Picking our thought back up but with the addition of an interesting portion of teaching found in a "Commentary of the Gospels" by James A. Fowler.
Truth to Deliver Us from the Law [that is to say...religion]
Before we get to far into what lies ahead I feel that I must share what James A. Fowler writes in his "Commentary on the Gospels" in chapter two titled “Light and Life, John 1:3-11” and section three on to the end of section five:
“Continuing to key off of the Genesis narrative of God’s creating light and life (Gen. 1:3), John then alludes to the spiritual realities of light and life in Jesus Christ (1:4). Though religion promotes enlightenment by rationalistic acceptance of propositional truth-statements and the consequent inculcation of moralistic living, such is confronted as antithetical to the divine and spiritual light and life of God in Jesus Christ exclusively. Christ is life (John 11:25; 14:6; Col. 3:4). Christ is the light of the world (John 8:12; 9:5; 12:46). As the very Being of God’s life in Jesus Christ becomes spiritually operative within the Christian, true spiritual enlightenment shines forth in the genuine self-disclosure of God. “The spirit of man is the lamp of the Lord” (Prov. 20:27). The light goes on in the lamp of man’s spirit when Jesus Christ, the life and the light, comes to dwell therein.
The spiritual light of the life of Jesus Christ shines in the spiritual darkness (1:5) of the world-system (John 3:19; 8:12; 12:35,46; I John 1:5,6; 2:8,9,11), the system governed by “the god of this world’ (II Cor. 4:4). Religion is part of that system of darkness. Fred Craddock notes that “this evangelist understands worldliness to assume its ugliest shapes in the entrenchments of religion.” Without spiritual understanding religion cannot comprehend what God is doing in His Son, Jesus Christ.
As the life and light of God, Jesus came into the physical world which He created, and the world of mankind as well as the world of religion did not know Him, recognize Him, or receive Him (1:9,10). He came among His own race and people, the Jews, but because of the misperceptions of their religious ideology, they did not receive Him (1:11). He experienced national and religious rejection, because religion refuses to accept Jesus on His own terms, the activity of His divine Being.
Section 4
Children of God - John 1:12,13
Only by the receptivity of faith can “as many” as receive Him, be they Jew or Gentile, male or female, become “children of God” believing into His name – His person – into spiritual union with His Being (1:12). Once again Jesus confronts the exclusivity of religion, extending God’s life to all men in the universality of the (His) gospel, which was God’s intent from the very beginning. The Jewish religion had the opinion that they alone were the “children of God” by physical birth and national privilege. They could not conceive of the need for spiritual birth, as is exemplified by the response of Nicodemus (John 3:1-6). The spiritual commencement of God’s functional life in man is not extended on the basis of racial and genetic heredity, nor on the basis of personal resolve to perform by self-effort in “bootstrap religion,” nor on the basis of man’s determination to acquire such, but can only be given by the living God (1:13). God is the progenitor of His life which is extended in His Son, and as “like begets like” the receptive Christian believer, who through the circumcision of the heart (the entry into the second estate) becomes a receptive being, partakes of the life of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Section 5
Incarnation - John 1:14-18
The Trinitarian understanding of God is intrinsic to the understanding of the incarnation of Jesus Christ as the God-man, and is fundamental to an understanding of the relational reconciliation of men with God through Jesus Christ. If God is a singular monad (an invisible thing, ie...the ultimate atom), He would be incapable of extended relational expression in His Son or in the “many sons” (Heb. 2:10) identified with Him. As the triune God by means of the incarnation, God could, in His self-revelation through the Son, reconcile all men to Himself (II Cor. 5:18,19).
“The Word became flesh” (1:14). The divine became embodied in the incarnation of the God-man. The life of the Son did not begin at His birth, for “in the beginning the Word was with God, and was God” (1:4). His incarnate life was an “advent” wherein God descended and arrived in the form of man. As spoken to woman in Genesis 3:15 through whom He would come.
Such an incarnational advent confronted the thinking of Greek religion. Greek dualism considered the abstract and spiritual as the realm of the divine and the “good,” whereas the physical realm was corrupt and evil. That God should become flesh was inconceivable to the Greek. This is why the earliest philosophical perversion of the Christian gospel came in the docetic concept of Greek Gnosticism in the second and third centuries. Docetism is derived from the Greek word dokein, meaning “to appear.” To avoid that which was inconceivable in their Greek dualistic thinking, they posited that Jesus only “appeared” to be human and enfleshed as a man. In addition, they developed Gnosticized interpretations of how a long sequence of angelic emanations or aeons would allow Jesus to partake of humanity, only if he were far enough separated from God. Paul counters such in his letter to the Colossians by writing that “the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form” (Col. 2:9). The incarnation of Jesus Christ confronted Greek religious thought at its most basic presuppositions.
The Jewish religion had an equally difficult time accepting the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. Their conception of God as a monad (invisible and therefore not seen or known) deity disallowed the extension of divine expression by the incarnate Son as the Word of God. Their belief that “no man has seen God at any time” (1:18) mitigated against the acceptance of the invisible God being made visible as a man. That God should come in the form of a baby born in Bethlehem grated against their attitude of infants and children being contemptible nuisances, and their expectations of the Messiah being a masculine military conqueror who would liberate God’s people from the oppressors and establish a nationalistic kingdom for the Jews. The incarnation of Jesus Christ confronted Jewish religious thought at the very core of its theology and Messianic expectations.
John continues to explain that the all-glorious character of God was expressed visibly in the person and behavior of Jesus Christ as He “set up His tent” and “tabernacled” among men (1:14). The Shekinah glory of God was seen in the tabernacle of Jesus’ embodiment. This manifestation of God’s glory in man, by which God is glorified, is far different from the religion that “receives glory from one another” (John 5:44), and seeks to glorify God by human performance.
That Jesus was “full of grace and truth” (1:14), and “grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ” (1:17) whereby those identified with Him might participate in “grace upon grace (1:16), is a confrontation of all religious thought and methodology. The distinctive character of Christianity is that Jesus Christ is the personified truth and reality of God. “I AM the truth” (John 14:6), Jesus said, “and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32) to be all that God intends man to be. Grace is the dynamic activity of God whereby He effects all that He does in Jesus Christ. The whole of Christianity is the activity of God’s grace.
The Jewish religion was a law-based religion. The character of God was expressed in legal demands for human performance. The Law was thus a separated entity from God Himself, which expressed “words” about God and His character. There was no ontological connection between God and the Law, nor was there any inherency of divine empowering in order to keep the demands of the Law, thereby evidencing the inadequacy of man apart from God. Religious men engaged in the performance of self-effort to keep the demands of the Law, the performance of which could make no man righteous (Gal. 2:21; 3:21). “Christ is the end of the Law for righteousness to everyone who believes” (Rom. 10:4). The distinctive character of grace in the Christian gospel is that the activity of God is expressed in the ontological reality of the “Word,” Jesus Christ, providing all divine empowering for all that God desires in man. Grace and truth must never be disassociated from Jesus Christ. Yet the “Christian religion” has done so repeatedly by cheapening these concepts into epistemological propositions and explanations. Paul the Apostle to the nations or gentiles warns of twisting, changing or watering down his gospel of the revelation of Christ within the Epistle to the Galatians and the letter to the Hebrew-Christs. In these he calls is another gospel and it is just this that has happened through religion.
Christians are those who have received the fulness of God in Christ (1:16). “All things belong to them in Christ” (I Cor. 3:20-23), and they are “complete in Christ” (Col. 2:10). Those who are “in Christ” have the privilege of operating in the continuity of God’s ontological adequacy and empowering, “grace upon grace” (1:16). While we remain receptive of His activity in trusting faith just as Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had done.
Though the Jewish religion repudiated the visibility of God, they were repetitively caught up in idolatrous pursuits of visibility. Jesus revealed, explained and “exegeted” God (1:18), as “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15). Jesus could say, “He who has seen Me, has seen the Father” (John 14:9). Christ’s continued function as the living Lord in the Christian allows the all-glorious character of the invisible God to be visibly expressed in the behavior of man to the glory of God, the purpose for which we were created (Isa. 43:7). Such is the continuing ontological self-revelation of God in man which confronts all religious practice.”
Now I've edited within brackets and in italic or just in italic words in James' writing from here we'll pick back up with our discourse and thought.
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