It is indeed the most daring, the most challenging, the most affirmative of all the words of scripture, which says: In the beginning was the Logos And the Logos was with God And the Logos was God (John 1: 1) This means that the key to all knowledge, to all understanding of anything that can be learned and, indeed, the meaning of everything that exists is in God, the Logos.

All things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made.

In creation, however, there are also powers of darkness, of disorder, of chaos, of resistance to the Logos. These illogical powers are also mentioned in the same prologue of John’s Gospel: That was the true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.

He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew him not.

Nevertheless, the unique event that expresses the whole content of the Christian claim did occur: The Logos was made flesh, and dwelt among us, And we beheld his glory, the glory as of the Only Begotten of the Father Full of grace and truth.

The synoptic gospels begin their narratives with historical events: the birth of Jesus, his baptism and the beginning of his preaching ministry. In contrast, John starts with a deliberate parallel between the story of creation and that of the new creation in Christ: “In the beginning God created heaven and earth” (Gen. 1:1). “In the beginning was the Logos” (John 1:1).

Our usual modern methodology in studying the New Testament leads us to see in John’s Gospel a theological interpretation of the already existing and basic narrative of the synoptics. Historically, this is undoubtedly true. The liturgical tradition, however, interprets the Gospel of John, as the foundation of the church’s kerygma: in the Orthodox Church, the prologue of John is read during the liturgy of the paschal night and thus begins the cycle of scripture readings for the entire liturgical year. What does that liturgical usage imply? It implies that in the resurrection of Jesus, the empty tomb, the joy of the mysterious encounters between the Risen Lord and his disciples, there is the revelation of the meaning of creation.

The Genesis story itself cannot be understood without the revelation-in Jesus-of what was the real original purpose of God’s creative acts: the new creation, the new humanity, the new cosmos, which are manifested in the resurrection of Jesus, are what God originally intended. As Proverbs says, God “rejoiced when he had completed the world and rejoiced among the children of men” (8:31). But human beings rejected God’s fellowship; their mutual rejoicing was replaced with a proud self-determination of humankind, which could only provoke God’s anger: but here, in Jesus, there is a new beginning, a new joy. And all of this is possible because the new creation comes by the will of the same God and is realized by the same Logos.

Here is, therefore, the first major implication of John’s prologue: Christ, being the Logos, is not only the saviour of individual souls; he does not only reveal a code of ethics, or a true philosophy: he is the saviour and the meaning of all of creation.

Christian theology has found a variety of formulations for the idea that between the Creator and the creatures, there is a relationship closer than that of cause and effect. This is, of course, eminently true of humankind, who have been established as the head and centre of creation.

The Bible speaks first of all of the human being as “image of God.” The New Testament has also a great number of terms signifying the communion that existed between God and humankind at the beginning, which was ruptured by sin and again restored in Christ. The preoccupation of theologians at all times was to maintain the two antinomical affirmations of the Christian revelation.

God is absolutely different from creation; God is transcendent, the “only one who truly exists”; unknowable in essence; adequately qualified in negative terms only, inasmuch as all positive affirmations of human mind concern the things created by God: as compared to these creations, God can only be the other;

God is present in his creatures; can be seen through them; God also “came into his own,” “became flesh” and, in the unique person of Christ occurred a union of humanity and divinity so close, so inseparable, that it can even be said that the Lord of glory was crucified (see I Cor or. 2:8).

The antinomy of transcendence and immanence must be maintained in Christian theology if one is to avoid pantheism on one side and the transformation of God into a philosophical abstraction on the other.

The theology of the divine Logos in its relation to the many logoi of creation, the “seeds” that provide a divine basis for everything that exists by the will of God, is the model most frequently used by the fathers to express the relationship between God and creation. The fact that this theology is already that of John’s prologue to his Gospel and that it was familiar to the intellectual worldview of Greek philosophy as well, made it a convenient means of communication between the church and the world: this communication, however, had also to express the absolute uniqueness of the God of the Bible, the personal Creator and the personal Saviour of the world.

No philosophy, except for Christianity, has ever identified the Logos as the very person of God, whose relation to creatures is to be defined in terms of his will for them to exist not only outside of himself, but in a sense in himself also, as objects in whose existence he is personally involved. God indeed is not only the Creator of the world, but he also “so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, so that those who believe in him may have everlasting life.

Therefore, the Word of God, which created the universe, is not simply a prime mover or an abstract cause. Things were created not only by him, but in him (Col. 1:16). He was before they came into existence, and their existence possess spiritual roots in him. This is how the great Maximus the Confessor visualizes not only the unique transcendent Logos of God, but also the logoi of individual creatures, who depend on him and pre-exist in him: We believe that the logos of the angels preceeded their creation; (we believe) that the logos of each essence and of each power which constitute the world above, the logos of men, the logos of all that to which God gave being - and it is impossible to enumerate all things - is unspeakable and incomprehensible in its infinite transcendence, being greater than any creature and any created distinction and difference; but this same Logos is manifested and multiplied in a way suitable to the Good, in all the beings who come from him according to the analogy of each, and recapitulates all things in himself.

It is not possible for us here to develop further a theology of the incarnation, but I wish to emphasize only one point, which is directly related to our theme, “Christ as Logos.”

If the divine Logos becomes flesh, there is no more and can never be an incompatibility between divinity and humanity. They cease to be mutually exclusive. For us Christians God is not only in heaven, he is in the flesh: He is with us first because he is the Logos and model of creation, and second because he became man. In Christ, we see God as the perfect man. Our God is not “somewhere” in heaven. People have seen him, we see him - in Jesus of Nazareth.

More so, the Logos, as divine person, must be seen as the personal centre of Christ’s human activity. The Nicean Creed teaches us that the Son of God, consubstantial with the Father, “was born, suffered...was buried.” He is the subject of these very human experiences of Jesus Christ. Therefore, he also shares our human experiences. The Logos is personally the subject of the death that took place at Golgotha, and it is precisely because it was the death of the Logos incarnate not only the death of a human individual that it leads to the resurrection. He is therefore with us at the hour of our death, and wills to lead us to life (if we will it also).

In the incarnation of the Logos, God did not only speak; he did not only forgive: He loved and shared every human experience, excluding only sin, but including death and ultimate suffering. In the beginning “without him was not anything made that was made.” And now, in his second and new creation, he left nothing that had been created, outside of himself, not even death, as fallen man’s condition, which now -if we believe in Christ- can become for us “a blessed repose” and not anymore a tragedy.

“God became man,” Athanasius said, not to disappear as God, but “so that man may become God.” The Christian gospel, the “good news” consists in that, and only in that.

The theology of the word of God, as Logos, especially in the light of the incarnation, has major practical implications in terms of the Christian mission and the life of the Christian church. If the Logos is the Creator, the meaning and the model of the entire creation, his body, the church, necessarily assumes a co-responsibility, one can also say of co-creativity, in the world as a whole.

This is indeed the essential expression of the church’s catholicity, its involvement in the wholeness of creation, because the Creator himself is its head.