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[PaulCruice]

Hi folk,
Just want to add a short comment which I believe will help solve many of the issues surrounding the word GOD. Most of us in the English speaking world refer to the Almighty as just “God”, be we Trinitarian believers or not. For example, in English we don't say, The Son of THE God (as the Greek would have it). Rather we would just say, The Son of God. This is somewhat unfortunate because our English word “God” which is used to translate the Greek word “theos”, generally does not like taking the definite article like theos does in the Greek. A far better word to use to translate theos is the word “deity” which in English can take the definite article without straining our grammatical thinking. A very good example of this is John 1.1 where we have the use of both theos with the article and theos without the article. If we use the word deity to translate theos many problems go away. Thus it would read: IN BEGINNING THE LOGOS WAS WITH THE DEITY AND THE LOGOS WAS DEITY. (I have deliberately put all this in upper case since the original Greek draws no distinction between upper and lower case.)
Now I say all this to draw our attention to the difference between deity and the deity. Deity (theos) is a grouping of beings having certain common characteristics and the word deity refers to those characteristics. THE Deity (ho theos), however, is just one of all those beings. As Paul writes in 1Cor 8, there are many deities and many lords but as for us one is deity, the Father….
Thus the Greek so often refers to the Father as “Father Deity” meaning the one who fathers all deity.
Hope these thoughts help.
Grace to all.

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