THE LOGOS CONCEPT
A Critical Monograph on John
1: 1
Abridged by the
Author
EDGAR J.
LOVELADY
Winona
Lake, Indiana
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
Word was God."
The
title Logos was the chief theological term descriptive of Jesus Christ of
Nazareth, which was applied in the full-flowered Christology of the ancient
church, being in a very distinct sense the basic content and starting-point of
the doctrine of Christ. And yet Biblically this title is found only in the Johannine group of New Testament writings; here in John 1:
1, in I John 1: 1, and
in Revelation 19: 13. Since John presents Christ as Logos
introductory to his Gospel, he reveals that this title is convenient and, more
than that, absolutely essential to a proper understanding of the relationship
between the pre-existent Son of God and the historically-manifested divine
revelation in the human life of Jesus. With stately simplicity John introduces
the Lord Jesus Christ
out of the eternal ages, representing Him not only as the focal point
of history, but also as the expansion of history in relation to creation,
preservation, and revelation in the world.
Picture yourself as a Jewish Christian familiar with the Book of
Beginnings in the Septuagint" version. It begins, enarche, just as in
the opening words of John's Gospel. This would suggest John's acquaintance with
the Old Testament in Greek, as well as a conscious effort on his part, by
inspiration, to take this appropriate and stimulating concept and use it to
give a new genesis account, now laid bare in conformity with the One Who
manifested revelation in its several forms. This leads us to several very
important questions: What did John mean when he applied this title to Christ?
(And he clearly did so, as in John 1: 14-18.) And since the idea of the Logos
was a widespread concept in the ancient world, whence was the origin of this
well-known linguistic expression, and what of its
function in earlier usage?
Therefore
it will be our task to trace the Logos concept in most of its forms in its
historical development; then to ascertain the extent and the effects of this
concept in its several distinct areas upon John's identification of the Logos;
and finally, to seek to arrive at various distinctions and syntheses relative
to the problem. Once this has been accomplished, a brief exegesis of the verse
itself will be undertaken, on the basis of the familiar structural analysis.
VARIOUS
INTERPRETATIONS OF THE JOHANNINE SOURCE
1. The Philosophical Logos Concept.
The Hellenic concept of the Logos was a doctrine of the Logos as the Divine
Reason: the Logos was the rational principle or impersonal energy
which was responsible for the founding and organization of the world. Thus the
Logos was an abstraction, not an hypostasis (a
transliteration of the Greek hupostasis,
"substance," hereafter denoting a real personal subsistence or
person).
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2. The Pagan Gnostic Concept. This
view, held by Bultmann, is that the Logos was a
"mythological intermediary being" between God and man. Here is an
approach to the Docetic heresy in that this
intermediary being at one time even became man, and saved the world by saving
himself.
3. The
Hebrew “Word” Source" Source.
This is the view that the theological usage of the term Logos is derived
directly either from the true Old Testament concept of the debhar
Jahweh, or the Palestinian Aramaic Memra, in which the outward dynamic expression of
the Word was the chief feature. Of course, we must distinguish between inspired
and uninspired literature, but in both cases the same descriptive term
"Word" was used as active, instrumental, creative, personal, and
revelatory in function.
4. The Philonian Source. In short,
Philo's system provided that since God was so far above the realm of creation,
His contact with the world could only have been through the medium of intermediate
powers, which, for Philo, became personalized when he replaced the Platonic
term “Ideas” with the Old Testament term "the Word of God," using
Logos as the Greek equivalent of that Scriptural form.
5. The “Special Guidance of the Spirit”
View. Here is an opinion which holds
that it is useless to inquire as to the origin of this idea in the mind of John;
we really have little to do with the origin of the term; for if we believe that
John was one of those men who had the special guidance of the Spirit, then the
term Logos is applied to Christ by God Himself, and it becomes us only to
inquire why it is so applied to Him.
6. The Hebrew “Wisdom” Source. J. Rendel Harris takes the prologue of John directly back to
the Wisdom references in Old Testament literature. It is asserted that there is
a connection between the Logos and the Sophia which makes them practically
interchangeable. Proverbs 8:22-23 sets the stage for this linkage, going on to
elaborate on the activity of this "Wisdom," which is parallel in
several ways to the Old Testament concept of the creative Word, becoming in
later Judaism an intermediary personification, a Divine hypostasis.
THE HISTORICO-LINGUISTIC BACKGROUND
Since
the Idea of the Logos was a concept of widespread usage in oriental-Semitic and
Greek literature both before and contemporaneous with Christianity, it is not
only profitable, but essential for us to examine some of the actual material
which presents the various facets of the Logos concept. Of course, the very
archaic forms must be treated as ultimate sources which hark back to revelation
at creation, which have become corrupted due to the depravity of human nature,
but which also have survived in one form or another, finally arriving at the
true, though perhaps incomplete doctrine of the Creative Word in the Old
Testament, and at last, the perfect realization of this doctrine in the
identification made by John: "In the beginning was the Word."
Some of the earliest historical notices that we have come from
THE
LOGOS CONCEPT 17
creative activity was predominant in fashioning the gods and the elements
of heaven and earth according to divine thought and the sacred oracle. Atum, or Ptah, or Thoth
(according to historical period and geographical location) became the
"heart and tongue" of the council of the gods, and the utterance of
the thought in the form of a divine fiat brought forth the world. From the
Memphite theology comes this illustrative text:
Ptab
the Great, that is, the heart and tongue of the Ennead; [Ptah]
...who gave birth to
gods;. ..There came into being as the heart
and there came into being as the tongue (something) in the form of Atum. The mighty Great One is Ptah,
who transmitted [life] to all gods, as well as (to) their ka's through this
heart, by which Horus became Ptab, and through this tongue, by which Thoth
became Ptab.. .And so Ptab was satisfied (or, "rested"), after he had
made everything, as well as all the divine order.1
Quite naturally, creation stories such as this one offer divergences due to locality and
time-sequence, but the patterns and results are practically the same
throughout, although the methodological symbolisms tend to vary.
This
concept is more forcefully presented in Sumero-Babylonian
thought in the form of poetry which represented the word of the god as a
powerful, dynamic figure, the extension of the divine energy in the realm of
creation and earthly affairs. All that the creating deity had to do was to lay
his plans, utter the word, and pronounce the name.2 An Akkadian hymn to the moon-god Sin portrays the dynamistic
aspect of this concept in
Thou!
When thy word is pronounced in heaven the
Igigi
prostrate themselves.
Thou!
When thy word is pronounced on earth the
Anunnaki kiss the ground.
Thou!
When thy word drifts along in heaven like
the
wind it makes rich the feeding and
drinking of the land.
Thou!
When thy word settles down on the earth
green
vegetation is produced.
Thou!
Thy word makes fat the sheepfold and stall;
it
makes living creatures widespread.
Thou!
Thy word causes truth and justice to be,
so
that the people speak the truth.
Thou!
Thy word which is far away in heaven, which
is
hidden in the earth is something no one sees.
Thou!
Who can comprehend thy word, who can equal it?3
Even
apart from such poetic representations, the Sumerian and Akkadian
terms Enem and awatu
linguistic evidence of the dynamistic association of the "word."4
The foregoing factors support our thesis that these ancient peoples conceived
of the divine word under the image of physical-cosmic power, in which the voice
of the god acts separately and distinctly as an entity possessing power. We
take this as a strong indication that the "word" concept is basically
of Near Eastern origin, an oriental development long before the Greeks launched
into their more lauded speculations.
Quite naturally, these pagan references
indicate their own degeneration, since they
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exhibit a vast difference from the Biblical usage, as will be shown presently.
Our position on matters of common expression in the ancient Near East is that
in the Biblical account the concept is preserved from error, a factor which
does not militate against the statements of truth found in profane sources, but
which does account for the differences.
In
the Canaanite literature discovered at the ancient site of
When
Baal gives forth his holy voice,
When
Baal keeps discharging the utterance of his lips,
his holy voice shakes the earth,
...the
mountains quake,
a-quiver are...east and
west,
the high places of the earth rock.6
The significance of this usage is the poetic
representation given to the voice and speech of Baal in the active fury of the
re-instituted thunderstorm, showing the conceptual relationship, mythologically interpreted, between the emanation of Baal's
voice and the active forces in nature. The word of Baal is not clearly
hypostatized as a distinct conceptual being having personal existence, but this
usage does show the concept of the divine word as more than mere conversation;
it indicates a tendency of the Oriental mind to conceive of God's relation to
the forces and personages of this world as being mediated through the almighty
word of his voice.
The
Hellenic doctrine of the Logos has been influential in both philosophical and
Christian thought, for it deals with an attempt to explain and comprehend God's
relation to the world, actually the basis of all religio-philosophical
speculation. And speculation it was, for the Hellenic impartiality in combining
a strong sense of reality with an equally strong power of abstraction enabled
these Greeks at an early date to recognize their religious ideas for what they
actually were: creations of artistic imagination. Thereby they set a world of
ideas in place of a mythological world, a world built up by the strength of
independent human thought, the Logos, which could claim to explain reality in a
natural way. For Heraclitus, Logos meant a law, an impersonal law of change.7
To Anaxagoras Logos was Mind, an impersonal moving principle.8 Plato
conceived
the Logos as the intermediate Demiurge which God had to form matter
from perfect Ideas.9 For the Stoics, the intelligible structure of
the universe was the Logos: active, creative world-reason, unfolding the divine
plan in world processes by myriad forms and laws which give individual divine
manifestation to individual objects and their activities. This pantheistic
concept can be eminently seen in Cleanthes' Hymn to Zeus:
For
that we are Thine offspring; nay, all that in
myriad motion
Lives
for its day on the earth bears one impress--
thy
likeness--upon it. ..
Aye,
for thy conquering hands have a servant of
living fire--
THE LOGOS CONCEPT 19
Sharp is the bolt!--where it falls, Nature shrinks
at
the shock and doth shudder.
Thus thou directest the Word universal
that pulses
through all things...10
Thus in Greek thought there was no
personal transcendent God like the God of the Old Testament, much less that of
the personalized Logos of the Gospel of John. And the volatile usage of the
word logos by the Hellenes does not significantly indicate a dynamistic conception
so characteristic of Semitic literature.
The
Old Testament is an ancient book of Near Eastern geographical origin, and in this sense contains various common
conceptions found generally in "the
Yahweh was personal, transcendent, and
moral from the very beginning of Hebrew history; hence the debhar Yahweh is the function of a
conscious, moral personality. In profane Semitic literature the "word' of
the god was a material, physical principle, while in the Old Testament the Word
exists in the actuating expression of the transcendent God. This can be seen in
at least four aspects in the Old Testament: (1) the Creative (Psa. 33:6; 104:7;
148: 1-5); (2) the Mediatorial-Preservative (Psa.
107:20; 147:15-18; 148:6,8); (3) the Judicial (Hos.
6:5; Isa. 11:4); and, (4) the Prophetic (Isa. 9:8; Jer. 33: 14). The two
strongest passages which support an independent personification of the Word as
divine creative activity are Psalm 33:6; "By the word of Jehovah were the
heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth"
(A.S.V.), and Isaiah 55:10,11: "For as the rain cometh down and the snow
from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it
bring forth and bud, and giveth seed to the eater; so
shall my word
be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it
shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and
it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it." (A.S.
V.)
From
the uninspired literature largely dating from the Inter-Testamental
period we are able to discern a departure from the Old Testament terminology
surrounding the Word. In the canonical writings it was "the Word of
God," while in these it is simply "the Word," perhaps the result
of yielding to extra-Jewish pressures in a world that was rapidly becoming cosmopolitanized. The "Word" is remarkably
hypostatized in the Wisdom.of Solomon
18: 15, 16:
Thine
all-powerful word leaped from heaven out of
the
royal throne,
A stern warrior, into the midst of the doomed land,
Bearing as a sharp sword thine unfeigned
commandment;
And standing it filled all things with death;
And while it touched heaven it trode upon the earth.
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This
usage is rather in line with the Aramaic Targumim,
which represented the acts of God by the personification of his
attributes. The reason for this
substitution in the Targumim was the matter of
avoiding the offense of anthropomorphisms, the possible misinterpretation of
the text, and desire of some overly-zealous Jews to protect the holiness of God
by using terms which designated certain attributes or aspects of His
personality. To quote Albright, "In Deut.
There
are two passages in the Dead Sea Scrolls that are claimed by some to have a
bearing on the doctrine of creation as found in the Johannine
Prologue.12 In spite of the superficial similarity to the Johannine passage, the Qumran references are not identical
at all because of one major difference: the Dead Sea Scriptures attribute
creation to God, while John ascribes it to "the Word," Who, in New
Testament theology is the Son of God, Jesus Christ, distinct from God the
Father in personality, though not in essence. However, several
The
Logos-doctrine was the bedrock of Philo's system, the focal-point of all his
views. He took Hellenic concepts and attempted to synthesize them with the Word
of the transcendent God found in the Old Testament. The result was the Logos as
an intermediary being between God and the created world. His notable weakness
is in oscillating between a personal and impersonal being; that is, it is inconsistent
to represent, as he does, the Logos as a person distinct from God and at the
same time as only a property of God actively operating in the world. Without
further elaboration we can state confidently that in Philo the Logos differed
from the Logos in John with respect to person, deity, existence, activity,
historical manifestation, and terminology, discrepancies which militate against
the possibility that John directly borrowed the concept from Philo.
A
POSITIVE APPROACH TO THE ORIGIN OF THE JOHANNINE CONCEPT
We
can properly approach the problem of the Johannine
usage on the basis of its alignment with the Semitic, and, more narrowly and
directly, Hebrew expressions. This is not to minimize the extent to which John
introduced new elements and fresh interpretation to the Logos concept by means
of the revelation of inspiration and the historical manifestation of Jesus
Christ as the Son of God. But in view of the extensive quotation of Old
Testament Scripture by the Christian authors stimulated by the guidance of the
Holy Spirit along with their strongly-imbedded personal familiarity with the
Jewish Scriptures, it is most natural to look to such a source for the key to
John's employment of the term "”Word” And Christ Himself revealed such a
foundation when He said to the Jews, “Ye search the Scriptures, because ye
think that in them ye have eternal life; and these are they which bear witness
of me" (John 5:39,40 A.S.V.).
From
the Old Testament come four lines of teaching which have a bearing on John's doctrine,
and with which the Johannine concept marvellously agrees. These are: (1) the Word of the
personal God as causative divine formative energy, responsible for the present
arrangement of the cosmos (Gen. 1); (2) the appearance of the malach Yahweh, the "Angel of the
Lord," God's
THE LOGOS CONCEPT 21
Messenger of revelation to the patriarchs
and prophets; (3) the activity of the debhar
Yahweh, the Word of Jehovah," primarily in the Psalms and Prophets;
and (4) the prominent Wisdom passages of Proverbs 8 and Job 28.
This
Christological concept is unintelligible and inexplicable as a Christian
doctrine outside its rich heritage in God's most ancient inspired revelation:
John interpreted what he knew of the Word personally in unequivocal conformity
with the Old Testament. And this thought is suggestive of our whole approach to
the issue: that the supreme influence in John's mind was the Person of
Christ Himself and the realization that in this pure and holy life of Christ on
earth all of God's purposes in revelation were accomplished. This is the
conclusion we reach after a study of John's Gospel and his other writings: he
was simply overwhelmed by the truth of Christ's message, and this was
explainable on no other grounds than that He in Himself was the true
message He proclaimed, the very revelation of God, indeed, The Word.
John's conviction on this matter was further heightened by an acute sensitivity
to the Old Testament teaching that the Word was mediator of creation and
revelation, a consideration further supported by other New Testament writers'
use of the Old Testament as the only authoritative pre-Christian source of
doctrine. This assertion is further borne out by the impact of Christ Himself
on other authors of the New Testament, along with their comparable teaching of
the eternal pre-existence of Christ and His ministry in creation and
redemption, which at last becomes the content of the Christian message: the
word of recon-
ciliation.
We
would stress, then, that the Biblical and Personal elements were
the foremost and immediate elements in the development of Johannine
Christology, making the employment of logos emphatically and distinctively a
Christian concept, and more than that, a revelation by the Spirit of God. And what of these extra-Biblical instances of hypostatical
speculation? It need not be absolutely denied that John was acquainted
with them, and did, indeed, enjoy in their presentation a preparation for the
final, divinely-inspired view of the Logos, a preparation both in the partial
truths these speculations contained, and by way of antithesis to
their erroneous conceptions. But these were only secondary and subordinate
to the Biblical and Personal aspects, which charged John's
message with that vital, life-giving energy drawn from the Word Himself, the
"power of God unto salvation," "even to them that believe on His
name."
A BRIEF EXEGESIS OF THE VERSE
The Apostle John forcefully
introduces his theological life of Christ by the first attribute predicated of
the Logos, His Pre-existence, His Eternity: "In
the beginning was the Word." The similarity of en arche to bere'sit
in Genesis 1: 1 is prominent, the Genesis account marking the temporal
initiation of creation. By this identification the writer is saying, "When
the act of creation took place the Word was." The exact source of
regarding the Word's Eternity of Person is found in the imperfect en,
"was." This construction features the durative aspect of the
imperfect tense, for" the augment throws linear action into the past ."13 This construction thus affirms
that the Logos already was existing. prior to the punctiliar act of
creation, throwing back the concept of the Word's Being from the impact of
creation into timeless eternity. From a philosophical stand-
point
John's construction may be inadequate, for to
use en in order to express duration and continuance in an area where
there is no possibility for such a designation (in eternity) would be a
categorical contradiction. But the existential verb eimi,
which designates a thing as existing as
22 GRACE
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distinguished from non-existent, coupled with the durative imperfect, comes as
close to representing pure, eternal Being as it is possible for the tongue of
man to come in such a succinct statement.
The
second attribute of the Word, that of Equality with God, is
distinguished by the Personality of the Logos as identified by the preposition pros:
“and the Word was with God.” It was no accident that this preposition was used,
for the preposition pros is distinctive above all others in the aspect
of close proximity, “denoting direction towards a thing or postion
and state looking towards the object. One might correctly say that this
preposition gives the distinct impression of a tendency toward, a movement in
the direction of, God. It has even been translated as “face to face with God.”15 This
would require conceiving of a relationship between two persons, the one as
absolute being, completely independent, sufficient within Himself, towards
which the other continually tends (en). This fact-to-face relationship
is sustained by two other passages, Mark 14:49, and II Cor. 5:8. In accord with
these usages Jon specifies the fellowship, and hence the equality, that exists
between the Logos and God as between persons, and does not consider them
as abstract, metaphysical concepts. At first glance there might be interpreted
a duality of Deity from this phrase, or a subordination or creation-emanation
from God, superficially regarded. John leaves it to the next phrase to reconcile
this problem, and the answer given there shoes decisively that it is only the
Personality of the Word that is being considered in this second proposition.
John
1:1 has long been a battle-ground between orthodox Christians, who would uphold
the doctrine of the Trinity, and the non-trinitarians,
who by their interpretations exhibit tendencies toward polytheism,
Unitarianism, or Arianism. The focal point of this
controversy is the third proposition dealing with the Deity, or Essence
of the World stated by John in this verse: “And the Word was God.” Defective views such as those
of Arianism were long ago rejected by the common
action of Christians who held to the orthodox position of the Christian faith.
But in spite of this well-known fact a form of the Arian heresy persists to
this day. The most active exponents of this teaching are the “International
Bible Students,” more popularly know as “Jehovah’s Witnesses.” Their view of
the Person of Christ is represented in this quotation from their recent literature:
He (the Logos) is the “only begotten Son”
because he is the only one whom God
himself created
directly without the agency or co-operation of any creature (John
A.V.;A.S.;Dy).
If the Word Logos was not the first living creature whom God created,
who, then, is God’s
first created Son, and how has this first living creature been
honored, and used
as the first-made one of the family of God’s sons? We know of no
one but the Word or
Logos.16
The
absence of the article ho with theos
in the predicate nominative construction of this verse is claimed to support
the foregoing interpretation; that the Logos was like God as a god,
possessing same of the qualities of God, but not God Himself or a part of God.
17 To this we would apply the following refutation:
1.
If
John has wished to convey this impression he could have used theios—"divine,
deity, like God”—already used in II Pet. 1:3 and Acts 17:29.
2. To posit such an intermediary being would be to contradict the
strict monotheism of Scripture.
THE
LOGOS CONCEPT 23
3. A study of predicate nouns with and
without the article occurring both before and after the verb (by E.C. Colwell
of the University of Chicago) shows that out of 112 definite predicates before
the verb, only 15 are used with the article (13%), while 97 are used without
the article (87%). From this and other discussion he concludes that word-order
and not definiteness is the variable quantum in passages of this nature. The
exceptions to the general rule that definite predicate nouns regularly take the
article are: (1) definite predicate nouns which follow the verb usually take
the article; (2) definite predicate nouns which precede the verb usually lack
the article; (3) proper names regularly lack the article in the predicate.
4.The principles here outlined are at once destructive of the arguments
advanced by those who would regard the construction as indefinite. The study by
Colwell shows that a predicate nominative preceding the verb cannot be
translated as indefinite solely because of the absence of the article, if the
context suggests that the predicate is definite, clearly the case here.
5. The statement "and the Word was God”
is not strange in the prologue of the Gospel that is climaxed by Thomas'
confession, "My Lord and my God."
The
proposition as we have interpreted it recognized the Logos as God in the
fullest sense of all that man can conceive of God to be. It resolves the
seeming duality suggested by the second proposition in affirming that the Word
simply. This leaves us with a paradox which is irreconcilable by human logic
and which stands logically unresolved in the New Testament. The Logos is
God, and yet He is with God. That is to say that God and the
Logos are not two beings, and yet they are also not identical. The obvious
conclusion is that the Logos is God with respect to essence,
while He is distinct with reference to personality, harmonizing with the
testimony of other Scripture on the distinctions and unifying factors within
the Trinity. We must take these Biblical statements as they stand, realizing
that on the one hand the Persons of the Godhead are
equal in being, power, and glory (Matt. 28: 19, II Cor. 13: 14), while
on the other, there exist certain distinctions of activity and voluntary
subordination between them, but these concern their respective functions.
The primary function of the Logos, as we have seen, was to reveal the action of
God in this earthly framework by the processes of creation, preservation, and
revelation, and redemption. And He did all this because of Who He Was!
PARAPHRASE
"At the initiation of time when the
creation of the world took place, the Logos--(the preexistent, pre-incarnate
Son of God, Who personally intervened in the cosmos for the purposes of
creation, preservation, and revelation)--this Logos was already with God the
Father, and this same Word was the essence of God in the most absolute
sense."
` DOCUMENTATION
1.John A. Wilson, "The theology of
the Old Testament, ed. James B. Pritchard (
2. S. N. Kramer, "Sumerian Theology
and Ethics, " The Harvard Theological Review,
XLIX (January 1954), pp. 53, 54.
3. Ibid., p. 50.
4. W. F. Albright From the Stone Age to Christianity
(Doubleday), p. 195
24 GRACE
JOURNAL
5. H. L.Ginsberg,
"Poems about Baal and Anath," Religions
of the Ancient Near East, ed.
Isaac Mendelsohn (Liberal Arts Press), p. 245.
6. Theodor H. Gaster,
Thespis(Doubleday), p. 197.
7. Gordon H. Clark, Thales to Dewey
(Houghton Mifflin), p. 19.
8. Ibid., p. 34.
9. Ibid, p. 94.
10. Frederick Mayer, A History of
Ancient & Medieval Philosophy (American book
pp.228. 229.
11. Albright,,op. cit., p. 372.
12. Theodor H. Gaster,
The
13. James H. Moulton, A
Grammar of N.T. Greek (Clark), Vol. I, p. 128.
14. Joseph H. Thayer, A Greek-English Lexicon(
15. A. T. Robertson, .A Grammar of the
Greek N.T.. (Broadman), p. 623. C
16. "The Word"--Who is He?
According to John (
17. Ibid., pp. 56, 58.
18. E.C. Colwell, "A Definite Rule
for the Use of the Article in the Greek N. T.," Reprint
from Journal of Biblical Literature, LII
(1933), p. 9.
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