Born, Not Preexistent

 

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From the REV Commentary:

"The word logos in John 1:1 refers to God’s creative self-expression—His reason, purposes, and plans, especially as they are brought into action. Thus, the logos has been expressed through His creation (Rom. 1:19-20), and Psalm 19 tells us that the heavens declare the glory of God. The logos has also been made known through the spoken word of the prophets and through Scripture, which is the written “Word of God.” Lastly, it has most fully been communicated through His Son (John 1:18; Heb. 1:1-2).

However, when studying John 1:1 and the use of logos in the Bible, and reading what the commentaries, systematic theologies, Bible dictionaries, etc., say about it, we must be very careful to discern theological bias in the information. John describes Jesus as the Son of God, not God himself. However, many commentators are Trinitarian and simply assume that the word logos in John 1:1 refers to Jesus, and then from that assumption ignore the way the Jews and Greeks of John’s time thought about the logos, and give it a meaning it had in later Christian history as the Trinity doctrine developed, and that new meaning is “Jesus Christ.”

For example, Edward Klink III writes: “Certainly the term [logos] might be recognizable [to John’s audience], but its direct connection to Jesus assumes that Jesus, not merely his [John’s] religious-philosophical context, determines its meaning. …John is not relying on a background but on a foreground. For it is Jesus who embodies the “Word” (logos) in the flesh.”b Klink is asserting that logos means Jesus in John 1:1 because later in John the logos became flesh (cf. John 1:14). But that is an unwarranted assumption. There is no historical evidence that the people in Christ’s time ever thought the logos was Jesus. But they did believe that God’s logos was His plans and purposes, and that logos then became flesh in Jesus Christ in much the same way that any plan or purpose that someone has comes into concretion as the person carries it out. In this case, God’s plan and purpose for the Messiah came into concretion with the birth of Jesus.

The renowned Trinitarian scholar J. B. Lightfoot correctly writes that it was Christian teachers who took the word logos and changed it, giving it new definitions, such as a divine Person, and that change occurred in the centuries after John lived.

The word logos then, denoting both “reason” and “speech,” was a philosophical term adopted by Alexandrian Judaism before St. Paul wrote, to express the manifestation of the Unseen God in the creation and government of the World. It included all modes by which God makes Himself known to man. As His reason, it denoted His purpose or design; as His speech, it implied His revelation. Christian teachers, when they adopted this term, exalted and fixed its meaning by attaching to it two precise and definite ideas: (1) “The Word is a Divine Person,” (2) “The Word became incarnate in Jesus Christ.” It is obvious that these two propositions must have altered materially the significance of all the subordinate terms connected with the idea of the logos.c

It is important to note that Lightfoot argues it was “Christian teachers” who attached the idea of a “divine person” to the word logos. It is certainly true that when the Christian church began to say that the word logos was Jesus Christ, the original meaning of John 1:1 was altered substantially. Lightfoot correctly understood that the original meaning of logos was “reason” and “speech,” not “Jesus Christ.” "