all its
consequences, necessarily recognised in the Logos the Son of God, the
chosen of God (Luke xxiii. 35), the realised image of God, and then in the
actual Jesus the incarnation or realisation, or rather the universalising
of this image, the Fourth Gospel ascribed to John will become much clearer
to us. Here lies the nucleus of true Christianity, in so far as it deals
with the personality of Christ, and the relation of God to humanity. It is
no longer said that God has made and created the world, but that God has
thought and uttered the world. All existences are thoughts, or
collectively the thought (Logos) of God, and this thought has found its
most perfect expression, its truest word, in a man in Jesus. In this sense
and in no other was Jesus the Son of God and the Word, as the Jews of
Greek culture believed, and as the author of the Fourth Gospel believed,
and as still later the young Athanasius and his contemporaries believed,
and as we must believe if we really wish to be Christians. There is no
other really Christian explanation of the world than that God thought and
uttered it, and that man follows in life and thought the thoughts of God.
We must not forget that all our knowledge and hold of the world are again
nothing but thoughts, which we transform under the law of causality into
objective realities. It was this unswerving dependence on God in thought
and life that made Jesus what he was, and what we should be if we only
tried, viz., children of God. This light or this revelation shines through
here and there even in the Synoptic Gospels, though so often obscured by
the Jewish Messianic ideas.

In the Fourth Gospel the influence of these ideas and their employment by
Jesus and his disciples cannot be mistaken. And why should not Jesus have
adopted and fulfilled the Logos ideas of the Greek world as well as the
Messianic ideas of the Jewish people? Do the Jews as thinkers rank so much
higher than the Greeks? How does the first verse read, which might well
have been said by a Neo-platonic philosopher, "In the beginning was the
Word"? This Word is the Logos, and this Greek word is in itself quite
enough to indicate the Greek origin of the idea. Word (Logos), however,
signified at the same time thought. This creative Word was with God, nay,
God himself was this Word. And all things were made by this Word, that is
to say, in this Word and in all Words God thought the world. Whoever
cannot or will not understand