It is the Spirit who gives life;
the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and
are life. (John 6:63 NASB)
Many (not all, to be fair) Protestant critics of Latter-day Saint
theology and other theologies that embrace baptismal regeneration (e.g.,
Catholicism; Eastern Orthodoxy) often appeal to John 6:63 in support of a non-sacramental
understanding of the “water” in John 3 (and a Eucharistic reading of John 6
itself). See Baptism,
Salvation, and the New Testament: John 3:1-7 for a discussion of this verse
and the meaning of “flesh” (σαρξ).
Interestingly, this popular Protestant (mis-)reading of the
passage is Gnostic in nature. Note the following from Urban C. Von
Wahlde:
. . . close analysis of the notion
of ‘knowing’ in the Gospel of John shows it has little in common with Gnostic notions.
Knowledge for the Johannine believer is knowledge of God not knowledge of self.
Moreover, in Gnostic systems the possession of knowledge and its ‘effects’
vary. In some Gnostic systems, it is said that there are three types of
persons: the ‘spiritual’ or ‘pneumatic’ (πνευματικος), the ‘psychic’
(ψυχικος), and the ‘fleshly’ (σαρκικος), who
were also called ‘earthly’ (χοικος) or ‘hylic’ (υλικος). For pneumatics, the ability to ‘know’
is connatural and, once knowledge is attained, salvation is assured (for
example, The Gospel of Truth 21.5-22.15).
At times, such knowledge is
conceived of as a gift from God given also to psychics. Yet in some systems,
the psychics, even with the gift of knowledge, are not capable of entering into
the Pleroma.
In their basic conception, these
ideas have almost nothing in common with the Johannine conception of the
ability to know. At the same time, it is easy to see how, on a superficial level,
the Johannine contrast between the insufficiency of the flesh and the
importance of the Spirit (cf. Jn 3.6; 6.63) could appeal to the Gnostics,
who held to the existence of different ‘types’ of men. Moreover, the
conviction that salvation was assured to the pneumatic person was similar in
some respects to the ‘realized eschatology’ of the Gospel inasmuch as the
believer who possessed the eschatological Spirit already possessed eternal life
in its fullness and so would not come into judgment.
However, the Johannine concept is completely
different in origin and nature from the Gnostic notion. In the Gospel of John,
the background of the failure to ‘know’ and the ability to ‘know’ is derived
from the OT portrayal that, throughout history, Israel had not ‘known’ God
(Isa. 1.2-4) This had led them into sin and idolatry (Jer. 9.2-3). But the
prophets had promised that ‘in the last days’ all this would change and the
Israelites would know God fully (Jer 31.33-34). (Urban C. Von Wahlde, Gnosticism,
Docetism, and the Judaisms of the First Century: The Search for the Wider
Context of the Johannine Literature and Why It Matters [Library of New
Testament Studies 517; London: T&T Clark, 2015, 2016], 35-36, emphasis in
bold added)
Furthermore, as Von Wahlde also notes, the
“sola fide” (mis-)reading of John 5:24 (“Truly, truly, I say to you, he who
hears My word, and believes Him who sent Me, has eternal life, and does not
come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life”[ NASB]) is also “Gnostic”
in nature:
Nowhere does the Gospel present a
view of the believer as someone endowed by nature with a destiny. Rather, the
believer receives the Spirit as a gift from the Father. However, . . . for the
community at the time of the second edition, once the Spirit had been received
there was no more effort needed to achieve eternal life—the person ‘does not
come into judgment but has crossed over from death to life’ (Jn. 5.24). This conception
of the believer bears some similarity to the ‘deterministic’ type of Gnostic thought
in that, once the Spirit has been received, the person has been reborn
and one of the consequences of that rebirth is sinlessness. (Ibid., 46, italics
in original, emphasis in bold added. “Second edition” refers to the author’s
proposed second editorial redaction of the Gospel of John.)
