What’s coming up this Saturday on the Deeper Waters Podcast? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.
The writings of John in the New Testament are noted for being difficult to understand. His Gospel is markedly different from the other Gospels. Let’s not forget about the book of Revelation either! Chesterton in his book Orthodoxy said “Though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators.”
A book I went through not too long ago on this topic is Johannine Theology by Dr. Paul Rainbow. After reading it, I was convinced that this was an important topic that needed some more discussion and so I asked Dr. Rainbow to come on the show. So who is he?
Dr. Rainbow was born in Minneapolis in 1955 and studied at Born 1955, Minneapolis.
Studied at U. Minnesota, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Harvard Divinity School, and U. Oxford (England). He taught briefly at Canadian Bible College when it was in Regina SK (1980–82) before undertaking advanced studies. He served on staff as a Lay Assistant at St Ebbe’s Church, Oxford (Church of England = Anglican), 1987–88. He has been at Sioux Falls Seminary (German Baptist) for the last 26 years teaching New Testament. He is married to Alison and they have two grown children. For a hobby, he is also a classical pianist.
As you can imagine, Johannine theology is about the doctrine of God that is found in the Gospel, the epistles of John, and the Apocalypse. For the sake of argument, we will be assuming that these are all Johannine writings. It is worth noting that Rainbow does give a defense of authorship, but it will be more important in the interview for us to focus on the main subject matter.
Many of us read the Gospel of John and think that it’s meant to reveal the nature of Jesus. Of course, to a degree, it is, but it goes beyond that. It’s mainly to show us the nature of God. The way that we know who God is is by looking at Jesus. Is Jesus the full and best revelation? Yes, but He is the full and best revelation of the Father and if we are to know the Father, then we will have to know the Son as well.
This is definitely a complex topic, but if you’re a follower of the Deeper Waters Podcast, you should be used to complex topics. Still, we will try to keep it as simple as we can so that the average listener can get the most out of it.
I hope that you’ll be watching your podcast feed soon in order to catch this episode and I encourage you to go to Amazon as well and pick up a copy of Rainbow’s book if you’re interested in studying the doctrine of God in the writings of John. John’s writings are difficult so we will be working to take full advantage of having a scholar in the field help us sort through the difficult issues.
In Christ,
Nick Peters