BONUS EPISODE - Is "John vs. Idolatry" the Interpretive Key to This Book? (With Dr. Steven Bryan)

An interview with Dr. Steven Bryan about the purpose of John's Gospel 

Get Dr. Bryan's book here

Thanks to everyone who supports TMBH at patreon.com/thetmbhpodcast

You're the reason we can all do this together!

Discuss the episode here

Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Bonus episode the bonus episode of the ten minute bubble podcast. Bonus episode the bonus episode of the ten minute bubble lower podcast. Come on now.

SPEAKER_02 0:50

This is going to be fun. I've got uh a friend, an associate here. I've got a bunch of things in common in terms of our background. This is Dr. Steve Bryan. He's a professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. I don't talk about this a lot around here, but that's where I went to seminary, though I don't think we overlapped. I didn't have any classes with Dr. Bryan. However, we've gotten to know each other over the years. And he's put out a book that I think is very interesting to me. I think it's going to be very interesting to you. It's a book about John, and it's a book that asks, I think, a very important question. And that is why? You already have three Gospels out there: the synoptics, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, that tell the story of the life and teachings and death and resurrection and commissioning toward the disciples of Jesus. It's it's very well-covered material. The Jesus stuff was a big deal, but then along comes John. And but part of the enchantment of John is that it takes a couple more read-throughs to start to figure out what he's going for and why this gospel exists. So, Steve, you wrote a book. What's the name of the book?

SPEAKER_00 1:59

The name of the book is The Visible Word of the Invisible God. Um, so visible word of the unseen God. So I can't even get the title of my book right, but that's the that's the title of the book. Uh, the subtitle is reading John Among Rivals, Old and New. It's a mouthful, I if you throw in the subtitle, but the visible word of the unseen God.

SPEAKER_02 2:19

Yeah, it's an academic book. They're all mouthfuls, right? Well, let's just cut to the chase. Why did John write John when you've already got three perfectly good versions of the story of Jesus floating around out there and being well received by the early church?

SPEAKER_00 2:34

That's a great question. And I think it's a question that's a very old question, a question that goes back to kind of the early, early centuries of the of the church. But I do think that uh John provides some pretty important clues for us. One part of it might simply be the fact that he's just a different dude. He's just got us a different way of thinking about things. But I think another is that it's very very much tailored to to an audience who has perhaps met uh one of the gospels, or maybe all of the gospels, uh, probably in a written form, and hadn't been persuaded. If you think about you know, Jews in the in a late first century, what's their main objection? And I think it's second commandment. It's the idea that the the invisible God, the God who can't be seen, the creator of all things, could take on human flesh. That's a really big pill to swallow if you're coming at this from a Jewish uh Jewish background.

SPEAKER_02 3:29

So do you think that John is mostly writing to Jews? And the reason I ask the question is especially on the front end, it seems like you're seeing a mix of Jewish stuff and Greek stuff. I mean, the heavy lift that the word Lagos is doing in the opening 18 verses. I mean, you can't ignore that. Surely John is tapping into something there. But also, you know, as a kid, I got taught a lot, like, oh, this is just a very Greek prologue. But then I got a little bit older and I looked through it and like, well, this is a very Jewish prologue. He's tapping into all kinds of language and concepts from the Old Testament that somebody familiar with the Hebrew scriptures would have been familiar with. So who is he writing to? Is he writing to Greek-minded Jewish people? Is he writing to Greeks and Jews and trying to kill two birds with one stone? Or are we inflicting the Greek stuff on this book and it's not really there at all? And this is really for a Jewish audience?

SPEAKER_00 4:25

You know, I think he's he's writing to to diaspora Jews. I think, you know, everyone recognizes that the sorts of terms that he uses, like Logos, had broad currency in the New Testament. But if you think about whether John is conceptually bilingual, I think the answer to that question is no, he's not both thinking as a Stoic and thinking as uh someone who is steeped in the Old Testament at the same time. At the end of the day, uh, if you're gonna make sense of the Gospel of John, you're gonna have to enter into the the world of the Old Testament and make sense on those terms. So John is, I think, first and last, an act of scriptural reasoning, reasoning that you know that rests for its its internal logic on the Old Testament.

SPEAKER_02 5:15

So then what is the thrust? What is the argument for John? If he was given the elevator speech to uh a scattered Jewish reader in the first century and they're somewhat familiar with the synoptics, and he's like, yeah, they're chatting, and and this skeptical Jewish reader is like, well, you know, I kind of I've heard about your Jesus, but uh, you got a minute, Buster. Tell me what I'm missing. What would be John's summary based on his gospel?

SPEAKER_00 5:44

I guess what I would say is that if the charge that John is effectively refuting is that the incarnation is idolatrous. I think John's basic response to that is it would be idolatrous if Jesus was not God's word who had been made flesh. Um, in other words, if we go back to the scriptural narratives, God has always been present in his word. That is the fundamental premise with within the Old Testament. It's it's what you might think of as the positive form of the second commandment. The negative form of the second commandment is don't make images because I am not present in an image. Don't bow down to them, don't serve them. I'm not there. One way of reading that is the incommensurability of the creator with the creation. But another way of thinking about it, John's way of thinking about it, is is to take that in its positive form. Well, where is God? How is God present in the world? And his basic answer to that question is the answer of the Pentateuch, the answer of Exodus and Deuteronomy. God is present in the world, in his word, and he always has been. And at Sinai, Exodus 19, Deuteronomy 4, that word becomes visible. So one of the things I I argue early in the book is that if you change one word of John 1.14, you basically have the thesis statement of the book of Exodus. And and so it the word that you would have to change is the word flesh. If you if John 1.14 read the word became visible and sanctuaried among us, and we beheld his glory, well, that's just the book of Exodus, because the word comes to Israel as Sinai, visible form. And then the promise, of course, of the rest of the book of Exodus is I'm going to be with you, I'm going to sanctuary uh among you. And and of course, you have the singular act of rebellion that makes that at least temporarily impossible, making of the golden calf. And God says, Cancel the plan. I'm I can't be with them. But when he does fill the tabernacle with his presence at the very end of the book, and sanctuaries among them, it's the same glory of the Lord that appeared in visible form at Sinai. It is the voice of the Lord, the word of the Lord that appeared in visible, uh invisible form. So the thesis statement of the book of John is effectively a kind of development of the thesis statement of Exodus. That's really what I'm arguing.

SPEAKER_02 8:18

Okay. So I'm looking at the subtitle here: Reading John Among Rivals, Old and New. And I'm starting to formulate a guess as to who some of those rivals you have in view are, but walk me through it. Who are the rivals old and new?

SPEAKER_00 8:34

What I'm trying to argue is that we don't have to guess who the rivals are to early Christian claims about Jesus. We know they're pagans on the one hand, and they're Jews. So we have these three rival groups. So Don is supposedly written in Ephesus, even if we don't say Ephesus in particular, but a place like Ephesus, then we have this trilateral argument, the debate between these three groups is around one basic question. And that basic question is how do we know God's here? Uh and the pagan way of answering that question is, I know my God's here because I've got I've got an idol, I've got an image. And then that was being sort of carried over into you know, emperor worship, you know. Oh, let's make this emperor of God. The idea that a deity could inhabit human flesh was already kind of being naturalized in in that environment. And so I think Jews look at Christians and say, Oh, we're just pagans. And John's response is, no, no, the incarnation is not a violation of the second commandment, it's God keeping it, it's the keeping of the second commandment. God has always been present in his word. And we go back to our founding narratives, Israel meeting God at Sinai and forming a covenant. And this is how God presents himself. This is how God is present with his with his people in the sanctuary.

SPEAKER_02 9:58

When we pick up John and read it today, is it the same rivals that clutter up our brains and our ability to read it? Is it the same rivals, but just in modern form? Or have you found that as history is unfolded and society has evolved, that it just happens to pick a fight with and be a response to new modern rivals?

SPEAKER_00 10:23

Downstream of the Enlightenment, God has become a problem, a question. Uh and the question is, how do we know God is here? And the answer is we don't really know that God is here. We can't know. We can believe, but we you can't know. And so that basic question of how do we know God is present? Uh, how do we know God is here? How are we gonna know God is with us is still like that's still the central point that's being contested, and maybe arguably it has been throughout the whole of human history. How God is present by thinking about the diffuse reality of spiritual power, spiritual life in stuff, in things, in objects, in nature. And so it's the idea that underwrites image making in the ancient world. Um, but you have forms of idea very commonly held today.

SPEAKER_02 11:19

So he's making this argument to a very specific kind of person. Most people who are going to pick up and read the Gospel of John or start their journey in the Bible with the Gospel of John, are not Jews scattered to the ends of the earth in the first century A.D., worried about idolatry as their primary pushback on the reality of Christ and the claims of the gospel. Yet John clearly, I mean, he says it more than once, is writing this thing to be persuasive. He wants you to see, he wants you to behold what the deal is. He wants you to see that Jesus is the Son of God and believe, and by believing, have life in his name. So does it still apply to the modern reader if they're not Jewish? Is there a different set of lenses that the modern reader should put on to track with John's argument and try to understand, try to see if they can see Jesus properly? Or is it just a book that's so timeless and so well done that it neatly translates from that original audience John was trying to persuade to a modern audience today?

SPEAKER_00 12:23

We are individual subjects surrounded by all these objects that we can know in some way, but not really. And so all we're left with is ultimately in a postmodern frame is with our own subjectivity. But John has a very different way of imagining what the world is and what God's ultimate purpose is. For John, he invites us to see reality as a sanctuary of divine presence. And that presence is the presence of God in his word. For John, that's his primary, primary image. Destroy this sanctuary, and I will raise it up in three days. And then in John 14, I'm going to prepare this place with rooms. You know, so the going through crucifixion and resurrection is the preparation of this place for inhabitation. We become, as it were, inhabitants of the life of God. Uh, so he invites a completely different social imaginary where we are invited inside the life of God. This is not uh a new idea, it's a very ancient idea, but God is not an object if your life is inside of his life. And if in one sense you only have life if you are living the life he gives.

SPEAKER_02 13:45

To round things out here, if a normal person like me goes and picks up this book, what would we get out of it?

SPEAKER_00 13:52

I think the the benefit of reading this book, this basic idea, all of us wrestle with is how do we how do we know God's here? How do we know God's with us? And to see John as someone who's testifying to the reality that God is present in his word. I think if something settles in an average reader from this book, it's it's what was, you know, the reformers constantly emphasize God is present in the world, in his word, and by his spirit. And so to think about the nature of God's presence as having always been that way from the beginning of creation, God has always been present in his word. Even before creation, God was present in his word. And so to think about that as a kind of reading rule for the Gospel of John and to think about that as the reason that we do not worship earthly things. We do not devote our lives to the pursuit of material objects. We worship and serve the Lord, God, who is present in his word. Our worship of Jesus is our keeping of the second commandment.

SPEAKER_02 15:04

Well said. My guest is Dr. Steve Bryan, professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. The book is called The Visible Word of the Unseen God, Reading John Among Rivals, Old and New. Obviously, there will be a link down below so you can go and pick up the book and check it out for yourself. I think we need to do this again. I feel like there are a lot more threads that you and I could be pulling on on uh John and other aspects of the Gospels in the New Testament as well. So I hope this is not our last conversation like this, but thanks for jumping in and processing John with me.

SPEAKER_00 15:38

Thank you very much, Matt. Enjoyed it.