In this essay I apply a "soul hermeneutic" to the "father-son" language in the Fourth Gospel. My "soul hermeneutic" is influenced by three elements: analytical and archetypal psychology, which reorients psychology to "the study of the soul"; reflection on African American cultural experience, which is often characterized as "soul"; and reader-response criticism, which emphasizes that the reading of a text is shaped by the reader's psychological and social location. After discussing briefly my method, I read "soulfully" two discourses (John 5:19-47; 17:1-26) in which Jesus repeatedly refers to himself as the son and to god as the father. I first poetically and playfully engage the images in these discourses, then I identify likenesses to these images in contemporary African American poetry, and finally I note likenesses to these images in my own soul.
82 Vs 22 My First Daddy
This essay comes out of both my academic and personal experience. (Doesn't everyone's?) For twenty years I have studied critically the Gospel of John, beginning with my first class of my first semester in seminary ("The Gospel of John" with Alan Culpepper) and continuing with a dissertation (Willett: 1992), a number of articles (Willett: 1988; Willett Newheart: 1995, 1996) and a work in progress. As some of these titles attest, I have particularly been interested in forging a psychological hermeneutic for reading the Gospel.
This essay is also grounded in my experience of fathering and being fathered. I am the only begotten son of the father (full of grace and truth? John 1:14) Edward Willett, who died when I was 16 after a long illness. And I am the father of two daughters: Anastasia, born in 1996, just after I sent off to prospective publishers the first chapter of my current work-in-progress, and Miranda, who was born in spring 1999, when I was working on this essay.
An anniversary of a passing is tough at any time but the first year anniversary is one of the toughest. The pain is still raw and the memories at their most vivid. If you are wishing someone well on the anniversary of a death or remembering one of your own these quotes are a good way to try and make sense of it all.
2ff7e9595c
Comments