John 1: 1-2
On Beginning the Moral Life With God
A new ongoing and indefinite series: The Gospel of John and the Moral Life.
Preface: On the Dangers of Moralizing Scripture
There was a trend within modern Christian theology which continues to die a slow and agonizing death: making all Scripture have a moral meaning. The roots of this practice can be traced differently. For some, this turn begins somewhere in the 19th century, with the work of Adolf von Harnack, in which church history’s meaning is measured by the contributions it makes to modern moral discourse. For von Harnack, the “essence” of Christianity was the dual command of loving God and loving one’s neighbor, which turn out to be effectively the same thing. For some, this turn is traced earlier to German pietists of the 17th century. For some, this equation of the moral life with theology can be traced further back to the dreaded Duns Scotus’ “univocity of being”, or to the collapse of the multi-valent reading of Scripture practiced by early Christians which was able to say that Scripture could be about both God and the world, without collapsing that difference.
However you want to trace the genealogy of this connection, the move tends to have a similar payoff: what God is—and what it means for us to love God—becomes measured by what most aptly loves one’s neighbor. To utter words about God which do not cash out in the love of neighbor, then, becomes irrelevant at best and heretical at worst. One can arguably read this off the face of the book of James, where James writes “show me your faith without works, and I will show you my faith by my deeds.” The problem is, though, that James uses these terms of God and life in the world as analogies: our life in the world illuminates our worship of that which is not of the world. To forget that God is not creation is to measure God by our best moral intuitions. Not only does this mean that God is subject to our metric of best practices, but that our best practices never have the opportunity to be exploded into something more grand or mysterious.
And yet.
To read Scripture is to ask questions about what this means for our living. To read Scripture is to risk trying to hold this wobbly connection together, neither separating God from the world nor collapsing God into it. On we go.
John 1: 1-2
In the beginning, in the utter void of nothing, there is God. And in that, there is everything. For in the beginning—in the space before space, in the time before time—the Word fills all that there is.
The one who will come into flesh is, from eternity, the speech of God, identical with God, eternal. There is no time we can concieve of when God is not speaking, when the Word is not coming forth from the mouth of the Father, when what we see in Genesis 1 is not happening from all eternity. This is just who God is: this communicating One who communicates who God is, by God.
This Word, who is in the beginning, who eternally is, is the very speech of God. And as such, we see the origins of speech itself: gestures of God in our mouths. The reason that so much weight is given to speech throughout Scripture stems from this: the Word eternally speaks, and so, for creatures1 to speak is to echo their own beginning. For humans, to bless and curse carries weight for they are putting life into motion—our words do things.
All of this is true, but it is also far more than John means for us to take up just yet. For here, John is laying the foundational claim of the Gospel: the One before us, learning to speak words, is the Word made flesh.
There will be time enough for us to reflect on speaking. But that time is not yet. In Christ, we see the speech of God not as discrete syllables to be dissected, but as a person to behold. To attend to the speech of God is not to do as professors of theology are apt to do—to engage in logical parsing—nor as professors of Bible are apt to do—to ask questions about grammar, textual variants, and original manuscripts. To attend to God is to first attend to the person before us who is God’s own speech. There can be no other starting point.
For it is not just that “in the fullness of time” that Christ came: the fullness of time is just what Christ is. For us to ask questions about what it means to live in time must follow from first understanding where time comes from, or what preceded time. And so, we start with God, the origin of our living, who speaks in a way that fills whatever comes next.
To say that the Word was with God in the beginning, then, invites us later speakers to trust as we seek to live well. For we were not there in that time before time, and are eavesdropping in on an eternal conversation, as it were. For us to know how to live well means to always be dependent on hearing what is communicated to us, words none of us authored ourselves. And so, it seems, that trust comes first—faith that what has been given to us is in fact not just good, but all there could ever be need for.
Recall that it is not just humans here who speak in Scripture: serpents tempt, donkeys prophecy, rivers and trees sing praises.