Creation in the Gospel of John: Tradition, Theology, and Ethics

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Ruben Zimmermann
• Subject Area: Protestant Theology
• Term: from 2019 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 428143557

The proposed project investigates the theme of creation in the Gospel of John with regard to its traditional historical basis, its literary aesthetic design and its theological and ethical implications. So the relevance of the theme is already given by the fact that it is a project on a central theological theme of one of the main canonical writings of Christianity and at the same time on an influential testimony of world literature. It is all the more astonishing that this has hardly been researched so far and that there are only four brief English-language monographs, each with a limited text stock and methodology. Furthermore, questions of creation ethics in theology should also be discussed in dialogue with the canonical writings of the Bible, which in view of the current ethical questions of the life sciences (e.g. longevity research) and the climate change debate attaches additional importance to the project. The project is based on the hypothesis that the Gospel of John is developing an original theology and ethics of creation. It finds support already by the prominent beginning of the Prologue of John, which is understood with explicit allusion to Gen 1 also as a reading instruction to the effect that in the following Gospel the motive of creation is to be perceived, which in many places is quite evident (e.g. clay in Jn 9; garden motive in Jn 18-19; breathing in of the breath of life in Jn 20,22 with connection to Gen 2,7 etc.). It is a question both of the creation of man and of life in the wide horizon of the cosmos. The evangelist starts from the endangered and fallen creation and searches for possibilities of restitution of life in the face of death. By linking the history of Jesus with the fundamental questions of creation theology, new insights into life and death or becoming and perishing are thus gained, which at the same time can give impulses for current debates in theology and ethics.The project pursues three subgoals: - Traditional historical development of the relevant ancient discourses of creation, especially in Second Temple Judaism (especially through expert workshops)- Analysis of elected pericopes and mapping of a semantic creation network in the Fourth Gospel- Describing a theology and an ethics of creation in the Fourth Gospel, amenable for current debates.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants