The Whitehead Home Place Recalls Rural Life of Yesterday

[The exact source of this article is unknown, although it was probably the Lexington Echo, possibly in the early eighties.  The author is not known.  I took the pictures of the site around 1990 or so.  The house was up for sale for around 300K.  It was tempting.]

The old Whitehead Home Place in Oglethorpe County between Carlton and Lexington resembles many farm houses built in 1880 but, inside, its storied walls bear witness to the unusually straight-laced rules of conduct so strictly enforced by the builder and his wife in rearing their family.

Cena and George Whitehead designed the box-like staircase on each side of the entrance hall.  One strictly for girls – the other strictly for boys, and to ensure that never the twain should meet upstairs, a solid wall was constructed to completely separate the bedrooms of the two daughters and their visitors from those of the four sons and their spend-the-night friends.

Even though the daughters were under strict supervision at all times, their bedroom walls must have had ears attuned to lovers’ names whispered to sisters and friends who crossed their hearts not to tell because many house parties and pillow talks later, there were talks of weddings.  Daisy chose Carl Stevens, son of Joseph, a neighboring farmer and Ettie married Walter Martin, a native of Florida.

Of the sons, Theodric never married; Herbert Calvin married Elma Thornton of Elbert County; George Wiley, Jr., chose Minnie Meadows of Madison County for his wife; and Walter Everett  [the author’s father-in-law] married Luna May Stevens of Sandy Cross, daughter of Augustus Stevens.  Walter furnished the material for this story while rummaging through his attic of memories.

George Wiley Whitehead was born in 1829 and Cena Ann Mathews [daughter of Raleigh H. Mathews) in 1845.  The awkward young man first saw Cena in the little one-room log schoolhouse they both attended for a short time.  Though he was sixteen years her senior, George said right then that he was going to marry that pretty little girl when she grew up.  George fought in the Civil War and his return, with a bullet still in his head, was due to one of the miracles of the war:  wounded and left for dead on a battlefield in Virginia, Private George regained consciousness to find a Yankee officer standing over him.  He gave the Masonic sign which the officer returned.  The Blue Coat carried his wounded Masonic brother to his own camp where he was given medical attention and, as soon as George was able to travel, he was exchanged for a Yankee prisoner.

On a cold, bleak January 30, 1866, Cena married George knowing that he would never be strong.  Through the struggles and strength – sapping days of the reconstruction era, besides giving birth to seven children – one of which died in infancy – she took much of the responsibility of rearing and helping to support the family.  A large woman, possessing a dominant personality, Cena was strong in body and mind.  Her manner was stern to the point of austerity:  there was no foolishness about her.  She made rules for her children to abide by and they abided.  She dealt with everyone in open frankness, and was an ever-present help in time of trouble.

Walter was twelve years old when the home place was built and very proud of the fact that he could help his father haul the hand-dressed 8” X 6” log sills and the bark-peeled logs 8” in diameter used for sleepers.

In keeping with the custom of the 19^th century, the kitchen was built away from the house with an open fireplace spacious enough to hold sticks of cordwood and a large wash pot on winter wash days.  A big cooking pot swung over the hot wood coals each day and on New Year’s Day it held hog jowl and dried black-eyed peas, to ensure good luck for the family all year.

Cena chose a dirt floor for her kitchen,

Because,” she said, “I won’t have to use the back-bending scrub brush.

(This brush was made of corn shucks fastened to a substantial hickory limb.)

Work was a dominant theme in this home.  Everybody had a job and working hours were from sunup to sundown, nevertheless, boys would be boys as one incident proves.

One of George’s chores was to drive the cows up from the pasture at night while Walter fed the mules.  One cold, blustery winter day, Walter finished feeding early, slipped into the house and covered himself with a sheet – and climbed a tree in the pasture near a log over a creek which George would have to cross, and waited.  When George was well on the log, Walter jumped out at him in ghostly apparel.  The fading light of early evening gave the exact illusion Walter desired.  George took one look, slid off the log into the water with the smoothness of a water moccasin, while Walter rolled in unconscionable laughter on the ground.  The joke wasn’t funny, and Walter’s laughter turned to tears later, when in the kitchen with mother, George stood with icicles hanging from the seat of his pants while Walter’s were being burned up.

“One job we hated,” Walter said, “was sweeping yards everyday with dogwood brooms.  Daisy and George would sweep a while and fight a while – just to break the monotony, I guess.”

Cena made her own candles until the advent of the oil lamp.  When George bought one of these new contraptions, she wouldn’t let him bring it in the house until he had tried it out for several nights on a stump in the yard.  The lamp became a necessity to the children during their scattered months of schooling in a one-room log schoolhouse nearby with its hard, backless benches where teaching encouraged soreness rather than learning.

The Whitehead parents used situations,  as they arose, to illustrate never-to-be-forgotten lessons of life.  This was one of Walter’s favorites:

I went with my father to slop the pigs every day and we had to push our way through as they crowded around our feet.  One day father emptied the contents of his bucket in the trough and walked free of hindrance back to the gate where we both watched the hungry animals ‘act like pigs!’”  Finally, my father interrupted their slurping noise, ‘Son,’ he said, ‘you thought those pigs were following me because they like me, didn’t you?  You see it was the slop I had that they were after.  Always remember, some people are like that, they follow you as long as you have something they want.’

Though they were few and far between, life had its lighter moments for the Whitehead clan.  On one such occasion, Walter and Ettie decided to play church, one of the few things with which they were familiar outside of home.  They induced Tish, a little black girl who lived on the place, to join Ettie in making up the congregation while Walter preached.  He gave his sermon all he had and Tish dutifully shouted to her heart’s content, but Ettie remained immovable.  Finally, Walter tired of his sister’s complacency and entreated,

Ettie, why don’t you shout?”  The prim little girl, sitting calmly with hands folded on her gingham – aproned lap, answered softly, “I’m just waiting for the Spirit to move me.

Walter bought the home after his mother and father passed away.  He felt the need of “This Old House,” and resolved that it would live much longer.  He took “time to fix the shingles, time to fix the floor” – he added chimneys and fireplaces in upstairs bedrooms which had been ignorant of heat during his boyhood.  Walter never forgot how his fingers grew numb on cold mornings while he was trying to cover his chilled body with warm, homespun clothes made by his mother’s industrious hands.

Mr. and Mrs. Charlie Graham lived there until a few years ago.  Charlie had been reared on an adjoining farm, and he gave the home place the same care he would have given any old, well-loved acquaintance.

In 1930, Walter enlarged the old and built new barns at the home place.  Around them he kept haystacks, standing tall like sentinels, guarding against an invasion of scarcity and want such as had once stalked this beloved and hallowed ground.

On one of these barns, Walter placed a highly – polished, granite cornerstone engraved with the name of his father and mother.  His father’s name appears also on an Oglethorpe County Courthouse plaque, as a member of the Board of Commissioners and County Surveyor when the courthouse was built in 1887.

The old landmark stands today half way between Carlton and Lexington, removed from the paved highway by a roller-coaster dirt road which boasts the longest covered bridge in Georgia.

A victim of the rural population’s steady trek to towns and cities, leaving the countryside almost as desolate as did Sherman’s march through Georgia, he house is untenanted now.  It sits like an old-fashioned, aging mother who has lost her brood but still bravely faces each new sunrise with only reminiscences of busy yesteryears, to meet empty todays.

The wide front porch which once reached out to welcome children and visitors into a lap – not of luxury but of hospitality – appears sad and lonely.

Walter passed away in 1951, leaving the home place to his son, Walter Joe Whitehead of Carlton, whose intention is to honor his father’s oft-repeated and last request, “Son, don’t ever sell the home place.”

Lecture Notes from Film Appreciation Classes with Dr. Benjamin Dunlap – Circa 1974

Dr. Benjamin B. Dunlap

A Passionate Life

Cocteau is really concerned not just with glory, but with the peculiar glory of the poet, with the manner in which the poet cannibalizes his own past.

Ultimately the kind of meaning that music and painting possesses is one of dynamic relationships of elements.

Robert Shoals – Quite frequently those trained in literature were least able to appreciate film because they anticipated that profundity must perforce be verbal.  They could not acknowledge that it was possible for film to be at once banal verbally and profound visually.

Film adumbrates the conceptual.  Literature adumbrates the concrete.

Literature starts with a general idea, then you must provide the concrete detail….  On the other hand, if I convey this in film, I begin with a concrete detail.  Immediately you know what the man looks like…, but you must deduce, from physical detail, what the meaning of the man’s appearance is.  That is, you start with concrete detail and move toward meaning, connotation, poetry.  And in literature you start with the conception, the conceptual, and move toward the concrete.

Robert Lowery – The fascinating thing is that film is capable of turning anything into poetic statement.

I had supposed myself somehow disembodied, not real in the way other people were, an observer but not an actor, not a doer.  And suddenly I realized that the world was full of people who didn’t know they were real, whose lives didn’t conform to the glamorous expectations generated by culture, by television, by film, by literature, or by magazines. And that it was my duty in life to validate them, to take pictures of them, to show them their reality, to redeem that aspect of their lives that was otherwise lost, to bring them into being.

Every instant the entire universe is going over the spillway.

In film … there is a kind of symbolic triumph over time.

Much avant-garde film is pre-occupied simply with analysis of surface reality.

Film also, by anchoring itself in physical reality, captures a kind of irrelevant detail, almost by chance ….  I feel that the random, in terms of concrete detail at least, is more inescapably present and more convincingly realistic [than in other art forms].

Two Types of Modern Avant-Garde Film

[“Meshes of the Afternoon”] is subjective ….  The unreliable narrator filters everything through her own sensibility and though we think we are getting the truth … how can we be sure?  [“Meshes” is] certainly the expression of a neurotic sensibility ….  This sensibility is pre-occupied with … personal liberation, sexual and emotional submission to the man with whom she’s having the affair.  Nothing literally happens, the dramatic action of the entire film consists merely of this woman’s coming to the apartment … and sitting down in the chair.  That’s all that literally happens in the film, but that’s not all that happens on the screen.  Deren creates a new reality … playing very deftly with Freudian suggestion.

In the apparent suicide that occurs at the end of the film the symbolic gesture is altogether ambiguous; we don’t know if it’s an act of suicide, and act of eroticism (by symbolic imagery), or a gesture of liberation.  Deren at this point turn her facile Freudianism brilliantly to advantage.  It might be a crude language, but she’s found a way to manipulate it to make it wonderfully expressive.  The knife … connotes both violence and sexuality in a way that perfectly conveys the heroine’s presumed confusion about her own life and emotional complications (regarding her relationship with Shasha Hammid, the co-director of the film).

We can’t be sure whether the act is … is suicide in neurotic despair at the violation of self she feels imposed by the world of a man with whom she is having the affair, or whether it represents the ending of a relationship that entrammels her (and hence a mode of liberation) or the act of sex, which, since Elizabethan times … has been represented as a metaphysical death (le petite morte), however desired and feared.  All three of these possibilities overlap and become a single … complex and subtle statement.

There is no strident feminism in the film….  Ultimately, Maya Deren is more interested in herself as a person than as a woman.  If anything, this film seems to question the compatability of the two.  And yet the message of the film is clearly that conventional roles constitute a violation of self….  But, and this is the catch, and the profundity of he film’s statement:  efforts to affirm the self often destroy it in the process, becomes a mode of self-mutilation.  Perhaps the film would be described best as a classic statement of the romantic dilemma, the tension between the self and the mask that can lead to the destruction of both.  What we are dealing with is to some extent the myth of Narcissus and hence the use of mirrors throughout the film (psychological mask and romantic reflection) as a kind of leit motif.  What [Deren is] analyzing is the complexity of the male / female relationship, compounded out of love and hate, submission and violence, a relationship at once desired and despised, with which one cannot extricate oneself without destroying some part of one’s self – that’s the catch-22 of “Meshes of the Afternoon.”

‘[‘Meshes’] culminates in a double ending in which it would seem that the imagined achieved, for her, that it became reality.”  But note that it’s not.  She’s not dead, simply because we still see through her sensibility that which she imagines.  And because there’s a second and third part to the trilogy – “At Land” and “Ritual in Transfigured Time.”

The Holy Spirit in the Fourth Gospel – The Gospel According to John

There are five verses in The Gospel According to John that are known as the Paraclete or Advocate verses:

John 14:15 – 17 – If you love me you will obey my commands;  and I will ask the Father, and he will give you another to be your Advocate, who will be with you forever – the Spirit of truth.  The world cannot receive him, because the world neither sees nor knows him; but you know him, because he dwells with you and is (or, shall be) in you.

John 14:25 – 26 – I have told you all this while I am still here with you; but your Advocate, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send you in my name, will teach you everything, and will call to mind all that I have told you.

John 15:26 – 27 – But when your Advocate has come, whom I will send you from the Father – the Spirit of truth that issues from the father – he will bear witness to me.  And you also are my witnesses, because you have been with me from the first.

John 16:5 – 11 – None of you asks me, “Where are you going?”  Yet you are plunged into grief because of what I have told you.  Nevertheless, I tell you the truth:  it is for your good that I am leaving you.  If I do not go, your Advocate will not come, whereas if I go, I will send him to you.  When he comes, he will confute the world, and show you where wrong and right and judgement lie.  He will convict them of wrong, by their refusal to believe in me; he will convince them that right is on my side, by showing that I go to the Father when I pass from your sight; and he will convince them of divine judgement, by showing that the Prince of this world stands condemned.

John 16:12 – 15 – There is still much that I could say to you, but the burden would be too great for you now.  However, when he comes who is the Spirit of truth, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own authority, but will tell only what he hears; and he will make known to you the things that are coming.  He will glorify me, for everything that he makes known to you he will draw from what is mine.  All that the Father has is mine, and that is why I said, ‘Everything that he makes known to you he will draw from what is mine.’

All five Paraclete or Advocate verses are put on the lips of Jesus by the author of The Gospel According to John.

The exact nature of the Holy Spirit as described in the Gospel of John is amorphous.  The Holy Spirit is not forthrightly described in absolute terms, but comes across as a solution to a well-designed puzzle.  There is no defining explanation of what the Holy Spirit is.  The scholarly criticism focused on the nature of the Holy Spirit is varied, being focused on different aspects of the Holy Spirit.  Biblical scholars battle with each other attempting to explain what the author of John was attempting to accomplish.  Some of the scholars are searching for a definitive, exacting portrayal of the Holy Spirit, which, of course, is not possible.  It is by nature a spiritual and amorphous task.  The Holy Spirit is an ingenious theological creation on the part of the author of John and and yields to broad theological interpretation.  None of the scholars are wrong, some are just grasping at specific theories that attempt to pin down the author to specifics.  Others are quite successful with their general interpretations of purpose.  However, all of the critical material can be combined to create a generalized depiction of the Johanine Holy Spirit.

The word “spirit” has its origin in the nature of wind.  Often within the Bible, “wind” and “spirit” are used interchangeably.  This can be used as a powerful literary device, as in Genesis 1:1 – 2:

In the beginning of creation, when God made heaven and earth, the earth was without form and void, with darkness over the face of the abyss, and a mighty wind that swept over the surface of the waters.

The New English Bible provides a footnote regarding the phrase, “and a mighty wind that swept.”  Besides its obvious meaning, it can also mean, “and the spirit of God hovering.”  This “mighty wind” and “spirit of God” are analogous.  This is a powerful image.  One can sense the image of the wind hovering over the “abyss” of the earth and easily relate it to the spirit of God.  The spirit of God is both a simple and complex concept that is often mysterious, impalpable concept.  Wind is also a simple, yet complex concept while at times mysterious and impalpable.  C. H. Dodd expands this concept of wind and spirit to humanity:

The impression of movement and force which the mind derives from contemplating the effects of wind seems early to have suggested that life and movement in the world are due to the presence of some element  analogous to the breath-soul in man.¹

In the Gospel of John, “Holy Spirit” conveys the concept of a continued relationship between Jesus and his followers.  It is, at times, referred to as “intercessor,” “Advocate,” and most often as “Paraclete.”  I will use the term, “Paraclete.”

Most of the information we have about the Paraclete, and, in turn, the Holy Spirit comes from the five Paraclete verses.  Scholars devote themselves to constructing a picture of the Paraclete through these five verses.  As an aid in discussion and an introduction to Paraclete scholarship, I will present leading arguments and conceptions of the Paraclete.  Afterwards, I will attempt to combine this scholarship into a summary concept of the Paraclete based on the original writings of the author of the Gospel of John.  My attempt is to arrive at some common ground between the views (if only abstractly).

As a starting point:

Hermann Sasse argued that the Paraclete was a human personality, one filled with the Spirit, a prophet who would proclaim Christ and creatively continue his revelation – just what the author of the Fourth Gospel did.  In that case, the evangelist himself would be the Paraclete, even though the final version of the book identifies the Paraclete with the Spirit.²

This scholarly concept is simply, a person filled with the Spirit.

Hans Windisch promotes the idea of a double Paraclete, one in heaven and one on earth:

The role of the Paraclete as a “double” becomes evident directly from John, not only from the expression about the ‘other Paraclete’ in 14:16, but also from the comparison with the intercessory function of Jesus in heaven in 16:26 as well ad from 1 John 2:1 (Jesus is the Paraclete of the Church with the Father).  According to John (the Gospel and the first epistle), the Church has two intercessors, one in heaven and one on earth – the one, the friend at court who stays at the court and intercedes there for his protege, and the other, the friend from court who is sent by the court and appears in the world as mediator, admonitor, teacher, and ambassador.³

The following quotes consider the Paraclete in more general terms and are, I believe, stronger because of that – much less is read into the original texts.  Raymond Brown asserts that Jesus was the first Paraclete and the Holy Spirit was the second Paraclete.  Through parallel comparisons of what John says about Jesus and what Brown believes is the second Paraclete, he elaborates:

Jesus is the truth (14:16), as the Paraclete is the Spirit of truth.  He is the Holy One of God (6:69), as the Paraclete is the Holy Spirit (accepting the reading in 14:26).  Hence the Holy Spirit in John, as in the New Testament generally, is the Spirit of Jesus; it rested on him as he began his ministry (1:32) and he breathed it forth at its close (20:22 and perhaps 19:30)

[Brown’s conclusion is] …as ‘another Paraclete’ the Paraclete is, as it were, another Jesus … and the Paraclete is the presence of Jesus when Jesus is absent.⁴

George Johnston responds:

As paraclete, the spirit is the representative of Jesus and it should not therefore be considered ‘another Jesus’ or ‘ the presence of Jesus when Jesus is absent.’  Rather, this concept directs attention to the evidence in the life of the apostolic church of wisdom, vitality, virtue, and graces that Christians could explain only as the sign of divine power and God’s very presence.

Within the churches the influence  and the gifts of the spirit-paraclete were mediated to certain persons who fulfilled precisely those functions that are ascribed in the Farewell Discourses to the spirit itself.  They are therefore to be identified as the agents of the divine spirit.  John the evangelist must be regarded as one such agent, and it would not be improper to honor him with the title of ‘paraclete of the Christians’ ⁵

Finally, C. K. Barrett provides a summary:

The Spirit’s work is to bear witness to Christ, to make operative what Christ had already effected.  The Spirit is thus the eschatological continuum in which the work of Christ, initiated in his ministry and awaiting its termination at his return, is wrought out.  … How, we may ask, does the Spirit in fact convince the world of sin, righteousness, and judgement?  The answer is, primarily through the witness which the Church bears to Christ, its preaching and sacraments.⁶

In my mind, Barrett’s helps to bring all the discussion of the Paraclete together into a strong argument about the contemporary thinking when the gospels were written.  The Spirit is directly related to the Church’s witness to Christ.  Put another way, the Church is the Spirit incarnate.  It is a “remembering of Jesus.”  The Christ of the Johanine Jesus is the crux of the Church.  This “remembrance” is what nourishes the Church.  Johnston rebukes strongly Brown’s thinking that “the Paraclete is the presence of Jesus while Jesus is absent.”  In his attempt to de-mythologize the Holy Spirit by giving it an early Christian explanation of the divine source of “wisdom, vitality, and graces,” he contradicts himself.  The very existence of the Church had its generation in Jesus’s death (John 12:24).  It is symbolically represented in Jesus’s exhaltation and giving of the Spirit to the disciples.  In John’s view, there would have been no wisdom, vitality and grace if there had been no death.  Bluntly, Christ and therefore, Christianity did not exist prior to Jesus’s death.  The death exalted the things Jesus shared with the disciples to the point of creating the Church – Jesus and his teachings are “resurrected” as Christ and Christianity when he dies.  Jesus is elevated to the role of the Paraclete, the Advocate at his death.  The Paraclete or Advocate is the Holy Spirit and John felt this Spirit was the wisdom, vitality and grace of the Church, which is Christ manifest.  Since the death and exaltation was the basis for the Church, so long as the Church exists, so does the essence of Jesus, which is Christ.  This is what the author of the Gospel of John is attempting to communicate in his conception of the Holy Spirit.  Jesus, in the flesh, is not present, but the mysterious, impalpable presence of Jesus is felt through the Church’s remembrance of, or witness to, him.

The Paraclete’s purpose is to

call to mind all that I have told you.  (John 14:26)

The Spirit will “bear witness” to Jesus (John 15:26).  This “presence through remembering” is the dynamo and Holy Spirit of the Church.  In fact, it is it’s defining attribute.  It is the Spirit of Jesus, the Spirit of truth

I am the truth.  (John 14:6)

and therefore, to the Church, the Holy Spirit.

Johnston does do some service, however, in the he concedes to Hermann Sasse that John could very well be labeled a “paraclete of the Christians.”  As suggested  earlier, the Church and the Holy Spirit are almost inseparable because the Church is made up of Christians possessing the Holy Spirit (John 7:39 and John 20:22).  The supporters of the Church (such as the author of The Gospel of John) perform the tasks associated with the Paraclete.  It is reasonable to assume the the author of The Gospel of John considered himself to be filled with the Spirit.  His conception of the Christian was a person filled with the Spirit.  The Church as a whole embodies the Paraclete idea (Barrett), but the author of The Gospel of John, being a leading force in the Church at this time, and by speaking “… on his own authority … only what he hears” (John 16:13), also personifies the Paraclete idea.

Raymond Brown and Han Windisch both emphasize the “double” existence of Paracletes.  Windisch supports the idea of “two intercessors, one in heaven and one on earth.”  Brown believes that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Jesus.  There’s some commonality here.  The intercessor in heaven can be seen as Jesus united with God and the intercessor on earth can be seen as the Spirit of Jesus or the Spirit of truth within the Church.  The interpretation by Brown, taken along with Barrett’s continuum, represents what I believe to be the idea closest to the conception of the Johanine author.  Brown’s argument is substantiated by two verses in the Gospel of John.  In John 14:6 Jesus says, “I am the truth ….”  In the Paraclete verse John 15:26. the Paraclete is referred to as the “Spirit of truth which issues from the Father.”  The unity of Christ and the Father (My Father and I are one.  (John 10:30)) clearly supports Windisch’s view – Jesus united with God as the heavenly Paraclete, the Holy Spirit as the earthly Paraclete (the Spirit of Jesus) left behind.

There is also evidence in John which presents the Holy Spirit as being the Spirit of Jesus within the Church.  The author of The Gospel According to John gradually builds on this theme until  Jesus’s exhaltation, when Jesus is made to pass the Holy Spirit onto the disciples.  The author begins with eucharistic imagery, the “bread of life” and “living waters.”

John 12:23 – The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.  In truth, in very truth I tell you, a grain of wheat remains a solitary grain unless it falls into the ground and dies; but if it dies, it bears a rich harvest.

Jesus must die in order to give up his Spirit.

John 16:7 – If I do not go, your Advocate will not come….

In order to have eternal life this Holy Spirit must be received.  The author uses the eating of bread that represents Jesus’s flesh to depict the Christian reception of the Holy Spirit.  The image of eating Jesus’s flesh represents both the death during the Passion and the reception of the Spirit through eating.  As bread is eaten for nourishment, so is the Holy Spirit received for eternal life; Jesus’s flesh is consumed.  The symbol of “living water” is used in similar fashion.

John 7:38 – ‘Streams of water shall flow out from within him.’  He was speaking of the Spirit which believers in him would receive later; for the Spirit had not yet been given, because Jesus had not yet been glorified.

Jesus must die before the Spirit can be given, before the “living water” can be consumed.

What is the nature of the Paraclete?  It is best understood as the unification of the followers of Jesus (the Church).  As Jesus is unified with God and the believers unified with the Spirit, all believers are unified through Jesus’s commandment:

 John 13:34 – 35 – I give you a new commandment:  love one another; as I have loved you, so you are to love one another, then I know that you are my disciples.

The Paraclete is to “confute the world, and show where wrong and right and Judgement lie” (John 16:8).  In John the “world” represents the world of Satan.  A division separates the disciples and the world.

John 14:17 – The world cannot receive him, because the world neither sees not knows him; but you know him, because he dwells with you and is (or shall be) in you.

When Jesus is exalted the Church is formed.  He tells the disciples,

John 20:22 – 23 – Receive the Holy Spirit!  If you forgive any man’s sins, they stand forgiven; if you pronounce them unforgiven, unforgiven they remain.

John is blending his image of the Paraclete with the Church as set apart from the world.  The Church, as the Paraclete, will judge the world.

In the Synoptics, Jesus’s message is “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31, Matthews 22:39, Luke 10:27).  Within John, this is an abstraction.  The “love one another” is depicted only within the context of the disciples, the Church.  This commandment is the strongest unifying aspect of the Church.  The Church is set against Satan’s world.  The world is always set against the disciples.  This is a manifestation of the contrast between the light and the dark.

Thus the Paraclete and Holy Spirit are closely related.  The Paraclete is the Church  and its continuing witness to Christ.  The Paraclete derives its power to “confute the world” through the Christian receipt of the Holy Spirit.  Jesus’s sending of the Paraclete is seen as the gift of the Spirit to the disciples at Jesus’s exaltation.  Barrett’s “eschatological continuum” paints a very clear picture.  George Johnston sums up the author of John:

[Jesus] … as the God-man is spirit and the source of spiritual life.  No one in John’s era could see Jesus the Son of God with the eye of the flesh; but they would see the embodiment in the Church of his disciples.⁷

The author of John theologically immortalized Jesus as Christ.  Indeed, Jesus became the exalted Christ in the Fourth Gospel.

______________________

¹Dodd, C.H., The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (London: Cambridge University Press, 1953), p.213.
²Reuman, John, Introduction to The Spirit-Paraclete in the Fourth Gospel by Hans Windisch (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968), p. xi.
³Windisch, Hans, The Spirit-Paraclete in the Fourth Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968), p. 20.
⁴Johnston, George, The Spirit-Paraclete in the Fourth Gospel (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 94.
⁵Johnston, p. 126.
⁶Barrett, C.K., The Gospel According to St. John (London: S.P.C.K., 1965), pp. 76-77.
⁷Johnston, p. 127.

_______________________

Bibliography

C.K. Barrett, The Gospel According to St. John.  London: S.P.C.K., 1965.

C.H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel.  London: Cambridge University Press, 1953.

George Johnston, The Spirit-Paraclete in the Fourth Gospel.  London: Cambridge University Press, 1970.

Hans Windisch, The Spirit-Paraclete in the Fourth Gospel.  Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968.