Committed Critic

For all the negative points I made about the Epistle of Barnabas, it does offer a beautiful portrait of redemption as the reenacting of God’s creation of humanity. Paul had written, “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation. Look! The old has passed away, the new has come.” Barnabas simply restated that using the language of Genesis, and if his wording was a bit convoluted, nevertheless the image was powerful.

The image is also timeless, as evidenced by a pair of songs Gary Miller wrote for Acappella in the late 1990’s.

For those who don’t know me, the Chrisitan music group Acappella is the reason I know next to nothing about popular music from the eighties and nineties. In high school I had no fewer than 35 albums from their organization’s various groups (including Acappella, AVB, the Vocal Union, Keith Lancaster, Sweet Deliverance, His Image, and New Life Quartet), and it is no exaggeration to say that back then I could sing 300 of their songs from start to finish––and for many of them, I could sing most of the harmony parts. I’ve been to at least 10 of their concerts in 5 different states, and I’ve performed songs of theirs at church and school events with four different groups of friends spanning high school and college.

(I have a feeling that Matt, Cody, and Micah all have an idea of what I’m talking about.)

These two songs have their campy moments (the first one, no kidding, includes the lines “Let freedom ring!” and “Let children sing!”), but in both of them Miller does a beautiful job of using the creation story from Genesis, as Barnabas used it, to describe the work of Christ.

The first song speaks broadly, describing the fall of humanity and the change of the world order brought about by Christ:

from Let There Be Love
by Gary Miller (1999)

Once there was love, long ago
Sweet innocence, long ago
Please tell me where did it go?
Our of our hearts, out of our world

Then someone came in the night
Came to lead man to the light
Turn us around, make us right
Bring love to our hearts, love to our world

Let there be peace around the world
Let there by joy around the world
Let there be hope around the world
Let there be love around the world

The second song is more personal, beginning with God’s promise to Abraham and going on to proclaim God’s will as the starting point for believers’ lives and decisions, by virtue of the new beginning which God creates within people:

from Begins
by Gary Miller (1996)

To an aged man God spoke
Words that sounded like a joke
Soon his wife would bear a child
A saying hard to reconcile

So he asked, Can this thing be?
Can a nation spring from me?
With a body grown so old?
In a word this man was told:

Your life begins with God
Your love begins with God
Your hopes and you dreams
And your plans begin with God
Begin with God

I was standing on the edge of the road
Hopelessly alone in the dark
In the beginning I was empty and void
In my mind, my soul, my heart of hearts

The creator came and moved in my life
He spoke and turned my darkness to light
Day by day he’s rearranging my ways
He’s my Lord, my God, my King

The first song, of course, transforms the line “Let there be light” (Gen 1:3) into “Let there be love.” The second song is more subtle (though just barely), using the reference to the dark as well as the words empty and void, to point to the unformed earth of Gen 1:2 as a metaphor for a person’s life before they are recreated by God.

I don’t have a lot of reflections to add, except to say that I find these lyrics both beautiful and powerful. They’re another example (as I noted before of contemporary song lyrics) of how intertextuality can help theology become art.

I’m also kind of interested in the thoughts of any other Acappella junkies. Anyone want to compete for bragging rights about Acappella album collections, concert attendance, or whatever? If you were a fan when you were young, are there any albums of theirs you still listen to?

Returning to my series on theological texts that interpret the creation story using intertextuality (read the start of this post for a definition), I want to look at how an early Christian letter called the Epistle of Barnabas interpreted the creation of Adam as pointing to salvation in Christ.

The author of Barnabas most likely wrote between about A.D. 70 and 135. He’s almost certainly not the biblical Barnabas, but we’ll call him that for convenience.

Old Testament Background

Barnabas specializes in allegorical interpretation, meaning that he interprets a given Old Testament text by explaining that certain words in the passage really refer to something different than a casual reading might suggest. This is a method that was popular among Greeks and some Jews (like Philo), although Barnabas turns the method against the Jews. To figure out what he’s doing, first we have to review the OT passages he’s using. Barnabas focuses on three scriptural texts in particular:

Genesis 1:26-28: “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’”Genesis 2:7: “Then Yahweh God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.”

Exodus 33:1-3: “Yahweh said to Moses, ‘Go, leave this place, you and the people whom you have brought up out of the land of Egypt, and go to the land of which I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, saying, “To your descendants I will give it.” I will send an angel before you, and I will drive out the Canaanites, the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jubusites. Go up to a land flowing with milk and honey…’”

The key to fitting these three passages together is recognizing a wordplay on the Greek word we transliterate as “geo”. The word can be translated into English as “earth”, “land” (as in “the land of Oz”), or “ground,” corresponding approximately to its three senses in our words geocentric, geopolitical, and geology. (Geopolitical is admittedly a stretch.) The word shows up in all three senses in the passage we’ll look at from Barnabas. Note that this wordplay does not work in Hebrew (the original language Genesis and Exodus were written in), but since Barnabas was apparently reading the text in Greek translation, it does work for him.

The ambiguity of this word affects the interpretation of any number of Bible passages. So for example, “The meek shall inherit the earth” (Matt 5:5) could refer to the whole planet, but in Psalm 37:11 the same line seems to refer to the land of Israel. Or for another example, the fifth commandment promises long life in the (promised) land in exchange for obedience to parents, but Ephesians 6:2, written for Gentiles, seems to interpret this as long life on this earth.

So as it turns out, in the Greek version of the Old Testament, the word for “ground” in Gen 2:7 –– the stuff man was made of –– is the same word as the promised “land” in Ex 33:1. In fact, all the words in bold in the three passage quoted above are the exact same word in Greek. This opens up room for Barnabas to make some interesting connections.

Particularly notice how the word “form” (both noun and verb) shows up repeatedly. I’m quoting (with adjustments) from Michael W. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers:

(8) What does the other prophet, Moses, say to [Israel]? “Behold, thus says the Lord God: ‘Enter into the good land, which the Lord promised by oath to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and take possession of it as an inheritance, a land flowing with milk and honey.” (9) But now learn what knowledge has to say: set your hope upon Jesus, who is about to be revealed to you in the flesh. For man is suffering earth [ = land], for Adam was formed out of the face of the earth.

(10) What, therefore, does “into the good land, a land flowing with milk and honey” mean? … (11) Inasmuch as he renewed us, then, by the forgiveness of sins, he made us into another type of person, so that we should have the soul of children, as if he were forming us all over again. (12) For the Scripture speaks about us when he says to the Son: “Let us make man according to our image and likeness, and let them rule over the beasts of the earth and the birds of the air and the fish of the sea.”

And when he saw that we were formed well, the Lord said: “Increase and multiply and fill the earth.” These things he said to the Son. (Barn. 6.8–12)

The Theological Claim

A big part of Barnabas’s argument in the 21-chapter letter is that Israel failed to understand what God was saying to them through Moses and the scriptures. He (incorrectly) reads passages such as Isaiah 1:11, “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says Yahweh,” as indicating that God was trying to do away with animal sacrifices, but Israel just wasn’t listening (Barn. 2.5). This is ironic, of course, because in reality it’s Barnabas that doesn’t understand what Isaiah was getting at. But the important thing to recognize is that Barnabas wants to appropriate the Hebrew Scriptures as always talking about Jesus, almost always at the Jews’ expense.

In this case, Israel misunderstood the promise that the prophet Moses had delivered to them in Exodus. They thought he was concerned with a real land, but “knowledge” (i.e., correct allegorical interpretation; 6.9) has something different to say: Jesus, not the land of Israel, is the real purpose behind all these promises.

To make the jump from Moses to Christ, Barnabas uses the idea of the land: humans are nothing but “suffering earth” (2.9), because they were formed out of earth, and Christ shared in this earth/land/ground when he took on flesh. Now, just as God formed the first man from the dust of the earth, so also a new creation/formation takes place in Christ (6.11).

So when Moses spoke of a “land” that Israel was going to, he actually was saying that God would reenact creation, the moment God formed the first man from the dust of the earth. Under Christ, the forgiveness of sins is an act of re-creation or re-formation, by which God takes hold of the dirt from which we are made and forms a new person, with the soul of a child (6.11). In Barnabas’s opinion it is this that Moses meant when he spoke of a land to which God would lead Israel (6.8); only their hard hearts prevented them from realizing it.

After establishing the connection between creation and salvation, Barnabas teases out the implications by bringing in another passage on creation from Genesis 1: “And when he saw that we were formed well, the Lord said: ‘Increase and multiply and fill the earth.’ These things he said to the Son” (6.12).

Just as God told the first humans he formed to fill the earth, so also when God recreates humanity through the suffering of Christ, he gives the same command to the Son. A creation so good is not intended to keep to itself; taken from the dust of the ground, it should become a gift for every land across the earth. And so Christ sends us into the world.

Implications for the Church

The New Testament does cite innumerable OT passages that it claims are fulfilled in Christ. Paul even claims, broadly, that “in [Christ] every one of God’s promises is a ‘yes’.” But the Epistle of Barnabas takes that approach to Scripture a step further. The claim here is not simply that the promised land in Exodus prefigured the coming of Christ (as in Hebrews 4), but rather that the people of Israel were foolish and blind for thinking that God was concerned with giving them an actual land in the first place. True, God did give them a real land, but that wasn’t what God cared about.

Barnabas makes the same kind of argument concerning scripture after scripture from the OT, a good example being the Isaiah passage mentioned above. As the letter drags on, the practice becomes tiresome, and it becomes increasingly clear that Barnabas lacks not only an understanding of the various OT passages in context but also an appropriate respect for the people of Israel. Barnabas cites some scriptures that don’t exist, interprets other scriptures arbitrarily so that they always favor Christians, dabbles in numerology, and relentlessly attacks not only the choices and beliefs but also the sincerity and integrity of the Jewish people.

It would be easy to dismiss the Epistle of Barnabas on these grounds, but in reality the line is not all that sharp between it and some of the New Testament texts. It was probably written later than everything in the NT, but not by much. What’s more, hints of Barnabas’s tendencies were already present in texts that were received into the canon, and at least one early church father (Clement of Alexandria) cited Barnabas almost as if it were scripture. Ultimately, most of us would argue that wisdom and the Holy Spirit prevailed in the selection of the scriptures that were deemed suitable for public reading in the church (i.e., the canon). I can only hope that it was Barnabas’s contempt for the Jews, and not just its late date, that kept it from being included.

In a sense, though, Barnabas simply takes certain arguments from the New Testament scriptures to their logical conclusion, and it is here that I think it can serve as a warning for churches now.

The understanding of the truth of Scripture among fundamentalists and evangelicals in the United States can be troubling sometimes. We have a tendency –– and for good reasons –– to approach Scripture as absolute truth. But the problem with making truth absolute is that then you have to carry it to its logical conclusions.

But Scripture, when you really get down to it, often reflects more of a discussion among competing voices than it does absolute truth. Certainly, there are parts of Scripture I would claim to reflect absolute truth, but they are surrounded by any number of passages that need to be interpreted with nuance and open-mindedness.

Some of these questions are fairly trivial. If we’re studying who wrote the Torah (Genesis through Deuteronomy), our conclusions should not hinge solely on whether Jesus said the five books came from Moses. When Jude quotes 1 Enoch, a patently fictional apocalyptic writing that was popular in the first century, we must not insist that Adam’s great great great great grandson Enoch actually spoke those words. These kinds of claims, in my opinion, take Scripture to be something that it is not.

But in other places, the logical conclusions that certain readings of Scripture might lead us to have more serious consequences, and Barnabas is a good example. When Luke tells us that Jesus “opened [the apostles’] minds to understand the scriptures” (24:45), it’s no great leap for us to fall into the attitude of Barnabas and wonder at the Jews’ stupidity for failing to see what was written in front of them all along. Or when Revelation describes a violent overthrow of all non-Christians at the end of time, it is not hard to see why so many Christians over the centuries have tolerated violence because it seemed to support Christian causes.

Barnabas’s sin, ultimately, is the spiritualization of OT scriptures to the almost complete exclusion of their original meaning, and it is a sin often mimicked by Christians today. It’s ok to suggest that God ultimately is most concerned with us being poor in spirit, but if that leads us to neglect teachings concerning those who are actually poor, we are taking certain scriptures too far. It’s ok (and in my opinion, correct) to hold that Scripture contains truth that God wishes to communicate to the church and the world, but if we use it to shut down communication with secular voices or to ridicule those who disagree, I believe we are missing our calling.

I like to think that these misuses (in my opinion) of Scripture simply come from not reading it carefully enough, but the attitudes and positions I see on the American political/religious landscape –– among people who apparently read the Bible quite carefully –– suggest otherwise.

Hopefully, my treatment of the topic here –– in contrast to the approach Barnabas chose –– is respectful enough that it won’t shut out the people whose views I’m criticizing. Some of these questions are too important to polarize over.

By Justin D. Burton

NOTE: This is a guest post by my friend Justin, who’s a musicology grad student at Rutgers and one of my favorite people. The topic is still intertextuality, but here it’s between a movie and a TV show. Justin and his wife Kathryn also have a great movie blog. -Scott

In episode FABF06 (‘Margical History Tour’) of The Simpsons, Marge takes her children (and Bart’s friend Milhouse) to the Springfield Public Library to research papers they must write for school, only to find that the library no longer carries books, opting instead for Yu-Gi-Oh! price guides, Everybody Poops: The Video, and newspapers perched atop snoozing bums. Unperturbed, Marge gathers the children around and offers lessons on historical figures to help the children write their papers. After telling of Henry VIII for Milhouse and Sacagawea for Lisa, she turns to Bart.

Marge: What famous historical figure do you want to write about?Bart: I don’t know. Boogeyman.

Marge: C’mon, Bart. We can make this fun. History’s like an amusement park, except instead of rides, you have dates to memorize.

Bart: Mom, everyone who ever lived is boring.

Marge: Boring? Is there anything boring about a bad-ass rocker who lived fast and died young?

Bart: I know there’s a catch, but tell me more.

With that, Marge launches into the story of Mozart, complete with a raucous piano concert, a scene at the Austrian Music Awards, a snippet of Bart/Mozart’s latest opera The Musical Fruit, and Bart/Mozart’s untimely death. The story, as Lisa points out, ‘sounds a lot like the movie Amadeus, which was historically inaccurate.’

The Simpsons is a richly intertextual television show, as it demands its viewers to be conscious of a vast reservoir of popular culture referential material. Often, the point of this intertextuality is to engage and critique the texts to which the show refers. Jonathan Gray, author of Watching with the Simpsons, puts it thusly:

[M]uch of [The Simpsons’s] humor is deeply transitive, pointing outside the borders of The Simpsons to all manner of other genres, texts, and discourses. To laugh at these jokes is frequently to read those other genres, texts, and discourses as much as it is to read The Simpsons. The Simpsons talks about other texts, and if its jokes ‘leak’ out of the program—if we activate them in everyday discussion, if they force a reevaluation of other texts, or if we recall them when watching other texts—then it becomes important for us to study how and with what effect this parody attacks other textual forms and formats: we can no longer focus on The Simpsons alone.

When we find within The Simpsons a lengthy reference to Amadeus, then, we are obligated, as Gray tells us, to study the effect of this parody. What I’d like to do here is talk briefly about why The Simpsons lampoons Amadeus.

Writer Peter Shaffer and director Milós Forman weren’t the first to conceive of Mozart in infantile and savant-like terms. Rather, the stories that fuel the myth of Mozart the eternal child had arisen immediately following his death. Importantly, though, Amadeus, as mass art, was situated in a position that allowed it to crystallize this notion in the public’s consciousness.

By caricaturing Amadeus with its own characters, The Simpsons impoverishes the Mozart myth expounded in Amadeus. In The Simpsons, we are confronted with a rock-star child genius whose musical ability is effortless and punctuated with infantile scatology, a pared-down version of the pared-down story Amadeus offers.

One explanation for The Simpsons’s intertextual tangling with Amadeus is de-mythification. As Roland Barthes explains myth, it is an impoverishment of a meaningful exchange. That is, I may say, ‘Mozart is a genius’ (though it’s not likely that you’ll hear me say that), and the statement is fully of history. That is, the statement involves the contingencies of both ‘genius’ and ‘Mozart,’ as the histories surrounding each word are immediately consultable to better understand the many different aspects of the statement ‘Mozart is a genius.’

When the statement is mythified, however, the statement is distanced from history. As Barthes puts it, the statement ‘leaves its contingency behind; it empties itself…history evaporates, only the letter remains.’ What is important in Barthes’s postulation, however, is that history is not entirely extinguished in the form; rather, it remains available as ‘an instantaneous reserve of history, a tamed richness, which it is possible to call and dismiss in a sort of rapid alternation.’ The statement becomes, then, something of a proof text of itself, to which one might point for salient historical facts or ideas, while disregarding its original multivalence.

Why a statement such as this one is impoverished is a bit tricky to nail down, but one explanation is the fear of the loss of the Great White Man. Since the Enlightenment, our histories have been filled with tales of great individuals who transcend their bodies and their cultures to do great things. With the growing sense of multiculturalism, however, many have noticed that these great transcendent people are always white and always men. As we try to reconfigure our understanding of history, several have balked at the notion and feared that white men are actually becoming the racist target of the rest of the world (see Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind for some nice examples of such a paranoia). If ‘Mozart is a genius’ can be proved by streamlining his history and turning him into a rock-star child genius, then his status becomes much more difficult to assail.

Now, in order to undo myth, Barthes tells us, we must mythify it, in turn. This involves impoverishing a myth. So, while ‘Mozart is a genius’ became impoverished in a myth that became crystallized in Amadeus, this myth is then impoverished in The Simpsons. As it turns out, a funny cartoon challenges to re-think and critically engage the history and person of one of our most revered artists. Not bad for seven hilarious minutes.

-JDB

Before I go on to the other theological texts that use the Genesis 1 creation story, I want to tabernacle, so to speak, among the readers of John 1 for a time. In particular, I want to quote excerpts from a pair of songs by contemporary Christian musicians that take John 1 as their starting point. (I have to say at the outset that most CCM artists are awful, but these two have real substance, in my opinion.)

The first is a song by Michael Card, called “The Final Word” (Card, above left, also wrote “El Shaddai”):

You and me we use
so very many clumsy words.
The noise of what we often say
is not worth being heard.
When the Father’s Wisdom wanted
to communicate His love,
He spoke it in one final perfect Word.He spoke the Incarnation
and then so was born the Son.
His final word was Jesus,
He needed no other one.
Spoke flesh and blood so He could bleed
and make a way Divine.
And so was born the baby
who would die to make it mine.

And so the Father’s fondest thought
took on flesh and bone.
He spoke the living luminous Word,
at once His will was done.
And so the transformation
that in man had been unheard
Took place in God the Father
as He spoke that final Word.

The second song, by Rich Mullins, is called “It Don’t Do” (Mullins, above right, also wrote “Awesome God”):

It don’t do to preach the gospel
If you don’t live the Christian life
It don’t do to dream about heaven
If you never look up and see the skyIt don’t do to preach on Matthew
If you have not yet read Mark
It don’t do to scream about the judgment
If there is no love in your heart

It don’t do to preach on Moses
If you bow down to the golden calf
It don’t do to think about glory
If you never dare to laugh

Word became flesh and He dwelt among men
He let us see Him with our eyes
He let us hold Him in our hands
And before you say whatever you will
I think you better do the best that you can
Or it won’t do

Now, as far as these two artists go, I should note up front that Michael Card is probably the squarest musician I’ve ever heard, and (the late) Rich Mullins could push mushy sentimentality to its very limits. However, both know the Bible, both exhibit thoughtful theology in their lyrics, and both (as far as I can tell) lack the kind of pretension that makes Christian rock music look so silly sometimes. Card approaches John 1 as a theologian, Mullins as a preacher.

Card, though he perhaps conflates John with the other gospels, does a pretty straightforward interpretation of the text; his language is fresh enough to help us see the text as we may not have seen it, and yet the point his song makes is essentially the same as the point of John’s gospel.

Card often uses his music to teach, and in this case he presents a clear explanation of a theological truth in terms of the scriptural text it comes from. For my tastes, his language is too obvious to be good art, but then his audience is the generation before mine, and his prioritization of clarity above art seems intentional. In any event, I appreciate the clarity with which he communicates one of the messages of John 1 here.

Mullins does something more interesting in my opinion, first of all by bringing in 1 John 1, a passage closely related to John 1:

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have handled, concerning the word of life –– indeed, life was revealed, and we have seen and we (now) testify and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and which was revealed to us. That which we have seen and heard, we (now) are proclaiming also to you, so that you, too, may have fellowship with us.

It isn’t entirely clear if 1 John intended for the “word” to refer to Jesus in the same way the Gospel of John did, but it is a reasonable interpretation, and so Mullins pulls them together to make his point.

The point, which Mullins of course makes more effectively with his lyrics than I can with my words here, is that God did not remain in heaven and speak words only at a distance. Rather, in Jesus Christ, God’s word became flesh (John 1) so that we could see it up close and handle it (1 John 1). So in a sense, God put his money where his mouth was, not asking anything of humanity that he would not do himself.

But Mullins does not stop with that theological claim; instead, he suggests that God’s action in the incarnation puts a claim on us as Christians. Because God’s word became flesh, our own words (of testimony, see 1 John 1) must become flesh too, in our actions.

Mullins plays (as John did) off the multiple meanings of “word,” linking it to our common experience of knowing (and being) Christians who speak far too many words with far too few actions. But instead of repeating, say, the cliché that we should practice what we preach, Mullins couches the plea in the terms of a pair of unexpected scriptural texts. This catches our attention with an unexpected challenge coming from a familiar text, and at the same time it enriches our reading of Scripture by suggesting connections we may not have seen before.

Scripture and Song as Theology

One reason I’m writing on these two songs is that good Christian music (whether CCM or church hymns) often does the same thing that Scripture does: it uses accepted traditions in creative ways to move us and motivate us, and in many cases it builds new theological truths that either were not present, or else were not apparent, in the originals.

To put it plainly, Michael Card and Rich Mullins are doing roughly the same thing John did. While Christians typically believe John’s text is inspired in a more profound sense than the works of modern musicians, nevertheless there should be a certain consistency in the way we listen to both kinds of “texts.” In both cases, we not only should learn from what we hear; we also should enjoy it. Scripture is not only revelation but also art.

It is my impression that God intends for us, at the same time that we believe in and obey Scripture, to appreciate it as something beautiful he has given us through the creativity of people created in his image.

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.