"There are an enormous number of people--I am one of them--whose native religion, for better or worse, is Christianity. We were born to it; we begin to learn about it before we become conscious. It is, whatever we think of it, an intimate belonging of our being; it informs our consciousness, our language, and our dreams."
~Wendell Berry, "Christianity and the Survival of Creation" (from Sex, Economy, Freedom, & Community: Eight Essays)
"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."
~C.S. Lewis, "Is Theology Poetry?"
The other night, I sat through an extremely confusing rhetoric and composition class, and basically came out of it having learned one thing: that the Greek Word logos--while it's often translated as word (or logic) really goes deeper than those words, potentially to the English word "worldview," or how we see the world. Worldviews are meta-narratives that explain everything else. A lens. A paradigm. The bias of our logic.
I still haven't figured out how that fit into our class's context, but it did force my mind to wander to the Gospel of John, and more specifically to its first book. The author begins with this beautiful, intriguing, and also confusing opening:
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In Him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it" (that's verses 1-5 from the New International Version, which I don't recommend).
If you haven't figured it out, "Word" was actually the word logos. Now the word (no pun intended) has traditionally been interpreted (or at least in my life's experiences it has) as a symbol for Jesus, for obvious reasons. It is even one of the passages Trinitarians point to as evidence.
And while I don't discount that interpretation, my revelation in class added to it, I think. I don't doubt that the author had Jesus in mind, but what do we do with this logos word being used?
My theory is this: John, whoever he was, was saying something about Jesus as worldview, as explanation. Jesus as being the crux of history who should forever "bias" the way we interpret things. Not in a bad or crazy way; we don't turn our brain off. But we all have a worldview (or several competing ones, in some instances), and what better source of our limited understanding than this man-God, Jesus?
I'm no Biblical scholar, and maybe some of my friends could give us a better exegesis of this passage, but I have to think that John was bringing Jesus together with this word for some pretty intentional reasons.
3 comments:
I am not a Biblical Scholar either but a Pastor/Practioner so my bias is to always move towards ministry applications.
For me this is John looking at the Synoptics (first three Gospels) and realizing that people from Greek backgrounds wouldn't connect with the Jewish lineage of Matthew or the Nativity story of two poor Jews in Luke 1-2. So he wrote to them using their language.
As I understand it Logos was a philosophical "catch-all" that could be used to explain and understand much of the world. (I realize how simplistic that is)
Therefore tying Jesus to this all-defining concept was a way to speak their language for ministry.
Much how Paul spoke in Athens to the philosophers at Mars Hill.
If I had to summarize my entire sermon, I think John's point was this: "In the beginning was the meaning of life, and that life was and is Jesus."
Philosophically speaking, "logos" has many meanings, especially with certain traditions. The more common, and probably most influential on NT writers, was the Stoic meaning which, more or less, meant something along the lines of a "rule or governing principle for all of nature."
It is difficult to say what the purpose of John's use of "logos" was in his gospel. It could have been a refutation of the early Docetic heresy which claimed that Christ only appeared as human. However--the notion that the "logos became flesh" would have startled and may have even turned off many people. In other words, "logos" for Stoics, or other Greeks, governed nature but was not an actual part of nature. As such, some have claimed that John perhaps supported the Docetic heresy about Christ since he used a word that many did not associate with human nature.
Whatever John was trying to do, it is clear that in the Christian tradition "logos" pertained to who Christ was/is as well as what the church is to proclaim. So, in essence, "logos" could apply both to Christ Himself and the words that the church says about Him.
(This, btw, is why I believe modern Evangelicals have elevated the status of the Bible to one equal with Christ--something I believe is tragic and deficient).
Concerning "logos" as a worldview, I would want to caution using it to mean "this is how I view things" because I think, traditionally speaking, it means something akin to "I view things this way because I am in tune with the logos".
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