Trinity and community: A reading of John 17

International Journal of Systematic Theology

Volumn 1, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 168-184

  Watson, Francis ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN   (United Kingdom)

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Indexed keywords

EID: 61149529091     PISSN: 14631652     EISSN: 14682400     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1463-1652.00012     Document Type: Review

References (9)

1. The Gospel of John is fundamental to his presentation of Jesus' person and work in terms of his communication of his perfect, sinless consciousness of God; see also The Christian Faith (ET Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1928), pp. 422, 434, 456, 474.
2. The Socinian background to Schleiermacher's reading of John is rightly noted by D.F. Strauss, in his The Christ of Faith and the Jesus of History: A Critique of Schleiermacher's Life of Jesus (ET Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), pp. 60-61.
3. The crucial role of the Gospel of John in the formation of the trinitarian dogma can be clearly seen in Tertullian's Against Praxeas, chs 20-25 and throughout.
4. John Locke's Socinian-inspired The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures (1695) is already well on the way to the concept of 'the historical Jesus', some decades before Reimarus. The significance of the Socinian tradition for critical biblical scholarship is noted by K. Scholder, The Birth of Modern Critical Theology: Origins and problems of biblical criticism in the seventeenth century (ET London: SCM Press, 1990), pp. 26-45.
5. See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2 (ET Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956), pp. 193-4.
6. I follow here Paul Ricoeur's account of metaphor, with its emphasis on 'the decisive role of semantic clash leading to logical absurdity': that is, '[t]he shift in meaning results primarily from a clash between literal meanings, which excludes the literal use of the word in question and provides clues for finding a new meaning capable of according with the context of the sentence and rendering the sentence meaningful therein' (Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 170).
7. E. Käsemann, The Testament of Jesus according to John 17 (ET Philadelphia: Fortress, 1968), pp. 69-70.
8. According to Brown, 'the prayer of xvii was not part of the Last Discourse in the first edition of the Gospel where xiv 31 was followed directly by xviii 1. Nor was this prayer part of the independently formed discourse that now stands as xv-xvi... The prayer seems to have been an independent composition that the redactor added at the same time that he added xv-xvi' (The Gospel According to John, Vol. 2, p. 745).
9. The translation is taken from E.R. Hardy and C.C. Richardson, eds, Christology of the Later Fathers, Library of Christian Classics, Vol. III (London: SCM Press, 1954).