| Seeing the Kingdom: A Symbolic Analysis of the Gospel of John 63,000 words from the Preface: This book was born in the Spring of 1997 when I began a series of long and invigorating conversations on the Gospel of John with a colleague in the Christianity Department of Houston Baptist University, Dr. Walter Lumpkin. As we dialogued, we quickly discovered that we shared a similar conviction that the literary language and devices of John’s Gospel did not weaken or diffuse its theological truths but, in fact, heightened and intensified them. Out of this shared conviction sprang a mutual desire to co-author a book that would use the methods of literary analysis to open up the Gospel and unpack its dense symbolic structure. Walter’s desire to combine the methods of literary and theological analysis had first been inspired in him by his reading of R. Alan Culpepper’s seminal work, Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel (1983). He encouraged me to read the book as well, and, when I had finished, we sat down and began to map out the structure our book would follow. Walter suggested that we take as our central thesis the theme of witness in the Gospel of John (our working title at that point was “Witness to the Truth: A Literary Analysis of the Gospel of John”), and from there we generated a rough table of contents and split up the chapters between us. Unfortunately, for two separate reasons, our plans never reached fruition. First, due to various personal and professional commitments that sprang up over the summer, Walter was prevented from writing his projected chapters. Second, as I began writing my own chapters (and continued to write “non-stop” throughout the Summer of 1997), I discovered that my vision of the book was slowly diverting from Walter’s. Although I felt (and still feel) that witness is central to John’s Gospel, I found that as I began the actual writing that the related but distinctive theme of seeing began to consume my attention more and more. This was perhaps to be expected. Whereas Walter is a Christianity Professor who reads deeply in literature and literary analysis, I am an English Professor who reads deeply in theology and biblical criticism. I was less concerned with the Johannine community than I was with the ideal, symbol-sensitive reader, less with chiastic structures than with metaphors, less with hermeneutics and exegesis than with poetic explication and sacramental meditation. In addition, though I followed my reading of Culpepper with a wider study of Johannine scholarship, I soon began to distance myself from the scholarship: not because I disagreed with it or found it lacking, but because I felt the need and the desire to wrestle directly with the Fourth Gospel and not through the mediation of secondary criticism. In the end, I chose a compromise method. In my Prologue and introductory chapter, I would address the secondary scholarship, but in the chapters that remained, I would keep my focus firmly and exclusively on the biblical text. During the Summer of 1997, I completed six distinct essays which evolved eventually into the present Prologue and Chapters 1-5. I then placed all six essays on the “back burner” and moved on to other projects. Five years later, in the Summer of 2002, as I prepared to lead a home Bible study on the Gospel of John for my students, I pulled out those six essays and re-read them. Somewhat to my surprise, I found them still fresh and original; indeed, considering the recent growth of postliberal criticism and the renewed focus within evangelical circles on sacred history and the dramatic and narrative elements of the Bible, I felt that what I had written was even more timely and relevant than it had been five years earlier. Accordingly, I revised and coordinated the six essays and then wrote two further essays (Chapters 6-7 of the present edition) that I felt were necessary to round off the analysis and argument. In preparing this revision and expansion of my original work, I also made an important decision. Though I would, in my Prologue and introductory chapter, lay out carefully my theory and methods for biblical literary analysis, I would not make these chapters prerequisites for an understanding of (and agreement with) the more direct and specific analysis carried out in the rest of the book. That is not to say that I have made no attempt to persuade the reader of the strength (and perhaps necessity) of my theory and methods; on the contrary, I have striven to do so with all the logical and rhetorical gifts at my disposal. Rather, it is to say that the explications carried out in Chapters 2-7 are relatively free-standing and can be grasped and appreciated apart from the more polemical nature of the Prologue and the more technical nature of Chapter One. What I have tried to offer is a doorway into a kind of reading of John’s Gospel that will be equally accessible and practical to the biblical scholar, the Christianity professor, the seminary student, the minister, the Sunday School teacher, and the Bible study leader. It is my hope as well that this work, which began as a collaborative effort and still retains the marks of its cross-departmental origins, will inspire both further interdisciplinary approaches to scripture and greater fellowship between believers in all fields of study. from Chapter One: Having laid out (in the Prologue) my more general theological and aesthetic argument for the legitimacy (and necessity) of reading and interpreting the Bible through the prism of literary analysis, and having laid out (in this chapter) the particular methods and ground rules by which I plan to carry out that analysis, I am now prepared, quite literally, to “lose myself” in the rich symbolic tapestry of the Gospel of John. I shall begin in Chapters Two and Three by piercing to the heart of what I consider to be the central (or master) symbol of John’s Gospel: seeing. Paying particular attention to John’s Prologue (1:1-18), to Jesus’ discourse on the bread from heaven (Chapter 6), and to the upper-room discourse (13-17), I shall argue that the symbolic structure of the Gospel is not only built on a foundation of seeing but that in order to perceive both foundation and structure, the reader must actually learn how to see. Once I have established what it means to think and to see in symbolic (spiritual, sacramental) terms, I shall then (in Chapters Four and Five) narrow my focus to a set of specific symbols (the vine and the fountain, the good shepherd) that have their own special resonance within the overall symbolic structure of the Fourth Gospel. Finally, in Chapters Six and Seven, I shall move again toward a wider vision, considering how John structures his Gospel around a series of seven miracles (or signs) that both embody and enact the symbolism laid out in the discourses and prepare the reader to witness and to understand (to see in its fullest sense) the bodily Resurrection of Christ. Although in this chapter and in my Prologue I have made fair use of recent scholarship to buttress my arguments, Chapters 2-7 shall confine themselves almost exclusively to the Gospel itself. John presents us with a unique microcosm in his Gospel, and it is a microcosm that must be entered fully if it is to be understood and appreciated on its own symbolic terms and in its own sacramental language. May that same Lord who healed the man born blind give us eyes to see and ears to hear. TO READ CHAPTER TWO OF THIS BOOK, PLEASE CLICK HERE. | ||