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