An Unconventional God– Part Twenty One

Last updated on: December 9, 2020 at 1:46 am by Ben Witherington

An Unconventional God– Part Twenty One 2020-10-28T17:50:49-04:00 Ben Witherington

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BEN: With all this talk about the blasphemy of the Spirit, I kept waiting and waiting for you to deal with Jesus’ trial or hearing before Caiaphas and his tearing of his robes. What I find striking about that story, perhaps especially in Mark, is that Jesus admitting that he is the messiah is not the blasphemy. Jews expected a Davidic messianic figure that would be a human being. Claiming to be him might be delusional but it was not blasphemy, it was not making a claim to divine status. The blasphemy comes when Jesus suggests he is the future coming Son of Man who will judge these judges when he comes, a Son of Man whom Dan. 7 says is to be worshipped and rule forever. That is what was the straw that breaks the high priest’s back, and causes him to tear his robes. Comments?

JACK: The high priest failed to acknowledge who Jesus was. That, in a way, is blasphemy. The irony is that the high priest blasphemes by judging Jesus a blasphemer. Even in retrospect, it is hard to see the difficult final days of Jesus as the lifting of the son of man in Daniel 7—but that, of course, is the work of faith. That, in fact, is the work of the Spirit, the Paraclete, in the Fourth Gospel—to help believers to understand the days of Jesus’ life as exaltation. John doesn’t much use the language of son of man, but that seems to permeate his entire gospel. Crucifixion, Jesus knows, is glorification. His followers can’t grasp that until the Spirit, the Paraclete, comes to teach them this.

BEN: In your discussion of the Nick at Night story in John 3, you do not mention that most ancients didn’t believe in the concept of conversion or ‘being born again’ and Nicodemus represents such an opinion. So foreign to him is the notion of rebirth, he thinks Jesus is talking about crawling back into one’s mother’s womb and calling for womb service— another physical birth. But, as you say, Jesus is not talking about that. He’s talking about a spiritual rebirth. Where your discussion likely goes wrong is thinking the story is about Christian baptism, a common mistake. If one studies actual Jewish discussions about water used in a symbolic or literal way, water is a euphemism for semen, and also for the amniotic fluid around a baby, and so ‘birth out of water’ (as the Greek says ‘ek hudatos’) is about physical birth, and birth out of the Spirit is about spiritual birth— a birth from above. Jesus is saying that a person must be both physically born and spiritually reborn to enter the kingdom of God. Mere physical birth, mere ethnic extraction is not enough— one must be reborn of God (bearing in mind the parenthesis in John 1 that it is not by descent, or the will of the parent but by rebirth that one becomes a child of God). The distributive use of the preposition ‘ek’ where it is assumed it applies to the second noun as well as the first is not uncommon Greek usage. Jesus has already made clear that there is a distinction to be made between physical and spiritual births. Surely the Evangelist knew perfectly well that Jesus would not be having a discussion about Christian baptism with Nicodemus long before there was any Christian church. Birth out of water is physical birth, birth out of Spirit is the birth from above Nicodemus needs. Just to punctuate the matter, the very next chapter reminds us that Jesus water baptized no one, but some of his followers followed the practice of John, but then this Gospel also tells us some of Jesus’ disciples used to be John’s disciples.

I also do not find the analogy with Titus 3 all that helpful, not least because the Greek text doesn’t mention baptism, it mentions the washing of regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit. Yes, the later church fused and confused these two things. This does not mean that the writer of Titus did. The word washing is just a metaphor there for internal cleansing, not external ritual. (I’m following p. 139 of your discussion).

The bigger issue is whether the Evangelist really is as anachronistic as you are suggesting— reading back later practices and concerns into John 3. I would say he is not, and he makes clear the difference between then and later by reminding his audience that ‘back then they didn’t understand these things as they didn’t yet have the Holy Spirit’. Finally, there is indeed the same contrast in John 1.31-34 between John’s and Jesus’ baptism as in the Synoptics. John baptizes with water, but the one on whom he saw the Spirit fall, will be the one who baptizes with Spirit (and noting it does not say will baptize with Spirit through baptizing with water). The contrast between John’s and Jesus’ baptism is clear in John as well. On the other hand you may well be right that ‘in spirit and truth’ with the preposition ‘en’ (not ‘ek’) may not be distributive since the writer elsewhere calls the Spirit, the Spirit of truth, and closely associates the two— it’s the Spirit that leads one into all truth. In any case, you are absolutely right that Jesus, and Jesus alone in this Gospel is said to be the source of the Holy Spirit. It was not given until he went away (and this also means that John 20.1ff. is about a prophetic promise or sign act that the Spirit will be given when Jesus leaves, not an initial dose of the Spirit on those present (which excludes the absent Thomas). Comments?

JACK: Well, the depth of your discussion has made me go back to that chapter in An Unconventional God and look at it again! Let me respond bit by bit. First, I try to be more nuanced in my interpretation of baptism. I begin:

From the standpoint of life after the death and resurrection of Jesus, this community doubtlessly understood Jesus’ words about being born from water and Spirit, at least in part, as an expression of the essential character of baptism. (Page 138)

I conclude:

If baptism lies in the background of Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, it does not lie there dormant. This is no paltry act of sprinkling that leaves the participant apparently unchanged. It is no symbolic soul-washing, no mere assumption that the Spirit is present but unseen and unheard. The Spirit is no trickle; it is a full, lavish gush, like a downpour during the dog days of August, a mountain waterfall when the snow melts, the break of a water-bag. It is a gift beyond measure (John 3:34). It is something out of which a believer emerges, drenched. It is children born not by human lust but by divine desire (John 1:12-13).

So I don’t think baptism is certain here, though it is hard to think readers would have missed the connection.

Second, I think the insertion of the church into this discussion gives us a foothold to say that baptism may be somewhere in the picture. I describe them “like a chorus in a Greek tragedy:”

The church, the community that cherished and perhaps composed the Fourth Gospel, unlike Nicodemus, does understand. We know this because the community, like a chorus in a Greek tragedy, chimes into the conversation between Nicodemus and Jesus in the first person plural: “Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you [plural] do not receive our testimony” (John 3:11). This community understands because it exists after the death and resurrection of Jesus, after he was glorified. They are the ones the Spirit, the paraclete in the Fourth Gospel, has reminded of all that Jesus said and did (John 14:26). The paraclete has guided them, though not yet Nicodemus, into the truth (John 16:13).

This is unique—how much the church enters into the discussion. So I don’t think there is anachronism here. I think there is a sense that the church’s understanding dovetails with the conversation between Nicodemus and Jesus.

Third, you mention Judaism. I too mentioned Judaism. I think the Dead Sea Scrolls are essential to understanding the connection between Spirit, water and cleansing. I agree totally, Ben, that Judaism is the primary context for this conversation—Nicodemus is a rabbi, after all!—and I would appeal here to the central document of the community at the Dead Sea, for whom washing with water needed to be accompanied by repentance in order for the Spirit to cleanse an individual and allow him (presumably just him) to become part of the community.

Fourth, I did not mean to stop the discussion at baptism. On the contrary, I wanted to evoke the grandeur of Israel’s tapestry of renewal by the Spirit, as I brought promises by Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Joel to bear upon the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus. That is why I nearly conclude my analysis of this breathtaking conversation in this way: “If baptism lies in the background of Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, it does not lie there dormant. This is no paltry act of sprinkling that leaves the participant apparently unchanged. It is no symbolic soul-washing, no mere assumption that the Spirit is present but unseen and unheard.”

If baptism is present in John 3, it is a wrenching exposure and erasure of our sin. That’s why the whole discussion concludes like this:

“Perhaps Nicodemus is not so far off after all. No, a grown man does not reenter his mother’s womb. Still, are the gush and flow, birth from above, the lust of a divine father to produce children, any less jarring, any less disquieting, any less unsettling than being shoved again into a mother’s womb? The absurdity of his misperception is no more outlandish than what Jesus demands: people must be born from a different sphere altogether, from above, from the divine father’s urge to have children, to make the word flesh, to establish a colony, a corner of the world, that is full of grace and truth.”

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