I believe that John’s Gospel tells us that the Logos descended, and to
it that the Logos returned, thereby making a way of ascent for those who are
from below. (David Bentley Hart, The Light of Tabor: Toward a Monistic
Christology [Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2025], 24)
In the endnote
for the above:
I should note there that I take it as given that it is a mistake to
read scripture or most of the patristic canon presupposing a set of premises
later regarding the relation of eternity to time; most especially, I think it
an error to imagine that many thinkers of the period thought of eternity simply
in terms of the timelessness of God. This may be where, chiefly, Behr and I
diverge in our readings of the record. Behr cites Herberg McCabe approvingly to
the effect that the vert notion of a “pre-incarnate Word” was an invention of nineteenth-century
theological scholarship; and, while I fully grant the solvency of the points McCabe
was making regarding God’s eternity and earthly history, I take this assertion
to be objectively false (Behr, John the Theologian, 19-30). It may well
be that we cannot find the phrase “pre-incarnate Word” anywhere in patristic
literature (22-23), but this strikes me as a perfect example of the absence of
evidence not constituting evidence of absence; quite the opposite, really, as
it would have been a phrase that no one needed to utter, sine it would merely
have stated that everyone regarded as obvious. I honestly do not believe that
any of the church fathers—not even Augustine, however, sophisticated his
metaphysical grasp of time as a creature—entertained an understanding of the
eternal realm from which the Logos descended anywhere near so precise as the
one McCabe presumed. I must respectfully part company with Behr when he
asserts, “It is hard even to understand what ‘pre-existent’ might mean, apart
from the ascription of some kind of timeless eternity to the one so described”
(23). It seems to me that he is speaking from the vantage of today, which
recognizes no intermediate aeonian or aeval interval between God’s eternity and
the flow of time as we know it, occupying the celestial regions above the moon
but below God’s empyrean. IT also seems clear to me that the distinction
between Jesus of Nazareth as the eternal Son of the Father and the Incarnate
Logos as one who existed before becoming human was one never clearly made or,
for that matter, conceived in the patristic era. For the fathers, for instance,
when the divine Son had acted as the subject of the theophanies of the Old
Testament, he had done so as the same agent who would later become
incarnate as Jesus but as yet had not done so; and the before-and-after of that
story, as far as they were concerned, was probably always understood as
belonging not only to the plane of terrestrial history, but also to the
celestial history of that one singular agent. (Ibid., 122-3 n. 3)
