Divinity United

It has been a while since posting, but I have been meaning to get to this one. I wanted to formally apologize to Dr. Saeed Hamid-Khani for not making use of his published thesis in the writing of my own thesis on the Gospel of John. Hamid-Khani's thesis was published as: Revelation and Concealment ofChrist: Theological Inquiry into the Elusive Language of the Fourth Gospel  (WUNT II/120; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000) . It was examined by William Horbury and C.K. Barrett. John Philip M. Sweet was Hamid-Khani's supervisor.  In the course of working on an essay related to the topic of "revelation" in the Gospel of John, I ran across the title of Hamid-Khani's book. I was able to get a copy through interlibrary loan and waded my way through the immense amount of work that the volume contains. The striking contribution of Hamid-Khani's thesis is his  challenge  to Rudolf Bultmann's claim that what is revealed in John's Gospel is an empty revelation fo...

In his published thesis, Markus Bockmuehl has some thought-provoking comments on the hiddenness of God. "This hiddenness is not an abnormality, an unfortunate occasional blemish in an otherwise predictable system of theology. New revelation from God may not in fact be forthcoming for long periods of time: 'In those days it was rare for Yahweh to speak; visions were uncommon' (1 Sam 3:1 NJB). Characters like Job, David, Hezekiah, Jeremiah, all have to cope at one time or another with the torment and agony of God's silence. True, God's silence and absence are never His last word, and therefore the hiddenness of Yahweh is not ultimately a cornerstone of an OT theology of revelation. Nevertheless, God is not simply 'available' to man, whether in daily experience or in the cult." Markus N.A. Bockmuehl, Revelation and Mystery in Ancient Judaism and Pauline Christianity (WUNT 2.36; Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1990), 10.

I have recently finished reading through John Ashton's second edition of his work Understanding the Fourth Gospel (OUP, 2007), and it is not merely the Technicolor version of the original publication (1991), although it may look that way. His introduction has had a significant overhaul in the second edition that streamlines the discussion, but the first edition's introduction may offer further background for readers on the state of play prior to Ashton, especially regarding Bultmann's contribution. The second edition has some rearrangement of chapters and four new excursuses. John Ashton's overall study remains the same: he argues for the importance of the theme of revelation in John's Gospel and disagrees with Bultmann's conclusion that all Jesus reveals is that he is the Revealer. Ashton concludes that the mode of the revelation, the gospel, has a part to play in the revelation. For the Fourth Gospel, revelation is not just about Jesus' words or the...