John's Christ

"John's designation of Christ as the Logos points to the fact that the evangelist envisions him as fulfilling the role of cosmic reason, in the Greeks' and in Philo's sense as that which grants all things their intelligibility. The subsequent events of the Gospel reveal, however, that John does not seek to demonstrate this by projecting the life of Jesus onto the level of Greek wisdom (or vice versa), but rather allows the incarnate Logos to interpret himself. The Logos reveals himself as 'gracious love' (karis), and thereby as 'glory' (the 'divinely beautiful', doxa), and precisely for this reason as the 'truth' (alethias). It therefore becomes possible to arrive at an intelligibility that illuminates the pure facticity of the historical as a necessity, and at the same time an intelligibility that cannot be reduced to that which the human being demands or (for whatever reason) anticipates."

~ Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible (Ignatius Press, 2004), 54-5.