God in the flesh

Unitarians labor to challenge the standard interpretation of John's Prologue. They offer different, conflicting interpretations. In light of that I'll sketch how I read it. A few preliminary points:

1. Because this is such a familiar text, it's easy to miss details. We're so used to it that it bounces right off of us. So we should try to read it as if we're encountering this text for the very first time. 

2. Likewise, we should try to read it through Jewish eyes. How would it strike a 1C Jewish reader who's not a Christian? 

3. Some commentaries filter it through a Wisdom Christology. There are several problems with that approach:

i) Nowhere in John's Gospel or 1 John is wisdom terminology used. 

ii) The personification of wisdom occurs in a conspicuously allegorical context (e.g. Prov 8), whereas the prologue belongs to a different genre–historical narrative.

iii) When personified, wisdom is feminine. Lady Wisdom or God's daughter. That's incongruous for a male figure.

iv) Scholars who take this approach quickly shift from the unmistakable Genesis background to a speculative Wisdom background. The postulated Wisdom Christology then bears the primary weight of interpretation. That becomes an exercise in misdirection. I agree with scholars like Ridderbos and Bauckham that a Wisdom paradigm is the wrong frame of reference. 

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 

1. As it stands, the narrator says there were two Gods: a Logos God and a non-Logos God. 

Unitarians accuse Trinitarians of commencing with an extraneous Trinitarian grid which they impose on a unitarian text. Ironically, the reality is precisely the opposite. Trinitarians come to a text that's explicitly binitarian rather than unitarian. The narrator has worded the opening statement in a way that looks downright polytheistic. The challenge for Trinitarians at this point isn't to derive divine plurality from a unitarian text, but to harmonize a binitarian text with monotheistic statements in Scripture. And that's more an exercise in philosophical theology than exegetical theology. The raw data in this text is binitarian. And not just in 1:1, but repeated in 1:18. (The Spirit of God makes his appearance later in the narrative to round out the Trinitarian configuration.)

2. As becomes apparent in the subsequent narrative, the Logos God is the Son while the non-Logos God is the Father. So in principle, the narrator could have written:

In the beginning was the Son, and the Son was with the Father, and the Son was God. 

Why didn't the narrator express himself that way?

i) By initially avoiding Father/Son terminology, he is able to used "God" twice to designate two different individuals. 

ii) He wishes to identify the Son as the Creator in the Genesis account. He uses several motifs to clue the reader into the Genesis background: "In the beginning," creation by divine speech, light/darkness, life.

Here's the Messiah's backstory, so that when he arrives on the scene in the 1C, the reader will be able to connect the 1C figure with a preexistent figure in a new phase. Both continuity and discontinuity. Something new and something eternal.  

2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. 

The Son/Logos stands in contrast to creation. The Son cannot be a part of creation, cannot be a creature, because all things were made by him (or "through" him, if you prefer).

4 In him was life, and the life was the light of men. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

i) The Son has several designations: Word, life, light. The Logos isn't a different individual from the Son, any more than the Son, Logos, light, and life represent four different individuals. Rather, these are all designations for one and the same individual. 

ii) Life is in the Son because the Son is the source of life, the creator of life. That's both backward and forward looking. It hearkens back to the Son as the original Creator of life, while it looks forward to the Son as the agent of the general resurrection. Future life. Eternal life. 

iii) By parity of argument, just as the Son is the life-giver, the Son is the light-giver. Light in the sense of its Creator or source. In Genesis that's literal, but here it's a spiritual metaphor. 

6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7 He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. 8 He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light.

Considered in isolation, that's abrupt and puzzling. How can the Baptist be an eyewitness to the God of Genesis? He wasn't present at the creation. 

For that matter, God exists apart from the world. He couldn't make the world in the first place unless he's separate from what he makes. So this statement leaves the reader in quizzical suspense. 

10 He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. 

Here's the answer: something happened between Genesis and the Baptist's timeframe. In some as of yet unexplained way, God is now in the world he made. And in some as of yet unexplained way, he's visibly present, so that he can be the object of eyewitness testimony. But that answer is puzzling. That answer raises additional questions, once again leaving the reader in a state of quizzical suspense. When did this happen? How did this happen?

14 And the Word became flesh 

Here's the answer. The Creator has come in the flesh (cf. 1 Jn 4:2; 2 Jn 7). In standard biblical usage, "flesh" is an idiom for human beings, with connotations of mortality and vulnerability. This includes the physical component, but covers the totality of what it means to be human. 

and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. 

i) The sudden shift from third person to first person narration means the narrator now identifies himself, along with the Baptist, and the other disciples, as an eyewitness to the Incarnate Son (cf. 15:27; 1 Jn 1:1-4). He briefly drops the detached convention of a third-person viewpoint to step into the very history he relates, thereby alerting the reader to his qualifications as a firsthand observer. 

ii) The narrator employs the imagery of the Shekinah, temple, and tabernacle (e.g. Exodus, Ezekiel) to describe the Incarnation. Consider how jolting it would be to a Jewish reader to say that when you see Jesus, you see the very glory of God. That's pretty blasphemous–unless Jesus is divine. 

iii) This isn't "sight" in the figurative sense (the "eye of faith"). For even the enemies of Christ witness his glory (e.g. 12:37-41).

18 No one has ever seen God; the one and only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known.

Once again, the narrator has worded his description in terms of two Gods. The invisible God is the Father while the visible God is the Son ("the one and only God"). 

This involves a like reveals like principle. The more alike two things are, the more mutually revelatory they are. 

Unitarians accuse Trinitarians of tritheism. But even assuming that Trinitarian theology has a polytheistic appearance, there's no reason for Trinitarians to be defensive about that since Bible writers sometimes use the language of divine plurality. That's no less inspired, no less normative, than monotheistic passages. So both must be respected and kept in balance. The pluralistic statements can't be collapsed into the monotheistic statements. 

How we harmonize both data sets poses a philosophical challenge, and there are many partial analogies. But if we take God's self-revelation seriously, we can't harmonize it by trimming some statements to artificially fit with other statements. A faithful harmonization will be fuller than either rather than reductive.