Joining the Eternal Conversation
John’s Prologue & the Language of Worship
by Robert W. Jenson
To allay some possible misgivings, let me say at the beginning: This essay will not be concerned with the old gender-feminist assault on liturgical language. Substitution of modalist or simply pagan formulas for “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” playing about with syntactically impossible pronominal neologisms, the gabble of “God . . . God . . . God . . .” and all that like, have been refuted enough times and enough ways. And indeed, their refutation is almost trivial. Moreover, except in church bureaucracies and seminaries the constituency for gender-feminist tinkering with language is retiring or departing with its promoters. That is not to say that in large tracts of what may or may not still be Church, the damage has not already been done, or that more is not still to come. But there is little that can be done about that in articles or books; the bureaucrats don’t read such things, and the various “theorists” in faculties only read each other.
But the uproar does perhaps serve one purpose: It draws our attention to the question of what sort of language is appropriate for Christian worship. It is a fundamental consideration of that question that I will attempt here.
Eternal Utterance
I find the warrant and indeed an outline of such an attempt in the prologue of John’s Gospel. There we learn, at the beginning of the whole tale, that the biblical God has eternally a word to say, a word that as God’s eternal Word must conversely be God.
The text presents no indication that we are to take its use of “word,” logos, in any attenuated sense. John does not say that God has and is something rather like a word, or that it is as if a word were God. John’s proposition is about as straightforward as could be, and appears in a decidedly pedagogic if strophic diction. Moreover and decisively, John 1:1–3 is a piece of Christological biblical exegesis, of Genesis 1, where God calls the world forth by formulated utterance. If I may cite Martin Luther, “Moses uses the term amar, which straightforwardly means the spoken word. . . . By a mere word that he speaks God makes the heavens and the earth from nothing.” And this, of course, tells us in turn how to read John’s exegesis of Genesis: The word that is “in the divine being,” says Luther, is “an uttered word by which something is . . . enjoined” (WA 42, 13:13–15). The Word that eternally is with God and so is God, is discourse, utterance.
We should not interpret logos in John 1 as if the evangelist were exegeting Socrates or Plotinus rather than the Priestly document. Reading logos in John 1 as “concept” has been a very creative misreading, going back to the Fathers themselves. We rightly marvel at the theologoumena that have resulted from it, and should indeed gladly appropriate them, for they have their own justification. But we should not allow that to rob us of the yet more important teaching that the text itself proposes. It is not a concept that is eternally with God, according to John, it is God’s utterance that is thus with him. And for our topic that is the decisive point.
The import of John’s doctrine for worship may perhaps be evoked in a preliminary way by noting a particularly lamentable hymn, familiar—I am sure—to many of us. John Greenleaf Whittier wrote meltingly of “the silence of eternity,” which is then interpreted for us by something called love. But in the triune God, the God of John’s prologue, there is no such thing as the silence of eternity. What is eternal is not silence, but discourse. Ignatius of Antioch propounded the magnificent theologoumenon that the Word “breaks God’s silence.” Two centuries of reflection, on questions that perhaps never occurred to Ignatius, made it dogma: This does not mean that God in himself is silent and then happens to speak, but rather that precisely the breaking of silence is eternally constitutive of God’s triune life.
This biblical and dogmatic notion of an intrinsically talkative God is, of course, an offense to usual religion. For by speech persons become involved with one another, they become mutually invested and historical, and it is precisely escape from mutual investment and history that human religiosity seeks in the various divinities it posits. The biblical God provides no such escape.
The triune God’s very life is mutual investment; in the classical formulation, a triune identity simply is a subsisting relation to the other triune identities. And whether you are willing to speak of the divine identities’ perichoresis as divine “history” or not is, I think, mostly a matter of conceptual taste. This God’s salvation, the “deification” to which he draws us, is not a vanishing into the sea of abstract perfection but our total inclusion in the life of the three identities, and that is to say, given John’s teaching, in their living discourse.
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