Abstract
What is Johannine symbol and how should we understand its presence and narrative uses to achieve the rhetorical ends of the fourth Gospel? These are the chief questions Akala seeks to answer in an earnest, well-structured, closely argued literary account of the network of symbols that forms the semantic field of what she calls the fourth Gospel's “Christological Symbology” (pp. xv, 58), which John introduces in the Prologue, develops in the following chapters, and brings to a peak in the prayer of John 17 (p. 29). The main thesis of this published version of the author's Ph.D. dissertation (Asbury Theological Seminary, Tom Thatcher [Cincinnati Christian University], director) is that John deployed a limited range of symbols that he developed in a narrative context in order to lead its listeners/readers into a salvific experience of the Son whom the Father sent to save the world, attested through a close comparison with the Prologue and the prayer of John 17.
These two chapters manifest most clearly the author's intent and where one sees the same range of symbols recurring, but with the help of the intervening chapters, that, rehearsing many of the terms found in both chapters 1 and 17, train the reader to understand and come into a full realization of their meaning in the prayer. All of this is in the service of the Gospel's chief mission statement, indicated in John 20:31, where the narrator states that the Gospel has been written in order to win believers. The unexpected Son-Father inversion of the title intends to communicate what Akala sees as central to the Gospel, namely that the symbol of the Son overrides that of the Father, both in focus and frequency, in order to make manifest what God has done through sending the Son into the world to save it.
Akala divides her monograph into two parts of five chapters each. The first she dedicates to a study of symbol and narrative in John and the second to John's “christological symbology.” Together they form an elegant and well-structured argument. As the main point of the book is to explore the narrative use of symbol in the Gospel, the first half treats definitions and studies of both terms. Following a rehearsal of prior works that treat Johannine symbolism, she takes up the theorization of the concept of symbol by W. W. Urban and Paul Ricoeur in order to arrive at her own definition of symbol as
a figure of speech that embodies certain characteristics of its literal meaning, and leads to a transcendent meaning that is significant within its narrative context and transformative in its theological purpose [p. 55, Akala's emphasis].
John has organized his narrative in such a way that it furnishes its audience with an inductive journey into the author's intended meaning. To account for this movement, she develops a theory of Johannine symbolism (pp. 59–78) comprising successive phases (representation, assimilation, association, transcendence), each with its own subset of components. This virtually architectural structure leads the reader invariably toward the realization of the Gospel's chief aim described in Akala's championing of pisteuēte (John 20:31) vs. the alternative pisteuēte, namely to lead people toward rather than keep people in the belief that Jesus is God's son sent by the Father to save the world and to give eternal life to all of humankind who believe in him. The second half of the study turns to the Prologue and the Prayer of John 17 to show first that the two sections when taken together reveal the narrative's authorial intent and second that they are carefully placed in a narrative sequence so that as readers proceed through the intervening chapters they gain ever greater insight into the Son's mission on behalf of the Father which leads them into personal relationship with him. Adopting Sandra M. Schneiders's beliefs about the role of symbol in John, Akala argues that the purpose of Johannine christology symbology is to
lead hearer-readers … to transformation; … what the symbols of the Fourth Gospel offer is a pathway to divine glory, which is both the location and the means of transformation” [quoting Schneiders, p. 75].
The final chapter explores theological implications of the study: Trinitarian subordinationism, gender and Son-Father language, and discipleship.
The study raises several questions for this reviewer. First, while a missiological reading can be derived from John's Gospel, there is a strong counter reading advanced by Johannine scholars at least from Wayne Meeks onward if not Bultmann, and notably Jerome Neyrey: that John is not missiological, but sectarian, not designed to draw people in, but to demarcate insiders from outsiders and to vilify unbelievers (i.e “the Jews”). Yet there is not a single reference in the study to this counter reading (Meeks’ seminal study does not appear in the bibliography). Neyrey's work on John's Gospel as sectarian (also absent) locates readers in this alternative christological symbology where the repeated uses of a relatively limited set of terms effects semantic exclusion rather than inclusion. Akala may disagree with these readings, but since she wholly ignores the history of a community of John's Gospel, her reading turns John into an ahistorical manifesto designed for the conversion of all of humankind (a position equally unsatisfactorily advanced by Richard Bauckham). Second, Akala repeatedly refers to “authorial intent” as though this is something she can easily apprehend: “The theological authorial intent expressed in 20:31 is unmistakable—that hearers-readers believe in Jesus the Son of God, and thereby experience eternal life” (p. 54). Unmistakable? It depends upon whom one detects as the hearers-readers, a point Akala seems to admit in a footnote that states her analysis is hypothetical and “reflects ways in which interpreters may apprehend the [sic!] symbolic meaning” (p. 127 n. 1, author's emphasis). For Akala these are the outsiders the Gospel wants to win over, hence the man born blind of John 9 is the quintessential convert the likes of which Jesus prays for in John 17. But arguably the blind man healed so he can see is a foil to assure that the sighted Jews who oppose Jesus are rendered blind. It is remarkable that nowhere does Akala account for Jesus’ refusal to pray for the world (17:9), the very world John 3:16 God sent his son to save (and who loved the darkness more than light [vv. 19–20], a part of the passage Akala ignores). Further, if John intends to convert, Nicodemus is a strikingly failed project (3:9–12). There is not a single reference to the alternative reading of 20:31, which the UBS apparatus lists as [C] (unable to determine based on available data). Nor can it be persuasive to postulate authorial intent in a text that arguably has a complex history of redaction (to which she gives a nod only to remain untroubled by it). Perhaps Reader-Response Theory would have helped Akala, even if the theory moves the ball without solving the problem of what is the correct response to an academically constructed implied author. In other words, Akala's Evangelical pre-understanding figures large in this study and it is rather her, not the author's, intent that informs her reading. Akala offers a pious reading of John's Gospel that will appeal to those who share her sincerely held beliefs.