![]() The Greek or pre-Christian speculation on the subject is marked by the names of Heraclitus, Plato and the Stoics. The theory of Philo and of the Alexandrian thinkers generally may be regarded as the connecting link between the Greek and the Christian forms of the doctrine. The doctrine may be said to have two stages:Ī Hellenistic and a Hebrew or, more correctly, a pre-Christian and a Christian. ![]() ![]() In this article it will be our aim to trace the evolution of the doctrine from its earliest appearance in Greek philosophy through its Hebrew and Alexandrian phases till it attained its richest expression in the writings of the New Testament, and especially in the Fourth Gospel. The two ideas, thought and speech, are indubitably blended in the term logos and in every employment of the word, in philosophy and Scripture, both notions of thought and its outward expression are intimately connected. The translation "thought" is probably the best equivalent for the Greek term, since it denotes, on the one hand, the faculty of reason, or the thought inwardly conceived in the mind and, on the other hand, the thought outwardly expressed through the vehicle of language. Hence, thought must be eternal as the Deity. It is impossible to imagine a time when God was without thought. Logos signifies in classical Greek both "reason" and "word." Though in Biblical Greek the term is mostly employed in the sense of "word," we cannot properly dissociate the two significations. While widely divergent views as to the Divine manifestation have been conceived, from the dawn of Western speculation, the Greek word logos has been employed with a certain degree of uniformity by a series of thinkers to express and define the nature and mode of God's revelation. To comprehend the relation of the Deity to the world has been the aim of all religious philosophy. The word has a long history, and the evolution of the idea it embodies is really the unfolding of man's conception of God. The doctrine of the Logos has exerted a decisive and far-reaching influence upon speculative and Christian thought. Suggestions of Personal Distinctions in Deity
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