Copyright © 2020, Bible Study Tools. What is meant is that the Word shared the nature and being of God, or (to use a piece of modern jargon) was an extension of the personality of God. James White is the director of Alpha and Omega Ministries, a Christian apologetics organization based in Phoenix, Arizona.
All things came into being by Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being…And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth… No man has seen God at any time; the only begotten God, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him. And is so called from his nature, being begotten of the Father; for as the word, whether silent or expressed, is the birth of the mind, the image of it, equal to it, and distinct from it; so Christ is the only begotten of the Father, the express image of his person, in all things equal to him, and a distinct person from him: and he may be so called, from some action, or actions, said of him, or ascribed to him; as that he spoke for, and on the behalf of the elect of God, in the eternal council and covenant of grace and peace; and spoke all things out of nothing, in creation; for with regard to those words so often mentioned in the history of the creation, and God said, may Jehovah the Son be called the word; also he was spoken of as the promised Messiah, throughout the whole Old Testament dispensation; and is the interpreter of his Father's mind, as he was in Eden's garden, as well as in the days of his flesh; and now speaks in heaven for the saints.
2) If one is to dogmatically assert that any anarthrous noun must be indefinite and translated with an indefinite article, one must be able to do the same with the 282 other times theos appears anarthrously. What does John 1:1 mean? The following article was originally an information sheet that we began distributing around 1985, Audiobooks for The Forgotten Trinity and What Every Christian Needs to Know About the Qur’an, A Ton of Topics on Tuesday (Except it is Thursday), Swimming the Tiber, Hosea 11:1 in the LXX, Frank Turek on Molinism, Son of God, Lord of Glory – The Biblical Doctrine of the Deity of Christ, Guessing About God: Mormonism’s Inability to Resist the Onslaught of Modernistic Skepticism (Part 3), Quick Report on Australia/New Zealand then Open Phones, Seb Goldswain, Big Brother Announces His Rulership, Leighton Flowers Goes Full-On Pelagian, The Difference in Jesus’ Divine Role Does NOT Indicate Inferiority of Nature. We'll send you an email with steps on how to reset your password. Some scholars see the anarthrous theos as emphasizing the nature of the Word, and all agree that it is not simply an adjectival type of description, saying that Christ is merely a “god-like one.” A more recent authors work (March 1973) bears on this issue as well.
This is right in line with what Robertson said – that the Logos is not all of God, and that you cannot say “the God was the Logos.” The very context (kai ho logos en pros ton theon) demonstrates this fully. ho logos sarx egeneto (John 1:14). John avoids confusion by telling us that the Word was with God, and the Word was God. No matter how far back we may try to push our imagination, we can never reach a point at which we could say of the Divine Word, as Arius did, “There was once when he was not”.11. Thus in the Trinity we see personal fellowship on an equality.4.
Considering the whole context of the prologue, many have identified this beginning as the same beginning mentioned in Genesis 1:1. And the Word was in fellowship with God the Father. 3) That the article before logos serves to point out the subject of the clause. The subject is made plain by the article (ho logos) and the predicate without it (theos) just as in John 4:24 pneuma ho theos can only mean “God is spirit,” not “spirit is God.” So in 1 John 4:16 ho theos agape estin can only mean “God is love,” not “love is God” as a so-called Christian scientist would confusedly say.
John would have us realize that what the Word was in eternity was not merely God’s coeternal fellow, but the eternal God’s self.3. Contact. There is but one eternal God; this eternal God, the Word is; in whatever sense we may distinguish Him from the God whom He is “with,” He is yet not another than this God, but Himself is this God. The authoritative reference source, Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, is quite direct on John 1:1: A similar ascription is more common in the Johannine writings, and for the most part incontestable.
En arche en ho logos, kai ho logos en pros ton theon, kai theos en ho logos. There is simply nothing that is existent anywhere that was not created by the Word. By exact and careful language John denied Sabellianism by not saying ho theos en ho logos. We'll send you an email with steps on how to reset your password.