Some of my favorite theological texts are those that exhibit a phenomenon called “intertextuality”: the use of one story or text within another, often with the result of tweaking (or outright changing) the older text’s meaning to make a theological point. Intertextuality can consist of quotations, allusions, or both.

The interesting task, as Richard B. Hays argues, is digging into how the one text uses the other as a part of a sort of stream of ideas, which often includes so-called “echoes” of meaning that lie in the interation between the two (or more) texts. The world’s best literature, in my opinion, uses intertextual references to other stories or ideas that are obvious enough for us to recognize but subtle enough to delight us when we unravel all their implications.

A good example of intertextuality in Scripture is Romans 7, which I described under my previous post (10/18/06). Paul seems to use the story of the temptation of the man and the woman in the garden to demonstrate how Sin uses the Law to lead us to death. That interpretation is rather subtle as these things go, and in fact we may even have conjured up a meaning for it not intended by Paul. However, there are far more obvious passages, especially those that include direct quotes from OT texts. In the case of Romans 7, my argument has in its favor that Paul has already brought up the story of Adam’s transgression (in Romans 5), which makes it far more likely that he had that story in mind in Romans 7 as well.

In any event, some of the scriptural and theological texts that I find most striking are those that refer intertextually to the creation story in Genesis 1, especially to the creative proclamation “Let there be light.” Today I want to begin a series of posts reflecting on some of these, how they fit together, and why I find them interesting or even moving.

I’ll begin with the best-known example of Christian theological reflection on the creation story. The allusion is almost unmistakable because the book begins with same two words (3 words in English) as the Greek Old Testament:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the word was god. He was with God in the beginning. Through him, everything came about––indeed, without him not one thing which has come about came about. In him was life, and the life was the light of humanity. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has no hold of it.There was a human, sent from God, named John. He came for testimony, in order to testify about the light, so that all would believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify about the light.

The true light, which enlightens all humanity, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world had come about through him, and yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and yet his own did not receive him. But for whoever did receive him, he gave to them––to those who believed in his name––authority to become children of God: those born not of blood or of the will of flesh or of the will of a man, but born of God.

And the word became flesh and dwelled among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of the only son of a Father, full of grace and truth. (John testifies concerning him, and he has cried out saying, “This was the one of whom I said, ‘The one coming after me is ahead of me, because he existed before me.’”) Indeed, all of us have received from his fullness, grace upon grace. Because while the law was given through Moses, grace and truth have come about through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but God the Only Son, who is at the side of the Father, has made him known.

[A note in explanation of my translation “the Word was god” (with a little “g”) in light of Greek grammar: I know most translations read, “the Word was God” (with a capital “G”), but that’s a little misleading with respect to the syntax of the Greek sentence. The placement of the word “god” does not reflect the proper name “God,” but rather what is usually called a “qualitative” sense of the word. It’s like saying, “Abraham was father to a great multitude;” calling him “a father” or “the father” wouldn’t mean quite the same thing. Some have suggested translating the phrase in John 1 as, “the Word was divine;” that would be accurate but would miss out on the repetition of the word “god,” which I think is important for the rhythm of the sentence. This grammatical subtlety of the passage is actually an excellent parallel to the subtlety of Christian reflection on what it means for Jesus to be divine.]

John turns the prologue to his story of Jesus into a retelling of the creation of the world by playing off the ambiguity of the Greek word logos. Among its many meanings, logos can mean both “word” and “reason” (i.e., logic); Greek philosophers often used it with the latter meaning. Philo of Alexandria (20 B.C. – A.D. 40), a Jew who was heavily influenced by Greek thought, portrayed the logos in personified form as an angel of wisdom who was responsible for directing humanity toward paths of righteous reason, lest they incur the wrath of God through their unreasoned wickedness. The OT book of Proverbs personifies “Wisdom” (closely related to the logos in Philo’s hellenistic Jewish thought world) as a (female) figure who participated in creation (Prov 8:27f).

It wouldn’t have been much of a stretch for early Christians to identify this apparently divine figure with Christ, and John 1 is a great example of just such an identification.

The beauty of the word “Word” as employed in John’s retelling of creation is that a spoken word, “Let there be light” (actually two words in both Hebrew and Greek), was the very means by which God created the world. God did not need to use a tool or an assistant or even his hand to bring light to the darkness, but only a word. For John, that word was the Word, Christ.

As beautiful as that reference is on its own, John weaves it into a far more complex picture by playing on the dual meaning of logos as both “word” and “reason.” While it is obvious that darkness and light in John 1:5 function figuratively (referring to the proclamation of righteous knowledge in a world of wicked ignorance), the passage is far richer when we bear in mind that the creation imagery is still in view. In the incarnation, God has repeated his first act of creation, brining light into darkness once again through his Word.

This is not just incidental or sentimental for John. Rather, his entire portrait of Christ is based on the notion that Jesus is the revelation of God. All of his words and all of his deeds reveal God to the world (thus John 1:18, he “has made him known”). What better way for humanity to learn true reason than for Reason (= Light = Truth = Only Son) himself to become a human and meet them in person? To find out what is true about the father, one must watch and listen for what the Son (who is at the Side of the Father) reveals.

We can probably take this one step further, if we push a bit. Gnostics (whose ideology many argue grew up alongside Christianity) tended to separate knowledge from the created world, arguing that the former was good and the latter bad. As a result, they tended to play off the God of Jesus Christ (who revealed knowledge) against the God of Israel (who created the world), thus turning the Creator into a wicked sub-deity who defied what Wisdom, the supreme deity, wanted.

The way John describes Christ in chapter 1, however, undermines what the Gnostics claimed by refusing to see two forces at work. John will not allow his reader to assume that the “Truth” which Jesus reveals is something one must break free from the created world to see. Instead, the logos is the very word God used to create the world––which means the world has to be a good thing. You can’t set up reason in opposition to the created world if the world was created through reason.

So, to put it in modern theological terms, in case anyone wanted to misinterpret Jesus as belonging to another world and somehow condemning created matter, John insists that both “special revelation” (what God tells us in words) and “natural revelation” (what we can learn by looking at creation) come from the same source: the logos who brought light into darkness both in the creation of Genesis 1 and in the incarnation described by John.