서강대학교

초록/요약

God created man as a free being. This freedom presupposes the recognition of God's revelation, the acceptance of truth, and the possession of a willingness to love the Creator and all creatures in his image. Freedom is the cause of God, the love itself, and ultimately, the gift God has given to man in accordance with the created order that is aligned with the loving God. In other words, the freedom that man has been granted from God is an invitation and gift given to the creature and ultimately to share communion with God and to accomplish himself through it. But humans have confused themselves and the world with God's creation principles and choices. Rather than answering God's call through emptiness, man wants to be the master of freedom himself, excluding God, the source of freedom. As a result, human beings have faced suffering due to disorder and, above all, oppression, forgetting true freedom. The declaration of John, "Truth will set you free," is proclaimed through the Word and life of Jesus Christ, the One who gave up his liberty, the freedom God has granted for his fellowship with you, is the Good News. John found ultimate freedom in eternal life. In order to give us eternal life, Jesus Christ, the Savior, declares that He is the only way to the truth itself, as the light leads us to true freedom. In this interpretation of Jesus Christ and of salvation, it can be said that the author of the Gospel of John had in mind diverse members of the community that would be reading his gospel and thus closely followed the traditions of the Old Testament as well as reflecting the understanding of the Greek thought that was familiar to the people in those days. In other words, the concepts of the eternal truth and the freedom in the Gospel of John reflect the religious characteristics of the Jewish society that has been exposed to Greek culture during the B.C and A.D. The terms carefully chosen to describe those concepts in this Gospel act to transform the Greek expressions that are familiar to the readers of John’s Gospel into greater expressions that fit the traditions of the Old Testament. In those modern societies that advocate multi-religious, pluralistic values and relativistic truths, the John proclaimed Jesus Christ as the only way to bring an end to all the chaos and reach to the true happiness to those who reject the true truth and experience confussion and pains due to the decisions that differ from their own will. Jesus is the true truth that came down from heaven and is the Savior who will give true freedom to all men, just as Moses freed the nation of Israel from the slavery of Egypt.