Christians are still familiar with the doctrine of creation. Creation from Nothing. But the question of why God would create is still one that gets raised time and again. John’s gospel, then, also gives an answer to the question of creation and, in so doing, gives the template for man’s glorious destiny.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” The gospel of St. John is the most poetic of the gospels and contains the highest Christology of the gospel accounts of Jesus Christ. Some scholars see a division of the work in thematic groups—the book of “signs” and the book of “glory.” While not wrong, such obsessive commentary misses the most obvious literary connection between John and the biblical tradition leading up to him: The creation account in Genesis.

The opening of the gospel of St. John deliberately parallels that of the opening of the book of Genesis. Biblical scholar Andreas Kostenberger says there is “canonical link between the first words of the [Hebrew] Scriptures and John’s Gospel.” That canonical link serves two obvious purposes. First is to bridge continuity with the Jewish tradition to Christianity. John’s gospel, the latest of the four gospels, was written in the late first-century A.D.—after the destruction of Jerusalem and the particularity of the Christian community coming into being after that traumatic event. Thus, John’s gospel continues to maintain the Jewish roots of Christianity by paralleling the first book of the Pentateuch. Second is the Christology of John which links Christ, as the Word, with the spoken Word of Genesis and that the light of Genesis 1:3 is paired with the “light of mankind” by John 1:4. This Christological link to Genesis also serves to establish Johannine Christology as the way, truth, and life; the light of mankind needed to live, love, and learn.

This is all well and good, but I would press another issue that is even more obvious and important. Christians are still familiar with the doctrine of creation. Creation from Nothing. But the question of why God would create is still one that gets raised time and again. John’s gospel, then, also gives an answer to the question of creation and, in so doing, gives the template for man’s glorious destiny.

The Christian account of creation, in its fullness, mirrors that of the Trinity. Much like how St. Augustine argued the imago Dei was really an imago Trinitatis (image of the Trinity), so too does one find in Christian tradition a threefold schema of creation which is relevant to John’s gospel and the subsequent incarnation when “the Word was made flesh.” Creatio ex nihilo is widely remembered, perhaps because it is the first of the tripartite understanding of creation. But creatio ex nihilo leads to creatio ex amore Dei (creation from the love of God) which culminates in the imago Dei where the reason for God’s creating, love, are bound together; reason and love are inseparable from each other. As Augustine said, the heart is restless until it unites with God—and until the heart unites with the God, the self is not completed until this union.

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