John's Gospel as Witness

The Development of the Early Christian Language of Faith

Alexander S. Jensen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351924948
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ancient History

This book defends the claims of historical-critical research into the New Testament as necessary for theological interpretation. Presenting an interdisciplinary study about the nature of theological language, this book considers the modern debate in theological hermeneutics beginning with the Barth-Bultmann debate and moving towards a theory of language which brings together historical-critical and theological interpretation. These insights are then applied to the exegesis of theologically significant texts of the Gospel of John in the light of the hermeneutical discussion. Drawing together the German and Anglo-American hermeneutical traditions, and discussing issues related to postmodern hermeneutical theories, this book develops a view of the New Testament as the reflection of a struggle for language in which the early Church worked to bring about a language through which the new faith could be understood.

Chapter 1

Language and Logos

 

 

 

Language is logos.

Language is logos as the meaningful interpretation of Being.

We find ourselves in an alien world. The world is full of other beings and manifold impressions. We are helpless against the rush of these other beings, unless we have language. Language is a powerful defence against the rush of the world. We name the other beings, as Adam named the animals in the Paradise-garden; being which is given a name can be set into relation, into meaningful relation to other beings and to the human self. Through language we can make sense of the world, understand and communicate what we encounter. Indeed, humanity can communicate!

Language is also based on convention within a group of people who share the same environment and experiences, and so one person can tell another the individual understanding of the world. As language develops, the interpretation of the world gets more and more complex. It starts with straightforward interpretations, like: ‘I gather from the vibrations of the earth here, the trumpet-sound and the stomping we can hear that a mammoth will be here soon. As we are many and have our spears with us, we could hunt it’ and proceeds to more complex ones like: ‘Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.’ In both examples language is a meaningful interpretation of reality.

The two interpretations of reality I have taken as an example are connected by many thousand years of humanity trying to understand itself within the world in which it finds itself. All these interpretations, all this language, are is connected with and related to each other. Later interpretations refer to earlier ones, contemporary interpretations refer to each other, in both cases either in agreement or disagreement. Together they form the universe of the logos, which is pure discourse. Every interpretation of Being which has ever been formulated is a part of this universe of discourse. Every interpretation of the world being formulated comes from there and goes there. It comes from there, because if a human person understands his or her world, it always takes place in interaction with other interpretations which are already part of that universe. It goes there, because after the interpretation has been formulated and uttered, it is part of that universe and participates in the universal system of reference.

We humans are part of both worlds, of the natural, physical world and of the universe of logos. In the human person, both worlds meet. The human person, part of the universe of discourse, receives different possible interpretations of the world, which can be evaluated and applied to its physical world. The experiences one makes in the physical world then influence the interpretation of the world, which, in turn, becomes part of the universe of the logos. Through the human person, logos and physis interact. The physis is what is interpreted by the logos, without physis there would be no logos. And without logos, physis would be meaningless and dead.

Logos and physis are related to each other also in another, paradoxical way. Logos is never available without physis. Human understanding of the world is only possible in language, which, as we have seen above, is logos, and language is always physically bound. There is no language without the soundwaves which transmit the spoken language from mouth to ear, without ink and paper (or, in the contemporary environment, the hardware of the computer and the electromagnetic waves rushing through the computer-networks and the World Wide Web). Therefore, logos is mediated by physis, and physis is able to carry logos. All the interpretations of the world, of which the universe of the logos consists, have been oral or written utterings. Theoretically, they could all be written down and collected in a library. Even the understanding of texts, which consists of setting the text into meaningful relation to other texts, to the physical world and the human self, is a process which is expressed in language and thus can be written down. Therefore, physis is able to embody logos. Yet physis does not exhaust logos; they are not directly identical, but in a paradoxical unity. Logos transcends physis and physis embodies logos.

The universe of the logos is full of conflicting interpretations of the physical world. Yet only one interpretation can be meaningful at a time, and only one can be true. Absolute truth, in turn, is not yet visible or directly accessible. A central part of Christian faith is that truth will be visible in the eschaton; until then there is no possibility of seeing, only of believing. Every assumption of truth is a belief, for it means to prefer one interpretation of the world over against others. Even to say that there is no truth and to assert a radical relativism is to assume that the relativist interpretation of the world is the only valid interpretation. Therefore, in this world it is necessary to live within the conflict of interpretations and to accept that the final truth will never be found here. Knowing that absolute truth will never be seen in this world, discourse has to bear the multitude of interpretations. Theology, as any other academic discipline, has to accept that its authority is questioned and has to question the other authorities. Only in this context will opinions be tested and prejudices abandoned. To utter one’s position, one’s interpretation of the world, is always an act of authority, which needs to be responded to by criticism. Only according to this rule will discourse be relatively free from oppression in a communicative network of authority and critique.

Language is logos. Within this hermeneutical framework theology and biblical interpretation takes place. The Bible as a whole and its books individually are part of the universe of discourse. They offer a range of interpretations of the world which are the basis of Christian theology. Christian theology has to see the Bible and the biblical books in their place within the network of meaning which is the world of the logos. Having received Christian faith and Christian thought-patterns from discourse, they need to be tested in the worlds both of logos and physis. They have to be translated so that they may be comprehensible and plausible in discourse. Then they are handed on into the communicative universe of the logos again, from where they will be taken up again, criticised, transformed and passed on again. In this process of receiving and passing on theology has its place, and to explore the significance of biblical studies in this framework is the aim of the present study.

Chapter 2

Biblical Interpretation in Conflict

Especially in the Anglo-Saxon environment, theologians have embarked on a new hermeneutical debate. Owing to a certain frustration with the historical-critical approach to the New Testament, supposedly new approaches are discussed and find more and more acceptance. Neo-Barthian approaches like the ‘canonical approach’ and rediscovered ‘biblical theology’ are broadly discussed, not to mention the so-called post-modern approaches like reader-response, post-structuralism and deconstruction and whatever can be found in the theological marketplace. What all these approaches to the New Testament have in common is that they are in danger of not taking seriously Christianity as a historically conditioned religion. The New Testament itself emphasises that it originated from something that happened in history, in a certain place and at a certain time: so Matthew 2:1, Luke 2:lf. Early Christianity, too, was highly conscious of the historical condition of Christianity, as, e.g. the under Pontius Pilate in the creeds indicates. Therefore, to separate Christianity from its historical origin and development means seriously to misapprehend its very nature.

One may suspect that these misapprehensions of Christianity are grounded in an insufficient theory of language. It has been said that language refers to something outside itself, that its meaning is not contained in language itself but that language can only point at it. Post-modern approaches reject this very notion and thus abandon the concept of an identifiable meaning of language. Yet a critical discussion of this concept of reference and its presuppositions is urgently necessary and has, to my knowledge, not yet taken place in the Anglo-Saxon context. An integral part of this study is to challenge this perception of language and meaning and propose a view of language as logos, of language as bearer of meaning. Language, as I am going to argue, is able to contain meaning and to disclose it, rather than merely to point at it.

This is not to say that the text is a self-contained whole, because it was created in relation to the discourse of a particular time and place. Therefore, the text is part of a world. The world of the text consists not only of the world within the text, i.e. the narrative and the system of reference within it, but also of the world in which the text was written, for it was written in a language in which every word has not only a specific meaning but also manifold connotations and additional references. As Gadamer puts it, ‘every word causes the whole language to which it belongs to resonate, and the whole of the perception of the world, that it is based upon, appear.’¹ Therefore, the text is meaningful within the world of which it is part and thus within the discourse, the network of meaning to which it belongs. To isolate the text from its world, i.e. its historical context, is to do great injustice to the text. I shall develop this theory of language in the first two chapters of this study and carry it out in the following chapters, where I interpret selected passages from John’s Gospel.

The view of language as logos sets me in opposition to approaches which find the meaning of the text, in our case the New Testament or the Bible as a whole, behind the text. These approaches are represented, on the one hand, by scholars who reconstruct historical events or characters (especially the historical Jesus) and use this reconstruction of a reality behind the text as the basis of theology and faith. On the other hand, neo-Barthian scholars who see the Bible as a whole as referring to the Word of God, which is to be found behind the text rather than in it, also fall under this category. This matter certainly needs to be further explored, as I shall do in the chapter on the debate between Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann.² Yet the view of language as logos also challenges the basic assumption of postmodernism, i.e. that ‘signification does not present or represent some original presence; the very notion of presence is itself an effect produced by signification.’³ Or, in other words, in post-modernism

There is no extratextual reality to which texts refer or which gives texts their meaning; meaning or reference are possible only to this network [i.e. texts referring to other texts], as functions of intertextuality.⁴

Thus, it is the very concept of meaning and text which I shall criticise in this study, which is also rejected by post-modernism by separating text and extratextual reality. The hermeneutics I am proposing in this study assume that the text has a distinct meaning which is to be found in the text rather than behind it. Therefore, the approach underlying this study has a thrust critical of the post-modern separation of language and meaning. In consequence, we need to be aware that the way to post-modernism is actually paved by the epistemology proposed by Karl Barth and his neo-Barthian followers who are, in fact, open to post-modern criticism - if they are not, wittingly or unwittingly, following post-modern presuppositions themselves.

This study is not the place for a comprehensive discussion of postmodern epistemology (or, as ardent post-modernists might prefer, tarachology), which would be a worthy subject of another study. However, I should address two more points here. First, an important emphasis of postmodernism is to identify power structures and hidden agendas in texts, which then need to be unveiled and criticised. This is, in fact, an important issue in hermeneutics in general as well as in biblical interpretation. However, one does not have to ta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Language and Logos
• 2 Biblical Interpretation in Conflict
• 3 The Starting Point: Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann
• 4 The Long Path to Language
• 5 Interpreting John: Introductory Questions
• 6 The Prologue: John 1:1–18
• 7 Jesus and Nicodemus: John 3:1–21
• 8 The Final Prayer: John 17
• 9 From Theological Hermeneutics to Hermeneutical Theology
• Bibliography
• Index