"il primo Amore"

         The connection between ideas and actions is intimate and enduring.  Because ideas have consequences, and because bad ideas have bad ones, it matters what you think.   The differences between natural theology and authentically Christian theology lead, therefore, to differences in spirituality, and they are our focus.

         I begin with an important and fundamental difference:  the difference between the first mover and the first lover, or what Dante called “il primo Amore.”

         If, in some degree, worlds reflect their makers, then consider this:  A world in motion is far different from a world in love.  Aristotle’s first mover is not, and cannot be, the first and greatest Lover, though Dante’s God can be the first mover, if we think of Love as spiritual motion, the way Dante does.  For him, indeed, “love makes the world go round.”  For Dante, God can be, and is, precisely that, the prime Lover, because Dante knows Christ, and knows the God revealed in Christ.  Multi-personal, interpersonal, everlasting Love lies at the core of Dante’s world, but not Aristotle’s, even though Dante inherited much from Aristotle, he did not inherit a prime Lover.  That had to come from elsewhere.  Being an aloof, distant, abstract and sub-personal force, Aristotle’s god could not give rise to Dante’s.  The chasm between the two gods and the two worlds they create is beyond mere difference.  It is incompatibility.  Mere motion, on the one hand, and righteous, self-sacrificial affection, on the other hand, must not to be confused or conflated.  Neither must the Gods from which they spring. 

         Consider, too, the difference in spirituality that the character and commandments pertaining to the two Gods in view (if we can say that Aristotle’s god even has a character or imposes moral requirements):  The difference is between (1) moving, and causing, on the one hand, and (2) loving, communing, incarnating, and self-sacrificing, on the other.  As even a moment’s reflection makes plain, personality-less, morality-less, love-less, and word-less unmoved movers like Aristotle’s cannot give rise to the Divine Comedy or to the spirituality it entails.  Much, very much, needs to be added to it before the piety of the Divine Comedy or the revamped heroism of Paradise Lost emerge.  That “very much” is the Word become flesh, the incarnation of Christ.             

Is John 6 about the eucharist?

         As one of the chief Biblical sources for believing that the actual body and blood of Christ are literally, physically, present in the Eucharist, Roman Catholics (and others) often cite John 6: 22 ff., commonly known as the Bread of Life discourse.  To do so, however, seems to me to ignore the context of Jesus' words and to misunderstand his meaning, as the following explanation will demonstrate.  The text is not Eucharistic.

         I invite, indeed strongly encourage, you to read each portion of the text identified before reading the explanation offered below.

Context and setting (22-25)   

         Geographically, this conversation between Jesus and those around Him occurred primarily, though not exclusively, in the synagogue of Capernaum (v. 59).  Those to whom He spoke were a mixed audience that included his disciples and other followers, his Jewish opponents, and countless unbelieving hangers on, eager to fill their bellies.  Nearly all had seen Him multiply fish and bread in order to feed 5,000 hungry persons at once (John 6: 1-15).  Many of them followed Him to Capernaum to get more free food, if they could, apparently missing the profound theological significance of the miracle they had witnessed and from which they had benefited.

         They did not understand that just as their forebears had been fed by the God-sent manna (also not Eucharistic) from Heaven centuries earlier in order to sustain their lives while they sojourned in the wilderness, even so had God now sent his Son from Heaven in order to feed their souls while on their sojourn through the wilderness of life in a fallen world.  By feeding the crowd with miraculously multiplied fish and bread, Jesus was demonstrating that He was to his audience (and to the world) something like what the manna was to the ancient Israelites.  But his audience did not understand the point, so many of them followed Him to Capernaum not for spiritual sustenance from God, which He came to supply, but simply for more food.  Some among them apparently had an inkling that his miracle showed he was the Messiah, but they wanted more proof.

         The context for this discourse, then, is not the Passover meal, during which Jesus instituted for his small band of disciples the ritual breaking of bread and the drinking of wine, by which they were to remember Him until He returned (Matt. 26: 26 ff.).  While near in time (v. 4), the Passover meal is still seven chapters away -- seven chapters.  The discussion here between Jesus and this mixed multitude is something quite different from the Last Supper and his exclusive instructions to his few followers.  To read this discussion as if Jesus were speaking of a distinctly Christian sacrament to a largely unbelieving Jewish crowd, and obliquely introducing to them without any explanation the concept of transubstantiation, is blatantly to disregard both the textual context and the audience, who first address Jesus, not about the Passover meal, but about how He managed to get to Capernaum without taking the last boat available, the one in which his disciples had departed (v. 25).

Jesus' first statement (26, 27)

         As is sometimes the case with Jesus, He does not answer the question posed to Him, but instead goes directly to the issue at hand, in this case the crowd's shallow motivation for following Him to Capernaum:  the food.  In order to meet them where their minds and hearts actually were at that moment, Jesus employs metaphorical language about food and advises them to work for the food that does not perish, food unlike the ancient manna or the recent fish and bread, both of which eventually rot.  Rather than physical food that perishes, He directs them toward a very different kind of food, a food that lasts, and that yields eternal life.  Physical food is not the sort of food He has in mind in this regard, and physical eating is not what He recommends, though that is the sort of food and consumption they now seek.  The soul nourishment He has in mind was something that He, the Son of Man, had been appointed and approved ("sealed") to give them by God Himself.  That nourishment of soul is not subject to decay the way physical food is.  Jesus is clearly distinguishing between physical food and food for the soul, and focusing their attention on the latter. 

         The metaphor of eating and drinking that Jesus employs here was common enough among ancient Jewish teachers and writers, and normally stood for appropriation -- in this case appropriating Jesus.

The people speak (28)

         The people respond to Jesus' admonition to work for the imperishable food that yields eternal life by asking Him what works they ought to perform in order to get this imperishable food.  Though we might well understand that their question was sincere, in light of what follows it was ill-conceived and misguided.

Jesus' second statement (29)

         As directly as possible, Jesus tells them that, in order to have eternal life, they must believe -- not eat and drink -- believe.  No mention, metaphorical or otherwise, is made here of food or of eating.  Believing in the One Whom God sent is the key that unlocks the door to eternal life, not the mastication of body or swallowing of blood.  Jesus is plainly and simply instructing them to move their attention away from food to something far more important and enduring, namely the well being of their souls through faith in Him.  Physical food and physical eating are simply not in view here.  Faith, not food; believing, not eating; is the issue

The people speak (30, 31)

         Perhaps some of his listeners understood that His point pertained to faith and not to eating because, in response to his instruction that they believe in Him, they asked him for additional signs as a basis for their belief -- as if the healings (v. 2) and the feeding of the 5,000 (v. 11-14) they had recently witnessed somehow were not enough. Others, just as apparently, still thought He was talking about normal food and drink.  To them, He responds.

Jesus' third statement (32, 33)

         As He did in verse 26, Jesus responds to the people on his own basis, not theirs.  Though they are thinking still about the physical food from Heaven that sustained their ancestors in the wilderness, He responds by directing them to the metaphorical bread that comes from God and that gives eternal life to the world -- and not merely to the Israelites in the desert.  Surely his reference to bread here is a figure of speech, for no combination of flour, salt, herbs and yeast yields eternal life for the world.  Bakers create many wonderful things in their ovens, but salvation is not one of them.  By speaking this way, Jesus is trying to move his listeners away from their crassly self-indulgent and materialistic view of the Messiah and his reign.  He tells them about a higher, a more ideal (so to speak) kind of bread.  He wants them to know that the manna from Heaven was prophetic, or indicative, or predictive, of the Incarnation, of Him and his entry into the world so that by faith the world  might be saved.

The people speak (34)

         His reference to the bread that gives eternal life evokes from them a strong and direct response, even demand:  "Give us this bread always!"

         It is difficult to know for certain if they understand to what Jesus is referring, but it seems that they do not.  They do not ask for help to aid their belief in Him.  They ask for a bread that is to be given, not a day at a time, or only for a while (as was the manna), or for a one-time feast of fish and bread such as they just experienced from the power and largesse of Christ.  They ask instead for bread to be given them always, apparently thinking that if they were given it  -- and were given it always -- it would yield eternal life for them simply because the giving of that physical bread continued.

        

Jesus fourth statement (35-40)

         Again, Jesus makes plain for them that the bread He has in mind is figurative bread, not literal bread, and that He Himself is the bread of which He speaks.  He tells them that they must come to Him and believe in Him because He is the bread of life.  If they believe in Him, they will not hunger and they will not thirst.  Again, in keeping with the figurative language He has been using, the eating and drinking to which He refers are not physical.  They are used in reference to believing.  Neither are the hunger and thirst they assuage physical.  He is not saying that if they believe in Him they will never again need to eat or drink, which would be the case if He were speaking of literal bread.  Of course they will grow physically hungry and thirsty again.  One does not cease to be physically hungry or physically thirsty simply because one is now a believer.  That is not the sort of eating and drinking, or the sort of hunger and thirst, He has in mind.  But, if they believe in Him, they will find enduring spiritual satisfaction because faith in Him is nourishment for the soul.  Once they turn to Him in faith, once they believe, their souls will have found the food on which their souls were meant to feed, food that yields not mere physical satisfaction, but eternal life.  They already had eaten physical food on the other side of the lake.  But that sort of eating did not keep them physically satisfied.  Nor did it redeem them.  The sort of satisfaction Jesus has in mind does not emerge from literal eating and drinking, but from believing.  Believing in Him, He boldly states, is the very will of God.  Because it is, if they believe in Him, God will deliver them on the day of resurrection. 

The people speak (41, 42)

         Jesus' insistence that He came down from Heaven stirs up dissent and debate among them because they know that He comes from Nazareth.  They know his parents.  Knowing his parents and his hometown, they figure they know and understand his origins.  They do not.

Jesus' fifth statement (43-51)

In order to put right the false objections they entertained about his Heavenly origins, Jesus reminds those who have been drawn to Him that they were drawn to Him by the very will and power of God, and He quotes from the Scriptures to that effect.   Once again He urges them to believe in Him because belief (not eating) is the path to eternal life (v. 47).  In explanation of his admonition to believe in Him, he reiterates the analogy He employed earlier by telling them again that, just as their ancestors ate manna in the wilderness, they themselves should eat his flesh and drink his blood -- startling and graphic language that compares the Israelites eating manna in the wilderness with his audience believing in Him.  That is, just as the ancient Israelites ate manna in the wilderness and thereby found sustenance for their bodies, they themselves should believe in Him and find sustenance for their souls -- eternal life -- a process that He graphically and memorably figures forth as eating his body and drinking his blood, a figure of speech He explicitly employed earlier (v. 35) when He clearly and overtly identified believing in Him with eternal life itself.  His point here is to urge them onward to belief, not urge them literally to gnaw on his body and to drink his blood.  In other words, because their minds seem so firmly fixed on the pursuit of physical food, He makes a shockingly graphic reference to physical food, and to eating and drinking it, as a verbal means by which to catch their attention, and thereby to re-direct their thoughts from food for their bodies to food for their souls, namely the eternal life that is the blessed consequence of believing in Him.  So that they, in their craving for food and drink, might turn to Him in faith, He refers to Himself as food and to believing in Him as eating and drinking.

Notice carefully that in verses 35, 40, and 47 Jesus clearly indicates that believing in Him yields eternal life.  When, therefore, He indicates in other verses that eating his flesh and drinking his blood also yield eternal life, He clearly is drawing a connection between believing, on the one hand, and what He calls eating and drinking, on the other.  In this figure of speech, the latter symbolizes the former, not the other way round.  The believing is literal; the eating and drinking of his actual body and blood are not.  To take his words literally, as if He were linking their eternal salvation to some kind of grotesque cannibalistic ritual, is abhorrent.  To imagine that He is directing them literally to feast on his body and to drink his blood is a notion any ancient Jew would have found both wicked and disgusting -- and clearly against the quite specific injunction of God Himself against any such practice (Gen. 9:4).  That is not what Jesus intends.

By calling Himself "the living bread" in v. 51, He puts beyond all doubt that his language here is metaphorical.  Babies and goats, for example, are alive. Loaves of bread in an oven or stored in plastic bags on a grocery store shelf are not.  Wafers, crackers and loaves are not alive.  Jesus is referring to Himself as the living bread, and his use of the word “bread” here is unquestionably metaphorical.  Bread is not alive.  Jesus is.  He cannot be speaking literally about Himself as "living bread."  He is a man, not a loaf.  Bread is not alive; He is.  It must be a metaphor.  It cannot be literal.  Nor, in keeping with his non-literal language, does He mean for us literally to eat His body and drink his blood.  Chewing Him up and swallowing Him down are not what He has in mind.   

The people speak (52)

         Still not properly understanding Jesus' metaphorical language, the crowd was shocked and grew deeply puzzled: How could they possibly eat his body or drink his blood?   It was unthinkable.  Had they understood his words in the non-literal way in which He meant them, their befuddlement and disgust would have quickly disappeared.  Their befuddlement is rooted in their misunderstanding Jesus as speaking literally. 

Jesus' sixth statement (53-59)

         Jesus continues to press home the startling metaphor He is employing, apparently intending by its cannibalistic absurdity to shock His hearers out of their preoccupation with physical food and with physical eating and drinking.  So He repeats and amplifies His point, which is expressed in the aorist tense (v. 53), which denotes a once-for-all action, a grammatical choice thoroughly unsuited to the repeated participation required in the RC Eucharist, were the Roman reading here to be followed.

The disciples speak (60)

         Some of Jesus' disciples were among those who mistakenly thought He was speaking literally.  Because they did, they too found His words deeply offensive, and (as one translation aptly puts it) "hard to stomach."  Because of their misunderstanding, and the shock and offense to which it led, He provides His own explanation of the teaching He has just articulated.

Jesus' seventh statement (61-67)

         As He sometimes does after He speaks figuratively and non-literally (cp. for example, Luke 8: 11ff), Jesus explains carefully to His disciples exactly what He meant.  He tells them that He is not speaking about actual flesh.  He tells them that the flesh yields no benefit, none.  As in the King James translation, "the flesh profits nothing."  The word "nothing" could hardly be more absolute.  Any benefit He has been talking about up until now is not related to flesh or to eating it.  Flesh profits nothing.  By contrast, what He has been talking about up until now yields unimaginable profit -- namely eternal life.  If  flesh profits nothing, and if what He has been talking about yields the unimaginable profit and benefit of eternal life, then He cannot have been talking about flesh.  By explaining Himself in this way, Jesus was correcting the error of some of his disciples, an error they shared with the crowds that also had mistook his meaning by interpreting Him literally.  His words are spiritual, He tells them, and it is His words, His message, that brings eternal life, and which He puts forward for their acceptance and beleif, not his flesh and blood for their physical consumption.  Those fleshly things profit nothing, He insists.

         The RCC, it seems to me, falls into the exact error Jesus worked so carefully to correct throughout this discussion.  The RCC insists that Jesus is speaking literally about eating human flesh and drinking human blood, and that He is doing so in agreement with their transubstantiationist view of the Eucharist.  But you could hardly insist that Jesus is telling you to eat His flesh and drink His blood in order to obtain salvation if He tells you that the flesh you eat profits precisely nothing.  Salvation is very far from nothing.  If the RCC is intent upon understanding Jesus literally, then the word "nothing" ought to be literally understood as well.  In short, by misreading Him as they do, Catholics are ripping the Bread of Life discourse out of its historical setting and planting it foursquare into the upper room and the Passover, and by doing so they thereby insist that Jesus was, without any overt explanation at all, incorporating for a disparate Jewish audience in Capernaum the Greek philosophical notions we call "substance" and "accidents," as well as the distinctions between them.   No one in Capernaum at that moment -- not Jesus, not his disciples, not his Jewish opponents, and not the food-seeking multitude -- says anything explicitly about the Passover meal or about the Eucharist, much less about the later RC doctrine of transubstantiation or any of its theological corollaries and Greek philosophical underpinnings.  By insisting what it does, the RCC is reading enormous amounts of its own theology back into the text.  As the next few verses indicate, Peter, whom they follow, does not. 

Peter speaks (68-70)

         While some of Jesus' followers left Him at that time, Peter did not.  Once Peter heard and understood Jesus' explanation of the connection between eternal life and believing in Him, he stood firm.  Indeed, rather than following the deserters, Peter rose to the theological and spiritual profundity of which he is sometimes so capable.  Though others might go away, Peter knows that the words -- not the flesh -- of eternal life come from Jesus because Jesus is the Son of the living God.  In John 6, Jesus Himself makes plain repeatedly and
 precisely how He expects people to obtain the gift of 
eternal life -- by believing.  Peter gets it: 
"we believe," Peter says, not "we eat, drink, or swallow" (v. 69). 

Salvation is appropriated by faith, by belief, not by the
 gastro-intestinal system.  The eating and drinking are 
figurative of belief.  Belief is not figurative of
 chewing, drinking, or swallowing.

         What we have in the bread is symbolic of his flesh.  The flesh He gave for the world was real.  It was crucified and has ascended into Heaven, which is where it remains until now, and will remain until the Second Coming.  That flesh is not on earth.  We know where that flesh is.  We know where his body now resides.  His disciples themselves told us so.  They watched it ascend to Heaven.  They told us about the event.  They told us exactly where his body now is.  It is not where some traditions insist it is.

         Perhaps long exposure has inured us to how shocking the Roman way of interpreting Jesus really is.  In order to feel it again, we ought to interpret a parallel passage from the same text.  In John 15: 5, Jesus says, "I am the vine and you are the branches." 

I quote the words of a Catholic fellow discussant words regarding John 6 here:  "No matter how much you deny it, those words are unambiguous.  They are clear, direct statements and *by definition* are not the [sic] figures of speech."  If I applied his bold words and bolder hermeneutic to the passage in John 15, then Jesus' words are both literal and true, and the only reason that He and all Christians don't appear to have bark for skin and leaves for hair is because while the substance of both His body and ours has changed from body to bush and from hair to leaf, we still look like we did before because the accidents remain the same.  Despite all appearances to the contrary, Jesus really is a vine and we really are branches.  He really is a door (John 10: 7, 9); He really is a shepherd, and, by extension, we really are sheep (John 10: 7-16).  The only reason He doesn't look like a door and we don't look like sheep is because, while the substances have changed, the accidents have not.  It's a miracle.  How we can have the substance of branch and of sheep simultaneously must be a miracle too.

         

The Theology of Invective

         I can see no other way.

         We must learn once more to confront nonsense in all its forms and to call things by their real names.  We must learn that euphemisms are lies and that patience and gentleness sometimes do no good.  Worse still, they often do injury.  Count on it, when you treat a fool with nothing but kindness, he remains a fool.  If you pat him on the back and stroke his ego, he does what any fool does:  he mistakenly concludes that everything is alright with him, rather than realizing that you are simply being kind to ignorance the way you are kind to all other forms of poverty.

         We must revive the ancient and honorable art of invective, which is to language what justice is to law -- a means of giving people what they deserve.  What some of them deserve is a good kick in the pants.  This article, therefore, is dedicated to telling the fools to bend over and grab their ankles.  The beatings will now commence.

The New Testament

         If, like me, you are a Christian, you often encounter brothers and sisters in the faith who are, to put it plainly, well-intentioned but mush-minded invertebrates.  They seem unwilling and unable to grasp with clarity or conviction that some things are wrong and some are wicked.  Even if they could grasp that fundamental truth about the world, they lack the courage to call evil and error by their real names.  They do not understand that, if you fail to call evil evil, then you are treating it no differently than you treat goodness, which you do not call evil either.  The only thing they seem able to oppose publicly is that small collection of Christians who speak forthrightly, Christians who are less afraid of giving offense to the offensive than they are of aiding and abetting wickedness and error with sloppy and unjustifiably lenient language.

         This will never do.

         We Christians rightly recognize Christ as the very embodiment of love.  But Christ was no bleeding heart, and He was no invertebrate.  The "gentle Jesus meek and mild" never existed.  He is a nineteenth and twentieth century fiction.   The historical Jesus was another matter altogether.  At various times, and when the situation demanded, the real Jesus publicly denounced sinners as snakes, dogs, foxes, hypocrites, fouled tombs and dirty dishes.  He actually referred publicly to one of his chief disciples as Satan.  So that his hearers would not miss his point, He sometimes referred to the objects of his most intense ridicule both by name and by position, and often face to face. 

         No doubt His doing so made the invertebrates around him begin to squirm because they realized how offensive this tactic would be to outsiders.  Nevertheless, Jesus persisted.  He did so because He knew better than his jellyfish camp followers that alluding to heinous acts, and to those who continue to practice them, in only the most innocuous and clinical language does no one, least of all the offenders themselves, any good.  I cannot say it forcefully enough:  Christ did not affirm sinners; He affirmed the repentant.  Others He often addressed with the most withering invective.  God incarnate did not avoid using words and tactics that his listeners found deeply offensive.  He well understood that sometimes it is wrong to be nice.  I deny that we can improve upon the rhetorical strategy of Him who was Himself the Word, and who spoke the world into existence.

         The objection raised by the invertebrates that Jesus spoke aggressively only to self-righteous Pharisees simply misses the point.  Any sinner who rejects repentance, or any sinner who holds repentance at bay because he somehow believes it is not for him, is self-righteous.

         Paul talked the same way. 

         Although his invertebrate comrades probably considered it offensive and indelicate of him to do so, Paul did not hesitate to suggest to several churches -- publicly, plainly, and in writing -- that his many detractors ought simply to emasculate themselves (Gal. 5: 12).  If you believe that circumcision makes you right with God, he argued, why not go the whole way and really get right with God?  If Lorena Bobbitt was reading the Bible on the night that made her famous, this was the verse she read.

         Furthermore, in the same letter, (in fact, in the space of but three verses) Paul twice refers to his Galatian readers, the very people he is trying to convince, as fools (Gal. 3: 1, 3).  Subsequent events indicate that his shocking words, though clearly offensive, were not ineffective.  The Galatians chose to follow Paul rather than the Judaizers, whose tactic was, in Paul's words, to "win the approval of men," the very tactic urged upon us so indefatigably by the invertebrates -- though never in gender specific language.

         In short, if the religion and practice of the New Testament offend them, the invertebrates need to argue with Jesus and Paul, not me.

Christian Literature

         Furthermore, like Christ and his chief apostle, the greatest Christian writers of the Western world also refused to subscribe to the principle that language deeply offensive to one's readers or listeners ought always to be shunned.  Neither the greatest writers of Western tradition (such as Dante, Erasmus, Milton, and Swift) nor the best of the present day permit their language to be censored or vetoed by the hyperactive sensitivities of the spineless.  Great writers select one word over all other words because that word, and that word only, most fully conveys their meaning, and because that word, and that word only, can best be expected to produce the author’s intended effect.  That meaning and that effect are occasionally, and sometimes intentionally, offensive.

The Rules 

         Verbal precision, not inoffensiveness, is the traditional hallmark of the West's best writing and the West’s best books, some of which were deeply and intentionally offensive to great numbers of those who first read them.  Dante's Inferno consigns a number of Catholic notables -- including popes -- to Hell.  Erasmus's Praise of Folly excoriates monks and theologians as a shameless and squalid mob.  His Julius Excluded locks Pope Julius out of Heaven because he was an adulterous, blood-thirsty, syphilis-ridden, mammon hound.  Some of Milton's political pamphlets and poetry are, among other things, timeless handbooks of insult and invective.  Great portions of the works of Jonathan Swift constitute a veritable scatologist's Bible.  These works and many like them would never have been written or published had the modern preoccupation with inoffensiveness been then the controlling consideration.  Because that preoccupation now prevails, these books and many like them are being harried out of the literary canon.  In other words, the guidelines according to which the invertebrates want us to write are guidelines that not only would have radically recast many of our culture’s great books had they been followed, but would have prevented some of them from ever being written at all.  Had modern guidelines been previously in effect, they would have banished many of our civilization’s most important and memorable texts far more effectively and extensively than has the politically correct curriculum at Stanford, Harvard or Oberlin.

Freedom and Virtue

         Invertebrates cannot comprehend that despicable conditions inevitably arise in a fallen world.  Those despicable conditions sometimes require us to employ the language of shock and of confrontation in our unflagging efforts to push back the frontiers of evil and error.  But the spineless do not like it when we do.  They want to police the way we speak.  They want, literally, to erase words from our language.  I have been told by one Christian professor, whom I like and whom I respect, that there was never a time when shock language was right.  Such language, I am asked to believe, ought to be eliminated.  But though others delete it, I shall not.  The fewer words you have at your disposal, the fewer thoughts you are able to think or to articulate with full precision, and the fewer points you are able to make with your desired effect.  When the range of words is small, the range of thought is small and the power of speech is diminished.  In that sense, word police are thought police.  The invertebrates want to put you under arrest. 

         Resist.

         Language, like liberty, is not normally lost all at once.  It slips through our hands a little at a time, almost imperceptibly.  Don't let it happen.

         Slang words and shock words have their legitimate use.  Sometimes the right word is a slang word or a shock word because no other word conveys your meaning as fully or as accurately, and because no other word elicits the response you desire.  Sometimes the right language is language that falls beyond the pale of polite discourse –- but not of virtue. 

John 1 and Greek Philosophy

“The World Knew Him Not” (John 1: 1-34)

The bird that sees a dainty bower

Made in the tree, where she was wont to sit,

Wonders and sings, but not His power

Who made the arbor: this exceeds her wit.

But Man doth know

The spring, whence all things flow:

And yet as though he knew it not,

His knowledge winks, and lets his humors reign:

They make his life a constant blot,

And all the blood of God to run in vain.

Ah wretch! what verse

Can thy strange ways rehearse?

               George Herbert, “The Temple”

Advocates of natural theology often invoke John’s use of the term “logos” in the prologue to his Gospel as evidence of a Biblical endorsement of natural theology and of philosophy.   It is not.

Given the enormous difference between John’s logos and that of the Stoics, and given the way John has so extensively corrected their rampant misconceptions, one could no more assert that John was endorsing natural theology here than one could assert that Friedrich Hayek was endorsing Karl Marx because they both use the word “capital.”  Wholesale correction is not the same as endorsement or implementation, even if a few of the terms used by both sides are the same.  Simply because Hayek and Marx both deal with the financial interactions of human beings, and simply because they employ some of the same language in so doing, it does not mean (1) that Hayek endorses Marx or Marxism, (2) that their views and methods are compatible, or (3) that Hayekian thought subsumes Marxist thought.  Hayek is no Marxist any more than John is a Stoic.  Hayek corrects Marx all along the Marxian path, a path Hayek knows to be “the road to serfdom.”  John corrects the Stoics in the same extensive way, as the analysis below will demonstrate.  John does to the Stoic logos something the Stoics would never do:  He identifies it with a particular Jewish man and then understands that man in light of Jewish history and Scripture, reaching back to Genesis and to the creative and powerful Divine Word, dabar.

John’s use of the phrase “in the beginning” (v. 1) refers back to the time before God had spoken, as does Genesis 1: 1.  In that beginning, the Word was pros ton theon (v.1) -- in front of God, so to speak, before Him, face to face.  That Word was with God and was God:  God and Word, God and God.  They are the same, yet they are distinct.  We arrive again where we began in Genesis 1:1, the Divine unity-in-plurality (a text at which we will look in more detail later).

Christ is called the Word because it is “He by whom God reveals Himself to man, and communicates His mind and will.  Christ Jesus is the Revealer of the Godhead . . . The term ‘Word’ would seem well adapted to express this.  A word is that by which we communicate our thoughts to others” (Jacobus, Notes on the Gospels, p. 20).

The Logos, therefore, is not some distant and abstract principle of making, not a simple uncaused cause of an eternal world.  The Logos is the Divine Person of revealing, not a mere principle of making.  God here is living, creative eloquence; He is Divine speech, utterance, and creative articulation -- Word.  By means of the Divine Word Who is God Himself, God Himself makes the world and thereby imparts Himself to it because the Word is God and God is the world-making Word.  By making the world with his Word, God reveals Himself to us.  From our perspective, in order to know God, that Word is a necessity.

For us to know God, He must reveal Himself to us.  If He remains silent, He remains both unknowable and unknown.  But silent He has not remained.  He has spoken.  To invoke the title of an important little book by Francis Schaeffer, "He is there and He is not silent."  According to John, but against anything to which a Stoic might affirm, God's utterance, God’s speech, God’s Logos, God’s Word, God’s Son, has become identified with a specific human creature in recent Jewish history, a man of flesh and blood, who lived, suffered, died, and rose again in the flesh.  That man is the Utterance or Eloquence of the Father to us, indeed to all creation, because by means of this Utterance, now incarnate, now made human -- by means of this very Logos -- the world itself was spoken into existence and God was revealed.

Notice carefully that the creative and revelatory flow in that Divine action is entirely from God to the world, from God to us, and not vice versa.  The Son is the creative, revelatory, articulation of Elohim; He is the loving and redemptive eloquence of a gracious Father to a fallen world.

Conversely, God conceived in Aristotle's way -- an unspeaking, unhistorical, impersonal cause, an unmoved mover, or a self-thought thought, standing behind an eternal world, something known or reached by our intellectual strivings up to it, and not by its articulations to us, is incompatible with the Biblical account of creation and redemption by a speaking God Who is known to us only by His doings, not ours, and especially by incarnation in a historical person.  Aristotle’s theory goes contrary to them and cannot be reconciled with them.

Only God could be in the very beginning with God, before anything that was made ever existed.  Whatever was not in the beginning with God was not God -- and because only God truly knows God, unless this God who was with God and who was God speaks to us about God, we cannot know Him.  He is too far above us, especially now in our fallenness.  He is the Light (v.4); we are the darkness (v. 5). Our darkness has not understood, or comprehended, the Light, nor can it (v. 5). The Greek word katalambano (v.5) can mean either mental comprehension or seizing by force.  Here, it seems, John means that “the light has been shining and is still shining, and never has the darkness been able to obliterate it” (Tasker, p. 45), though “obliterate it” the world has tried pointedly to do.  “Obliterate” is precisely right, for that is how the children of darkness respond to the Light that reveals their sin, their folly, and their rebellion.  They blot it out, obliterate it, if they can. They suppress it, exchange it for a lie, and they kill it. That is a Johannine notion with which Paul concurs in Romans 1: 18ff.

The world, indeed the whole world -- Greek philosophers included -- “knew Him not” (v. 10) because the world – Greek philosophers included -- “received Him not” (v. 11).  In order to “know” Him, you must “receive” Him.  Unless you know Him Who is the Word and Who is God, you do not, and cannot, know the Father.  Knowing the Father requires receiving the Son.  So far as we can tell, Aristotle did neither.  In that sad and rebellious condition, Aristotle was simply one with a world of human beings who did not receive or know their Maker.  By its own choice, “the world is closed to the Word and its light” (Barth, Witness to the Word, p. 69).

In order to know Him, to receive Him, and to become a child of God, requires a gracious and transcendent “power” (v. 12).  That power is a gift (v. 12), something given, and not something humanly achieved, like Aristotle’s deductions concerning an uncaused cause, an unmoved mover, and self-thought thought.  To receive Him (v. 12), you must believe in his name (v. 12).  Without spiritual life, which comes through belief in his name, there is no Divinely given enlightenment.  Such enlightenment happens because of the will of God, and not the will of anyone else (v. 13).  “Can one fail to see that revelation is presented here as a self-enclosed circle into which one cannot leap from the outside?” (Barth, Witness to the Word, 75).  Revelation, regeneration, enlightenment -- in other words, knowledge and life -- they go inextricably together.  Within that circle, Aristotle is not included.

When the Word came into the world, He did so, contrary to Greek philosophy, by becoming flesh (v. 14).  Flesh is, so to speak, the historical medium of revelation.  To the Greeks, that particular medium was unthinkable and disgusting.  Merely to suggest it was to be scorned.  Therefore, by asserting that the Word dwelt among us in human flesh, that He “tabernacled” with us in that fleshly way, John’s reference and indebtedness is to the Old Testament shekinah glory, and not to Greek philosophy.  In His flesh, the Word was “full of grace and truth” (v.14).   Between “grace” and “truth” is an intimate and unbreakable connection.  Without grace, the truth about God is unknown.  From His fullness of grace and truth, we all have benefited. (v.16).   That benefit comes to us in the form of the Word’s “exegesis” of God, His declaration of the otherwise unseen and, to us sinners, unseeable Father (v. 18).

The contrast here between sinful human creatures, on the one hand, and the incarnate Word, on the other, is startling and humbling.  It silences our pretensions.  None of us, without exception, has -- or can -- see God.  By “see” here, John does not mean mere eyesight.  He means seeing as understanding, as knowing.  For that task, our fallen and merely natural powers of sense and reason are ridiculously inadequate.  By means of them, no one has seen God (v. 18).

But the Son has done what we could not.  He has understood the Divine Mysteries and declared to us what He has seen, much like his disciples have done, who saw Him and declared to us what they saw (1 John 1: 1-3).  They could declare God to others and to us only because the Word had declared God to them.  They could speak because they first were spoken to, and because their minds and hearts were given new life and new light by God.  The Hidden God came out of hiding, declared Himself in history and in the flesh, and renewed the souls of His chosen ones so that they might finally understand. 

The conjunction of “grace” and “truth” here requires further elaboration:  You cannot have truth about God unless you first have grace from God.  That is, knowing the truth about God depends upon the grace of God.  While the law came by Moses, grace and truth came by Jesus Christ (v. 17), Who is the only One Who has ever seen the Father, without whose grace we could not have this divine truth.  The Word has brought us the truth about God.

Though He made us, we do not know Him (v. 10).  No one, indeed, has ever seen God -- except the only begotten Son.  Therefore, unless the Son, the Word, speaks, we cannot and do not know God.  He alone has made Him known (v.14).  Only God knows God.   We cannot know Him or speak of Him, as He Himself teaches (Matt 11: 27).

Put differently, the “light” and the “life” go together (v. 4).  Seeing the light depends upon having the life.  Without that life, we all are still in darkness, Aristotle included.  Without this life (zoe), we are dead, and we cannot see.  You cannot see the light (phos) if you do not have the life (zoe).  He is the Light and the Life.  Both life and light are wrapped up in Christ, Who is the Revealer and the Revealed, the Goal and the Means, the Light and the Life.  Without Him, you do not and cannot know God.  Life is indispensable to seeing the Light.  Death blots out the light, and only Christ can bring the life by which we see, the new life of regeneration, the regeneration exclusively by which we see the kingdom of God (John 3: 16ff.)  The natural man has no life and cannot see things that are spiritually discerned (1 Cor. 2: 14).  Aristotle, being spiritually dead, is blind and cannot see.  To follow him is for the blind to lead the blind or, even more absurdly with regard to Christian advocates of Aristotelian natural theology, is for the blind to lead the sighted.  In either case, the result is sadly predictable:  We remain in darkness.  That darkness is condemnable:  “This is the condemnation, that light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil” (John 3: 19).  In other words, “It was the nature of the darkness -- this deep darkness of the soul -- this human ignorance, depravity and perverseness -- to resist the light -- not to entertain it nor retain it” (Jacobus, Notes on the Gospels, p. 25).  Aristotle and his metaphysical machinations are not exempt from the failings of human nature in this regard.  They are its classical embodiment.

The rejection of the Light by those without the life is universal.  On this point, unless you are born again by the will of God (v. 13) you have no hope.  For those without the life and the light, knowing God is impossible.  Whatever else they might have in this regard, it is not knowledge of God because knowledge of God depends upon divine speech.  The transcendent God can be known no other way -- precisely because He is transcendent.  We know him as imminent only if He speaks, only if He reveals Himself to us -- and only if we understand and do not distort that revelation.  But we distort, and we do not understand.  We are blind in the face of light, dead in the face of life.  We knew Him not and received Him not.

He came bearing gifts.  But they killed Him.  In that horrifying action, they are like us in all ways.  We dwell willingly, and therefore self-destructively, in the darkness that confronts and resists revelation.  We ourselves are that darkness.  He is the Light that scatters darkness and makes clear our path (John 8: 12; cp. 12: 35).

To scatter darkness and set it to flight is a matter of cosmic conflict and conquest, not calm persuasion.  He must destroy within us both Satan’s work and our own.  In response to the Divinely induced destruction that precedes our regeneration and enlightenment, we aim to kill Him.  Both sides, God’s and ours, succeed, but we only temporarily.  We killed Him, but He did not stay dead.  Our rejection and slaughter of Him shows that in us lives no good will toward the Light, no readiness to receive it, but open conflict instead:  opposition, antithesis, animosity, and murder.  The darkness in us can never make itself Light, nor does it want to do so.  It aims rather at making the Light darkness by snuffing it out, by replacing the Light of the world with the garish, self-glorifying, self-reflecting, artificial lights and tinsel trappings of human-made gods, which, like the fires of Hell in Milton’s Paradise Lost, give off not light, but “darkness visible” (Paradise Lost, Bk.1: 63).  Even though the Light enlightens every man, we snuff out the light within us and become endarkened, not enlightened, instead.

No one can see God at any time (v. 18) because for us a direct vision of God is impossible.  John’s words here “do not deny the possibility of a true knowledge of God, but of a natural knowledge of God such as can be described by “sight.” (Westcott, p. 15, emphasis added).  In this sense of seeing God, even the theophanies of the Old Testament fell short.  Any knowledge, any authentic recognition, we have of God, whether as sight or as insight, must be mediated.  That Mediator is Christ.  He mediates both our redemption by God and our knowledge of God.  From His unique position in the Father’s bosom, and as the Father’s only begotten Son, He alone can declare, or "exegete," the Father for us (v. 18).  The argument in vv. 17, 18 is that while Moses was highly esteemed by the Jews, by means of him no one could see God.  By contrast, Jesus Christ has revealed Him.  Aristotle, (1) without benefit of either the Mosaic revelation of earlier centuries, (2) or the Christic revelation of the future, and (3) subject to his own damnable evil and its inevitable suppression of Truth, knows God even less than those who killed Him, which is to say not at all.  There was no knowledge of God, even in the land of Israel (Hosea 4: 1, 2).  Therefore, do not expect to find it in pagan, morally debased, Greece.

Although the Logos made the world, the world did not know Him.  The story here in John’s prologue is not about knowing God from nature and reason; the story here in John 1 is about the breach between the world and its Creator, a breach bridged by Him.  It’s about the shameful fact of the world’s damnable and self-imposed ignorance.  This is a tale of judgment, not of natural theology’s alleged insights.  In other words, this prologue and chapter teach precisely what Paul teaches in Romans 1.  It’s a story of condemnation:  The Light has come into the world, but because of our wickedness and our preference for darkness, a darkness we hope serves to cover our sins, we hate the Light.  Whoever does evil -- Don’t we all? -- hates the light because by it our deeds are exposed for what they are (John 3: 19, 20).
Do you hate the light?  Take your time, and resolve to be absolutely honest, before you answer that question.  

Excursus I:  The Commentators

In order to underscore my contention that John’s use of the term “logos” is not an endorsement of, or even an implementation of, Greek philosophy, in particular, or of natural theology, in general, I cite here twenty passages from the commentary tradition, copied almost at random as I came to them in my study.  The number could easily have been doubled, even tripled.

(1.) “There can be little doubt that the roots of the ideas contained in this term [i.e., “logos”] are to be sought in the O. T.” (Ross, p. 135).

(2.) “[Philo’s] misty, vague philosophizing is worlds away from John’s concrete, historical outlook on the personal Logos, who from times eternal was with God and who became flesh in Jesus Christ.  The theory that John derived the term Logos from Philo is very wide of the mark; there is no real evidence that John had ever heard of Philo.  It is just as wide of the mark to regard John as having derived this term from Greek philosophy” (Ross, 136).

(3.) “But, though [John] would not have been unmindful of the associations aroused by the term, his essential thought does not derive from the Greek background.  His Gospel shows little trace of acquaintance with Greek philosophy and less dependence upon it.  And the really important thing is that John in his use of Logos is cutting clean across one of the fundamental Greek ideas.  The Greeks thought of the gods as detached from the world, as regarding its struggles and heartaches and joys and tears with serene divine lack of feeling.  John’s Logos does not show us a God who is serenely detached, but a God who is passionately involved.  The Logos speaks of God’s coming where we are, taking our nature upon Himself, entering the world’s struggle, and out of this agony winning men’s salvation”  (Morris, pp. 116-17).

(4.) “[T]he “Word” irresistibly turns our attention to the repeated “and God said” of the opening chapter of the Bible.  The Word is God’s creative Word (v. 3).  The atmosphere is unmistakably Hebraic”  (Morris, pp. 117-18).

(5.) “[W]e find that in other biblical authors, as well as in John, the word [i.e., “Logos”] is never used to signify the divine Reason or Mind; nor indeed those of any human creature”  (Alford, p. 677).

(6.) [Comparing Philo and John] “There is a wide and unmistakable difference between his logos and that of the Apostle” (Alford, p. 679).

(7.)“It would be difficult not to recognize in these first verses an allusion to the beginning of Genesis”  (Godet, John, 243).

(8.)“The term Word, no less than the term in the beginning, serves to recall the narrative in Genesis; it alludes to the expression:  and God said, repeated eight times . . . All these sayings of God John gathers into one single, living word” (Godet, John, 245).

(9.) Logos as reason “is foreign to the N.T.” (Godet, John, 246).

(10.) “The word logos in John, signifies as in the whole Biblical text, word.  In Philo, it signifies, as in the philosophical language of the Greeks, reason.  This simple fact reveals a wholly different starting-point in the use which they make of the term. . .

“In Philo, the existence of the Logos is a metaphysical theorem. .  .God being conceived of as the absolutely indeterminate and impersonal being, there is an impassible gulf between Him and the material, finite, varied world which we behold.  To fill this void, Philo needed an intermediate agent, a second God, brought nearer the finite; this is the Logos, the half-personalized divine reason.  The existence of the Logos in John is not the result of such a metaphysical necessity. God is in John, as in all the Scriptures, Creator, Master, Father.  He acts Himself in the world, He loves it, He gives His Son to it:  we shall even see that it is He who serves as intermediate agent between men and the Son (6: 37, 44) . . . in John everything in the relation of the Logos to God is a matter of liberty and of love, while with Philo everything is the result of a logical necessity. . .

“To the view of Philo, as to that of Plato, the principle of evil is matter; the Jewish philosopher nowhere dreams, therefore, of making the Logos descend to earth, and that in bodily form.  In John, on the contrary, the supreme fact of history is this:  “The Logos was made flesh” (Godet, John, pp. 287, 288).

(11.) “It is not in Greek philosophical usage, however, that the background of John’s thought and language should be sought . . . The true background of John’s thought and language is found not in Greek philosophy but in Hebrew revelation.  The ‘word of God’ in the Old Testament denotes God in action, especially in creation, revelation and deliverance” (Bruce, John, 29).

(12.) “John’s standpoint is that of the Old Testament and not that of the Stoics nor even of Philo”(Robertson, 3, 4).

(13.) “It constantly happens in the history of thought that the same terms and phrases are used by schools which have no direct affinity, in senses which are essentially distinct, while they have a superficial likeness . . . A new teacher necessarily uses the heritage which he has received from the past in order to make his message understood”(Westcott, John, p. xv).

(14.) “It is admitted on all hands that [John’s] central affirmation, ‘the Word became flesh,’ which underlies all he wrote, is absolutely unique.  A Greek, an Alexandrine, a Jewish doctor, would have equally refused to admit such a statement as a legitimate deduction from his principles, or as reconcilable with them” (Westcott, John, xv).

(15.) “Philo and St John, in short, found the same term current, and used it according to their respective apprehensions of the truth.  Philo, following the track of Greek philosophy, saw in the Logos the divine Intelligence in relation to the universe:  the Evangelist, trusting firmly in the ethical basis of Judaism, sets forth the Logos mainly as the revealer of God to man, through creation, through theophanies, through prophets, through the Incarnation. . . In short the teaching of St John is characteristically Hebraic and not Alexandrine” (Westcott, John, pp. xvi-xvii).

 (16.) “We must not overlook the fact that the Gospel of John begins with the same words as the first book of the Old Testament.  If we, like the first Christians of the Diaspora, were accustomed to reading the Old Testament in Greek, this would immediately catch our attention” (Cullmann, p. 250).

(17.) “[T]he Gospel of John did not derive from the widely spread Logos idea a doctrine of general, not exclusively Christian, revelation . . . on the contrary it completely subordinated the extra- and pre-Christian Logos to the one revelation of God in Jesus of Nazareth, and in this way, completely re-formed it”  (Cullmann, 254).

(18.) “If the author takes over many statements about the Logos from Hellenism as well as from the Old Testament, he does not mean to say thereby that the Greeks, for instance, because they spoke of the Logos, already possessed true knowledge.   That would be a modern way of thinking.  This is what the evangelist is saying:  The Greeks spoke of the Logos without knowing him” (Cullmann, 264).

(19.) “The word logos was a current term in Greek philosophy to denote the rational principle in man and, on a cosmic scale, the universal principle which imposed order on the raw material of which the world was made. . . But the background of John’s terminology is properly to be sought in the Old Testament, where the “word” of Yahweh is his will in action”  (Bruce, Message, p. 103).

(20.) “False philosophy was dealing out to the world all kinds of error in regard to God and the modes of the Divine existence.  What darkened reason was thus struggling after when ‘the world by wisdom knew not God,’ John was commissioned to set forth, as God’s own revelation of Himself.  The Evangelist borrowed none of his doctrines from those systems.  But he takes, in this case, a term that had become so universally familiar in the chief philosophies of the world before Christ’s coming, and this Logos that they had spoken of so blindly and ignorantly, he declares unto them” (Jacobus, Notes on the Gospels, p. 21).

In short, the Gospel of John emphasizes Jewish history and piety over philosophy.   It focuses on the story of God’s redemptive works in the world, concerning which we find ourselves somewhere in the middle, somewhere short of the end, when all will be made clear, not to unaided human reason and its metaphysical speculations, but to those regenerate persons whom God has chosen for sight, for hearing, and for belief.  John’s gospel does not assume that Biblical knowing and classical knowing are either the same or interchangeable.  That’s another way of saying that the medieval scholastic wrestling grounds and their Aristotelian rules are not the practice field upon which one discovers the mind of Christ or learns to reproduce it.  Bibliocentric thinking is learned and mastered elsewhere and in other ways.

Excursus II:  John the Baptist

I take it to be a widely accepted belief among Christians, including those who advocate natural theology in the Aristotelian vein, that from even before birth (Luke 1: 41), John the Baptist understood God in Christ (and therefore God Himself) better than did Aristotle.  If so, then the point to remember is that John the Baptist did not know Him.  We have John’s own word on it, twice.  The sinful human darkness into which we all are plunged is so deep and so all-engrossing that even John the Baptist himself did not know God when confronted by Him face-to-face (John 1: 31, 33).

We understate the case merely to say that John the Baptist was not the light (John 1: 8, 21).  It’s worse than that:  Even with his impressive devotion to God, even with his prophetic insight, even with his undaunted holy boldness, and even with his compelling articulation of the message of repentance -- all of which combined to make him famous -- John the Baptist himself did not know the Light (John 1: 31, 33) until it had been divinely pointed out to Him by a miraculous, historical revelation, whereby he actually saw with his own eyes the Holy Spirit descending upon Christ like a dove and (presumably) heard with his own ears the heavenly voice uttering its Divine attestation.  John himself twice admits (John 1: 31, 33) that, before witnessing that divine attestation, he did not know Him, and did not recognize the only One who has seen the Father and made Him known.  But because of that divine sign, that descending Dove and attesting Voice, which replaced John’s ignorance with knowledge, John finally knew and John finally testified (John 1: 34).  Without that miraculous sign, John the Baptist was no better off than the Pharisees, who did not know, and did not recognize, God Himself when He stood directly before them (John 1: 26).  They did not know Him Who alone is the Way, the Truth, and the Life (John 14: 6).  They were human creatures, and, on their own, they could not know Him.  Indeed, even with God Himself plainly and directly before their eyes, they did not know Him.  Apart from His saving grace, no one can and no one does.  In their depraved and debilitating solidarity, they were stuck on the wrong side of the canyon of impossibility.  They could not know God by their own devices (John 1: 18).  If, despite all their great revelational advantages, both John the Baptist and the Pharisees were blind and could not know God, how then, one wonders, without all those advantages, but with all their debilitations, could Aristotle, the pagan? 

Though he was not the light, John the Baptist was a witness to it.  But he was a witness to it only as a result of Divine intervention, only as a result of miracle.  Even then, his knowledge of God in Christ and his witness to it were partial and vacillating.  Even at the very end of his life, John still needed to ask Jesus if He were the One, or if he, John, ought to continue looking for someone else (Matt. 11: 2-6).  Jesus replied by saying that He was performing the miracles predicted by Isaiah.   Even at the end of his life, John the Baptist was hesitant and unsure.  Please notice that in order to move from his natural condition of ignorance to his position as witness to Christ, John the Baptist required the miraculous action of God.  He required even more miraculous action in order to keep that witness strong and well directed.  Without miracle(s) John did not know Him, and without miracle(s) John could not maintain his witness to Him.  Knowing God, and staying in that privileged position, required multiple divine actions, even for John the Baptist.  John had to witness the Holy Spirit descending in visible form upon the Son before he knew the very God Who confronted him there, and even after that John had to hear about all the miracles Jesus was performing in fulfillment of Divine prophecy.  Short of those miracles, even John the Baptist did not know, could not know, and could not maintain, what we all need to know, namely God, Who is revealed only in Christ (Matt. 11: 27).

Please remember for whom this impossibility loomed so large.  Please remember what sort of person was stranded on the island of humanly impenetrable ignorance of the Divine.  It was not simply some typological everyman; it was the best and highest of us all:  not just a prophet, but one whom Jesus said was “more than a prophet” (Matt. 11: 9).  We have it on the Highest Authority that John the Baptist was simply the greatest of us all (Matt. 11: 11).  Yet, even the greatest among us is less than the lowest member of the Kingdom of Heaven (Matt. 11: 11).  The momentous God-caused shift from John the Baptist’s (and our) natural condition to knowledge of God indicates that only by means of God’s doing, not ours, do we desperate sinners get placed above even the highest and best of human creatures.  Only then do we get to know God.

If the greatest among us required such remarkable Divine doings both in the beginning and in the sustaining of his knowing God, then how much more does Aristotle need it, and how much greater is Aristotle’s darkness because he had neither of John the Baptist’s advantages?  Yet, despite that Aristotelian darkness, so many Christians turn to him for theological methods, rubric, support, insight, and apologetics.  Jesus was no theological Aristotelian.  Neither was Paul.  Nor should you be.    

From the highest to the lowest, each one of us finds himself or herself in the position of Jacob and his ignorance:  “Surely the Lord is in this place and I did not know it” (Gen. 28: 16).  For this ignorance, Aristotle’s machinations are no cure; they are one more form of its many symptoms.

Excursus III:  “Heard,” “Seen,” “Handled” (I John 1: 1-3)

         In the opening verses of his first epistle, the apostle John further distances himself from the Stoic logos by asserting that his message is based upon what he himself, and others, have heard with their own ears, seen with their own eyes, and touched with their own hands  (vv. 1-3) -- things no Stoic would say about their logos and which Aristotle would not say about his uncaused cause, his unmoved mover, or his self-thought thought.

         The apostles' tangible and visible encounter with the divine was something to which they had given witness from the beginning:  “We cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard,” they testified to the Sanhedrin (Acts 4: 20).  It was a way of thinking and learning they gathered from Jesus Himself when, frightened by his post-resurrection appearance to them He said:  “Handle me and see; for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Luke 24: 39).  Handling the flesh-and-bones body of the Logos is hardly a Stoic notion, hardly an idea related to Greek natural theology, and is indeed thoroughly inimical to it.  Similarly, while Aristotle saw what he deemed were physical evidences, or consequences, of the uncaused caused and the unmoved mover, he would have ardently objected to any idea that that cause and that mover could themselves be physically and tangibly encountered, just their effects.  That the Stoic logos might become flesh, or that the uncaused caused and the unmoved mover could do so, was utterly unthinkable to those whose notions they were -- though not to some of today’s Christians, who have kidnapped those pagan ideas and made them serve a purpose for which they are ill-suited and were never intended.

         The tangible, audible, and visible manifestations to which the apostles had access were the sorts of epistemological advantages that Aristotle so highly valued.  He valued the human powers of perception and the deductions made logically from them.  With the world his uncaused cause or unmoved mover allegedly produced, Aristotle had plenty of direct contact.  Of that cause and mover behind the world, he had none, nor could have.  That notion he deemed impossible.  But precisely what was impossible in his system -- direct sensory contact with the divine (and not just with the world Aristotle’s "divine" allegedly made) -- that is what John here and elsewhere so boldly asserts:  Aristotelian and Stoic impossibilities are historical realities.  Christianity begins precisely where philosophical possibilities end.  No bridge can span the gap between a logically impossible human incarnation (Aristotelian and Stoic), on the one hand, and a demonstrably human and historical manifestation (Christian), on the other.  No synthesis between true and false, real and unreal, yes and no, is here possible.  You must pick one or the other.  The impossible is not possible; the true is not false; no is not yes.  They cannot both be made to serve the same affirmation without doing violence either to one concept , or the other, or both.  Nevertheless, what Aristotle himself (and the Stoics themselves) considered impossible has been simply overlooked or overruled by their later Christian adherents, who have removed those limits and ignored those implications whenever it suited them.  They want Aristotle, but they do not want Aristotle.

         According to A. E. Brooke, John’s announcement in these verses “is no new discovery.  The revelation began with creation.  It was continued in the history of the nations and the People, in the work of the Prophets, Psalmists, Legislators.  It culminated in the earthly life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth” (Brooke, p. 1), assertions that Aristotle himself, the very one who knew his own system best, considered impossible.  But what was impossible to Aristotle is affirmed by his later Christian devotees.  That affirmation undermines the integrity both of Aristotle’s teachings and the Bible’s.  Aristotle says that direct, sense-based, contact with the divine is impossible.  The Bible says we’ve had it for centuries.