![]() ![]() ![]() Paul utilized these ideas in talking about Christ: We can start to see how New Testament authors like St. It connects our bodies and souls as well as ourselves with the created order. And this includes not just inanimate objects like the solar system, but our own bodies and souls. It is the “glue” that holds the created order together. In addition to being creator, in the vein of Heraclitus and the Stoics, the logos is the ordering and governing principle of the universe. Philo had many names for the logos, two of which were “image” and “sight of God.” This was Philo’s way of saying that the logos was as close to God as possible, being like Him in all ways, but yet being distinct. 6 So the Logos is at the same time creature and creator. “ For the Father of the universe has caused him to spring up as the eldest son, whom, in another passage, he calls the first-born and he who is thus born, imitating the ways of his father, has formed such and such species, looking to his archetypal patterns.” 5 ( Conf. 63)Ī confusing point in all of this is that eventually, Philo equates the Logos with the creative power itself. Philo stated that the Logos was the first begotten Son of the uncreated Father: Philo now applies the same to the concept of logos. In post 36, I mentioned how the Stoics developed the concept of “ eternal generation” and applied it to creation. This is obviously a paradox that the logos could be, at the same time, both first born and eternal. But at the same time, since logos was synonymous with God’s transcendent eternal thought, then its generation was eternal. ![]() The Logos as the First Born Son of GodĪccording to Philo, the logos had an origin. For Philo, then, the eternal Logos is one and the same with God’s Word. The logos then becomes a manifestation of God’s thinking-acting. Both the Hebrew Word and Greek Logos represented God’s ideas as well as His actions in creation. 3 It is easy to see parallelism between God’s Word and the Greek Logos. In the same way, for the Hebrews, God’s utterance or His Word was a part of His inscrutable essence, but when He spoke, His Word affected creation itself, even bringing it into existence (Genesis 1) or “breaking to pieces the cedars of Lebanon” (Psalm 29). There was no such thing as a word that was not accompanied by action unless it were a “stillborn” word. In post 20 on Abraham, I mentioned that to the Hebrews, words and actions were synonymous. Philo saw a parallel between this purely Greek concept and the Hebrew idea of God’s Word or utterance as found in the Hebrew Scriptures. In the previous post, I mentioned that the logos represented both the idea of God’s inscrutable essence – His divine mind – and the manifestation of God’s existence in creation. ![]() In order to bridge the Hebrew and Greek world, he introduced the Greek concept of logos conceived by Heraclitus and the Stoics into Judaism. 2 And his logos was the intermediary between the two. Philo of Alexandria’s Concept of Logos and God’s Wordīy attempting to bridge Hebrew and Greek thinking, Philo laid the foundation for Christian theology and philosophy. Koine Greek reflected God – it was at the same time a transcendent and an immanent language. But at the same time, the same philosophical terms found in classical Greek were also found in Koine Greek. 1 It replaced the older Attic Greek or Classical Greek and was spoken widely throughout the world. Koine (κοινή) Greek was “street Greek,” the parlance of the common person. Paradoxically, the type of Greek in which the New Testament was written was Koine Greek. And thus it leant itself to eventually being used by the Church fathers to develop Christian theology. It came loaded with philosophical terms and ideas that the Greeks had been developing for over 400 years. It is no accident that the New Testament was written in Greek. (Please see the previous post as background for this one.) Greek as the Bridge Between Judaism and Christianity This made the idea of the logos so significant that, I would argue, it was the only word John could have used in chapter 1 of his Gospel. In this post, I will discuss how Philo of Alexandria put Hebrew flesh and bone on the Greek abstract concept of logos. ![]()
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