The Logos (Biblical Analysis #1)

"In the beginning, there was the Word
And the Word was with God
And the Word was God."

John 1:1

Because they're so cryptic, most people glance over these words without a second thought, including theologians whose very job it is to understand these texts. However, properly understood, these three lines contain one of the most powerful messages of theological literature.

What is the Word, and why is it capitalized here, and never again anywhere else?

In order to understand this verse, we have to think like the people who wrote it. Imagine preliterate humanity. Or better yet, spend a day with a preschool child. Without full mastery of language, their world is a mysterious and incomprehensible place. To a preliterate child, life is a blur of sensation, emotion, sound and light. That's why, upon discovery of language, children are desperate to know the words for every new object they see. So they can categorize these perceptions, and thus understand them.

When we learn the word for something we acquire power over it, in a very real sense. This is because when we give an object a name, we can highlight it from the murky, indistinct background of our experience, and can thus interact with, and manipulate it. This is why we say we 'grasp' a concept, when we mean we understand it. To grasp something is to hold it, and holding an object is one short step away from using it.

But language does more than just give us the ability to use an object. It seems to create the object itself. Through language, we can decide what something is by virtue of what it isn't.

For example, we learn to apply the word 'cat' to a particular sensory experience, thus distinguishing it from the panoply of other percepts we might encounter. The word 'cat' then, is a box which excludes everything but a very specific pattern to us. Our senses are exclusionary too. We can only perceive a very narrow band of light waves, sound waves, tactile sensations, and the like. Anything beyond those ranges is then excluded from our perception.

But by excluding, we also create. Just like by excluding patterns like dog, stove, television, grass, ect, we 'create' cats. They manifest in our experience as a result of us linguistically highlighting them. Thus in the Bible, the power to manifest the world from the obscure, cloudy potential is associated with the Word or Logos, and the Word is then associated with the divine.

"In the beginning, there was the Word" that power rests at the beginning of all time, or more aptly put, outside of it.

"And the Word was with God" here is the implication that at some point the power of the Word will not be with God, at least not exclusively.

"And the Word was God" again, reiterating that the power of the Logos is to be revered as the highest ideal, after all, it created the universe. (At least, the universe we know).

Ah, and now might be an interesting time to mention that no other animals seem capable of using the Logos, with a few caveats. Dolphins can communicate emotively with high pitched screeching, the best and brightest parrots can comprehend language at about a four year old level, and chimpanzees can sort of make some headway with sign language, particularly if they're taught while young.

But no other animal can even remotely access the linguistic capabilities of humans, no matter how hard we try to teach them. Our capacity for language seems to exceed the next best competitors' by orders of magnitude. If speech is closely tied with the ability to create, then our ability to create reality also surpasses that of any other animal by miles, which would make sense, from a Biblical perspective.

After all, we were made in the Creator's image.