Browsing by Subject "Christology"

The New Testament book known as the epistle to the Hebrews contains little obvious reference to Jesus' resurrection. Modern interpreters generally account for this relative silence by noting that the author's soteriological and christological concerns have led him to emphasize Jesus' death and exaltation while ignoring, spiritualizing, or even denying his resurrection. In particular, the writer's metaphorical appeal to the Yom Kippur sacrifice, with its dual emphasis on the slaughter of the victim and the presentation of the victim's blood by the high priest, allows him to explain the salvific significance of Jesus' death and exaltation. The crucifixion can be likened to the slaughter of the victim, while Jesus' exaltation in heaven can be likened to the high priest entering the holy of holies. In this way the cross can be understood as an atoning sacrifice. Such a model leaves little room for positive or distinct reflection on the soteriological or christological significance of the resurrection.

This study argues that the soteriology and high-priestly Christology the author develops depend upon Jesus' bodily resurrection and ascension into heaven. The work begins with a survey of positions on Jesus' resurrection in Hebrews. I then present a case for the presence and role of Jesus' bodily resurrection in the text. First, I demonstrate that the writer's argument in Heb 1-2 for the elevation of Jesus above the angelic spirits assumes that Jesus has his humanity--his blood and flesh--with him in heaven. Second, I show that in Heb 5-7 the writer identifies Jesus' resurrection to an indestructible life as the point when Jesus became a high priest. Third, I explain how this thesis makes coherent the author's consistent claims in Heb 8-10 that Jesus presented his offering to God in heaven. I conclude that Jesus' crucifixion is neither the place nor the moment of atonement for the author of Hebrews. Rather, in keeping with the equation in the Levitical sacrificial system of the presentation of blood to God with the presentation of life, Jesus obtained atonement where and when the writer says--when he presented himself in his ever-living, resurrected humanity before God in heaven. Jesus' bodily resurrection is, therefore, the hinge around which the high-priestly Christology and soteriology of Hebrews turns.

Christianity in South Korea has long been touted the one success story in Asia, dubbed the “Korean miracle,” whose traction and trajectory of explosive growth are unanimously traced back to the Protestant missionaries who arrived in numbers at the end of the nineteenth century. Among them, one monumental figure towers over all: the Presbyterian Reverend Horace G. Underwood (1859-1916), widely considered the single most important and influential western missionary ever to set foot on Korea, in large part due to his extraordinary sacrificial love for the nation and the people of Korea.

As such, his theology and practice of missions represent a work of love from the missionary par excellence of Korea, who missiologically operated out of best intentions and overwhelming love for the natives. However, as this dissertation critiques, it is a work of love compromised by his racial imagination, not incidental to his missiology but at its core. Specifically, this dissertation theologically examines how race manifests and functions in Underwood’s missiology as a multifaceted pseudo- or anti-Christology. Hence, the story of Underwood is one in which his theology of mission problematically operated out of a thick and dynamic racialized Christology, even as he imagined he was espousing and performing the very teachings of Jesus, making it all the more ironic and tragic. At the core of such a false and faulty “Christology,” whiteness, with Underwood himself as its white masculine exemplar, as racially constructed and stabilized, unrelentingly seeks to usurp the Person and the Work of Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity. In this way, race as an anti-Christology with the white masculine posing as Christ functions as the missiological basis for his formation of a de facto white Korean Christianity.

The dissertation deconstructs and critiques Underwood’s racialized Christology in two parts. In Part I, I argue that Underwood’s missiological approach in making Koreans known through a comprehensive and comparative racial characterization presupposes a racialized doctrine of creation, whereby the white body, in lieu of Jesus, is deemed the revelation of full humanity (Chapter 1). What is more, in this doctrine, the white body positions itself also as the definitive judge of all humanity, and through its “all-seeing, all-knowing” judgment, the white body creates humanity anew, which in Underwood’s case meant re-creating Koreans as racialized modern subjects with a subjectivity posed to perform whiteness. As such, whiteness arrogates for itself Christ’s divine roles as the Judge and the Creator (Chapter 2).

In Part II, I shift to the heart of Underwood’s missiology: his racialized soteriology. I show that his argument for the missionary investment in Koreans is predicated on a racialized doctrine of salvation, which designates the white body, as opposed to Jesus, as the very incarnation of the elect, the very image of the saved (Chapter 3), along with the nation, as opposed to the church, as the body politic of the elect, with the emerging American empire the very image of the elect nation (Chapter 4). Moreover, in his racialized soteriology it is the white body who is the savior or the one electing, in place of Jesus, the true Elected One and Savior. Here, his racialized doctrines of creation and salvation come together in his re-creation of Korean religious subjectivity for the sake of saving the nation and the people of Korea. In this way, Underwood helps to establish a vision of racial nationalism for Korea that continues to shape the interaction between Christian practice and nationalist goals of well-being and progress in whiteness within Korea and in other parts of the world.

This dissertation argues that, for Luke, universal witness belongs within a broader claim about the identity of Israel’s Messiah. Framed by Luke 24:46-48 (and Acts 26:22-23), the book of Acts narratively construes the unfolding universality of the Christian movement as the unfolding of the universality of Jesus’ Lordship. The “Lukan Commission,” rooted in a prophetic promise, prefigures the role of Acts in narratively unfolding the identity of Jesus as πάντων κύριος (Acts 10:36).

Universal proclamation of salvation in Acts—implicitly by Jesus and explicitly by his witnesses—narratively realizes the universality of Jesus’ Lordship. Luke’s second volume reconfigures the narrative sense of “presence” and “activity” on the basis of Jesus’ exaltation to heaven and Lordship by the Spirit (cf. 2:17-36). Especially as the “word” spreads beyond Jerusalem and the Jewish people, the Lord Jesus’ influence on the unfolding of universal witness becomes pronounced.

Though the apostles receive Jesus’ commission, their outreach is generally restricted to Jews in Jerusalem. Not until the Cornelius incident (Acts 10:1-11:18) does the universal vision of Jesus’ commission (Luke 24:47; Acts 1:8) intersect with apostolic witness, which is why Luke gives the episode almost unparalleled emphasis (cf. 11:5-17; 15:7-11). In this respect, the event proves paradigmatic for Luke’s coordination of christological identity and universal witness, establishing Jesus’ messianic identity as “Lord of all” (10:36). The full scope of Jesus’ identity is what participants in witness must discover in their encounter with the (ethnically) “other” (ἀλλόφυλος).

This theological breakthrough lies behind Paul’s outreach in the Diaspora and finds expression in the makeup of the Syrian Antioch community (11:19-26; 13:1-3), itself the basis for Paul’s outreach to Jews and Gentiles everywhere. In endorsing Antioch’s ministry, Peter, James, and the Jerusalem believers “model” for unbelieving Jews the proper interpretation of the salvation of the Gentiles in relation to Israel’s hopes (Acts 15). Jesus’ identity as universal Lord helps explain Paul’s “turn” to the Gentiles (13:46; 18:6; 28:28) less as a result of Jewish rejection than as a fulfillment of the Messiah’s work as outlined in scripture (1:8; 13:47; 26:23). The receptivity of Gentiles to Paul’s preaching provokes Paul’s Jewish audiences even as it models proper receptivity to the universality of Jesus’ Lordship. The present study confirms that for Luke mission is in part a means for expanding the witnesses’ comprehension of the scope of Jesus’ Lordship in light of God’s work among the Gentiles. Luke’s focus on the response of Jewish believers to this emerging reality in Acts reconfigures notions of χριστός in light of the (narrative) expansion of his identity as πάντων κύριος.

The present study represents an attempt at reading the views on Christ of fourth-century Syriac writer Aphrahat, author of 23 Demonstrations, within the context of coeval developments in Christian thought, especially in Syria. Given the breadth of the set of questions posed by the topic, these pages are not conceived as an exhaustive treatment, but rather as a series of incursions into a complicated terrain. The first chapter shows how scholars studying Aphrahat's Christology have often worked, more or less outspokenly, on the basis of confessional and dogmatic assumptions. I will argue for a change in this regard. The second chapter discusses the Syriac version of the so-called "Eunomian interpolation" found in Pseudoclementine Recognitions 3.2-11, and attested in Latin and Syriac. Through a work of contrasting and comparing the two versions of the text, I will examine the strategies of which the Syriac translator availed himself to moderate the anti-Nicene peaks of the Greek original. The peculiar characteristics of this translation need to be understood, I will suggest, as a token of the livelihood and conflictiveness of Syriac Christianity around the half of the fourth century. Against the same backdrop, presenting competing models for understanding the figure of Christ, I will propose that we read the complex Christological speculation developed by Aphrahat in his Dem. 17. The third chapter of the study interprets the seventh paragraph of this Demonstration, recounting the story of the creation of Adam in a highly unusual manner, as a coherent Christological discourse, rather than a mere digression. In that section we witness, I will argue, a synthetic integration of Adamitic Christology with the scheme of the prolatio of the Logos, and a dynamic engagement, on the part of the Persian Sage, with contemporary theological debates. The study does not reach overall conclusions about the tenets of Aphrahat's Christology, rather presenting itself as an invitation to take this author out of the intellectual isolation in which he has long been kept by scholars.

This dissertation contributes to contemporary scholarship on the historical and theological significance of Christian iconodulia—the appropriate veneration of holy persons, places, and things. By accentuating the economic aspect of the Byzantine image debates it illustrates how the concerns raised by those defending the holy images in the eighth and ninth centuries proved to be precisely the issues that would accompany the resurgence of Christian iconoclasm in the Protestant Reformation. What should be clearer from the standpoint of this study is that debates concerning the legitimacy of the production and veneration of holy images touch on the fundamental claims of the Christian faith as at the heart of the theological defense is the mystery of God-made-man and the implications of this mystery for how God continues to seek union through his own body, that is, in the sacrifice of the Eucharist and in the Church itself. Attending closely to the economic aspect of the theological defense of iconodulia, we can see that the “economic appropriation” of the incarnation funds theological claims about the ontological stability, or unicity, of the Church. That is to say, to speak about the history and theology of iconodulia in the Christian tradition one must acknowledge the ecclesiological claims inherent to the orthodox defense. Therefore, this dissertation also contributes to contemporary ecumenical discussions and challenges some of the presumptions at the heart of that discussion.

This dissertation contributes to contemporary scholarship on the historical and theological significance of Christian iconodulia—the appropriate veneration of holy persons, places, and things. By accentuating the economic aspect of the Byzantine image debates it illustrates how the concerns raised by those defending the holy images in the eighth and ninth centuries proved to be precisely the issues that would accompany the resurgence of Christian iconoclasm in the Protestant Reformation. What should be clearer from the standpoint of this study is that debates concerning the legitimacy of the production and veneration of holy images touch on the fundamental claims of the Christian faith as at the heart of the theological defense is the mystery of God-made-man and the implications of this mystery for how God continues to seek union through his own body, that is, in the sacrifice of the Eucharist and in the Church itself. Attending closely to the economic aspect of the theological defense of iconodulia, we can see that the “economic appropriation” of the incarnation funds theological claims about the ontological stability, or unicity, of the Church. That is to say, to speak about the history and theology of iconodulia in the Christian tradition one must acknowledge the ecclesiological claims inherent to the orthodox defense. Therefore, this dissertation also contributes to contemporary ecumenical discussions and challenges some of the presumptions at the heart of that discussion.

First Peter uses the metaphor of new birth as a way to communicate what happens when someone becomes Christian. While I am not the first to suggest that in this extended new birth metaphor Christ is presented as the nascent Christian’s mother, I aim in this dissertation to both renew the argument for this conclusion and to explore further how this metaphor impacts the soteriology and Christology of the letter. The chief methodology employed is to examine a broad range of references to mothers (both “real” and metaphorical) in texts popular around the time of First Peter.

The introduction orients the reader to the metaphor theory that undergirds the remainder of the dissertation, provides an overview of basic Einleitungsfragen concerning to First Peter, and summarizes the contributions of previous scholarship to this question. The first chapter examines two aspects of the text of First Peter. Firstly, it treats basic philological and intertextual questions concerning every verse that mentions new birth directly, or mentions something closely associated with birth, such as blood, seed, or milk, also situating these verses in their immediate literary context. Secondly, it considers the broader ecosystem of metaphors that co-exist in First Peter, especially soteriological and Christological metaphors.

In the second chapter, I turn to medical literature concerning human reproduction, from the Hippocratic corpus to Soranus. The third chapter treats Greco-Roman texts featuring mothers from outside the corpus of medical writings. The fourth chapter begins by repeating the study of the previous two chapters with Jewish texts. I then treat the use of parental metaphors in Paul, whose writings I take to have been a source for First Peter. Paul uses maternal imagery for apostolic work, and I show that Peter has a general tendency to take Paul’s apostolic language and use it to describe Christ. Finally in chapter four, I read First Peter comparatively with other early Christian writing roughly contemporary with First Peter that uses birth imagery. The fifth chapter continues the strategy of comparative reading, turning to much later Christian texts that employ maternal imagery for Christ in more explicit and developed ways.

Starting with chapter two, in each chapter I explore how the material treated so far can enrich a reading of First Peter. In the synthetic conclusion, I draw these threads together, gathered under four headings. Firstly, the maternal metaphor presents Christ and the Christian as being in a close, intimate relationship, in which Christ plays both a protective and a disciplinary role. Secondly, recognizing the maternal metaphor helps to give a more nuanced account of what it means to say that Christians are brought to resemble Christ. Children were seen as resembling their mothers, but various texts put different emphases on “nature versus nurture” in terms of how this resemblance is wrought. This allows readers to understand their resemblance to Christ as more or less inchoate. Thirdly, various ways in which motherhood was viewed as a form of suffering that led to honor or health allow the maternal metaphor to communicate how Christ passed through suffering to heavenly glory. Finally, the infantilization of the readers and promise of resemblance to Christ that are part of the new birth metaphor help make sense of Peter’s ethics.

Christology and soteriology in First Peter are ultimately at the service of the letter’s paraenetic aims. The maternal metaphor is but one thread in an expansive Christological / soteriological tapestry. Paying more attention to this thread, though, has surprisingly rich pay-off for interpreting the letter.

To exist racially "in-between," has been characterized as a tragic existence in the modern world. The loneliness and isolation of these lives have given rise to the term the "tragic mulatto." The dissertation Mulatto Theology: Race, Discipleship, and Interracial Existence theologically interprets mulatto lives making visible and interrogating the wider reality of racialized lives in modernity. The mulatto's body is significant in that it discloses what is masked in modern (and particularly white) identities.

Culture, identities (individual and communal) are not only interconnected, but they are mixtures where peoples become presenced in the lives and practices of other "alien" peoples. This mixture requires reflection upon the formation of all identities, and the ways these identities become visible within the world. Given this arc of identity any reflection upon Christian identity must articulate itself within the tensions of these identities and the practices that mark such identities within the world.

In examining the formation and performance of mulatto bodies this dissertation suggests these bodies are theologically important for modern Christians and theological reflection in particular. Namely, the mulatto's body becomes the site for re-imagining Christian life as a life lived "in-between." The primary locus of this re-imagination is the body of Christ.

A re-examination of theological reflection and Scripture regarding his person and work display his character as mulatto, or the God-man. But not only is his identity mulatto, but his person also describes the nature of his work, his re-creation of humanity. So

understood Christian bodies can be construed as "interracial" bodies -- bodies of flesh and Spirit that disrupt modern formations of race. The Christian body points to a communal reality where hybridity is no longer tragic, but rather constitutive of Christian discipleship. This new, hybrid and "impure" way of existing witnesses to God's redemptive work in the world.

To say that the first Gospel is about Jesus is to state what any reader knows from the most cursory glance at Matthew's narrative. Yet the scholarly discourse about Jesus' identity in Matthew reveals a fundamental confusion about how to articulate the identity of Jesus vis-à-vis "God" in the narrative. Not infrequently, for example, scholars assert that Matthew portrays Jesus as the "expression" or "embodiment" of Israel's God, but those same scholars - often leaving opaque the theological content of such descriptors - assert that Jesus is not therefore to be "identified" or "equated" with God; Jesus is "less than God," God's agent "through" whom God works. The result is a significant lack of perspicuity regarding the proper articulation of Jesus' identity in Matthew's Gospel.

The present work attempts to bring greater clarity to the articulation of Jesus' identity in Matthew by attending more precisely to two unique linguistic patterns woven deeply into the entire narrative's presentation of Jesus, namely, Matthew's use of προσκυνέω and his paternal-filial idiom. We turn first to Matthew's extensive use of the word προσκυνέω. Such language constitutes an important part of Israel's liturgical-linguistic repertoire - used often, for example, for the "worship" of Israel's God in Deuteronomy and the Psalms - and Matthew clearly shares that theological grammar (e.g., 4:9-10; cf. 22:37). At the same time, προσκυνέω serves as a Christological Leitwort in Matthew's narrative. While the word's meaning of course depends on its context - it need not mean "worship" in every instance - Matthew uses it ten times for Jesus and in all portions of the narrative; it constitutes the most basic (proper) response to Jesus. Matthew's reservation of the word προσκυνέω for these two figures - Israel's Lord God and Jesus - and his pervasive use of it for the latter suggests it may help render more intelligible the expression of Jesus' identity vis-à-vis "God" in the first Gospel.

We begin our study of προσκυνέω, therefore, by surveying its history of usage in Matthew's cultural encyclopedia, which helps sensitize us to the linguistic "training," so to speak, in which Matthew participates. Since the narrative, however, is the actual discourse in which the meaning of words is determined, I then go on to consider the particular contours of Matthew's appropriation of προσκυνέω language in the whole narrative. Not only does Matthew use προσκυνέω frequently for Jesus - unlike Mark and Luke - but more importantly, he employs it repeatedly in Christologically provocative and literarily strategic ways. At the climactic moment of the magi's visit, for example, the magi's action is expressed this way: καὶ ἐλθόντες εἰς τὴν οἰκίαν εἶδον τὸ παιδίον μετὰ Μαρίας τῆς μητρὸς αὐτοῦ (2:11). Likewise, at the climactic moment of Jesus' temptation, those same words reappear in Satan's mouth - ταῦτα σοι πάντα δώσω, ἐὰν πεσὼν προσκυνήσῃς μοι - only to be rebuffed by Jesus in the words of Israel's most basic confession: κύριον τὸν θεὸν σου προσκυνήσεις (4:9-10). I argue that Matthew has carefully shaped these accounts to reflect one another in a number of significant details, such that the reader is left with an apparent incongruity - Jesus receives from the magi what he declares belongs to Israel's God.

Several literary phenomena further confirm that these initial appearances of προσκύνησις are not incidental to Matthew's theological grammar. The sharpness of the incongruity between 2:1-12 and 4:8-10 is intensified cumulatively as Matthew repeatedly deploys προσκυνέω language in a way that re-activates his earlier uses. In his next use of προσκυνέω - after the temptation - the leper falls down in προσκύνησις before Jesus, whom he addresses as κύριε (8:2-4). Along with other important elements, Matthew has added/adapted these words to/from his Markan source as well as "intratextually" reflected Jesus' words at his recent temptation - only the κύριος receives προσκύνησις (see also 9:18; 15:25; 20:20). In such accounts, I argue, the content of the characters' actions remains ambiguous - προσκύνησις need not mean "worship" at the story level - but Matthew has nonetheless made a number of moves at the literary and lexical levels that make his προσκυνέω motif reverberate loudly for the reader in a christologically significant manner; the προσκύνησις offered to Jesus reflects that which Israel offered to its God. Importantly, similar patterns obtain not only in the details and literary settings of various pericopae, but also in the narrative's broader shape.

For instance, Matthew - uniquely among the synoptists - brings three episodes in a row into close correspondence linguistically and thematically, which come together to underscore the question of true and false "worship" (14:33 [προσκυνέω]; 15:9 [σέβω;]; 15:25 [προσκυνέω]). The "worship" of the two "outer" episodes turns explicitly on the question of Jesus' identity (14:33; 15:25), thereby setting in bold relief the "inner" episode that highlights Israel's "vain worship" (15:9). As another example, the magi's action in the narrative's introduction of Jesus is mirrored in its corresponding literary frame - the women grasp the risen Jesus' feet and offer him προσκύνησις, as do the eleven disciples (28:9; 17). What Satan requested of Jesus - only to be refused on theological grounds (4:8-10) - Jesus receives.

Finally, I consider how Matthew closely connects the προσκύνησις offered to Jesus in the narrative's frame with a decisive episode at the center of the narrative, 14:22-33. There, the disciples render Jesus προσκύνησις as "Son of God" (θεοῦ υἱός) after Peter repeatedly addresses him as the "Lord" in whose "hand" is the power to "save" from the mighty waters. I argue extensively that 14:22-33 - both in its literary form and in its sustained appropriation of OT imagery for YHWH - compels the reader to see Jesus, the filial κύριος as the recipient of the προσκύνησις Israel reserved for κύριος ὁ θεός. How Matthew can make this christological move while affirming Israel's basic commitment to the one God, I argue, turns on the filial language that comes to expression in the disciples' dramatic confession. Matthew, that is, reshapes the articulation of Israel's Lord God around the relation of the filial and paternal κύριος.

It is to that filial and paternal language, therefore, that we turn as the capstone of our discussion of Matthew's theological grammar. I contend that the narrative as a whole reflects the basic logic of 14:22-33; to tell the story of Israel's κύριος ὁ θεός is to tell the eschatologically-climactic story of the filial κύριος who rules and saves. I examine closely several passages - and their literary contexts - that serve seminal roles in Matthew's theological grammar, tracing how each brings Father and Son together in mutually constitutive relationship around their identity as κύριος (e.g., 22:41-46; 3:1-17; 11:1-12:8; 23:8-10; 23:37-24:2). I further trace the pattern of Matthew's filial and paternal language, demonstrating the ubiquitous christological shape to Matthew's paternal idiom; the identity of "God" in Matthew cannot be articulated apart from this particular Father-Son relation. Finally, I conclude the study by considering the close relation between Matthew's Emmanuel motif and his filial grammar (1:23; 18:19-20; 28:19-20); the Son is the filial repetition of the Father, his immanent presence among the people whom he saves (1:21; 2:6).

As a work of Christian dogmatic theology, this dissertation proceeds from the primary theological claim that human existence in time is determined by the incarnation, passion, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. It also examines how the predominant accounts of time in the modern West have been affected by, and produced by, claims of scientific authority. The implications of these accounts are not only a matter of abstract doctrinal and philosophical reflection. Instead, they have had, and continue to have, concrete ramifications for human life together. They have been death-dealing rather than life-giving, characterized by a set of temporal pathologies that participate at the deepest level in marking some lives as expendable.

There are four particular pathologies that this project addresses in turn. The first is the mystification of theology by questions of human origins, especially as those questions are addressed by figures of scientific authority. The second is the problem of progress and politicized eschatology, in which securing a desired vision of the future becomes a human project. The third is temporal distancing, in which some human beings are marked as temporally retrograde or outside of history. The fourth, and final, problem addressed is the Hegelian perspective outside of time from which time is evaluated.

This dissertation offers a set of Christological temporal recalibrations through a reading of Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth, highlighting the ways that both figures rejected an approach to time that is not coincidentally intertwined with a racialized account of history, and with the co-opting of Christianity by the modern Western state. It also suggests how the liturgical calendar may, and may not, provide Christians with the formational resources to think differently about their own time, and about their neighbors.

The canonical gospels are each concerned to present the significance of Jesus vis-à-vis the Jewish tradition. Yet the Gospel of John exhibits a particularly strained relationship with Judaism, especially through its frequent description of Jesus’s opponents as “the Jews,” its presentation of numerous hostile exchanges between Jesus and characters described as “Jews,” and its application of significant Jewish imagery (e.g., “the temple of his body,” “I am the true vine”) to the person of Jesus rather than to traditional Jewish institutions or figures. This dissertation argues that the Gospel of John presents Jesus as the one through whom the Jewish tradition realizes its eschatological hopes in continuity with the stories and symbols of its past. As the Fourth Gospel presents its theological vision for the significance of Jesus, it also criticizes the theological vision of a rival group—that is, “the Jews.” In the Fourth Gospel, “the Jews” represents an alternative—and for John, a rival—theological vision for how the Jewish tradition might live into its future in continuity with its past. Therefore, John’s affirmations of many aspects of the Jewish tradition are bound up with its negation of how another segment of the tradition would construe those same features of the tradition.

Methodologically, this study attends to how the narrative of John characterizes Jesus as the fulfillment of particular Jewish hopes and expectations, and also as the narrative of John states (or implies) the shortcomings of Jesus’s opponents insofar as they fail to bring the Jewish tradition into more thorough continuity with its storied past and prophesied future. Attention to John’s narrative does not override the importance of its historical location, however. Questions that were directly relevant to Second Temple and late first-century Judaism about how the tradition might live faithfully are pertinent to the structure of the Fourth Gospel and its presentation of Jesus and “the Jews.” John narrates the fulfillment present in Jesus and the failure represented by “the Jews” by drawing on discourses that were accessible within late first-century Judaism. Historical context is thus essential for understanding the logic of John and the terms in which the Gospel tells its story. This study concludes that the Fourth Gospel is a late first-century narrative that takes up the question of how the Jewish tradition might move into its future in continuity with its past. Through the vehicle of the Gospel narrative, John argues for Jesus as the one who enables the people of God to experience the future toward which the Jewish tradition had long been oriented.

In John's Gospel, Jesus does not cite the Shema as the greatest commandment in the Law as he does in the Synoptic Gospels ("Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might" [Deut 6:4-5]; only Deut 6:5 appears in Matthew and Luke). This dissertation, however, argues that, rather than quoting the Shema, John incorporates it into his Christological portrait of Jesus' unity with the Father and of the disciples' unity with the Father, the Son, and one another.

This study employs historical-critical methodology and literary analysis to provide an exegetical interpretation of the key passages relevant to the Shema in John (John 5:1-47; 8:31-59; 10:1-42; 13:34; 14, 15, 17). After examining the Shema in its Deuteronomic context and throughout the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Jewish literature, the study considers how John's understanding of the divine unity has been shaped by some of these writings. Just as some of the OT prophets and authors such as Philo and Josephus interpret the Shema within their historical settings, John, in turn, interprets the divine unity within the socio-historical realities of his community.

According to John, Jesus does not violate the unity of God as it is proclaimed in the Shema. Rather, Jesus resides within that unity (10:30); he is therefore uniquely able to speak the words of God and perform the works of God. John depicts the unity of the Father, Jesus, and the disciples as the fulfillment of OT prophecies of restoration. Zechariah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel envision Israel as one people regathered in the Land, worshiping the one God of Israel (11:52; 17:11, 21-23). John filters this eschatological understanding of the Shema through a Christological lens: disciples of Jesus are the one flock gathered to the one Shepherd and testifying to Jesus' unity with the Father (10:16). The Farewell Discourse material confirms this thesis; Jesus models obedience to the Shema and also commands that he receive the love normally reserved for YHWH (14:15, 21, 23, 24). He issues his own commandment of love (13:34; 15:12), which has far-ranging implications for John's view of the Mosaic Law.

This reading of the Shema coheres with the Martyn-Brown hypothesis that some Jewish leaders during the late first century excluded believers in Jesus from the synagogue. The author of the Fourth Gospel reverses the situation, composing a narrative of empowerment for his embattled community. His rendering of the Shema provides legitimation for the Christological claims of the Johannine community, while at the same time excluding unbelieving Jews from God's eschatological people. John's high Christology, intertwined with his expulsion of unbelieving Jews from Israel's covenantal life and eschatological hopes, constitutes a form of theological anti-Judaism which defies mitigation. The Johannine crucifixion and Prologue bear this out: "the Jews" reject Jesus' unity with the Father and thereby cut themselves off from the people of God (19:15; 1:11).

John's language has all-too-often been used in a pernicious manner against Jewish people in the post-biblical era. One of the aims of this study is to properly situate John's reinterpretation of the Shema in its social and historical setting and thereby to apprehend fully its anti-Jewish potential. In so doing, it sheds fresh light on the parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity and creates new opportunities for dialogue and reconciliation.

With the rise of the modern nation-state in recent centuries, "the people" has emerged as the most determinative concept of human community, the decisive imaginary for negotiating and producing human difference. It has become the primary basis for killing and the measure of life and death. John Howard Yoder sought to articulate the Christian political alternative in the face of the violence of modern peoplehood, a violence that cannot be understood apart from its anti-Jewishness. After expositing Yoder's account, I argue that it is inadequate insofar as it does not attend to God's election of Israel. I then trace the rise of modern peoplehood from "the West," particularly in the case of the people of the United States, in order to expose both the peculiarly Christian racism that has informed it and the key trope of "new Israel" for the imagination of political independence and exceptionalism. Following this historicization and analysis of modern peoplehood, I build critically on Karl Barth's account of the elect people of God in order to offer a Christian understanding that can subvert the violent, racist tendencies of modern political formations and embody a peaceable alternative in the midst of them. I sustantiate my Christian account of peoplehood as determined by God's election of Israel in Messiah with readings of key passages in the Tanakh/Old Testament, the Gospel of Matthew, and the Epistle to the Romans.