It is interesting to observe that in these early statements about God, Christian monotheism oscillates between the trans-personal element of Being and the personal element of God as creator, and of course saviour, etc. This oscillation is necessary in the moment in which the idea of God is made the object of thought. You cannot escape some elements of the eternal, of the unconditional, the unchangeable, etc. On the other hand, the practical piety and the experience of creatureliness in which we find ourselves, presupposes a person-to-person relationship, and between these two elements Christianity always oscillates and must oscillate, because these are two elements in God himself.
Between God and man, there are angels and powers, some of them good and some evil. But their mediating power is insufficient. The real mediator is the Logos. Now what is this Logos? I remember that in former classes the question was always asked: Now after all this speaking about “Logos”, I would like to know what the word really means! And I hope that after the next four weeks, when you hear much more about the Logos, you can ask this question. But I will try my best, although the best is very poor in comparison with the difficulty of the problems, especially for the difficulty in the minds of people of whom I say they all are nominalists by birth! This makes it so difficult because, of course, a concept such as “Logos” is not the description of an individual being, but the description of a universal principle.
And if one is not used to thinking in terms of universals as powers of being, then such a concept ” as Logos remains impossible to understand. So I should do the following: to convert you, at least hypothetically, to medieval realism – to Platonism, if you want to call it thus – and then to speak about the Logos. But since time is limited, I will do this implicitly if possible, and cannot do it explicitly.
