Title of the Article: Interpreting and Preaching the Gospel of John*
About the Author: David L. Bartlett
Columbia Theological Seminary, USA
Bibliographic Data: Scripture and Interpretation
S & I 2, no.2 (2008): 225-245
Outline of the Article:
- Introduction
- The World Behind the Text
- The text Behind Our Text: Source Criticism/ Content Criticism
- The Community Behind the Text
- The Social Dynamic Behind the Text
- The World in Front of the Text
- The World Barely in Front of the Text: R. Alan Culpepper
- The World Between the Text and the Reader: Jeffrey Staley
- The World of the Whole Text: Brevard Childs
- The World in Front of the Text: Theological Implications
- The World We Bring to the Text: Theological Implications
What is the Article all About:
When it comes to the Gospel of John, Bultman made two major contributions that conveniently and probably not coincidentally reinforced each other. As a content critic, he tried to discover those themes that were central to John’s theology-and to right Christian preaching-themes that could relativize and even critique other themes in this gospel. Using the tools of source criticism, Bultmann was able to excavate a putative text whose main themes provided just the theology his content criticism had sought to find. In at least three ways the evangelist gave Bultmann the themes for his own theology. Methodologically, the evangelist demythologizes so that, for instance, apocalyptic eschatology is demythologized to become the ever-present possibility of the future, called “eternal life” Ecclesiastically, a pure doctrine of the word is not diluted by sacramentalism. Philosophically, John provides a model for existential Christianity that stresses individual decision, openness to the future, and the quest for authentic existence. Hermeneutically, content criticism allows the critic to test the claims of any particular passage against the larger claims of the kerygma. There is a kind of parallel between the kind of reading Martyn does the reading we usually call allegorical. In allegorical reading the meaning of the text depends not only on the words on the page but on the realities that the words signify. In Martyn’s analysis, the action on the page signifies a communal reality “behind” the narrative. Ricoeur described his reading of biblical narratives not simply as reading the world of text, but as reading the world in front of the text. Once a literary critic has decided that the Gospel of John is literary unity, and indeed a fairly sophisticated work of literature, is it not a question whether one can make everything fit. The question is, “how?” Brevard Childs remind us for his part, powerfully and effectively, that the job of the Christian theologian is not to provide a reading of Ur-Mark or of Q or even to make a brief for what the Corinthians must have said in their letter to Paul. Theologians and preachers first of all preach the canon in its canonical form.
