The Pulpit Commentary — John — Volume 1 — Section 8

inhmitance, a faith that has made heroes and martyrs, a faith that works by lovo, a hope thnt will not nrnke us A.Shamed. J t is a mi~take t.o regard the GoRpel of John as the acropolis or citadel of tbo Christian faith. The Christian Church was established; the new Jerusalem came down out of hea,·en; the great High Priest WI\S seem to pass, with the blood of his own i,aciifice, or in the merit of his vicarious death for the sins of the wholo world, within the 'l"eil of the celestial temple; a new creation bad begun; a new life was being lived; the Godhead was known to be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, by reason of the lessons involved in the Divinity and humanity of the Lord Jesus; before that Gospel opened the brart of Jesus, revealed the depths of th'.l Father's love, or made it obvious to hahes in Christ, as well as to strong men, that he had been, was, and would for ever be "the Way, the Truth, the Life." ' 11. llut, though the Gospel be not the acropolis of the faith or the key to the whole position occupied by Christianity, it is of incalculable preciousness. Some who have persuaded themselves that it could not have been produced by its presumed author, have been free to admit this much. On the supposition that it was produced at the close of the second century by a pious falsarius, as a dramatic theologic romance, with special reference to the controversies then prevailing, some advocates of this untenable hypothesis have been ready to admit that it reveals the deepest insight into the mind and heart of Jesus. , Thus F. C. Baur(' Church History of First Three Centuries,' i. 154, Eng. trans.) "cannot but admire the breadth of true feeling and the delicate art with which the evangelist has seized those elements which led from the standpoint of the .Apocalypse to the freer and higher standpoint of the Gospel, so as to spiritua.lize the .Apocalypse in to the GospeL" Schenkel(' A Sketch of the Character of Jesus: a,'Biblical Essay,' p. 34, Eng. trans.) says that the author of the Fourth Gospel "has taken out of their historical framework, elevated into the region of eternal thought, and invested with· transfiguring glory, a selection of reminiscences from the eV11.Dgelical tradition of the public lifo of Jesus.. ,.. Without this Gospel the unfathomable depth, the inaccessible height, of the character of the Saviour of the world would be wanting to us, and his boundless influence, renewing all humanity, would for ever remain a mystery. He was not what that Gospel paints him actually, but he was that essentially. . . . The representation of the character of Jesus becomes eternally true only in the heavenly splendour of that light which streams forth from the Fourth GospeL" So .Albrecht Thoma (' Die Genesis des Johannes-EVILilgeliums ein Beitrag zu Seiner Auslegung Geschichte und Kritik' (1882), p. 879): "Nothing earlier than itself, nothing later, not the synoptic history, nor the doctrine of the Church, is necessary to give the worth to this Gospel which corresponds to its place in the canon. From its rich treasury the scribe instructed unto the kingdom of God can ever take things both new and old. The Spirit which works within the book-the Spirit of Chris~vermore will llpeak what he himself hears, and will make known things to come, and will glorify him for whose glorification this Gospel has been written. n Holtzmann said (in Schenkel's • Leiicon' (1869), vol. ii.)-what he does not exactly repeat in his recent 'Einleitnng,' though ho would not deny it (1885)-" The most fundamental and far-reaching thoughts of the Fourth Gospel lie far beyond the second century and beyond the entire outlook of the Christian Church even to the present day." Testimonies like these might be indefinitely multiplied, and they call attention to the fact that very mnch c,f the most fundamental thought of the Gospel is ·absolutely verified by the Christian consciousness, by whomsoever it was first formulated, and r,t what time soever it was first recorded. E.g. we know, as absolutely true, that "whosoever willeth to do the will of the heavenly Fa.ther k!!ows of the doctrine wLether it be of ·God" or whether it merely issue from human,Jips; the true condem- nation of sinners, viz. that "they love darkness rather than light," is affirmed by every conscience. 'l'he need of hea:venly birth is corroborated by every reason, that ifl sufficiently introspective. The spirituality of God and of worship is as 'far ahead of the second century as of the first, and even of the nineteenth as .of the second. '11he drawing of the Father to the Son, by the Son, so that none cometh to the Father except by this great revelation, is so profoWld a tho11ght that it esta.blishea itself in the  'fllE GOSPEL .ACCORDING TO ST. JOIIN. xi