What Writers of the Past Have Said of the Logos at John 1:1
If, in the introduction to his Gospel, John had asserted that Jesus was truly God, he would have proposed to his readers a Messiah whose very nature and properties were totally different from those of the person whom the prophets predicted, and whose advent the Jews eagerly expected. He would also have contradicted the assertions of Moses, of John the harbinger of the Messiah, of Jesus himself, and of his apostles and disciples, that he was a man. John himself, in the same chapter in which he says, “The Word was a god,” has provided ample means of preventing any construction of his language, different from the commonly-received sense of it at that time, and in those parts of the world. When the term QEOS or KURIOS, or any of the Hebrew appellations of the Supreme Being, are applied in Scripture to a magistrate or a prophet, on what ground do we affix a meaning to them different from that which we affix to the same words when applied to the Most High? Is it not on account of the clear and distinct properties of humanity that belong to, and are inseparable from, the magistrate and the prophet? If, then, decisive characters of humanity are annexed to the LOGOS, in the introduction to John's Gospel, and in several other parts of the first chapter, as well as in many other passages of his writings, and in other books of the New Testament, these will be as proper a guide to the interpretation of QEOS in this as in any other parts of Scripture. The rule equally applies to all. . . . . . . From the whole, then, it follows, that the term 0soc, as predicated of the Aoyoc, must be understood in a sense in which it often occurs in Scripture, namely, that of a divinely-commissioned human being, who spake, in the name of God, the truths and precepts which God communicated to him, and who wrought miracles which no one could work unless he were empowered by God.—If any persons think, that the foregoing explanation of the term QEOS be not fully proved to be the true one, still the phrase which we are considering will not convey the idea that the Word was truly God. For, by all fair rules of interpretation, QEOS HN O LOGOS should be explained in a manner similar to that in which other Scripture phrases of the like kind are interpreted. Now, in all cases in which the verb EIMI is used to affirm any thing which implies a contradiction to well-known fact, to reason, to the context, or to the general tenor of Scripture, a figurative sense of it is adopted in preference to the literal meaning. If it be maintained that the apostle John's assertion, QEOS HN O LOGOS, proves the Word, or Jesus Christ, to be truly God, - the affirmation of the apostle Paul, 1 Cor. x. 4, H PETRA DE HN O CRISTOS, equally proves him to be an inanimate rock; and the assertion of Christ, AUTOS ESTIN HLIAS, proves John the Baptist to be really Elias. Paraphrase: Ver. 1. From the commencement of his public life, Jesus was a teacher of righteousness, and a publisher of glad tidings. To this preacher the Most High imparted extraordinary wisdom and power, and the privilege of speaking and acting in his name. As it was on account of similar divine communications that the Supreme Being himself called Moses a god; that Jewish writers called those men gods, to whom the word of God came; that Christ himself countenanced this meaning of the term; and that Isaiah predicted the Messiah by the names Jehovah and God; so, in the same sense, Jesus was a god. 3. All that regeneration of mankind which the gospel produced was effected by his instrumentality; and without this, not any reformation was accomplished by it. 10. He was publicly conversant with men; many were reformed by him; and he imparted the best means of renovating the human race; yet mankind in general did not believe in him. 14. This teacher was a human being, &c. — Abridged from SIMPSON: Essays on the Language of Scripture, vol. ii. pp. 17–19, 22–25, 44–46.
1. In the beginning of this new age, this grand era of the moral world (the apostle appears to me to say), he was the Word, was appointed to be the Revealer of the divine will; and the Word was with God, favoured by his heavenly Father with peculiar intercourse with him, and with express and complete communications respecting that grace and truth which came by him, and the means by which his all-important commission was to be executed; and the Word was God, or, rather, a god, since to him the word of God came, and he was the representative of the Most High. 3. All things relative to the Christian dispensation were done, or executed, through him: aided by divine power, and acting under divine authority, he accomplished the gracious purposes for which he came; and without him was not any thing done that was done: he gave the apostles their commission, and illuminated their minds; he communicated to them the miraculous powers by which they were to diffuse and establish the gospel; he continually directed them in their great work; and it was through his agency that the world was anew created, and Gentiles as well as Jews placed in a state of spiritual privilege, and made heirs of eternal salvation. 10. He was in the world; he dwelt among men, while engaged in executing his important commission; and the world was made, or formed anew, through him: introduced by him into a new state, a state of blessed and sanctifying privilege; and yet the world knew him not, he was despised and rejected of men. 14. And the Word, this illustrious Revealer of the divine Will, though highly exalted by the Father's love and favour, and appointed to high dignity and power, became, or was, flesh: he was “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” We might have expected, that he would be raised above the common lot of humanity; but he was subject to infirmity, distress, and mortality, and exposed to want and suffering; and at last experienced the shame and agony of the cross, – CARPENTER: Unitarianism the Doctrine of the Gospel, pp. 61—60.
The Greek word LOGOS is susceptible of several interpretations, the chief of which are these two, -“reason” and “speech;” ratio and oratio. Were I to desert the beaten track (which I do not think there is here sufficient evidence to warrant), I should prefer the word reason, as suggesting the inward principle or faculty, and not the external enunciation, which may be called word or speech. The passage of Holy Writ referred to is Prov. viii. throughout. What is here termed O LOGOS is there H SOFIA. There is such a coincidence in the things attributed to each, as evidently shows, that both were intended to indicate the same divine personage. The passage in the Proverbs, I own, admits a more familiar explanation, as regarding the happy consequences of that mental quality which we may call true or heavenly wisdom....... 3. “All things were made by it; and without it.”—4. “In it was life.” It is much more suitable to the figurative style here employed, to speak of the word, though denoting a person, as a thing, agreeably to the grammatical idiom, till a direct intimation is made of its personality. This intimation I consider as made, ver. 4, “In it was life.” The way of rendering here adopted, is, as far as I have had occasion to observe, agreeable to the practice of all translators, except the English. But it deserves to be remarked, that every version which preceded the common translation, as far as I have been able to discover, uniformly employed the neuter pronoun it. So it is in that called the Bishop's Bible, and in the Geneva English. Beside, that this method is more agreeable to grammatical propriety, it evidently preserves the allusion better which there is in this passage to the account of the creation given by Moses, &c. — Abridged from Dr. CAMPBELL on the Gospels
The Greek word, which our translation hath rendered by that of word, signifies also reason, intelligence, wisdom. This sense is much better than the other: it is more accommodated to the divine nature, which is purely spiritual, and to which word is not congruous. If God is often represented as speaking, it is nothing else but his wisdom which conceives any design; and the sacred writers borrow this metaphor from men, who manifest their intentions by speech. This being laid down, the design of St. John, in my opinion, is to inform us, that the same wisdom, which formed the creatures with so much skill, hath not shone with less splendour in the creation of the new world....... I shall annex a short paraphrase, that the ideas of St. John may at once be clearly seen: — 1. There is an eternal Reason, a sovereign Wisdom, which hath existed from all ages: this Wisdom hath ever been inseparable from God; or, to speak properly, it is God himself. 2. In the beginning of the world, it was then with God, who never does any thing without consulting it. 3. And he employed it in the creation of the universe. In effect, there is no creature, in which one doth not see some trace of this Wisdom shine; so that, without it, things would never have attained that point of beauty which we admire. 4. Wisdom is the source of life and of true happiness; and not merely this, - it serves, moreover, as a light to conduct us to them. 5. This life especially hath shone forth in our days; but, how capable soever it were of dispelling the shades of ignorance, blind mortals chose rather to wander in error, than follow the counsels of pure and unclouded reason. 14. And if the Divine Wisdom hath appeared in the works of the creation, one may say that it hath no less displayed its splendour under the gospel. It hath rendered itself sensible and palpable in Jesus Christ: by his means it hath never ceased to do good to men. We have been witnesses of the miracles which were effected by this Wisdom, and of the glory with which Jesus Christ was invested; — a glory much greater than what appeared in Moses and the prophets, such as was proper to be the glory of the only-begotten Son of God. — ABAUZIT: Miscellanies, pp. 143, 144, 148, 149.
If we suppose the Word to have been God, personally, in any sense, the most irreconcilable inconsistencies will follow. .... The very idea of God's becoming a man, is totally shocking. Scarcely less so is it, that the Creator of the world should be united, in one person, with a human body and a human soul, and in that condition receive glory from a higher being still. Such difficulties are, to my mind, I confess, totally insuperable. They seem utterly irreconcilable with any clear conception of the nature of either God or man. I can conceive of divine attributes being with God, and constituting God, and being displayed in creation and revelation, and being especially manifested in Jesus Christ, so as to clothe him with glory, and make him to appear to be the peculiar favourite of heaven; but I cannot conceive of a Divine Person to do all this. .... I take the whole passage to mean this: — The word which God spake by Christ, the revelation which he made of himself, through him, is nothing new, but is a part of a series of revelations running back to the very beginning of all things. The same Almighty Power and Perfect Wisdom, which were displayed in the miracles and doctrines of Christ, were first manifested in the works of the physical creation: “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth.” The next manifestation was in the creation of the soul of man, to which he imparted, in a fainter degree than that in which they exist in himself, some of his own attributes: “The inspiration of the Almighty hath given him understanding.” “In him, or rather it, was life; and that life was the light of men. But the light shone in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.” The revelation which God made of himself in the material world, and in the soul of man, was not understood, and the world fell into idolatry. The next revelation that God made of himself was to the Jewish nation, by which he took a particular people, and made them his own, brought them into an especial relation to himself. After a long interval, he visited his own people by another revelation; but they did not recognise him in it. He sent John the Baptist, to announce the coming of his last and greatest revelation to man; and at length, in Christ himself, that Light, which had ever been shining, burst out with greater brilliancy; that Life, which had ever been the source of intellectual energy to men, received a more perfect development; that Word, which had been sounding in the ears of mortals since the beginning of time, from the works of God, from the heavens above and from the earth beneath, received a more full and articulate annunciation. — BURNAP: Expository Lectures on the Doctrine of the Trinity, pp. 54, 55; 61, 62.
It was the apostle's purpose, in the introduction of his Gospel, to declare that Christianity had the same divine origin as the universe itself; that it was to be considered as proceeding from the same power of God. Writing in Asia Minor for readers, by many of whom the term Logos was more familiarly used than any other, to express the attributes of God viewed in relation to his creatures, he adopted this term to convey his meaning, because, from their associations with it, it was fitted particularly to impress and affect their minds; thus connecting the great truth which he taught with their former modes of thinking and speaking. But upon the idea primarily expressed by this term, a new conception — the conception of the proper personality of those attributes — had been superinduced. This doctrine, then, – the doctrine of an hypostatised Logos, it appears to have been his purpose to set aside. He would guard himself, I think, against being understood to countenance it. The Logos, he teaches, was not the agent of God, but God himself. Using the term merely to denote the attributes of God as manifested in his works, he teaches that the operations of the Logos are the operations of God; that all conceived of under that name is to be referred immediately to God; that in speaking of the Logos we speak of God; that “the Logos is God.” .... Adopting this term [Power of God], we may say that the Power of God, personified, is the subject of the introductory verses of his Gospel. It is first said to be God, and afterwards declared to have become a man. It is first regarded in its relation to God in whom it resides, and afterwards in its relation to Jesus through whom it was manifested. Viewed in the former relation, what may be said of the Power of God is true of God: the terms become identical in their purport. Viewed in the latter relation, whatever is true of the Power of God is true of Christ, considered as the minister of God. His words were the words of God; his miracles were performed by the power of God. .... The word SARX, in its primitive meaning flesh, is often used to denote man. When it is said, that the Logos, or the Power of God, became a man, the meaning is, that the Power of God was manifested in and exercised through a man. It is afterward, by a figurative use of language, identified with Christ, in whom it is conceived of as residing.—NORTON: Statement of Reasons, pp. 241–245.
St. John ... carefully warns us against thinking of his personification as otherwise than identical with the Supreme, by saying outright that the Logos is God; and therefore that whatever he may say about the former, is really to be understood as spoken of the latter. The whole proem divides itself into two ideas: that from the Genius or Logos of God have proceeded two sets of divine works;– the material world; and the soul and inspiration of heaven shed upon the world through Christ. His object, I believe, is to link together these two effects as successive and analogous results—physical in one case, spiritual in the other— of the same divine and holy energy. Having warned us, ... that this energy is not really a person distinct from the Supreme, he abandons himself without reserve to the beautiful personification which follows; assuring us that thereby were all things made at first, and thereby were all men being enlightened now; that our very world, which felt that forming hand of old, had not discerned the blessed influence which again descended to regenerate it: ungrateful treatment! as of one who came unto his own, and his own received him not. Yet were there some of more perceptive conscience and better hearts; and they, be they Jew or Gentile, whose spirits sprung to the divine embrace, were permitted to become, by reflected similitude, the sons of God. — Thus far, that is, to the end of the thirteenth verse, there is no mention of Jesus Christ as an individual: there is only the unembodied personification of the abstract energy of God in the original design, and the newer regeneration of the world. ... In the next verse, however, the heavenly personification is dropped upon the man Jesus; the mystic divine light is permitted to sink into the deeps of his humanity; it vanishes from separate sight; and there comes before us, and henceforth lives within our view throughout the Gospel, the Man of sorrows, the Child of God, with the tears and infirmities of our mortal nature, and the moral perfection of the Divine. “And the Word was made flesh,” &c. — MARTINEAU: Lecture on the Proposition “that Christ is God; being the fifth of a series; pp. 34, 35.
If, in the introduction to his Gospel, John had asserted that Jesus was truly God, he would have proposed to his readers a Messiah whose very nature and properties were totally different from those of the person whom the prophets predicted, and whose advent the Jews eagerly expected. He would also have contradicted the assertions of Moses, of John the harbinger of the Messiah, of Jesus himself, and of his apostles and disciples, that he was a man. John himself, in the same chapter in which he says, “The Word was a god,” has provided ample means of preventing any construction of his language, different from the commonly-received sense of it at that time, and in those parts of the world. When the term QEOS or KURIOS, or any of the Hebrew appellations of the Supreme Being, are applied in Scripture to a magistrate or a prophet, on what ground do we affix a meaning to them different from that which we affix to the same words when applied to the Most High? Is it not on account of the clear and distinct properties of humanity that belong to, and are inseparable from, the magistrate and the prophet? If, then, decisive characters of humanity are annexed to the LOGOS, in the introduction to John's Gospel, and in several other parts of the first chapter, as well as in many other passages of his writings, and in other books of the New Testament, these will be as proper a guide to the interpretation of QEOS in this as in any other parts of Scripture. The rule equally applies to all. . . . . . . From the whole, then, it follows, that the term 0soc, as predicated of the Aoyoc, must be understood in a sense in which it often occurs in Scripture, namely, that of a divinely-commissioned human being, who spake, in the name of God, the truths and precepts which God communicated to him, and who wrought miracles which no one could work unless he were empowered by God.—If any persons think, that the foregoing explanation of the term QEOS be not fully proved to be the true one, still the phrase which we are considering will not convey the idea that the Word was truly God. For, by all fair rules of interpretation, QEOS HN O LOGOS should be explained in a manner similar to that in which other Scripture phrases of the like kind are interpreted. Now, in all cases in which the verb EIMI is used to affirm any thing which implies a contradiction to well-known fact, to reason, to the context, or to the general tenor of Scripture, a figurative sense of it is adopted in preference to the literal meaning. If it be maintained that the apostle John's assertion, QEOS HN O LOGOS, proves the Word, or Jesus Christ, to be truly God, - the affirmation of the apostle Paul, 1 Cor. x. 4, H PETRA DE HN O CRISTOS, equally proves him to be an inanimate rock; and the assertion of Christ, AUTOS ESTIN HLIAS, proves John the Baptist to be really Elias. Paraphrase: Ver. 1. From the commencement of his public life, Jesus was a teacher of righteousness, and a publisher of glad tidings. To this preacher the Most High imparted extraordinary wisdom and power, and the privilege of speaking and acting in his name. As it was on account of similar divine communications that the Supreme Being himself called Moses a god; that Jewish writers called those men gods, to whom the word of God came; that Christ himself countenanced this meaning of the term; and that Isaiah predicted the Messiah by the names Jehovah and God; so, in the same sense, Jesus was a god. 3. All that regeneration of mankind which the gospel produced was effected by his instrumentality; and without this, not any reformation was accomplished by it. 10. He was publicly conversant with men; many were reformed by him; and he imparted the best means of renovating the human race; yet mankind in general did not believe in him. 14. This teacher was a human being, &c. — Abridged from SIMPSON: Essays on the Language of Scripture, vol. ii. pp. 17–19, 22–25, 44–46.
1. In the beginning of this new age, this grand era of the moral world (the apostle appears to me to say), he was the Word, was appointed to be the Revealer of the divine will; and the Word was with God, favoured by his heavenly Father with peculiar intercourse with him, and with express and complete communications respecting that grace and truth which came by him, and the means by which his all-important commission was to be executed; and the Word was God, or, rather, a god, since to him the word of God came, and he was the representative of the Most High. 3. All things relative to the Christian dispensation were done, or executed, through him: aided by divine power, and acting under divine authority, he accomplished the gracious purposes for which he came; and without him was not any thing done that was done: he gave the apostles their commission, and illuminated their minds; he communicated to them the miraculous powers by which they were to diffuse and establish the gospel; he continually directed them in their great work; and it was through his agency that the world was anew created, and Gentiles as well as Jews placed in a state of spiritual privilege, and made heirs of eternal salvation. 10. He was in the world; he dwelt among men, while engaged in executing his important commission; and the world was made, or formed anew, through him: introduced by him into a new state, a state of blessed and sanctifying privilege; and yet the world knew him not, he was despised and rejected of men. 14. And the Word, this illustrious Revealer of the divine Will, though highly exalted by the Father's love and favour, and appointed to high dignity and power, became, or was, flesh: he was “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” We might have expected, that he would be raised above the common lot of humanity; but he was subject to infirmity, distress, and mortality, and exposed to want and suffering; and at last experienced the shame and agony of the cross, – CARPENTER: Unitarianism the Doctrine of the Gospel, pp. 61—60.
The Greek word LOGOS is susceptible of several interpretations, the chief of which are these two, -“reason” and “speech;” ratio and oratio. Were I to desert the beaten track (which I do not think there is here sufficient evidence to warrant), I should prefer the word reason, as suggesting the inward principle or faculty, and not the external enunciation, which may be called word or speech. The passage of Holy Writ referred to is Prov. viii. throughout. What is here termed O LOGOS is there H SOFIA. There is such a coincidence in the things attributed to each, as evidently shows, that both were intended to indicate the same divine personage. The passage in the Proverbs, I own, admits a more familiar explanation, as regarding the happy consequences of that mental quality which we may call true or heavenly wisdom....... 3. “All things were made by it; and without it.”—4. “In it was life.” It is much more suitable to the figurative style here employed, to speak of the word, though denoting a person, as a thing, agreeably to the grammatical idiom, till a direct intimation is made of its personality. This intimation I consider as made, ver. 4, “In it was life.” The way of rendering here adopted, is, as far as I have had occasion to observe, agreeable to the practice of all translators, except the English. But it deserves to be remarked, that every version which preceded the common translation, as far as I have been able to discover, uniformly employed the neuter pronoun it. So it is in that called the Bishop's Bible, and in the Geneva English. Beside, that this method is more agreeable to grammatical propriety, it evidently preserves the allusion better which there is in this passage to the account of the creation given by Moses, &c. — Abridged from Dr. CAMPBELL on the Gospels
The Greek word, which our translation hath rendered by that of word, signifies also reason, intelligence, wisdom. This sense is much better than the other: it is more accommodated to the divine nature, which is purely spiritual, and to which word is not congruous. If God is often represented as speaking, it is nothing else but his wisdom which conceives any design; and the sacred writers borrow this metaphor from men, who manifest their intentions by speech. This being laid down, the design of St. John, in my opinion, is to inform us, that the same wisdom, which formed the creatures with so much skill, hath not shone with less splendour in the creation of the new world....... I shall annex a short paraphrase, that the ideas of St. John may at once be clearly seen: — 1. There is an eternal Reason, a sovereign Wisdom, which hath existed from all ages: this Wisdom hath ever been inseparable from God; or, to speak properly, it is God himself. 2. In the beginning of the world, it was then with God, who never does any thing without consulting it. 3. And he employed it in the creation of the universe. In effect, there is no creature, in which one doth not see some trace of this Wisdom shine; so that, without it, things would never have attained that point of beauty which we admire. 4. Wisdom is the source of life and of true happiness; and not merely this, - it serves, moreover, as a light to conduct us to them. 5. This life especially hath shone forth in our days; but, how capable soever it were of dispelling the shades of ignorance, blind mortals chose rather to wander in error, than follow the counsels of pure and unclouded reason. 14. And if the Divine Wisdom hath appeared in the works of the creation, one may say that it hath no less displayed its splendour under the gospel. It hath rendered itself sensible and palpable in Jesus Christ: by his means it hath never ceased to do good to men. We have been witnesses of the miracles which were effected by this Wisdom, and of the glory with which Jesus Christ was invested; — a glory much greater than what appeared in Moses and the prophets, such as was proper to be the glory of the only-begotten Son of God. — ABAUZIT: Miscellanies, pp. 143, 144, 148, 149.
If we suppose the Word to have been God, personally, in any sense, the most irreconcilable inconsistencies will follow. .... The very idea of God's becoming a man, is totally shocking. Scarcely less so is it, that the Creator of the world should be united, in one person, with a human body and a human soul, and in that condition receive glory from a higher being still. Such difficulties are, to my mind, I confess, totally insuperable. They seem utterly irreconcilable with any clear conception of the nature of either God or man. I can conceive of divine attributes being with God, and constituting God, and being displayed in creation and revelation, and being especially manifested in Jesus Christ, so as to clothe him with glory, and make him to appear to be the peculiar favourite of heaven; but I cannot conceive of a Divine Person to do all this. .... I take the whole passage to mean this: — The word which God spake by Christ, the revelation which he made of himself, through him, is nothing new, but is a part of a series of revelations running back to the very beginning of all things. The same Almighty Power and Perfect Wisdom, which were displayed in the miracles and doctrines of Christ, were first manifested in the works of the physical creation: “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth.” The next manifestation was in the creation of the soul of man, to which he imparted, in a fainter degree than that in which they exist in himself, some of his own attributes: “The inspiration of the Almighty hath given him understanding.” “In him, or rather it, was life; and that life was the light of men. But the light shone in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.” The revelation which God made of himself in the material world, and in the soul of man, was not understood, and the world fell into idolatry. The next revelation that God made of himself was to the Jewish nation, by which he took a particular people, and made them his own, brought them into an especial relation to himself. After a long interval, he visited his own people by another revelation; but they did not recognise him in it. He sent John the Baptist, to announce the coming of his last and greatest revelation to man; and at length, in Christ himself, that Light, which had ever been shining, burst out with greater brilliancy; that Life, which had ever been the source of intellectual energy to men, received a more perfect development; that Word, which had been sounding in the ears of mortals since the beginning of time, from the works of God, from the heavens above and from the earth beneath, received a more full and articulate annunciation. — BURNAP: Expository Lectures on the Doctrine of the Trinity, pp. 54, 55; 61, 62.
It was the apostle's purpose, in the introduction of his Gospel, to declare that Christianity had the same divine origin as the universe itself; that it was to be considered as proceeding from the same power of God. Writing in Asia Minor for readers, by many of whom the term Logos was more familiarly used than any other, to express the attributes of God viewed in relation to his creatures, he adopted this term to convey his meaning, because, from their associations with it, it was fitted particularly to impress and affect their minds; thus connecting the great truth which he taught with their former modes of thinking and speaking. But upon the idea primarily expressed by this term, a new conception — the conception of the proper personality of those attributes — had been superinduced. This doctrine, then, – the doctrine of an hypostatised Logos, it appears to have been his purpose to set aside. He would guard himself, I think, against being understood to countenance it. The Logos, he teaches, was not the agent of God, but God himself. Using the term merely to denote the attributes of God as manifested in his works, he teaches that the operations of the Logos are the operations of God; that all conceived of under that name is to be referred immediately to God; that in speaking of the Logos we speak of God; that “the Logos is God.” .... Adopting this term [Power of God], we may say that the Power of God, personified, is the subject of the introductory verses of his Gospel. It is first said to be God, and afterwards declared to have become a man. It is first regarded in its relation to God in whom it resides, and afterwards in its relation to Jesus through whom it was manifested. Viewed in the former relation, what may be said of the Power of God is true of God: the terms become identical in their purport. Viewed in the latter relation, whatever is true of the Power of God is true of Christ, considered as the minister of God. His words were the words of God; his miracles were performed by the power of God. .... The word SARX, in its primitive meaning flesh, is often used to denote man. When it is said, that the Logos, or the Power of God, became a man, the meaning is, that the Power of God was manifested in and exercised through a man. It is afterward, by a figurative use of language, identified with Christ, in whom it is conceived of as residing.—NORTON: Statement of Reasons, pp. 241–245.
St. John ... carefully warns us against thinking of his personification as otherwise than identical with the Supreme, by saying outright that the Logos is God; and therefore that whatever he may say about the former, is really to be understood as spoken of the latter. The whole proem divides itself into two ideas: that from the Genius or Logos of God have proceeded two sets of divine works;– the material world; and the soul and inspiration of heaven shed upon the world through Christ. His object, I believe, is to link together these two effects as successive and analogous results—physical in one case, spiritual in the other— of the same divine and holy energy. Having warned us, ... that this energy is not really a person distinct from the Supreme, he abandons himself without reserve to the beautiful personification which follows; assuring us that thereby were all things made at first, and thereby were all men being enlightened now; that our very world, which felt that forming hand of old, had not discerned the blessed influence which again descended to regenerate it: ungrateful treatment! as of one who came unto his own, and his own received him not. Yet were there some of more perceptive conscience and better hearts; and they, be they Jew or Gentile, whose spirits sprung to the divine embrace, were permitted to become, by reflected similitude, the sons of God. — Thus far, that is, to the end of the thirteenth verse, there is no mention of Jesus Christ as an individual: there is only the unembodied personification of the abstract energy of God in the original design, and the newer regeneration of the world. ... In the next verse, however, the heavenly personification is dropped upon the man Jesus; the mystic divine light is permitted to sink into the deeps of his humanity; it vanishes from separate sight; and there comes before us, and henceforth lives within our view throughout the Gospel, the Man of sorrows, the Child of God, with the tears and infirmities of our mortal nature, and the moral perfection of the Divine. “And the Word was made flesh,” &c. — MARTINEAU: Lecture on the Proposition “that Christ is God; being the fifth of a series; pp. 34, 35.
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