Quote for Today

From "A New Christianity for a New World

Donna Kaplan asks:

I have a question about the scripture passage from St. John's Gospel that you quoted recently in one of your columns: "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father but by me (meaning Jesus)." What about the Jews?

... At this moment, I am reading Rudolf Bultmann's The Gospel of John: A Commentary. He argues, persuasively I believe, that John portrays Jesus as the logos enfleshed in human life, calling us all to a deeper sense of what it means to be whole and human. To come to the God present in Jesus for John was to discover the logos in each of us. That, argues Bultmann, is what Jesus represented to the people of his day. It was that discovery, not some form of doctrinal Christian belief or faith, that was for John the only doorway into the ultimate reality we call God. That is quite different from saying that only those that believe in what Christianity says about Jesus will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Recall that in Matthew's parable of the judgment (Mt. chapter 25), Jesus says the criterion for eternal life is not what you believe but how you respond to the presence of God in another human being, especially those regarded as the least of our brothers and sisters. In that parable neither the sheep nor the goats are ever asked what creed they say. They are asked "did you see and respond to the presence of God in another human being." It was the Epistle of John that states that if you cannot love your neighbor whom you have seen, how can you expect to love God whom you have not seen?
Those who quote John's gospel to validate their own exclusive religious prejudices simply have no idea what John's Gospel is about. This Gospel does not lend itself to proof texting. It is far too profound a work for that.

– John Shelby Spong