From: Larry Swain (swainl@rocky.edu)
Date: Thu Jun 25 1998 - 15:45:30 EDT
At 02:52 PM 6/25/1998 -0400, you wrote:
>
>It seems that both PROSKUNEW and LATREUW have both religious and secular
>uses. I am not sure that *any* of the terms we are examining here, in Greek
>or in English, are exclusively used of God. As a matter of fact, I'm trying
>to think if *any* word that could only be used of God - even words like
>"omnipotent" may be used hyperbolically of people like Bill Gates.
A little off Greek, but remember that the world in which the GNT and LXX
were made is a world in which one's religion is not a separate existence
from the rest of one's life. As one of my theology professors put some
years ago, "Their attitude was a god may or not be omnipotent, but he is
sure bigger than me!" i. e. the line between whether to obey a governor or
a god doesn't exist back then-until of course we run into the Jews and
Christians in the Roman world (let me say that it is different for
Israelites {distinguishing between pre-Captivity and post-Captivity} than
for the Jews in the Roman world); then that line becomes very important,
but there is no vocabulary to express it other than the words already
discussed in this forum. So the church begins to try to clarify things by
hermeneutical devices. BUT, back to main point, most of the words we use
and understand in a religious context did not have a specifically religious
context in the Hellenistic world.
Just a reminder.
Larry Swain
Larry J Swain
Academic Computer Specialist
Rocky Mountain College
swainl@rocky.edu
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