The Word / Logos

The Logos title gathers four OT and intertestamental streams. First, the creative speech of Genesis 1: "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light" (v.3) — the universe arises through divine speech, a pattern repeated for each day of creation. Augustine, in his Tractates on John, treats this as the foundational OT background for the prologue's "All things were made by him." Second, the personified Wisdom of Proverbs 8:22–31: Wisdom present with God before the world's foundation, "daily his delight, rejoicing always before him." Calvin reads Prov 8 as a pre-incarnate window into the Son's eternal relation with the Father — though carefully refusing to flatten the distinction between Wisdom and the Word. Third, Psalm 33:6 — "By the word of the LORD were the heavens made" — and Isaiah 55:11 — God's word "shall not return unto me void" — both treat the divine word as personal, effective agency. Fourth, the rabbinic Memra tradition (the Aramaic Targums often substitute the Memra of the LORD where the Hebrew text has YHWH); Westcott notes the existence of this tradition without supposing it to be John's source — the OT itself supplies more than enough.

John 1:1–18 is the locus classicus: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (v.1). Calvin, on John 1, treats the prologue as a deliberate echo of Genesis 1 — the en archē of John's first words mirrors the bereshit of Moses's first words, and the creation-by-word of Genesis is now identified personally. Westcott, in his Cambridge commentary on John, develops the prologue's three movements: the Word's eternal relation to God (vv.1–2), the Word's role in creation and revelation (vv.3–13), and the Word's incarnation (vv.14–18) — "the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us" (v.14). 1 John 1:1 echoes the same — "that which was from the beginning… the Word of life" — and Augustine reads 1 John as the apostle's pastoral application of his own gospel's Christology. The title returns at Revelation 19:13 in eschatological register: "his name is called The Word of God." Hebrews 4:12 carries the related theme of the divine word as living and active.

Augustine's Tractates on John reads the prologue as the church's strongest answer to every philosophy of the day: the divine Logos is not a faceless principle ordering the cosmos but the eternal Son personally with the Father, by whom all things were made and through whom they are sustained. Calvin presses the structural claim: John's prologue places the incarnation inside an eternity-then-creation-then-flesh frame, so that the man Jesus is identified — without diminution of either nature — as the Logos who was with God in the beginning. Westcott's exposition presses the theological balance Calvin guards: the Word was with God (distinguishable) and the Word was God (homoousios), and any flattening of either clause loses the prologue's meaning. Henry adds the pastoral note: the Christian who reads "and the Word was made flesh" reads what no philosophy has imagined — the Logos who orders the cosmos has entered the cosmos as a man, and "of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace" (Jn 1:16). The title is therefore the OT creation account read forward into the gospel and back to its source.