Karl Barth once said that we must always think three times before contradicting Hegel's system, ‘because we might find that everything we are tempted to say in contradiction to it has already been said within it’. Hegel wanted his thought to mirror the full movement of life, and to Barth (avid moviegoer no less than Mozart aficionado), this movement proceeds like the film of the cinematograph, though one so extraordinary that it depicts ‘the rhythm of life itself’, running exhaustively through the fullness of history, capturing the ‘exact recollection’ of the observed plenitude of being. When Hegel in the Phenomenology concludes the magisterial section on absolute knowledge with the statement that here ‘Spirit has wound up the process of its embodiment’, he is not, as Richard Rorty cavalierly suggests, recommending a new and improved vocabulary, but is celebrating the complete infusion of truth into the dialectic of knowing. As Barth says, ‘Truth is necessary to [Hegel] and, indeed, necessary to him in its unity, in its actuality, in the divine rigor inherent in it.’

Toward the conclusion of his Theology After Wittgenstein, Fergus Kerr states that,

The rationalistic attempt to find the deeper psychological or evolutionary significance of ceremony only distracts us from the deep significance that a description of the event already communicates…

The sacrifice of the priest-king is no different in kind from religious actions that we might ourselves perform …, confessing one's sins…, baptism…

…The phenomena of the natural world, of birth, of death, and of sexual life… none of which is especially mysterious but any of which can become so to us prompt certain human reactions. …these customs are not adopted because of views that people have; they are too primitive and unreflective for that, they are reactions, in certain situations.

The late medieval synthesis reflected in the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) generally and in the doctrine of transubstantiation in particular established an understanding of the nature of the church and authority that was to be varied and wide in its effects. Transubstantiation as doctrine and as coalescor of Church worship laid the groundwork for a particularly formative understanding of the ekklesia of Christ. It issued in a view of immanental, divine authority and grace that would come to manifest itself in the indulgences, the treasury of merits, invocation of saints, relics, etc. To be critical of the Mass was to bring into question the entire hierarchy of the Church and its authority on earth. In this context of strong ecclesiological authority, God was reckoned primarily as immanent and immediate through the papal head. In the face of this development, John Calvin asserted that Christ, as center of all true Christian reality, is the necessary focus and the preeminent authority in and to the Church through the Word of God, the Scriptures.

The problem of the Beloved Disciple (BD) has come to seem virtually insoluble. It cannot be John bar-Zebedee: there would be no reason to suppress the name of so high an authority; striking events which he attended (Jairus' daughter, the Transfiguration) are passed over in silence; and anyhow the whole Gospel is antipathetic to the Jerusalem leadership (see below). It cannot be an anonymous jerusalem disciple: none such is mentioned in the Jerusalem events of 2–12; these latter seem to consist of elements also found in the synoptic tradition, given a Johannine slant; and why should his name be suppressed, if he were Jesus' favourite, and the Gospel community's hero? It cannot be a totally fictitious ‘symbolic’ figure: no proposed symbolism is clear or adequate; and it was rumoured in the Church that he would not die. No one believes that he was Lazarus or John Mark: so what are we left with? It is time to approach the question from a different angle.