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INTRODUCTION

It must have been in February of 416 that Augustine, bishop of Hippo, began his famous 124 tractates on John’s Gospel.1 We might commence our own study of the same subject by a brief consideration of the thoughts with which the church father opens his treatment. In relation to John 1:1–5 he asks how his hearers are to understand, and how he is to state and explain what is written, when over both of them stands the judgment that the natural man does not understand the things of the Spirit of God [1 Cor. 2:14]. There is need to appeal for the assistance of grace. They must all understand what they can, and he must say what he can. For who can say it as it is? “I dare to say, brethren, that perhaps not even John himself has said it as it is, but only as he could, for a man has here spoken about God, a man enlightened by God, but still a man. (Quia de Deo homo dixit et quidem inspiratus a Deo sed tamen homo.) Because enlightened, he has said something; if he had not been enlightened, he could have said nothing; but because he is an enlightened man, he has not said it all as it is, but only said it as a man can say it.”2 Ps. 71:3 of the Latin Bible may be adduced here: Suscipiant montes pacem populo tuo et colles iustitiam [= Eng. Ps. 72:3]. There are mountains and hills in relation to what we receive from God, i.e., greater and smaller souls. The former are enlightened by wisdom, receive peace, and impart it to the latter that these may live by their faith. From the mountains it is said to the church: Peace be with you. One of these high mountains who received peace on behalf of the hills (the rest of us) was John the Evangelist. But even as a high mountain John is still one of those of whom it is said that no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into any human heart [1 Cor. 2:9]. If wisdom came into the heart of John, then it was only insofar as he was not a man but had begun to be an angel, i.e., one who proclaims God, only insofar as God called him and he mounted with his heart above all created things and met the Word by whom all things were created. But not to be a man in this sense, to be instead one who is called to proclaim God, presupposes that he is first known and acknowledged precisely in his humanity. In relation to the Evangelist, then, we have to recall not only: “I lift up mine eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help” [Ps. 121:1] (although in truth he stands high and holy among all the mountains which have received peace for the people of God), but also the continuation of Ps. 121: “My help is from the Lord, who hath made heaven and earth” [v. 2]. Hence “lift up your eyes to this mountain, i.e., the Evangelist.”3 But “do not lift up your eyes to this mountain in such a way that you think you must set your hope on a man.”4 “The mountains receive only what they pass on to us; it is to the place from which they themselves receive it that we are to direct our hope5 (unde et montes accipiunt, ibi spes nostra ponenda est).” “If we lift our eyes to the scriptures because these are given to us by men, we lift our eyes to the mountains from which help comes to us; but because those who wrote the scriptures were also men, they do not shine of themselves, but he was the true light that enlightens6 everyone that comes into this world.” It is precisely in this sense that the other John, the Baptist, says of himself: I am not the Christ, and: Of his fulness have we all received. What the mountains impart to us is the possibility of hearing something. They cannot impart the illumination of the understanding. They themselves need illumination. John the Evangelist “offered words, but thou must receive understanding where he who offers thee the words attained it,7 that thou mayest thus lift up thine eyes to the hills from whence thy help comes, and there receive the cup, i.e., the Word, that is held out to thee, yet still (because thy help is from the Lord who made heaven and earth) fill thy heart at the place where he also filled it.”8 The hearers should thus see that their preacher is only apparently nearer to them than God. “Direct your ears to me and your hearts to him.” “See, you lift your eyes and your bodily senses to us, and yet not to us (for we are not among the mountains) but to the Gospel, to the Evangelist, and your heart, that is to be filled, to the Lord.”9 Let each of us see to the heart and whither it is lifted up. “If one sees that one bears the burden of the flesh, one takes pains to purify by continence what one lifts up to God.”10 Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God [Matt. 5:3].

Thus far Augustine’s introduction. I have quoted it because it reminds us that as we face the task of reading and explaining John’s Gospel, we enter a concrete, specific situation whose form does not depend at all on us but which is this situation and not another by a necessity that lies in the matter itself. What kind of a situation is it? With the help of what we have just heard, I would point to three decisive features.

1. We cannot open and read the Gospel without first realizing that it comes to us as the “good news,” as its title indicates, that the Word of wisdom which the Evangelist passes on (not as it is but as he could) is spoken to us, that the “cup” of divine, i.e., new and unheard-of, truth that challenges all our other knowledge does in fact reach us so that the question of faith is put to us. No matter what our answer may be, no matter that we must all see ourselves as natural beings who do not understand the things of the Spirit of God [cf. 1 Cor. 2:14]! It is not in dispute that we are hills which hear of divine peace from the mountain. The Gospel is the mountain from which that peace comes to the hills. We hear (and understand) the Gospel only when we do not ignore that relation between it and us, when we do not ignore the actuality or reality with which it does not so much stand over against us as encounter us. We cannot adduce any objections based on the usual rights of scholarship.11 We cannot ignore that relation. In it and in it alone the Gospel is what it is and seeks to be studied as such inasmuch as it is a subject of scholarship. If we ignore that relation, then with the same reason or unreason we might study wooden iron or frozen fire. If the Gospel, John’s Gospel, is not directed to us in the name of God and does not presuppose and demand our faith—then what else can we say of it but that it is a fantasy no matter how truly it might be before us on paper in what is probably its earliest text? If it is simply the monument of no more than a historical entity, if it is dumb or a Word that is or was directed to others—no matter what else it may be,12 it is not the Gospel, it is not John’s Gospel. The true Gospel of John that we have to study can be only the Gospel of John that comes to us. How do we know this?

How is it that Augustine assumes from the very first lines that John’s Gospel is necessarily speaking to him and to his listeners? Certainly not because of some so-called subjective presupposition. Conscientious expositors must be as free as possible from such things as religious or non-religious notions, from philosophical or ethical convictions, from personal feelings or reactions, from historical habits of thought, prejudices, and the like. They must have an ear simply for what the text says to them, for the new thing that it seeks to say in face of the totality of their previous subjective knowledge. This freedom is part of the lifting up of the heart about which Augustine goes on to speak. If we want to be truly objective readers and expositors of John’s Gospel, however, we will not want to free ourselves from the fact that we are baptized, that for us, then, John’s Gospel is part of the canonical scripture of the Christian church. It was not written and does not exist as anything other. Canonical scripture, however, means scripture to which we stand in that relation from the very first,13 a Word that is spoken to us from the very first in the name of God and with the claim that it is saying something radically new, a Word which even before we could hear it has opened a dialogue with us, a dialogue which, because it is conducted in the name of God,14 we cannot escape. “From the very first,” I say and therefore not on the basis or in the form of ordinary experience, nor on the basis or in the form of our faith, but on the basis and in the form of our life in the church of Christ as baptism attests to it. As we recall this life of ours under the sign of baptism and therefore in the sphere of the church of Christ, we do not indulge in the kind of presuppositions that we have to suspend or repress (perhaps at least provisionally) for the sake of the scientific investigation of a matter, as though the character of the Gospel as an authoritative address were perhaps15 based on our apprehension or experience of its content; as though we stood in some better relation to the Gospel (e.g., by way of our own observation, reflection, or experience), as though fundamentally it could be told us in some other way than in the strict form of that “from the very first” in which it is told us in our baptism; as though the fact that we are baptized and in the Christian church were not originally and inescapably related to the witness of the prophets and apostles to the revelation of God, and hence to the true Gospel of John that applies to us. What does the church mean, or baptism, or God, if we have the possibility, if we can even reckon with the possibility, of abstracting away from it, of suspending our life in this nexus—if this presupposition is not validly grounded in an objectivity compared to which all other objectivity, e.g., historical objectivity, can be regarded only as a secondary, derived, or loaned objectivity?

2. It is, of course, part of the concrete specificity of the situation in which we find ourselves regarding the Gospel—and Augustine, as we have seen, laid great stress on this—that the Evangelist who addresses us in the name of God is a man. This does not alter the fact that the mountain is here speaking to the hills (and we are not among the mountains).16 Not just anyone speaks to us, but a great soul,17 and not just any great soul, but one who is called and enlightened, an apostle, one of those who wrote the scriptures that are called such in a qualified sense, one to whom wisdom is assigned in a very special way so that he may speak of it in a very special way to us. Hence, lift yourselves up to the Evangelist.18 For the relation to him is in fact the relation in which wisdom imparts itself to us. Yet he is still a man. His historicity, to which we must cling, has a place and therefore a limit in time. It shares in the relativity, the specificity, and the question-ability of every historical phenomenon. This entails a reservation. He is only a man. He has not said it as it is but as he could.19 As we hear and understand his words we are wholly entangled in the historical problems that surround all human words. We cannot avoid them. We should not try. He is not Christ but John. He does not shine of or through himself. If we look at him we look into the darkness of history and not into the light. He passes on a light that he has himself received. But he only passes it on; the giver is he from whom he himself received it. It was as the recipient of that which the natural man does not grasp that he was no man but an angel, one who proclaims God. We may not, then, set our hope on him. He is not an apostle at the level of the historical phenomenon to which we are referred. On earth he bears no halo by which we know that he is an apostle as we know a king on his throne. To see him as an apostle we need the same illumination that he needed and received in order to be an apostle. He does not proclaim God without God, nor may he be known as one who proclaims God without God. His word is qualified as address in the sense described, as holy scripture, in virtue of God’s address to us by means of the words of this man. We have to speak, not of quality, nor of the qualified nature, but of the qualifying of his word, not of a being but of an action, the divine action in virtue of which his word is qualified as address. That the Gospel really comes to us in that original and inescapable way is not proper to it as a kind of natural or magical force that may be perceived and experienced in the power of the reader, and displayed and made efficacious in the power of the preacher or exegete.

The Gospel comes to us with the promise that God himself will confess it. But it is not self-evident that this should happen. It is in the balances, no, it depends on God’s good pleasure whether it does so or not. If it does not, we shall hear the Evangelist and yet not hear him. Thus our relation to him has a twofold character. We are pleased to let ourselves be bound by his word even as and although we see that in the first instance we have to do with it alone, with this particular man and his particular words in their own place, within the limit of his time, in all the specificity with which he speaks as a man like any other. We face a historical problem. But we let ourselves be bound only in order that, thus bound, we may be freed by God himself to and for God himself. Without being bound we cannot be freed, for it is from the mountains that the light comes to us, the little hills, from the apostles that the Word of God comes to those that are in the church. This is why we hear them and lift up our eyes to the hills. But without the liberation we are not bound, for the mountains do not illumine unless they are illumined, the apostles do not speak to us as such unless it is ever and again given to them to do so by God. Thus our help comes from the Lord who has made heaven and earth [Ps. 121:2]. As a medium20 what is historical, the human word of the witness to revelation, demands our total, concentrated, and serious attention. But only as a medium,21 not for its own sake and not to be understood in terms of itself, but as witness which itself needs witness and expects witness—the witness that its subject must give. This giving is an event, an action, the action of God in the strictest sense of the term. The point of our own action as hearers and expositors of the Gospel stands or falls with God’s action through the instrument with which we have to do.

3. Our situation as readers and expositors of the Gospel means finally that we are placed under a specific demand. This relates to our own concrete attitude to this task. I do not mean the demand for faith. Our starting point is that the Gospel at once addresses to us a demand for faith that we can neither miss nor avoid. I add that every point at which we are occupied with the Gospel carries this demand with it and necessarily has the significance of an act of obedience or disobedience to this demand. But what is faith if not the illumination without which we cannot perceive the light of scripture? And what is this illumination if not the inscrutable and uncontrollable work of God upon us for which we can only pray?22 What we have now to discuss, however, is the other demand that Augustine expresses in connection with the familiar cultic formula of the early church: “Lift up your hearts.”23 What does this mean? If we listen to Augustine, the mysticism of Neoplatonism and the asceticism of the Hellenistic mystery religions tell us what he meant. From the mountains that we see with our eyes we should mount up higher and higher to the invisible One who has made the visible mountains, just as John as a recipient of the divine gift was one of the highest mountains because he rose up above everything created, above all heavens and angels, to the uncreated Word that was in the beginning. And for our hearts to be able to do this, they need cleansing—for they are carnal—they need the catharsis, the purifying of continence. To us these are alien notes. But they cannot be totally or finally alien. Alongside or prior to the faith that is not put in our own hands, on the level of what we desire and can do, in a way that does not bind him from whom every good gift comes, but not on that account without significance, there is a readiness for faith or for understanding what faith and its object are all about. Concretely, there is a readiness to understand24 that only in the sphere denoted by the terms church, sacrament, and canon can John’s Gospel be read and understood as the word of an apostle, i.e., as the word of a witness not to himself, but to the revelation imparted and entrusted to him. There is a readiness to look in the direction indicated, even if only in the form of a hypothetical intention demanded by an understanding of the formal nature of the subject.25 There is an openness to the need to understand this matter within its own logic and ethic. There is a willingness to adapt to this need because one wants to understand. Instead of willingness, then, we might say objectivity. We are perhaps not guilty of too great misrepresentation if we go on to say that the continence that Augustine commends consists concretely of opposing to the subjective presuppositions with which, to the hurt of our understanding, we constantly approach scripture, the equally subjective but sincere and earnest desire to read and expound the Gospel, not as teachers but as students, not as those who know but as those who do not know, as those who let ourselves be told26 what the Gospel, and through it the divine wisdom, is seeking to tell us, holding ourselves free for it as for a message that we have never heard before. This readiness can be the subject of a demand. We can want it, seek it, and have it. It is not a final word. It is not identical with faith. But as a penultimate word the demand for this readiness has its place. In the situation in which we find ourselves, as an integral part of its reality, there sounds forth unmistakably for all who are in it the cry: Lift up your hearts.