The Apologists, and the Road to Nicaea

Logos theology became the main bridge by which the second-century church explained Christ to an educated pagan world. The Apologists, above all Justin Martyr, argued that the same divine Word that became flesh in Christ had scattered "seeds of the Word" (logos spermatikos) among the philosophers, so that whatever Socrates or Heraclitus grasped of the truth they grasped through him. This was a generous account of pagan wisdom, and it gave Christianity a way to claim the philosophical tradition rather than simply oppose it.

It also carried a risk the tradition later had to correct. The early Logos theologians tended to describe the Word as in some sense generated for the work of creation, and therefore as ranking below the Father, a subordinationist tendency that, pressed further, fed the Arian claim that the Son was a creature. The resolution of the fourth century, at Nicaea and after, kept the Logos language of John but insisted the Word is eternal and fully God, "begotten, not made." The doctrine of the Logos thus sits at the junction of Christianity and Greek philosophy, and its history is the story of borrowing a philosophical term and then disciplining it.