Towards, unto, into and in Theos

Why should we use the greek word Theos (θεος), the Hebrew word ‘el (אל) or any of the other words used to describe the creator in the Bible, rather than the commonly used term ‘God’?

The habit of the Roman empire was to assimilate local deities and customs (feasts etc) into the empire as it was present in a particular locality. This made various nations and tribes less hostile to the empire as they were not under the impression that the empire had utterly subdued them, destroying their customs and, therefore, their cultural identity, but had merely modified the names and feasts of their tradition.

In the early 4th century AD, during the reign of Constantine the Great, christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire. In the same century Bishop Ulfilas (311-383) translated the Bible into Gothic, the language (whose alphabet, it is argued, he largely created from Greek and Latin) of the Visigoths and Ostrogoths who were then resident in central Europe. In this translation, or perhaps more accurately in this first presentation of the Bible in the newly created Gothic language, he substituted the Greek term Theos (θεος) and/or the Latin term Deus with the Gothic ‘Gudan’. This term was also the term used to describe a proto-Germanic deity and may have been the origin for the term Goth. It is one of a number of deities shared with the Scandinavian nations where the Goths emerged from where he was called Odin and in the British Isles as Wodan. Eventually, as German developed, the term became Gott, which today is still used (in German) as the noun ‘God’.

We can see, therefore, that the use of the term ‘God’ originates in the habit of Romans of assimilating nations and their deities into the prevailing Roman culture and, in this case, religion. Its presence indicates a compromised position where a Norse/Gothic deity has been confused with the one revealed in the bible. As is the case in assimilation and compromise the values of the two become confused and their qualities bleed into one another.

If language is the expression of a mind then by using the term ‘God’ we are, however unwittingly, part of an expression which the creator of the heavens and earth did not choose for himself, therefore we are not expressing his mind but the mind of a false understanding of another, mythological, deity. We should therefore prefer to use the term he uses and the meaning underpinning it.