In the previous post we looked at how Justin promoted the Logos. He embraced the Stoic view, and furthered it by proclaiming that Jesus was the living incarnation of the Logos. Justin wrote that the Logos inspired the both the Jewish prophets, and the Greek poets and philosophers. He also declared that the Logos manifested itself in angels and in fires.
Justin wrote about a century after the Book of Acts. We have seen earlier that primitive, Original Christianity did not promote either the deity of Christ or the Trinity. We are now seeing that Justin did not not promote these ideas either. In fact, it is very significant that Justin did not view Jesus as equal to the Father in his writings. Justin wrote about the inequality, or the hierarchial rank of the Word (Logos), Jesus, and God the Creator:
“The first power after God the Father and Lord of all is the Word (Logos), who is also the Son . “[i]
This shows Justin’s viewpoint that identifies the Logos as the Son, Jesus Christ, and as inferior to the Father.
A century after the Apostles moved and taught the word of God, we still have no evidence that any believers up until this point, the mid-second century, believed in the Deity of Christ as the second Person of a Trinity. There clearly was no trinity at all at this point. In fact, every indication is that Jesus was viewed as subordinate to the Father. While Jesus was definitely seen as the incarnate Word, the living Logos, he clearly was subordinate to the Father.
[i] DICTIONARY OF EARLY CHRISTIAN BELIEFS, David W. Bercot, Editor, Hendrickson Publishers, Peabody, MA, 7th Printing, March 2008, ISBN 978-1-56563-357-5, p. 695
© copyright 2011 Mark W Smith, all rights reserved. last revised 10/29/23