/christian/ - Christian Discussion and Fellowship

The three persons of the Trinity are

- The Father

- The Son, aka the Logos, aka the uncreated Wisdom of God, aka the Christ

- The Holy Spirit

>>725611

The Logos (in English, the Word) eternally proceeds from the Father, and all things were created through him. The Word is the Son. John 1 contains a basic explanation on the word/logos

https://christiananswers.net/bible/john1.html

yeah, OP - good question

and in the opening of the Gospel of John we see the Word depicted as being with God and also being God

… and this same Word is then shown to take on flesh and becomes the man, Christ Jesus

>>725614

The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father eternally. The Logos/Son is begotten of the Father.

>1 In the origin there was the Logos, and the Logos was present with GOD, and the Logos was god;

>2 This one was present with GOD in the origin.

>3 All things came to be through him, and without him came to be not a single thing that has come to be.

>4 In him was life, and this life was the light of men.

>5 And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not conquer it.

>6 There came a man, sent by GOD, whose name was John;

>7 This man came in witness, that he might testify about the light, so that through him all might have faith—

>8 But only that he might testify about the light; he was not that light.

>9 It was the true light, which illuminates everyone, that was coming into the cosmos.

>10 He was in the cosmos, and through him the cosmos came to be, and the cosmos did not recognize him.

>11 He came to those things that were his own, and they who were his own did not accept him.

>12 But as many as did accept him, to them he gave the power to become GOD’s children—to those having faith in his name,

>13 Those born not from blood, nor from a man’s desire, but of GOD.

>14 And the Logos became flesh and pitched a tent among us, and we saw his glory, glory as of the Father’s only one, full of grace and truth.

>15 John testifies concerning him and has cried out, saying, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who is coming after me has surpassed me, for he was before me.’”

>16 For we all have received from his fullness, and grace upon grace;

>17 Because the Law was given through Moses, the grace and the truth came through Jesus the Anointed.

>18 No one has ever seen GOD; the one who is uniquely god, who is in the Father’s breast, that one has declared him.

>>725727

To understand my translation of the first eighteen verses of the Gospel, the reader should refer to “A Note on the Prologue of John’s Gospel” in my postscript to this volume. Here in the Gospel’s prologue, as well as in the closing verses of chapter twenty below, I adopt the typographical convention of the capital G followed by small capitals to indicate where the Greek speaks of ὁ θεός (ho theos), which clearly means God in the fullest and most unequivocal sense, and I use one capital letter followed by two lowercase letters to indicate where the Greek speaks only of θεός (theos) without the article; but, to make the matter more confusing, I have indicated three uses of the word without article (vv. 6, 12, and 13), all concerning the relation between the divine and the created, in all small capitals, to indicate that it is not clear in these instances whether the distinction in forms is still operative, and whether the inarticular form of the noun is being used simply of God as related to creatures through his Logos. And then, in v. 18, I assume the first use of the inarticular form of theos still refers to God in the fullest sense, God the Father, though again the clause in question concerns the relation of creatures to the divine.

>>725728

There may perhaps be no passage in the New Testament more resistant to simple translation into another tongue than the first eighteen verses—the prologue—of the Gospel of John. Whether it was written by the same author as most of the rest of the text (and there is cause for some slight doubt on that score), it very elegantly proposes a theology of the person of Christ that seems to subtend the entire book, and that perhaps reaches its most perfect expression in its twentieth chapter. But it also, intentionally in all likelihood, leaves certain aspects of that theology open to question, almost as if inviting the reader to venture ever deeper into the text in order to find the proper answers. Yet many of these fruitful ambiguities are simply invisible anywhere except in the Greek of the original, and even there are discernible in only the most elusive and tantalizing ways. Take, for example, the standard rendering of just the first three verses. In Greek, they read, 1Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος· 2οὗτος ἦν ἐν ἀρχῇ πρὸς τὸν θεόν· 3πάντα δι᾽ αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο, καὶ χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἓν ὃ γέγονεν· (1En archēi ēn ho logos, kai ho logos ēn pros ton theon, kai theos ēn ho logos; 2houtos ēn en archēi pros ton theon; 3panta di’ avtou egeneto, kai chōris avtou egeneto oude hen ho gegonen.) I am aware of no respectable English translation in which these verses do not appear in more or less the same form they are given in the King James Version: “1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2The same was in the beginning with God. 3All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.” Read thus, the Gospel begins with an enigmatic name for Christ, asserts that he was “with God” in the beginning, and then unambiguously goes on to identify him both as “God” and as the creator of all things. Apart from that curiously bland and impenetrable designation “the Word,” the whole passage looks like a fairly straightforward statement of Trinitarian dogma (or at least two-thirds of it), of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan variety. The average reader would never guess that, in the fourth century, those same verses were employed by all parties in the Trinitarian debates in support of very disparate positions, or that Arians and Eunomians and other opponents of the Nicene settlement interpreted them as evidence against the coequality of God the Father and the divine Son.

>>725729

The truth is that, in Greek, and in the context of late antique Hellenistic metaphysics, the language of the Gospel’s prologue is nowhere near so lucid and unequivocal as the translations make it seem. For one thing, the term logos really had, by the time the Gospel was written, acquired a metaphysical significance that “Word” cannot possibly convey; and in places like Alexandria it had acquired a very particular religious significance as well. For the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo, for instance, it referred to a kind of “secondary divinity,” a mediating principle standing between God the Most High and creation. In late antiquity it was assumed widely, in pagan, Jewish, and Christian circles, that God in his full transcendence did not come into direct contact with the world of limited and mutable things, and so had expressed himself in a subordinate and economically “reduced” form “through whom” (δι᾽ αὐτοῦ [di’ avtou]) he created and governed the world. It was this Logos that many Jews and Christians believed to be the subject of all the divine theophanies of Hebrew scripture. Many of the early Christian apologists thought of God’s Logos as having been generated just prior to creation, in order to act as God’s artisan of, and archregent in, the created order. Moreover, the Greek of John’s prologue may reflect what was, at the time of its composition, a standard semantic distinction between the articular and inarticular (or arthrous and anarthrous) forms of the word theos: the former, ὁ θεός (ho theos) (as in πρὸς τὸν θεόν [pros ton theon], where the accusative form of article and noun follow the preposition), was generally used to refer to God in the fullest and most proper sense: God Most High, the transcendent One; the latter, however, θεός (theos) (as in καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος [kai theos ēn ho logos]), could be used of any divine being, however finite: a god or a derivative divine agency, say, or even a divinized mortal. And so early theologians differed greatly in their interpretation of that very small but very significantly absent monosyllable. Now it may be that the article is omitted in the latter case simply because the word theos functions as a predicate there, and typically in Greek the predicate would need no article. Yet the syntax is ambiguous as regards which substantive should be regarded as the subject and which the predicate; though Greek is an inflected language, and hence more syntactically malleable than modern Western tongues, the order of words is not a matter of complete indifference; and one might even translate καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος as “and [this] god was the Logos.” But the issue becomes at once both clearer and more inadjudicable at verse 18, where again the designation of the Son is theos without the article, and there the word is unquestionably the subject of the sentence. Mind you, in the first chapter of John there are also other instances of the inarticular form where it is not clear whether the reference is the Father, the Son, or somehow both at once in an intentionally indeterminate way (as though, perhaps, the distinction of articular from inarticular forms is necessary in regard to the inner divine life, but not when speaking of the relation of the divine to the created realm). But, in all subsequent verses and chapters, God in his full transcendence is always ho theos; and the crucial importance of the difference between this and the inarticular theos is especially evident at 10:34–36. Most important of all, this distinction imbues the conclusion of the twentieth chapter with a remarkable theological significance, for it is there that Christ, now risen from the dead, is explicitly addressed as ho theos (by the Apostle Thomas).

>>725730

Even this startling profession, admittedly, left considerable room for argument in the early centuries as to whether the fully divine designation was something conferred upon Christ only after the resurrection, and then perhaps only honorifically, or whether instead it was an eternal truth about Christ that had been made manifest by the resurrection. In the end, the Nicene settlement was reached only as a result of a long and difficult debate on the whole testimony of scripture and on the implications of the Christian understanding of salvation in Christ (not to mention a soupçon of imperial pressure).

Anyway, my point is not that there is anything amiss in the theology of Nicaea, or that the original Greek text calls it into question, but only that standard translations make it impossible for readers who know neither Greek nor the history of late antique metaphysics and theology to understand either what the original text says or what it does not say. Not that there is any perfectly satisfactory way of representing the text’s obscurities in English, since we do not distinguish between articular and inarticular forms in the same way; rather, we have to rely on orthography and typography, using the difference between an uppercase or lowercase g to indicate the distinction between God and [a] god. This, hesitantly, is how I deal with the distinction in my translation of the Gospel’s prologue, and I believe one must employ some such device: it seems to me that the withholding of the full revelation of Christ as ho theos, God in the fullest sense, until the Apostle Thomas confesses him as such in the light of Easter, must be seen as an intentional authorial tactic. Some other scholars have chosen to render the inarticular form of theos as “a divine being,” but this seems wrong to me on two counts: first, if that were all the evangelist were saying, he could have used the perfectly serviceable Greek word theios; and, second, the text of the Gospel clearly means to assert some kind of continuity of identity between God the Father and his Son the Logos, not merely some sort of association between “God proper” and “a god.” Here, I take it, one may regard chapter twenty as providing the ultimate interpretation of chapter one, and allow one’s translation to reflect that.

>>725728

>God in the fullest sense, God the Father

Isn't that a heresy, i.e. identifying God the Father with the essence, making God the Father somehow more God than the other persons of the Trinity?

>>725670

>The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father *and the Son* eternally.

ftfy lol

>>725864

ty

>>725730

BUILD THAT WALL

>>725732

Thanks for this. It's a little tough to follow though.