The Word Made Flesh

Beneath Justin’s doctrine of the seminal Word lies a theology of who the Logos is: the divine Word begotten of the Father before all creation, “another God and Lord” numerically distinct from the Father yet not separated from him, through whom God made the world, who appeared in the Old Testament theophanies, and who at last “became man” in Jesus Christ for our salvation. This file treats Justin’s account of the Logos as a divine person, the theophany argument, the incarnation, and the subordinationist features of his Logos-Christology that place him on the road to Nicaea.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Word Begotten of the Father

Justin’s Logos is not an impersonal cosmic principle but a divine person, distinct from the Father and yet sharing his divinity. He is “the first-begotten of God,” begotten of the Father before all creatures, through whom all things were made (First Apology 21, 23, 63; ANF 1). Justin draws on the prologue of John, on the “Word of the Lord” of the prophets, and on the Wisdom of Proverbs 8 (“the Lord created me the beginning of his ways”) to present the Logos as God’s own Word and Wisdom, eternally with the Father and brought forth from him for the work of creation and revelation (Dialogue with Trypho 61–62, 100, 129; ANF 1). To explain how the Word can proceed from the Father without diminishing him, Justin uses the image of fire kindled from fire: “when we give out some word, we beget the word… without lessening the word which remains in us”; and “as we see also happening in the case of a fire, which is not lessened when it has kindled [another], but remains the same; and that which has been kindled by it likewise appears to exist by itself, not diminishing that from which it was kindled” (Dialogue with Trypho 61; ANF 1). The Word is generated from the Father as flame from flame — truly other, truly the same in nature, the source undiminished.

“Another God and Lord”

The most daring formula Justin uses, and the most easily misread, is that the Logos is “another God and Lord” (theos kai kyrios heteros) beneath the Maker of all (Dialogue with Trypho 56; ANF 1). He presses this against Trypho to account for the Old Testament passages in which “the Lord” appears, speaks, and is seen — at Mamre, at Sodom, in the burning bush, on Sinai — for the unbegotten Father, Justin argues, cannot leave the supercelestial realms and be contained in a place; therefore the One who appeared must be a second divine person, the Word, distinct from the Father in number but doing always the Father’s will (Dialogue 56–62, 127–128; ANF 1). “There is… another God and Lord subject to the Maker of all things; who is also called an Angel, because He announces to men whatsoever the Maker of all things… wishes to announce to them” (Dialogue 56; ANF 1). This is Justin’s celebrated reading of the theophanies as appearances of the pre-incarnate Christ — an interpretation that became standard in the early Church and that grounds the Orthodox reading of the Old Testament theophanies as manifestations of the Son (see The Debate with Trypho). “Another God” does not mean a second deity in the polytheist’s sense; Justin insists the Word is numerically distinct but “not separated” from the Father, doing only the Father’s will and worshipped with him. But the language is pre-Nicene and imprecise, and it carries a subordinationist cast that the later Church would have to refine.

The Word and Wisdom of Proverbs 8

A particular scriptural text does heavy lifting in Justin’s account of the generation of the Word: the passage in Proverbs 8 where Wisdom says, “The Lord created me the beginning of his ways for his works… before all the hills he begets me” (Proverbs 8:22–25, LXX; cited in Dialogue with Trypho 61, 129; ANF 1). Justin, like many early Fathers, identifies this divine Wisdom with the Logos, the Son, and uses the text to show that Scripture itself testifies to a second divine person brought forth from the Father before creation for the work of creation. The same passage would later become a storm-center in the Arian controversy, where the word “created” (ektisen) was pressed to argue that the Son was a creature; the Nicene Fathers answered by distinguishing the eternal generation of the Son from any creation in time. Justin stands before that controversy and uses the text innocently, to establish the Word’s distinct personal existence and his role as the agent of creation, without yet facing the questions Arius would raise. Reading Justin here is a lesson in historical sympathy: he is securing the truths available to him — the Word’s divinity, distinction, and pre-existence — with the texts and concepts of his age, and the later refinements were not yet his to make (Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, pp. 96–100).

The Incarnation

The Word who appeared to the patriarchs in figure and in fire became, at last, fully and bodily man. “Jesus Christ is the only proper Son who has been begotten by God, being His Word and first-begotten, and power; and, becoming man according to His will, He taught us these things” (First Apology 23; ANF 1). The Word “was made flesh” — taking real flesh and real blood “for our salvation,” born of the Virgin Mary by the power of God, living, teaching, suffering, crucified, risen, and ascended (First Apology 31–33, 46, 50–51; Dialogue 100; ANF 1). Justin reads the incarnation as the appearance in full of the One who had always been speaking and showing himself in part: the seed sown everywhere is now given whole; the Word who spoke through the prophets and appeared in the theophanies has now become a man and dwelt among us. The reality of the flesh is essential to Justin — it grounds his eucharistic realism (the food is the flesh and blood of “that Jesus who was made flesh”; see Eucharistic Realism in Justin) and his hope of the resurrection of our own bodies. The Word made flesh is the center of Justin’s whole theology: the cosmic Logos of the philosophers, the divine Lord of the theophanies, and the crucified Jesus of the apostles’ memoirs are one and the same.

Subordinationism and the Road to Nicaea

Justin’s Logos-Christology, for all its power, is pre-Nicene and bears the marks of its age. He speaks of the Word as “in the second place” and the prophetic Spirit “in the third” (First Apology 13; ANF 1); he can describe the Word as in some sense subordinate to and ministerial under the Father, brought forth for the work of creation; and his “another God” language, taken without his qualifications, sounds like two unequal deities. This is the subordinationism common to the Ante-Nicene theologians, who lacked the conceptual tools — the distinction of ousia and hypostasis, the term homoousios — that the fourth century would forge to confess the Son as fully equal to the Father, of one essence, distinct in person but not in divinity or rank. Justin should be read as standing at an early point on the road that leads to Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381): he secured the essential things — that the Word is truly divine, truly distinct from the Father, truly the agent of creation and revelation, and truly made flesh — while leaving the precision of their relation to be worked out by those who came after (Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, pp. 95–101). [Disputed: how to weigh Justin’s subordinationism. Some read his “another God” and “second place” language as a genuine theological deficiency later corrected at Nicaea; others stress that he affirms the Word’s full divinity, eternal generation, and inseparability from the Father, and that his subordination is one of order and economy rather than of nature — a difference of emphasis rather than of doctrine from the later Church.]

The Spirit and the Triad

Although Justin’s primary concern is the Logos, he is not a binitarian who knows only Father and Son; he confesses also the Holy Spirit and gives an early, if undeveloped, witness to the threefold name. He describes Christians as worshipping the Father “in the first place,” the Son “in the second place,” and “the prophetic Spirit in the third” (First Apology 13; ANF 1), and he reports baptism as administered into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (First Apology 61; see The Earliest Liturgical Witness), echoing the threefold structure of the eucharistic thanksgiving as well (First Apology 65). The “first, second, third” language again carries the ordering and the subordinationist cast of his age, and Justin does not work out the relations of the three with anything like Nicene or Cappadocian precision. But the threefold pattern is unmistakably present — in the rule of worship, in the baptismal formula, and in the eucharistic prayer — and it shows that the trinitarian shape of Christian faith was already fixed in the Church’s worship a century after the apostles, well before it was given its conciliar definition. Justin is a witness to the lex orandi, the law of prayer, from which the lex credendi, the law of belief, would later be drawn out: the Church baptized and gave thanks into the Three long before it had the technical language to define their unity and distinction.

The Orthodox Reading

The Orthodox Church honors Justin as a true witness to the divinity of the Word and the reality of the incarnation, reading his imperfect formulas in the light of the conciliar dogma they helped prepare. His theophany exegesis — that it was the Son who appeared to Abraham, Moses, and the prophets — is the Church’s own; his confession of the Word made flesh for our salvation is the Church’s own; his eucharistic and incarnational realism is the Church’s own. Where his language falls short of Nicene precision, the Church reads him as a Father feeling his way toward truths the councils would define, not as a heretic to be censured. The Word who in Justin is “another God and Lord, subject to the Maker of all” is, in the Church’s matured confession, the one Lord Jesus Christ, “Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten not made, of one essence with the Father” — and Justin’s faltering second-century articulation is one of the streams that fed that confession (see The First Christian Philosopher).

References

Justin, First Apology 13, 21, 23, 31–33, 46, 63. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1.
Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 56–62, 100, 127–129. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1; trans. Falls, rev. Halton, ed. Slusser.
Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Doctrines. Rev. ed. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1978.
Barnard, L. W. Justin Martyr: His Life and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967.