"In the beginning was. . . . Jesus Christ"

"by reading [the] houtos [of Jn 1:2] forward . . . as an anticipatory reference to Jesus of Nazareth . . . Barth is able then to claim that the identity of the one called provisionally the Word in v. 1 is an identity that is only finally disclosed in v. 15.  The concept of the Word appears in v. 1 as a 'placeholder' for the one whose identity is only made clear in v. 15. . . .  [T]he Word is a predicate of Jesus.  Jesus is not the predicate of a Word whose identity is already secure in himself without reference to Jesus.
Barth has thus “close[d] the door firmly on any attempt to find in John 1:1 a wholly abstract conception of the Word and, with that, an equally abstract conception of the Father’s relation to a Son who is not, in himself and as such, Jesus.  For John, there is no eternal Word as such, no eternal Word in himself that is not already defined by his relation to the Jesus who is still to come.  And that means too that the only-begotten Son is already in himself, in pretemporal eternity, Jesus Christ by way of anticipation of the event of the incarnation in time.
     "The Christological subject in [even] John’s Gospel has here been shown to be 'Jesus Christ.'  Jesus is the Word both in eternity (by anticipation) and in time (in concrete realization).  'Preexistence' is a less doubtful concept when speaking of the Johannine Prologue than it was in relation to the Synoptics.  A step [(or 'development' (238))] has been taken by John towards greater clarification.  But it is a step that remains in contact with the solutions provided in the Synoptics and ensures their commensurability with him.  For here, too, it is a human being of whom all these things are said, a human being who is proper to the identity of the eternal God. . . . As a relation already proper to the Son in pretemporal eternity, . . . Jesus Christ is something like 'the hypostatic realization in God of His electing purposes' [(McCormack himself)].  He is the second person of the Trinity.  So even when Jesus prays 'So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in our presence before the world existed,' this ['I'] is not to be understood in terms of a Logos who bears in himself no relation to Jesus but who is now speaking in the voice of the human Jesus as his instrument. . . . No, it is the human Jesus who prays this prayer.  And he can do so meaningfully because he is present by way of anticipation in the electing purposes of God that define him as a 'person' of the Trinity."

     Bruce Lindley McCormack, The humility of the eternal Son:  Reformed kenoticism and the repair of Chalcedon (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 2021), 243-245, underscoring mine.  Not sure yet what I think of this considered as a project of Chalcedonian "repair," I do nonetheless resonate with the specificity with which it rejects the diffusely "cosmic" character of certain Christologies.