The Johannine prologue: A hermeneutical key to the community theme

Verbum et Ecclesia

 
 
Field Value
 
Title The Johannine prologue: A hermeneutical key to the community theme
 
Creator Gharbin, Godibert K. van Eck, Ernest
 
Subject Theology John; community; social-scientific; Logos; prologue
Description As John wrote to a community grappling with incarnating its communalistic values, he furnishes readers with remedies for addressing such sociocultural maladies. However, to appreciate the Johannine response to colossal cultural failure, we must begin from the Johannine prologue because the narrative develops the enigmatic constructs it postulates. Although the community theme is one of such, it has not received attention despite the gamut of academic interests in the prologue and the ubiquitous acknowledgement that it is a compendium of the major themes in Johannine prologue. Therefore, this article aimed to contribute to the ongoing discussions on the major themes in the Johannine prologue and the divine remedy to these challenges – how the believing community can epitomise the eternal community. The study employed a narratological analysis because it analyses and guides the reader to recreate the Johannine theological concept of community, studying the poetics and meaning of what the prologue promulgates. The findings indicated that the Johannine prologue is the hermeneutical key to understand the community theme: it establishes its legitimacy, explicates what it entails and lays the foundation for its narratological development. Thus, no academic autopsy on the community theme should ignore it.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The Johannine characterisation of a community challenges the relational dimension of a community – the anthropological view that defines community by the ‘quality relationships’ between group members – by redefining a community as a group of people participating in the divine community. This research thus intersects with the disciplines of anthropology and sociology.
 
Publisher AOSIS
 
Contributor
Date 2022-10-13
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion — —
Format text/html application/epub+zip text/xml application/pdf
Identifier 10.4102/ve.v43i1.2621
 
Source Verbum et Ecclesia; Vol 43, No 1 (2022); 8 pages 2074-7705 1609-9982
 
Language eng
 
Relation
The following web links (URLs) may trigger a file download or direct you to an alternative webpage to gain access to a publication file format of the published article:

https://verbumetecclesia.org.za/index.php/ve/article/view/2621/5974 https://verbumetecclesia.org.za/index.php/ve/article/view/2621/5975 https://verbumetecclesia.org.za/index.php/ve/article/view/2621/5976 https://verbumetecclesia.org.za/index.php/ve/article/view/2621/5977
 
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Rights Copyright (c) 2022 Godibert K. Gharbin, Ernest van Eck https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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