Divine fellowship in the Gospel of John: A Trinitarian spirituality

Dirk Van Der Merwe

doi:10.4102/hts.v75i1.5375

Abstract

This article investigates how Trinity features are presented in the Gospel of John and how the early Christians experienced the Trinity in their daily lives. The immanence and ‘lived experiences’ of the divine are fostered by how the immanence of the divine is expounded in terms of the familia Dei: God as Father, the Logos as Son of God, believers as Children of God and the Spirit-Paraclete as the one who constitutes the family and educates the children in the family. Therefore, in this article, the familia Dei will be the facilitating hermeneutical principle used to examine the divine fellowship as well as the ‘lived experiences’ and immanence of the divine in early Christian everyday living. John’s reflection on perichoresis lies embedded in a ‘fellowship’ perspective. The divine fellowship is investigated from the four perspectives of how the divine is identified in John: life in the familia Dei, love in the familia Dei, unity in the familia Dei and glorification in the familia Dei.

Highlights

From the beginning of the early Church onwards, the early Christians embraced decisively exclusive monotheism and the veneration of Jesus. Both forms of Christian worship were already absolute when Christianity emerged from its original Jewish context (Bauckham 2008:294)
Just more than three decades later, Aune (1972:5) made a corresponding consent: ‘[p]erhaps the single most important historical development within the early church was the rise of the cultic worship of the exalted Jesus within the primitive Palestinian church’
For Hurtado (2003): The accommodation of Jesus as recipient of cultic worship with God is unparalleled and signals a major development in monotheistic cultic practice and belief. This variant form of monotheism appeared among circles who insisted that they maintained faithfulness to the monotheistic stance of the Jewish tradition

Summary

Introduction

From the beginning of the early Church onwards, the early Christians embraced decisively exclusive monotheism and the veneration of Jesus. The discussion will return to the identity characteristics of the Father (shared by the Son) to be experienced, as a Trinitarian spirituality, by the disciples of Jesus and be embodied in their lives through the Spirit-Paraclete. In 1:18, John refers to the Son to be ‘in the bosom of the Father’ (cf Koester 2008:49) This mutual love between the Father and the Son that unites them and endorses the divinity of Jesus shows their acts towards one another. According to John, the Father’s love for the Son caused the Father to put all things into the hands of the Son, showing him all that he himself is doing (Jn 3:35; 5:20) He gives to Jesus the Spirit without measure to assist him to accomplish these tasks (Jn 3:34). He uses family metaphorics to explain this fellowship in terms of the ‘life’, ‘love’, ‘unity’ and ‘glorification’ in the familia Dei

Conclusion

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