The Unfolding of Truth – 4: Christian Revelation – Creation, Logos, and the Problem of Time

With the advent of Christianity, a new voice enters the unfolding of thought, one that speaks not only of the eternal, but of a personal God who creates out of love, enters into history, and redeems. The metaphysical speculation of the Greeks meets the narrative structure of Scripture. Logos becomes flesh. Eternity touches time.

At first glance, the Christian vision seems to deepen what came before. The Logos, described in the Gospel of John, recalls the Platonic Nous and Stoic Reason, a divine principle of order, intelligence, and life. “Through him all things were made, and without him nothing was made that has been made.” This is no mere metaphor. Christ is the Logos, the structure of all things, the light that illumines every being.

And yet, alongside this profound continuity, there emerges a radical new element: creation from nothing (creatio ex nihilo). Unlike Plato’s demiurge or Plotinus’s emanation, God does not shape preexistent matter or unfold Himself into the world. He wills it. Freely. Out of nothing. The world is not necessary; it is a gift. And that gift unfolds in time.

This marks a decisive turn. Time is no longer a lesser shadow of eternity, but the very medium of divine action. History becomes meaningful. God acts, speaks, intervenes. The incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ are not symbolic gestures; they are events, located in time, yet bearing eternal significance.

Here, then, we face a profound tension.

Christian thought affirms that God is eternal, unchanging, outside of time. And yet, He acts in time. He creates a world that did not exist, enters into it, and transforms it. This implies a kind of becoming; not in God, but in the world. And it raises a question: how can the eternal relate to the temporal without contradiction?

Early theologians struggled with this. Augustine saw time as a distention of the soul, a kind of unfolding of attention, and emphasized God’s timeless presence to all moments. Others, like Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor, sought to preserve both the integrity of time and its ultimate transfiguration. In Christ, time is healed. In the resurrection, it is fulfilled.

But the contradiction persists. If God created the world out of nothing, then the world once was not. If beings once were not, then they are not eternal. And if they are not eternal, can they be truly real?

Christian metaphysics, especially in its Western form, affirms the radical dependence of all things on God. But this dependence, understood as contingency, often implies that beings are not necessary. That they could be otherwise. That they might not have been. This introduces the specter of nothingness; not only as absence, but as a real possibility. And this nothingness begins to haunt Western thought, growing stronger with the rise of voluntarism, nominalism, and the modern will-to-power.

Still, Christianity preserves an essential truth: that all things are created in love, that they are good, and that they are not accidents, but desired. The Logos is not a cold principle; it is a Person. The world is not illusion; it is beloved. The problem is not in the affirmation of creation, but in the lurking assumption that creation implies contingency, and that contingency implies nothingness.

That is the contradiction yet to be resolved.

Christianity introduces the vision of a cosmos created not from within Being, but from outside of it. This opens the possibility of grace, of freedom, of gift, but also the shadow of nihilism. How can what once was nothing now be eternal? How can becoming coexist with Being without undermining it?

The next steps in thought, whether in Neoplatonism, Islamic philosophy, or Christian mysticism, will attempt to navigate this tension. Some will emphasize the return to unity. Others will radicalize the personal. But all will grapple with the same rift: the relationship between time and eternity, between what is and what seems to become.

And the resolution still waits.