God’s Incarnate Son As The Embodiment Of Last Day Resurrection: Eternal Life As Justification In John’s Gospel -- By: Ardel B. Caneday

Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 18:4 (Winter 2014)
Article: God’s Incarnate Son As The Embodiment Of Last Day Resurrection: Eternal Life As Justification In John’s Gospel
Author: Ardel B. Caneday


God’s Incarnate Son As The Embodiment Of Last Day Resurrection: Eternal Life As Justification In John’s Gospel

A. B. Caneday

A. B. Caneday is Professor of New Testament and Greek at the University of Northwestern in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He earned his Ph.D. in New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Dr. Caneday is the co-editor (with Matthew Barrett) of Four Views on the Historical Adam (Zondervan, 2013) and the author of Must Christians Always Forgive? (Center for Christian Leadership, 2011). He has also written many scholarly book reviews and articles, including essays in two significant edited volumes: The Faith of Jesus Christ: Exegetical, Biblical, and Theological Studies (Paternoster, 2009) and A Cloud of Witnesses: The Theology of Hebrews in its Ancient Context (T & T Clark, 2008). Dr. Caneday is also the co-author (with Thomas R. Schreiner) of The Race Set Before Us: A Biblical Theology of Perseverance and Assurance (InterVarsity, 2001).

Introduction

Long ago Rudolf Bultmann argued that Jesus’ activity as “Revealer of God” is the eschatological event, “the judgment of the world.”1 Thus, Jesus’ advent and departure constitute the last day so that resurrection and judgment are “now present in the word of revelation” he brings.2 Thus, “the ‘coming’ eschatological hour, which men had hoped for at the end of time, is declared to be already present, for it is the hour in which the Word of the Revealer is heard. It is the hour of the resurrection of the dead.”3 Consequently, the

last day has already arrived so that it “is not a dramatic cosmic event which is yet to come and which we must still await. Rather the mission of the Son, complete as it is in his descent and exaltation, is the judgement.”4 For Ernst Käsemann, Bultmann’s student, emphasis upon the presence of last day resurrection prompts him to suggest at one point that John’s Gospel reflects the error of Hymenaeus and Philetus who taught that the resurrection has already occurred (2 Tim 2:17-18).5

A generation before Bultmann, evangelical theologian Herman Bavinck more evenhandedly observed, “For Christ is the Son of Man who already precipitated a crisis by his appearance, continues it in history, and completes it at the end of time. Their relation to him decides the eternal weal or ...

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