Logos (Christianity)
Based on Wikipedia: Logos (Christianity)
The Word That Was There Before Words
Here's a puzzle that has fascinated theologians for two thousand years: How do you describe something that existed before language itself? The Gospel of John opens with one of the most audacious claims in all of literature. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
That English word "Word" is translating the Greek term Logos. And Logos means far more than just "word."
It encompasses reason, discourse, the underlying logic of reality itself. When ancient Greek philosophers talked about the Logos, they meant something like the rational principle that orders the universe—the cosmic intelligence that makes the world make sense. So when John opens his gospel by declaring that this Logos was with God from the beginning, and in fact was God, he's making a claim that would have stopped both Jewish and Greek readers in their tracks.
Why John Chose This Word
According to Irenaeus of Lyon, who lived from around 130 to 202 CE and studied under Polycarp—himself a student of John the Apostle—John didn't choose the term Logos by accident. He was picking a fight.
A teacher named Cerinthus was causing trouble in Ephesus, the city where John had settled after returning from exile on the island of Patmos. Cerinthus taught that the world was created not by the supreme God, but by some lesser power far removed from the Almighty. He also insisted that Jesus was just an ordinary man, born to Joseph and Mary through normal human reproduction, upon whom a divine "Christ" descended at baptism—only to leave again before the crucifixion.
John, according to Irenaeus, wrote the opening of his gospel as a direct rebuttal. There is one God, John insists, and He created everything through His Word. And that Word became flesh. The eternal Logos and the human Jesus are not two separate beings that temporarily overlapped. They are one and the same.
The Philosopher's Word
John wasn't the first to give philosophical weight to the concept of Logos. A Jewish philosopher named Philo of Alexandria, who lived from about 20 BCE to 50 CE, had already developed an elaborate theology around the term. For Philo, the Logos was an intermediary between the utterly transcendent God and the material world—a kind of divine agent through which God interacted with creation.
Scholar Stephen L. Harris argues that John adapted Philo's concept, identifying Jesus as the incarnation of this divine Logos that shaped the universe. Whether John drew directly on Philo or both drew on common philosophical currents in the Hellenistic world, the parallel is striking.
This made Christianity unexpectedly accessible to Greek-speaking intellectuals. They already had a category for a divine rational principle underlying reality. John was telling them that this principle had become a person.
The Logos in Revelation
Interestingly, while John chapter one is the most famous reference to the Logos in the New Testament, it may not technically be the first. The Book of Revelation—traditionally attributed to the same John—includes a dramatic scene where a figure called "the Word of God" rides a white horse into the final battle.
He is clothed with a robe dipped in blood, and His name is called The Word of God... And on His robe and on His thigh He has a name written: King of Kings, and Lord of Lords.
This is the Logos as conquering warrior, leading the armies of heaven at the Second Coming. It's a very different image from the philosophical abstraction of Greek thought—more like the divine warrior traditions of the Hebrew Bible, where God fights on behalf of His people.
Ancient Echoes
Early Christian theologians loved finding hints of the Logos in the Hebrew scriptures, read through the lens of the Greek Septuagint translation. Psalm 33:6 was a particular favorite:
By the Word of the Lord were the heavens established, and all the host of them by the Spirit of His mouth.
Here were the Word and the Spirit, side by side, participating in creation. Theophilus of Antioch, Irenaeus, Origen, and Augustine all saw in this verse a foreshadowing of the Trinity—three persons (Father, Son or Word, and Spirit) acting together from the very beginning.
Augustine noted that in this psalm, both the Logos and the Pneuma (Spirit) were "on the verge of being personified." What the Old Testament hinted at, the New Testament would make explicit.
The First Generation After the Apostles
The earliest Christian reference to the Logos outside the New Testament comes from Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, who lived from roughly 35 to 108 CE. Ignatius had been a disciple of John himself. Writing to the church in Magnesia, he declared that "there is one God, who has manifested Himself by Jesus Christ His Son, who is His eternal Word, not proceeding forth from silence."
That last phrase—"not proceeding forth from silence"—is a pointed rejection of the idea that there was ever a time when the Word did not exist. The Logos is eternal, not a later addition to the Godhead.
Writing to the Ephesians, Ignatius described the Son in paradoxical terms that would become characteristic of Christian theology: "possessed both of flesh and spirit; both made and not made; God existing in flesh; true life in death; both of Mary and of God; first capable of suffering and then beyond suffering."
This is the Logos theology in miniature: the eternal divine principle has genuinely entered human existence, with all its limitations and vulnerabilities.
Justin Martyr's Philosophical Bridge
Justin Martyr, writing around 150 CE, took the Logos concept further than anyone before him. Like Philo, he identified the Logos with the mysterious "Angel of the Lord" who appears throughout the Hebrew Bible—the figure who speaks to Moses from the burning bush, who appears to Abraham at Mamre, who wrestles with Jacob through the night.
These weren't random angelic appearances, Justin argued. They were pre-incarnation appearances of the Logos, the Son of God making himself known before he would be born in Bethlehem.
God begot before all creatures a Beginning, a certain rational power proceeding from Himself, who is called by the Holy Spirit now the Glory of the Lord, now the Son, again Wisdom, again an Angel, then God, and then Lord and Logos.
To Jewish audiences, this was a way of demonstrating Christianity's continuity with the Hebrew scriptures. To Greek audiences, it was a way of connecting Jesus to philosophical concepts they already respected.
Justin employed a memorable analogy to explain how the Logos could be distinct from the Father while remaining one with Him. Think of fire being kindled from fire, he said. You can light many torches from a single flame, and each torch has its own distinct fire—yet the original flame is not diminished. The Son proceeds from the Father without dividing the Father's essence.
Theophilus and the Inner Word
Theophilus, who served as Patriarch of Antioch until his death around 180 CE, added another layer to the theology. He distinguished between the Logos "internal"—the Word dwelling within God from eternity, God's own reason and thought—and the Logos "expressed" or "uttered," when God spoke the Word forth to create the universe.
God, having His own Word internal within His own heart, begot Him, emitting Him along with His own wisdom before all things. He had this Word as a helper in the things that were created by Him.
This wasn't like the Greek myths of gods having children through physical union. This was truth, Theophilus insisted: "the Word, that always exists, residing within the heart of God." Before anything came into being, God had the Word as His counselor, "being His own mind and thought."
And then—when God wished to create—He uttered this Word. The first-born of all creation. Yet even in speaking the Word forth, God was not "emptied of the Word," not diminished in His own reason. He remained always in conversation with His Logos.
Defending Against the Charge of Atheism
By the late second century, Christians faced a peculiar accusation: atheism. Because they refused to worship the traditional Roman gods or participate in the imperial cult, they were seen as godless. The philosopher Athenagoras, writing around 176 CE in his defense of Christianity to the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, used Logos theology to refute this charge.
Who would not be astonished to hear men called atheists who speak of God the Father, and of God the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and who declare both their power in union and their distinction in order?
Athenagoras articulated what would become the orthodox paradox: the Son is both the Logos of the Father and one with the Father. He is "the first product of the Father, not as having been brought into existence"—for God always had the Word within Himself—but rather as the expression of God's creative power.
Cleverly, Athenagoras pointed to the Roman emperors themselves as an illustration. Marcus Aurelius ruled jointly with his son Commodus. Two rulers, yet one empire. So too the Father and the Son: distinct persons, yet one God, with all things subjected to them both.
Irenaeus Against the Gnostics
Irenaeus of Lyon, our source for John's original intentions, developed perhaps the most comprehensive early theology of the Logos. For him, the Word was central to everything: creation, revelation, and salvation.
In his "Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching," Irenaeus defined the second article of faith as:
The Word of God, Son of God, Christ Jesus our Lord, who was manifested to the prophets according to the form of their prophesying... through whom all things were made; who also at the end of the times, to complete and gather up all things, was made man among men, visible and tangible, in order to abolish death and show forth life and produce a community of union between God and man.
Notice the sweep of this vision. The same Logos who created the universe appeared to the prophets, became incarnate in Jesus, and will one day complete the work of reuniting God and humanity.
Irenaeus was particularly concerned with refuting Gnostic teachers like Cerinthus, who wanted to separate the divine Christ from the human Jesus, or who claimed the material world was created by a lesser, perhaps evil deity. Against all this, Irenaeus insisted on unity: one God, one Word, one Christ, one creation.
"He indeed who made all things can alone, together with His Word, properly be termed God and Lord," Irenaeus wrote. Everything else is creature, not creator. The sharp distinction between maker and made runs through all his work.
The Burning Bush Revisited
One of Irenaeus's most striking moves was identifying the Logos with the God who spoke to Moses from the burning bush. "I am who I am," the voice declared from the flames. For Irenaeus, that voice was the pre-incarnate Christ.
"Christ Himself, therefore, together with the Father, is the God of the living, who spoke to Moses, and who was manifested to the fathers."
This reading transformed the entire Hebrew Bible into a series of Logos appearances. Every theophany—every manifestation of God to human beings—was actually an appearance of the Word who would later become flesh. The patriarchs who walked with God, the prophets who heard His voice, Moses who spoke with God face to face—all of them, according to this reading, were encountering the Logos.
Alexandria's Complicated Legacy
The great intellectual center of Alexandria in Egypt proved to be particularly fertile ground for Logos theology, though sometimes the results made church authorities nervous. The mixing of traditional Egyptian thought, Greek philosophy, and Christian doctrine produced thinkers like Origen, Cyril of Alexandria, and Didymus the Blind.
These Alexandrian theologians pushed Logos speculation further than their counterparts elsewhere, sometimes into territory that later generations would judge heretical. The relationship between the Father and the Son, the precise nature of the Logos's divinity, the mechanics of how the eternal Word could genuinely become human—Alexandria produced brilliant and controversial answers to all these questions.
Why This Matters
The Logos theology that emerged in the first two centuries of Christianity accomplished something remarkable. It took a specific historical figure—Jesus of Nazareth, a Jewish teacher executed under Pontius Pilate—and identified him with the cosmic principle of reason that Greek philosophers had been discussing for centuries.
This was intellectually audacious. It claimed that the organizing intelligence behind the universe had become a particular human being at a particular moment in history. Not just appeared in human form, as gods might do in Greek mythology, but actually became human—with all the vulnerability and mortality that implies.
The early theologians worked out this concept through argument and analogy. Fire kindled from fire. A word spoken that remains within the speaker. An emperor ruling jointly with his son. Each image captured something about how the Logos could be both one with the Father and distinct from the Father.
And they insisted, against various competitors, that this Logos theology answered the deepest human questions. How can the infinite God relate to finite creation? Through the Word who spans both realms. How can we know an invisible God? Through the Word who has made Him visible. How can death be overcome? Through the Word who entered death and came out the other side.
The first verse of John's gospel—so familiar it can become invisible—was a depth charge thrown into the philosophical waters of the ancient world. In the beginning was the Logos. And the Logos was God. And the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us.
Two thousand years later, theologians are still working out what that means.