Central to understanding John’s Gospel and his presentation of Jesus Christ as Son is the idea of Jesus being sent from the Father. The sending motif is an axiom to John’s narrative, Christology, and Theology Proper. This one motif touches every other conceivable Johannine theme and even acts as a unifier to weave different themes together. And so, to understand John’s witness to Jesus, understanding what it means for the Son to be sent and the implications that understanding holds for Christology is crucial.
This paper will survey various theologians from the early church to the present day to understand how they viewed the Son’s sending in defining his personhood. Throughout history, what it means for the Son to be sent from the Father has gone through many twists and turns, developments and deconstructions. This survey will analyze the conceptual and theological shifts that have taken place from Pre-Enlightenment to Post-Enlightenment commentators, attempting to provide a taxonomy of views. From this survey, I will argue that the early church to the post-Reformational church understood the Son’s sending in a more theological and trinitarian way as opposed to the last 75 years of Johannine scholarship, which has deemphasized a theological reading for an approach that looks more to ancient backgrounds like rabbinic Judaism and the ancient Greco-Roman world.