John's Gospel In Sickness and Health, and oh, yes, Franklin Graham
Wednesday, May 12, 2010 at 3:01AM | by Otter From the Mailbag:
Subject: John 14:6
I'm wondering if you would help me with an interpretation of this verse. There is a discussion going on over at the S___ Forums about Franklin Graham being dis-invited from the Pentagon National Day of Prayer event because of comments he made stating that the Muslim religion is evil.
Some have argued that since Jesus said that no one comes to the Father except through him, it follows that all other religions are evil, and that Mr. Graham should be applauded for speaking the truth.
One poster said that her interepretation of that verse is that Jesus alone is fit to judge humanity, and that if he decides to allow a Muslim into heaven, what is that to us?
I have to say that I like her interpretation, because it fits in well with my idea of a loving God. What do you think? Is there another way to interpret that verse other than what I've always been taught - that you must be a Christian, to come to the Father?
I have to say that I am deeply troubled by that thread. There's so much talk about "truth", and "the Scriptures are clear" and "going to Hell". It's giving me heartburn, I tell you.
John 14:6 reads, "Jesus answered him, 'I am the way, the truth, the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." It's worth reading in a larger context of the chapter, of course, but that's not nearly helpful enough.
John's a funny gospel and tricky to handle. People who believe that they are reading it "clearly, for exactly what it says," very frequently leave out the striking tensions in the text. And if I don't see signs of that tension in their interpretation (I don't in your description above) I'm a little less inclined to take them seriously.
It's easy to see why they do this: they've been told that the gospel is about a Jesus who plucks people from hell through their belief. So some positively majestic passages, like John 3:10-21 get quoted to bolster the dynamic of salvation from hell. This is like using Shakespeare's original folios as cigarette paper.
But what's really conspicuous (and to some of my students, shocking) in John, when you really dig into it, is an almost total absence of hell. (One of my students broke down and cried on discovering that hell was not a major component of the gospels. Go figure.)
So my best guess, without reading the forum thread you refer to, is that people are manhandling John in a way that supports a theology they're pressing on him.
You're right to intuit that it doesn't have to be that way.
Whenever I deal with John, I go back and read the Prologue, John 1:1-18, usually in some detail and (if I have time) in Greek. John front-loads his major themes there, and the prologue is the key to the whole show. It's worth looking at it in detail, not to explain away his dicta but to understand what he means.
He relies on the concept of the logos, a Greek idea taken from the pre-Socratic philosophers apparently to refer to the principles in any feature of creation (we might loosely say a thing's "is-ness") and exploited by the Jewish Hellenistic philosopher Philo to mean something like "the divine principle of creation."
His aim is to present Jesus' life in terms of this philosophical conception.
What's interesting to me here is that John pictures the descent of the logos from an invisible God. We might consider it this way: God is "spirit," that is, an intangible thing outside the realms of human discourse. "No-one has seen the Father," says Jesus in John, "except the Son."
Note that "Son" who has "seen the Father" in John functions a little differently than it does in the other gospels. In Mark "Son of God" seems to function in the ancient Near Eastern sense: it means the King, the son of the [local] God. Mark drafts that term from the Hebrew Bible's prophets and histories to mean "the Messiah," the Son of David who will establish the apocalyptic Kingdom.
Matthew and Luke, for whom the apocalyptic kingdom has slightly different implications, take "Son of God" to be quite a literal description: they both have Jesus conceived by the Virgin through the action of the Holy Spirit.
John, by contrast, is an allegorical gospel. And his language is a bit metaphorical here. "Son" is a metaphor for the way in which the creative principle of God, the "word" or logos, emerges out of God. That is, it's a description of how it is that creation as you and I know it has come to be. John intentionally evokes Genesis ("In the beginning...") as well as following Philo by making the creative Word of God the logos of Greek philosophy: the word invests the thing with its existence. So, says John, "Without him, nothing was made that was made."
That logos in John descends into space-time (that is, into the creation he made), and is recognized by John the Baptist ("... he comes after me but he was before me..."), but in general his own people, the Jews, do not receive him. Furthermore, the phrase "the World" in John is a metaphor not for created reality (which came into being through the logos) but for that portion of the world that will not enter into the great marriage between the logos and the creation it has made.
Therefore, the logos is metaphorized as "life" and "light" (again images from Genesis): it's as if the light has shone in the darkness, but the people closed their eyes to it. The judgment in John isn't hell, but that they continue to live in darkness, like people who close their eyes against the light.
That's the metaphor: the "reality" for John is that such people are purely physical, and not spiritual. That is, they are not open to discourses except those proper to all created things. "You don't see the wind," says Jesus to Nicodemus, "where it is going or where it comes from. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit... What is flesh is flesh, and what is spirit is spirit."
Unlike the gnostics of his time, John does not believe that spirit is good and matter "fallen" from spirit. Rather, he believes that God's creative act is continually offering union with the life of God, but that many, "whose deeds are evil," do not wish to come to that union with God, where all truth is known.
This is why marriage imagery, and the play between genders, is so important in John: he sees his book as an allegory of the mystical union between spirit and flesh, and it takes on some wonderfully provocative overtones. There's the Disciple Whom Jesus Loved (Lazarus, I think, not John) "receiving" the mother of Jesus (not named Mary, here, but nameless: it's the source of the logos that is meant); there's Jesus demanding that Mary not touch him "because I have not ascended to my Father"; and there's the transformation of the water of flesh into the wine of spirit in the wedding of Cana. Here's a Samaritan woman who's had five husbands and one spare currently in her trailer. It goes on and on.
So physical flesh isn't odious to John. But for those who believe, their deeds are brought into the light of God's creative energy (which is "truth" and "the way") and they are unified to God.
Here's a diagram: note that the Jews and "The World" and pagan faiths are still created matter by dint of the Logos having created... but they do not by faith or belief or fidelity attach themselves to the action of the logos in the world. They are outside the dotted line that is porous, traversed through pistis, the Greek word for faith, belief, or fidelity. (My students and I refer to this as "The Cone," the region of intersection between God and creation by agency of the logos.)
Water here symbolizes created matter, so that Jesus says one must be born "of water and the spirit," and the six stone water jars "there for the Jewish rites of purification" in Chapter Two symbolize the Jewish life that must be infused with spirit in order to be meaningful. This is reiterated in Jesus' conversations with Nicodemus and the Samaritan Woman (who are juxtaposed to emphasize their different natures: the one a Jewish male who "comes by night" and misunderstands everything; the other a Samaritan Woman whose marital difficulties symbolize the restless search for God that end in the reception of the logos.
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Okay, so what's this have to do with your question?
When Jesus says "No-one comes to the Father but by me," keep in mind that the essential dynamic of the entire book is not about avoiding hell. It's about approaching God through the logos and its intersection with space-time history.
And while the claims of John's Jesus are still pretty sweeping and exclusive, so long as people are worrying themselves about who's going to hell, their quotations from John are shooting blanks. They're not reading the book. They're looking at the Disney film.
As for Frankllin Graham: I think if one aims to take John as John meant to be taken, he's right so far as the exclusivity goes. John sees Jesus as the incarnate logos and puts all those words in Jesus' mouth.
But to put it bluntly, the distortion of the gospel into the salvation from hell makes Graham's gospel a little beside the point. The New Testament was an apocalyptic text when it was written, and has gradually become instead a theological one. It's traded in the passion for the Kingdom and acquired instead something like a belief that the consequences for who we are matter more than who we are. it's in that sense that I think Graham takes it, though of course we can dress that up any way we like. That's disappointing in Graham: he's done much good work that encourages evangelicals to live well now.
I have a lot of questions, though: if the logos, the creative activity of the unseen God, was always creating from at least the beginning, who is to say that some mother sacrificing hersef for her child did not engender the perfection of the logos? And since we've established that in John it's not about avoiding hell but of gaining the great marriage between spirit and flesh, could it really be said that the logos subsists in one man only? Or does the one man speak in John for the logos?
And as for "other religions," if somebody in there has stumbled on the logos, what call does Franklin Graham have to say that he hasn't? If God has called somebody clean, is Franklin Graham going to set scripture against God?
Christianity isn't a religion in the marketplace of religions. Not in John. It's the means by which your religion, whatever it is, declares itself part of God's life in the world. Or doesn't.
These would be deep waters. Wear a life-vest and keep your hands in the boat at all times.
Reader Comments (2)
As always, a lot to think about. Thanks for posting this.
Wow! That was awesome. Thank you for taking the time to write to me in your sleep deprived state. Imagine if you had been well rested! Seriously, you have a way of writing that speaks to me. You've opened this up for me in a way that gives me peace. Thank you.
I knew there must be another way to look at those verses, and the entire gospel of John for that matter. I just finished reading "Surprised by Christ" by A. James Bernstein. He is a Jew who converted to Protestant Christianity in the '70's (Jesus Movement), and then to Eastern Orthodoxy. He's an Orthodox priest now. What you've written about "God's creative act continually offering union with the life of God" reminds me of what he has written about EO's views on heaven and hell. Actually much of what you have written here fits in nicely with where I'm headed on my faith journey. Thank you so much. I know I'll have to read it several more times (I'm slow). It means so much to me that you took the time to answer me so thoroughly.
Elizabeth