The Gospel of John
Part 2, The World
In yesterday's post I pointed to how the Gospel of John presents Jesus as the Choice. And that Choice sets up a dualism, actually many dualisms, that dominate the Gospel of John.
As you likely know, the Gospel of John is built around dualisms. These dualisms include:
Light versus Darkness
Death versus Life
Flesh versus Spirit
Above versus Below
Earthly versus Heavenly
Truth versus Falsehood
Freedom versus Slavery
The big category in John that gathers up the negative pole of these dualisms is "the world." "The world" is the domain where God is opposed, the territory of darkness, death, sin, slavery, falsehood, and demonic influence. The devil is the ruler of "the world." Because of all this, "the world" stands under God's judgment.
Scholars here often contrast the eschatological vision of John with the Synoptics. The eschatology of the Synoptics is described as "horizontal," like a timeline. The current evil age is contrasted with a future Messianic "age to come." John's eschatology, by contrast, is "vertical," a cosmological contrast between heaven "above" and the world "below." One implication of this, as I described yesterday, is that John brings the eschaton, typically situated in the future, into the present moment. This creates the Choice: how you stand today in relation to Jesus determines your eschatological future. Judgment day is upon you. The future is now.
It strikes me, reflecting on this, just how out of step the Gospel of John is with current fashions in progressive Christianity, where non-dualism and non-dualistic thinking is all the rage. Jesus as the Choice is very dualistic. The very prominent theme of Light versus Darkness in John--"the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it"--is very dualistic.
More, current fashions also present a very optimistic and positive view of "the world." John's view of "the world," by contrast, couldn't be more pessimistic and grim. According to John, we are not to be "a part of this world," because Jesus is "not of this world." The world hated Jesus, and the world will hate the children of light. So says the Gospel of John.
Dr. Jordan Peterson has unwrapped the “judgement of God” in a way that really seems to offer a great definition.
Judgement is a part of the purification process, it calls us to more of what we were truly meant to be. Without resistance weakness happens. We know this in weight lifting, skills at our jobs, etc. Every time we face someone who is more holy than we or when we see that a task is being done better & more efficient than we are currently executing we find our judge. Both are an invitation to be better than we currently are.
It seems to me that a childish misunderstanding of critique or judgement is at the root of the problem. From a church, Christian perspective, the people of Christ, historically, have used their righteous status before God as grounds for being the ones who pass judgement upon others. This has done more to undermine the good news of the Gospels than any attack by satan. It’s this form of pride, which is a fruit of satan, that has kept & pushed people away. I’m not suggesting blanket acceptance, not in the least. What I am suggesting as the antidote is checking of our heart, i.e. motives, before we offer the much needed critique others crave. I heard a comedian say “I love Jesus, I just don’t like His fan club”. If our hearts were kept in check everyone would want to be around us, want our feedback, welcome our critiques & aspire to our level of joy even if they didn’t want to be christians. This is a goal we should all aim at & settle for nothing less.
Much of the nondual writing of the Rohrs and bourgeaults strikes me as, ironically, lacking a dialectic -- something to hold that principle in tension with so as not to allow it to swallow everything (which it often does for this generation of mystics). Perhaps it’s simply allowing for different planes on which paradoxical truths can both be true: a deep or transcendent plane on which everything is one in God, and a historical plane on which there is a kingdom and an anti-Kingdom (as the Latin American liberation theologians put it) or a way of life and way of death (in the didache’s language) which must be chosen between and given allegiance or opposition. John seems to me at least to hold both of these dimensions in relation.