God and the world in the epistles of Paul
Abstract
Paul is not interested in cosmological thinking in the proper sense of the word. This article
starts by questioning the cosmological language of biblical writings. The authors of the books
of the New Testament mostly use terms they found in the Septuagint – with a few remarkable
exceptions. This article described how the specific term κόσμος has been used by the New
Testament authors. There are two main usages of κόσμος: (1) as an anthropological term to
describes mankind in its entirety; and (2) as an ecclesiological term to describes ‘the others’,
that is the non-believers or the people outside the church. This is the reason why God is never
called ‘the king of the world’; he is only its judge.
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- Faculty of Theology [977]