418 Peter Frick of God’s love (hjgavphsen) corresponds to the final cause since divine love is the ultimate reason for the sake of which God acted (12). God’s only Son corresponds to the material cause as it is the Son’s incarnate life that became the ‘material’ on the cross for the ultimate defeat of the power of death (13). The efficient cause may be identified with the verb ‘gave’, in that the giving of God’s Son in love is necessarily God’s free giving to the sinful world (14). And even though the verse does not explicitly denote the dynamic source of change, namely the efficient cause, we may infer that it is God’s giving by ‘grace’ (15). If so, here we find all four Aristotelian causes veiled in one short verse! 4. 1 John 4,9 A second Johannine text, 1 John 4,9, reveals very close conceptual parallels with John 3,16. Here we can identify the same formal elements and linguistic parallels as in John 3,16. The four elements that correspond to the four causes are as follows: (1) God (oJ qeov"), (2) divine love (hJ ajgavph), (3) the act of sending (ajpevstalken), and (4) the only Son (to;n uiJo;n aujtou' to;n monogenh). The correspondence between these four aspects of 1 John 4,9 and ' the four categories of Aristotelian causes is as follows: The formal cause is God. The final cause is expressed more precisely in this verse than in John 3,16 as the love of God (hJ ajgavph tou' qeou') (16). The material cause is as in (12) Cf. Rom 5,5.8. (13) Admittedly, if we follow Aristotle and Philo’s classification of the causes, it is apparent that in the following verse, John 3,17, the Son functions formally as the instrumental cause. Given the prepositional scheme, the expression i{na swqh'/ oJ kovsmo" di∆ aujtou' identifies the Son as instrumental rather than material cause. The difficulty arises from the fact that the author of the Fourth Gospel does not explicitly employ the model of causality in a technical sense as Philo. Nonetheless, our point is not to demonstrate the author’s philosophical mastery of the technical use of prepositions, but to show that his soteriology implies a distinction of causes, however veiled this distinction may be. (14) The precise meaning of the word kovsmo" in this verse becomes apparent when understood within the immediate theological context and the Johannine usage as a whole. Since in this context the theme is divine love for the cosmos, it is presupposed that the cosmos must be in need of love. Hence, my reading of the term kovsmo" is that it stands for sinful humanity as a whole. It may include an eschatological cosmic rejuvenation similar to Paul’s view (cf. Rom 8), but this question must be left open. The reference to kovsmo" as the totality of sinful humanity is important in another aspect. The word denotes all of humanity and not the sum of its individual members. John does not say ‘all the people of the cosmos’, but simply ‘the cosmos’. If the need for divine love is for the cosmos, then we may assume that the issue is such that it affects all aspects of the cosmos, all of life. In that sense, the word kovsmo" is a distinct reference to the ubiquitous nature of sin. The term kovsmo" includes the physical universe and all of humanity. Given the larger context, it is evident that John concentrates on the latter aspect, namely sinful humanity. (15) John 1,17 says o{ti oJ novmo" dia; Mwu>sevw" ejdovqh, hJ cavri" kai; hJ ajlhvqeia dia; ∆Ihsou' Cristou' ejgevneto. This is the only reference in the gospel of John where grace and the act of Jesus are brought into relation. This correlation is far more explicit in the Pauline corpus. Cf. Rom 3,34; 5,15; 15,15; 1 Cor 15,57. (16) Syntactically, the phrase ejn touvtw ejfanerwvqh hJ ajgavph tou' qeou' ejn hJmi'n is distinct from the main clause o{ti to;n uiJo;n aujtou' to;n monogenh' ajpevstalken oJ qeo;" eij" to;n kovsmon. There is a dynamic correlation between the two in that the first phrase provides the formal reason (the love of God) for the content of the main clause (God sent his Son). In other words, the first phrase is the final cause and the main clause represents the formal, material and efficient causes.