Due to the common identification of the terms “Logos” and “word”, it is asserted in JC theology that the Logos which is the rational, ordering principal of the Universe, is dependant upon the word of God being spoken.
However, God’s speech is surely dependant on his ability to move breath, so for the above to be true it must follow that the movement of God’s breath and all prior causes are not in accordance with the Logos.
Which would seem to indicate that either the account is inconsistent, or I have misunderstood the term “Logos”, and it does not actually mean “the rational, ordering principal of the Universe”.
I am basing my understanding of Logos on my reading of Greek philosophy, so maybe it has a different meaning in this context.
Well, you do have God saying “Let there be light”, and the spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters, and so on, but there’s no requirement that it be physical speech or physical hovering as we understand it. But maybe I’m not understanding what you mean by “Logos”. Are you talking about the Greek concept that Philo introduced into Judaism? The semi-aware force or natural order created by God?
One more thing, I forgot to mention. Along with that idea is that God Himself is the fundimental basis of order…So you don’t have a chaotic God until the creation of the “Logos”…the “Logos” is that aspect of the divine force that brings order to the Universe. So, the Spirit of God hovers over the face of the waters, and God says “Let there be light”, and at that moment, the “Logos” is created, because God is extending His fundamental order outward and imposing it on the chaos of the Universe.
The problem is that you are interpreting “speech” in a too-literal sense. When God says “Let there be light”, He’s doing something the true nature of which we are incapable of understanding; describing it as speech is merely the Bible’s way of putting it into terms comprehensible to us.
Christian theology also holds that the Logos is the Son. He is the Word of God, but if He can be said to be “spoken”, then He is eternally “spoken”; there was never a time when He did not exist. Since the Logos has always existed, all created beings must therefore exist through and in accordance with the Logos.
Totally incorrect, at least according to Judaic theology. G-d has no physical manifestation, and G-d’s “speech” has nothing to do with breath. However, since G-d’s actual essence is beyond human comprehension, G-d’s actions are described using the verbs for comparable human actions, in the case of “speech”, spiritual communication.
Conversely, it could be said that G-d’s actions are the true meaning that these verbs are conveying, and since we humans are created in G-d’s image, our limited ability to imitate these actions (e.g., communicate, but through breath-speech rather than spirit) is best described by the equivalent words that describe the actual divine actions.
Literalism is annoying whether it’s advanced by fundamentalists, atheists, or anything in between. We do not have a common-usage vocabulary for describing what a life unconstrained by time is like, what uncaused causes must be, how two illimitable omnipresent things can be distinguished one from the other, etc. So we use metaphors.
Mohammed got all bent out of shape at the idea that Jesus is Son of God – as though God took His Divine Whanger and humped the Virgin Mary with it. (I’m not being insulting to either Christianity and Islam in that – the apparent blasphemy of the idea is what Mohammed objected to, why he rejected Jesus’s Sonship.)
But the significance of the idea that God is not the Absolute Despot at Whose whim people suffer or are arbitrarily rewarded, but rather a loving Father Whose wish is that His erring children return and live in amity with Him – both aspects of that depend on the use of human roles used as metaphors for Him.
BTW, if Christ, God the Son, is the Logos, the Word which God speaks, and the issue raised in the OP has any validity beyond taking a metaphor too literally, it’s important to note that the Holy Spirit is the Ruach or Pneuma, which is translated variably as “spirit,” “breath,” and “wind.” The line in Genesis 2 about God making Adam from the mud of the Earth and then breathing his spirit into him, is quite literally saying that His ruach (breath) placed his ruach (spirit) into him.
Philo’s exposition of the Logos (which originated in Greek philosophy but which Philo, an Alexandrian Jew, introduced into Judaism) was that it represented the “Divine Thought” or “Divine Plan.” Calling it a “word” is a metaphor, what it really represented was the God’s pure will not his obviously non-literal spoken word.
By extension, Philo called the Logos a mediator. Any manifestations of God’s will or Divoine Plan on earth was a manifestation of the Logos. Philo used examples like Moses, not that Moses was the Logos, but that Moses was a tool of the Logos.
Philo did not personofy the Logos or see it as a separate “person” from God, he saw it more as an impersonal force. The Gospel of John seems to be the first written incidence of the Logos being personified- specifically in Jesus.