Objection · Case 04 · The Trinity
Couldn’t the Word in John 1 be God’s plan or utterance, personified, which became flesh in the sense of being embodied in Jesus’s life? Unitarians read it that way without any preexistent divine person.
One objection from the free evidence repository at apologetics.pro.
Response
That reading exists, and it struggles with John’s own text. The Word was with God (a relationship, not an attribute), the Word is called God, and in John 17:5 Jesus asks for the glory he had with the Father before the world existed, which is personal preexistence in Jesus’s own voice. Personified plans do not pray. The reading of the Logos as a distinct divine person is the one nearly all commentators, including non-Christian ones, take John to intend.
About this exhibit
This objection is to The Word made all things, John 1:3.
John says of the Word, who is then identified as Jesus, that “all things were made through him,” and that nothing that exists was made without him.