Ethics in the Gospel of John: Discipleship as Moral Progress

Abstract

This study seeks to challenge the dominant scholarly view of John's ethics as an ineffective and unhelpful companion for moral formation.The Gospel of John has been an unwelcome outsider when it comes to the discussion of ethics since it has been accused of being morally bankrupt, not ethical enough to be included in New Testament ethics, and a puzzling book -indeed, a major challenge -for ethical enquiry.No one has been, however, more sceptical about the value of John's ethics than Wayne Meeks, whose criticisms have contributed significantly to this negative view.In order to demonstrate the inadequacy of such claims, this study aims to identify the undergirding ethical dynamic that shapes John's moral structure by bringing out the implicit ethical elements that are embedded throughout John's narratives, and thus suggests a way to read the whole Gospel ethically and appreciatively of its literary characteristics.Chapter 1 surveys recent scholarship on John's ethics and categorises the works into three distinguishable groups based on their general methodological objectives: 1) The Role of the Law in John's Ethics; 2) Exploring Possible Conceptual or Historical Backgrounds for John's Ethics; 3) Linguistic-Semantic Analysis of Johannine Terms to Expose Hidden Ethical Meanings.The overview of recent literature on John's ethics identifies the primary reasons that make the study of John's ethics problematic: John does not use the ethical language that is commonly found in other New Testament books, and most of the terms we find in the Gospel have been understood either theologically or christologically.Furthermore, there are no ethical chapters in the Gospel of John like the Sermon on the Mount or the paraenetic sections 1

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.