Did the word “logos” simply mean “word” in the Bible, or did the word “logos” have greater connotations than that since the word is connected to Jesus in John chapter one? In this part, we will address this question.

In this next quote, you will read how this modern scholar reinterprets a simple concept, “word”, and turns it into a complex philosophical thought. And he does so because that is what the philosophers and Trinitarian Christians did with it, and he wants to justify them for doing so…

“It is difficult to explain what the word logos means…because this concept is not the description of an individual being, but of a universal principle…The concept of the Logos can be explained best against the background of Platonism or medieval realism…. The Logos is the first ‘work’ or generation of God as Father…So Justin could say: ‘The Logos is different from God according to number, but not according to concept.’ He is God; he is not the God, but he is one with God in essence. Justin used also the Stoic doctrines of the immanent and transcendent Logos…” Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought, 31.

If you ask most Trinitarians “who” the “word” is, they will tell you “It’s a person, Jesus Christ.” But not according to this modern scholar who is, “regarded as one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century”. He claims it is “not a person” but a “universal principle.” Whenever you speak a “word” do you put forth out of your mouth a “universal principle” or are you simply sharing your thoughts? If the latter, then you already know what the word “word” really means, and you shouldn’t allow yourself to be spoiled by people’s philosophy (Col. 2:8). Folks, that “universal principle” concept comes directly from pagan philosophy, not the Bible. And this scholar is explaining how Justin Martyr and the ECTD’s used the term in a philosophical way in explaining their multi-person deity. So, this is yet another modern scholar testifying that Justin adopted pagan philosophy (not Jewish mysticism) in his conception and description of God and His son.

In the next quote, notice how Tillich justifies why he chooses to interpret the word logos in strictly philosophic terms. It is because the “dogmatic development” of the Trinity cannot be understood without it. This is how the one God of the Jews gets replaced with the god of the pagans…

“The Stoics were more important than Plato and Aristotle together for the life of the late ancient world. The life of the educated man in the ancient world at this time was shaped mostly by the Stoic tradition…Christianity took from its great competitor [i.e. the Stoics] many fundamental ideas. The first is the doctrine of the Logos, a doctrine that may bring you to despair when you study the history of Trinitarian and Christological thought. The dogmatic development of Christianity cannot be understood without it.
“Logos means ‘word.’ But it also refers to the meaning of a word, the reasonable structure which is indicated by a word. Therefore, Logos can also mean the universal law of reality. This is what Heraclitus meant by it, who was the first to use this word philosophically…
“For Stoics the Logos was the divine power which is present in everything that is.” Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought, 7.

According to Tillich, Trinitarian thought “took from its great competitor…the doctrine of the Logos…” He didn’t say they got it from Jewish mystics or the Bible; his doctrine of the logos comes from Stoic philosophy. Here is a modern scholar admitting that Trinitarian thought owes its main concepts to pagan philosophy not Jewish speculations.

Why in the world would a Christian believe that the dogmatic development of Christianity cannot even be understood without understanding pagan philosophy?

Does that mean Jewish Christians who remained pure from the gods round about them didn’t have a hope or clue of truly understanding who and what God is? That is a preposterous idea! And yet this is exactly how the ECTD’s taught Jesus’ people to commit spiritual harlotry with the neighboring gods.

There is biblical truth and then there is pagan, Stoic philosophy. The latter is the “great competitor” that Tillich was referring to. Tillich says that Christianity took from them “many fundamental ideas”. Folks, that is what spiritual harlotry looks like when someone is trying to justify it.

You see, the Trinity was developed because apologists like Justin Martyr weren’t satisfied with what the Bible says and weren’t satisfied with receiving the first commandment on faith. They still believed what they had learned in pagan philosophy, about multi-person gods, and they weren’t willing to give up those ideas. So, they interpreted scripture through philosophy. But the Scriptures simply say that God spoke and creation came into being (Genesis 1), and later, in John 1, that the word was made flesh. That doesn’t say anything about a “universal principle” in either case or anywhere in scripture. Word simply meant God’s “words”. This was the earlier view as testified by all scriptural uses of the word “logos’, and by Irenaeus and even Tertullian. The Scriptures don’t say that a universal principal was begotten out of God in a Trinitarian sense. Trinitarian theologians brought that concept with them from their pagan educations and used platonic ideas like that to interpret the Bible. Which causes them to both add to and take away from what is written and explained in the Bible.

And just because they did it before, but you didn’t hear it directly from them, doesn’t mean you couldn’t reason in your mind and come up with the same type of unbiblical conclusions that they came up with.

“There is a way which seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death” (Proverbs 16:25).

If there is a way that seems right to you, but it breaks a commandment of God, you can be sure that is a way that ends in death.

These “apologists” sincerely believed that by resorting to pagan philosophy they were simply backing up their conclusions with good, sound, worldly science. What was the “science” of the day? You guessed it—philosophy! For example…

“…Clement [of Alexandria, Christian and philosopher]…strenuously asserted not only the merits of Philosophy in the past but its continuous necessity in the Church…Science is the correlative of Duty. And though Scripture is the all-sufficient guide, even here the Christian must borrow assistance from the Schools. For Philosophy is necessary to Exegesis…But their great Platonic maxim, that ‘nothing is to be believed which is unworthy of God,’ makes reason the judge of Revelation…. Accordingly they put the letter of the Bible in effect on one side, wherever, as in the account of Creation or of the Fall, it appeared to conflict with the teaching of Science…Their object is to show, not that Common Sense is enough for salvation, but that neither Faith without Reason nor Reason without Faith can bring forth its noblest fruits…” Charles Bigg, Christian Platonists of Alexandria, 50-52.

Do you see the attitude of the fathers of the Trinity? When “reason is the judge of revelation” they are basically saying that “the way that seems right unto man” is the way to understand the scriptures. But the Bible says it is the way of death. The ECTD’s were perfectly willing to put aside the letter of the Bible when and wherever it conflicted with their science falsely so-called, which was philosophy. Thus, we see that walking by sight is more important for Trinitarians than walking by faith in God’s word. This is what Tillich was doing in defending the actions of the Christian apologists, who counted “Philosophy…necessary to exegesis.” That means, in common terms, they used philosophy to explain the Bible, not the Bible itself.

In doing so, Trinitarians from Justin to Tillich and beyond believed that to understand the Bible you have to use concepts the apostles refused to use.

“²²For Jews ask for signs, Greeks seek after wisdom, ²³but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks” (1 Corinthians 1:22-23).

“¹²But we received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is from God, that we might know the things that were freely given to us by God. ¹³We also speak these things, not in words which man’s wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual things. ¹⁴Now the natural man doesn’t receive the things of God’s Spirit, for they are foolishness to him; and he can’t know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:12-14).

In effect, the ECTD’s claimed that faith in the Bible alone is not sufficient. For them, human reasoning, grounded in the human sciences of philosophy, must validate our interpretation of biblical teachings. In this way, they are saying we must walk by sight and not just faith. Trinitarians subordinate God’s word under faith in the human sciences. And that is humanism.

The next quote is from the preface to Tillich’s book. This quote shows that Trinitarians are completely aware that their doctrine of the logos comes directly from philosophy through such figures as Justin Martyr.

“When Tillich referred to himself as an apologetic theologian, he had in mind the example of the great second-century apologist, Justin Marty, for whom the Logos doctrine was, as for Tillich, the universal principle of the divine self-manifestation…Because the Logos who became flesh was the same Logos who was universally at work in the structures of human existence.” Carl E. Braaten in Preface to Tillich, “A History of Christian Thought,” Simon and Schuster, 1968, Pgs xix-xx.

The “universal principle” refers to the pagan philosophical view of the logos. Where does the Bible call the son of God, or God’s word, “the universal principle”? It doesn’t. In his book, Tillich wrote…

“(In Judaism)…is the memra’, the Word of God, which later became so important in the fourth gospel…The Logos became most important for it united the Jewish memra’ with the Greek philosophical Logos…” Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought, 11.

“If one thinks in Old Testament terms, one would prefer to translate logos by ‘word.’” Ibid., 31.

And there it is! That is a clear confession that by marrying a Jewish word with a meaning from philosophy, and from pagan mythology, they were able to produce their illegitimate offspring named “Trinity.” This is a modern, highly acclaimed, and very influential Trinitarian scholar admitting that if one thinks in O.T. terms, they will translate logos as simply word. This is further proof that Trinitarian historians are completely aware that philosophy is the source of the Trinitarian interpretation of the Bible.

If you have ever heard the term “logos Christology” or “logos doctrine”, now you know what it means and where it came from. It means the switch from viewing “logos” as being merely a “word” to being either a “universal principle” or an “incarnation” of God. When you see this, you will notice it pretty much all over the place in the transition that was happening in the second century onward. Recall the quote from Chadwick in Part 5: “…the so-called ‘Monarchian controversy’…[which] originated in a revolt against the Logos theology of Justin the apologist. Justin had boldly spoken of the divine Logos as ‘another God’ beside the Father…” (Chadwick, The Early Church, 85-86). If one can simply retain the Jewish understanding of “logos” as “word,” the whole deception and confusion that was introduced by Justin (and before him the Gnostics) gets exposed and can then be rejected.

The historians are also aware that the antichristian Gnostics were the first to resort to philosophy…

“The Gnostic heretics had appealed to the principles of Platonism to provide a philosophical justification for their doctrine…From the text of Plato…there was a sufficient plausibility about the argument to make it look impressive. The Gnostic appeal to pagan philosophy did not tend to encourage the study of philosophy among those who feared Gnosticism as a corrupter of the truth. Philosophy came to seem like the mother of heresy. To Irenaeus of Lyons Gnosticism was a ragbag of heathen speculations with bits taken from different philosophers to dress out bogus, anti-rational mythology…But in the middle of the second century the atmosphere was very different. Justin Martyr…was converted, but did not understand this to mean the abandonment of his philosophical inquiries, nor even the renunciation of all that he had learnt from Platonism. He regarded Christianity as ‘the true philosophy.’” Henry Chadwick, The Early Church, 74-75.

Here is another modern-day historian’s confession that Trinitarians simply followed the Gnostics and Platonism. They toned down Gnostic mythology, but they kept the Gnostic appeal to philosophy. Probably–perhaps I should say hopefully–most Trinitarians are unaware of their strong roots and ties to both Gnosticism and philosophy. Ignorance is one thing; intentional idolatrous harlotry is another thing.

But we aren’t done addressing the falsehood that no scholars agree that the trinity came from pagan philosophy. Here’s another quote…

“The formula ‘one ousia in three hypostaseis’ was crafted on the workbench of theologians; and even for them, it is more of a convenient abbreviation than the last word that might be uttered…In standard Greek, and in Christian theological usage for much of the fourth century, the words ousia and hypostasis were synonyms. The history of the formula is the history of the growth of a distinction in meaning between them, and the fact that the Cappadocians had to struggle to explain the distinction shows that it was anything but obvious.” Joseph T. Lienhard, “Ousia and Hypostasis: The Cappadocian Settlement and the Theology of ‘One Hypostasis’,” in The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Trinity, 103.

This is another Trinitarian confession. The doctrine of the Trinity was “crafted on the workbench of theologians.” This is a confession that says, in simpler words, they created it: something crafted on a workbench. They didn’t have the words, or the concepts spelled out in the bible, so they had to invent new words and/or new meanings for old words. “Crafting” something on a “workbench” sure sounds like hammering out a man-made idol to me. Now, look at this…

“I am far from supposing that there is no useful, valuable, and even essential work to be done on the Trinity by contemporary thinkers. I do not suggest that we simply repeat one or another patristic formulation and let it go at that. The Trinity, no less than other articles of the Christian faith, needs re-examination and reformulation for each age, as has happened throughout Christian history…For example…twentieth century logic can be employed to render threefoldness in unity less mysterious.” William P. Alston, “Substance and the Trinity,” in The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Trinity, 179.

Isn’t that interesting: “Reformulation…as has happened throughout Christian history”! “Formulation” means, “to devise or develop, as a method, system, etc.” So, the Trinity doctrine was hammered out, but it isn’t finished and is still being “redevised” and “redeveloped”. What ever happened to a closed canon of scripture? Apparently, it gets in the way of subjecting the word of God to human reasoning. And now, since the masterpiece isn’t finished, where do these theologian scholars suggest we go for more raw materials? To the Bible? To Jewish mysticism? No. Rather, quite simply, it’s back to the forest of philosophy for lumber, and the mine of human wisdom for ore…

“Rather than presenting at this point some formulations from the Fathers, I will first go back to the fountainhead of substance metaphysics, Aristotle, from whom the Fathers inherited the concepts in terms of which they set out their substantialist formulations.” Ibid. Alston, “The Trinity…”, 180.

Here we have a modern Trinitarian scholar clearly admitting that the “Fathers” of the Trinity /i>did inherit concepts (not just words) from the substance metaphysics of the pagan philosopher Aristotle. This is just another contemporary admission, which some Trinitarians try to tell us don’t exist at all, openly telling us that the actual source of the concepts and the “substance” of Trinity is pagan philosophy. This is also nothing else than going after the gods round about them. This is precisely what Paul warned against when he said not to be spoiled by philosophy after the rudiments of the world (Colossians 2:8, 20). Paul also explicitly said that he taught things through words that the Holy Spirit teaches, in contrast to the words of men (1 Corinthians 2:13). Trinitarians reverse the way Paul taught.

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