A Fresh Perspective - 07/28/08
Following the conversation between Jesus and the woman of Samaria at Jacob's well, the woman hurries back to her village and exclaims, "Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?" (Jn. 4:29).
Jesus, of course, did not literally tell her everything she ever did. But he did speak truth to her and she felt as if he really knew what she was about. What she says is an overstatement; it is an exaggeration. She is speaking what she felt in her heart. It was not intended to be a literal, factual statement. It is the language of testimony.
Much of the Gospel of John is the language of testimony. Gospel scholars point out that the Synoptic Gospels are more reliable in terms of getting at what Jesus actually said and did. The monologues and discourses of Jesus in John's Gospel reflect the testimonies, preaching, and theology of the church of the last decade of the first century or perhaps the first decades of the second century, possibly in Ephesus. Irenaeus, an early witness to this Gospel, calls this a "spiritual" Gospel written after the other Gospels.
Much of this Gospel reflects what the church in Asia at the end of the first century was preaching and teaching about Jesus. The exclusive language attributed to Jesus in John is not what Jesus actually said, but what the church in Asia was saying about Jesus. And one of the ways to understand it is through the language of testimony.
When the Johannine church says, "no one comes to the Father except through Jesus" they are using the language of testimony to declare what was true in their own experience. It is not a factual or literal statement that is true for all people in all places. This is how they came to know God - through Jesus, God's Son. A testimony is not a propositional theological statement. It reflects a heart-felt experience.
Neither John's church at the end of the first century nor the church of today at the beginning of the twenty-first century can tell God what God can or cannot do. To use the Bible that way is to misuse the Bible and limit God; it amounts to putting God in a box where the perimeters are determined by our own presuppositions and beliefs.
I am sure that God's presence and love is wide enough to make God's self known to people in other places who are immersed in very different cultures and who have very different customs and beliefs from ours. We certainly have no reason to be ashamed of the gospel of Christ - that God has come to us in Jesus Christ to bring about our redemption - and this message we proclaim out of our own experience; but we also have no right to insist that God's grace and presence are limited to those who know only the Christian tradition.
So when we share our testimonies of how God is at work in us individually and in our faith communities through the relationship we have with the risen Christ, let us not discount and certainly not disdain the testimonies of others whose experience of God is different from our own - those within the Christian tradition and those outside of it.