Intro: Logos in the Gospel of John
Hello, I’m going to be talking about Logos from John today. It can be said that logos is one of the concepts of Greek philosophy, one of Heraclitus’s ideas. By explaining the Logos, a concept of Greek philosophy, John begins the story of Jesus, who is a living word, in John through a description of Jesus.
Reverend Campbell G. Morgan explains John 1:1 as follows.
Was the Word in the beginning? Words are wisdom on the premise that they exist. “The word was with God.” Here, wisdom wears the clothes of character. If you can use that word, Think not of yourself, but of an infinite person, if you can use that word. I think that personality in the human realm is limited: “the Word is God,” or in Greek, “God is the Word,” which means that the essence of wisdom is the essence of all wisdom
The background of Logos
The Gospel of John has a Jewish and Greek background. John is a book that reinterprets the gospel from a Jewish background from a Greek point of view. It proclaims the gospel of Christ to intellectuals with a Greek thinking structure.
Verse 1:18, the beginning of the Gospel of John, is intended to use the concept of Logos to give the readers of the Greek intellectuals orientation to the upcoming Gospel of John.
The Greek word Logos originally came from the verb legein, which means ‘gather’, ‘count’, and ‘speak’. It has various meanings from the basic meaning of calculation to ratio, relationship reasoning, conceptual thinking, method, explanation, narrative, and so on.
In Latin, ratio has a similar meaning to logos. In addition to instructing humans on the right path to the truth, logos is also a measure of ethical behavior.
The event of Jesus Christ, described in Chapters 2 through 20, is to help us understand that the eternal divine logo is an event of revelation and salvation of God in the flesh. The Logos of the Gospel of John seems to speak only of Hellas, but it is actually an Old Testament and Jewish concept.
In other words, Logos in John refers to the word of God and the wisdom of God in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, the Word of God was a means of creation, revelation and salvation.
Chapter 8 of Proverbs, a wisdom text, says that God created the world through his wisdom. Therefore, this world represents God’s wisdom. Jewish theology embodies the word and wisdom of God.
Jewish theology, before and after the New Testament, gradually developed binitarianism for the theological theory of transcendence.
This theological theory is an expression of the inherent nature of God by using the concepts of God’s Word and wisdom in the Old Testament and Jewish theology.
It sets the words of God and his son, or the wisdom of God and his daughter. God’s word and wisdom do God’s work as God’s agent. Then through theology and philosophy, I will explain Logos in John.
Logos In Gospel
According to the Greeks, what does the Greek logo mean? It refers to an abstract notion that lies behind every specific object in a concrete word that refers to every area of thought.
Logos are a revelation of God, a word that represents God, which guides man to wisdom, sometimes forces him, and heals the weak.
As the commandment of God for man, Logos is the right way, and it is a natural law as opposed to the law in people’s customs.
Logos, as symbols of God, also have their own images in humans. In this sense, man was created in the image of God. Therefore, Logos is the fundamental framework and operation principle of God’s creation of the world.
Humans are rational as long as humans have participated in God’s reason. Human reason can be considered a symbol of God’s reason in this context.
However, unlike God’s reason, human reason is incomplete, and in that sense, God’s reason and human reason are qualitatively different.
Nevertheless, humans can reach their full potential with the grace of God by walking along God’s path of reason with the power of reason that they are assigned to.
