Johannine Ethics

The Moral World of the Gospel and Epistles of John

Christopher W. Skinner, Sherri Brown, Christopher W. Skinner, Sherri Brown, Sherri Brown

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781451496468
• eBook ISBN: 9781506438467
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

The Gospel and Epistles of John are often overlooked in discussions of New Testament ethics; indeed, it has been asserted that the Fourth Gospel is of only limited value to such discussions--even that John is practically devoid of ethical material. Representing a range of viewpoints, the essays collected here by prominent scholars reveal the surprising relevance and importance of the Johannine literature by examining the explicit imperatives and the values implicit in the Gospel narrative and epistles. The introduction sets out four major approaches to Johannine ethics today. Essays in subsequent sections evaluate the directives of the Johannine Jesus (believe, love, follow), tease out the implicit ethics of the Gospel's narrative (including its fraught and apparently sectarian representation of hoi Ioudaioi as Jesus's opponents), and propose different approaches for advancing the discussion of Johannine ethics beyond the categories now dominant in critical scholarship. In a concluding essay, the editors take stock of the book's wide-ranging discussion and suggest prospects for future study. The sum is a valuable resource for the student as well as the scholar interested in the question of Johannine ethics.

II

Implied Ethics in the Johannine Literature

4

The Creation Ethics of the Gospel of John

R. Alan Culpepper

The Gospel of John is unique among the Gospels in that it opens with a cosmic Prologue that introduces Jesus as the incarnation of the Logos, through whom the world was created. This essay^[1] explores the implications of this introduction for the ethics of the Gospel, as a contribution to recent narrative-critical study of the Gospel’s “implied ethics.” I will suggest that John is rooted in Jewish tradition that grounded ethics both in creation and in covenant, especially the Sinai covenant.

Obviously, there is more here than I can excavate in one essay, so it will necessarily be a fast tour, programmatic and suggestive for further exploration. As a point of departure, we may pose the question, What are the implications of starting the story of Jesus with the role of the Logos (Word) in creation? Our plan will be to assess briefly (1) the new approach to John’s ethics, (2) the role of the Prologue as introductory exposition, (3) creation in Jewish tradition, (4) creation ethics and covenant ethics in Judaism, (5) the sacredness of human life in Jewish tradition, (6) the theme of life in John as an ethical principle, (7) John’s ethic of divine love and its fulfillment, and (8) implications of creation ethics.

The New Approach to John’s Ethics

In his groundbreaking work on New Testament ethics, Richard Hays contended that the ethical significance of the New Testament narratives cannot be restricted to their didactic content. Moral instruction is communicated not only in didachē (teaching) but also in

the stories, symbols, social structures, and practices that shape the community’s ethos. A text such as the Gospel of John, for example, may have relatively little explicit teaching, but its story of a “man from heaven” . . . is fraught with ethical implications for the community that accepts the message and finds itself rejected by the world.^[2]

Following Hays, several Johannine scholars have applied this insight to the Gospel of John. For example, Johannes Nissen shifts the focus from individual ethics to the community ethos and defines the early Christian communities as communities of character. Identity shapes action, being shapes seeing: “Who we are and who we are becoming as a result of the faith we hold determines in large part what we see.”^[3] Following this same line of thought, Richard A. Burridge sought to broaden the basis of New Testament ethics from its explicit instructions to its responses to the life and example of Jesus. Resisting the limitation of Johannine ethics to the new command, Burridge insists, consistent with his “principal argument” that “the full picture of what love means in the Fourth Gospel can be found only in its portrait of Jesus.”^[4]

The papers from a conference held at Nijmegen in 2009, collected in a volume appropriately titled Rethinking the Ethics of John, took up the challenge of interpreting John’s implicit, narrative ethics.^[5] In the introductory essays, Michael Labahn and Ruben Zimmermann respond to the widely held view that in contrast to the Synoptic Gospels John offers no instruction in ethics because it does not contain explicit injunctions and prohibitions, or teachings on ethical issues, and does not present Jesus as a model to be imitated.^[6] For example, there is no Sermon on the Mount in John, none of the parables we find in the other Gospels, nor any of the lists of virtues and vices we find in the rest of the New Testament. This does not mean that the Gospel of John has no ethical teachings. Michael Labahn contends that “the quest for a Johannine ethic cannot be limited to direct moral instructions such as the ‘new commandment,’ but must also consider the whole story and its underlying value system, which together lead the reader toward certain actions that are in accordance with the text’s ideas.”^[7] Instead of presenting the traditional forms of ethical instruction, the Gospel draws the reader into a narrative world in which Jesus is characterized as a revealer sent from above to make known God’s revelation for humanity—a revelation that has inescapable implications for ethics.

Rather than instructions related to various typical ethical situations, the Johannine Jesus gives the disciples an encompassing new commandment: “Love one another as I have loved you” (John 13:34–35; 15:12, 17). More than a code of specific instructions that his disciples should follow, Jesus lays down a principle that pervades the ethics of Johannine Christians. “Love one another” is a comprehensive, challenging basis for ethics. Of course, the love command occurs in other forms in Jewish and Christian teachings, other religious traditions, and now in secular humanism also. On the other hand, the injunction to “love one another as [kathōs] I have loved you” ties the love command to history, to the person of Jesus, and to the memory of his ministry. In John, moreover, it ties the love command to the incarnation and embeds it within the narrative of the Gospel. As John says in the Prologue, “the word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (1:14).^[8] This means, at a minimum, that when we seek to understand the meaning of the new command we are driven to the record of Jesus’s ministry in the rest of the Gospel. There is a christological context that defines and animates the ethics of this Gospel.

In addition, we should not miss the object or focus of the command: “love one another as I have loved you.” In contrast to the other Gospels and the love command in the Sermon on the Mount, the Johannine Jesus does not command love of one’s enemy, or even one’s neighbor. Just to sharpen this point for a moment, consider the following verses from Matthew:

You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. . . . For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? (Matt 5:43–44, 46)

Similarly, in Luke Jesus responds to the lawyer’s question, “And who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29) with the parable of the good Samaritan. When set beside these texts, the new command in John appears to be limited, narrower, even sectarian.^[9] Who is meant by “one another,” and if it has the narrower meaning of fellow disciples rather than other human beings, as the words that follow suggest, namely, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (13:35), does this mean that Jesus’s disciples are to love only other disciples? The question already takes us into the world of the Fourth Gospel and to the Gospel as a whole.

Francis J. Moloney has recently given us a fresh reading of the narrative development of the theology of the Gospel, focusing on its portrayal of God’s love.^[10] Three facets of his argument reorient discussion of the theme of love in John. First, Moloney argues that a full understanding of this theme requires attention not only to what Jesus says about love but also to what he does. Second, he interprets Jesus’s actions as revelatory of what God does in and through his Son, culminating in Jesus’s death. And third, Moloney connects Jesus’s death, his “hour,” to the theme of love. Jesus’s mission, to complete or “perfect” God’s work (4:34; 5:36), reveals a God whose love for the world (3:16) has no limits. Moloney also rejects the sectarian reading of John’s love ethic that has been debated since its forceful articulation by Ernst Käsemann and Wayne Meeks.^[11] On the contrary, “Jesus’s prayer that disciples be swept into the love that exists between the Father and the Son (17:26) is a prayer for the world that God loved so much that he sent his only Son (3:16–17).”^[12]

Parenthetically, we may note that as this survey of recent scholarship indicates, it appears that we have come to a point that Dietrich Bonhoeffer anticipated in his Christology and ethics. He insisted:

Those who wish even to focus on the problem of a Christian ethic are faced with an outrageous demand—from the outset they must give up, as inappropriate to this topic, the very two questions that led them to deal with the ethical problem: “How can I be good?” and “How can I do something good?” Instead they must seek the wholly other, completely different question: “What is the will of God?”^[13]

Bonhoeffer’s Ethics is not just theocentric; it is based on the model of Jesus Christ and requires formation in the church. These aspects of his Ethics are of course also serviceable in a study of John’s ethics. Like Bonhoeffer we will begin with the affirmation that for religious, and in our context Christian, ethics, the discourse proceeds from an understanding of God’s purpose for humanity. In the Gospel of John, the Prologue contains its initial statement on God’s initiatives and will for humankind.

The Role of the Prologue as
Introductory Exposition

The Gospel of John is distinctive among the Gospels in that it opens with an elaborate, initially poetic Prologue (1:1–18) that introduces the narrative that follows. The Prologue supplies what Meir Sternberg called chronological, preliminary, concentrated exposition.^[14] For our present purposes, we may make the following observations about ways in which the Prologue introduces aspects of the Gospel that have implications for its ethics.

A cursory reading of the Prologue reveals that it speaks to six specific moments of divine initiative:

1. The work of creation through the Logos (v. 3)
2. The giving of the law through Moses (v. 17)
3. The sending of John the Baptist (vv. 6–8, 15)
4. The coming of the light (v. 9) / the incarnation of the Logos (v. 14)
5. The birth of the children of God (vv. 12–13)
6. The revelation of the Father ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: (How) Can We Talk About Johannine Ethics? Looking Back and Moving Forward
• The Johannine Imperatives
• Implied Ethics in the Johannine Literature
• Moving Forward
• Conclusion: Moving the Conversation Forward—Johannine Ethics in Prospect
• Bibliography
• Author Index