Unitarianism Defended: A Series of Lectures by Three Protestant Dissenting Ministers of LiverpoolMartineau, James
Religion
Unitarianism Defended: A Series of Lectures by Three Protestant Dissenting Ministers of Liverpool
Martineau, James
Unitarianism
sentences, referring to this very conception of the Logos, from the
Jewish Philo. The invisible and intellectual Logos, he says, is the
image of God, by whom the world was fashioned; his first-born son, his
vicegerent in the government of the world; the mediator between God and
his creatures; the healer of ills; God’s divine Son, whose mother is
wisdom. In another place, the Logos is the very same with the wisdom of
God; the most ancient angel, the first-born of God; to the resemblance
of whom every one, who would be a son of God, must fashion himself. He
is even the “second God,” “To the Archangel, and most ancient Logos,”
says this writer, “God granted this distinguished office, that he should
stand on the confines of creation, and separate between it and its
Creator. With the incorruptible being he is the suppliant for perishable
mortality. He is the ambassador of the Supreme to the subject creation.
He announces the will of the Ruler to his subjects. And he delights in
the office, and boasts of it, saying; I had stood between you and the
Lord as mediator; being neither unbegotten as God, nor begotten as you,
but between the two extremes, and acting as hostage to both,”[194] All
this sounds very mysterious; the important thing to bear in mind is,
that the writer is certainly speaking not of any separate divine person,
but of the impersonated attributes of One Sole Supreme.
St. John then, I conceive, does the very same; only he carefully warns
us against thinking of his personification as otherwise than identical
with the Supreme, by saying outright, that the Logos is God; and
therefore that whatever he may say about the former, is really to be
understood as spoken of the latter. The whole proem divides itself into
two ideas: that from the Genius or Logos of God have proceeded two sets
of divine works; the material world; and the soul and inspiration of
heaven shed upon the world through Christ. His object, I believe, is to
link together these two effects as successive and analogous results,
physical in one case, spiritual in the other, of the same divine and
holy energy. Having warned us, as I have said, in the very first verse,
that this energy is not really a person distinct from the Supreme, he
abandons himself without reserve to the beautiful personification which
follows; assuring us that thereby were all things made at first, and
thereby were all men being enlightened now; that our very world, which
felt that forming hand of old, had not discerned the blessed influence
which again descended to regenerate it: ungrateful treatment! as of one
who came unto his own, and his own received him not. Yet were there some
of more perceptive conscience and better hearts; and they, be they Jew
or Gentile, whose spirits sprung to the divine embrace, were permitted
to become, by reflected similitude, the Sons of God.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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