I haven’t been doing much theology blogging recently. Sorry guys.However, I realized something pretty interesting recently. It actually strikes me as something I may have seen earlier and forgotten.
As most of you know, a central premise to my first book on Christianity is that the term “Salvation” is misunderstood today, taken to mean something that 2nd temple Jews living in Jesus day would not have meant. Indeed, even the church did not see “salvation” in the sense of “saving people from hell” sense for hundreds of years. [Note, for example, Athanasius’ understanding of the term presently indirectly on page 18 of my extra topics pdf.]
Anyways, part of the argument for this understanding comes from the way that John [and I think Paul, but it is less clear] used the Greek term often translated “eternal life.” My claim is that this referred to the Jewish O’lam Ha-ba in general and the New Covenant and its attendant indwelling of the Holy Spirit in particular.I give several reasons for considering this plausible in chapters 3 and 4 of my book, but one that I don’t think I referenced is this interesting pair of verses:John 4:13-14 says:Jesus answered and said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again; but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.”And then John 7:37-39 says:Now on the last day, the great {day} of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink. “He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, ‘From his innermost being will flow rivers of living water.’ ” But this He spoke of the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were to receive; for the Spirit was not yet {given,} because Jesus was not yet glorified.
Note how similar these passages are…not only do they both speak about water, but they also speak about the water flowing out from the inside him, they both include a message about people coming to receive something from Christ, and they both come right before a reference to Jesus as Christ. If we can take these as being connected in their metaphor, we are left with another at least reasonable argument for “eternal life” being a reference to the indwelling of the Spirit.