it corresponds neither with the immediate unity of the Son with the Father (§ 143, c, d), which comes out so strongly in the self-testimony of Jesus, to think of the relation of both being mediated by the Spirit; nor could the apostle, with his tendency to point out the marks of His original glory as Logos given in the historical life of the Son of God (note a), have any interest in this to follow further the traces of His truly human life in the incarnate One, which made Him require such constant activity of the Spirit. Hence these doctrinal elements, that rest on a true remembrance of the words of the Baptist, or that have come to him by tradition, continue with him in a sort of isolation,-an isolation which almost makes them appear as a contradiction to the ideas current with Him, while they yet, although not expressly brought about by them, involve to his consciousness no such contradiction.

CHAPTER II.

THE SALVATION IN CHRIST.

§ 146. Christ the Life of the World.

As the Messiah, Jesus brings the highest saving blessing, which John designates as eternal life, and likes best to think of as now present (a). But eternal life consists in the living contemplative knowledge of God, as Christ has had it from eternity (b). To bring life to the world by means of this knowledge has He been sent, and He therefore calls Himself the bread of life (c). But He also imparts this life by His quickening word, whose contents form the powerfully energetic revelation of God (d).

(a) Even with John, Jesus begins with the proclamation that the kingdom of God is at hand, and it is now therefore important to fulfil the conditions under which only can one have a share in it (iii. 3, 5; comp. § 13). If the idea of the kingdom of God, as the saving blessing brought by Christ, falls latterly entirely in abeyance, and instead of it the idea of

life, or of eternal life, comes uniformly in its place,1 then this latter, even in the oldest tradition of Jesus' words, designates the salvation prepared for the individual in the kingdom of God (§ 34, b); and it corresponds simply to the tendency of John's writings, directed as these are to the subjective Christian life (xx. 31; I. i. 3, 4), if, in the words of Christ, as in the Epistles, the highest blessing is brought forward exclusively from the side on which it is realized in the individual. But as in the synoptical preaching of Jesus the kingdom of God is not only future, but even already present (§ 15, c), so with John also is the eternal life, which the Messiah came to bring, not only a blessing of the other and future life, but also of this and the present life. The believer has eternal life (iii. 36, v. 24, vi. 47, 54, xx. 31; I. v. 12, 13), He has already passed from death to life (v. 24; I. iii. 14). Bodily death cannot stop the continuance of this life (xi. 25), for that life death is as though it did not exist (vi. 50, 51, 58, viii. 51, 52, xi. 26); the resurrection is no more the condition, but the result of that life (vi. 40, 54). What has till now been the highest promise of God has now been fulfilled (I. ii. 25). This idealism, which beholds the ideal already realized in the present, we have learned to know in manifold forms as the characteristic aspect of the method of apostolic teaching (§ 51, c; 96, b; 104, d; 117, d), but it is implied in the speciality of the Johannean theology (§ 141, c), that it here comes into stronger prominence than anywhere else.2

(b) If John had found in the contemplative knowledge of Christ, and of the revelation of God given in Him, the highest

1 Only in xviii. 36 does Jesus speak of His kingdom, which is not of a worldly kind; but here there is no thought of the Messianic kingdom, but He has only in view thereby an explanation for the Gentile, in which sense Jesus might call Himself a king in a spiritual kingdom, which comprehends all friends of the truth. By John, wń in the absolute sense, and an aivos, are constantly used promiscuously (iii. 36, v. 39, 40, vi. 53, 54; I. i. 2, iii. 14, 15, v. 11-13), as § 34, b (comp. in Paul, § 65, d).

2 Since Col. iii. 3 is quite different (comp. § 104, d), so only in John is eternal life, according to its true nature, thought of as beginning here, and it forms thereby the specific saving blessing. What Peter proclaimed as the second birth to hope (§ 50, b), what James as the engrafting of the perfect law (§ 52, b), what Paul as justification and new creation by the grace of God (§ 82, 84), what the Epistle to the Hebrews as the ratios in the New Covenant (§ 123), in order to characterize the salvation come with Christ for the individual, that appears in John as the bestowal of the highest blessing by Him, eternal life.

blessedness (§ 141, b), then must he too see in it the eternal life, which the Messiah had come to bring. That is eternal life, to know the only true God, and Jesus Christ His messenger (xvii. 3), he says in a passage where it was important to show by a convincing explanation of the eternal life how the communication of it (ver. 2) must tend to the glory of God (ver. 1). This highest saving blessing was not only not yet given to the world, it was not even as yet once made known to it. It is true that elsewhere the thought is not foreign to the New Testament, that in the vision of God the highest blessedness of eternal life lies in the future world (§ 34, b; 99, b; 126, d; 132, d); but there was as yet awanting any view to show how eternal blessed life was given with this vision of God. But now the Son of God was come, who possessed this highest good; for He had said of Himself, that the Father had given to Him to have life in Himself, as He Himself only had it in Himself (v. 26, vi. 57). As an eternal life was this life made known to the eye-witnesses of His earthly walk (I. i. 2: Cwn épavepwon . . καὶ ἀπαγγέλλομεν ὑμῖν τὴν ζωὴν τὴν αἰώνιον), as He had testified of it as a life from the very beginning (ô v ảπ' ȧpxns: ver. 1), and therefore also as a life not to be lost, and as a blessed life, as it was led in living fellowship with the Father (Ts v Tрòs тòν Tатéρа: ver. 2; comp. John i. 1, 2); but what was the essential contents of this life is clear from this, that He had again and again pointed back to this, how He had beheld God in His original existence with the Father, and He traced His peculiar knowledge of God back to this beholding Him (§ 144, a). But even in His earthly life all

3 In xvii. 6 the iyá os idižara of ver. 4 is resumed by iqavipwrá σov rò ovoμa, so that here too the glory of God consists in bringing about the true knowledge of God. Since eternal life is undoubtedly thought of as spiritual, it was natural for John throughout to regard this moment in the spiritual life as the real nature of it, a moment which, according to his individuality, generally appeared to him as the ruling central-point of the total spiritual life, and in which he had experienced the deepest deliverance from his spiritual needs through Christ, had found and laid hold on the highest salvation.

Ordinarily the "hypostatized" (?) wń in I. i. 1 is understood of Christ Himself by a reference to John i. 1; but ver. 1 by no means proves this, but rather the opposite, since the words there do not refer to the person, but to what (") was experimentally made known to the eye-witnesses of the earthly life of Christ in and about this life. But this is nothing else than the true eternal life which

the blessedness of the eternal life seemed already realized. A life in uninterrupted fellowship with His Father, whose highest satisfaction was the fulfilling of His will (iv. 34); a life full of peace (xiv. 27) and joy (xv. 11, xvii. 13), such as the world. cannot give nor take away (comp. xvi. 33); a life which is ended by a going home to the Father, as it began with a coming down from heaven,-that was eternal blessed life even here. And what formed the deepest essence of this life could be but the one thing, which He always testified He had had before all others-His matchless, intuitive, perfect knowledge of God.

(c) Christ had come as the Messiah to impart this highest good to men. God has given us eternal life, and that life is in His Son (I. v. 11). Christ Himself, therefore, calls Himself the life, i.e. the life-giver (xi. 25, xiv. 6; comp. I. v. 20); and the apostle, who had recognised Him as the incarnate Word, calls Him the Word needful for life (I. i. 1: ὁ λόγος τῆς ζωῆς), because it cannot give life without the

from the beginning was in Him (John i. 4), which exhibited therefore His original existence with the Father not as a restful quiescent, but as a living activity. Only the constant movement of His life did not consist in this, that He sought to take up everything which separated and distinguished Him from God into a unity with Him, as Baur, p. 352, philosophizes into it; but in this, that He beheld the Father, as the Father beholds Himself. It is characteristic of John's spiritual tendency, that while elsewhere in the Scriptures the living activity of God is the expression for His powerful activity in the world, here the living Father (vi. 57), according to the analogy of that which elsewhere the apostle regarded as the deepest nature of the true life, is in the first place He who beholds Himself in the depths of His self-consciousness. The true life is even a spiritual one, which cannot be thought of without this self-consciousness. But while a Paul brings forward especially the side on the divine яvμ, according to which it is simply the effectual power (§ 84, a, footnote 4), it appears here especially from its intellectual side, which is, to be sure, conceived by John throughout in immediate unity with the practical (comp. § 141, d).

5 From this also it is clear that the uros can apply only to Christ, since nowhere else is God called (wn. God has life in Himself (v. 26, vi. 57), but the Mediator of life can only be Christ, of whom it is said in the beginning of the verse that He is come to give us the power to know God, in which eternal life consists. That was, indeed, the object of His mission, that He might communicate to the world life (I. iv. 9; comp. John vi. 40, x. 10) in Him (iii. 15: read in air) or in His name (xx. 31), i.e. if we know Him as He whom His name designates (Χριστός è viòs Tov Əsaũ; comp. § 145, a), we have eternal life. That was, indeed, the full Messianic power given Him (comp. § 143, b) to give eternal life to all flesh (xvii. 2), and this life consists in the knowledge of the one true God mediated by Him (ver. 3).

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mediator of revelation. As now the simplest means of nourishment which supports the physical life is bread, Christ calls Himself the bread necessary for life (vi. 35, 48: ó äρтos TŶs Cwns), or the bread which gives life to the world (vi. 33, 50, 58). But He is this, because He is the perfect revelation of God (§ 143, d); because the Father is seen in Him (xiv. 9), and known (viii. 19); because we have the Father in Him (I. ii. 23; II. 9), who can be seen and possessed as the highest good in Him. In this way is the seeing of God possible to the world, a seeing which the Son once had with the Father, and which includes in itself eternal life, the highest blessedness. The true knowledge of God, in which this life consists, presupposes throughout such a seeing of God (xiv. 7, 17; I. iii. 6). This seeing is not a higher stage of knowledge (Frommann, p. 223); according to § 141, b, John knows only of an intuitive knowledge, which is a spiritual seeing, and this knowledge can therefore be designated as the true life, just because it is no theoretical knowledge, but a living, i.e. an effectual grasping of the highest; according to its nature, the whole life is a determinative object of knowledge. A pretended knowledge of God, which does not regulate the life, is a lie (I. ii. 4), it in truth does not exist (I. iii. 6, iv. 8; III. 11); only in its working on the moral life does one know the true knowledge (I. ii. 3), and that one has attained in it, and with it, the true life out of death (I. iii. 14).

(d) But the Son, sent by the Father, is not a dead organ of revelation, not a means of life such as (physical) bread, which can indeed work life, but has not itself life in itself; He is the living bread (vi. 51), inasmuch as the living Father has given Him, with a view to His mission, to have life in Himself (vi. 57, v. 26). He Himself possessed the life of the knowledge of God, which He had to communicate by His self-manifestation (note c), and He could therefore make known God's name (xvii. 6, 26). He needed but to com

6 Even according to the oldest tradition, Jesus, by His appearance, gives satisfaction and quickening to the world (§ 21, d; comp. § 46, c); and if this is there found in the moral renewal wrought by the saving preaching of Jesus, we will see that here the true knowledge of God communicated by Christ directly settles and renews the whole life.