(2) The record of Christ’s teaching in the Fourth Gospel presupposes the Synoptics, and in Apostolic perspective, under illumination of the promised Spirit, unfolds their final meaning. Were this Gospel not from John, it still would show how the most spiritual Christians in Apostolic days recalled the words of Jesus respecting the Son and Spirit, and how their experience witnessed to them. In the Apocalypse, Jesus appears, after the manner of the Synoptists, as Son of Man exalted as Son of God; ‘in the Fourth Gospel, Christ is revealed as the Divine Son incarnate, not humbled, but with His eternal glory veiled by temporary abode among men, only to burst forth again in full splendour at His ascension. Jesus here presents Himself as central in salvation ; He is the eternal life (6*-*), of which men must partake or perish. From this central position Jesus ever looks up to the Father and forward to the Spirit. He speaks much more here of the Holy Spirit than He does in the Synop- tics. He enlarges and unfolds here what He indi- cated there. He identifies Himself more closely with the Gospel. The kingdom appears here as eternal life, and that life is in Christ. (14 326 5% 6%). He is not a guide to the way, or a preacher of truth: He is the way, the truth, and the life (14°). When John’s disciples wondered at His knowledge of men, He told them that He was Jacob’s ladder, reaching all the way to God (1°-*). To see Him was to see the Father (14°). His solemn words, ’Ayiy duyy . . . eyo elus (8°8), seem to reflect the ‘I AM’ of Ex 34. In His typical interview with Nicode-
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mus, the Jewish theologian, He presented salvation as flowing from Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Baur says Jn 3! sums up all Christian truths, and from it the Trinity appears as ‘the most definite expression of the peculiar relation between God and man which has been realized through the re- velation of Christianity’ (Lehre von d. Dreieinig- keit, i. 80 f.). Nicodemus addressed Jesus as ‘teacher’ (32); but Jesus replied that He was ‘eternal life’ (vv. 8), and pointed out as the three steps in man’s redemption, (1) regeneration by the Holy Ghost (vv.> ); (2) faith in the Son of God, who came from heaven to save men b His death (vv.¥2); and (3) the love of God the Father, who gave His only-begotten Son to redeem the world (v."), The elaborate teachings of Jn 14-17 are but an unfolding of what is here taught as the way of salvation. Moving from heaven to earth, as the thought of Jesus does in the Fourth Gospel, we find His theology consists of (1) God the Father in glory and the glorification of the Father in the redemptive work of the Son ; (2) the salva- tion of men through the incarnation, death, and exaltation of the Son; and (3) the establishment of a kingdom (so in the Synoptics) of eternal life (so in Fourth Gospel) through the Church, in which by the special revelation of the Holy Spirit men will be born again and equipped with spiritual gifts for service, and all to the glory of the Father and the Son (Jn 51721 24.43) “Ryen when speaking to a Samaritan woman and early in His ministry, Jesus related acceptable worship to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He taught that God is His Father (4-6), and, through Him, Father of believers only (1? 8") ; and that the Father is to be worshipped in spirit and in truth, that is, in the Spirit of truth (44, cf. 141”). To the Jewish theologian as an in- quirer, to the Samaritan woman as indifferent, and to the eager disciples (14° 18-16) the Lord’s theo- logy is the same—to the Father, through the Son, by the Holy Spirit. In the farewell discourses (14-17) the Father, Son, and Spirit are so repeatedly spoken of as if persons, as acting together and apart, as going forth one from another, and return- ing one to another, that the question of difficulty is not : How can one God subsist as Father, Son, and Spirit, but rather: How can the Father, Son, and Spirit, here respectively set forth by Jesus, consti- tute one God ?
In these discourses Jesus sheds some light upon the inner Trinitarian relations of the Godhead. He shows first that the work of redemption in- volves His triumphant return to the glory which He had with the Father before the world was (6 13%!*2 175), It was Divine, eternal glory to which the Son returned : such glory only a Divine Being could lay aside and take again. It re- mained ever with Him as Son of God, but was veiled in the incarnation (114 2U 11”), Jesus says the Son is so one with the Father that He has glory of His own, has eternal life in Himself (e28 11”) ; in fact, that all that the Father has the Son has (57 161° 172-5), Men may believe in Him as in the Father (141), seek life from Him as from the Father (6%), pray to Him as to the Father (144), and are as safe in His hands as in the Father’s hands (10° °°), And for this equality with God He gives a remarkable reason : ‘My Father is greater than I.’ He describes His relation to the Father in the paradoxical words: ‘T and m Father are one’ (14° 10%), and again, ‘My Father is greater than I’ (14% 10”), Jesus never calls Himself God; but ever claims to be Son of God, and does this through a perfect human conscious- ness (1476 17° 20"), He knows that both as Son of Man and Son of God He came from heaven (138 88); and He calls Himself the Son of Man who is in heaven (3%), He claims to be ‘the Son’ in an