Ontologies of Gracious Abundance and Practices of Sharing in the Gospels of John – Isaac Zika

The basic view of the world that I was raised with can perhaps be sketched by relating a story. A long-time friend of my parents visited us for a day in order to teach me and my older brother about the art of business. He had been more or less a pastor figure for my family during my early childhood. I had spent a fair amount of time at his rather nice suburban house. I had spent a number of mornings at his kitchen table reading scripture. I particularly remember reading 1 John chapters 3-4 about God’s love for us and the command to participate in that love by loving other people. But that day, this man was preaching another gospel: the gospel of business. At one point he said that “you cannot run a business with the love of God.” I can remember being particularly struck by this comment, and it has stuck with me for the nearly two decades since that teaching session. While I wanted this family friend to be wrong in his assertion, over the intervening years, I have found his statement to be often empirically verified in the real businesses that I have known about (and worked for). The danger in this of course is ontologizing this statement so that it becomes a description of reality as it is and as it should be. And this ontologizing of business as the governing logic has tragic consequences for those peculiar people who gather as the church of Jesus the Christ. This is because the ontology of business displaces the ontology of the One who said “I am the way, the truth and the life.”

I tend to see this ontology of business operative in the ways that churches often go about their business. Church business is often dominated by financial concerns in ways that cause the church to forget that they are called to “remember the poor.” The ethic of efficiency can cause those gathered for church to lose sight of non-efficient practices of care that are indigenous to Christian community such as visiting the sick, caring for the poor, housing those without homes, listening to those who are lonely and afflicted, rebuking systems of death, and calling sinners to repentance that leads to life.

One way that this ontologizing of the business world can be detrimental to churches’ ministries is that it can render their acts of compassion and mercy as merely random, elective activities that are nice and laudable but out of step with the way the “real world works.” Selfishness and greed, upon which businesses in our late-capitalist, neoliberal economy are built, come to be seen as the non-reducible core of human nature. We are seen as self-interested consumers who must be seduced and cajoled accordingly. If someone’s selfishness eccentrically manifests as a need to help others, that is fine, just so long as this does not disrupt in any significant way the functioning of the “real world” or of people in that world. In this view of things, Christian witness is a kind of optional activity for tender and admirable souls. A fervent desire to help people who are poor by, say, paying off their debts, providing adequate housing, sharing wealth with them, and/or calling those with wealth to follow the example of Zaccheus, is seen as an oddity–perhaps cute and a bit endearing–at best and as a vexing threat to the functioning of the “real world” at worst. 

Sadly, when the doctrines of efficiency and business are taken by church folks as normative descriptions of how reality is fundamentally structured and thus how humans should live in the world, they (church folks) start to say things like “we should just run the church like a business”. This would be completely fine, in a perverse sort of way, if the church was anything like a business.  But, I strongly contend, it has as much commonality to a business as a piano does with a machine gun. Within the current world, ruled as it is by late-capitalist logic of maximizing profit, externalizing costs, and so on, the Church must contend with questions concerning the true shape of reality. Margaret Thatcher, the late prime minister of the UK and a fervent apostle of neoliberal market economics, famously stated, “There is no alternative” to that economic system. This phrase is often shortened to the acronym “TINA.” Thus reality–as construed by Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Milton Friedman, Mark Zuckerburg, Bill Gates, et al, has a name that is explicitly above every other name–and that name is TINA. Followers of the crucified and resurrected One from Nazareth should quickly discern that there can be no peace between such a dictatorship of capital and the Prince of Peace. In this essay, I will endeavor to illustrate how the pictures of reality presented in the gospels of Luke and John upend the logics of TINA by revealing reality as a gracious gift named creation in which humans are called to participate in practices of self-giving and forgiving love and mutuality.

While the Gospels of Luke and John (from here on referred to simply as Luke and John) differ quite markedly in content and language, I have found that they deal with some similar themes in complementary ways. In this essay, I will contend that John presents Jesus as teaching and embodying a radically gracious ontology and that Luke presents Jesus as proclaiming and practicing a praxis of radically abundant forgiveness. Both Luke and John root their claims about Jesus deeply within Jewish scriptures. John and Luke both draw portraits of Jesus as one who embodies and teaches, preaches and practices an ontology and way of life of radical grace that is antithetical to the ontologies and practices of greed and violence that are seen as normative for those who rule the world. In this essay, I will briefly note some of the historical context behind both of the Gospels, draw out a few significant themes, and note how the respective portraits of Jesus may have been helpful to early communities of Jesus followers in their particular contexts. Lastly, I will suggest some ways that these portraits of Jesus may be helpful for the community of Jesus followers of which I am a part–and perhaps by extension, for the communities in which readers find themselves within. Overall, I hope to suggest some ways that readers of Luke and John can find radically reformed re-visions of reality that can counter the totalizing logics that order the world according to the image of neoliberal economics.

Luke and John were both likely written sometime between 80-100 CE. John was written to Jesus’ followers of both Jewish and possibly non-Jewish  backgrounds who were facing opposition and subsequent separation from Jews who rejected Jesus. These Jewish Jesus followers were likely organized in sectarian and egalitarian communities.  Luke was likely addressed to Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus and people interested in the way of Jesus. I can imagine that the Johannine community would have found especially poignant the themes of Jesus’ rejection by “his own” as they had also (likely) experienced rejection by their own Jewish and non-Jewish kin. According to Daniel Ulrich’s class lecture, the writer of Luke, responding to charges–brought by both Pagan and Jewish leaders–that the Jesus movement was upsetting the social hierarchy and was thus promoting a dishonorable way of life, set out to vindicate the Jesus movement’s reputation by setting forth the kin-dom ethics of Jesus that train disciples into habits of honor that radically and redemptively redefine the concept. 

Having briefly reviewed some of the historical context of John and Luke, I will now turn to some themes in John. I believe that John 20:24-31 offers a valuable interpretive key for this Gospel. The writer states “…these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.” In order for something to be considered “good news” it must be believable that it is indeed good and true. Thomas’ demand for tangible proof that Jesus, the crucified one, is the same as the resurrected one whom he now sees, is an example of the demand that good news be truly good and not too good to be true. Once Thomas sees that the risen Jesus is the same as the one who was crucified, he proclaims of Jesus “My Lord and my God!” He has found Jesus’ news worthy of his trust because he has found in Jesus’ claims a truthful story. And so, he becomes a witness to the truth.

While echoing the creation narratives of Jewish scriptures in the prologue of this Gospel, John narrates Jesus as existing within God’s story from before the beginning of creation. John thus locates Jesus with the Father and the Spirit at the creation of all that is. This names the story of Jesus as true in that it is the basis for all that truly exists. This is a kind of ontology that can provide a trustworthy basis for belief. However, to stop here would be to leave out a crucial portion of the prologue that portends the Passion narrative at the climax of the Gospel. It is to this that we will now turn.

John states that, “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him.” This appears to foreshadow the scene in which Pilate interrogates Jesus. Jesus’ assertion that, “My kingdom does not belong to this world” contrasts sharply with Pilate’s loaded question and assertion: “Do you not know that I have power to release you and power to crucify you?” Theologian David Bentley Hart comments that, “this is the only truth that he himself [Pilate] knows–‘I have power to crucify thee’.” There is thus an incommensurable difference between the kingdoms of the world–dare I say, the creation imagined by the world’s rulers–and the kingdom of which Jesus is king. Because, “Easter reverses the ordering of this scene [of Pilate and Jesus], vindicates Christ over against the power that crucifies, locates truth there where he stands, in the place of the victim and the captive.” Whereas Pilate and his ilk cannot imagine a world outside the realm of coercion and violence, Jesus is the embodiment of truth that upends every form and justification of coercion and violence. Hart drives this point home–that, “the form of God and the form of humanity have both been given to us, completely, now and henceforth always, in the form of a slave.” By sharing fully in the suffering inflicted by the powerful on the enslaved of the world, and by triumphing over them in his resurrection, Jesus demonstrated an ontology that truly “does not belong to this world.” Indeed, Jesus (as the one who is the form of a slave) judges all worldly kings; Hart states, “and if this judgment has already come upon us, and liberated us from death, we can do no other now than desire and advance the release of all who lie in bondage.” While Jesus’ kingdom does not belong to this world, it has arrived in this world as a gift of grace. It is truly a gift– “grace upon grace,” and full of “grace and truth”– that calls all to receive “power to become children of God.” Children of the God revealed in the crucified and resurrected One, the One who is in the form of a slave, live by an ontology of grace and truth that sets humans and creation free from all their forms of bondage.

This ontology starkly contrasts with that evidenced by the Caiaphas (and the Romans whom he and some Jewish leaders understandably feared) in John 11:47-53. Caiaphas, some Jewish leaders, and the Romans see human life as expendable if the sacrifice of that life secures the continuity of their institutions (“our holy place/temple and our nation”) and presumably the lives that they believe are divinely entrusted to their care. Jesus as the Word Incarnate both authored all life and lays down his life as “the Good Shepherd” on behalf of every human life. None are expendable and there is no limit to the lengths that Jesus’ long-suffering love for the lost. This love, fully disclosed and incarnate in Jesus, forms a trustworthy basis to believe his promises about his continued presence with the disciples through the Holy Spirit. This ontology of creative and self-giving love incarnate in Jesus is again recapitulated in John 21 in Jesus’ miraculous multiplication of fish for the failed fishermen and in his commands to Peter to “feed my lambs/sheep.” 

In my view, the ontological views of Jesus in John support his ethic of love and add assurance that it is not just an arbitrary way of being in the world but rather one that proceeds from and indeed undergirds and pervades the very essence of all reality. One comes to see this reality in the Word Incarnate in Jesus: in the creation of the world through him, his bearing in his body the violence of the world’s powers, the gift of new life through the death and resurrection and giving of the Holy Spirit. I imagine that such a grounding of the Johannine communities love ethic would have provided powerful intellectual and emotional support as they endeavored to remain faithful to Jesus and each other in the face of Roman oppression that ruled through death (often crucifixion) and painful separation and alienation from non-believing Jews.

Isaac Zika is a husband, part-time piano teacher and music therapist, full-time parent, part-time seminary student, gardener, carpenter, and also a congregant at West Charleston Church of the Brethren. He lives with his wife Julie and their two kids, Arthur and Rosemary, near Greenville Ohio.

1. I owe much of this framing to Eugene McCarraher, “You’re a Slave to Money, Then You Die” Church Life Journal, March 24, 2020. University of Notre Dame. Accessed November 22, 2022. https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/youre-a-slave-to-money-then-you-die/ and Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity, (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019). See also Joshua Ramey, “Neoliberalism as a political theology of chance: the politics of divination” Palgrave Communications, (December 8, 2015), DOI: 10.1057/palcomms.2015.39, I owe an additional debt to Bruce Rogers-Vaughn for his articles on neoliberalism and pastoral care. Bruce Rogers-Vaughn, “Blessed Are Those Who Mourn: Depression as Political Resistance” Pastoral Psychology 63, (2014), 503-522. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11089-013-0576-y  Also Bruce Rogers-Vaughn, “Pastoral Counseling in the Neoliberal Age: Hello Best Practices, Goodbye Theology” Sacred Spaces: The E-Journal of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors 5, (2013). Accessed November 22, 2022. https://ir.vanderbilt.edu/bitstream/handle/1803/8312/Rogers-Vaughn-PastCounNeolAge.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y Also helpful to my thoughts on this topic has been Harvey Cox’s essay “The Market as God” published in The Atlantic Monthly and republished in The Best Spiritual Writing 2000, ed. Philip Zaleski, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. 2000). Of further help on this topic was William Cavanaugh’s lecture “Myth of the Free Market” Victoria University, Wellington, July 31, 2012. Accessed November, 22, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yiu2-kUNGI Also, David Bentley Hart, “What Lies Beyond Capitalism? A Christian Exploration” Plough (August 12, 2019). Accessed November 22, 2022. https://www.plough.com/en/topics/faith/discipleship/what-lies-beyond-capitalism 
2. My usage of the term “ontology” draws on David Bentley Hart’s book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 46-86, 87-151. Hart draws helpful distinctions between ontology–the study of Being–and cosmology–the study of the universe. This is useful for my purposes in this essay because I believe that when cosmology is mistaken for ontology–as Hart contests that it often is in our materialistic age–and the business world is seen as the way the world (cosmos) works (as McCarraher argues in essay cited in the above footnote) then it is an easy step to think that the way the business world/capitalism works is simply the way being itself is structured. For Christians, this view leads towards idolatry in that one trusts in the god of business to reveal the workings of the world and being itself rather than trusting in God who is Being and the source of all being–as Hart argues. I also draw on another of Hart’s books in which he discusses ontological issues at length, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth, Grand Rapid, MI: William B Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003, 35-93, in which Hart, drawing on John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990, discusses various “ontologies of violence” (Milbank’s phrase) that are present in postmodern philosophies and juxtaposes these with “Christianity’s narrative of a primordial peace whereupon violence intrudes as an unnecessary, arbitrary, and sinful invention of the will” (37).
3. See Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth, 37, “If being is not also the good, but only ‘eventual,’ then force or tenderness, retreat, conquest, or charity are all equally ‘true.’” See also Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, 251-76 for an excellent exposition of God as goodness itself and thus the source of goodness. This, for Hart, means that all goodness participates in God and thus in tune with the fundamental nature of Being itself.
4. While this history is fairly easy to find in any number of sources, Bruce Rogers-Vaughn, “Pastoral Counseling in the Neoliberal Age: Hello Best Practices, Goodbye Theology”, 6-9, contains a good brief overview of neoliberalism with a focus on it effects on humans and human communities from the perspective of pastoral care. Also, Rogers-Vaughn, “Blessed Are Those Who Mourn: Depression as Political Resistance,” offers a helpful overview and analysis of the history of neoliberalism and particularly its effects on mental health and mental healthcare.
5. I owe a debt of gratitude to Daniel Ulrich, Professor of New Testament at Bethany Theological Seminary for teaching me how to skillfully and faithfully read the New Testament. Dan also gave helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay, for which I am grateful. I owe another debt of gratitude to Chibuzo Petty for suggesting that this essay be expanded for publication at Devotion: Brethren Life  & Thought Blog. Chibuzo is an intelligent, thoughtful, empathetic, rigorous, and patient editor for whom I am deeply grateful. 
6. Daniel Ulrich, “Historical Background of the Gospel of John and the Johannine Epistles” Class Lecture, and Daniel Ultich, “A Life-giving Word for God’s Green Earth: John 1:1-14” Brethren Life & Thought 62, no. 2, (Fall-Winter 2017-2018), 46. And, Colleen Conway, Introductory Essay to “The Gospel According to John,” in The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version With The Apocrypha, [5th ed.] ed. Michael Coogan et. al. (New York: Oxford, 2018), 1919.
7. Daniel Ulrich, “Historical Background of the Gospel of John and the Johannine Epistles” Class Lecture. Thomas Slater, “1-3 John.” In True To Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary, edited by Brian Blount et. al. 496-517. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 497-499 & 513-514, argues that Johannine epistles came from the same community as John’s Gospel and that this community was “sectarian” and practiced its ethic of love within the boundaries of its community.
8. Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder, “The Gospel of Luke,” In True To Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary, edited by Brian Blount et. al. 158-185, Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007. 158-159 Crowder asserts that Luke was addressed to “Gentile believers and Roman officials.”  Robert Spivey, D. Moody Smith, C. Clifton Black, Anatomy of the New Testament, [8th ed.], (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2019), 119. Spivey, Smith, and Black mention that Jesus identifies himself with the temple in Jerusalem in Luke and “…thus assures both Jewish and Gentile believers of the antiquity and continuity of the new faith” (119). This seems to point to Luke’s Gospel having both Jewish and Gentile believers in mind as its audience.
9. Reta Halteman Finger says that “…research indicates that the term was introduced into public discourse  by Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz who said she learned it from her friend Georgene Wilson, O.S.F.” See Finger,“From Kingdom to Kin-dom and beyond,” Christian Feminism Today. 2013. Accessed January 24, 2022.Accessed January 25, 2022, https://eewc.com/kingdom-kindom-beyond/ 
10. Daniel Ulrich, “Historical Background of the Gospel of John and the Johannine Epistles” Class Lecture. 
11. John 20:31 NRSV. This and all subsequent Bible quotations are from the NRSV.
12. John 20:28.
13. Daniel Ulrich, “A Life-giving Word for God’s Green Earth: John 1:1-14,” 47-49.
14. John 1:10
15. John 18:36
16. John 19:10b
17. David Bentley Hart, “The ‘Whole Humanity’: Gregory of Nyssa’s Critique of Slavery in Light of His Eschatology,” Scottish Journal of Theology 54, no. 1 (2001), 68.
18. David Bentley Hart, “The ‘Whole Humanity’: Gregory of Nyssa’s Critique of Slavery in Light of His Eschatology,” 68.
19. David Bentley Hart, “The ‘Whole Humanity’: Gregory of Nyssa’s Critique of Slavery in Light of His Eschatology,” 69.
20. David Bentley Hart, “The ‘Whole Humanity’: Gregory of Nyssa’s Critique of Slavery in Light of His Eschatology,” 68.
21. Cf. John 1:16, 17&12.
22. Cf. John 8:31-36.
23. John 10:11 & John 3:16
24. John 14:15-31
25. Allen Dwight Callahan notes these themes of Jesus creatively providing for Peter’s needs and calling him to follow Jesus’ self-giving way in service to others in Allen Dwight Callahan, “The Gospel of John,” in True To Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary, edited by Brian Blount et. al. 186-212, (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 210.
26. John 3:16, 13:34-35, 15:9-17, 21:15-19.
27. Colleen Conway, Introductory Essay to “The Gospel According to John,” in The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version With The Apocrypha, [5th ed.] ed. Michael Coogan et. al. (New York: Oxford, 2018), 1919.