II. ESCHATOLOGY IN THE GOSPEL OF JOHN.—
We pass by questions as to the date or authorship of tliis Gospel. The writing may be placed with conlidence near the border dividing the 1st and 2nd centuries. It does not matter for our purpose on which side of the border it is placed. To the eyes of most Anglo-Saxon critics the Gospel reveals still the marks of an intimate of Jesus, and with them we assume that, even in the form in Avhich we read the Gospel, it proceeded from the circle of a ' <Usciplc whom Jesus loved.' We assume also — what probably no one denies — that there is but one mind between the author of the Gospel and the author of the Epistles that bear the name of John. Whoever was its author, the Gospel could not have reached so soon the position of authority it has held in the Christian Church since the 2nd cent., had it not been considered to express the living and profound belief of Christendom regard- ing what was most essential in the Person and History of Jesus. This is the matter of import- ance to our present inquiry. If we find that the view of our Lord's eschatological consciousness, which has seemed to us to be most reasonably deducible from the Synoptic Gospels, agrees on the whole with what is presented here, that view may be considered to have behind it a weight of authority that could not well be greater. For the authority is not simply the consciousness of an inspired Apostle or Apostolic man ; it is that of the consciousness of the Church as a whole at the critical period of the close of the Apostolic age. We may fix attention on three matters: (1) the idealizing style of the Gospel ; (2) its conception of Eternal Life ; (3) its attitude to Eschatology proper.
1. The idealizing style of the Fourth Gospel. — From the first it has been admitted that, as com- l)ared with the Synoptics, this Gospel is one rather of the mind than of the external actions of Jesus. Even the most remarkable external actions, the miracles, are but 'signs' of tlie mystery that is really important to us— that, viz. , of the Person of the 'Son of God.' The 'signs' are recorded that we may believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and may have life through His name (20^"'-). The Logos that was ' towards God (Trpds rbv Bebv) and was God' (!'), was made flesh, and the writer and his companions beheld His glory, and reported the vision, not .so much from literal reminiscence of the acts and words done and spoken by Jesus on earth, as under the inspiration of the Spirit that came according to promise from the |)resence of the Father and the Risen Ascended Son. The author is concerned rather with the discourses of Jesus than with His actions, and the discourses are, we believe, not so much reported as inter- preted. They are the words of an eternal life in which the ,writer and his fellow-believers share (1 Jn 11"). Jesus is Himself the Word, the Truth, the Life. What is told of Him represents but a few out of many instances of His self-manifesta- tiou. They are like tlie sparks that witness tg
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a hidden, mighty, and continuous electric stream. One consequence of this mode of treatment is tliat there is little in this Gospel to indicate that Jesus experienced anythinL; of the sinless infirmity of flesh and blood. There is, e.g., no suggestion that He grew in knowledge of the path He had to tread as the Saviour of the world. There is no temptation, no agony in Gethsemane, no ignor- ance or doubt as to the times and seasons of the Consummation. The author does not, perhaps, consciously ignore these things, but to mention them is no part of his purpose to manifest the eternal life that was in the Son of God.
If such a view of the Person of Jesus were carried out with rigorous abstract logic, we should reach a result that would not only be glaringly at variance with the picture presented by the Synoptists, but would be indistint;:uishable from the heresy against which, at least in its ^t-ruiinal form, the author himself protests (1 Jn 222 58), viz. that the incarnation of the Logos was mere appearance. The point to be observed is that the view is not carried out rigorously. The reason is that the author combines a sense of history with a sense of spiritual fact. But what mainly concerns him is the spiritual fact : what Jesus, who rose and ascended, is now to His Church, that in deep reality He has always been. No doubt He was truly human, and, because Ue was so, there was during His earthly sojourn real limitation, but the limitation was free because self-imposed (see, e.g., 1018), and behind it there was alwajs the Divine reality. He was never other than the Logos, the eternal and only-begotten Son of God.
Even though it be concedeil, as we think it must be, that neither as regards incidents nor discourses is the Johannine picture of Jesus so strictly his- torical as that of the Synoptists, it does not follow that it is not, in another tlian the literally historical sense, a deeply true picture. The guarantee of its truth is the fact tliat the Chris- tian Church has accepted it, and in doing so has conquered both its own feeling of disappointment in the delayed Paroiisia and the unbelief of the world. The Church discovered, that is to say, the presence in the mind and utterances of Jesus of a quality of which it had not at lirst grasped the significance. His words were ' spirit and life ' (g63) They could be interpreted only by His own perpetual teaching through the Spirit of truth (16«»-).