The world God so loved

A necessarily political John 3:16

A couple of weeks ago, at an Interstate rest area just west of Crab Orchard, Tennessee, I found a Chick tract entitled, “This Was Your Life.”

It certainly was. Victoria and I were returning home from my fiftieth high-school reunion, where the reunion committee had asked me to give the opening prayer. I think my invitation to pray stemmed from my teenaged, Jesus-freak zeal. I preached a lot in the school hallways during lunch and passed out a lot of Chick tracts, including “This Was Your Life.”

Back then, in my old life, someone leaving a tract on a bathroom’s hand dryer would have been considered shy. In him, the love that caused us to witness was mixed with the fear of man, so he’d leave tracts around to do the work for him (with, he’d rationalize, the Spirit’s help).

The ideal witness, on the other hand, might have been someone like Rainbow Man, who wore an attention-getting rainbow afro-wig while sitting behind the goalposts at NFL games. During field-goal and extra-point attempts, he’d waive a poster that read, in its entirety, “John 3:16.” Nothing shy there, I believe.

And, from my old life’s reductionist, evangelical point of view, John 3:16 was also enough said.

On page 14 of “This Was Your Life,” the tract’s protagonist—I’ll call this anonymous person Guy—sits at church, listening to the preacher quote the famous King James Version of John 3:16:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

But Guy looks distracted. Whereas Rainbow Man sits in the stadium with his mind on John 3:16, Guy hears John 3:16 with his mind in the stadium. His thought bubble reads, “I wonder who’s winning the ball game.”

Of course, Guy can’t discreetly glance at his phone for the score since Chick tracts came out long before cellphones. (I mean, this is the exact same tract I passed out over half a century ago.) “This Was Your Life” is dated in other respects, too. Guy, for instance, wears a tie to the family dinner table, and his TV is about as deep as it is tall. Speaking of TV, the tract’s play on the 1950s series This Is Your Life is, of course, lost on most Americans now.

Despite all that, I wasn’t surprised to find the tract still in circulation. The tract’s understanding of John 3:16 and the tract’s unstated, apolitical assumptions about what the KJV translates as “world” and “eternal life” persist today.

Because I love John 3:16 now even more than I did during the years I handed out Chick tracts, I want to help free the verse from these assumptions through its context in Jesus’s religious and political project, the kingdom of God. I’ll cite a few theologians and political theorists along the way.

Let’s start with “world” in “For God so loved the world.” The Greek word transliterated as kosmos and found in John 3:16 is different than the Greek word transliterated as oikoumenē, which theologian David Bentley Hart defines as “the inhabited world of human beings.” Compared to oikoumenē, kosmos is a lot more . . . cosmic.

Hart uses “cosmos” for every kosmos in his translation of the New Testament, including the kosmos in John 3:16. To him, the English word “cosmos” best fits a Greek word “that most literally means ‘order’ or ‘arrangement,’ or even ‘loveliness of design.’”¹ In New Testament times,

the “cosmos” was quite literally a magnificently and terribly elaborate order of reality that comprehended nature (understood as a rational integrity organized by metaphysical principles), the essential principles of the natural and animal human condition (flesh and soul, for instance, with all their miseries), the spiritual world (including the hierarchies of the “divine,” the angelic, and the daemonic), the astral and planetary heavens (understood as a changeless realm at once physical and spiritual), as well as social, political, and religious structures of authority and power (including the governments of human beings, angels, celestial “daemons,” gods, terrestrial demons, and whatever other mysterious forces might be hiding behind nature’s visible forms).²

God, then, so loved his order. That is, God loves what he does in Genesis’s first chapter, which, as Rabbi Everett Fox points out, describes “God’s bringing order out of chaos, not creation from nothingness.”³ That order includes the political order that God redeems from imperial chaos both at creation and at Jesus’s crucifixion. It includes “the rulers of this age,” who if they had known better, “would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”⁴ It includes the physical earth, too, and all of its flora and fauna, including its human beings. So “the world” in John 3:16 is a lot more than humanity.

It’s hard for us reductionist and materialist moderns to imagine such a cosmos. God’s cosmos, Hart says, is a “vision of the whole of things that is unlike any with which most of us are today familiar, and that simply does not correspond to any meaning of ‘world’ intuitively obvious to us.” But here we are, already swimming in the cosmic waters of a deeper and broader John 3:16.

What does God’s love for such a cosmos have to do with the verse’s purported promise of eternity in heaven away from this cosmos? Well, nothing. And how could a God who loves such a creation send us away from there for eternity—and to do so as a reward for our faith? We have lots of compelling cultural imaginings of a restored world. But what are our cultural imaginings of eternal life in a heaven separated from that restored world? Cumulus clouds, haloes and harps. I can’t take harp music for five seconds. How about for eternity? Would eternity work?

Happily, John 3:16 makes no promise of an eternity in heaven away from earth. Theologian and New Testament scholar N. T. Wright anticipates people’s shock when, after he quotes the KJV’s John 3:16, he compares the common understanding with how the New Testament uses zoe aionios, the transliteration of what the KJV translates as “everlasting life”:

There we are, think average Christian readers. This is the biblical promise of a timeless heavenly bliss.

But it isn’t. In the many places where the phrase zoe aionios appears in the gospels, and in Paul’s letters for that matter, it refers to one aspect of an ancient Jewish belief about how time was divided up. In this viewpoint, there were two “aions” (we sometimes use the word “eon” in that sense): the “present age,” ha-olam hazeh in Hebrew, and the “age to come,” ha-olam ha-ba. The “age to come,” many ancient Jews believed, would arrive one day to bring God’s justice, peace, and healing to the world as it groaned and toiled within the “present age.”⁵

John 3:16, then, doesn’t tell us how to get to heaven. It promises instead that God will involve us in reordering the cosmos “to bring God’s justice, peace, and healing” to it. That’s because God loves the cosmos, despite what we and the dark forces in it have done to it over the centuries. I don’t like harp music, but let’s look at the matter from the cosmos’s standpoint. It would be odd for God to express his love for the cosmos by sending his best political agents away from it forever.

Hart’s perspective on zoe aionios is similar to Wright’s. Hart points out that aionios corresponds to various forms and uses of the Hebrew olam or the Aramaic alma, words that typically mean “age” and not “eternal.” Because of this Hebrew correlation, Hart is as straightforward as Wright in finding no categorical word for “eternal” in the New Testament:

There really is no word in Hebrew that naturally means “eternity,” either temporal or atemporal, or any word that naturally means “forever”; the claim occasionally made by champions of the received view—that both aiōn and olam in scripture mean “eternal” typically rather than defectively—is not merely logically impossible to verify, but simply false.⁶

Hart’s translation of John 3:16 captures this understanding, substituting “the life of the Age” for what we typically read as “eternal life”:

For God so loved the cosmos as to give the Son, the only one, so that everyone having faith in him might not perish, but have the life of the Age.⁷

Wright’s translation renders zoe aionios in John 3:16 similarly:

This, you see, is how much God loved the world: enough to give his only, special son, so that everyone who believes in him should not be lost but should share in the life of God’s new age.⁸

This more political understanding of “the cosmos” and “God’s new age” referred to in John 3:16 comports with the rest of the verse and with the next verse, too. Theologian Raymond E. Brown’s Anchor Bible points out that “He gave the only Son” (Brown’s translation) refers implicitly to Abraham, who gave his only son Isaac as part of his covenant with God. Abraham’s offering is an echo of God’s political, covenantal plan for turning chaos back into creation since, in Brown’s words, “even the mention of ‘the world’ fits in with this [Abrahamic] background, for Abraham’s generosity in sacrificing his only son was to be beneficial to all the nations of the world.”⁹ Just as Abraham comes out of an empire to set the nations free from the chaos that includes empires, so also Jesus is crucified by an empire to set the Gentile nations free from the same recurring chaos.

Brown’s assumption of the New Testament’s message of eternal life causes him to spot a change of subject in John 3:17:

If 16 assures us that the purpose of the Father’s giving the Son in Incarnation and death was eternal life for the believer, 17 paraphrases this in terms of salvation for the world.¹⁰

But Jesus doesn’t really change the subject in verse 17. Verse 16 already involves us in the world’s salvation. John 3:16 promises our involvement in the kingdom of heaven, which, as Wright points out, “is not about people going to heaven. It is about the rule of heaven coming to earth.”¹¹ The heavenly city is, after all, last seen in the Bible coming down to earth.¹² John 3:16 promises that, in the next age, we’ll have political work to do.

Even Guy in our tract seems to understand this at some level. On page 6, as an angel whisks him to the judgment seat of Christ, he protests that heaven is really “here on earth.” But the angel, informed by an evangelical view of heaven as eternally separated from earth, simply ignores him.

This difference of ages helps us understand the New Testament’s different attitudes towards the cosmos. If we live in the overlap of what Paul calls “the present evil age”¹³ (or what he also calls “the hour of crisis”)¹⁴ and “God’s new age” that begins at Jesus’s crucifixion, then “for God so loved the cosmos” fits with John’s admonition, “Do not love the cosmos or the things within the cosmos.”¹⁵ Don’t love the corrupt world of this present evil age on its own terms, but love the world as God sees it, the world God calls “very good” after his initial creation,¹⁶ the world God will renew in the new creation.

But to me, the best gift that a biblical understanding of “world” and “life of the Age” in John 3:16 is its help with our politics today, before the new age fully comes. Several modern thinkers point out that we’re suffering from a battle in the public realm between the world and bare human life. Politics, these thinkers point out, should provide an abundant, public life and places where we meet to care for our parts of our common world. But in recent centuries, this notion of politics has given way to a more social and selfish form of politics aimed at addressing our individual concerns en masse.

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben believes that our modern inability to distinguish a politics for all from a politics for each en masse makes our politics dangerous:

We can no longer distinguish between zoē and bios, between our biological life as living beings and our political existence, between what is incommunicable and speechless and what is speakable and communicable. As Foucault once wrote, we are animals in whose politics our very life as living beings is at stake.¹⁷

A John 3:16 would help us get politics right if it doesn’t love the world by leaving it. But the prevalent understanding of John 3:16 as God’s way for us to escape the world seems to condemn the world, to adopt the language of John 3:17. This understanding would exacerbate what political theorist Hannah Arendt calls the “modern growth of worldlessness” that makes true politics next to impossible. In this “withering away of everything between us,” she says, we become atomized and begin to overvalue mere biological life as a substitute for the political world among us.¹⁸ Life itself, and not the world, becomes, in the words of English theologian Paul Fletcher, the “unsurpassable and supreme” good.¹⁹

Austrian philosopher and theologian Ivan Illich would agree with Fletcher. Life has become exalted even as it has gotten more commodified. According to his friend and literary heir David Cayley, Illich believed that life in modern times had

taken on the character of a substance or entity. This was a “shadowy” substance and yet, even so, life had become “stuffy—a thing which has stuff.” He had many examples of this—from the “lives” in which news media calculate the damage done by war or natural disaster to the habit of speaking in categories like “manpower” and “human resources.” What these many usages have in common is the imagination of life as a “compact reality” capable of management.²⁰

In the political desert created by this worldlessness and this emphasis on a commodified life, governments are more likely to focus on managing and protecting life. Thomas Hobbes envisioned such a government. To protect us from our neighbors’ violence, Hobbes would have us enter into a

covenant of every man with every man, in such manner, as if every man should say to every man, I authorize and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy right to him, and authorize all his actions in like manner.

In this “commonwealth,” Hobbes’s Leviathan becomes “that Mortal God to which we owe, under the Immortal God, our peace and defense.”²¹

Fletcher finds that this Mortal God “replaces the transcendent God” to a great extent. In this form of idolatry, the state becomes “the creator and upholder of life as such.”²² Illich’s critique of society’s concept of life as manageable and “stuffy” is similar: he describes this exaltation of bare life as “the most powerful idol the Church has had to face in the course of her history.”²³

But it is Arendt who most famously contrasts the tension between bare life and the world we share:

Courage liberates men from their worry about life for the freedom of the world. Courage is indispensable because in politics not life but the world is at stake.²⁴ [155]

Arendt’s words seem written in the spirit of John 3:16. God gives up his only Son for the love of the world. We’re called to have the same faith for the same love.

My limited proviso: although I insist that any reading of John 3:16 must account for its political message (ergo, the “necessarily political” in my subtitle), I do not insist that anyone else adopt my own specific reading here of John 3:16 (the modest “a” in my subtitle).

Heck, though I have my qualms with “This Was Your Life,” I didn’t even take the bathroom’s copy out of circulation. I left it on the World Dryer. After all, my own journey to Jesus’s economic, political, and religious kingdom is ongoing, and it began with the likes of Rainbow Man’s poster and Jack Chick’s tracts. Who am I to quench the Spirit?

Above: A John 3:16 poster back when the Lions and Bears were both bad. The short footnotes below refer to full citations in the manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

1. Hart, New Testament, 559.

2. Hart, 558-59.

3. Fox, Five Books of Moses, 13n2.

4. 1 Corinthians 2:7-8 NNAS.

5. Wright, How God Became King, 44-45.

6. Hart, 541-42.

7. John 3:16 (Hart, 174).

8. John 3:16 (Wright, Kingdom New Testament, 176).

9. Brown, Gospel According to John, Vol. 1, 147.

10. Brown, 147.

11. Wright, How God Became King, 43.

12. Revelation 21:2.

13. Galatians 1:4 NNAS.

14. Romans 13:11 REB.

15. 1 John 2:15 (Hart, 481).

16. Genesis 1:31 REB.

17. Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, Theory out of Bounds, v. 20 (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 138.

18. Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics (Schoken Books, 2005), 201-202. Italics in the original.

19. Quoted in David Cayley, Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey (Penn State University Press, 2024), 475.

20. Cayley, 488.

21. Hobbes, Leviathan, 109. Italics in the original.

22. Quoted in Cayley, 476.

23. Quoted in Cayley, 468.

24. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 155.