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For Christians, Christ is the only true access to God. Christ is "God made flesh," God as a human and so subject to death. As such, he represents God's infinite mercy, his promise to humanity that God is within reach. Christ for Augustine is also eternal, perfect wisdom itself, since such wisdom is both the nature of and the access to God. Christ is also referred to as the Word of God, that by which God made all of creation. This idea informs Augustine's reading of the statement in Genesis that "In the beginning was the Word." Since God cannot have anything to do with time, Augustine suggests a reading of "beginning'" as referring to God as the primary cause of existence. His "Word" is read as Christ, the eternal wisdom by which and in which the universe is created (rather than some kind of temporal speech).
