(a) The Scriptures enlarge our conceptions of Christ's Sonship by giving to him in his preëxistent state the names of the Logos, the Image, and the Effulgence of God.—The term “Logos” combines in itself the two ideas of thought and word, of reason and expression. While the Logos as divine thought or reason is one with God, the Logos as divine word or expression is distinguishable from God. Words are the means by which personal beings express or reveal themselves. Since Jesus Christ was “the Word” before there were any creatures to whom revelations could be made, it would seem to be only a necessary inference from this title that in Christ God must be from eternity expressed or revealed to himself; in other words, that the Logos is the principle of truth, or self-consciousness, in God.—The term “Image” suggests the ideas of copy or counterpart. Man is the image of God only relatively and derivatively. Christ is the Image of God absolutely and archetypally. As the perfect representation of the Father's perfections, the Son would seem to be the object and principle of love in the Godhead.—The term “Effulgence,” finally, is an allusion to the sun and its radiance. As the effulgence of the sun manifests the sun's nature, which otherwise would be unrevealed, yet is inseparable from the sun and ever one with it, so Christ reveals God, but is eternally one with God. Here is a principle of movement, of will, which seems to connect itself with the holiness, or self-asserting purity, of the divine nature.
Smyth, Introd. to Edwards' Observations on the Trinity: “The ontological relations of the persons of the Trinity are not a mere blank to human thought.” John 1:1—“In the beginning was the Word”—means more than “in the beginning was the x, or the zero.” Godet indeed says that Logos = “reason” only in philosophical writings, but never in the Scriptures. He calls this a Hegelian notion. But both Plato and Philo had made this signification a common one. On λόγος as = reason + speech, see Lightfoot on Colossians, 143, 144. Meyer interprets it as “personal subsistence, the self-revelation of the divine essence, before all time immanent in God.” Neander, Planting and Training, 369—Logos = “the eternal Revealer of the divine essence.” Bushnell: “Mirror of creative imagination”; “form of God.”
Word = 1. Expression; 2. Definite expression; 3. Ordered expression; 4. Complete expression. We make thought definite by putting it into language. So God's wealth of ideas is in the Word formed into an ordered Kingdom, a true Cosmos; see Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 76. Max Müller: “A word is simply a spoken thought made audible as sound. Take away from a word the sound, and what is left is simply the thought of [pg 336]it.” Whiton, Gloria Patri, 72, 73—“The Greek saw in the word the abiding thought behind the passing form. The Word was God and yet finite—finite only as to form, infinite as to what the form suggests or expresses. By Word some form must be meant, and any form is finite. The Word is the form taken by the infinite Intelligence which transcends all forms.” We regard this identification of the Word with the finite manifestation of the Word as contradicted by John 1:1, where the Word is represented as being with God before creation, and by Phil. 2:6, where the Word is represented as existing in the form of God before his self-limitation in human nature. Scripture requires us to believe in an objectification of God to himself in the person of the Word prior to any finite manifestation of God to men. Christ existed as the Word, and the Word was with God, before the Word was made flesh and before the world came into being; in other words, the Logos was the eternal principle of truth or self-consciousness in the nature of God.
Passages representing Christ as the Image of God are Col. 1:15—“who is the image of the invisible God”; 2 Cor. 4:4—“Christ, who is the image of God” (εἰκών); Heb. 1:3—“the very image of his substance”(χαρακτὴρ τῆς ὑποστάσεως αὐτοῦ); here χαρακτήρ means “impress,” “counterpart.” Christ is the perfect image of God, as men are not. He therefore has consciousness and will. He possesses all the attributes and powers of God. The word “Image” suggests the perfect equality with God which the title “Son” might at first seem to deny. The living Image of God which is equal to himself and is the object of his infinite love can be nothing less than personal. As the bachelor can never satisfy his longing for companionship by lining his room with mirrors which furnish only a lifeless reflection of himself, so God requires for his love a personal as well as an infinite object. The Image is not precisely the repetition of the original. The stamp from the seal is not precisely the reproduction of the seal. The letters on the seal run backwards and can be easily read only when the impression is before us. So Christ is the only interpretation and revelation of the hidden Godhead. As only in love do we come to know the depths of our own being, so it is only in the Son that “God is love” (1 John 4:8).
Christ is spoken of as the Effulgence of God in Heb. 1:3—“who being the effulgence of his glory”(ἀπαύγασμα τῆς δόξης); cf. 2 Cor. 4:6—“shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” Notice that the radiance of the sun is as old as the sun itself, and without it the sun would not be sun. So Christ is coëqual and coëternal with the Father. Ps. 84:11—“Jehovah God is a sun.” But we cannot see the sun except by the sunlight. Christ is the sunlight which streams forth from the Sun and which makes the Sun visible. If there be an eternal Sun, there must be also an eternal Sunlight, and Christ must be eternal. Westcott on Hebrews 1:3—“The use of the absolute timeless term ὤν, ‘being’, guards against the thought that the Lord's sonship was by adoption, and not by nature. ἀπαύγασμα does not express personality, and χαρακτήρ does not express coëssentiality. The two words are related exactly as ὁμοούσιος and μονογενής, and like those must be combined to give the fulness of the truth. The truth expressed thus antithetically holds good absolutely.... In Christ the essence of God is made distinct; in Christ the revelation of God's character is seen.” On Edwards's view of the Trinity, together with his quotations from Ramsey's Philosophical Principles, from which he seems to have derived important suggestions, see Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 338-376; G. P. Fisher, Edwards's Essay on the Trinity, 110-116.
(b) The names thus given to the second person of the Trinity, if they have any significance, bring him before our minds in the general aspect of Revealer, and suggest a relation of the doctrine of the Trinity to God's immanent attributes of truth, love, and holiness. The prepositions used to describe the internal relations of the second person to the first are not prepositions of rest, but prepositions of direction and movement. The Trinity, as the organism of Deity, secures a life-movement of the Godhead, a process in which God evermore objectifies himself and in the Son gives forth of his fulness. Christ represents the centrifugal action of the deity. But there must be centripetal action also. In the Holy Spirit the movement is completed, and the divine activity and thought returns into itself. True religion, in reuniting us to God, reproduces in us, in our limited measure, this eternal process of the divine mind. Christian experience witnesses that [pg 337] God in himself is unknown; Christ is the organ of external revelation; the Holy Spirit is the organ of internal revelation—only he can give us an inward apprehension or realization of the truth. It is “through the eternal Spirit” that Christ “offered himself without blemish unto God,” and it is only through the Holy Spirit that the church has access to the Father, or fallen creatures can return to God.
Here we see that God is Life, self-sufficient Life, Infinite Life, of which the life of the universe is but a faint reflection, a rill from the fountain, a drop from the ocean. Since Christ is the only Revealer, the only outgoing principle in the Godhead, it is he in whom the whole creation comes to be and holds together. He is the Life of nature: all natural beauty and grandeur, all forces molecular and molar, all laws of gravitation and evolution, are the work and manifestation of the omnipresent Christ. He is the Life of humanity: the intellectual and moral impulses of man, so far as they are normal and uplifting, are due to Christ; he is the principle of progress and improvement in history. He is the Life of the church: the one and only Redeemer and spiritual Head of the race is also its Teacher and Lord.
All objective revelation of God is the work of Christ. But all subjective manifestation of God is the work of the Holy Spirit. As Christ is the principle of outgoing, so the Holy Spirit is the principle of return to God. God would take up finite creatures into himself, would breath into them his breath, would teach them to launch their little boats upon the infinite current of his life. Our electric cars can go up hill at great speed so long as they grip the cable. Faith is the grip which connects us with the moving energy of God. “The universe is homeward bound,” because the Holy Spirit is ever turning objective revelation into subjective revelation, and is leading men consciously or unconsciously to appropriate the thought and love and purpose of Him in whom all things find their object and end; “for of him and through him, and unto him, are all things” (Rom. 11:36),—here there is allusion to the Father as the source, the Son as the medium, and the Spirit as the perfecting and completing agent, in God's operations. But all these external processes are only signs and finite reflections of a life-process internal to the nature of God.
Meyer on John 1:1—“the Word was with God”: “πρὸς τὸν θεόν does not = παρὰ τῷ θεῷ, but expresses the existence of the Logos in God in respect of intercourse. The moral essence of this essential fellowship is love, which excludes any merely modalistic conception.”Marcus Dods, Expositor's Greek Testament, in loco: “This preposition implies intercourse and therefore separate personality.”
Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 62—“And the Word was toward God” = his face is not outwards, as if he were merely revealing, or waiting to reveal, God to the creation. His face is turned inwards. His whole Person is directed toward God, motion corresponding to motion, thought to thought.... In him God stands revealed to himself. Contrast the attitude of fallen Adam, with his face averted from God. Godet, on John 1:1—“Πρὸς τὸν θεόν intimates not only personality but movement.... The tendency of the Logos ad extra rests upon an anterior and essential relation ad intra. To reveal God, one must know him; to project him outwardly, one must have plunged into his bosom.” Compare John 1:18—“the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father” (R. V.) where we find, not ἐν τῷ κόλπῷ, but εἰς τὸν κόλπον. As ἦν εἰς τὴν πόλιν means “went into the city and was there,” so the use of these prepositions indicates in the Godhead movement as well as rest. Dorner, System of Doctrine, 3:193, translates πρός by “hingewandt zu,”or “turned toward.” The preposition would then imply that the Revealer, who existed in the beginning, was ever over against God, in the life-process of the Trinity, as the perfect objectification of himself. “Das Aussichselbstsein kraft des Durchsichselbstsein mit dem Fürsichselbstsein zusammenschliesst.” Dorner speaks of “das Aussensichoderineinemandernsein; Sichgeltendmachen des Ausgeschlossenen; Sichnichtsogesetzthaben; Stehenbleibenwollen.”