As for the Bible, Ihave you never run across the idea that Jesus Christ, the Bible, and the created realm are all three revelations and incarnations of the second person of the Trinity?

I’m just going from what I remember from my philosphy course. Socates was big into ideals and the ideal of good was what he refered to as Logos. It is almost another word for God. In the socratic sense I guess you could say it was God. But then Soctates was condemed by the Greek authorities for teaching the young not to believe in their gods. However his conception of Logos is closer, I think to what we in the west now consider to be God. I agree it is releated to the word logic, but given the use of it by philosophers at the time I think it can be seen in other lights. To be honest I don’t know that the Gospel of John was first written in Greek or not. But I suspect whoever wrote Logos was meaning something close to God. Heraclitus also wrote a lot about the Logos and in terms that connoted God or the first source of the Universe. I have a Greek friend and I asked him if logos meant the good in a common sense and he said that it did.

I suppose you are right and there are other meanings for it, even in classical use. The sophists used it to mean discourse. But then I don’t really like the sophists myself. However if I see logos as the Socratic ideal of good, then I can see christ as the logos made flesh and it makes sense to me. To say that he was the bible made flesh makes very little sense to me at all.

To me the logos is the ideal of good, or in a more common sense simply “the good.” I don’t see how that has anything to do with the bible, which, while made up of words and seen by some as “the word of God” is completely different from the classical sense and use of Logos.

If I get a chance I’ll take a look at that book. Thanks for the reference.

I’m going to assume that your question to me was rhetorical.

As for #9, if the Bible is, in any sense, the Word of God, in what sense is it not also the Logos?

By the way, you might enjoy Dorothy L. Sayer’s portrayal of the Trinity in “Mind of the Maker”. She has an interesting take on Jesus as Logos.

Thanks for your lengthy response. It gave me something to think about. I agree there are all of these different faces of God in the Bible as you have said. I have read the entire Bible and I used to read the new testament quite frequently. So I can relate to what you are saying and that, combined with a number of other threads that I am reading on this site it giving me a new perspective on things.

One point I can make however, is something I learned from an ancient philosophy instructor. The passage were it says Jesus is the word made flesh, is a funny translation of the orginial Greek. The original Greek word that was translated as word, is Logos. That is the thinking reasoning good, or just the good. Socrates was really into the Logos. So, I don’t think the bible is saying that Jesus was the bible made flesh, whatever that may mean, but the Logos made flesh. The Gospel of John is somewhat unique in that it consistently makes the case that Jesus was the son of God. The other three gospels tend to hedge the point. I just nociced this recently however. Again, thanks for your post and thanks for creating this site.

Shaodwfx