D28guy said:
We are not to pay any attention to what "over half of the modern world" is doing.
It is the scriptures, and the scriptures alone that we are to turn, and thus we know that sprinkling water on an infant will no more make that infant a christian than it will make that infant a lizard.
I agree with you 100%.
However, HP wanted to set the above standard for other words.
We can't pick and choose.
Koine Greek is a static language; English is not.
We need to look at the Scriptures, the words used therein, and what they mean therein, and not apply modern usages to them. All of them.
Not pick and choose.
Unfortunately, our preconceived ideas blind us to what Scriptures say. For example, there were many passges about lost people that did not make sense to me. I, like most Baptists (and most other Christians and some non-Christians that I know) equated "lost" with "unsaved". Well, I have learned the hard way that reading from the Greek keeps modern usages from getting in the way. I realized that only a person in the family could become "lost". But, an a saved person become unsaved? I think that would contradict Scriptures, if he could.
By the same token, "aiOnios" does not mean "forever". It doesn't mean it in the Greek, it doesn't mean it in the Latin, it did not mean it in English until the last two or three hundred years. It's an adjective derived from "aiOn" and means "age-lasting".
Now, if a person were honest, he would be like a Nazarene preacher friend of mine who admits that the word means "age-lasting", but feels that the writers were incapable of expressing "forever". Personally, since there is a Greek idiom that means "forever" and it's used several times throughout the Bible, that God is not the author of confusion, so would not use two completely different expression to mean exactly the same thing.
There are some words that have multiple meanings, but offhand, I can't think of two different Greek words that have precisely the same meaning. It's a very precise language, and the nuances mean things. There are several different words for "child", and they all mean something different. In English, I use the word "son" to talk about my male child, from the time he was in the womb, when he was born, now, when he's 15, and I will use it until the day I die, no matter how old he is.
However, in the Greek there are different words for the different stages of development, whether it's from the perspective of the parent or the child, etc. It clarifies many confusing passages to look at it in the Greek. A "son" is not the same as a "child", but because of our English usages, we interchange them. (Also, part of the English conventions uses pronouns, when often in the Hebrew OT, the way the proper names are used are very, very important, and we miss those parts of the message.)
It's important to look to the Scriptures, and the Scriptures alone to get their meanings. But, we need to shed our modern ideas in order to do that.
(Chiasmus is another good example of this. In the Western world, we generally write linearally, with a beginning, a middle, a climax, and an end. In the ancient world, in several different societies, it was more circular, with a beginning, a middle, a climax, the middle restated, back to the beginning. Beautiful and poetic, but lost on us if we don't shed our modern English thinking.)
BTW, if I've made any typos, I apologize. One of my cats has decided that she needs to sleep on my right hand, and she's pretty persistent right now.
