Word or deed? The question that Goethe's Faust is faced with when translating the Johannes prologue concerns theology at a crucial point. Where does it find its all-determining condition? What is their cause in the past and present? The Kirchliche Hochschule Wuppertal, which has chosen the first sentence of the Gospel of John as its motto, is not only turning to its own beginnings in the time of the church struggle with this book. Rather, the intention is to visualize the original power of Christianity in the horizon of the problems of our time.