Logos Bible Quotes

The destiny of the logos was not the printed page. A mirror can only reflect the object; likewise, the purpose of the page was only to reflect the message which is “Christ in you.

Logos (The Biblical Manuscripts/Canon of Scriptures) & Rhema (The Person/Life/Words/Death/Resurrection of Jesus Christ): The 'special' & 'ultimate' revelation of God. Without these revelations God would be unsearchable, unknowable, and inscrutable." ~R. Alan Woods [2013]

Philo believed that when we caught a glimpse of the Logos in creation and the Torah, we were taken beyond the reach of discursive reason to a rapturous recognition that God was ‘higher than a way of thinking, more precious than anything that is merely thought’.

Mithras, who was "Mediator between God and man," [194:9] was called "The Saviour." He was the peculiar god of the Persians, who believed that he had, by his sufferings, worked their salvation, and on this account he was called their Saviour. [194:10] He was also called "The Logos." [194:11]

So it was a bit of shock, years later, when P.T. delivered a sermon, one of his few memorable ones, in which he told us all that the word "Word" was translated from the Greek word *Logos,* which didn't really mean "word" at all, but rather something closer to "plea" or even premise." It was a small betrayal for my little apostle's heart to find out that I had gotten my journal entry wrong. Worse still, I felt then, was the betrayal of language in translation. Why didn't English have a better word than "Word" if "Word" was not precise enough? I started to approach my Bible with suspicion. What else had I missed? Even though I felt ambushed, I did like the ambiguity that the revelation introduced into that verse. In the beginning there was an idea, a premise; there was a question.

Jezus, de Logos, zou de functie van de verwoeste tempel overnemen en de plaats waar de joden de goddelijke aanwezigheid konden ontmoeten[...]. Het jodendom en zijn heiligste symbolen waren vervangen door een triomfantelijk, strijdbaar christendom. Er loopt een spoor van haat door het Nieuwe Testament. Het is niet juist om de christelijke Bijbel te kenschetsen als antisemitisch want de schrijvers waren zelf joden.

In some respects it was quite simple for Jewish thinkers who were intimately familiar with their scriptures to connect them with some of these Stoic and Platonic philosophical ideas. In the Hebrew Bible, God creates all things by speaking a “word”: “And God said, Let there be light. And there was light.” Creation happened by means of God uttering his Logos. The Logos comes from God, and since it is God’s Logos, in a sense it is God. But once he emits it, it stands apart from God as a distinct entity. This entity was sometimes thought of as a person distinct from God. The Logos came to be seen in some Jewish circles as a hypostasis.

Scripture is always, always written by humans from a human perspective. We call it the “word of God,” but the only Word of God unequivocally endorsed in the Bible’s pages is Jesus, the eternal Logos.

Of course, the Bible speaks of many things—for instance, the creation of the world—that for the biblical authors themselves belong to the remote past. But there is undoubtedly much history in the Bible—accounts of events written by contemporaries or near-contemporaries. One is thus led to say that the Bible contains both “myth” and “history.” Yet this distinction is alien to the Bible; it is a special form of the Greek distinction between mythos and logos. From the point of view of the Bible, the “myths” are as true as the “histories”: what Israel “in fact” did or suffered cannot be understood except in the light of the “facts” of Creation and Election. What is now called “historical” are those deeds and speeches that are equally accessible to the believer and to the unbeliever. But from the point of view of the Bible, the unbeliever is the fool who has said in his heart “there is no God”.

It is readily seen that in the formulation of this Logos theology, the Apologists were largely influenced by Greek modes of thought. The question for them was how they could protect the deposit of faith against those who were real heretics while they were themselves so largely controlled in their thinking by false modes of thought. Here were the Gnostics; they thought of God as the featureless beyond. They brought this featureless beyond into contact with the world of space and time by means of a series of impersonal emanations...The apologists, on the other hand, according to the deposit of faith, thought of the creation or emanation of the Logos as a voluntary act on the part of God. But how would they be able to defend either their doctrine of God or their doctrine of the voluntary procession of the Logos from the personal God against the equivalent teachings of the Gnostics so long as they themselves admitted that God needed an intermediary to make contact with man? If they really held to the God of the Bible there was no room for such an intermediary and if they really held to the personality of God and to the exhaustively personal character of his work with respect either to himself or to the universe, then they would have to renounce their rationalistic efforts...The problem of harmonizing the teaching of the Rule of Faith with the speculations of Greek philosophy would therefore, in the nature of the case, tend to become the problem of defending the deposit of faith against the encroachments of this speculation.

distinctions between logos and rhema—logos being the eternal counsel of God and rhema being the Word of God spoken. This citation in Ephesians 6 tells us that the sword of the Spirit is the rhema of God. In other words, it is not the Bible on your bedside table; it is the Word of God operating when you speak it with your mouth.

It is readily seen that in the formulation of this Logos theology, the Apologists were largely influenced by Greek modes of though. The question for them was how they could protect the deposit of faith against those who were real heretics while they were themselves so largely controlled in their thinking by false modes of thought. Here were the Gnostics; they thought of God as the featureless beyond. They brought this featureless beyond into contact with the world of space and time by means of a series of impersonal emanations...The apologists, on the other hand, according to the deposit of faith, thought of the creation or emanation of the Logos as a voluntary act on the part of God. But how would they be able to defend either their doctrine of God or their doctrine of the voluntary procession of the Logos from the personal God against the equivalent teachings of the Gnostics so long as they themselves admitted that God needed an intermediary to make contact with man? If they really held to the God of the Bible there was no room for such an intermediary and if they really held to the personality of God and to the exhaustively personal character of his work with respect either to himself or to the universe, then they would have to renounce their rationalistic efforts...The problem of harmonizing the teaching of the Rule of Faith with the speculations of Greek philosophy would therefore, in the nature of the case, tend to become the problem of defending the deposit of faith against the encroachments of this speculation.

The book of the cosmos (the world, St Augustine says, is a ‘first Bible’) and that of the Scriptures match each other, since they have the same author. Both of them find their full revelation in Christ who, after writing them, made them his body and his face. The incarnate Logos frees the speechless tongue of creation and unites it with the world as logos alogos

The word translated “word” in almost all English versions of John 1 is the Greek logos, a term with a rich and diverse philosophical heritage. The term is common to a number of pre-Socratic Greek philosophers. For Heraclitus (535–475 BC), whose thought only remains known to us in small fragments and is therefore very difficult to reconstruct, it appears that the logos is a principle of transformation that orders the cosmos. Its symbol is ever-changing fire, flickering and consuming ever more material, although, in so far as it never does anything other than change, it remains constant. The term also appears in the fragments that remain from the writing of Parmenides (sixth-fifth century BC), who uses it to mean something like thinking, in opposition to habit and sense experience. Whatever the differences between these uses of the term and its other occurrences in ancient Greek thought, one feature marks each of them as distinct from the Johannine account: in every case but John’s, the logos is impersonal. To

The idea of calling the second person in the Trinity the Logos, or Word [373:3] is an Egyptian feature, and was engrafted into Christianity many centuries after the time of Christ Jesus. [373:4] Apollo, who had his tomb at Delphi in Egypt, was called the Word. [373:5]

While the Bible assuredly insists that man still bears the divine image, although impaired by his fall into sin, it nonetheless stresses God’s ontological as well as moral and noetic otherness; divine revelation is not manipulatable through man’s initiative and mystical techniques, but is mediated everywhere at God’s initiative through the Logos of God. The Bible, moreover, represents this mediated divine disclosure as rational and objective, and not as transcending logical distinctions and the sphere of truth-and-error. That the Logos of God is central to the Godhead is an unyielding scriptural emphasis. While there is a mystery side to God, revelation is mystery dispelled and conveys information about God and his purposes.

The destiny of the Logos was not to be caged in a book or a doctrine but to be documented and unveiled in human life! Human life is the most articulate voice of Scripture. Jesus is God’s language; mankind is his audience (Heb 1:1-3).

Jesus is the crescendo of God’s conversation with humankind; he gives context and content to the authentic thought. Everything that God had in mind for man is voiced in him. Jesus is God’s language. His name declares his mission. As Savior of the world he truly redeemed the image and likeness of the invisible God and made him apparent again in human form (Heb 1:1-3). The destiny of the logos was not the printed page. A mirror can only reflect the object; likewise, the purpose of the page was only to reflect the message which is “Christ in you.” He completes the deepest longing of every human heart. The incarnation is the ultimate translation.

Many Christians, including BioLogos, like to throw out the "you can't take the Bible literally" argument. They think it is the ultimate zinger that will end any debate in their favor. But if we shouldn't take the Bible literally, why should we believe God is real in the literal sense? Perhaps God is a metaphor also. Maybe God is really a metaphor for nature or chance. Heaven forbid! However, BioLogos insists on having it both ways: God is literally true but the Bible is not. That's like saying Mother Goose is literally true but her nursery rhymes are not.

The work of Planck and his intellectual progeny virtually resulted in the discovery of God, and the work of Einstein, the most positive influence on logos since the Logos Himself, showed us that time is illusory, such that death, a result of time, is also not what it seems to be.

In his work on the sinner’s soul, Christ remakes the heart of stone into a heart of flesh, and he opens the sinner’s eyes to the incredible riches of God’s Word. This divine illumination comes from Christ alone as the Logos, or Word. Christ is our all-sufficient Prophet, our teacher, and the self-disclosure of the invisible God (John 8:26; 14:9; 17:8). Christ is the telescope by which we see God in creation, and the clue that leads us through the history of divine providence. Through Christ the Bible is applied to the hearts and lives of Christians.

This hexagonal shape is even incorporated into Aldean’s new logo; just look at his ‘award winning’ stage-lighting featuring this ‘eye of saturn’ (image), which made for the perfect backdrop for a mass-human-sacrifice. Aldean’s logo—featured in the last image—boasts a single hexagram which is accentuated by the outline of three more hexagrams.

As for Holy Scripture, the Bible was the Logos in the truest sense, the Word of God set forth “in order that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ,” John the Evangelist wrote. “So believing, you will have life in His name”—along with that final wisdom generations of philosophers had sought in vain.18 For the Lord’s message was not just for the lovers of wisdom, but for all mankind. Christianity put what had been the privilege of the few within the grasp of everyone, even those who lived beyond the pale of empire. “Thanks to the Logos, the whole world is now Greece and Rome.”19

The destiny of the logos was not the printed page.

And this mother of all churches was dedicated to Sophia, Holy Wisdom. The word sophia in Greek originally meant a kind of practical skill. Characters in Homer were described as sophos – wise – if they could tame a horse, or build a boat. This sense continues into late antiquity, personified as Lady Wisdom. Not only does Lady Wisdom allow a mystical, distinctly sensuous appreciation of the world and its mysteries; she encourages a foot-forward, practical engagement with it. This is the wisdom of the streets and of women, not just of men in their study halls. Sophia appears as a fleeting character in the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament, as well as in numerous popular religious writings. Lady Wisdom is more frequently found in the Apocrypha – religious works that were often believed to contain inconvenient truths and so were exiled from canonical texts. For many Christians Sophia was understood to be a kind of sublime force which had birthed Jesus himself. Sophia might not have ended up in the canon, but she was a popular and populist notion in both antiquity and the medieval world. Our word wisdom and Sophia share a common, prehistoric sense – the Proto-Indo-European root suggests a clear-sighted understanding of the world. The Sophia church was also dedicated to the Logos – the Word – the manifest and recondite Wisdom of God. So this great building was made up not just of bricks and mortar but of an idea – an imaginative understanding of the eternal power of both masculine and feminine ways of being wise, of the possibilities of negotiating the world with both mind and mystery. It is a remarkable statement from a building at the heart of the city that considered itself the heart of the world. In the Hebrew Bible Sophia’s equivalent Hokhma is described in Proverbs 8 as being ‘better than rubies, and all the things that may be desired . . . I am understanding . . . set up from everlasting, from the beginning . . . whoso findeth me findeth life’. The building of Haghia Sophia was not just a placatory offering to the divine; it was an answer.

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.

Samuel Gregg: Certainly, Smith notes, Einstein was right to claim that the theories designed by humans are important tools for comprehending reality. Yet before there is theory, Smith adds, there is thought and reason, a logical sequence that, he says, finds it parallel in the opening verse of the gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word [Logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (1:1 KJV).