<<I agree with Carl and Micheal. This verse is hardly an exception to the
rule under discussion. Whether O ENERGWN EN hUMIN is the subject (for He
who works in you ... is God), or "it" (ESTIN) is the subject (for it is
God who is at work in you ...), it is clear there is no compelling reason
to go against the rule.
I am still interested to see if a legitimate exception to the rule does
exist, or if the rule is 100%.
At any rate, is QEOS definitie, qualitative, or indefinite? Does anybody
dare posit indefiniteness here? Surely, the options are only two:
qualitative or definite. My vote is definiteness. Is not Paul pointing
to and stressing a particular identity here? It is interesting that
textual variants here have the inclusion of the definite article on QEOS
(Byzantine and the majority of manuscripts). It is probable the scribes
felt QEOS was definite and so included the article in order to make it
the subject, or at least make it interchangeable with the articular
predicate.
Paul Dixon >>
Interesting. If Lane McGaughy (Toward a Descriptive Analysis of EINAI as a
Linking Verb in New Testament Greek [Missoula, MT: University of Montanna,
1972], 53) is correct in stating, "If both words or word clusters are
determined by an article, the first one is the subject," then it would seem
those scribes who used the article with THEOS understood it to be the
subject, not the predicate.
Greg Stafford
University of Wisconsin