Dr. Thomas Schreiner · The Master's Seminary · 35 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Thomas Schreiner, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
John tells the same fulfillment in a different key: not kingdom but eternal life, the life of the age to come already possessed by everyone who believes. Dr. Schreiner walks the great texts: the prologue, the I AM sayings, Thomas's confession, the cross as lifting up. Listen for how many different pictures John uses for the single act of believing.
The storyline in brief: the offspring of the woman will triumph over the serpent; the promise narrows to Abraham and his offspring, then to David and his; and it will be fulfilled in a new covenant, with a new creation, a new exodus, and a new David. Opening the New Testament, all of it is fulfilled in an inaugurated, already-not-yet way: the new David and last Adam has come, the new redemptive event has happened in his death and resurrection, the new creation has dawned, the new covenant is sealed, the Spirit is given, the law is written on hearts. The Synoptics showed the kingdom arriving surprisingly, without apocalyptic power: prophecy fulfilled and mystery revealed, a mustard seed, leaven hidden in dough, a kingdom come through the death of the King, which no one anticipated.
John is immediately different: he speaks of the kingdom of God only four times. His theme is eternal life, and Schreiner argues this is the life of the kingdom under another name. Eternal life in John is not an abstraction; it is the life of the age to come, and that coming age has entered this present evil age. The eschatological promise of life is now possessed, already, though not yet consummated.
John's emphasis falls on what scholars call realized eschatology. Truly, truly: the one who hears Jesus' word and believes the Father who sent him has eternal life, now, will not come into judgment, and has passed, the Greek perfect tense marking an accomplished crossing with ongoing effect, from death to life. So too John 3: the believer has eternal life, present tense; and the one who disobeys the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him, also present tense. Text after text says the life of the age to come is the believer's present possession.
Rudolf Bultmann pressed John's realized emphasis into the claim that John has no future eschatology at all, and the same chapter refutes him: do not marvel, for an hour is coming when all in the graves will hear his voice and come out, some to the resurrection of life and some to the resurrection of judgment. Bultmann's solution was to call those verses a gloss, a later editor's addition, with no textual evidence whatsoever; the verses had to be added later because John had no future eschatology, which is to assume the conclusion. Schreiner names the method can't-lose exegesis, and skewers it with a parable: the dissertation arguing that wine in the New Testament always means grape juice, except in the passages where people get drunk, where it means wine. A theory that discards every inconvenient text cannot lose, and it is not exegesis. John holds both: life now, and the physical resurrection still ahead.
Eternal life is obtained by believing, and it centers wholly on Jesus: he is the bread of life; he has come that his sheep may have abundant life; he is the resurrection and the life; he is the way, the truth, and the life. Life comes from knowing him, and the Gospel is written for exactly this, that you may believe Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and have life in his name; the epistle adds that it is written so that believers may know they have eternal life. Schreiner pauses over that word know: the Council of Trent pronounced an anathema on anyone claiming to know he is saved, apart from special revelation, which excludes essentially everyone. But the biblical writers, John above all, write so that believers may have assurance, and here, Schreiner says plainly, is a place where Roman Catholic theology is not fully biblical.
John's Christology is high from the first page, and Schreiner offers a help for reading it. When Nathanael cries, you are the Son of God, you are the King of Israel, he is not, thirty seconds after asking whether anything good can come from Nazareth, confessing Jesus' deity; Son of God there means the King, for the king is God's son. But John, writing the last of the Gospels, invests the title through his whole book with its deeper meaning: the Son who is himself divine. The author invites a two-level reading, what Nathanael meant, and what the whole Gospel reveals, and Schreiner reads Peter's confession in Matthew 16 the same way.
In the beginning, echoing Genesis, was the Word. The term logos carried freight for Greek ears, from the earliest thinkers on the nature of reality to the Stoics, for whom living according to nature meant living according to reason, the logos ordering the world; the church fathers even borrowed the language generously enough to call Socrates a Christian, which Schreiner finds debatable. But the fundamental background is the Old Testament: God created the heavens and the earth by his word. In the beginning was the Word: a beginning without beginning, the imperfect tense stretching back forever; and the Word was with God, persons in relation, a conclusion drawn rightly from the context rather than squeezed from a preposition; and the Word was God. The grammar matters: the definite predicate before the verb will not permit the rendering a god, as in the New World Translation, whose translators, unlike those of every reputable version, have never been named. And the article's absence guards a second truth: John will not let the Word collapse into the Father, the error of modalism. In the church's later words for John's teaching: one essence, distinct persons, the Word fully God and forever with God.
The Gospel closes its argument with Thomas before the risen Christ: my Lord and my God. Schreiner reviews the evasions with a smile: that Thomas addressed the Father past Jesus, or that he simply exclaimed, taking the Lord's name in vain in the Lord's own presence. Could there be a less plausible reading? John intends what he wrote: Thomas addresses Jesus as Lord and God, and the reader is meant to join him.
Behind Jesus' I AM sayings stand Exodus 3, I am who I am, and Isaiah's refrain, I am he, the first and the last. Jesus is frank about his messiahship only with the Samaritan woman, who would start no revolution, but the I AM sayings run through the book, and John loves to join saying to sign: the feeding of the five thousand, then I am the bread of life; the healing of the man born blind, then I am the light of the world; Lazarus called from the tomb, and I am the resurrection and the life. At the arrest, Jesus says I am, and it could be mere self-identification, except that the whole arresting party falls to the ground. John brackets the words as theophany: the soldiers cannot take him until he, in effect, invites his own arrest.
When John speaks of the cross he reaches for a different idiom: Jesus is lifted up; Jesus is glorified. The language comes from the servant song, my servant shall be raised and lifted up and glorified, so that Jesus is the servant of the Lord whose bloody death, and John never denies the suffering, is the very means of his exaltation, the road by which he goes to the Father. He is the Lamb of God, with the Passover and perhaps Isaiah 53 in the phrase; and all his going language, I am going to him who sent me, I go to prepare a place for you, travels one route: via the cross. The glory comes through the cross.
John uses the verb believe ninety-eight times, and unfolds it through a wealth of parallel images. Believing is receiving him and accepting him, language John himself uses, whatever some hyper-careful critics say. It is obeying him. It is hearing him: the sheep hear his voice, and Schreiner recalls his own conversion at seventeen, out of a Roman Catholic boyhood into a Baptist Sunday school, hearing the word as fabulous while classmates heard the same words unmoved; there is hearing, and there is hearing. It is coming to him for life. It is seeing him, and there is seeing and not seeing. It is eating his flesh and drinking his blood, of which Augustine said, exactly rightly, that to believe is to have eaten. It is entering through the gate, abiding in him, remaining, continuing, following, being drawn. Believing in John is never bare intellectual recognition; it is the whole soul's appetite and allegiance.
After the hard word of John 6, many disciples abandon Jesus, and he turns to the Twelve without a trace of panic: do you want to go away as well? Peter answers for the saved of every age: Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. Schreiner draws a pastoral lesson from the unworried Christ: the church should never sound desperate, in its appeals or its offerings, for God will meet the needs of his church; the question for his people is whether they will have the joy of participating. John also tells us why people do not believe: they love the darkness rather than the light, and they love the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God. And twice the Gospel speaks of those who believe yet do not really believe, a warning to read faith in context.
John's fulfillment themes gather at Cana. The point of the first sign is not, as Schreiner's father once argued to his newly converted son, that Jesus made wine so everyone could have a good time, though wine it truly was. The point is the sweet wine dripping from the mountains: the new creation has come, and the old water pots of Judaism are being replaced with the new wine Jesus gives. The first miracle announces that the days of fulfillment are here. So too the temple: destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it, spoken of his body, for Jesus is the true temple. And so the Samaritan woman's question, Gerizim or Jerusalem, receives a startling answer: Jerusalem had been right, and the argument is now passe, for the true temple stands before her. The issue is no longer where, but whom: worship in spirit and truth, worship him.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all twelve are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. What takes the place of kingdom vocabulary in John?
2. What does John 5:24 claim for the believer right now?
3. How is Bultmann's claim of a wholly realized eschatology answered?
4. What is can't-lose exegesis?
5. What did the Council of Trent anathematize that John gives warrant for?
6. What did Nathanael mean by Son of God, and what does John mean by it?
7. What is the fundamental background of the Logos in John 1?
8. Why must John 1:1 read the Word was God rather than a god?
9. Why do the arresting soldiers fall to the ground in John 18?
10. What is John's idiom for the crucifixion?
11. Which images unfold what believing means in John?
12. What is the point of the sign at Cana?
All twelve correct. Lecture 26 is complete.
John writes so that believers may know they have eternal life. Where does your assurance actually rest from day to day, and what would it change to anchor it in the Son's own word?
Believing in John is hearing, coming, eating, drinking, abiding: appetite words. What has your soul actually been feeding on this month, and what would eating and drinking Christ look like instead?
When the crowds walked away, Jesus did not beg. Where are you tempted to make the gospel sound desperate, to yourself or to others, and how does the unworried Christ of John 6 correct you?
John 5:24, the present tense of salvation: the one who hears the Son's word and trusts the Father who sent him possesses the life of the age to come already, and has crossed over from death into life.
The lecture names no outside reading this hour; the fuller treatment is the John chapter of The King in His Beauty, the course's companion volume, alongside Augustine's dictum the lecture endorses: to believe is to have eaten.