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Dear Father Angelo,

While reading the book “Faith and Theology” by Yves Congar, a very beautiful book of intense doctrinal depth, I came across a sentence that sounded more or less like this: “God is not the word”. That surprised me quite a bit, since I compared that quotation with John’s prologue which says: “The Word was God”. Now, I know that the word “Logos” has many meanings, including “thought”, “wisdom”, “word”, “communication”… and that the meaning of “Word” can be considered both in the hypostatic aspect, that is, Christ, and in that of “communication” of God’s truths, that is, Revelation.

Could you please clarify this point to me?

Thank you for your answer and for the splendid service you are doing for the benefit of the Church and of the people of God.

Warmly,

Lorenzo

Answer from the priest

Dear Lorenzo,

1. regardless of what Father Congar said, the problem is easily solved by making a distinction between the uncreated Word and the created word.

The uncreated Word is God himself; that is the Word that St. John speaks of at the beginning of his Gospel.

The created word is the word that God has spoken in communicating himself to mankind, by making use of human words.

Among those words are also the words of Jesus.

2. Therefore, when God says to Abraham: “Go forth from the land of your kinsfolk and from your father’s house to a land that I will show you” (Gen 12:1), we are faced with a word spoken by God.

However, it is a word created specifically to be heard by Abraham.

It is a word spoken within time. It is not the eternal, uncreated Word.

3. The uncreated Word is the very thought of God, called Logos in Greek and Verbum in Latin.

That Word is not articulated like a human word that is expressed through many letters and syllables. It is the very thought of God, who grasps the abyss of his own divinity and all created realities in a single instant without reasoning, as we instead do.

4. Having made this premise, I quote the text from Father Congar:

“The expression ‘word of God’ can have two meanings above all:

the first one, that of the uncreated Word, that is, the act of God who speaks, an act that is God himself, his Word;

the second one, that of a created reality, onto which God by his own initiative and responsibility decides to bestow the value of a sign or a manifestation of himself and his thought.

That can happen in a formal and specific way when God makes the word of a man his own (a prophet, a hagiographer, an apostle, first and foremost that of Jesus of Nazareth) and takes the initiative and responsibility to make it an expression of his thought:

both at the moment in which he utters such a word: the prophetic, apostolic word, indeed sometimes, when God wants it and he himself comes to speak to us, the preaching of the ministers of the Word; but also, in a trusted way, since it is based on the covenant, in the case of the judgment given by the ecclesiastical magisterium that specifies the meaning of the apostolic and prophetic word.

And in the written testimonies of the preaching of the prophets and apostles: through the charism of scriptural inspiration.

The Holy Scriptures represent those signs of God, of his thought and his will.

They are not in themselves the word of God in the form of an act of God, but of an effect created by that act; as we will see, our faith does not have the Holy Scriptures as its end, as if they were its constitutional reason: faith has God himself as its end, who manifests himself through such signs” (Faith and Theology, p.13).

5. I agree with you on the judgment you gave on Yves Congar’s book: it is simply a precious work.

In it we discover the same clarity, depth, and persuasive force in the argumentation of his common brother St. Thomas.

I bless you, I remember you in prayer and I wish you a happy continuation of the present Christmas holidays.

Father Angelo