An individual can have an awakening overnight, but the consciousness of societies changes very slowly—and the whole human race takes even longer. In the realm of politics after Jesus, it took nearly 2,000 years to get rid of fake divine kings. The incarnation of God did something similar to philosophy, and it’s taking even longer to work itself out.
The Greeks were the finest academic minds of the time; even today, Greek thought is the foundation of Western philosophy. The Greeks observed that despite its constant flux, the material world follows orderly rules. The source of this order couldn’t be in the material world itself, they reasoned, because the material world is constantly decaying. In fact, the source of order couldn’t be on the chain of being at all, since everything on the chain of being—from beach sand to the gods—is subject to time and change. They postulated an underlying order, distinct from everything else that is, which they called the Logos (literally “Word”).
That order was behind, and expressed by, the regularity of the material universe. It was bigger than the world, certainly bigger than any person or god — after all, persons have emotions and change; persons can’t be trusted. By contrast, the Logos was an impersonal, trustworthy order, an unchanging source of certainty.
And then the Apostle John comes and says “The Logos became flesh and lived among us, and we saw His glory.” To the philosophers, that was ridiculous. No mere god could be trusted with the order of the world. And how would that even work? The order of the world certainly could not become flesh.
Ridiculous as it sounds, John says, it’s true all the same: you aren’t floating loose through an impersonal universe, nor are you at the dubious mercy of a character like Zeus. “The Order of the Universe has a name,” John says. “I met Him. He’s nothing like you’d expect.”
If you’ve never read John’s firsthand account of what that was like, you might be surprised. Give it a shot — John’s Gospel is only 16,000 words or so, divided into 21 short chapters. It takes about an hour for an average reader.
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