RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Iioesoher Logos
then, to say that in all the Johannine writings the Logos is conceived, as a personal revelation of God foFsalyation or for judgment, a,p.erson who has an existence of his own with the Father before and after the duration of this world, as well as an existence here in time and in the flesh. Between the eternal and the temporal being of the Logos it is clear from the whole trend of the prologue that the difference is only one of manner and not of essence. II. Source of the Term : "To the question whence the author derived the term several different answers have been given: (1) It is simple enough to Hofmann, who asserts that the primitive Christian community designated as " the word of God " the Evangelical message. The author of the Fourth Gospel would thus associate himself only so far with this conception as to allow him to emphasize the personal content of the message. But more than one phrase in the prologue quite obviously precludes the acceptance of this view. (2) Others, especially Weiss, find the source of the term in the Old- Testament expressions concerning the Word of God. (There is this much in favor of such a view, that the prologue plainly refers to the account of creation in Genesis, and that in the Psalms and prophets a poetical personification of the word of God as a creative and saving power sent forth into the world occurs not infrequently; but in these cases the spirituality and omnipotence of God are the fundamental thoughts, and the proclamation of his unconditioned unity leaves no place for a personal principle besides himself as the mediator of his activity in the world J Moreover, wherever on purely Hebraic soil in later times the idea of a creative intermediate cause appears, it is connected "With the name not of the Word but of Wisdom (Prov. viii. 22-31; Ecclus. xxiv.), just as where the Word occurs (as in Wisdom ix. 1, xvi. 12, xviii. 15) the influence of Greek, especially Stoic, thought is discernible. The Johannine doctrine of the Logos may have taken up the Old-Testament notion of the word of God as operative in the world, but this can not be its sole source. (3) Still less can it be shown to have come from the use made of " Word of Yahweh " {dibra dayay, meymra dayay) in Palestinian theology. The meymra is used as an abstract term to conceal the name and spiritualize the idea of God; it is thus employed instead of "God" where his operation in history is spoken, of or where the context contains anthropomorphic expressions. There is no hint of a concrete hypostasis of the Godhead or of a being mediate between him and the world. (4) The derivation ofV the Johannine doctrine from the Alexandrian religious philosophy, and especially from Philo, was taken up in the eighteenth century and accepted in the nineteenth by Liicke, De Wette, and the school of F. C. Baur. Philo, interested alike in the tradition of his people and the contemporary pagan culture, .found in the,Jl1QgQs_a._means of reconciling the transcendence of the Jewish conception of Goa with the immanence taught in the philosophy of his day. A pupil of Heraclitus, familiar with the Platonic doctrine of ideas, and still more strongly influenced by the Stoic doctrine of the Logos as the active, rational, teleological principle which
Morms the passive matter, he attempts to connect these really pantheistic views with the Jewish conception of God, and thus gives the Logos an intermediate place between God and the world; his Logos is at once the worlqLimmanent in the divine thought_and ,Ged operative in -the world, a mesites in every sense— cosmological, moral, and religious. Stoic elements are most prominent in his idea, but there is room also for the Mosaic creative word and the later Jewish developments which add religious weight to the purely cosmological idea. But the religious motives and convictions in the two writers are, as might be shown by a detailed examination, too radically distinct to justify the theory of a definite borrowing from one by the other — though this only proves that the term Logos receives in the Gospel an entirely new direction when the historic redeeming work of Christ becomes its essential content, and not that there is not a considerable Grange over which the two are in harmony. If to these points are added a number of others throughout the Fourth Gospel which go to show that the author was well acquainted with Hellenic Judaism, either in the Philonic or some other popular form, the derivation to some extent of the Logos-idea from that source acquires a considerable degree of probability. But this by no means justifies an attempt to deduce the portrait of Christ in the Evangelical story from philosophic speculation, nor to confine the influence of the Logos-idea to the prologue, as Harnack has sought to do. The truth of the Johannine combination of an abstract idea with history is shown by the manner in which the eternal, inexhaustible personality of Christ not only permits but actually requires it.
III. Significance of the Term: In determining this it is necessary to read into it nothing from Philo or from the later church doctrine, but to confine oneself strictly to the account given by the evangelist. Its significance for him lies altogether in the religious department, giving him the answer to the questions " Who is God? How may I come to him and to participation in his life and light? " The cosmological interest is for him wholly subordinate; his use of the term serves only to place the whole human race on an equality with the favored people of Israel. The Logos, by whom the world was jfiade, was made flesh for the world; but the mission which he is to perform in this universal field is the soteriological one of revealing God and thereby bringing grace and truth./ When John identifies the person of Jesus Christ with the Logos, his purpose is to express in a universal way, comprehensible without as well as within the limits of Israel, that Jesus is set over the world, in union with God as the eternal mediator of his creative and redeeming will, and that therefore he is in his historical appearance the absolute and universal self-revelation of the Godhead, the exclusive conveyer of salvation. /He does not so much as touch the metaphysical problems which from Justin onward make the Logos-idea a fertile source of questionings. Of the later theology on the subject it has been truly said that it subordinates the moral interpretation of the plan of salvation to the logical, and that it leads either to deistic or to pan-
Log-os Lollards