Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

LOGOS

(Gk. lógos)

A prominent concept in the NT, particularly the Fourth Gospel, where it is specifically identified with Jesus of Nazareth as the preexistent Christ and the incarnate savior (John 1:1-14). The word, however, has had a variety of usages from ancient times conveyed by such English terms as “word,” “speech,” “narration,” and “expression.” For Heraclitus lógos meant “explanation” and by extrapolation “transcendent meaning” and an underlying cosmic principle of order and proportion in the material universe. Plato and Aristotle employed the term to mean “discourse” or “rational explanation,” thus signifying the structural order in the mental and moral universe. Plato made much of the notion of a cosmic order emanating from the transcendent world or from the mind of God. The term had a central role in the worldview of the Stoic philosophers. For them God and the material world were one and lógos was the vital force and rational element which pervades the whole universe and controls its order, function, and life. Some identified it with fire and air, associating it with breath and spirit.

Philo Judaeus made much of the concept. For him lógos was the rationality in the mind of God which gave God’s mind order and the potential for expression. It was the conceptual framework which arose in the mind of God for the formation of the universe(s) and the expression of that framework as the template for the creation. Lógos was the inner structure of natural and moral law which gives form and function to the material and moral universes, respectively. Moreover, it was the rational and epistemological structure of the human mind, as part of the created universe(s), which corresponded coherently with the structure of the creation and thus made knowledge and scientific investigation possible. It was the comprehensive system of understanding of the universe(s) that the human mind can achieve by philosophy, theology, science, and piety, thus thinking God’s thoughts after him. In the LXX lógos usually translates Heb. dāḇār, “word,” which Philo identified rather closely with the Hebrew word for wisdom (Prov. 1–9).

The NT uses lógos frequently, but not in the philosophical senses of rationality or the rational or ordering principle of the universe. It simply means “word,” “speech,” “report,” “assertion,” or a “matter” under discussion. Thus it often refers to the Christian gospel preached or written. Only in the prologue of the Gospel of John does lógos take on cosmic dimensions when used to name Jesus Christ as the transcendent, preexistent, and incarnate Word or self-expression of God. This has some similarities to Philo’s usage and that of the Stoics, except that in John lógos is personalized.

The term is common in the Greek Patristics and in gnostic tradition. Justin Martyr, Theophilus of Antioch, and Irenaeus of Lyon, in the late 2nd century, employ lógos to describe the transcendent, preexistent, and incarnational role of Jesus Christ as the facilitator of God’s entire redemptive economy in creation, providence, and salvation. However, they seem more dependent upon the usages of Middle Platonism such as that of Philo, Stoicism, and the Hellenistic Jewish literature of Second Temple Judaism, than upon the prologue of the Fourth Gospel.

J. Harold Ellens

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

LOGOS

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)