It is readily seen that in the formulation of this Logos theology, the Apologists were largely influenced by Greek modes of thought. The question for them was how they could protect the deposit of faith against those who were real heretics while they were themselves so largely controlled in their thinking by false modes of thought. Here were the Gnostics; they thought of God as the featureless beyond. They brought this featureless beyond into contact with the world of space and time by means of a series of impersonal emanations...

The apologists, on the other hand, according to the deposit of faith, thought of the creation or emanation of the Logos as a voluntary act on the part of God. But how would they be able to defend either their doctrine of God or their doctrine of the voluntary procession of the Logos from the personal God against the equivalent teachings of the Gnostics so long as they themselves admitted that God needed an intermediary to make contact with man? If they really held to the God of the Bible there was no room for such an intermediary and if they really held to the personality of God and to the exhaustively personal character of his work with respect either to himself or to the universe, then they would have to renounce their rationalistic efforts...

The problem of harmonizing the teaching of the Rule of Faith with the speculations of Greek philosophy would therefore, in the nature of the case, tend to become the problem of defending the deposit of faith against the encroachments of this speculation.

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