Abstract
Under the very probable influence of reading Eastern Orthodox theology, especially its teaching about salvation as theosis (as it appears from the many titles indicated in the final bibliographical list), Mathew E. Sousa aims to prove in his above-mentioned book that in the Gospel of John ‘salvation consists of far more than the emergence of belief in a moment of “decision”’ (p. vii). More precisely, Sousa understands the way John’s Gospel presents salvation as an ongoing process not only on the level of mental perception (belief), but also on the level of ethics and human corporeality, as a ‘transformation of what believers do and how they live in relationship with God and others’ (p. vii). Subsequently, the human predicament from which one must be saved, ‘is a way or manner of life, a mode of existence that is not wholly rectified or resolved for John in the moment one comes to believe in Jesus’ (p. vii). This hermeneutical positioning of the author seems to be congruent with the Eastern Orthodox doctrine of salvation, as product of co-operation between faith and good deeds.
Accordingly, Sousa highlights, in a rather brief research overview, that most scholars understand salvation in John’s gospel not very much on a moral or ethical level, but instead on a theoretical level, and thus reduce its theological horizon. To this perspective the author opposes the ‘church’s reading of the Gospel of John’ (p. 15) illustrated by Irenaeus and Maximus the Confessor, as examples of proper understanding of Johannine soteriology. Sousa uses an exegetical method he calls narrative criticism through which he wants to read John’s Gospel ‘cooperatively and competently’ (p. 17), but his method turns out to be more a harmonizing reading of texts. In the three main chapters of his book the author analyzes three texts from the Gospel of John: The Prologue (pp. 21-48), John 5 – the healing of a man with a disabling illness at Bethesda (pp. 49-70), and John 8 – the conversation of Jesus with his fellow ‘Jews’ during the feast of Tabernacles (pp. 71-94). These texts receive a key role in the general argumentation of the present work because they present, according to Sousa’s opinion, on the one hand the complexity of sin and human predicament, and on the other hand the dynamics of the salvation process, which involves besides belief also the ‘bodily renewal and transformation’ (p. 95).
Undoubtedly the book invites to further reflection regarding the topic of salvation in John’s Gospel. At the same time, the reader cannot avoid the following question: to what extent and especially with what consequences a certain theological conviction could and should influence an exegetical approach?