E-Book, Englisch, 120 Seiten
Reihe: Lived Theology
E-Book, Englisch, 120 Seiten
Reihe: Lived Theology
ISBN: 978-1-68359-367-6
Verlag: Lexham Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)
Gerald L. Bray is Research Professor of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School of Samford University (Birmingham, Alabama). He is the author of numerous books including God Is Love, God Has Spoken, and Biblical Interpretation: Past and Present.
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CHAPTER 1 John the Man HIS LIFE John was born to a Christian family in Antioch, probably in or around the year AD 349.1 His father died when he was still a boy, and he was brought up by his mother. He received an excellent classical education and was taught rhetoric by a man called Libanius, who was widely regarded as the greatest teacher of the subject at that time. When John was eighteen years old, he broke off his studies and tried to adopt a strict monastic way of life, much to his mother’s distress. He was baptized about this time and eventually managed to escape to the nearby mountains, where he found refuge with a hermit. After four years in the hermit’s cave, John branched out on his own. For two years he practiced the most extreme asceticism, doing considerable damage to his health in the process. In the end it was too much for him, and he returned to Antioch, where he sought medical help and went back to the church of his youth. In 381 John was ordained a deacon by Bishop Meletius of Antioch, and five years later he was made a priest by Meletius’s successor Flavian. For the next eleven years John preached regularly in the city’s main church, and it was there that he acquired his enduring reputation as a preacher. His most famous sermons were delivered during those years, which in hindsight were the happiest ones of his life. He developed an expository style of preaching and seems to have worked his way through Genesis, Isaiah, and the Psalms in the Old Testament, along with Matthew, John, and the Pauline Epistles (including Hebrews) in the New. John’s reputation spread, and in 397 he was chosen to become patriarch of Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. John did not want to go, but the emperor intervened and forced him to leave Antioch. On February 26, 398, he was consecrated a bishop in his new see, but it turned out to be an unfortunate choice. Constantinople was a hotbed of corruption and political intrigue, and John was too forthright to be able to negotiate its treacherous byways successfully. He condemned the moral laxity of the city without compromise and did what he could to reform the church, which had succumbed to its atmosphere. By deposing unworthy bishops and clergy he made enemies who became increasingly determined to get rid of him, and his denunciations of the imperial court’s luxury and decadence earned him no friends there either. In particular, the empress Eudoxia turned against him, having been convinced by John’s enemies that his criticisms were directed mainly at her. John also faced problems caused by the rivalry between Antioch and Alexandria. He had been consecrated as patriarch by Theophilus of Alexandria, but the latter was acting under duress, having been forced by the emperor to perform the ceremony. A few years later, Theophilus was summoned to Constantinople to answer charged leveled against him by some Egyptian monks. The trial was presided over by John, and Theophilus came to believe that the whole affair had been instigated by him. Seeking revenge, Theophilus summoned a meeting of thirty-six bishops, twenty-nine of whom were Egyptians like himself, in order to try John on a series of trumped-up charges. The strategy worked, and in August 403 he was deposed, a decision that the emperor lamely accepted. John was expelled from the capital, but he was recalled the very next day when riots broke out in the city in his defense. John was restored to his office, and things seemed to be patched up, but two months later he was again accused of attacking the empress. This time the accusation stuck. The emperor ordered John to retire from his functions, but John refused to do so, and trouble soon followed. John had many followers in Constantinople, and when the army tried to expel him from his church the congregation resisted, with some loss of life. The situation became intolerable, and on June 9, 404, five days after Pentecost, John was forced to leave the city. He was exiled to the Armenian town of Cucusus (now Göksun in south central Turkey), where he lived for the next three years. Unfortunately for John, Cucusus was not all that far from Antioch, and his former parishioners were soon making the pilgrimage to visit him, along with some dedicated followers from Constantinople. Nor was Cucusus a safe place for someone of John’s stature to reside. It was subject to periodic raids by the mountain men of nearby Isauria, and John had to flee from them at least once during his stay there. The support that he received from both Antioch and Constantinople alarmed John’s enemies, who had the emperor banish him to Pityus (now Pitsunda in the Abkhazian region of Georgia). Forced to go there on foot, and exposed to the hardships of bad weather and a semidesert terrain, John never made it to his destination. On September 14, 407, he died in Comana Pontica, a city that lay near modern Tokat, about halfway between Cucusus and the Black Sea, and is now in ruins. John’s death came to be seen as a form of martyrdom, and his fame spread. A century after his death he became known as Chrysostomos (“golden mouthed”) because of his gift for preaching, and the name has stuck. The Roman church broke off relations with Constantinople because of what happened to John, and it was not until the wrong done to him was put right that relations between the two largest churches of the Christian world were restored. Thirty years after he passed away, John’s remains were brought back to Constantinople, and the emperor Theodosius II (408–450), the son of Arcadius and Eudoxia, publicly begged forgiveness for his parents’ sin in opposing John’s ministry. In later times John became the best loved of all the Greek fathers of the church, and his extensive legacy has been preserved almost intact. The simplicity of his life, the sincerity of his faith, and the sufferings he was unjustly forced to endure all combined to enhance his reputation, which was particularly strong among the Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century, who regarded him as a model Christian leader. John’s reputation began to suffer in the late nineteenth century, when interest in the early church period turned more toward studying the history of Christian doctrine. John was not particularly involved in any of the great theological controversies of his time, though he was a convinced and consistent defender of Nicene orthodoxy. His pastoral approach left the impression that his theology was simplistic, and some scholars started to wonder whether he could be called a theologian at all. The result is that today John is little known and seldom read. There are few recent translations of his writings, and it is only quite recently that interest in them has started to pick up again, partly because of a renewed concern for patristic biblical interpretation. Whether this will lead to a renewed interest in John as a preacher remains to be seen, though it is probably true to say that this is unlikely to occur unless it is accompanied by a more general revival of interest in preaching. HIS WORKS John wrote a few treatises on moral and pastoral subjects, and he has left us a fair amount of correspondence, but his reputation rests mainly on the large number of his sermons that have survived. Unfortunately for us, his fame as an orator was such that many people sought to imitate him, and much of what later circulated under his name comes from these admirers rather than from him. The task of sorting out the genuine sermons from the spurious ones remains unfinished, and there is as yet no critical edition of his works, which puts him at a disadvantage when compared with great contemporaries like Athanasius and the Cappadocian fathers (Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa). There is also a difficulty regarding translations. By no means all of John’s vast output is available in English, though his expository sermons on the New Testament were published between 1888 and 1893 in five volumes of the Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. The translation style is somewhat archaic for modern readers and makes John seem old fashioned and occasionally obscure, but there is nothing comparable available elsewhere. John’s sermons on the Old Testament and his other writings are only partially translated, and much remains to be done to make them accessible to modern readers. Surprising though it may seem, John’s reputation has also suffered from the fact that most of his sermons are expositions of Scripture. One reason for this is that his expository style seldom attracts the interest of modern biblical scholars, whose work is based on different hermeneutical principles and often leads to quite different interpretations of the texts. More significantly, John’s applications of those texts, while it had a powerful effect in his day, is frequently hard for later generations to appreciate because of the very different circumstances in which we now live. Nevertheless John’s methods and principles often remain valid, even if many of the details now seem obscure or irrelevant, and it is by examining them that we can rediscover his genius and its ongoing importance for preachers in every age. A difficulty with reading sermons is that it is impossible to recapture the original atmosphere in which they were preached. John’s use of gestures, his tone of voice, his sense of humor, his allusions to contemporary events that are unknown to us now—all of these are lost to the modern reader. Nor can we be sure to what extent the texts we have represent what he actually...
