THE WORD

Jerry Harkins

As a child, Sunday mass always seemed more of a drudge than a joy.  But I always perked up as soon as the priest began to read the opening verses of the Gospel of St. John [1].  In Latin of course, just as the Emperor Constantine had decreed in the fourth century AD.  "In principio erat verbum et verbum erat apud Deum and Deus erat verbum."  In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and God was the Word.  Not as clear as it might be but not without welcome meaning to me:  the end was in sight.

In fact, John 1:1 is both poetic and dense with meaning.  The Word is said to be both God and with God, an apparent contradiction which is resolved by asserting that there is more than one "person" in the Godhead and implying that the Word is one of those persons.  The standard theological position is that Jesus is the Word, the son of the Father but also co-equal, co-eternal, indeed consubstantial with the Father.  There is a third person of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit who is said to "proceed" from the Father and the Son but is also co-equal, co-eternal and consubstantial with both.  Proceed here means to originate from.  So one contradiction is resolved by means of another. [2]

A similar problem is created by the Nicene Creed's assertion that Jesus was "begotten by the Father before all ages."  Beget means to cause or produce.  In the case of sexual reproduction, it usually refers to the father's contribution.  The mother is said to "conceive" which is a more passive role but in the later Apostles' Creed (c. 390 AD) it is said that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Ghost and "born of" the Virgin Mary."  Applied to the divine nature of Jesus, the phrase "before all ages" seems to refer to a condition before time began or, in modern terms, before the Big Bang.  But time is a property of the universe and did not exist before the universe came into being.  There can be no cause and effect – no begetting –  without time. [3]

Although Jesus as the Word of God is not heavily emphasized in the West, it is bedrock belief in more mystical precincts.  Among the Eastern Orthodox, the Jesus Prayer is perhaps the most profound practice within the Hesychasm prayer tradition.  One common variation, repeated by monks thousands of times each day, is, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son and Word of the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner."  The Angelus, recited in the West three times every day quotes John's statement in 1:14, "And the word was made flesh and dwelt among us."  At this line, all bow down or genuflect.  The same line is part of the Nicene Creed that used to be recited at every mass.  Et verbum caro factus est.  The priest would genuflect. [4]  In the Book of Revelation, also supposed to have been written by John, it is said of Jesus, "and his name is the Word of God."

Perhaps the clearest statement of Jesus as the Word occurs in the so-called Johannine Comma that used to appear in the First Epistle of John (5:5-8) but is omitted in most biblical translations today.  It was included in Saint Jerome's Latin Vulgate edition although it is present only in a bastardized translation in modern Catholic Bibles.  In the King James Version, it reads:

Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?  This is he that came by water and blood, even Jesus Christ; not by water only, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is truth.   For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.   And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one.

These verses also happen to be the clearest biblical support for the doctrine of the Trinity, the notion that there is only one God and there are three divine persons in that God.  Early Christians debated this notion fiercely both because it seems illogical on its face and because it flies in the face of the strict monotheism inherited from the Jews.  There are several theories as to why the idea of the Trinity became so central to the new faith but the simplest is that by the fourth century Christianity was becoming the official state religion of the Roman Empire.  Defining the crucified Christ as God appealed to both the pride and the religious history of the Romans who often thought their reigning Emperor was a God.  However, it simultaneously invited theological speculation on why the three-in-one solution was not an absurdity.  There were many attempts to square this circle. [5]

I grew up with a Catholic version of Karl Barth's Trinitarian logic that asserts that Jesus is the Father's perfect self-knowledge and the Spirit is the Father's perfect self-love.  This does offer a framework for believing that Jesus was the Word in that words are the media by which most knowledge is communicated.  But it also raises the question of exactly what John meant by the Word.  In both 1:1 and 1:14, John, who wrote in Greek, uses logos which is always translated into the English word but which has a philosophical as well as a grammatical meaning.  Elsewhere, when he is referring to the latter meaning, he uses ῥήματα (raimara) as in 3:34 where he has John the Baptist refer to Jesus as "the one whom God has sent speaks the words of God."

In English also, word can be used to imply more than the smallest meaningful element of speech or writing.  It can suggest a command, a promise, an assurance of truth and many subtle variants of all these.  In Greek, logos almost always has an overlay of the idea behind the word and it certainly has that connotation in John's gospel.  An idea is not a simple passing thought or even a complex hypothesis in particle physics.  For such, the Greeks have a perfectly good word, idea, which has pretty much the same meaning it does in English.  But logos refers more to a metaphysical concept which is roughly the real "being-ness" of thought.  In a sense, it is akin to Plato's teaching that "pure ideas" are the ultimate reality.

So the Word is not what Jesus is either literally or metaphorically.  It is something he has but it is not merely a possession.  It is something he actually embodies –  uniquely –  and has embodied "before all ages." [6]  It is timeless and, therefore, divine, not  part of his human nature.  What, exactly might that be?  The answer is unknowable.  For example, if it turns out to be God's perfect self-knowledge, it would, by definition, be knowable only to God.  Indeed, no matter what the Word is, no human mind can know it.  Whether it is divine love, divine omnipotence, divine knowledge or divine anything else, it is not accessible to a less than divine mind.  "It" ultimately means that God is unknowable.

This is not a new theological construct.  It is a necessary axiom of apothatic theology which has a long and continuing tradition.  Tertullian wrote, "…that which is infinite is known only to itself."  Saint Cyril of Jerusalem said, "For we explain not what God is but candidly confess that we have not exact knowledge concerning Him."  And in his Confessions Augustine of Hippo tells us that God is "…other, completely other."  John of Damascus claimed that all positive statements about God reveal not his nature but rather things incidental to his nature.  John the Evangelist certainly did not mean anything like this even if his gospel leaves no alternative.

It seems to me that ideas about God are precisely that – ideas.  Widespread ideas and once upon a time comforting, even necessary ideas but they have no more reality than the idea of Santa Claus.  Over the course of the centuries they have become less necessary and more harmful as institutional religion has had to fight desperately to maintain its dominion over its adherents.  The apocalypse is at hand.  It will not be the second coming but the final curtain and it will usher in a new age in which, in the absence of God, mankind will have to invent a new and enduring basis for morality and ethics.

Notes

1. There are several men named John in the New Testament and a good deal of the commentary on the Gospel of John concerns itself with identifying which one was the Evangelist.  There is no modern consensus but, if there were, it would probably be that the Evangelist was the same person as John the Divine, John the Apostle and John the Beloved Disciple.  It is also widely believed that this was the same John who wrote three epistles and the Book of Revelation.  Many scholars think that these writings were attributed to John by later authors who, following the tradition established by the authors of Matthew Mark and Luke, simply adopted a more authoritative nom de plume. 

2.  The Trinity is said to be a "miracle" which is defined as something "above" reason but not contrary to it.  It – the Trinity – is a dogma of faith, something you are required to believe.  Nevertheless the statements that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and that he is co-eternal with the Father are antagonistic to each other and, by the Principle of Non-contradiction, cannot both be true.

3.  Physicists are sometimes reduced to the same linguistic artifice as biblical commentators.  The Big Bang is said to have originated in a massive explosion of a "singularity" of infinite density and temperature which, whatever it was, was not nothing.  Actually the notion that the Big Bang represents the birth of the universe is imprecise.  Rather it refers to the moment when the laws of physics as we understand them came into effect.  That "moment" is thought to have taken about 300,000 years.  Even Genesis understands that creation did not come about ex nihilo.  In its beginning, "…the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep." 

4. The complete sentence in Latin is Et incarnátus est de Spíritu Sancto Ex María Vírgine, et homo factus est.  This translates as, "And [he] was made flesh by the Holy spirit out of the Virgin Mary, and was made human."  The new English version of the mass translates this as "…by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary."  Presumably this means that Jesus was made into the flesh of the Virgin by the Holy Spirit thereby becoming human.  In any event, at these words, all bow. 

5.  Around the same time (c. 380 AD), the church began to formulate what became the doctrine of transubstantiation, the mystery by which ordinary bread and wine are transformed into the actual flesh and blood of Jesus in the Eucharist.  The problem is that the Father and the Holy Ghost do not have either flesh or blood.  If they are thought to be "consubstantial" with Jesus, however, they must be present in the consecrated host.

6.  Actually this phrase was not in the original version of the Creed adopted at Nicaea but was added 56 years later by the Council of Constantinople.  The original only said, "…begotten from the essence of the Father, God from true God."  It is not at all clear what was meant by the essence of the Father.  God does not have parts, no essence, no accident and to say otherwise is heretical.