Pre-existence of Christ

Pre-existence of Christ

Introduction

The doctrine of pre-existence of Christ is about the personal or ontological existence of Jesus before his beginning. There is non-Trinitarian analysis that doubts the part of divinity, or the characteristic of individual pre-existence, or both. John 1:1-18 is one of the related Bible passages where, in the Trinitarian view, Jesus is recognized as a pre-existent holy hypostasis described as the Word or Logos. This paper discusses the Pre-existence of Christ.

Discussion

Basically, Pre-existence of Christ is a belief that, Jesus Christ was present in eternity, before he was sent on earth as a human. Overall, Christ was beyond the limits of time. The concept of Pre-existence of Christ is said to be articulated by Paul (Col. 1: 15 ff.) and in the gospel of John (17: 5). It was their understanding of a heavenly aspect in Christ that compelled them to assert that he should everlastingly and forever have was present. It may be disputed on the foundation of the preface to the gospel of John that when Christ was born (John 1: 14) the Logos was then recognized with the Jesus of the past and that the Logos was pre-existent.

The Greek word logo is a highly significant technical term in pre-Christian Greek philosophy. It is employed in the Septuagint to translate important Hebrew ideas; it occurs in the NT in various senses to refer to Scripture, divine utterance, or as a Christological title, and it is a key term in early Christological formulations. Furthermore, its significance in Hellenistic philosophy continued with the middle Platonic schools as exemplified in the writings of Plotinus (ca 205-70) and Porphyry (ca 235-ca 305), it functioned as part of the cosmological formulations of writers who represent trajectories in early Christianity usually grouped together under the heading of 'Gnosticism', and the term has retained widespread currency in Christian writings (both theological and popular) down to the modern period.

The semantic field of the term logos is related to the verb lego, 'I say, recount, utter.' In this primary semantic sense logos represents the product of the act of speech - 'a word' or 'an utterance'. It should be noted, however, that the term logos is not usually employed in a grammatical sense to refer to the unit of speech that linguists would classify as a lexeme (a 'word-type' unit). Rather, for that precise sense Greek writers would employ the term lexis. Thus, the term logos encapsulates the more active or performative aspect of speaking, which is perhaps better understood from the perspective of speech-act theory, whereby the act of utterance is seen as having an illocutionary function - by saying something, something is done or instantiated.

The expression, though, is not restricted to this primary sense, but encompasses a rich range of related meanings. In Greek literature of the classical and Hellenistic periods it is widely used to denote 'computation' or 'reckoning', often of monetary value, but also more widely of dues and penalties in ...