John Webster

Mar 25, 2026

John Webster (1955 - 2016), English theologian. Some of his lectures are on YouTube. In these, he presents the Christian doctrine of God from the perspective of dogmatic theology, that is, the systematic treatment of settled Christian teaching about who God is in himself, and on the relationship between God and Jesus. These lectures are thus quite helpful for developing a deeper appreciation of foundational Christian doctrines, like the Trinity, which are not easily covered in the format of a sermon or Bible study

Some notes from the lecture Why Did the Word Become Flesh.

  • “The church confesses that at a particular time, and in a particular place, there occurred a human history to which God gives the name Immanuel. The church lives in and from the presence of Jesus Christ now, but his presence as the church’s contemporary always includes a retrospective dynamic, since it is anchored in his presence there and then, and only by that anchorage can his present identity and relation to the church be known. It’s for this reason, then, that the gospel requires the Gospels, which set out his presence there and then in its mysterious openness to the future, and which set all futures in relation to his past. Immanuel, therefore, reaches backward into the divine perfection and forward into the historical future.”
  • The apostolic witness is that Jesus’s human history was a genuine human life, but not merely a human life. “In its familiarity, [Jesus’s life] is shot through with the Absolute.”
  • Calvin’s comment on John 1: Jesus’s life has an inner existence, of which it is an outward manifestation. Its secret existence lies outside the network of causality and suffering out of which all other human histories emerge; therefore, it is free.

Other lectures in this series

See also Fred Sanders’ article On John Webster’s Trinitarian doctrine of Scripture.