Abstract
The key passage in Neil Richardson’s John For Today arrives on p. 33, on which the author writes: ‘Who was John writing for? That’s not as obvious as why he wrote, since he tells us that.’ Such could well be said of John For Today, in which the book’s intended audience is less obvious than the motivation for writing. Richardson’s stated aim is to ‘relate this Gospel to the contemporary debate about God’ (p. 124), yet his intended audience is not named in the text until the final page. Without diminishing Richardson’s exegesis (the competence of which is evident), by that point, his audience has been made clear enough that a more accurate title might read: John for Sympathetic Agnostics in Post-Christian Cultures.
Richardson, a retired Methodist minister and author of a companion piece to the present work, 2012’s Paul for Today, peppers his text with references to theologians such as Raymond Brown, Nicholas Lash, and Wolfhart Pannenberg, as well as such familiar characters as Richard Dawkins, but he does not presume familiarity with any technical aspects of Johannine scholarship (he also helpfully provides suggestions for further reading). Rather, John For Today serves as a fluent and informed overview for curious novices, moving from interpreting John’s famous prologue to parsing issues of authorship, then to surveying contemporary questions about the text, its historical context, and finally, its contemporary relevance. It’s this final chapter that contains most of the book’s most substantive claims, although worthwhile commentary appears throughout—particularly Richardson’s acknowledgement of anti-Jewish language in the text. In a tone reminiscent of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, Richardson offers a gentle apologetic for John’s relevance, arguing that the Gospel can be read as some combination of mission statement, court testimonial, and display of dramatic irony—in that God is shown to have made the world, but the world is incapable of knowing God. It is the irony at the heart of its text that Richardson sees as John’s chief relevance for today: God is in the world as transforming love, yet God’s undisclosed nature and ontological distinction from the world effectively dismantle such temporal distinctions as Church and world and (in spite of its anti-Jewish language) Jew and Christian. Understood as love, God in the Johannine Gospel is opened up to non-religious readers, and the avoidance of a firm Church/world distinction has the potential to compel Christians to better engage the world through transformative love and belief. In spite of its limited audience, John For Today is heartily recommended as an introductory text to precede more substantive works from the likes of Brown, N. T. Wright, or J. D. Crossan, and would make a worthy addition to undergraduate curricula in theology.