The Names of God and What They Mean

As Calvin argued in his Institutes (Bk. I, Ch. XIII), unless we contemplate God according to His self-revelation, only bare, empty, schematic notions of God will flit about in our brains, to the exclusion of the true God.

Unless we contemplate God according to His self-revelation, we go astray; we go afield.  To avoid that detour, we need to take recourse to those names by which He calls Himself, and to the actions and personality associated with those Divine names -- of which there are many:  Elohim, Yahweh, and Jesus, among them.  With God, there is graphic and startling historical and personal particularity.  He is this, not that; He is Himself, not some other.  He says and does these things, not those, and not nothing.  Aristotle’s god, you recall, is nameless, voiceless, and uninvolved.  It is not the God of the Bible, not Yahweh, not Elohim, and not Jesus.  They can talk, act, and relate; it cannot.

The loss of God’s many names is the loss of God and of reliable windows into His fullness, which those names help provide.  As Biblical theologians, we must beware of the appalling loss of depth and meaning that the word “God” has suffered because in place of His names we employ philosophical taxonomy and methods, which assimilate and reduce God to nature and to the philosophical deductions we draw from it.  These assimilations, reductions, and deductions can be corrected only by the invasion of God’s authentic, articulate, and gracious Godness in all its historical and human particularity in Israel and in Christ.  Only the objective revelation of the Lord God Himself can successfully turn back our penchant to subdue and reduce His divine reality into some form of our humanly-controlled and humanly-generated subjectivity.  By our methodologically illicit subjectivity, He is shrunken to the boundaries of our own alleged intellectual autonomy and its attendant misunderstandings both of God and self.  The sovereign, transcendent, and uncompromised objectivity of God does not permit unregenerate sinners to understand Him apart from His revelation of Himself in his words, works, and names, without which no natural theology can validate itself.  We cannot steal, we cannot fabricate, knowledge of God behind His back.  He gives it or it is never gotten.  God’s character, and therefore His glory, cannot be accurately and reliably abstracted by us from His creatures and His creation.  To do so is to presuppose a functional dualism between God and Himself:  Recall that in Christ and in Scripture God reveals Himself, and not mere information about Himself.  He does so only to the redeemed.  To think that self-deluded sinners can know God on some other basis than God’s self-revealing, that other basis being their own wicked making and doing, is to separate God from the Word, which is Himself, and in its place to conflate God with nature, which is not Him, but merely comes from Him.  The Incarnation means that God Himself enters history in Jesus of Nazareth.  In Him, with Him, and as Him, the Word remains forever.

A partial list of the Divine names in Scripture follows.  It indicates both separately and collectively the multi-layered richness of His character and of His relationships with His people.

         Yahweh [Lord, Jehovah] This is the most commonly used name of God in the Hebrew Scriptures and seems to emphasize His omnipotence as the Supreme Ruler of all things and, as such, was too holy even to utter, a reluctance carried on by some even until today.  “Yahweh” is translated very loosely as "The Existing One,” which suggests that He is to become known and will reveal Himself accordingly.  As the existing One, He is set apart from all the false gods who do not exist outside the minds of those who invented them.

Elohim [God, Judge, Creator] Though the etymological derivation of this plural word is highly controverted, its usage is less so.  It implies the functional sovereignty of God over all things, period.  He made them and they are His.  He can rule over them as He wishes.

Adonai [Lord, Master] Just as “Elohim” is plural, so also is “Adonai” (the singular being “adon,” which normally is used of human leaders or sovereigns, though not exclusively so).  In reference to God, the plural “Adonai” is frequently used, and is sometimes translated as “my lords.”  Sometimes “Adonai” was used as a substitute for “Yahweh.”

El Elyon  [The Most High God] This name expresses the sovereign majesty of God and His unapproachable superiority.

Jehovah Nissi  [The Lord My Banner, The Lord My Miracle] The word “Nissi,” which derives from “Nes,” meaning "banner," recognizes that God is the banner under which the ancient Israelites conquered their enemies.

Jehovah-Rohi: [God is My Shepherd]  As famously articulated in Psalm 23, God is the Shepherd Who feeds, protects, and pastures His flock and each of its members.  As shepherd, God also is our friend, companion, and ally.

El Shaddai [Lord God Almighty, All-Sufficient One] According to some scholars, this name derives from an ancient word for breast and implies that in His mighty power God is also, so to speak, the Great Provider of motherly nurture and nourishment.

Jehovah Rapha:  [God the Healer] As our Great Physician, God restores and heals His people, both inwardly and outwardly.

Jehovah Shammah [The Lord Who is There] This name for God name indicates that He has not and will not abandoned His people.  He is "The God who is There," to quote Francis Schaeffer.  Even if God's people now are in grievous trouble, they will be restored because He is there and has not forsaken them.

Jehovah Tsidkenu [The Lord is Our Righteousness] In the Old Testament, this name indicates that God has spoken to us and has become known as the straight and righteous One, in Whom is no bentness or twistedness.  His character is therefore the measure of righteousness.  For that reason, He also is known as Jehovah Mekoddishkem, the Lord Who makes us Holy, Who sanctifies us and sets us apart for His use, to which He has dedicated us.

Qanna [jealous] God is depicted here as Israel's husband.  He is a jealous God, desiring our praise, allegiance, and affection for Himself.  They are rightly His.

Jehovah Jireh [The Lord Who Provides] Even in our hour of deepest need and most extreme circumstances, and no matter what our plight, God will provide.  Because He is the great and sovereign God, He will supply all our needs, perhaps in ways we do not know and cannot anticipate.  As Lord of the whole world, He is never without sufficient resources.  

Life in the Desert: Theology Today

        Too often when I read contemporary theological books and essays, I am driven to the question:  Is this the theological world?  Are these shallow, trendy, half-informed, anti-theological posers -- who know little, understand less, and yet who speak endlessly -- are they the current state, or even the future, of what Karl Barth rightly described as the happy discipline of theology?   These temporizing amateurs, who are they? 

         In Carlyle’s words, they are “ill-natured weaklings,” “unhappy souls” more ravenously hungry for notoriety than for truth.  “They are not red-blooded men at all,” he said.  “They are things only for writing articles.”  They have yet to learn even the fundamentals of the theological craft, much less the content of Biblically-based thinking.  They are fit only for writing articles that ought not be published, read, or studied, persons fit only for lecturing at conferences that ought not be attended; conferences that merely spawn more conferences of the same sort because conferences, like those who organize and attend them, reproduce after their own kind.  Those organizers and attendees, again in Carlyle’s words, “are more to be pitied than blamed.”  “I do not hate them,” he said, “I would only that stone walls and bars were constantly between us.”  One brief letter from Goethe was worth more to him than all the article mongers in London and Edinburgh could produce in a generation.

         When I look into the books and articles that emerge around me daily, I see there is no soul within them and, if no soul, no theology, at least not theology rightly so-called.  Living souls know God.  Indeed that is the very definition and description of a living soul -- it knows God.  Knowing Him gives life -- is life -- to the soul.  A living soul knows that metaphysical speculation and clever turns of phrase are things very different from the God it knows, loves, and worships.  No one ever did, or ever could, know, love, and worship an uncaused cause, a thought thinking itself, or a mover unmoved.  To the article mongers, the difference between these soul-starving metaphysical abstractions, on the one hand, and the articulate multi-Personal Spirit that spoke the universe into existence, on the other hand, is inconceivable and unwelcome.  They do not want to be reminded that dead souls give rise to dead gods, and that dead gods cannot give life to dead souls.   

         I know firsthand it does no good to point out to them their life-wide and heart-deep lack.  They respond only with bafflement and over-weaning offense.  They do not know what you are talking about, and they are very angry with you for talking about it.   To them, their offense trumps all contrary truth, which they label as hate.  The desert wanderer, craving water, indeed dying of thirst, spits it out in disgust when a cool draught from the very river of life is offered them.   Offer them medicine for their souls and they will wonder who you think you are.  They take it for arrogance, not compassion.

         Would it do any good to print their names here?

         If I thought so, I’d do it.            

The God of the Philosophers

          When a philosopher tells me that an uncaused cause made the world, I encounter several theological problems.  First is the concept the world-whole, which views the world as “a thing,” not as “all things.”  When all things came into existence, it was not “a thing” that was made, but “all things” that were made.   By so speaking and arguing, the philosopher is seeking a singular cause to a singular thing, which might not be the case at all, either with all things or with their making(s).  The Biblical account of creation is not a singular making, but a series of makings that is progressive and in stages -- the makings of several things, not one.  The philosopher’s alleged making of “one thing” (world) is different from the series of makings of Biblical creation.  Further, the “one thing” thus made is finite and to explain the origin of a finite effect requires only a finite cause, which is not the God of the Bible.  Second, when the philosopher mentions “making,” the making alluded to here is a making within a causal nexus, the sort of making with which our cause/effect analysis has normal connection.  Normally, when we talk about making, we talk about making out of pre-existing matter, as when a sculptor makes a statue out of pre-existing granite, employing a hammer and a chisel to do so, or as when a contractor builds a house out of wood, glass, shaped metal, rubber, etc.  When we speak about cause and effect of this sort, we are not speaking about Biblical creation, which does not entail pre-existent matter.  While our cause/effect reasonings and explanations always entail some material cause, Biblical creation does not.  Cause/effect, as we normally employ it, is irrelevant to Biblical creation which is a creating, not a making, and to which our cause/effect explanations (as normally employed, and as the philosopher employs them here) are something very different.  Creation out of nothing is not what we normally mean when we invoke cause and effect, which stand at the root of the philosopher’s argument.  To get philosophically to God creating the world, we must have a cause/effect sequence without a material cause, but we do not.  Our explanations yield no such results, nor can they.  Third, the “cause” thus allegedly reached is not the God of the Bible -- the infinite, articulate, multi-Personal Elohim Who, in His unsearchable plurality-in-unity, spoke the universe into existence.  All we get, if we get anything at all, is a mere finite, inarticulate, impersonal cause.  In short, with the philosophical conclusion that an uncaused cause made the world, I object to the philosopher’s use of the words “cause,” “made,” and “world,” none of which seem properly commensurate with Biblical doctrine and usage.

           To paraphrase Emil Brunner, any god reached by reason is a mere reason-god, which is always an idol.   Unlike the God of the Bible, Aristotle’s god does not speak, love, or feel.  It cannot become flesh, is not multi-Personal, and did not exist before the world.  To Aristotle, remember, the world is eternal.

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.

         

Why Atheists Can Have No Moral Absolutes

"No God, No Good:  Atheism's Futile Quest for Morality, and the Unconscionable Practice of Stolen Concepts"

         One often hears atheists assert that the moral virtues are those virtues without which we humans beings cannot, and do not, flourish because they are rooted in human nature.  One also sometimes hears atheists assert that moral virtues are those virtues that enjoy a consensus that spans culture, country, and century, something like the Tao described at the end of C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man.  That moral values described or derived in either of these two ways are not truly moral values, much less moral absolutes, is the burden of this brief essay.

         First, atheist values determined either by human flourishing or by human nature are not truly right or wrong, not properly moral absolutes; they are pragmatism or utilitarianism masquerading as good and coöpting the language of virtue and of “oughtness,” to which they have no philosophical or (especially) theological claim.

         As the following analysis will demonstrate, one must not contend that human nature and human flourishing yield moral absolutes, properly so-called, because such a theory fails to account for (1) the origin of human nature, (2) changes in human nature, and (3) the selection of “flourishing” as a category of moral discernment.  I shall leave aside the vexed philosophical question of whether or not human nature itself actually exists as an entity in its own right and has objectively knowable and universal characteristics, or if it is merely a philosopher’s fiction without any extra-mental reality.  I simply note in passing that the atheistic theory of morality here under review assumes an answer to this difficult philosophical question that, if mistaken, devastates the atheist theory of morality by erasing its metaphysical basis.

         (1) If, as atheists insist, human nature arose as the chance result of a mindless evolutionary process, a process behind which exists no divine mind and no divine plan, then moral absolutes disappear.  That is, if human nature is the result of evolutionary accident (time, plus matter, plus chance), and if right and wrong arise solely from human nature, then right and wrong are accidents, not moral absolutes.  Biological chance, evolutionary accident, cannot serve as the philosophically proper foundation for right and wrong; it is their undoing.  If human nature and human mind are the unintentional outcome of the chance collocation of atoms and of the mindless and unpredictable meanderings of natural selection (in other words, if the human mind is a mere epiphenomenon contorting and disporting itself for a short while upon the face of physical matter), then we have no convincing reason -- and no metaphysical justification -- for trusting them as indicators of moral goodness; nor have we any real or enduring right and wrong.      

         (2) Had the evolutionary process been different, or had the primordial soup been mixed from a different recipe, so to speak, or stirred at a different temperature, human nature, if it existed at all, might have been noticeably altered, along with the allegedly moral values atheist theory insists arise from it.  Evolution might well have yielded a quite different array of species than it has, and humans might not be the most intelligent species and they might flourish in ways radically different from those that now obtain.  That is, one can easily imagine a set of markedly different biological conditions, a set of conditions that demonstrated the physiological supremacy of a non-human species, one that flourished after the fashion, say, of an intelligent cockroach.  Cockroach-style flourishing would then become the measure of virtue, and not that means of flourishing that we humans sometimes now employ.  In other words, the moral absolutes yielded by the atheist system of thought (biological might makes moral right) are neither truly moral nor truly absolute.   They are simply that set of actions that the biological winners perceive to tend most effectively toward the pleasure and prosperity of their own species, which is, to put it bluntly, simply species bigotry parading as morality.

         To make the point in a different direction, precisely why the actions that conduce to the flourishing of the most intelligent and biologically innovative survivors of natural selection, whatever those survivors happened to be like, should be called morality is not clear and has not been (indeed cannot be) metaphysically justified or properly established.  In other words, what is here propounded by the atheists is not true morality.  It is an intellectual misfire that bases morality on the philosophically injudicious assumption that somehow biological might makes moral right, or that merely by succeeding biologically a species gets to use itself as the measure of good and evil.  This is not a system of moral absolutes; it is a system of biological relativism.  It is selfishness masquerading as the basis for right and wrong.  

         That those actions which conduce to the flourishing of the most biologically innovative survivors of natural selection should be called "moral" merely confuses with right and wrong those actions that seem to the atheists of that species to permit that species to flourish at one particular point in its evolution.  If in the atheistic worldview species evolve, then the species whose flourishing they appoint as the arbiter of morality was sufficiently different in its earlier stages of development from what it is now, and will be likely be sufficiently different in its later stages of development, that those means by which it now flourishes might be significantly different both from what they once were and might eventually become.  We simply do not know.  But whatever those unknown facts were in the past and will be in the future, the atheist must endorse them as moral, however grotesque and wicked they might actually be.  If so, what are now called right and wrong in the atheist view are not moral absolutes, but simply that set of actions perceived to be most efficient at the moment.  What set of actions will be so perceived in the distant future is still an open question, a question that might receive a starkly different answer then than either it now does or previously did, but which the atheist system of thought must nevertheless consider morally correct and universally binding if it is to employ the language of moral absolutes.  In short, to our previous charges of species bigotry and biological relativism we now must add time relativism and moral contradiction -- but not moral absolutes.  The new atheists cannot find metaphysical grounding for their claims to morality.  They cannot talk about how religion ruins everything because the word "ruins" implies a morality not metaphysically available in the atheist worldview.  They can say they do not like what religion does, and that they prefer something else.  But they can raise no truly moral objection.

         To take it a step further, not only does the doctrine of evolution entail the notion that the human species and human nature are essentially mutable, but this natural mutability is amplified by the very startling, and very real, prospect of the species itself orchestrating and accelerating its own evolution and alteration by means of its scientific experimentation and acumen.  Like the natural mutability that precedes it, this self-orchestrated mutability is the death knell of any and all moral absolutes supposedly rooted in human nature.  When we do acquire the power to modify the nature of the race -- and some speculate that our ability to do so is soon to be gotten -- will what we produce still be truly and fully human?  Will right and wrong then be rooted in human nature as it was or in human nature as it is in whatever it is we shall have made of it?  Assuming that the alteration in human nature is accomplished only one person at a time rather than in the entire race all at once, and assuming therefore that two (or more) sorts of persons with a defendable claim to human nature exist simultaneously, which version of human nature supersedes the other and is to be considered the fountain from which all right and wrong arise?  Will those who possess the older human nature be subject to a system of right and wrong that arises from a newer nature not entirely their own?  What if our experiments do not always succeed?  That is, what if the treatment does not always "take;" what if it yields occasionally idiosyncratic results that produce far more than merely two varieties of human nature?  Which variety is normative?  Shall we fall into the logical contradiction of having a number of competing sets of moral absolutes, each with different content?  The answer to these and other questions are still unknown to us.  In the wake of their ignorance, the atheists are flying by faith.  Though the answer to such puzzling questions might be difficult, or even impossible, to identify, and though the answers to such questions might raise insurmountable difficulties for those who advocate this inadequate atheistic system of moral absolutes, the answers given to those questions make no difference at all to my purpose because any answer given them exposes the metaphysical foundation of the atheistic ethical system as shifting sand, not moral bedrock.  Nothing transitory can yield moral absolutes. 

         Furthermore, if humans did not exist at all (and under the direction of a mindless evolutionary process they easily might not), and if right and wrong arise from human nature, then right and wrong would not exist (regardless of whether we considered right and wrong as either moral absolutes or as the biological relativism that emerges from biological success).  In other words, because the atheist theory of ethics ties morality to human nature, the fate of human nature is the fate of morality.  That fate, if the second law of thermodynamics is correct, is oblivion.  The material world is winding down to something like an amorphous, motionless mass of dead matter at a low temperature, incapable of sustaining life.  Along with the demise of the physical universe go all the atheist's alleged moral absolutes, the true name of which we now see is “nihilism.”  In this system, morality, like everything else, comes precisely to nothing.  When human beings cease to exist sometime in the future, as any worldview that leaves out God must assert, right and wrong cease to exist at that same moment.  In short, what is intended by the atheists to be the foundation of morality is really its death warrant.  

         (3) Why flourishing (and not something else) should be the measure of morality cannot be proven, cannot be metaphysically rooted or justified.  To select flourishing as the measure of moral discernment, or to define flourishing as one thing and not another, is merely to elevate both one's own personal preference for flourishing and one's own definition of flourishing (whatever it happened to be) to the level of a moral absolute, which they neither are nor ever could be.  One might just as easily have selected private pleasure at the expense of another's pain as the measure of moral conduct, as might someone like the Marquis de Sade.  One might even prefer death to life, as do virtually all suicides.  That happiness or prosperity, and not death, is the proper content of flourishing cannot be established upon a merely evolutionary basis, except that an atheist simply assert a preference (pragmatic or otherwise) for the one and not the other.  Again, whatever else such private preferences might be, they are not moral absolutes.

         The un-Godded worldview does not, and cannot, yield moral oughtness. It yields only competing sets of preferences to which some atheists unjustifiably try to attach the language of oughtness. Other more astute atheists refuse to make that mistake. On that point those more astute and consistent atheists deserve full credit because they understand that no atheistic explanation of morality has the metaphysical rootedness necessary for moral absolutes. Their worldview precludes it. They know that when other more inconsistent atheists want to hold onto atheism and to avail themselves of the language of oughtness, they fall afoul of what atheist Ayn Rand called the error of stolen concepts: They employ ideas and categories to which their system has no metaphysical access.  Atheists who invoke morality are idea thieves.

         Put differently, it makes all the difference in the world whether we say mind came from matter or matter came from mind. Because ideas have consequences, if you choose the former, you cut yourself off from the consequences that attach solely to the latter. One of those lost consequences is the metaphysical rootedness necessary for moral absolutes, that is, for a morality that rises above the level of mere preference.

         Finally, as much as I value the work of C. S. Lewis, in general, and his The Abolition of Man, in particular, I would be misusing his book were I to argue from it that, because there appears to be substantial agreement among the peoples of the world about the rules of right and wrong, therefore these rules of right and wrong are moral absolutes.  Consensus, regardless of how extensive or how enduring it might be, is no sure measure of morality.  All too often the majority has consented, either explicitly or implicitly, to colossal evil.  Atheist governments have made it happen time and again.  Morality is not determined by nose count (or by power).  "Majority" is no synonym for "morality."

         In a word, if there is no God, there is no good.

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.