In the beginning was the Word.
You have heard that sentence more times than you can count. It is the first line of John’s Gospel. It is the verse that opens the lesson on Christmas Eve in many sanctuaries. It is on the bookmark your aunt gave you in the eighth grade.
You have probably never stopped to ask the question it begs.
Why a Word?
The Son of God could have been named a thousand things. The Light. The Truth. The Image. The Wisdom of God. The Lamb. Each of those names appears in the New Testament. Each carries its own weight. But John, sitting down in his old age to write the most theological of the four Gospels, did not open with “In the beginning was the Light” or “In the beginning was the Truth.” He opened with “In the beginning was the Word.” Out of all the names available to him, he chose this one. The choice tells us something.
It tells us that Christianity is a religion of speech.
The Word
λόγος (logos), pronounced LO-gos. A second-declension masculine noun. The verb in its family is legō — to speak, to say.
If you have heard one piece of pop etymology about a Greek word, you have probably heard this one: logos is where we get our English word logic. That is true, as far as it goes. Our English logic, logical, biology, theology, and a hundred others descend from logos. The word’s family tree is wide.
The trouble with the family tree is that it tells you where a word came from, not what it means. Logos in first-century Greek does not mean “logic.” It does not mean “reason.” It does not mean “the rational principle of the universe.” It means word — the ordinary, everyday Greek word for a word.
That ordinariness is the gift. When John reached for the most theologically loaded vocabulary in his Gospel, he reached for an ordinary word. Not a word reserved for divinity. Not a word he had to invent. Just word. The word for what you do every time you open your mouth. God spoke. The Son is what God said.
Range of Meaning
In its New Testament usage, logos covers a wide field:
- A single word — the basic sense. “For by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.” (Matt 12:37, NET). What comes out of your mouth.
- Speech, discourse, talk — an extended unit of speaking, the content of what is said.
- A statement, declaration, or message — what was announced.
- A reckoning or account, in the bookkeeping sense. “Therefore, each of us will give an account of himself to God” (Rom 14:12, NET). The word reaches into the courtroom and the ledger.
- A reason, a ground, a cause — the basis for something. This is where the family connection to “logic” comes in. The word can name not only what is said but why.
- The gospel message itself. “The word of God continued to spread” (Acts 6:7, NET); “Consequently faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the preached word of Christ” (Rom 10:17, NET). When the apostles say the logos, with the definite article and no further specification, they often mean the gospel.
- In John especially, but also in 1 John and Revelation: the divine Word, the eternal Son. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was fully God.”
The English word word can carry several of these — but in English we usually have to add adjectives to make the sense come out. His word is good (his promise). I’d like a word with you (a conversation). The word from headquarters (the message). The Word of God (the gospel, or the Bible, or Christ, depending on context). The Greeks did it with one word.
When the New Testament uses logos, the context tells you which of these is in play. Sometimes it is the everyday sense. Sometimes it is the gospel message. Sometimes — in the prologue of John, dramatically — it is the eternal Son. The trick is to let context govern, not to import every meaning into every occurrence.
Where You’ll Meet It
Some of the most important New Testament occurrences:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was fully God.” (John 1:1, NET)
This is the verse that gave us the whole conversation about Logos Christology. John opens his Gospel by claiming that the Word — the logos — was God’s eternal companion, was Himself God, and was the agent of all creation. The opening five Greek words are a deliberate echo of Genesis 1:1. John is saying: in the same beginning where God spoke creation into being, the One who was spoken — the spoken Word — was already there.
“Now the Word became flesh and took up residence among us. We saw his glory—the glory of the one and only, full of grace and truth, who came from the Father.” (John 1:14, NET)
The hinge of the Christian faith in one verse. The Logos who was with God in the beginning became sarx — flesh, a real human being — and pitched his tent (literally — the verb is eskēnōsen, from the word for tent) among us. We will come back to sarx in Sarx. What this verse tells us about logos is that the Word is not an abstraction. The Word has a face. The Word grew up, learned a trade, called disciples, ate fish on a beach.
“The word of God continued to spread, the number of disciples in Jerusalem increased greatly, and a large group of priests became obedient to the faith.” (Acts 6:7, NET)
Now we are in the second meaning. The logos of God is the gospel message — the preached announcement of what God has done in Christ. Notice the active verb: the word “increased.” Luke writes about the word the way a botanist writes about a vine. It grows. It spreads. It does things.
“Consequently faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the preached word of Christ.” (Romans 10:17, NET)
The means-of-grace verse. Faith is not produced by spiritual instinct, moral effort, or sincere seeking. Faith comes by hearing the logos. The Word is what creates faith. We will come back to this in the entry on Pistis.
“For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any double-edged sword, piercing even to the point of dividing soul from spirit, and joints from marrow; it is able to judge the desires and thoughts of the heart.” (Hebrews 4:12, NET)
The Word does not sit on a shelf. It is alive. It cuts. It exposes. When Lutherans say the preached Word is a means of grace, this is the kind of verse they have in mind. The logos of God is not information about God; it is God speaking, and God speaking does things.
What Confessional Lutherans Hear
Two things ring in Lutheran ears when we hear logos.
First, the Word is a means of grace. When Lutherans use that phrase, we are not being decorative. We are saying that God has chosen to deliver Christ to us through speaking — through the preached Word, the Word read aloud in worship, the Word spoken in absolution, the Word attached to water in baptism, the Word attached to bread and wine in the Supper. The Word is not the wrapper around the gift. The Word is the vehicle by which God hands the gift over.
This is why, in our liturgies, the reading of Scripture is followed by “This is the Word of the Lord” — said in present tense. It is. Right now. The Word that was preached to first-century congregations in the Roman Empire is the same Word being preached to your congregation in the upper Midwest, and the same Spirit is at work in it. The Augsburg Confession, Article V, puts it as plainly as the Lutherans ever put anything: God has instituted the office of preaching and the sacraments so that the Holy Spirit, where and when He pleases, works faith in those who hear the gospel.
That phrase — where and when He pleases — is important. The Spirit comes through the Word and not apart from the Word. He does not give you private revelations on the side that override the Word. He does not come to you in a dream that contradicts the Word. He comes through the Word — the spoken Word, the written Word, the Word made flesh in Christ and now ministered to us in preaching and sacrament. The external Word — verbum externum in the Confessions — is how the Spirit reaches us. This is the wedge between Lutheran theology and the various flavors of Christianity that locate the Spirit’s work primarily in inner experience.
Second, the Word eternal and the Word preached are the same Word — distinguished but not separated. The Logos who was with God in the beginning is the same one whose voice is heard in the gospel preached this Sunday morning. The preacher does not invent the Word, does not domesticate the Word, does not improve on the Word. The preacher speaks the Word, and when the Word is spoken faithfully, the Word does what the Word does. He is heard. He is present. He works faith.
The pastoral payoff: when you sit through a sermon and your mind drifts and you wonder whether the Word is “doing anything,” the answer is that it is. The Word is at work whether you feel it or not. That is exactly why Lutherans put the weight on the external Word rather than the inner experience: the Word is given to you from outside yourself, and what it does, it does. You do not have to feel it for it to be true. Your job is to keep showing up where the Word is preached. The Word does the rest.
Where People Get It Wrong
Three common ways.
The first is the logos = logic trap. This one comes up in apologetics. “Christianity is the religion of logos — meaning logic, reason, the rational principle of the universe — and therefore Christianity is the only rational faith.” This is the root fallacy in clerical clothing. The English word logic comes from logos; logos in first-century Greek does not mean logic. John was not writing a treatise on epistemology. He was telling us that Jesus is the Word God spoke into the world. The argument from rationality is a fine apologetic argument; it is not what logos in John 1 means.
The second is the John 1 is Stoic philosophy reading. This is a more sophisticated version of the same trap. Greek philosophy — Stoic, Platonic, Philonic — used logos to mean the rational principle that orders the cosmos. Some commentators treat John 1 as if John is borrowing this Greek concept and applying it to Jesus, making the Gospel a fusion of Hebrew faith and Greek philosophy. John may well know the philosophical associations and may even be playing with them. But he is a Jewish Christian reading his own Bible. The “Word” of John 1 is the Word of Genesis 1 — the Word by which God spoke the world into being. It is the Word of the prophets — dabar YHWH, the word of the LORD, the word that goes out and does not return void (Isaiah 55:11). It is the Word the Psalmist hides in his heart. John 1 is Hebrew, with Greek inflections, not Greek with a Hebrew accent.
The third is the loaded reading of every occurrence. Logos shows up some 330 times in the New Testament, and most of those occurrences are ordinary speech: a word, a message, a statement, a saying. Not every logos is the eternal Logos. When Jesus says “for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.” (Matt 12:37, NET), he is talking about your ordinary words — the things you say at the dinner table and in the parking lot. Context governs. Let the verse around the word do its work.
So What
You are about to read a book that takes Greek words seriously. Logos is the right word to start with, because it is the word that tells us why Greek words are worth taking seriously at all.
If God had wanted to deliver Himself to us as a set of moral principles, He could have published a code. If He had wanted to deliver Himself as a system, He could have given us a syllabus. Instead He gave us a Person, and He gave us that Person as a Word. The Son is what God said. And what God said, He went on saying — through prophets, through apostles, through the pages of Scripture, through the preacher who climbs into your pulpit on Sunday, through the spoken absolution after you have confessed, through the words of institution over the bread and the cup.
When you read your Greek New Testament — or when you read your English one, which is a faithful translation of words a Greek-speaking, Spirit-borne first-century church handed down — you are not reading literature. You are reading what God said. And the speaking has not stopped. The same Spirit who breathed out the logos once in writing is still at work in the logos now in preaching.
That is why careful word study matters. Not because Greek is magic. Not because you have to learn Greek to be a real Christian. But because the Word matters, and looking carefully at the words God used is one of the ways the church loves its Word.
The other forty-nine words follow.