The Tension Between Divine Presence and Divine Absence

The opening chapter orients the study in relationship to previous scholarship. I seek to show how previous scholarship has long recognized a tension between John’s Christology and his concurrent emphasis on Jesus’s impending absence but often neglects the way in which this tension pervades John’s narrative and drives the plot. In particular, I argue that studies which understand John’s Christology in terms of a heavenly redeemer figure, the temple, or Stoicism, as well as studies reconstructing the Johannine community, all propose (in various ways) that John eliminate the tension created by Jesus’s absence by minimizing the reality of his absence. In contrast, this study will argue that John uses the tension between presence and absence as a central conflict throughout the narrative. I then lay the groundwork for this argument by briefly describing my understanding of John’s Christology as one focused on divine presence and illustrating how that understanding activates motifs of divine absence underappreciated by previous Johannine scholarship.