'The3" who follow the Spirit's guidance will not receive an illumination enabling them to dispense with truth, but the enablement to lay hold of truth. ... On the one hand, the Trutli given in Christ will need from age to age His expounding to unlock its stores ; and, on the other hand, the faith in Him afld His office in the present shall never loosen men from the Gospel given once for all, or draw them away from the eternal Father, by enabling any \'oice born only of the present to seem wholly Divine. Standing fast in the unchanging Truth, and an endless progress in taking knowledge of it shall be indissolubly united' (Hort, The Way, the Truth, and the Life, p. 58 f.).
Thus, while the author carefully and stringently safeguards the future revelations of religious truth
TUKiXlNG
TURNING
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by limiting them to the sphere of the historical Logos, he contemjjlates fresh advances in the apprehension of Christ (16'^), just as he does in the practical extension of the Church (IT^**). Revela- tions in the future, and of the future, fall within the scope of the Spirit of Truth. The latter is not fettered by the past. This prophetic function of the Spirit may seem rather one-sided (so Beyschlag, NT Thcol. i. 282) as compared with its ethical presentation in Paul. But it is in line with the Synoptic tradition, where the Spirit is primarily, if not entirely, a spirit of witness ; while the other, more ethical aspect, is at least suggested in the context (cf. M^"- '''). The truth or reality of the Divine life, at any rate, includes the future (cf. Ps 25^ [LXX]) ; as indeed it must, if God's purpose is a developing jjlan throughout history and ex- perience, and if this truth or reality is personal. For as a personality is ex hypothesi full of resources and surprises, the richer is its life. Its spirit must be a perennial self-expression, conditioned only by the receptive powers of men. Consequently the aim of the Fourth Gospel, in these allusions to the progressive witness of the Spirit of Truth, in the future and of the future, is to prevent loyalty to tiie historic essence of Christianity from degenerat- ing into stagnant adherence to an institution or a creed. What Jesus said, as Cyprian used to insist, was : ' I am the Truth,^ not, ' I am Tradition.' Christ is God's last Word to the world. But, as the writer strikingly implies in the phrase, ' The Spirit shall guide you into all the truth,' the full interpretation of that Word was not attained by the primitive generation of the disciples. They had no monopoly of it. ' Most friends of truth,' said Vinet, ' love it as Frederick the Great loved music. It used to be said of him that, strictly speaking, he was not fond of music but of the flute, and not indeed fond of the flute but of his flute.' It is to prevent any religioxis aberration of this kind that such words of the Fourth Gospel are put forward. They express the spirit of Christ's revelation, which cannot be held by a trivial or narrow life, any more than it can be selfishly grasped or adequately weighed by the most ad- vanced age of Christendom.
Literature. — The conception of truth in the Fourth Gospel is handled by all the editors, notably by Westcott and Oscar Iloltzmann. Besides the special essays of Wendt (see above) and Riiling (XKZ, 1895, 625 f.), see Schrenck's Die johann. Anschauung vom Leben (1898), p. 86 f. ; J. Grill, Untersuchungen iiber die Entstchung des vierten Evarig. (1902) pp. 201-206 ; E. A. Abbott, Johannine, Vocabulary (1703, 1727) ; V. H. Stanton in Hastings' DB iv. 816-820 ; Cheyne in EBi 5217-5219 ; Weiss NT T/ieol. (Eng. tr.) ii. § 147 ; H. J. Holtzmann, NT Theol. ii. p. 375 f . ; Hort, The Way, the Truth, and the Life (1894), p. 41 f. ; Du Bose, Soteriology of NT, pp. 291 f., 297 f. ; R H. Hutton, Theological Essays (p. 18 f.); Phillips Brooks, The Inflttence of Jesus (p. 142 f.); E. F. Scott, The Fourth Gospel, 253 ff.
James Moffatt. TURNING. — 1. The Gospel terms. — In EV of
the Gospels the vbs. 'turn,' 'convert' represent no fewer than 8 different Gr. words. The ordinary terms, and the ones we have almost exclusively to do with in the following article, are arp^cpw and iirLffTpicpo} (whence iin.(XTpo<p7}, ' conversion,' in Ac 15^). In addition to these we find (each, however, used only once in the Gospels) diro(rTp^<pu} (Mt 5*^), viro(TTpi<piM (Lk 2-»5), divaxi^pio} (Mt 2=^), AvaKdixirru} (Lk 10"), diro^aivu, (2V^), yivofiai (Jn 16-")- all asso- ciated wdth the idea of turning, and rendered by ' turn ' either in AV or RV.
(1) Literal turning. — Both (rTp^(f>(a and iina-Tp4<f)u) are used in this sense. Once a-Tp(<pu) occurs transi- tively, where Jesus bids His disciples, when smitten on the right cheek, turn the otiier to the smiter (Mt 5^"). Both vbs. frequently occur in the passive form, but with a reflexive or middle meaning, to denote the turning of oneself round. Usually it is Jesus Himself who thus turns round {(rrpcLcpeis,
eTTLarpacpeis), to look for someone (e.g. Mk 5^", Lk 22'''), or to address some pointed worcl to those who follow {e.g. Mt W\ Lk 9^=^).