The Hump of the Camel

In the last post I showed how the whole of John’s gospel (and 1 John) weave a network of ideas together to give substance to the theme of his prologue: Jesus as the Logos of God. The conclusion was that for John, Jesus the person should never be divorced from his actions and, particularly, from his teaching. It is all of them together that constitute the logos of God.

Today I want to continue the theme by showing that John’s “logos” extends beyond Jesus’s personal teaching to include that of the prophets before him. The following post will extend that to the apostles after him. John sees (or rather, Jesus teaches) that they are all utterances of the logos –  the former looking forward to the fuller revelation of the Incarnation, of course, and the latter looking back to it, and forward to his second coming. Nevertheless, Jesus’s own logoi show that the Old and New Testaments have the authority of Jesus himself. They form the Christological basis for a doctrine of infallibility, which needs to be nuanced and refined, of course, but which is foundational to historical Christianity. Continue reading →

In my last post I pointed out the many instances of the Greek word “logos” in John’s writings, and showed how they demonstrate that, for John, Jesus and his teaching are virtually one. This is logical if Jesus is indeed God’s Word – that which God speaks. Speech is at the heart of the Incarnation.

In the previous post I drew attention to John’s style of writing, which consists of interconnecting related ideas in a kind of network. This is particularly true of the logos concept. It is wrong to think of logos as purely a technical term, for the idea is also covered by a number of other words and concepts in John. These are so common that the theme of John’s prologue is found to pervade the whole gospel (and the letter of 1 John). Continue reading →

In a previous post  I pointed out that the prologue of John’s gospel introduces the key concept of Jesus Christ as the Logos, or Word, of God, yet after these 18 verses appears to drop the idea altogether. But this is misleading, because John uses the word “logos” some 24 times more in his gospel, and another 6 or so times in the letter of 1 John.

Of these, the majority refer to the idea of teaching, but the most interesting are a few instances where there is some considerable ambiguity about whether Jesus himself is meant by the word. Continue reading →

A brief excursus on John’s style of writing. This is especially obvious from John’s 1st letter. Anyone who has learned, like me, even minimal Greek knows it’s by far the easiest New Testament book to translate. The Greek is simple, the vocabulary limited. A child could do it after half a dozen Greek lessons. Yet once you’ve translated it it is one of the hardest books to understand, especially if you have scientific training. Continue reading →

One of the things that becomes evident when discussing theology with theistic evolutionists (ID isn’t a theological project, so it’s harder to tell) is how seldom one encounters a high view of biblical authority, still less inerrancy, amongst largely evangelical supporters. BioLogos has published a preponderance of articles, with a few notable exceptions, on the errors in Scripture and how they needn’t affect faith. In other words there’s a lot more about detecting what it gets wrong than what it gets right. More significantly the comments of those in the TE camp predominantly range from support for an ill-defined limited infallibility to an assumption that the Bible infallibly teaches that it is not infallible, the opposite view being a nineteenth century invention. There seems much sympathy for concepts not far removed from the old “Christ unites, doctrine divides” dictum. Continue reading →