Logos

Logos is a Greek word for "word," "reason" or "account," and the Christian doctrine of the Logos is the identification, in the prologue of John's Gospel, of that Word with the eternal Son who becomes incarnate in Jesus: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God ... and the Word became flesh" (John 1:1-14).

The term arrived carrying a long philosophical history. Heraclitus had used logos for the rational principle ordering the cosmos; the Stoics developed it into an immanent divine reason pervading all things. In the Hellenistic-Jewish world, Philo of Alexandria fused this with the creative Word of Genesis and the personified Wisdom of the Hebrew scriptures, making the Logos a mediating figure between the transcendent God and the world. John's prologue takes up this freighted word and does something none of the sources had done: it identifies the Logos not with a principle or an intermediary but with a person, who was God, was with God, and entered history as a particular man.

Logos theology became the main bridge by which the second-century church explained Christ to an educated pagan world. The Apologists, above all Justin Martyr, argued that the same divine Word that became flesh in Christ had scattered "seeds of the Word" (logos spermatikos) among the philosophers, so that whatever Socrates or Heraclitus grasped of the truth they grasped through him. This was a generous account of pagan wisdom, and it gave Christianity a way to claim the philosophical tradition rather than simply oppose it.

It also carried a risk the tradition later had to correct. The early Logos theologians tended to describe the Word as in some sense generated for the work of creation, and therefore as ranking below the Father, a subordinationist tendency that, pressed further, fed the Arian claim that the Son was a creature. The resolution of the fourth century, at Nicaea and after, kept the Logos language of John but insisted the Word is eternal and fully God, "begotten, not made." The doctrine of the Logos thus sits at the junction of Christianity and Greek philosophy, and its history is the story of borrowing a philosophical term and then disciplining it.