Logos

In John chapter 1...

"John is seen to be revealing Jesus Christ in all his cosmic glory; the Son of God from the beginning, the present and the future. You can't get a "bigger picture" than that. Jesus is revealed as the Logos of God; the Reason God created all things, the Reason all things exist, the Reason we have been formed if only we will be formed in him. In other words, John 1 is a Creation story that, like all good creations stories, starts from the beginning and explains everything.

We benefit by using the word Logos in the full philosophical context of the day, which John supersedes in a similar way to the Genesis supersession of the Ancient Near East myths. The term Logos was widely used in the Greco-Roman culture and in Judaism. And although it has many everyday meanings (such as word, speech, statement, discourse, refutation, ratio, account, explanation, reason), through most schools of Greek philosophy the term was used to designate a rational, intelligent and thus enlivening principle of the universe. To ancient people every phenomenon had to have an underlying factor, agent, or principle responsible for its occurrence; hence demons, principalities and power and the pantheon of the gods. The Logos was deduced from thinking about the universe as a living creature.

The 6th-century BC Greek philosopher Heraclitus was the first to use the term Logos in a metaphysical sense. Heraclitius asserted that the world is governed by a firelike Logos, a divine force that produces the order and pattern discernible in the flux of nature. The Logos accounts for how things are put together, and how they interact. He believed that this force is similar to human reason and that his own thought partook of the divine Logos.

What soul, then, has skill and knowledge? Even that which knoweth beginning and end, and the reason [logos] that informs all Substance, and governs the Whole from ordered cycle to cycle through all eternity. (Marcus Aurelius, V, 21 pp. 124-125)

Perhaps the most extensive accounting of The Logos was by Philo of Alexandria, a Hellenistic Jew who lived around the time of Christ. Philo wrote allegories of Old Testament books authored by Moses, interpreting them in the light of Greek philosophy. He used the term, logos, more than 1300 times in his writings, in many varied ways. Of particular note are his references to The Logos as the Divine Reason, by participation in which humans are rational; the model of the universe; the superintendent or governor of the universe; and the first-born son of God. Although there is no direct evidence that John ever read Philo (and it doesn't matter either way), its pretty obvious that the concepts he articulated were firmly in the mind of John when he wrote his gospel.

As therefore the city, when previously shadowed out in the mind of the man of architectural skill had no external place, but was stamped solely in the mind of the workman, so in the same manner neither can the world which existed in ideas have had any other local position except the divine reason [logos] which made them ... (Philo, On the Creation V20 p. 4)

...for God, like a shepherd and king, governs (as if they were a flock of sheep) the earth, and the water, and the fire, and the air and all the plants, and living creatures that are in them, whether mortal or divine; and he regulates the nature of the heaven, and the periodical revolutions of the sun and moon, and the variations and harmonious movements of the other stars, ruling them according to law and justice; appointing as their immediate superintendent, his own right reason [logos], his first-born son, who is to receive the charge of this sacred company, as the lieutenant of the great king; ... (Philo, On Husbandry XII 45 p. 178)

So in Greek thought we can boil Logos down like this:-

a conception or idea
the plan or model of the universe
the source of order in the universe, that by which all things come into being and all things come to pass
the source of human reason and intelligence
universal all-pervading enlivening force

John takes the Greek Logos on in the same way that Paul takes on the Unknown God and Moses takes on the ANE myths; John rewrites the script and elevates Jesus Christ as Stephen Hawking's "fire in the equations," and God's own reason "why the Universe goes to all the bother of existing." Its ultimate big picture language, and John's embrace of it shows that Christianity really does have all the answers."

By J Pogson

Modus Operandi part 3

When I think about the way God brought Israel back into being and compare it to the way he made life flourish I find there are striking parallels.

Science is the exploration of the universe God created, which includes trying to understand how it works. That last phrase is important to register. The universe works to patterns and rules - each of which have their own logical outworkings. The universe is in effect one enormous process.

It is through this enormous process that God works to guide and shape his creation - with us as the eventual consequence. This is where the parallel comes in with the way that God shaped the political processes to lead Israel back to life, and also the way in which we can understand God's hand on our lives. We can see the effect of it but really are unable to say specifically where it has worked

Think of our own creation. Each of us was made by God...

For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother's womb.
Psalm 139 V 13

We know how this happens: meiosis, fertilisation, mitosis, specialisation of cells etc; all processes through which God works. With this in mind we could expect that acts of 'special creation' i.e. that defy natural explanation are few and far between in the universe we live in. God is a potter.

Modus Operandi (part 2)

The Bible contains many varying prophecies about future events. One of the most striking is the prophecy that the people of Israel would be regathered to have their own nation once more (having initially been thrown out around 600BC). One of the prophets who foretold this was Ezekiel:

For thus says the Lord God: Behold, I, I myself will search for my sheep and will seek them out. As a shepherd seeks out his flock when he is among his sheep that have been scattered, so will I seek out my sheep, and I will rescue them from all places where they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness. And I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries, and will bring them into their own land. And I will feed them on the mountains of Israel, by the ravines, and in all the inhabited places of the country. I will feed them with good pasture, and on the mountain heights of Israel shall be their grazing land. There they shall lie down in good grazing land, and on rich pasture they shall feed on the mountains of Israel. I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I myself will make them lie down, declares the Lord God.

Chapter 34

This prediction was fulfilled dramatically in 1948 only THREE years after the horrors of the holocaust and the attempts to wipe the Jews out as a people. Such a turnaround is depicted graphically in the famous words of Ezekiel 37 where a valley full of dry bones is the scene of an incredible resurrection. No wonder the witness of the Jewish people has long been seen as proof of God's hand in the world He created. There is a famous story in which the Kaiser asks Bismarck, “Can you prove the existence of God?” Bismarck replies, “The Jews, your majesty. The Jews.”

But the point of this post is to think about how this happened. Ezekiel describes God as a Shepherd but it is impossible to show exactly where God acted. There must have been millions of seemingly random decisions and actions by politicians and people throughout the centuries that brought us to 1948. Nowhere can we say, 'This is where God did it!' It is impossible, yet the fact is that it happened. God shepherded the Jews back to their own land. His hand was unseen, yet its effect is undeniable. God is a potter, shaping the lives of his people.

Stages of Faith... one last quote!

Perhaps the most important thing that can be said in concluding this book is that our study of faith development, so far, underscores the fact that we human beings seem to have a generic vocation - a universal calling - to be related to the Ground of Being in a relationship of trust and loyalty. That vocation calls us into a covenantal relationship with the transcendent and with the neighbour - when the neighbour is understood radically to be all being. Faith development studies confirm the judgment that human beings are genetically potentiated - that is to say, are gifted at birth - with readiness to develop in faith.

Modus Operandi (part 1)

Perhaps the most fascinating and engaging aspect of looking at science from a religious point of view is the realisation that we are really gaining insight into the way God works. The Romans quote from the bottom of the page throws that door wide open.

Over the past eighteen months or so I've been interested to see a picture developing. It feels like digging away at a seam of rock. There is new richness to be discovered with each layer, and the direction is unpredicatable. Writing about it, reading more, and talking with friends, have all helped shape the ideas as they emerge. Yet it feels like there's so much more to discover

One thing I've realised is that there is a reassuring consistency between the God revealed in the Bible, the God of the Universe and the God of my experience. These three are one.

My experience of God is not one of dramatic, overt intervention, nor are there voices that speak to me in the night. I can't point to a miracle and with certainty say 'That was God' and I've never received a vision. God's hand has always been unseen but at the same time, looking back, quite visible. Whilst I have had moments in my life where God's work seems so obvious, most of the time it is in the background. God is a Potter.

More from Stages of Faith

Another quote...

Since I began systematically to work on a theory of faith development it has been clear to me that my normative images... have been strongly influenced by H. Richard Niebuhr...

In developing the concept of radical monotheistic faith, Niebuhr understood himself to be bringing to expression the dominant thrust of biblical faith. He understood it as the central element in the covenant relationship between a liberated Israel and the God of the Exodus. He understood that the Torah was given and elaborated in order to give form to a righteous community, a community fit to be priests to other nations. He saw Jesus as steeped in the Jewish vision of a covenant relationship with God and in the Jewish hope of a coming reign of God that will redeem, restore and fulfill God's creation in a kingdom of right-relatedness between God and humanity, between peoples and between people and nature. Niebuhr saw Jesus as the pioneering embodiment of radical monotheistic faith, the "pioneer and perfecter" of the faith to which we are called. He saw the resurrection of Jesus, in power and glory, as God's ratification of the truth for all people, of the proclaimed coming Kingdom of God.

That sounds good to me, looks like I'll be reading some Niebuhr next!

Considering irreducible complexity...

‘Irreducible Complexity’ is a phrase coined by Michael Behe in Darwin’s Black Box to describe how some parts of living organisms are too complicated to be put together by Darwinian mechanisms.

Whilst the idea is one I have some sympathy with – there may indeed be biological machinery out there that wasn’t put together by natural selection – the problem is that we just don’t have the data to be able to confidently say one way or the other.

The other problem is that seemingly irreducible systems can, with the steady march of science, suddenly become reducible. Here’s a recent example.

Mitochondria are the boiler room of our cells, providing all the energy. They actually look like discreet cells in themselves, and for good reason. Numerous lines of evidence suggest that they started out as bacteria that became incorporated within the more complicated ‘eukaryotic’ cells. It’s the ultimate in symbiotic relationships where the 2 become 1.

One of the many puzzles that this theory presents is how did the bacterium come to be able to transport across its membrane proteins that previously it would have been keeping out. A group of researchers have identified how this seems to have happened. Having identified strikingly similar proteins in bacteria that are used in the mitochondrial transport machinery they observed:

(i) that protein components found in bacteria are related in sequence to the components of mitochondrial protein transport machines, but (ii) that these bacterial proteins are not found as part of protein transport machines and (iii) that some apparently “primitive” organisms found today have protein transport machines that function with only one or few component parts.

In other words a stepwise process for the co-opting of proteins from one function to another seems to be emerging.