The Pulpit Commentary — John — Volume 1 — Section 119

Gospel and Epistles. In a sense, and to R degree never before realized on earth or expressed in literature, do we come face to face with One whose God-consciousness wns veritnbl~- expressl'd by the epithet, "the Father," "my I•'ather." Christ is not merely the Expression of the ineffable One, and "the Image of the invisible God 11 (Col. i. 16), but the Son of the Father. The relation of Logos to 'l.1ieos is warmed. into nnd expounded by the relation of a Son to a Fatlwr. 'l'he idea is not peculiar to John, for St. Paul declared thitt "it pleased the Father that in him should all fulness dwell," itnd that" :h~ough Ch_rist we have access to the Father; 11 and the writer to the Hebrews (i. 2) bad laid 1t down m words suggested by the author of 'Wisdom of Solomon,' that Christ the Son wss the Effluence of the Father's glory, the express Image of his substance or essence. That essence was a Father's heart; that efiluence was the Son of the Blessed. (3) The Father and the Son. The I.<'atherhood of God does not exhaust the concrpt which St. John formed of the Godhead; for within the bosom of the Father, in his essential Divinity, insphered in his eternal glory before the world was," with him,'' and yet "One with him," was "the Son." 'l'he Fatherhood was essential to God, and therefore the Sonship was before all worlds. The gracious self-communication, the infinite benevolence of God, appertains to his eternal essence. From before all time, and independently of time and place and earthly service, the evangelist saw love in infinite activity, streaming forth in boundless, inexhaustible fulness, and adequately responded to. This conception of God goes down to the depths of thought, and forms the basis of all the moral perfections of Deity, and discriminates it from the impersonal abstractions and characterless quiescence and inaccessibility of the Supreme Monad of the Platonic schools. The Johannine conception starts with the use of certain expressions which had arisen in the schools of Jewish thought, and confers upon them a meaning and application from which those schools would have shrunk. The e.&s, whose most fundamental Name and whose essential Being is set forth as" the Father,'' is first of all described as before the creation of the world, or of every thing and force which has come into being, standing in intimate immanent relations with the A&.,,os (the expression of his own thought and will), who is, while "with God," also God himself. Distinction from God is twice over covered by the explicit assertion, "the Word was God,'' and the same idea is subsequently expressed in the prologue (eh. i. 18) by the terms of "Father" and "only begotten Son." The µ.ovcry•vfis is in the bosom of the Father, and therefore alone competent to reveal him. Equality of essence is predicated alike of Father and Son, of Theos and Logos, and yet dhtinction of hyposta.sis is also asserted. 'l'he Godhead, therefore, involves an internal and reciprocally immanent relation. Reuss strongly m.aint.a.ins that the evangelist simply leads us back to the beginning of time, and says nothing of an eternal relation. .AIJ.y such assertion is, according to criticism, an inference from the text, and not contained in it. We may concede that the earliest Creeds, culminating in those of Nie&a, Chalcedon, and the so-called Athanasian, do draw this inference; but it is one which logically and immediately flows out of the text. The converse of the inference, or the Arian assertion, "that there was (time or period) when he was not," and "before he was begotten,'' does immediately predicate an infinite difference between the Father and Son-a statement entirely incompatible with the ~-quality of nature and essence and wi~h the true m~n0thei~m of the ent~e biblical revelation. But so far as the self-consc1ousness of this Son 1s represented m the con- sciousness of Jesus, we frankly concede that there is in the Divine order a superiority, primacy, solity, a.scribed to the Father: he who has independently life in himself gave the like self-dependence to the Son (eh. v. 27). The Father sent the Son. "The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he secth the Father do" (eh. v. 19). 'l'he Father and Son are one, but the Father sanctified and sent the Son into the world (eh. x. 31--37). The Father created all things "through (8,c\) the Lo11:os." "The Father is greater than I," said Christ (eh. xiv. 28). "I live," Eaid he (3111 .,-bv na..,-lpa, eh. vL 57), "on account of the Father." 'fhe Father gave the Spirit to the Son (eh. iii. 34). 'l'his headship of the Father does not contradi_ct the _eternal filiatio~, but both ideas are necessary to interp-•!t the fulness of mea.nrng which St. John gives to the concept of the " only veritable God." (4) God and the Logos. The characteristics of the A&,,os before bis manifestation in the humanity of Christ a.re that he is the Divine Agent in th@ creation, the Source ot  Tirn GOSPEL ACCORDING TO S'l'. JOHN. cxxxi