action, and showed its approval in certain ways.
184 CHRISTIANITY AND OTHER FAITHS
4. That the Christian Church eventually. came to endorse such action, and showed its approval in certain ways.
5. That such endorsement must be regarded either as a fundamental mistake, or as a sign of growing into truth under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
6. That if the second of these two alternatives be adopted, then
it is right to carry it to its logical conclusion, in dealing with the sages and prophets of all non-Christian religious movements, both past and present.
Of these six propositions the first three are mainly concerned with the use of the term Logos. Protestant scholars to a varying extent have tried to show that its use in the Fourth Gospel prologue
is to be regarded as having Jewish rather than Gentile significance.
If they have not done this, they have, like Bultmann, sought to detach the prologue from the rest of the Gospel, and to regard it as of the nature of a Gentile accretion. Bultmann even goes so far as to say that it embodies a Gnostic myth. My own contention is that
it is, on evidence, a deliberately planned introduction, composed by the writer of the succeeding chapters, and that if we approach it without prejudice, we are bound to see in it what was perhaps the
first serious attempt at relating the Christian God-story to the religious beliefs of the Gentile world.
We must begin therefore by tracing the history of the term Logos up to the time of the emergence of the Christian movement.
It is usual to start with the Ionian thinker Heraclitus of Ephesus, whose main philosophical activity is centered traditionally about 504 to 501 B.c. and probably ended by about 480 B.c. Although the number of pre-Socratic thinkers is considerable, it is certainly a matter of observation that almost all the quotations from fragments which employ the word "Logos" come from Heraclitus. It is therefore reasonable to inquire what he meant by it. Perhaps the best description would be to say that it is to him an attribute of the Absolute. Recent scholars have rendered it in English as "formula"
r "element of arrangement." All things happen in the universe kata Tov Adyov ("according to," or "in tune with," "the Logos') says Heraclitus, but he complains that most men do not realize this, but are agvvero. (uncomprehending). In a fragment quoted by
_ Hippolytus,* Heraclitus says "Listening not to me but to the Logos,
* Philosophumena Bk. IX, para. 9.