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What Language Shall I Borrow?1

May we study you and study ourselves, we pray.

This is a book with a practical pastoral approach based on a fresh study of St. John’s Gospel. St. John’s Gospel is like an art gallery. Each chapter is like a room that gives a new vision of an answer to the question, “How does Jesus give himself to us?” Each chapter is journeyed through from a narrative-critical and reader-response point of view, defined below. Of course, I try to honor all Johannine scholarship. The emphasis here is that part of the message of John is devoted to pastoral theology and to an answer to that key question. Side by side with this, and step by step through the Gospel, connections are made to the deep pastoral care of persons, and an understanding of human personality development. In particular, I shall be using a developed model deriving from Clinical Theology and the work of psychiatrist Dr. Frank Lake. Alignments with John are made in sequence, with particular insights based on a psychodynamic approach into the pain and distress that often grows in us. Models of understanding from pastoral counseling, psychotherapy, and literature are brought to bear as a spur to our own awareness and ministry to others. Bringing together text and therapeutic applications in this way puts us in touch with, and enables us to sense, how it is that Jesus Christ can enter and bring healing and peace, the abundant life that consists of abiding in him.

1. The Beginning

Many threads have woven the tapestry of this book over a long period of time. I was privileged to go on a Mid-Service Clergy Training Course at St. George’s, Windsor Castle, UK, in January 1974. My field of interest and experience was group work. I tried to write up a paper on it, especially on the value and effectiveness of group work that is pastorally informed, both in the core and on the edge of church life. The course arranged for small groups to meet for reflection. The tutor presence in the group I was in was Canon Stephen Verney (as he then was). He was sometimes not there, though never an absence, for he was always in our mind in that he was caring for his first wife, who was in hospital dying of cancer. I happened to be the leader on a day when he returned from hospital. We were put in touch with what we suffer when we and our loved ones are ill, and especially of what the ravages of terminal illness mean, and of how distressing many interventions are, both to patient and relative. We were put in touch with the extremity of human suffering and existential threat. We tried to listen and empathize and be not quite inadequate, to be a presence for him out of our own half/mid maturity of ministry.

Indebted to him for his courage, faithfulness, and sensitivity, for the way his ministry and personal journey had a shared integrity, and impressed by the openness of his approach to and passionate conviction about ministry, I suggested him as the person to take the meditations or sermons in the Holy Communion services of the annual Clinical Theology Association Conference in 1974 or 1975. He led four meditations on John, though that is too quiescent a word—four stimuli, stirrings, connectings, provocations (in the narrow sense), expositions—with passion: John 2:1–11; 4:4–26; 8:56—9:10; 15:1–17. The theme was the new consciousness that comes to us with Christ. Something of his own vitality cum pain made the great Johannine words our own—water, life, truth, worship, seeing, abiding, believing. He was representing the truth we were looking for. It was fresh. I was hooked on St. John. Here, text and human personality and faith could run together. These talks were a foundation for his later book in 1985, Water into Wine: An Introduction to John’s Gospel. I thank him for the beginning!

I was inspired to start preaching seriously on St. John’s Gospel! I began my long series in January 1977. There are now more than fifty sermons in it and it is still being added to over forty years later! There is no point at which the text is exhausted. It renews itself and me all the time. I have hopes for its effects on the hearers. The main thrust was to make it come alive in a fresh way for my congregations.

This was meant to happen in two ways. I tried, and am still trying, to relate the content of the message about Christ to personal life. The conviction (and the experience for self and others) is that all that is within us, our interior being, must hear the Gospel. Sadly, so many sermons do not speak to what is actually happening inside us, or in our lives. It is meant to happen for us by allowing a fresh response to the text, free of some of the old traditional issues. The question is, for instance, not so much “Did it happen?” or “What does it (objectively) mean?” as “What is the impact of this narrative on me and how does it touch me?” Later, when the language developed, I discovered this approach was called narrative and reader-response criticism!

Then in 1980 my daughter started her A Level religious education course on St. John’s Gospel! As we swapped testing quotes and questions across the family table, I learnt by heart, for the first time, the content of every chapter and the sequence of every episode and discourse. That was in my development a huge step forward. It is always hard to remember what is in the Gospels, in which one, and in which place! My appreciation grew of the sheer brilliance of the Gospel we have to which we give the name John. The long journey started in earnest to understand how it came to be and what it was saying and how it was saying it, and what it means to us now. That fascination remains. It “remains enigmatic and fascinating.”2

2. Reading John

2a. Some Parameters I Am Using

Some parameters need to be made clear. I am using “John” for the end product, and also for the writer whose writing has notionally completed itself in the final product we now work with. We must, we can, “let John be John.” The narrative-critical approach burst on the scene from literary theory with Alan Culpepper’s Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel: A Study in Literary Design in 1983. The dominance of historical-critical scholarship gave way to a style of looking at texts as literature, “that is as forms of communication that affect those who receive or experience them . . . narrative criticism treats these same texts as mirrors that invite audience participation in the creation of meaning . . . texts shape the way readers understand themselves and their own present circumstances.”3 We are in touch with “The world barely in front of the text.”4 The text’s purpose is to lead “readers to ‘see’ the world as the evangelist sees it . . .” and it “is therefore a mirror in which readers can ‘see’ the world in which they live.”5 We may be looking back on the life of Jesus, but as with all factual and fictional historical reading, we enter the historical world as though we are contemporaries.

A church member said, “I love Jane Austen. I read it and I become part of the story.” The implication is that it becomes part of me because I feel and behave differently; I am moulded, stirred, and affected (affect) by the story.

There are tools of the trade:

 the implied author, the perspective from which the work appears to have been written;

 the point of view;

 the implied reader, the expectations we have of the effect the text has on the readers who seem to be the target;

 the plot, the aim of conveying a meaning in the events;

 characters, who appear to be historical yet are intended to convey a message;

 style, which contains, for instance, repeated themes, symbolism, double meanings, or irony.

Narrative criticism does not displace historical criticism. John Ashton, who is very wary of the former, can still say, “There is no obvious reason why the two approaches should not be combined.”6

Taking the language at face value is not exhaustive; there is always more to its significance than meets the eye. Sometimes in John it can be said “the language does not quite surface.”7 Wolfgang Iser in The Reader Process asserts, “the ‘unwritten’ part of a text stimulates the reader’s creative participation,” and quotes Virginia Woolf on Jane Austen: “She stimulates us to supply what is not there.”8 We need “a state of readiness for catching similarities.”9 “The continuous implicit communication within the Fourth Gospel is a major source of both its power and its mystery. What seems clear and simple on the surface is never so simple for the perceptive reader because of the opacity and complexity of the gospel’s sub-surface signals.”10 These tools (reader-response and psychodynamic approach) help as a means of assessing the text, and of accessing the impact of the text on the reader. The writer draws us into a world “created from materials drawn from life and history as well as imagination and reflection. The narrator speaks retrospectively, telling a story that is a sublime blend of historical tradition and faith.”11 “[O]ne of John’s most remarkable traits: the unique artistry with which it controls multiple layers of symbolic or associative significance.”12

2b. John’s Purpose: What Was It?

What was the purpose of John’s writing? Many answers have been given to that question. In the short 125-page introduction by Gerard Sloyan, What Are They Saying About John?, there are seventeen different references to the purpose of the Gospel, each with a legitimate slant! The approach in this work is that it was “pastoral.” This is a pastoral gospel, or the Pastoral Gospel. What I mean by that is that it deals with, to put it crudely, what goes on inside people and groups. In particular it answers the cry, “How does Jesus Christ come to me? How does he get inside me?” Or better, “How does he give himself to me?” At the very start of faith and continuing all through in the faith, I want to know, how does he give himself to me? This surely is the simplest expectation of those drawing near, and hearing talk or reading of the “presence” of Christ in us, abiding with us, living with us, giving his life to us, giving his life for us. What does it all mean in experience? When I read in earlier writings about union with Jesus, how does it happen? How did Jesus give himself to them, the first Christians? How does he give himself to us?

The Gospel answers that pastoral-theological question through the way John tells the story. The relationship of Jesus, and of the message to individuals and to the group and to the Johannine community, is preeminent. “Only the narrative mode through which a theological claim is made . . . throughout, shows the glory of God revealed in the person of Jesus,”13 and connects him to ourselves and enables a response to be made to him. The Gospel clearly is both individually and corporately focused; it responds to the community needs at the time or times of writing, and thus can be perceived as dealing with the group process, and at the same time the experience of the individual is also preferred, as the range of individual profiles makes clear. So my focus, whilst, I hope, not doing injustice to the vast wealth of Johannine scholarship, is on the pastoral impact by utilizing instincts and much experience about personality and pastoral care. “Only when the FG is used as a mirror held up to readers’ lives, as the narrator intended, can there be interaction with the glory of Jesus it discloses.”14 It is literature, it is history and art, truth and “fiction,” “all reconciled in the evangelist’s deft performance. If these are reconciled in the hearers’ lives and with their lives, John can speak to them.”15

In the simplest terms, John indicates his own purpose in writing: “that you may believe, continue in believing” (present subjunctive) (John 20:31). There is a possible alternative reading, the aorist (past-tense) subjunctive, and it is still possible to think that John is writing for those who already have faith and that the phrase means to have a renewal, or “a new impulse in their faith.”16 This is the desired response of reading, for the first time or for all time. “Belief” is more than responding to “signs”; it is a change in relationship to Jesus, to each other, and to self. “Signs” may refer, not just to the Book of Signs, which is postulated as lying behind the Gospel, but to “the whole content of the Gospel, sign and word.”17 For that, it is refreshing to substitute for “belief” the word “trust.” That means the impact of the text is so much more fresh. Trusting means, not “believe and then so-and-so will happen,” but being in a relationship and in it trust grows. The paradox of trust, especially in small group work, is that one only learns to trust by trusting. It is always liminal, crossing a threshold. Trusting is not conditional, but always the experience of mutual gifts, and as such harmonizes with and is transformative of the dynamics of our internal world.

Look at how the whole ministry of Jesus is about crossing boundaries and thresholds:

 Chapter 2: social distress;

 Chapter 3: a search that is preconditioned;

 Chapter 4: sexual and racial and religious conventions;

 Chapter 5: thinking about the nature of illness and healing;

 Chapter 6: that which really nourishes;

 Chapters 7–8: deep-rooted racial memory;

 Chapter 9: institutional control of health;

 Chapter 10: he actually claims to be the “door”;

 Chapter 11: death of a loved one;

 Chapter 13: relating to his own disciples;

 Chapters 12–20: his own death, the final barrier, the “long good night” into which he went with much transcending conversation, the passion and the glory;

 Chapters 20–21, where he created a new orientation to shocked disciples. Yet he was still reaching out to and into others, especially those who trusted him. We too are enabled to live liminally in a threshold-crossing fashion.

Philo of Alexandria, contemporary with Jesus, whose thought came from both Judaism and Plato, especially in the use of logos, wrote, “to his Word, his chief messenger, highest in age and honor, the Father of all has given the special prerogative, to stand on the border and separate the creature from the Creator.”18 For Christians the life of Jesus means exactly the opposite, not separation but unity, as John consistently witnesses to. Incarnation means exactly that. Jesus walks with us along the fault lines of our human experience.

Rather than “crossing” the boundary, Jesus lives on the boundary. Better still, he is the boundary, the “gate” through which we go back and forth (John 10:7, 9). It is through him and within him that we can move and live, travel the boundaries within ourselves and between others. In Christ! When we are dealing with our psychic nature, this is the John theme par excellence.

My thought is that there is chapter by chapter a revealing of the process, of going through “gates” with Christ, that occurs in us step by step as we move from distrust to trust, and from not having Christ to having him. When you hear, see these steps, you will respond, will be able to respond. You can respond. This is the way to respond, this is the way you will be enabled to respond. We can experience the gospel, and the Gospel, as the expression of energy that will work in a dynamic way within us and between us. It is the nature of the rich and laden narrative to achieve this. For instance, John’s metaphors, misunderstandings, double meanings, and ironies prompt us to ask, make us ask, “What is going on here?” The invitation is the same—come higher, go deeper—here in this way Jesus gives himself to you. We search for the realities beneath the appearance, “to let the uncertain remain uncertain, but to learn how much and what we could honestly regard as true, believe that and live by it.”19

Re-experiencing the text depends on our capacity for imagination so that what has been concretely located can now be relocated in contemporary experience.

3. Language

We need language to build an adequate picture of things.20

A large proportion of investment in studying John is spent on “hearing” the language. This means a moderate attempt to both translate and listen to the Greek. I have tried to help those with no knowledge of Greek by including pointers to Greek words. This is needed less as we move through the chapters because we become familiar with words that appear time and time again. Words are transliterated for two reasons: so that we can hear the similarities of sound in the original, and also so that we can see that different English words in the translation may in fact be the same Greek root. It means also having an intensely attentive ear for the nuances of John’s language. The sight of the Greek word also makes connections to other places where John has used it, and thus illustrates the way themes weave in and out of the tapestry. His use of imagery and metaphor is fluid and allows the mingling of ideas. John is like a tapestry with colors and images and threads now surfacing and now hidden. Ronald Ferguson writes of the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown, “George was captivated by the notion of divine creativity in the weaving of tapestries, the threads of which were the raw materials of human life and history.”21 John’s tapestry in addition weaves in the divine life. The “process of reading is to become attuned to the profusion of textual indicators which between them weave the meanings of the narrative . . . to decipher the inner story within the outer story.”22 Astonishingly, in the process we will weave ourselves into the tapestry!

In terms of making sense of language, there is an unavoidable fundamental problem. It is partly related to the life situation of the Johannine community, but it is also totally general.

When sacred texts develop to express and define group identity in a context of conflict, they often crystallize these idealizations and projections and preserve them in written form. While these formulations may be appropriate in the formative stages of the religious community, it sets the stage for future distortions. As Paul Ricoeur has observed, something significant happens when communication moves from speech to text. In dialogue, it is possible to clarify ambiguity by direct reference to the surroundings. Once a communication moves into text, however, the direct referential context is lost, and the multiple significances inherent in written language make a variety of interpretations possible.23

The plain fact is, of course, that we can’t hear the words as spoken. There is no intonation in the New Testament! Yet the way we communicate is by intonation. A distinguished scholar reading a passage in John containing direct speech was already interpreting the meaning because he read with his own intonation. It was loaded with his own view of the character. There is no other way! Every time the language is read aloud we add in our own view. So much of our faith is based, not on what the written words say, but on how we read them. When we want to read afresh, even in our own heads, we must try out all sorts of possibilities of varied tonal voice and emphasis. Every piece of speech was originally spoken in a particular way, and we have no access to it. We simply do not know how the words were said. (And, of course, there is the question of how far John represents what Jesus and others actually said, and how—and the intonation running in his head whilst writing!) When reading text, we have to start with our own ignorance, our own “not knowing.”

Inscribed on a pavement slab outside a bookshop in Inveraray, Scotland, is, “In the river of words ideas are eddies spinning downstream.” In John we could also reverse it—in the river of ideas, words are eddies spinning downstream! To sail the sea of Johannine faith is to launch into a sea of metaphors and images—staying, water, birth, seeing, witnessing, breath, spirit, light, dark. Words such as these appear to be simple comparisons, when in reality “the images metaphors embody may originate in layers of thought that are usually inaccessible to inspection.” It is not only the words that are repeated over and over again, but the metaphorical sense reappears again and again. We do not experience the images solely with cold reason; “Figurative language springs from strong affect.”24 To refresh ourselves at St. John’s well is to need to sense the imagery afresh.

Metaphors in common usage become faded. So, for example, the word “anatomy” in the title Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel: A Study in Literary Design might enter our minds as, say, just meaning “the parts of,” or “the elements in,” or “structure of,” or, picking up the word “design,” “the plan of.” Whereas if the metaphor itself came alive for us, we would be “image-ining” flesh, blood, eyes, sinews, muscle, breath, heart, bone, movement, a living being, sickness, the wrong sort of growth, dying! John’s metaphors are not used merely as illustrations of propositions; they do not simply refer to theological concepts. They are much too dense for that. They are poetic; in imagination we experience a reality beyond our formulations; such experience is authentic. Culturally we have to live with the anomaly of having concrete statements that we do not interpret literally—Jesus as “the Son of God,” or “the Father,” for instance. In getting into John, we continually have to live in the metaphor afresh, without retreating into the fundamentalism of previous eras or contemporary literalism. When everything seems so familiar, we find we have to live on the edge of language.

This seeking of a deeper meaning is not unknown to biblical interpretation. From the earliest Christian times, the text was deemed to have two levels of meaning, a “literal” (historia in Greek) and a “spiritual” (theoria). The latter required insight into the symbolic, the hidden, even esoteric, meaning. “[T]he worldview of the early church led the early Christians to a more introverted attitude that directed their gaze into the world of the soul, which for them was a living reality . . . the early Christian commentators were natural depth psychologists.”25 “What is hidden beneath the literal meaning is not merely another and more hidden meaning, it is also a new and totally different reality . . . It is the divine life itself.”26 So this “interpretation” does involve us in looking back on an ancient text through very modern lenses, and through lenses, in particular, that are therapeutically attuned.

The art of interpretation is called hermeneutics, from the Greek word hermeneuo, “to interpret,” as used by Jesus in Luke 24:27 as he interpreted the scriptures on the way to Emmaus. “Hermeneutics is not simply a task of making a meaning from the text that suits the needs of the readers, nor simply a task of unlocking some a priori meaning ensconced in the text. Rather, hermeneutics is a process in which a unique relationship between text and reader evolves.”27

Speaking of the need to make the old prophetic faith rooted in old treasured texts credible for today, Walter Brueggemann wants the church’s pastoral task to be committed to the hard work of recovering a style of discourse that makes real now, in concrete ways, the significance of the old message. This needs not just heroic work by a pastor, but “an entire community of . . . believers who trust its own way of speech.”28

4. The Style of Bible Study Used in the Workshops

My aim in the workshop is both to present the best scholarship I can and also to wish for readers to be open with the biblical text, and to want it to lodge and abide in themselves. (I distinctly remember in Sunday school, at the age of seven, thinking to myself that Daniel could not possibly have survived in a den of lions! What was important was that I was not shocked or fazed by the thought of alternatives.) It means that to take part in a Bible study is to accept that there will be “traditional” as well as “liberal” or radical views of event and meaning. Discourse over a passage will contain different points of view. Attitudes will be not only cerebral but heartfelt, and even unconscious. So the aim is both to maximize scholarship (as well as I am able) and also to want others to be nourished, “enfaithed.” Finding a way through the minefield of Johannine scholarship is as tricky as finding a way through the territory of the human personality! The academic is fascinating, and traditional methods of criticism valid and essential; whilst the personal is also fascinating, essential, and valid in its own way.

Practically all the workshops have been worked through generally, and particularly in a group over about fifteen years in the Enfield, London Circuit of the Methodist Church. I am deeply indebted to them and to all the groups I have worked with, all faithful and adventurous. I take a leadership role, using a table or lectern to set out notes and books with quotations. This could be called a “tutorial” role. But with pleasure, and I hope some skill, I recognize that the group (of which I also am a member!) has a life, an energy, a cohesion, and a fellowship (koinonia) and will settle the text down into itself, the group, and find it full of significance.

So the method of study includes both a traditional one, a historically based discussion utilising knowledge of the text through the familiar criticisms, and also a recontextualization through meaning felt in group sharing, through social interaction. These “social means” (John Wesley’s term for sharing personal experience in caring groups) extend the traditional hermeneutic stances. Speech exchange patterns and the interaction of different “voices” in a group illustrate “subtle interpretative interaction” and suggest “a hermeneutic at work . . . that is not driven by a quest for knowledge, but rather by relational concerns; and by the hope that in their ‘fellowship’ and learning together they will discover insight.”29 The groups are indeed meant to do “Bible study,” but in the context of personal activity. They are what we call “experiential” or “empirical.” They look at a text and relate to it, to their inner world, to each other, and to the group process. They practice biblical interpretation in a faith community. “[A] social interactionist approach recontextualizes understanding of biblical interpretation.”30

In analyzing speech exchange patterns and the interaction of different voices in the group that connect a passage to personal experience, Todd notes that the leader with a tutorial style “projects the possibility of a particular kind of response,” but when he also “invites people to identify their own experience . . . the effect is striking.”31

Sharing personal material and story is facilitated by the questions asked. They have the effect of contextualizing the passage in our own experience. When the right questions are asked, people are set free to relate to the passage in themselves. The questions are the key. “In the question lies the answer.”32 They will reflect the mind of the facilitator, but will also open the doors of opportunity, opportunity for the members to speak their mind, to open their minds to the text and to each other. Asking the right question is signally important.

Boxes are used as a simple device to separate sharing activity from the unfolding commentary. Inside the box are one or more questions designed carefully to encourage personal sharing. They are not intended for discussion, but for sharing, with the framework of experience suggested in the passage which is being studied acting as the holding background. Time must be given to this, for members of the group to enter in to the narrative, together with entering into themselves. Where more than one question is suggested, they should be taken one at a time for the fullest benefit, and used to journey step by step along the inward and the exterior road. The pertinence of the passage, experienced through the question, is for self-awareness and deeply personal sharing. Because we open the text, we are enabled to open ourselves.

5. The Workshop Style: In Particular,

the Nature of Sharing in Small Groups

The advantage of a workshop style is that it provides the opportunity for a variety of distinct yet interrelated elements. A session can include straight teaching, discussion, personal reflection, sharing in pairs or small groups or in the whole group, debriefing together, and activities. There is flexibility and openness, separateness and togetherness, hard work and humor, giving and receiving, waiting and watching, and above all mutuality. Members of the group can be pressed to the utmost of their learning capacity. They can also press for slowing down and for explication. The more we know about the text, the world behind and within, the better. This is the context in which we can search the world, our world in front of the text. Yet we must move beyond the cerebral to the affect. We bring our whole self to the text and experience it in community. Reading John is both an individual and corporate activity. As interpreters we live and work in a collegiate enterprise.

Our fellowship is foreshadowed by the intimate relationships portrayed in the text, between men and women, insiders and outsiders, searchers and believers, unbelievers and followers, and the leader. The trust (belief) of which we read is practiced by us. So the golden thread that holds the tapestry of interaction together is the practice and awareness of personal sharing. All the other elements are important in their turn and are given reality by the encounter between persons that is taking place. Sharing takes place throughout, but especially in response to the bidding, “Share how you feel . . .” So we need to be quite clear what it involves.

What is new in the experience is a “new way of being oneself and being with others”33 and being prepared to entrust our joy and suffering to the other. We shall live (even if briefly) in liminality, on the border between, in the space between, parts of ourselves, and between ourselves and others. Others will hear that “I am.” And I will hear them saying, “I am.” This is what “I am.” And that is a very Johannine expression!

Sharing is a distinct activity. It involves talking about oneself. It is not discussion of ideas. It is a specific discipline, easily learnt but hard to practice consistently, needing constant watchfulness over oneself, one’s thought about oneself and the language to express it. That sounds pretty bleak, but it is the richest form of communication. It is vastly more than the cerebral communication of ideas, though precision in ideas is not discounted. It is full of affect. It is the royal road to truth and comfort in the truth.

I started my first “Care and Share Group” in 1973, long before banks became “listening” and co-ops (a series of grocery and bank cooperatives in the UK) became “caring-sharing”! Training in Clinical Theology Association workshops and growth groups alerted me to a different style of meeting. I was the minister of a large Methodist church of over five hundred members; I was attending a lot of meetings, but began to feel I was not “meeting” people. I was usefully busy, leading a hectic life, with much pastoral visiting, and realized that there was no way I could care for everyone. People had to care for each other and be trained for it. The more insight and skill they had, the better. So I began to offer pastoral training courses, and continued to do so throughout my ministry! The core of the training was a new way of talking and listening to each other.

I was due to lead a house group one night and simply had had no time to prepare a talk. I nervously asked the members to share how they felt about their relationship to the church at the moment. After a long silence, one person said, “Well, I’m scared.” She had just been made president of the Young Wives Club, a large fellowship of fifty or so members, and she felt the weight of responsibility. After a long pause, one by one, each shared what they felt. Just that! It was a most moving occasion. I realized the agenda was in the people. It was my “conversion to a life of dialogue” (Buber). It was a different style of ministry—open, trusting, intimate, moving, real, creative of deep relationships, healing of felt inadequacies—which also trained people in their own style of deep pastoral care. If you can talk about yourself in a mutually caring group, you can listen to others, you are empowered to offer the ministry you have received and receive the ministry you have offered. It was a breakthrough.

6. The Need for a Model or Models

Our practice of reading and sharing will need a model or models so that we have understanding of what we read, say, hear, and feel. Models are keys to understanding that illuminate and give shape to what goes from us and comes into us. They are maps, not the territory itself. The first map, called “The Babylonian Map of the World,” from about 500 BC, “presents an abstraction of terrestrial reality”; a map presents “an imaginative representation of an unknowable object (the world).”34 Models draw elements out of a dimly perceived reality and through the imagination offer a synthesis, eclectic in a non-compulsive way, whereby we have tools for hewing meaning out of multifarious input and output. They will make sense of our journey through the stages of life, of the qualities a carer needs, of the nature of personal distress, of the development of personality, of the relationship between helper and the person being helped, and of the nature of the writing we read and of the way it abides in us.

In particular, what is useful is a dynamic model of personality. “What particularly distinguishes the term ‘psychodynamic’ is that the activity of the psyche is not confined to relating to people, or to objects outside of the self . . . Activity also takes place within the psyche, in relation to itself.” So if I say, “I don’t like half of what is inside myself,” I am being both subject and object. I am observing myself. “We can just as easily love, hate of fear parts of ourselves as we can other people.”35 We understand the different elements in us when we realize the power of the connection between our infancy and childhood experience and the development of our personality. So my comments and analogies are meant not to be definitive, but suggestive, of viewpoints into text and person.

I am using the basic model created by a deeply committed Christian, Dr. Frank Lake (1914–1982), a former parasitologist and medical missionary, who faced the clamant needs of the human psyche and trained and practiced as a psychiatrist. He was a key pioneer of pastoral counseling in the UK. He developed what he called “Clinical Theology,” the basic insights of which we use because they are invariably helpful. He founded the Clinical Theology Association in 1962 (now the Bridge Pastoral Foundation). His aim was to train people in the churches to exercise fine, skilled pastoral care to each other and in small groups. An understanding of personality, its strengths and weaknesses, was essential and was held in the Christian experience.

The approach was eclectic, or in today’s terms, integrative, built on the foundational works of the key thinkers in the psychodynamic field, and particularly influenced by the Object Relations school.36 Lake and helpers offered training seminars in pastoral care and counseling, which he began in 1958. His large tome of nearly 1,300 pages, Clinical Theology, was published in 1966. It was abridged in 1986 by Martin Yeomans, a Methodist minister, and a reader was produced in 1991 by Carol Christian—both excellent introductions. My brief summary and application is a million miles from the depth and extent of his insight. Frank Lake wanted a combined base for both thought and praxis, namely, theology rooted in the love and power of God, but also pastoral care rooted in a careful and adventurous observance of the sound practice of psychiatry, psychotherapy, and group work.37

One of the difficulties for some is that his mind and his writing and his practice slipped seamlessly across the two disciplines of therapy and theology. For others it brought a great healing and window opening reconciliation.38 Others have since crossed disciplines with approbation; for instance, Cox and Theilgaard crossing the disciplines of literature and therapy. Murray Cox was responsible for bringing William Shakespeare into Broadmoor, the secure psychiatric prison. We apply their words to our theme: “Definition becomes sharper when one discipline immerses itself in the other and thereby discovers its own nature with greater certainty.” “[T]he topic of inter-disciplinary transfusion is relevant.” A nice phrase is “the mingling of contraries.” “Our intention is to show how each sphere has much that can nourish its neighbour, without either discipline being reduced or diluted in any way.” The boundaries between disciplines are important but permeable, or even porous, certainly not watertight (a metaphor John could approve of). In contemplating the hope and heartache of the human condition intrapsychically (within the person), and interpsychically (between persons), in the light of theological conviction and psychodynamic insight, it can be argued that “both modes of descriptive language are necessary.” “[P]roviding vital inter-disciplinary boundaries are strongly guarded, each has much to give the other. So much so, that without their mutual gaze, both would be losers.”39 And Cox is quite precise in a Frank Lake memorial lecture delivered to the Clinical Theology Association: “We owe Frank Lake a very great deal, because he made us take seriously this interwovenness of things clinical and things theological.” That was my note at the time, though it is not, I think, in the printed text of the lecture, Transferring the Untransferable (1993). There we do have: “Frank Lake was a tireless herald who kept high the banner which had clinical embroidered on one side and theology on the other . . . Woven into the very texture of the material is the paradox that feelings and attitudes which were presumed untransferable can, though the therapeutic action of grace and the graceful action of therapy, be transferred.”40 In our case, it is the disciplines of biblical study and psychodynamic insight that are blended in the “therapeutic” impact of the Fourth Gospel. To have a model that enables us to see into the text and to see into how we respond does not imply a denial of theological validity, but gives a whole new dimension of experience.

1. Paulus Gerhardt, “O sacred Head sore wounded,” MHB 202, H&P 176, STF 280.

2. Witkamp, Some Specific Johannine Features, 43.

3. Green, Hearing the New Testament, 240–41.

4. Bartlett, “Interpreting,” 55–56.

5. Culpepper, Anatomy, 4–5.

6. Ashton, Studying John, 208.

7. Philip Brockbank cited by Cox and Theilgaard, Mutative Metaphors, 28; and Shakespeare as Prompter, 231.

8. Iser cited by Tompkins, Reader Response Criticism, 51.

9. Arieti cited by Cox and Theilgaard, Mutative Metaphors, 39.

10. Culpepper, Anatomy, 151.

11. Culpepper, Anatomy, 231.

12. Ridderbos, Gospel of John.

13. Sloyan, John, 57, italics original.

14. Sloyan, John, 53.

15. Sloyan, John, 53, italics original.

16. See Moloney, Glory, 179 and n. 84; Brown, Gospel, 2:1056; citing Schnackenburg, St. John, 3:337–38.

17. Brown, Gospel, 2:1058.

18. Barrett, New Testament Background, 263.

19. Words of J. A. Froude applied to George Eliot by Stephen Gill’s introduction to Adam Bede (p. 14).

20. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 197.

21. Ferguson, George Mackay Brown, 72.

22. Knights, Listening Reader, 82.

23. Rollins and Kille, Psychological Insight, 138.

24. Knights, Listening Reader, 62.

25. Sanford, Mystical Christianity, 2–3.

26. Thomas Merton, cited by Sanford, Mystical Christianity, 4.

27. Underwood, cited in Rollins and Kille, Psychological Insight, 70.

28. Brueggemann, Texts That Linger, 41.

29. Todd, “Interaction of Talk and Text,” 70.

30. Todd, “Interaction of Talk and Text,” 74.

31. Todd, “Interaction of Talk and Text,” 76.

32. Moran, Listening, 105–30.

33. Levine. Poesis, 54.

34. See Brotton, History, 2, 5.

35. Jacobs, Psychodynamic Counselling, 5.

36. Object Relations, in the psychodynamic field, focuses on relationships, initially that between the carer, usually mother, and child. We carry persons we have known inside us, and have an idea, an image, and entity within us, which is a representation of the people, of mother. That image is called an “object.” We are not objectifying people; we live in a dual, fluid world of internal and external relating. If we focus on a particular feature of a person, that image in us is called a “part object.” Then we have a limited view of the person. D. W. Winnicott developed the insight further, in his psychotherapeutic work with children, with the idea of the “transitional object,” the child’s comforter, a blanket or toy, and what that external object signifies in our inner world, the presence of mother, say, even when she is elsewhere. It helps us to bridge the gap of absence. It gives security when anxious. It facilitates the stage of separating and becoming more autonomous. In any caring relationship, the carer becomes, for a time, a transitional object. An awareness of our inner objects helps us to form less incomplete relationships. See Howard, Psychodynamic Counselling, 11–12, 48; Gomez, Introduction, 1–2, 92–93.

37. Frank Lake’s reputation faltered for a time; for some because he was a Christian; for some because early on he used LSD to access early memory, even though once the connection with pathological conditions was known, he gave up using it as soon as did everyone else, psychiatrists at the Tavistock Clinic, for instance. His standing should remain high. His insights, theoretical and practical, are of such worth.

38 A classic study joining psychoanalysis, history, and faith is Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther, risking “that bit of impurity which is inherent in the hyphen of the psycho-historical as well as of all other hyphenated approaches” (13). Of particular importance is Ulanov, Finding Space. A useful study of writing across disciplines is found in Miller, “Crossing the Border’; and a useful reader is Rollins and Kille, Psychological Insight into the Bible. Of interest is Watts et al., Psychology for Christian Ministry; and Buckley, Where the Waters Meet; and Mace, ed., Heart and Soul re: philosophy; and Fiumara, Other Side of Language; and re: literature, D. R. Davis, Scenes of Madness; Knights, Listening Reader; re: opera, Cordingly, Disordered Heroes in Opera. In relation to faith, Verhagen et al., eds., Psychiatry and Religion; Wilber, Marriage of Sense and Soul. In relation to theology, Ghiloni, “On Writing Interdisciplinary Theology.” In relation to art, psychiatry, and brain science, the works of Eric R. Kandel; and Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist. In relation to biblical criticism, Wayne G. Rollins in Glas, et al., eds., Hearing Visions. A searching example where the general psychodynamic approach is sympathetic is Kalsched, Trauma and the Soul.

39. Cox and Theilgaard, Shakespeare as Prompter, 39, 51–52, 382–83.

40. Cox, Transferring, 15–16.