Mary Coloe
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Dwelling In The Household Of God
$29.95Add to cartIn her remarkable first book, God Dwells With Us: Temple Symbolism in the Fourth Gospel, Mary L. Coloe, P.B.V.M., explored the profound insight of John’s Gospel expressed in Jesus’ invitation to his disciples: “Make your home in me, as I make mine in you” (John 15:4). For the gospel’s author and audience, the dwelling of God among humans was, above all, the Jerusalem Temple. The gospel traces how-after the trauma of the destruction of the Temple-the Johannine community came to expand and deepen its knowledge of God’s dwelling among humans, finding it now in the person of Jesus and in the community of believers.
Dwelling in the Household of God moves us from seeing God’s dwelling place as the Temple to seeing God’s dwelling place within the community of believers. The starting point now is an image in John 14:2: “my Father’s house,” which is given its Old Testament meaning of “my father’s household.” Our awareness thus moves, like that of the first Christians, from understanding “My father’s house” as the Temple (John 2:16) to “My Father’s Household” as a community of believers drawn into Jesus’ own divine filiation. Coloe invites us to re-read the gospel from the post-Easter perspective of those who have become brothers and sisters of Jesus and living Temples of God’s presence. What emerges is nothing less than a profound mysticism of the mutual indwelling of God and believers.
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God Dwells With Us
$29.95Add to cartThe image of the Temple speaks of a building, of a place of God’s heavenly presence, and yet the experience of many Christians has been of God’s indwelling in the human heart. In God Dwells with Us, Mary Coloe crosses the centuries through John’s Gospel text and plunges into the experience of the Johannine community. Here, readers receive a sense of God’s indwelling as promised by Jesus, and how it relates to the symbol of the Temple in the gospel narrative.
In the years after the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple, the Johannine community looked to the symbol of the Temple as a key means of expressing its new faith in Jesus. During his lifetime he was the living presence of Israel’s God dwelling in history. In the absence of the historical Jesus, the believing community-past, present, and future-continue to be a locus for the divine indwelling and so can truly be called a living Temple.
God Dwells with Us offers a new and consistent perspective on the symbol of the Temple which clarifies the christology of the Fourth Gospel. It establishes a new plot for this gospel-the destroying and raising of the Temple; and shows how this occurs within the text. The chapters provide a new approach to its structure. It is unique in its treatment of John 14:2 where it establishes that the new Temple is the household of believers on earth. It also presents a new interpretation of the Johannine Crucifixion and the scene with Jesus’ mother and the Beloved Disciple.