans la mondalization, 86(1998).
48. Cf. Goulet, op.cit., pp. 241-247.
Aggressive capitalistic greed manipulates advertising and the media in

order to convince people that they need luxuries to live both a human
and a humane life. In other words, consumerism deliberately deceives
people into viewing luxuries as either enhancements or necessities. This
deliberate lie ambitions the maximization of capital gains.
The reign of God, by contrast, demands the renunciation of luxuries
because it mandates the creation of an egalitarian social order in which
the advantaged seek to serve the disadvantaged in humility and simplic-
ity. Christians cannot serve both God and mammon. By blurring and
even obliterating class distinctions, the kingdom also proscribes all crav-
ing for luxuries which re-enforce class distinctions.
Commitment to the elimination of world hunger will not demand of
First-World nations the renunciation of the necessities and legitimate
enhancements of life; but it will surely demand the renunciation of many
useless luxuries. Those who cling stubbornly to luxuries whose enjoy-
ment denies to others the necessities and enhancements of life play the
part of the rich man in Luke’s parable. They allow their greed and self-
indulgence to blind them to the suffering of the poor; and, unless they
repent, they risk the rich man’s fate.
The Contract with American illustrates well the point I am trying to
make. The Contract tried to convince Americans that they could no longer
afford federal food programs for the poor. In point of fact, wealthy people
in this country spend more on jewelry ($30.1 billion) than the federal
government prior to the Contract spent on food and nutrition assistance
($28. billion).49 By promoting tax breaks for the rich and by eliminating
federal nutrition programs, the Contract with America made it clear that
in the eyes of those who supported it the rich need their jewelry more
than the poor need food.
We cannot eliminate world hunger tomorrow, but we can begin today
to collaborate with others in the effort to mitigate it. Active participation
in an ecumenical, Church-based lobby like Bread for the World provides
contemporary Christians with a set of proximate political and economic
goals for beginning to address in practical ways the problem of world
hunger.
In its statement of policy, Bread for the World has articulated those
goals clearly. The lobby has committed itself to fight hunger in the United
States by improving existing programs like food stamps, school lunches,
and nutritional assistance. Hunger legislation needs to target those most
vulnerable: like pregnant or nursing mothers and infants. Bread for the
World ultimately ambitions a national nutrition policy which will enable
every citizen of the United States to get an acceptably nutritious diet.
49. Cf. Bread for the World Institute, Hunger 1995: Causes of Hunger (Baltimore, MD:
Communication Graphics, 1995), p. 3.
Bread for the World also supports the reform and expansion of the
United States’ development assistance to poorer nations. Here we face a
complex set of issues. When measured by gross national product, the
United States now ranks last among First-World nations in such develop-
ment assistance. Bread for the World calls for increased aid for needy
nations which increases their own capacity to feed themselves in environ-
mentally sustainable ways. Bread for the World also urges the separation
of development assistance from all forms of military assistance. At the
same time, the lobby promotes the over-all reduction of military spend-
ing and aid. Bread for the World fosters preferential treatment of poorer
nations in setting international trade policies. The lobby also calls for the
cancellation of the debts of the poorest debtor nations.
Bread for the World supports the ongoing study of the policies and
economic impact of transnational corporations and for the passage of
legislation which calls the transnationals to public accountability.
Bread for the World calls for responsible efforts to control population
growth, for aid to the world’s poor which enhances their ability to extri-
cate themselves from their cruel predicament, for health programs abroad
which reduce infant mortality and which increase health security. The
lobby also seeks to modify consumption in the United States in ways
which allow other nations to grow economically. Bread for the World
also encourages its members to recognize their religious responsibility to
eliminate luxuries.50
Anyone can join the fight against hunger today by joining Bread for
the World. Just send $25.00 or whatever you can afford to Bread for the
World, 1100 Wayne Ave. Suite 1000, Silver Spring, MD 20910.
As I have already indicated, by joining you commit yourself minimally
to writing both your senators and your congressional representative about
once a month. Bread for the World sends out a regular newsletter which
provides the needed data for composing an informed letter which will
advance anti-hunger legislation through Congress.
By joining Bread for the World you also commit yourself minimally to
informing yourself about the causes of world hunger. Bread for the World
offers a wide range of resources for educating oneself and others about
why a child dies of hunger about every two seconds.
Finally, by joining Bread for the World, you also commit yourself mini-
mally to praying for the end of world hunger and for generosity and
courage in responding to the challenge which it poses.
If you want more than just minimal involvement, you can in addition
do any of the following.
1) Interest others in the fight against world hunger.
50. For the full text of Bread for the World’s statement of policy see: Arthur Simon, Bread
for the World, pp. 195-201.
2) Discuss the question of world hunger within your family and en-
courage your relatives to take up the fight against starvation.
3) Write to the local media urging them to educate people about world
hunger and about the efforts to end it.
4) Examine your conscience regularly about the extent to which Ameri-
can individualism, militarism, capitalism, and consumerism are under-
mining your commitment to the gospel.
5) Encourage your local church to become a “covenant church” which
educates itself about world hunger, lobbies to end it, and gives financial
and political support to Bread for the World.
6) Form a local Bread for the World group which gathers regularly for
prayer, self-education on hunger issues, and letter writing. Bread for the World
will supply suggestions for the best way to go about forming such a group.
7) Organize a Bread for the World “offering of letters” in your parish
by getting others to write Congress on Sunday when they gather to wor-
ship. Bread for the World will also supply you with a how-to-do-it kit for
organizing an offering of letters.
8) Help some of the poor and hungry in your area. Befriending the poor
helps their morale and shores up your own commitment to end hunger.
9) Support financially relief agencies which are fighting hunger.
10) Encourage the pastoral leaders of your church to make educational
materials about world hunger available to the worshipping community.
Urge them to preach regularly on the appropriate Christian response to
world hunger.
Full-time political activists might well object that a chapter on
socio-political conversion which starts with liberation theology and ends
with Bread for the World begins with a bang but ends with a whimper.
Surely meeting the dire need of the poor and hungry demands more than
letter-writing.
I could not agree more. I am not proposing Bread for the World as a
panacea to all the social, economic, and political ills of humanity. I am
not even proposing it as a final solution to the problem of world hunger.
I am proposing it as a tried and effective pastoral tool for helping middle
class Americans take their first steps down the path of a faith-motivated
socio-political conversion. One does not expect heroic sanctity of initial
converts; nor can one realistically expect to transform overnight into po-
litical radicals an American middle class alienated from the political pro-
cess and duped by popular ideologies.
I do, however, recommend Bread for the World as an effective pastoral
strategy which accords with the melioristic ethical idealism defended in
this study. For individualistic, religiously privatized North Americans, a
lobby like Bread for the World offers a realistic first step toward a respon-
sible Christian commitment to social justice. Moreover, that strategy has
proven its pastoral and political effectiveness. I have no doubt that if

every parish in the United States which has an RCIA program would also
transform itself into a Bread-for-the-World covenant parish, those same
parishes would have a significant and positive impact on the political
process in this country; and we would live in a world which better ap-
proximates the moral demands of responsible Christian living. Once ad-
vanced thus far down the road to corporate responsibility, a parish can
begin to ask itself as a community what the next step might entail.

A sound RCIA program seeks to foster an integral, five-fold conversion
in those who enter the Church. One cannot, however, with any credibil-
ity challenge others to convert unless one is already converting oneself.
Those who conduct the RCIA will, therefore, successfully persuade oth-
ers to active commitment to the Christian search for social justice only if
they themselves have converted socio-politically. Until one devotes a sig-
nificant amount of time to some just cause of universal human import,
however, one has yet to advance even to an initial socio-political conver-
sion. In other words, those who lead the RCIA need minimally to model
for converts a participatory political activism through participation in an
organization like Bread for the World. The parish which new converts
are in process of joining needs to model the same commitment corpo-
rately and collectively. It could do so by becoming a Bread for the World
covenant parish. Given the individualistic character of American mores,
RCIA teams need, moreover, to put high on their pastoral agenda the
fostering of a graced socio-political conversion in neophytes.
Bread for the World offers one very effective strategy for involving con-
verting Christians in an ecumenical search for a just national and inter-
national world order. One might encourage involvement in other analo-
gous organizations. I have, however, focused on Bread for the World both
because of its effectiveness as a lobby and because it offers, in my opinion
and in the opinion of others, one of the most effective pastoral tools for
conscientizing middle class Americans.
In this chapter, I have reflected on the ways in which commitment to
Jesus Christ in faith transforms socio-political conversion and inspires
the Christian quest for social justice. It concludes this foundational at-
tempt to understand how commitment to Jesus Christ in justifying faith
transvalues the secular forms of conversion.
I began the first volume of this study by proposing a Christological
experiment. I suggested testing the ability of a foundational theology of
conversion to resolve the current crisis in Christology. In the brief afterword
which follows this chapter I shall assess the relative success of that experi-
ment.
552 Donald L. Gelpi: The Firstborn of Many
Afterword
In the first volume of this study I argued that contemporary Christo-
logical speculation manifests confusions analogous to those which fueled
the Christological controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries. Both
periods betray considerable confusion about three key Christological terms:
humanity, divinity, and the relationship between them in Jesus.
The contemporary Christological crisis differs, however, in significant
ways from the Christological controversies which troubled the patristic
era. During the first centuries of the Christian era, uncritical acquies-
cence in the dualisms of Platonic thought sowed confusion in the minds
of theologians. Contemporary theologians, by contrast, find themselves
hard put to deal with the challenge of intellectual pluralism.
I identified three “nests” of intertwined issues at the basis of the con-
temporary Christological crisis. First, contemporary Christology has wan-
dered down three culs de sac from which theologians are still struggling to
emerge. Second, four major paradigm shifts in theological thinking have
raised complex issues in need of resolution. Third, the secularization of
contemporary thought has led some theologians to acquiesce, sometimes
uncritically, in an Enlightenment fundamentalism.
I described the three dead ends in the following terms: Dead End One:
The classical philosophical understanding of divinity and of humanity
have collapsed; and no other philosophical consensus has replaced them.
Nor does any promise to do so in the near future. Dead End Two: Theo-
logians generally agree that the “high” Christologies developed during
the middle ages sacrifice Jesus’ humanity to His divinity. How best to
correct these medieval errors remains, however, to date an open question.
Dead End Three: Overspecialization among academic theologians has led
to the dissociation of Christology from trinitarian theology.
In volume one, I also identified the following four paradigm shifts which
exacerbate the current Christological crisis: 1) The context of theological
thinking has shifted from metaphysics to history. At the same time, con-
fusion about how to deal with the complex speculative challenges raised
by the history of theology and by the history of human speculation in
general has caused a drift toward historical relativism. 2) The shift from a
classical, normative understanding of culture to concern with inculturated
theological thinking has raised the specter of cultural relativism. 3) Femi-
nism has called into question the “masculinist” presuppositions the Chris-
tian theology and of Christian faith. 4) The dialogue among world reli-
gions has caused some theologians to call for muting any normative claims
for the revelation of God given us in Jesus Christ.
Afterword 553
Secularism challenges contemporary Christology in the following three

ways: 1) Naive acquiescence in the presuppositions of Enlightenment
fundamentalism has led some theologians to rationalize theological think-
ing in ways which question the truth of traditional Christological beliefs.
2) Enlightenment fundamentalism also propagates an ethos of individu-
alism which erodes shared religious faith and shared religious commit-
ment. 3) In the United States as in other western nations, the combined
impact of aggressive capitalism and of consumerism so undermines prac-
tical commitment to gospel living as to promote a practical atheism.
After anatomizing the current Christological crisis, I examined several
methods which theologians have already invoked for dealing with that
crisis. I found some merit in each of them; but I judged them all finally
inadequate to deal with the scope and complexity of the contemporary
Christological challenge.
I therefore suggested an experiment. I proposed to test the claims of
Lonergan’s method to provide norms for distinguishing between sound
and unsound doctrinal beliefs. In Lonergan’s theory of theological method,
a normative theology of conversion measures doctrinal authenticity. Doc-
trines which promote conversion count as authentic, while doctrines which
fail to promote conversion count as inauthentic.
A Christology developed in the context of a normative theology of
conversion asks the following question: How ought faith in Jesus Christ to
transform every dimension of the conversion process? If the experiment which
I proposed succeeded, then in the course of answering that question, one
would discover the norms which would, like Ariadne’s thread, lead one
out of the contemporary Christological labyrinth.
The time has come to assess the results of the speculative experiment
which I proposed in volume one. Does the Christology developed in
these volumes provide a means for dealing with the Christological dead
ends, with novel paradigm shifts, and with the challenge of secularism?
The foundational Christology developed in these pages avoids the pit-
falls of Enlightenment fundamentalism by building on sound philosophi-
cal critiques of the fallacies of Enlightenment philosophy. Among phi-
losophers in the United States, C.S. Peirce mounted, in my judgment,
the most telling systematic refutation of Enlightenment philosophy.
Peircean realism refutes Enlightenment nominalism and subjectivism. His
relational logic of consequences justifies a perspectival realism and dem-
onstrates the irreducibly social and relational character of all human ex-
perience and thought.
Josiah Royce, whose philosophy of religion also contributes significantly
to the metaphysics of experience proposed in these volumes, developed,
with Peirce’s distant blessing, some of the theological implications of
Peirce’s triadic metaphysics. Peirce regarded the mature Royce as the only
other pragmatist he knew. Royce’s work finds an echo in the contempo-

rary critiques of Enlightenment individualism mounted most tellingly
by Robert Bellah and by Roberto Mangabeira Unger. The Christology
developed in these volumes builds upon and extends the insights of Royce’s
monumental work The Problem of Christianity. More specifically, this read-
ing of Christology in the light of a metaphysics of experience seeks to
illustrate the justice of Royce’s claim that, in writing The Problem of Chris-
tianity, he had created a speculative context for dealing doctrinally with
the person of Jesus.1
Not only, therefore, does the preceding Christology invalidate the un-
critical acquiescence of theologians in the speculative presuppositions of
Enlightenment thinking in its many philosophical and methodological
expressions; but it also invalidates individualism as either a social or per-
sonal ethos. In other words, the Christology which I have developed quali-
fies as genuinely and constructively “post-modern” in one of the many
meanings of that muddled term.
The preceding foundational Christology also avoids wandering down
the theological culs de sac which seem to baffle many contemporary
Christologists. It offers a viable philosophical and theological alternative
to classical conceptions of both divinity and humanity. The Christology
defended in these three volumes conceives both divinity and humanity as
experiential processes, one infinite and eternal and the other finite and
spatio-temporal. Process theology ambitions something analogous; but
the Christology here proposed replaces the nominalistic process philoso-
phy of Alfred North Whitehead with a defensible metaphysical realism.
As a result, the experiential Christology which I have here defended finds
no need to deal reductionistically with Christian revelation as most pro-
cess theology does. On the contrary, a triadic, social, relational meta-
physics of experience interprets both the hypostatic union and the trinity
while respecting the mystery which they reveal.
The foundational Christology presented in this volume also makes it
clear that in rejecting inflated medieval Christologies which sacrificed
the humanity of Jesus to His divinity, one need not endorse any of the
contemporary “low” Christologies which sacrifice His divinity to His
humanity. Judged by the norms of the foundational Christology devel-
oped in this study, such “high” and “low” Christologies qualify as bad
Christology.
Finally, the foundational Christology here espoused also avoids the fal-
lacy of academic overspecialization, which separates Christology from
trinitarian theology. On the contrary, the preceding foundational Christo-
1. Cf. Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity (2 vols.; Chicago: Regnery, 1968), I, pp.
202-205, II, pp. 423-429.
Afterword 555
logy invokes a triadic metaphysics of experience in order to coordinate

incarnational and trinitarian faith.
Among theologians, the shift from metaphysical to historical thinking
has raised the specter of theological relativism. The metaphysics of expe-
rience developed in these three volumes unmasks the choice between his-
tory and metaphysics as a false option. It does so by proposing a meta-
physics which interprets the historical process as developing experiences.
By discovering in the incarnation a unique, normative historical revela-
tion of how a saving God relates to humanity and of how a sinful human-
ity ought to relate to a saving God, an experiential foundational Christo-
logy also avoids historical relativism
The foundational method invoked in this study ambitions an
inculturated North American Christology; but it avoids cultural relativ-
ism by providing norms for assessing culturally conditioned perceptions
of reality. Reality itself judges those perceptions by either behaving or
failing to behave as different cultures expect it to behave. Cultural per-
ceptions which cannot interpret the world accurately need revision. The
historical world we know includes Christian revelation and therefore ex-
hibits an eschatological dimension.
Moreover, the fallibilistic logic invoked in this study views cultures as
interpretative frames of reference and therefore judges them by the norm
of adequacy. Cultures which prevent one from reflecting on realities which
require intelligent interpretation need corresponding revision. Finally,
fallibilism requires all local cultures to look to other cultures to correct
their oversights and amplify their insights.
Feminist Christology has yet to develop a truly systematic Christology.
The foundational Christology developed in this study does, I believe,
give evidence of an ability to dialogue with feminists both about the pre-
suppositions and conclusions of their Christological proposals.
Finally, as we have already seen in reflecting on the soteriological impli-
cations of Christological faith, an experiential Christology invites dia-
logue with other world religions, without, however, needlessly sacrificing
to dialogue any traditional Christological beliefs.
The story goes that someone challenged Karl Barth toward the end of
his career to summarize in a single sentence the many volumes of his
Church Dogmatics. He whimsically replied: “Jesus loves me, this I know
because the Bible told me so.”
I have undertaken this more modest Christological study as a way of
responding to the current crisis in Christology. I have done so by devel-
oping a systematic foundational Christology of conversion which chal-
lenges people to practical assimilation to Jesus in the power of His Breath.
By approaching Christology in the context of conversion, I have also laid
systematic foundations for the kind of Christological catechesis which

ought to go on in the RCIA.
Perhaps I can most fittingly close and summarize these three volumes
by imitating Barth’s whimsy. I grew up in New Orleans with the sound of
Dixieland jazz in my ears. Should it come, then, as any surprise if the first
two verses of an old New Orleans spiritual sum up for me with deep
feeling and admirable simplicity the preceding Christological argument?
Just a closer walk with Thee

Grant it, Jesus, is my plea;
Daily walking close to Thee,
Let it be, dear Lord, let it be.
I am weak but Thou art strong.

Jesus, keep me from all wrong.
I’ll be satisfied as long
As I walk, let me walk, close to Thee.
Glossary 557
Glossary
ABBA: in Hebrew, a term of intimate address to one’s father; Jesus’ name for God
ABDUCTION: in pragmatic logic, an inference which concludes to a case from
a rule and a result; in other words, an inference which gives an initial
classification to data in need of explanation on the basis of a law assumed to
function in reality; the formulation of an hypothesis
ABSOLUTE: unconditioned; as an ethical category, commitment to particular
ideals and principles no matter what the circumstance
ABSTRACT: lacking concreteness
ACCOMMODATION: adjustment; in developmental psychology, adaptive
growth
ACT: as a technical philosophical term, the determination of a potency
ACTUAL: in a metaphysics of experience, factual, or pertaining to the realm of
decision
ADAPTATION: change with regard to a situation; in developmental psychol-
ogy, adjustment to an environment through accommodation or assimilation
ADOPTIONISM: the heterodox doctrine that Jesus first existed as a human
person and only subsequently became the Son of God by an act of divine grace
AESTHETICS: in pragmatic logic, the normative study of ideals and of the
habitual forms of behavior which appreciate and respond to them
AFFECT ATTUNEMENT: in social psychology, the capacity of an adult to
share empathetically and symbolically in the emotional experiences of an infant
AFFECTION: in a metaphysics of experience, the emotive perception or
judgment of reality
AFFECTIVE CONVERSION: the decision to take adult responsibility for one’s
own subsequent emotional development
ANALOGY: similarity in difference
ANALOGY OF CHRISTOLOGICAL KNOWING, THE: practical assimila-
tion to Jesus in the power of His Breath in different historical situations
ANALYTIC: dividing into elemental parts or basic principles
ANHYPOSTASIS: a term introduced into the Christological tradition by
Friedrich Loofs which denies a hypostatic, or subsistent, character to the
humanity of Jesus in its own right
ANONYMOUS CHRISTIAN: the questionable theological doctrine that all
persons experience an a priori, graced orientation to Jesus Christ prior to the
act of faith in Him
ANTHROPOLOGY: a more or less organized account of the human
ANTI-CHRIST: those persons or institutions which sinfully oppose Jesus and
His religious vision
ANTICLERICALISM: opposition or hostility toward those holding religious
authority
APOCALYPTIC: revelatory
APOCALYPTIC THEOLOGY: a visionary account of the end time: i.e., of the
final stage or salvation and of final judgment
APOLLONARIANISM: the heterodox doctrine that in the incarnation Jesus’
divinity and humanity blend into a third theandric reality
APOPHATIC THEOLOGY: a doctrine of God which holds that created reality
can only reveal what God is not
A PRIORI: before the fact; the character of an argument which fallaciously claims
validity without evidence to support it
ARIANISM: the heterodox theological denial of the divinity of Jesus and of his
divine Breath
ASCETICISM: cultivated physical austerity, often for moral or religious motives
ASSIMILATION: in developmental psychology, biological adaptation through
ingestion
ATHEISM: the denial of the reality of God
PRACTICAL: the failure to accept the practical consequences of one’s alleged
belief in God
ATONEMENT: reconciliation; the restoration of a ruptured relationship by
accepting the suffering which reconciliation requires
AUTHENTICATION: validation
AUTHORITY: the power and right to make decisions concerning others
AUTONOMY: in a metaphysics of experience, the bare capacity to initiate
activity
BAPTISM: ritual washing; the first part of the Christian rite of initiation
BEATIFIC VISION: the face-to-face vision of God in the next life
BEATITUDES, THE: the eight blessings of the new covenant which open the
sermon on the mount in Matthew’s gospel
BEAUTY: the intuitive perception of excellence; the simultaneous intuitive grasp
of goodness and of truth in some reality
BEELZEBUL: the Lord of the Flies; in the Old Testament, the name of the god
of the Philistine city of Ekron; in the New Testament, a Hebrew name for the
prince of demons
BEING: really existing
BELIEF: in pragmatic logic, a proposition for whose consequences one stands
willing to assume responsibility
BELOVED DISCIPLE, THE: the author of the fourth gospel
BENEDICTUS, THE: in Luke’s gospel, the prayer of praise uttered by Zechariah
after the birth of his son, John the Baptizer
BIBLICAL CHRISTOLOGY: an account of what the New Testament says
about Jesus Christ
BIGOTRY: rigid stereotyping of the members of an out-group combined with
overt hostility toward them
BLASPHEMY: insulting God
BODY: in a metaphysics of experience, the immediate environment from which
a finite self emerges
BREATH-BAPTISM: personal transformation in the third person of the trinity
which begins with justifying faith and ends with resurrection
CAPITALISM: an economic system which buys human labor for producing,
handling and marketing goods, which promotes a so-called1 free market system
1. The freedom of the capitalistic market varies with one’s economic assets. Wealthy
corporations, the rich, and the affluent experience considerable freedom in a capital-
istic market. The starving poor tend to find it oppressive rather than liberating.
Glossary 559
as well as the private and corporate ownership of the means of production, and
which seeks to maximize the profits of businesses and corporate investors
CASE: in pragmatic logic, the classification of data in inferential thinking
CATECHUMENATE: an organized period of preparation for receiving the
sacraments of Christian initiation
CATEGORY: a predicate; an concept used in interpreting reality
CELIBACY: the deliberate renunciation of genital sex
CERTAIN: beyond the shadow of a doubt
CHALCEDONIAN CHRISTOLOGY: the doctrine that the person of Jesus
unites His divinity and His humanity without blending them into a third
reality
CHARISM: a particular manifestation of the gift of salvation accomplished in the
missions of Jesus and of His Breath; a supernatural empowerment which
renders one docile to the inspirations of the Breath of Jesus
CHARITY: love in the image of Jesus
CHIASM: literally, shaped like the Greek letter chi (X); an ordering of textual
elements in such a way that the first and last, the second and second-to-last, etc.
correspond
CHIASTIC: having the literary structure of a chiasm
CHRISTIAN CONVERSION: the decision to respond to the revelation of God
in Jesus Christ and in the mission of His Breath on the terms which that
revelation demands
CHRISTIAN ORIGINS, CRITERION OF: a norm for authenticating histori-
cally words or actions of Jesus which asserts that any historical portrait of Jesus
must offer a plausible account of how the movement He headed could have
evolved into the Christian Church
CHRISTOGENESIS: a term invented by Teilhard de Chardin for the
incarnation’s transformation of the process of evolution
CHRISTOLOGICAL KNOWING: the knowledge of Jesus Christ which
results from practical assimilation to Him in the power of His Breath
CHRISTOLOGICAL QUESTION, THE: asking how divinity and humanity
relate in the person of Jesus
CHRISTOLOGY: a more or less organized account of the person and ministry
of Jesus Christ
ATONEMENT: an account of the person and ministry of Jesus which
highlights the reconciliation between humanity and God which He effects
DOCTRINAL: a foundational theological account of how commitment to
Jesus Christ in justifying faith transforms inferential perceptions in theological
faith of His person and mission
OF HOPE: a foundational theological account of how commitment to Jesus
Christ in justifying faith heals, perfects, and elevates natural and sinful human
hopes
KENOTIC: an account of the divine self-emptying, or self-abnegation, which
the incarnation demands
NARRATIVE: a foundational theological account of how commitment to
Jesus Christ in justifying faith transforms intuitive perceptions of His person
and mission communicated in story form
PRACTICAL: a foundational theological account of how commitment to
Jesus Christ in justifying faith transforms both personal moral conversion and
socio-political conversion
SPIRIT: an account of the person and ministry of Jesus which gives promi-
nence to His relationship to the Breath, or Spirit, of God
CHRISTOPRAXIS: living out the practical consequences of commitment to
Jesus Christ in justifying faith; Christological knowing.
CLASSIC: a work of art or literature which from generation to generation makes
human life and experience meaningful
CLASSISM: the fallacious ideological justification of giving to one or more social
groups privileged access to the benefits of a society to the detriment and even
oppression of other social groups
CLERICALISM: the sinful abuse of ecclesiastical authority through self-serving
domination over others
CO-EXISTENCE: the simultaneous enjoyment of reality
COHERENCE, CRITERION OF: a norm for authenticating as historical
words and actions of Jesus on the basis of their compatibility with other words
and actions already authenticated by other norms
COLONIALISM: a policy which extends and maintains the control of one
nation over foreign dependencies
COMMON GOOD: a social arrangement which ensures that every member of
society has the opportunity to share with reasonable adequacy in that society’s
benefits and to contribute to those same benefits
COMMON SENSE: colloquially, the ability to deal realistically with one’s
world; as a technical philosophical term, the power to correlate sense percep-
tions
COMMUNICATIO IDIOMATUM: literally, Latin for “the communication
of traits”; in theology, a doctrinal account of the way human and divine traits
relate in Jesus Christ
COMMUNICATION: in a metaphysics of experience, symbolic activity which
expresses to one mind the evaluative perceptions of another about some entity
COMMUNICATIONS: a functional theological specialty which uses the results
of theological reflection in order to re-establish dialogue among the members
of a religious community when lack of conversion causes dialogue to break
down
COMPLEMENTARITY: the assertion of true propositions about interrelated
realities
CONCEPT: in a metaphysics of experience, a particular way of responding
evaluatively to one’s world
CONCUPISCENCE: those forces in the environment of a baptized person
which differ from that person’s own sins but which nevertheless come from sin
and lead to sin
CONSCIENCE: personal judgment of moral right and wrong
CONSCIOUSNESS: awareness
PERSONAL: awareness which begins with distinguishing one’s own body
from its surrounding environment and which develops by making distinctions
and asserting relationships
Glossary 561
COMMUNAL: the consciousness of a community which results from its
shared memories, shared hopes, shared lives, practice of atoning love, and
degree of conversion
CONTRADICTION: the assertion of mutually exclusive propositions about
the same reality
CONVERGENCE: the assertion of true but different propositions about the
same reality
CONVERSION: the decision to pass from irresponsible to responsible behavior
in some realm of human experience
INITIAL: one’s first assumption of adult responsibility in some realm of
experience
ONGOING: living out the consequences of initial conversion
CONSUMERISM: an economic system which seeks to persuade buyers to
regard luxuries, i.e., possessions which enhance class status, as necessities
COORDINATION OF CATEGORIES, THE: reflection on the relationship of
categories which derive from different disciplines which study the same or
related realities
CORRELATION, METHOD OF: a mode of thinking which interrelates
different realities under investigation
COUNCIL OF THE CHURCH: a plenary meeting of leaders and teachers of
the Christian community in order to decide doctrinal and pastoral questions
COUNTERDYNAMIC OF CONVERSION: the tendency of the lack of
conversion in one realm of experience to undermine the presence of conversion
in another realm of experience
COVENANT: a mutually binding agreement among persons
CREATION: as a divine act, God’s ongoing constitution of the developing
universe as a reality; as an object, the developing spatio-temporal universe
viewed as a product of divine activity
CRITICAL COMMON SENSISM: a doctrine of pragmatic logic which main-
tains that if one attempts to doubt seriously one’s spontaneous beliefs, one will
find some beliefs which one cannot doubt
CULTURE: reality mediated and conditioned by human symbolic behavior
DECISION: in a metaphysics of experience, an action which makes reality
concretely this rather than that; a fact
DEDUCTION: in pragmatic logic, an inference which concludes from a case
and a rule to a result; in other words, the prediction of facts not yet in evidence
but entailed by a particular abduction
DEISM: a philosophical system which posits the existence of God, the immor-
tality of the soul, and universal moral principles but which denies divine
intervention in human history
DELIBERATION: in a metaphysics of experience, disjunctive thinking; the
weighing of mutually exclusive alternatives for choice
AESTHETIC: disjunctive thinking about how best to communicate an
intuitive grasp of excellence
PRUDENTIAL: disjunctive thinking about ethical choices
PRACTICAL: disjunctive thinking about how best to get a job done
SPECULATIVE: disjunctive thinking about mutually exclusive interpreta-
tions of reality
DEMIURGE: in Platonic philosophy, a quasi-deity who fashions the material
universe
DEMYTHOLOGIZATION: the substitution of rational explanation for a
mythic grasp of reality
DE-OBJECTIFICATION: the process of replacing inferential thinking which
claims to grasp things as they are in themselves with a mode of thought which
recognizes the relational character of all reality and of all knowing
DEPRAVITY: moral corruption; as a theological term, the doctrine that sin has
so corrupted human nature that it can of itself perform no morally good acts
DIALECTIC: a functional theological specialty which compares and contrasts
different doctrinal frames of reference in order to assess if and why they agree
or disagree
DIOHYPOSTATIC THEOLOGY: an early form of heterodox trinitarian
theology which focused on the existence of two subsistent realities in the
Christian Godhead, the Father and the Son, but which left the Son’s eternal
existence and co-equality with the Father vague
DI-POLAR NOMINALISM: a philosophical doctrine which reduces human
knowing to the subjective interrelation of concrete percepts and abstract
concepts
DISCERNMENT: a charism of the Holy Breath which renders human delibera-
tion receptive to Her inspirations
DISCONTINUITY, CRITERION OF: a principle for authenticating histori-
cally words and actions attributed to Jesus which argues that, if one cannot
trace them either to the milieu in which Jesus lived or to the apostolic Church,
they probably originated in Jesus Himself
DISPENSATIONAL THEOLOGY: a descriptive account of God’s saving
action in human history
DIVINITY: divine reality; the nature of deity
DOCTRINES: a functional theological specialty which distinguishes sound
from unsound doctrine by the former’s ability to advance an integral five-fold
conversion and by the latter’s tendency to undermine an integral five-fold
conversion
DUALISM: the fallacious conception of two interrelated realities in such a way
that their real relationship to one another becomes subsequently unintelligible
COSMIC: conceiving time and eternity in such a way that their real
relationship to one another becomes subsequently unintelligible
MATTER-SPIRIT: the characterization of reality as divided into essentially
different realms, one embodied and the other disembodied, with the result that
their interrelationship becomes subsequently unintelligible
OPERATIONAL: the conception of human powers of activity in such a way
that their interaction becomes subsequently unintelligible
SUBJECT-OBJECT: an interpretation of a cognitive relationship in such a
way that the act of knowing becomes subsequently unintelligible
Glossary 563
SUBSTANTIAL: the division of the human person into two essentially
different substances whose essential difference makes the unity of the person
unthinkable
DUTY: a moral obligation to respond to the need of some person or persons
DYNAMIC OF CONVERSION: the tendency of one kind of conversion to
re-enforce another
ECCLESIOLOGY: a more or less organized account of the Church
ECLECTICISM: the endorsement of beliefs on the basis of taste and without
much concern for their mutual compatibility
EGO: in psychology, the conscious person
EGO DEFLATION: the painful psychological state of one whose ego-inflation
has led to positing an act with destructive consequences to oneself and/or
others
EGO INERTIA: in clinical psychology, the human tendency to resist challenges
to personal attitudes, beliefs, or commitments
EGO INFLATION: a psychological state of exaggerated self-confidence result-
ing from lack of contact with potentially destructive, unconscious impulses
EMBARRASSMENT, CRITERION OF: a norm for authenticating historically
words or actions of Jesus which argues that, if a New Testament author records
something about Jesus as disconcerting either to the one who records it or to
the Christian community, then the event in question probably took place
EMOTION: in a metaphysics of experience, the affective perception or judg-
ment of reality
SYMPATHETIC: a benevolent attitudinal response like affection, sympathy,
friendship, love which functions as the affective equivalent of a logical “yes”
NEGATIVE: an attitudinal response which function as the affective equiva-
lent of a logical “not,” like fear, anger, shame, guilt
EMPIRICAL THEOLOGY: a theology which requires that all theological
propositions find verification in the historical events which reveal God in space
and time
ENHYPOSTASIS: a term invented by Friedrich Loofs which asserts the exist-
ence of the humanity of Jesus in the hypostasis, or subsistent reality, of the
second person of the trinity
ENLIGHTENMENT FUNDAMENTALISM: the spontaneous and dogmatic
endorsement of the untenable aspects of Enlightenment philosophy
ENLIGHTENMENT, THE: an intellectual movement in the eighteenth cen-
tury which defended the superiority of scientific knowing nominalistically
conceived, moral individualism, the purely subjective character of moral and
religious judgments, and social contract theory
ENVIRONMENT: in a metaphysics of experience, the physical universe from
which the self emerges, most immediately its own body but also the surround-
ing world from which it derives its physical life
EPISTEMOLOGY: a philosophical account of human knowing
ESCHATOLOGICAL: pertaining to the eschaton
ESCHATOLOGY: a more or less organized account of the final age of salvation
inaugurated by the incarnation and by the paschal mystery
ESCHATON: the final age of salvation inaugurated by the incarnation and by
the paschal mystery
ESSENCE: what something is; in a metaphysics of experience, a mode of
evaluative perception abstracted from the one perceiving and the reality
perceived
ESSENCE FALLACY: the indefensible reification of essences as existing in their
own right instead of regarding them as fallible modes of perception
ESSENTIALISM: a philosophy which endorses the essence fallacy
ETERNAL OBJECT: in Whiteheadean philosophy, a concept in the conceptual
pole of the divine experience
ETHICS: a moral code which measures human conduct by norms, principles,
and ideals which make absolute and ultimate claims
EUCHARIST: thanksgiving; the ritual, sacramental recall of the paschal mystery
through the re-enactment of Jesus’ last supper with His disciples
EVALUATION: in a metaphysics of experience, a quality of experience viewed
as an intentional, cognitive relationship
EVALUATIVE CONTINUUM: in a metaphysics of experience, the entire
network of intentional, evaluative relationships in human experience which
includes, sensation, emotion, memory, intuition, inference, and deliberation
EVANGELIST: the author of one of the canonical gospels
EVOLUTION: the emergence over time of different biological species
AGAPASTIC: evolution motivated by love
ANANCHASTIC: the emergence of new biological species as the conse-
quence of some natural cataclysm
TYCHASTIC: the emergence of new biological species through chance, or
sporting
EXCELLENCE: a reality’s capacity to evoke in another the simultaneous
intuitive perception of goodness and of truth; in the theology of Jonathan
Edwards, harmonious, proportional existence exemplifying the consent of
whole to parts and of parts to whole
EXCEPTIVE CLAUSE: in Matthew’s gospel, the phrase “except for uncleanness
(porneia)” which qualifies Jesus’ prohibition of Mosaic divorce practices
EXEGESIS: the interpretation of texts
EXISTENTIALISM: a phenomenological account of the human subject’s rela-
tionship to Being understood as the total pattern of meaning
EXORCISM: the ritual driving out of a demon, or evil spirit, which assumes the
personality of a human being and controls the person’s bodily movements,
including speech
EXORCIST: one who performs an exorcism
EXPERIENCE: in a metaphysics of experience, a process composed to relational
elements called feelings; the higher forms of experience contain three kinds of
relational elements: evaluations, decisions, and tendencies
REALM OF: an distinctive habitual way of responding evaluatively or
decisively
FACT: in a metaphysics of experience, a decision, an action which makes reality
concretely this rather than that
Glossary 565
FACULTY PSYCHOLOGY: an account of the human person which explains
human activity by grounding it in really and essentially distinct powers with
fixed formal objects
FAITH: commitment to a self-revealing God on the terms which that self-revelation
demands
JUSTIFYING: an initial religious conversion which conforms the convert to
the divine will and therefore commits one to ongoing religious conversion
THEOLOGICAL: the graced transformation of intellectual conversion
CHARISM OF: a gift of the Holy Breath which enhances the social visibility
of one’s commitment to God by rendering it more prayerful, more docile to the
movements of grace, and more willing to take personal risks for the sake of God
FALLACY OF UNIVERSAL TEXTUALITY, THE: the false belief that one can
characterize every entity as a text
FALLIBILISM: in pragmatic logic, the philosophical doctrine that if one admits
that one can err in interpreting reality one has a better chance of reaching the
truth than if one denies one’s capacity for error
FALSE: the characteristic of a belief which contradicts the evidence
FEELING: in a metaphysics of experience, a relational element within experi-
ence, which in its higher forms manifests three kinds of relational elements:
evaluations, decisions, and tendencies
FEMINISM: a movement of social reform with scholarly and theological
underpinnings which seeks to vindicate the rights of women to freedom from
personal and institutional oppression on the basis of sex
FINITUDE: limitation
FORMAL OBJECT: the object of a power of operation which defines the essence
of that power by specifying the aspect under which it operates on its object
FORENSIC: pertaining to legal proceedings or argumentation
FOUNDATIONS: a functional theological specialty which proposes a strictly
normative account of the forms, dynamics, and counterdynamics of conver-
sion
FREEDOM, ELEMENTARY: the power to act or not or to choose to do this
rather than that
FUNCTIONAL SPECIALTY: a realm of theological investigation which raises
a particular kind of theological question requiring a distinctive method to
answer it
FULFILLMENT: an event which keeps a promise and/or makes a prediction
come true
GENEALOGY: a family tree
GOODNESS: desirability, the exemplification of excellence
GOSPEL: a narrative account of Jesus told in the light of the paschal mystery
SYNOPTIC: the accounts of Jesus written by Mark, Matthew, of Luke;
literally, “at a glance, a term derived from the practice of reproducing these
gospels in parallel columns for the purpose of comparative analysis
GRACE: as a theological term, God’s utterly gratuitous intervention in human
history in order to undo the consequences of human sinfulness and in order to
unite humans to God and to one another
GLORY: the divine excellence, especially in its historical manifestations
HEAVEN: as a theological term, perfect union with God and His saints after
death
HELL: separation from God after death
HERESY: the tenacious defence and propagation of a heterodox belief
HERESIARCH: the principal propounder of a heresy
HERMENEUTICAL CIRCLE, CLOSING THE: a theological method charac-
teristic of liberation theology which begins by investigating a situation of
institutional injustice, searches divine revelation for norms which promise to
rectify the injustice, and then devises specific strategies for effecting the desired
rectification
HERMENEUTICS: a theory of interpretation
HETERODOX: in theology, the characteristic of a belief which interprets divine
revelation incorrectly
HIERARCHY: a social order characterized by subordinated grades or classes
HIERARCHICALISM: a theological account of Church order characterized by
subordinated grades or classes in which grace and activity always proceed from
higher to lower
HIGH CHRISTOLOGY: an account of the person and mission of Jesus which
begins with reflection on His divinity and which sometimes sacrifices His
humanity to His divinity
HISTORICAL-CRITICAL METHOD: the scholarly interpretation of a text in
the light of the circumstances which originally inspired its composition
HISTORY: developments in space and time; in the metaphysics of experience,
the unfolding of spatio-temporal experience; as a functional theological
specialty, a scholarly account of a religious community’s development
HOLY BREATH: the third person of the trinity conceived as a sanctifying source
of divine life
HOMOIOUSIOS: similar in being; a technical Greek theological term for
asserting that the Son and Holy Breath have a divine reality similar to the
Father’s
HOMOOUSIOS: one in being; a technical Greek theological term for asserting
that the Son and the Holy Breath have identically the same divine reality as the
Father
HOPE: in a metaphysics of experience, the intuitive perception of a desirable
future
HUMANITY: the nature possessed by finite embodied persons
HYLEMORPHISM: a philosophical doctrine which asserts that finite sub-
stances consist of a potential principle called matter (in Greek, hyle) and an
actual principle called form (in Greek morphe)
HYPOSTASIS: in theology, the Greek term for a particular, subsistent reality
HYPOSTATIC UNION: the uniting of divinity and humanity in the second
person of the trinity without their blending into some third reality neither fully
divine nor fully human
HYPOTHESIS: an abduction
ICON: a sign which communicates by resembling what it signifies
IDEAL: a desirable possibility which makes normative claims
IDEOLOGY: the false and deceptive rationalization of a situation of injustice
Glossary 567
IMAGINATION: the capacity to interpret reality through the use of images
IMMATERIAL: purely spiritual, devoid of matter
IMMORALITY: the decisive violation of ethical ideals and principles
IMMUTABILITY: the inability to change
IMPASSIBILITY: the inability to suffer
IMPOSSIBLE: what cannot or could not have happened; the character of a belief
which defies verification under any circumstances
IMPLAUSIBLE: the character of a belief which the preponderance of the
evidence calls into question without, however, ruling it out altogether as false
or impossible
IMPROBABLE: the characteristic of a belief which the evidence calls seriously
into question but without establishing the likelihood of another interpretation
INAUTHENTICITY: having a false or bogus character; hypocrisy
INCARNATION: embodiment; as a theological term, the embodiment of the
second person of the trinity
INCOMMUNICABILITY: the incapacity of transference from one entity to
another
INCULTURATION: evangelization or theological thinking which uses the
symbols of a particular culture, which invokes the gospel to challenge that
culture’s sinfulness, and which establishes a dialogue between a particular
culture and the Church universal
INDEX: a sign which communicates by physical activity
INDIVIDUAL: single; separate
INDIVIDUALISM: the ideological belief that society consists of atomic indi-
viduals with only accidental and artificial relations to one another
EXPRESSIVE: the self-isolating ideological belief that one must defend one’s
“core self” from the incursions of others
UTILITARIAN: the ideological belief that one can justifiably do anything
necessary to advance one’s own interests and to succeed
THERAPEUTIC: psychological theories and healing practices which incul-
cate the ideological belief in oneself as an atomic individual with only
accidental and artificial relationships with others which one can sacrifice as
needed in order to ensure personal self-fulfillment
INDIVIDUALITY: the results of individuation; the traits which make one
individual differ qualitatively from another
INDIVIDUATION: the process of becoming an individual qualitatively distinct
from other individuals
INDUCTION: in pragmatic logic, an inference which concludes from a result
and a case to a rule; the verification of a deductively clarified abduction which
establishes the reality of the rule which a prior abduction presumed to obtain
in reality
INFANCY NARRATIVE: an account of the birth of Jesus in the light of the
paschal mystery
INFERENCE: in pragmatic logic, an argument which interrelates a rule, a case,
and a result
INFINITE: that which encompasses every other thing and is encompassed by
nothing
INFUSED KNOWLEDGE: preternaturally communicated perceptions of real-
ity
INSTITUTION: a group of persons acting in socially sanctioned ways
INTELLECT: in philosophy, the spiritual power which grasps Being cognitively
as true
AGENT: in scholastic philosophy, the spiritual power of the human soul
which uses an image in the imagination as an instrument for imprinting an idea
on the passive intellect
PASSIVE: in scholastic philosophy, the spiritual power of the soul which the
active intellect enables to grasp sensible being as true
INTELLECTUAL CONVERSION: the decision to take adult responsibility for
the truth or falsity of one’s beliefs and for the adequacy or inadequacy of the
frames of reference in which one fixes one’s beliefs
INTELLIGIBILITY: something possessing significance or meaning
INTERPLAY OF CATEGORIES: the interpretation of categories derived from
one intellectual discipline by categories derived from another intellectual
discipline
INTERPRETATION: a meaningful account of symbolic significance; as a
functional theological specialty, exegesis, or a scholarly account of the signifi-
cance of religious texts and artifacts
INTUITION: in a metaphysics of experience, knowledge mediated by images
and affections
JESUSOLOGY: a rational account of Jesus’ humanity and mortal ministry
JOURNEY DISCOURSE: Lk 10:51-19:27; Luke’s account of Jesus’ final
pilgrimage to Jerusalem in which He instructs His followers about the
demands of discipleship
JUBILEE: an English term for the law enunciated in Lv 25:8-17, 29-31, which
called for the periodic rectification of injustice in Israel
JUDGMENT: in pragmatic logic, the fixation of a belief
JUSTIFICATION: in theology, passage from a state of sin to the obedience of
faith
KINGDOM OF GOD: Jesus’ central message; Jesus’ egalitarian vision of a new
Israel founded on unconditioned trust in God; on the free sharing of the
physical supports of life, especially with the poor, the marginal, and the
expendable; on prayer; on mutual forgiveness even of one’s enemies; and on
non-violence
KENOSIS: the Son of God’s free self-emptying in becoming human and
suffering crucifixion
KENOTIC CHRISTOLOGY: a Christology which interprets the meaning of
the divine self-emptying which occurred in the incarnation
LAMB OF GOD: a Johannine title of Jesus which designates Him as the victim
of a covenant sacrifice, as the suffering servant of God, and as the victorious
messiah
LAW: in the metaphysics of experience, a general tendency
LIBERATION THEOLOGY: a theology which takes as its starting point social,
economic, and political injustice and which invokes gospel values to overcome
such injustice
Glossary 569
LIBERTY: in a metaphysics of experience, responsible human freedom; freedom
to live for the beautiful, the good, and the true
LINKAGE: a literary device employed by an evangelist in order to unify into a
coherent narrative anecdotes about Jesus
ALLUSIVE: the literary use of repetition in order to interrelate different parts
of a gospel
DRAMATIC: the way in which Jesus relates to identifiable constituencies in
a gospel narrative
THEMATIC: the development of a theological idea through different
incidents in a gospel
LOGIC: a normative account of the way the human mind ought to think
KANTIAN: transcendental logic, which recognizes only deductive inference
and which offers an a priori account of the structure of human subjectivity
LOGICAL: inferentially self-consistent; lacking internal contradictions in mean-
ing
LOGICAL ADEQUACY: in pragmatic logic, the ability of a theory to interpret
all relevant data
LOGICAL APPLICABILITY: in pragmatic logic, the ability of a theory to
interpret some relevant data
LOGICAL COHERENCE: the characteristic of a theory whose key terms
remain unintelligible apart from one another
LOGOS: the Greek term for word; as a Christological term, a title of the incarnate
second person of the trinity which portrays Him as a divine communication
LOGOS-ANTHROPOS CHRISTOLOGY: a Christology which claims that
the incarnate Son of God possesses a complete humanity which consists of both
a body and a soul
LOGOS-SARX CHRISTOLOGY: a heterodox Christology which claims that
in the incarnation the divine Logos replaces the human soul in Jesus’ humanity
with the result that the second person of the trinity in becoming incarnate
possesses a human body but not a human soul
LOW CHRISTOLOGY: a Christology which begins by reflecting on Jesus’
humanity but which sometimes fails to offer an adequate account of His
divinity
LUXURY: a possession which enhances class status
MAGNIFICAT: Mary’s prayer of praise to God in Luke’s infancy narrative
MARIOLOGY: a theological account of Mary as mother of God
MATTER: physical reality; in Aristotelian philosophy, the pure potency for
substantial change
MEANING: in a metaphysics of experience, evaluation viewed as the intentional
grasp of significance
MEDIATION: the establishment of a relationship between or among distinct
realities
MEDIATOR: a go-between
MELIORISM: an ethical system which sanctions those choices which best
approximate a moral ideal
MEMORY: the ability of recall past experiences
MESSIAH: the anointed one; in Jewish apocalyptic theology one anointed by
God to effect the deliverance and salvation of Israel
MESSIANIC AGE: in apocalyptic theology, the era of peace and prosperity
resulting from the victory of a messiah
MESSIANIC SECRET: in Mark’s gospel, Jesus’ unsuccessful attempt to conceal
his messianic identity
MESSIANISM: belief in the coming of a messiah
METAPHOR: the intuitive grasp of analogy through the verbal identification of
two partially similar realities
METAPHYSICS: an organized account of reality in general; a theory of the
whole of reality which develops systematically a root metaphor for Being
METAPHYSICS OF EXPERIENCE: a theory of the whole which takes experi-
ence as a root metaphor for the whole of reality
METHOD: a set of recurrent and related operations yielding cumulative and
progressive results
MIAHYPOSTATIC THEOLOGY: an early heterodox form of theology which
discovers only one subsistent reality in the Christian deity
MIA PHYSIS: the Greek phrase meaning “one nature”; as a Christological term,
Cyril of Alexandria’s unusual term for the person of the incarnate Word
MIRACLE: an event which defies explanation, which occurs in a religious
context, and which invites faith in God’s saving intervention in human history
MISSION: the sending of one person by another; in trinitarian theology, the
historical sending of the second and third persons of the trinity
MODEL: a representation of some reality
MONOPHYSITISM: Apollonarianism; the heterodox Christological doctrine
which taught that the divinity and humanity of the incarnate Word blend into
a third nature neither fully divine nor fully human
MONOTHELITE CONTROVERSY: debate about whether Jesus possessed
both a divine and a human will
MORALITY: a code of conduct which measures choices by ideals, principles, and
realities which make ultimate and absolute claims on the human conscience
PERSONAL: a code of conduct which invokes rights and duties in resolving
interpersonal conflicts
PUBLIC: a code of conduct which measures institutional justice by the
common good
MULTIPLE ATTESTATION, CRITERION OF: a principle for validating
historically words and actions of Jesus which claims that, when different New
Testament authors bear witness to the fact that Jesus said or did something, He
probably did, especially if the authors in question represent independent
historical traditions about Jesus
MYSTERY: whatever eludes explanation or cognitive comprehension
MYSTAGOGY: the last phase of the catechumenate which instructs newly
baptized Christians in the demands of Christian living
MYTH: a story which creates an adult world of value
NARCISSISM: morbid self-preoccupation
NARRATIVE: a tale told by a story-teller to an audience about a world
Glossary 571
NATURAL: in a metaphysics of experience, the character of an experience which
responds legitimately to created value only and which ignores the historical
self-revelation of God
NATURAL LAW: a tendency operative in the cosmos
NATURE: in philosophy, a reality’s essence viewed as the source of its activity;
in theology, created reality untransformed by saving, supernatural grace
NATIONAL SECURITY: an ideology which claims that a government has the
right to do anything at all which secures its own interests
NEO-ARIANISM: the heterodox tendency in contemporary Christology to
portray Jesus as a graced human person
NEO-COLONIALISM: the economic domination of one nation by another or
by transnational corporations
NEO-ORTHODOXY: a movement in Protestant theology which rejects meta-
physical thinking and which recognizes only the analogy of faith as a legitimate
theological method
NEO-PLATONISM: a school of Platonism which fused middle Platonic phi-
losophy and contemplative religious impulses
NESTORIANISM: the heterodox denial that Mary is the mother of God
NOMINALISM: the philosophical denial of real generality
CLASSICAL: the reduction of universal concepts to mere spoken words and
of reality to concrete sensibles
CONCEPTUAL: the restriction of real generality to conceptual universals
which exist only in human subjectivity
NORM: that which measures something else
NORMATIVE SCIENCES: philosophical disciplines which reflect on the way
in which one ought to respond to reality aesthetically, ethically, and logically
NOTE: in theology, a category which assigns to a particular belief a degree of
verifiability
NOTION: a conception; in trinitarian theology, a predicate which designates a
relationship between divine persons
NUNC DIMITTIS: in Luke’s infancy narrative, the prayer of Simeon in
response to his seeing the messiah
OBJECTIFICATION: the attempt to portray reality as it exists in itself instead
of portraying it as inherently relational
OMNIPOTENCE: supreme power
OMNISCIENCE: supremely perfect knowledge
ONTOLOGICAL: metaphysical; pertaining to a theory of the whole
ONTOLOGISM: the philosophical doctrine which claims that created minds
have immediate access to the ideas in the mind of God
OPERATIONAL: pertaining to activity
OPTIMISM: the tendency to focus on good and pleasant realities rather than on
evil and unpleasant realities
ORALITY: the characteristic of a culture which communicates through the
spoken rather than through the written word
PRIMARY: the way language functions in purely oral cultures
SECONDARY: the way orality functions in literate cultures
ORDINATION: sacramental incorporation into Church leadership
ORTHOPRAXIS: decisive behavior which conforms to appropriate norms
ORTHODOXY: shared religious beliefs which conform to the norms of truth
and adequacy in interpreting the historical self-revelation of God
ORIGINAL SIN: the totality of human sinfulness in the experience of the
unbaptized minus one’s own personal sins viewed as standing within experi-
ence and conditioning it in both conscious and unconscious ways
OUSIA: a Greek term for being; as a technical trinitarian term, the reality
common to the three members of the trinity
PANENTHEISM: the doctrine that created reality differs from God but exists
in Him
PANTHEISM: the identification of all created reality with God
PARABLE: a comparison, which, when expressed in narrative form, seeks to
subvert a familiar world in order to open its audience to an alternative way of
viewing reality
PARADIGM: in grammar, a list of inflectional forms; in the philosophy of
science, an organized way of asking and answering questions which invokes an
appropriate method, appropriate instrumentation, appropriate models, and
appropriate concepts for dealing with a problem; in morality, a concrete norm
PARADIGM SHIFT: the abandonment of one organized rational way of asking
and answering questions for another
PARADIGMATIC: uniquely binding
PAROUSIA: Jesus’ second coming in divine judgment in order to vindicate those
who believe in Him
PASCHAL MYSTERY: Jesus’ death, resurrection, and mission of the divine
Breath
PASSION: the affective perception of interpersonal relationships
PENTECOST: literally, the fiftieth day; a Jewish harvest festival during which
the Breath of the risen Christ created the Church through a outpouring of Her
charisms
PERCEPT: a concrete, sensible reality viewed as an object of knowledge
PERFECTIONISM: unrealistic religious or moral rigorism
PERICHORESIS: a Greek term designating the existence of one reality in
another
PERSON: an autonomous, subsistent reality enjoying continuity of life and
capable of entering into responsible social relationships with other realities like
itself
PERSONAL MORAL CONVERSION: the decision to take adult responsibility
for respecting the rights and duties of others
PESSIMISM: the tendency to focus on evil and suffering rather than on good,
pleasant, beneficial realities
PHANTASM: in scholastic philosophy, a term for an image in the imagination
PHARISEE: the member of a Jewish sect which resisted the Hellenization of
Jewish religious faith by requiring that Jews observe not only the Torah but
pious oral traditions as well
PHENOMENOLOGY: the organized description of what appears in experience
without attempting to distinguish between reality and illusion
PHILOSOPHY: critical reflection on lived human experience
Glossary 573
PHYSIS: the Greek term for nature
PLATONISM: the school of philosophy founded by Plato in the fourth century
b.c. which divides reality into an unchanging, spiritual realm of ideas and ideals
and a material realm of constant change and illusion
MIDDLE: a school of Platonism which located ideas and ideals in a quasi-divine
intellect
PLAUSIBLE: the character of a belief supported by some evidence without that
evidence ruling out other possible or even probable interpretations
PLEROMA: a Pauline term for the extension of salvation in Christ to the material
universe through the mediation of the Church; in Gnosticism, the realm of
angelic and demonic creation; in Stoicism, the cosmos
PLURALISM: the characteristic or a situation which permits of a variety of
interpretative approaches and evaluations
PNEUMATOLOGY: a more or less organized account of the Holy Breath, the
third person of the trinity
POLICY: an institutionally sanctioned practice
POSSESSION, DEMONIC: the seizure of a human person by an evil spirit
which thereafter controls that person’s bodily movements, including speech
POSSIBLE: the character of a belief which could conceivably enjoy verifiability
despite the fact that little evidence supports it
POSSIBILITY: that which could occur; an idea or ideal capable of real or actual
exemplification
POST-MODERNISM: a vaguely organized movement in contemporary west-
ern thought which seeks to advance beyond the presuppositions of modern
culture, often characterized by the denial of any subject of discourse and by
extreme skepticism concerning linguistic meaning
POTENCY: as a technical philosophical term, the capacity for actualization
PRAGMATIC LOGIC: a theory of inference which holds that the deductive
operational consequences of any abduction define the whole of its meaning
PRAXIS: decisive activity which seeks to transform reality, especially oppressive
social institutions
PRE-CATECHUMENATE: the first phase in the instruction of candidates for
Christian baptism which seeks to introduce them to the Christian community
and to evoke from them an initial Christian conversion
PRECONSCIOUS: capable of recall
PRE-EXISTENCE: a technical Christological term for the mode of being
enjoyed by the second person of the trinity prior to the incarnation
PREFERENTIAL OPTION FOR THE POOR: a principle of Christian ethics
which insists that in the resolution of disputed questions of public morality the
needs of the socially, economically, and politically disadvantaged take prece-
dence over those of the advantaged and affluent
PREHENSION: in Whiteheadean philosophy, a concrete fact of relatedness
which includes a subject, its initial datum (or what it prehends at the beginning
of its processing), the subject’s objective datum (or perspective on the uni-
verse), its negative prehensions (which distinguish it from other prehensions),
and its subjective form (or way of prehending the universe)
PREJUDICE: an opinion formed without sufficient attention to the facts
PRE-OPERATIONAL: in developmental psychology, a characteristic of the
cognitive behavior of children who have yet to develop the capacity for abstract
rational thought
PRESENTATIONAL IMMEDIACY: in a metaphysics of experience, the way
in which an evaluative response makes the mind present to its world and the
world to it
PRETERNATURAL: beyond the powers of created nature
PRIEST: one who mediates between God and humanity
PRINCIPLE: a rule of conduct derived from an ideal
PRINCIPLE OF ALTERNATION: in logic, a rule which asserts that the mind
should focus by turns on the investigation of particular problems and the
readjustment of its metaphysical theory of the whole in the light of the results
of a focused investigation
PROBABLE: the character of a belief which the preponderance of the evidence
favors without, however, establishing its certitude
PROCESS THEOLOGY: an account of God which equates all reality with
change and development
PROPHET: one who speaks for God in summoning a community to repentance
and to hope
PROPORTIONALITY: balance, symmetry, harmonious relationship
PROSOPON: a Greek term for the mask worn by an actor in classical Greek
theater; as a theological term, prosopon has many different meanings, some
orthodox, some heterodox
PRUDENCE: deliberation ruled by sound moral principles
PSYCHIC CONVERSION: Robert Doran’s term for the kind of conversion
which transforms human affectivity; ordering disordered affectivity in the light
of sound insights generated by intellectual conversion
PSYCHOLOGY: the scientific study of human behavior
EMPIRICAL: the scientific study of human behavior which measures its
hypotheses against the behavior of control groups
DEVELOPMENTAL: a branch of empirical psychology which argues that
human behavior develops in predictable stages
SOCIAL: the scientific study of how individual persons and institutions
interact
PURGATORY: a time of moral and religious purification after death
QUALITY: in a metaphysics of experience, an instance of particular suchness
QUESTS FOR THE HISTORICAL JESUS: the rational attempt to validate
words and actions of Jesus as authentic (the new quest) and to situate them in
the context in which He lived (the third quest)
RACISM: prejudice and bigotry directed toward the members of a particular race
RCIA: The Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults; the restored catechumenate
REACTION: a way of responding to reality
CIRCULAR: in developmental psychology, an activity whose pleasurable
character tends to motivate its repetition
PRIMARY: in developmental psychology, an infantile circular reaction which
focuses on the infant’s own body
Glossary 575
SECONDARY: in developmental psychology, an infantile circular reaction
which focuses on objects other than the infant’s own body
TERTIARY: in developmental psychology, an infantile circular reaction
which explores the child’s environment
REAL: in a metaphysics of experience, pertaining to the mode of existence of a
tendency
REALISM: in philosophy, a defense of the mind’s ability to grasp reality in
opposition to subjectivism, or a defence of the existence of real generality in
opposition to nominalism, or the simultaneous defence of both positions
REDACTION CRITICISM: the interpretation of a text in the light of its editing
REDEMPTION: reacquisition; as a theological term, salvation viewed as the
divine reacquisition of a religious backslider
REFORMED SUBJECTIVIST PRINCIPLE: an axiom of Whiteheadean phi-
losophy which asserts that apart from the experiencing of subjects there is
nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness
REJECTION AND EXECUTION, CRITERION OF: a norm for authenticat-
ing historically words and actions of Jesus which asserts that any historical
portrait of Jesus must offer a plausible account of why He suffered condemna-
tion and crucifixion
RELATION: the ordering of one reality to another
CONCEPTUAL: intentionality
FACTUAL: interaction
VECTORAL: tendency
RELATIVISM: the philosophical denial of binding, universal norms for human
behavior and cognition
RELIGION: an organized way of relating to God
REPENTANCE: the conscious repudiation of one’s former sinfulness
RESEARCH: in theology, a functional specialty which provides other theolo-
gians with the tools which they need in order to think theologically
RESPONSIBILITY: accountability to oneself, to others, and ultimately to God
RESPONSIBLE, PERSONAL FREEDOM: the liberty to choose the beautiful,
the true and the good which results from an integral five-fold conversion
RESULT: in pragmatic logic, the descriptive identification of data in need of
explanation
RESURRECTION: total transformation in God after death
REVELATION: in theology, God’s historical self-disclosure
REVERSION: a technical term in Whiteheadean philosophy for the experience
of novel possibility by prehending an eternal object in the mind of God
RHETORIC: the study and practice of the art of persuasion
RIGHT: a personal need which makes legitimate claims on another person or
persons
ROOT METAPHOR: in philosophy, an intuitive grasp of analogy which serves
as a conceptual model for Being in general
RUAH: the Hebrew word for breath or wind in motion; in Christian theology
a Hebrew term for the third person of the trinity
RULE: in pragmatic logic, the conceptual formulation of a real law or tendency
SACERDOTAL: pertaining to the priesthood
SACERDOTALISM: the theological assimilation of Christian clergy to the
Jewish levitical priesthood in a manner which separates them from the laity and
endows the ordained with a superior, sacral status
SACRAMENT: most broadly, an event which simultaneously reveals and
conceals the reality of God; in sacramental theology, an official act of new
covenant worship which expresses the shared faith of the Christian commu-
nity, which therefore requires a minister sanctioned by that same community,
and which challenges Christians assembled in worship to committed faith in
the paschal mystery and in the triune God which the paschal mystery reveals
SACRIFICE: a ritual offering
SADDUCEES: a religious sect in first-century Judaism which fostered obedience
to the Torah but which, in contrast to the Pharisees, denied bodily resurrec-
tion, the existence of angels, and did not regard unwritten Jewish religious
practices as binding
SALVATION: in theology, the state of standing in a life-giving relationship with
the triune God
SAMARITAN: an inhabitant of Samaria, a province of first-century Palestine
between Galilee and Judea; in the first century, orthodox Jews tended to regard
Samaritans as heretics, enemies, and Roman collaborators
SANHEDRIN: the supreme governing council of Palestinian Jews, composed of
elders, priests, and scribes
SATAN: the Biblical personification of all those forces which oppose God and
put those who believe in God to the test; in the New Testament, the
personification of anti-Christ
SAVIOR: a rescuer; as a theological term, one who puts another in a life-giving
relationship with God
SCHEMA: in developmental psychology, a technical psychological term for an
acquired cognitive habit
SCHOLARSHIP: systematic study which eschews the technological instrumen-
tation and precise mathematical measurement of the empirical sciences
SCIENTIA BEATA: in theology, a Latin term for the special transformation of
Jesus’ human self-awareness effected by the incarnation
SCRIBE: in the ancient world, a member of the literate class charged with making
and keeping records
SECOND COMING, THE: the parousia, Jesus’ return in divine judgment in
order to vindicate those who believe in Him
SECULARISM: an ethos which either subordinates religious values and realities
to values and realities which have nothing to do with religion or which replaces
religious realities and values with non religious ones
SELF: in the metaphysics of experience, an autonomously functioning tendency
SEPTUAGINT: literally, “seventy”; the name of the Greek translation of the Old
Testament made in Alexandria, allegedly by seventy-two scribes, before the
Christian era, probably in the third century b.c.
SENSATION: initial perception of environmental impact on a conscious animal
SEVEN DEADLY SINS: pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and
sloth
SEXISM: discrimination and oppression for reasons of gender
Glossary 577
SIGNIFICANCE: in the metaphysics of experience, the intelligibility of events
and of symbolic communications
SIN: a deliberate violation of the will of God
ORIGINAL: situational sin abstracted from one’s own personal sins and
viewed as standing within experience and conditioning it in conscious and
unconscious ways
PERSONAL: an individual’s acts of disobedience to the divine will
SINLESSNESS: perfect obedience to the divine will

SOCIO-POLITICAL CONVERSION: the decision to take responsibility for
seeking to end institutional oppression through commitment to some just
cause of universal human significance
SOUL: an animating principle
SOTERIOLOGY: a more or less organized account of God’s saving activity in
human history
SPIRIT: in philosophy, immaterial reality
SPIRIT CHRISTOLOGY: an explanation of the person and ministry of Jesus
which takes into account His relationship to the divine Breath
STRATEGY: a concrete plan for implementing a policy or principle
STRICTLY NORMATIVE THINKING: critical reflection of one’s own behav-
ior in the light of ideals and principles which one has appropriated and
interiorized
SUBJECT: in a metaphysics of experience, an emerging, experiencing self; in
substance philosophy, an underlying reality
SUBJECTIVISM: the philosophical belief that one can experience only one’s
own subjectivity
SUBJECTIVITY: the evaluative responses of an experiencing self contrasted
with the realities that self experiences
SUBSISTENCE: in a metaphysics of experience, autonomous functioning
SUBSTANCE: in philosophy, that which exists in itself and not in anything else
as a subject of inhesion
SUPERNATURAL: that which exceeds the power of created nature; in theology,
pertaining to the realm of saving grace
SUPERNATURAL EXISTENTIAL: an alleged a priori, graced expansion of the
formal object of the agent intellect which endows it with a spontaneous longing
for the beatific vision and for the God revealed in Jesus Christ
SUPREME: greater than all possible conception
SYMBOL: in the metaphysics of experience, whatever mediates the symbolic
grasp of significance
COMMUNICATION: an evaluative response expressed by one mind to
another through decisive activity
EXPRESSIVE: a significant event
INTERPRETATIVE: an unexpressed evaluative response
SYNECHISM: the philosophical assertion of continuity in development
SYNERGY: simultaneous, collaborative activity
SYNTHETIC: pertaining to the perception of relationship and of unified wholes
SYSTEMATICS: in theology, a functional specialty which examines relation-
ships among sound theological doctrines
TENDENCY: in a metaphysics of experience, a general law in reality; a habitual
orientation to decide or evaluate in a particular way
THEANDRIC: combining divine and human traits
THEISM: belief in the reality of God
THEOLOGY: a more or less organized account of God
MEDIATING: the theological retrieval of a religious tradition; the functional
specialties of research, interpretation, history, and dialectics
MEDIATED: the theological reformulation of a religious tradition; the
functional specialties of foundations, doctrines, systematics, and communica-
tions
THEOTOKOS: a Greek term meaning “mother of God”; in theology, the
doctrine that Mary is the mother of the second person of the trinity
THERAPEUTIC CHRISTOLOGY: an interpretation of the person and mis-
sion of Jesus in the light of the psychological study of human behavior
THOMISM: philosophical and theological ways of thinking inspired by the
thought Thomas Aquinas
TIME: the present transformation of a past into a future
CLOCK: measured motion
REAL: in a metaphysics of experience, the present movement of experience
from a past toward a future
TRANSACTION: decisions which put autonomous selves into social relation-
ship
TRANSNATIONAL CORPORATION: a business which practices interna-
tional capitalism
TRANSCENDENTAL THOMISM: the reformulation of the thought of
Thomas Aquinas in the light of Kantian logic and the turn to the subject
TRANSDUCTIVE: in developmental psychology, pre-rational, intuitive think-
ing
TRANSMUTATION: change relationally, aesthetically, and organically con-
ceived
TRANSVALUATION: the re-evaluation of a reality, actuality, or possibility by
transposing it from one frame of reference to another
TRINITY: three persons in one God; the Christian deity
ECONOMIC: the revelation of the triune God in history
IMMANENT: the reality of the triune God in its transcendence of space and
time
TRIUMPHALISM: a view of the Catholic Church which presents it alone as the
one, true Church and which de-emphasizes or denies its flaws and sinfulness
TRUTH: the correct interpretation of reality
TURN TO COMMUNITY, THE: a methodological shift from preoccupation
with the individual subject to concern with the way in which persons interrelate
socially and institutionally
TURN TO EXPERIENCE, THE: the systematic use of “experience” as central
category in one’s account of reality
Glossary 579
TURN TO THE SUBJECT, THE: critical reflection on human intentionality
which typically invokes Kantian logic
ULTIMATE: final; in ethics, the characteristic of some reality or value worth not
only living for but, if necessary, worth dying for; in Whiteheadean philosophy,
universally predicable
UNCERTAIN: in logic, unsupported by evidence which would force a judgment
one way or the other
UNCONSCIOUS: lacking awareness
UNIQUE: incapable of reduplication
UTOPIA: the title of a book by Saint Thomas Moore describing an ideal society;
an unrealizable ideal world
VAGUE: the character of a belief which one can neither verify or falsify until one
first clarifies its meaning
VALIDITY: in logic, the characteristic of thinking which follows sound meth-
odological principles; the characteristic of a verified inference or belief
VALUE: desirability; in a metaphysics of experience, a particular mode of
perception
VULGATE, THE: the Latin translation of the Bible made by St. Jerome
VIRTUAL INFINITY: the alleged ability of a finite power of operation to aspire
to infinite satisfaction
WILL: in philosophy, a spiritual power to make decisions
WOMANIST THEOLOGY: a strain in feminism usually promoted by women
of color which criticizes the ethnic and class bias of white feminists
WORLD RELIGION: an organized way of relating to God professed by a large
number of people of different racial, national, and cultural backgrounds
WORLD SOUL: in philosophy, the animating principle of the universe
INDEX OF JOHANNINE PERICOPES
THE GOSPEL OF JOHN
The Prologue: Jn 1:1-18, 13-24, 25-27, 34, 38, 56, 60, 73, 93, 102, 129, 154,
183, 206, 209 n.16, 212
The Witness of John the Baptizer: Jn 1:19-34, 99, 26-32, 38, 85-86, 102, 113,
152, 162, 206, 209 n. 16, 212, 218
The Call of the First Disciples: Jn 1:35-51, 32, 38-39, 86-87, 95-96, 99, 131,
153-156, 184-185, 218
The Book of Signs:
The First Miracle at Cana: Water into Wine: Jn 2:1-12, 97-99, 106, 153, 158,
180, 193-197, 212, 219
The Cleansing of the Temple: Jn 2:13-25, 39-40, 56, 106, 117-119, 156-157,
173 n. 24, 196, 198, 209 n.16, 218
The Meeting with Nicodemus: Jn 3:1-21, 26, 35, 37-43, 46-47, 73, 86, 102-
103, 112, 131, 152, 168, 185, 196-197, 209-210, 216
The Baptizer’s Last Witness to Jesus: Jn 3:22-36, 99, 32-35, 41-43, 56, 157,
195-196, 206, 209 n. 16
Jesus in Samaria: Jn 4:1-42, 41, 43, 46, 87, 101-102, 106, 113, 131, 152, 158-
161, 185, 196-197, 205-206, 209 n. 16, 212, 218
The Second Miracle at Cana: The Cure from a Distance: Jn 4:43-54, 168, 193,
195, 197-198, 209 n.6
The Sabbath Cure: 5:1-18, 45-47, 86, 106, 114-115, 119, 148
Jesus’ Discourse on His Sabbath Cure: Jn 5:19-47, 44-49, 62, 114-115, 198,
203-205
Jesus and the Father: Jn 5:19-30, 152, 198, 210
The Witnesses to Jesus: Jn 5:31-47, 36, 48, 54, 198, 205, 210
The Miracle of the Loaves: Jn 6:1-15, 131, 148, 160-161, 185,, 193, 198, 219
Jesus Walks on the Water: Jn 6:16-21, 56, 161, 208
The Bread of Life Discourse: Jn 6:22-71, 105, 109, 148-149, 152, 204-205
Opening Dialogue: Jn 6:19-34, 50-51, 94, 148-149, 160
The Bread of Wisdom: Jn 6:35-50, 48, 51-52, 107-108, 210-212
The Eucharistic Bread: Jn 6:51-66, 44, 53, 86, 108, 149, 161-162, 196, 210-
211
Peter’s Testimony: Jn 6:67-71, 162, 218
The Feast of Tabernacles: Jn 7:1-59, 41, 43, 106, 149-151, 193, 197
Jesus Goes to Jerusalem for the Feast of Tabernacles: Jn 7:1-10, 113, 119-
120
Disagreements about Jesus: The Debate Opens: Jn 7:11-30, 48, 54, 73, 104-
105, 108-109, 120-121, 149, 205, 210-212, 218
Jesus Predicts His Departure and the Gift of Living Water: Jn 7:31-39, 87-
88, 113, 121, 196, 205-206, 210-211, 216, 218
The Disagreements Deepen: Jn 7:40-52, 109, 112-113, 121, 137, 180, 205,
210, 218
Index of Johannine Pericopes 581
The Woman Caught in Adultery: Jn 7:53-8:11, 112-114, 150, 205
Jesus Proclaims Himself Light of the World: Jn 8:12-20, 55, 61, 102, 105,
114, 137, 205-206, 210-212
The Unbelieving “Jews”: Jn 8:21-30, 48,56-57, 63, 79, 102, 103, 105, 109,
121, 137, 198-199, 205-208, 210-211, 215,
Jesus, Abraham, and the Father: Jn 8:31-59, 44, 48,58-60, 62-63, 104-105,
109, 143, 151-152, 162-164, 205-206, 208, 210-211
The Cure of the Man Born Blind: Jn 9:1-41, 46, 61-63, 102-103, 111, 114-115,
163-164, 193, 199-200, 202, 210
Jesus, the Shepherd of Israel: Jn 10: 1-21, 64, 104, 188-189, 210-211
The Feast of Dedication: Jn 10:22-42, 36,46, 63-66, 102, 105, 121, 164, 193,
207, 211, 218
The Raising of Lazarus: Jn 11:1-44, 66-67, 102, 115-116, 121, 158, 164, 193,
212, 218
Jesus Condemned to Death: Jn 11:45-54, 121-123, 150, 164
The Last Passover Approaches: Jn 11:55-57, 106, 115, 123
The Anointing at Bethany: Jn 12:1-11, 111, 123, 150, 153, 164-165
The Triumphal Entry: Jn 12:12-19, 102, 116, 120, 131, 150, 164, 166, 219
The Greeks Seek Jesus: Jn 12:20-36, 41, 67-69, 72, 101, 103, 150-151, 160,
173, 180, 198, 212, 214, 218-219
Jesus’ Rejection and Final Testimony: Jn 12:37-50, 46, 48, 69-71, 73, 102
The Book of Glory:
The Foot Washing: Jn 13:1-20, 71, 102-103, 105, 167-170, 172, 198-199, 217
Jesus Foretells Judas’s Treachery: Jn 13:21-32, 38, 48, 59, 61, 72, 93, 101, 170,
173, 179, 217, 219
The Last Discourse, I: Jn 13:33-14:31, 124, 169-178, 205, 213-217
The New Commandment: Jn 13:33-38, 170-173, 179. 215
The Way, Truth, and Life: Jn 14:1-21, 44, 47, 72-75, 102, 152-154, 173-
175, 177, 177 n.23, 179, 213, 215-217
The Coming of the Other Witness: Jn 14:22-31, 47, 64, 71, 75, 83, 89, 92,
102, 152, 175-176, 178-179, 213, 216
The Last Discourse, II: Jn 15:1-17:26, 44, 58, 109 n. 6, 153, 179, 213-217
The Vine and the Branches: Jn 15:1-17, 64, 75-77, 109 n.6, 152-154, 178,
214-217
The Hostility of the World: Jn 15:18-16:4a, 63, 77, 88-90, 103, 105, 126,
176, 178, 213, 216-217
The Testimony of the Other Witness: Jn 16:4b-15, 26, 41, 47, 77, 83, 90-
91, 102-103, 154, 176-177, 177 n. 27, 178, 214-216
Jesus’ Return and Victory: Jn 16:16-33, 77-78, 90, 102-103, 124, 155, 164,
178, 215-217
Jesus’ Priestly Prayer: Jn 17:1-26, 66, 78-81, 102-103, 124, 152, 154, 162,
178-179, 213, 215-217, 219
Jesus Arrested in the Garden: Jn 18:1-11, 82, 102, 105, 116, 123-125, 133, 136,
181, 208
Jesus before Annas: Peter’s Denial: Jn 18:12-27, 93, 102, 106, 124-126, 164,
179-180, 208
Jesus Tried by Pilate: Jn 18:28-19:16, 37, 44, 82, 103-104, 106, 126-140, 166,
197-198, 218-219
The Crucifixion: Jn 19:17-42, 140-147
The Charge on the Cross: Jn 19:17-22, 106, 128-129, 140, 152
Jesus’ Garments Divided: Jn 19:23-24, 140-144
Jesus Gives His Mother to the Beloved Disciple: Jn 19:25-27, 93, 96-99,
142, 158, 164
Jesus Dies: Jn 19:28-30, 90, 94, 140, 142-144
The Sign of Blood and Water: Jn 19:31-37, 94, 129, 140, 157, 173 n. 14,
196
Joseph and Nicodemus Bury Jesus: Jn 19:38-42, 43, 106, 112, 136, 180-181
The Resurrection: The Disciples See Jesus: Jn 20:1-31, 41, 160
The Beloved Disciples Sees Jesus: Jn 20:1-10, 96, 181, 183, 198, 200
Mary Sees Jesus: Jn 20:11-18, 124, 158, 181-183
The Ten See Jesus: Jn 20:19-23, 63, 73-74, 82-83, 85, 87-88, 91-92, 103,
166, 177 n.27, 178, 183, 186 n. 41, 196-197
Thomas Sees Jesus: 20:24-29, 96, 181, 183-184, 199
The Conclusion: Jn 20:30-31, 96
Appendix: Apparition in Galilee: Jn 21:1-23, 90, 94, 167, 179-180, 185-189,
215
Second Conclusion: Jn 21:24-25, 95, 99
THE FIRST LETTER OF JOHN:
Introduction: The Word Made Flesh: 1 Jn 1:1-4, 21-23 n.14

Breaking with Sin, I: 1 Jn 1:5-2:2, 81-82, 88, 176 n. 26, 200-201 n.7
Keeping the Commandments: 1 Jn 2:3-11, 173-174 n. 24, 176-177 n.27
Detachment from the World: 1 Jn 2:12-17, 104-105 n. 2, 174 n. 24177 n.27,
185, 185-186 n.41
The Enemies of Christ, I: 1 Jn 2:18-29, 10-11 n. 2, 97-98 n. 76, 109 n. 6, 161-
163, 168-169 n. 21, 177 n.27
Living as God’s Children: 1 Jn 3:1-2, 109-110 n. 6, 185-186 n. 41
Breaking with Sin, II: 1 Jn 3:3-9, 86, 105 n.6, 109-110 n.6, 169 n. 21, 200-210
n. 7
The Commandments: The Law of Love: 1 Jn 3:10-24, 168-169 n. 21, 171-172
n. 23, 173-175 n. 24
The Enemies of Christ, 1 Jn 4: 1-6, 10-11 n.2
The Centrality of Love: 1Jn 4:7-5:4, 173 n.24, 174-175 n.25, 185 n.41
The Centrality of Faith: 1 Jn 5:5-12, 41, 144-145 n. 39
Conclusion: 1 Jn 5:13-21, 168-169 n. 21, 176 n. 26, 185 n. 41
THE SECOND LETTER OF JOHN:

2 Jn 1-13, 10, 21-23 n. 13, 163, 173-174 n. 24, 174-175 n. 24, 185, 185-186
n. 41
THE THIRD LETTER OF JOHN:
3 Jn 1-15, 10, 174-175 n. 25
Index of Johannine Pericopes 583
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Gelpi The Firstborn of Many Doctrinal and Practical Christology Marquette Studies in Theology 20

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Gelpi The Firstborn of Many Doctrinal and Practical Christology Marquette Studies in Theology 20

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Donald L. Gelpi, S.J.

Andrew Tallon, Series Editor

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gelpi, Donald L., 1934-

Cover image compliments of St. Isaac of Syria Skete.

We gratefully acknowledge the generous support of The New Orleans

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

Preface to Volume 3 ............................................................................ 7

Part 1: The Transition to Doctrines:

Chapter 1: The Beloved Disciple: His Community, His Prologue ...... 9

Part 2: Doctrinal Christology ......................................................... 224

Chapter 6: Issues in Post-Chalcedonian Christology ....................... 225

Part 3: Practical Christology ........................................................... 488

Chapter 15: To Love As Jesus Loved ............................................... 488

Afterword ....................................................................................... 552

Donald L. Gelpi, S.J.

The Community of the Beloved Disciple

The Johannine community probably arose in or near Palestine. Its

Johannesbriefs,” Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentlische Wissenschaft, 81(1990), pp.

Disciple shows the most accurate knowledge of first-century Palestinian

In the beginning was the Word (ho Logos),

The second strophe asserts:

All things came to exist through Him,

It was the true light

In designating the Word’s light as “true” the hymn implicitly contrasts

by the chosen people brings to an historical climax their disobedience to

And the Word became flesh (Kai Logos sarx egeneto)

though, as we shall see, faith in the risen Christ without confronting

Some scripture scholars would include verse 18 in the prologue. More-

knowing” I mean the knowledge of Jesus which results from practical

John the Baptizer Testifies to Jesus

Without a doubt, however, in portraying the Baptizer as a witness to

When pressed by the priestly delegation to justify his ministry of preach-

like baptizing? The fourth evangelist’s John answers in a self-deprecating

John’s reply echoes, with significant variations, words of John preserved

In portraying the Baptizer as sent for no other purpose than to mani-

mark that person out as the Breath-baptizer. The Baptizer subsequently

Jew in question would have challenged the Baptizer’s disciples to recog-

The Analogy of Christological Knowing

I call the fourth evangelist’s portrait of John paradoxical because it

Johannine Jesus during His mortal ministry with dogged determination

Jesus and His Father

As the glorified Son of Man, Jesus in the New Testament normally

This passage recapitulates much of the gospel’s prologue.19 It also enunci-

flecting on the judgmental character of Jesus’ sabbath healings, the fourth

Vertreter Christlicher Nordreichstheologie,” Biblische Zeitschrift, 36(1992), pp.

the saved by raising them to eternal life. He judges the unbeliever by

The fourth gospel espouses a realized eschatology analogous to that

Jesus’ sealing by the Father has received three different interpretations.

It is written in the prophets, “And they shall be taught of God.” Everyone

Jesus interprets the Father’s action in leading believers to consent to

In the fourth gospel, during the feasts of Tabernacles and Dedication,

Once again we find ourselves on familiar ground (Cf Jn 5:41-47). Jesus

faith in those to whom He preaches. By the same token, Jesus’ actual

Even if I do bear witness to Myself, my testimony is true, for I know where

As we have seen, in their account of Jesus’ walking on the water after

The warning, however, meets only with incomprehension. Jesus’ hos-

In the final redaction of the fourth gospel, Jesus, in His conversation

If I glorify Myself, My glory amounts to nothing. The One who glorifies

of violence and of unbelief. The light, however, continues to shine in the

focuses on Jesus’ origin. In acknowledging Jesus as one who proceeds

the world: in repudiating Jesus, one repudiates the divine shepherd of