The Fourth Gospel is simple and yet the most theologically dense, literarily sophisticated, and historically debated text in the New Testament. Its Prologue echoes Genesis, the Prayer in Chapter 17 as well as the entire Gospel. The Glory and Glorification in John are essential.
Not until Dunn advocated "Let John be John" to begin new trends adhering to the Gospel as is, John as a book was questionable in various ways: Not until Dunn advocated "Let John be John" to begin new trends adhering to the Gospel as is, John as a book was for over 100 years questionable in various ways: its historical reliability; The Synoptic Disconnect; The Voice and Christology of Jesus; Hellenistic and Gnostic Accusations; The Paradigm Shift; as well as the Fatherhood of God.
This study exists to select coordinated motifs and synthesize them into an overall duality Fatherhood and Family which encompasses all duaities in John as Minear suggested:
"Returning now to the problem of interpreting the three negations of John 1:13, I admit that it remains uncertain whether the narrator consciously referred to the Genesis curses in describing the second family. What is certain, however, is his double desire: to stress the significance of the birth of God's children through the grace of the Logos, and to contrast that birth to the birth of another family. Each family became visible through the doing of its father's will, through sharing in the works of that father. The unity of each family in this conjunction of wills is reflected in the three petitions of Jesus' prayer to his Father on the night of his arrest. He requested that his followers might become "one as we are one" (17:11, 21); that they might be made holy in the truth of God's word (17:17); and that they might be protected from the evil one, the devil (17:15). Those three petitions are interdependent, in that the fulfillment of each requires the fulfillment of the other two. Such fulfillment would restore the glory and the love that existed before the world was created (17:5, 24)—before that world was polluted by the devil, who had been a liar and a murderer from the beginning. In the name of Jesus, the evangelist thus gave the greatest possible importance to God's action in protecting his own children from the evil one.By attributing such ultimate significance to membership in the two families, John by implication radically reduced the significance of other matters to which readers often attribute too much significance. Consider, for example, the endless discussions of the various titles used for Jesus in the Gospel. Within the scope of a single chapter (chap. 9), the narrative applies a wide range of terms to Jesus: "this man" (v. 29), "the man called Jesus" (v. 11), "rabbi" (v. 2), "a prophet" (v. 17), "the Messiah" (v. 22), "from God" (v. 33). The narrator appears to accept all these terms as true, rejecting only the term "sinner" (v. 24). But more important, none of them was considered necessary in the healing of the blind man; he needed only to obey the command and to accept his being "sent." It was the work of God that confirmed Jesus' action as justifying the titles "the light of the world" (v. 5) and "Son of Man" (v. 35). As Jesus himself made clear, to recognize the works of God was more important than to use the right title for Jesus (10:38); such works indicated that Jesus had come from God (9:33) as the pretemporal word of God: "Let there be light" (9:5; Gen. 1:3).According to this narrator, the truth that Jesus had come from God and returned to God diminished the importance of human concern about both the "now" and the "when" of that advent and of that return. This Gospel does not have or need a birth story. "Where he was born" becomes a topic for discussion but is ultimately of little importance. So, too, the mystery of "where I am going" could not be understood in advance, even by his closest disciples (chap. 14); it was this "where" that became a dominant motif in the story of his appearances. The Gospel viewed the Passion as necessary; Jesus' commission would be fulfilled only when he was "lifted up from the earth." But the truth of his return to the Father, and his assurance that his disciples would be "where I am," tended to displace their confusion over the mode of his glorification. So faith itself, along with birth from above, came to depend on recognitions that Jesus had come from God and was going to God—both movements oriented around the reference to God's Logos through whom all things came into being (1:3). Because he had gone to the Father, his presence with them as Counselor-Advocate-Spirit enabled them to do even greater works than he had done. The unity of this family signified that the direct link between "there" and "here" diminished the importance of all other measurements of space and time."
