These definitions identify the book's uses. Biblical and historical terms retain the ranges belonging to their source contexts. Adjacent definitions preserve distinctions; they do not supply the arguments for the claims. Greek and Hebrew forms are transliterated where helpful.
Abductive alignment. Comparative explanatory fit weighed against rivals and costs. Compatibility alone supplies no discriminating confirmation.
Accountable history. Shorthand for how acts become durable and answerable, investigated by distinct disciplines. It names no universal mechanism or extra framework stage.
Acquired parts. Real projects, habits, roles, arrangements, and self-understandings belonging to a person without exhausting that person's nature or identity.
Active context. Present framing, attention, instructions, pressures, and retrievable cues, capable of changing faster than durable dispositions.
Adamic death / death under Sin's reign. Bodily dissolution within the Adamic reign, joined to alienation, fear, accusation, judgment, and propagated corruption.
Adamic headship. Adam's historical-covenantal relation to the fallen human order, answered by Christ's headship; distinct from genetic and genealogical ancestry.
Alignment. Ordered relation to truth and purpose, whose technical, developmental, moral, and saving senses differ. Saving participation is Spirit-given life in Christ.
Apostolic tradition. The publicly received and delivered gospel, teaching, worship, practice, and hope carried by communities rather than private invention.
Argument order. The sequence by which a reader assesses an account, distinct from the order of dependence the account affirms.
Axiom of Purpose (AoP). Declared commitment that creation receives existence, intelligibility, good, and ordered ends under the Logos. Typed purposes and nonfungible goods prevent outcome from becoming intention.
Beloved Logos (secondary contemplative usage). Secondary contemplation of the Son from the Father's love; it supplements rather than renames Son, Word, Image, and Lord.
Body. Material creaturely life in sensation, action, need, vulnerability, place, relationship, and resurrection hope; constitutive of human life.
Broken formation pipeline. The corruption of trust, ends, learning, valuation, action, feedback, relationship, and shared conditions in Genesis 3. Personal rebellion remains the governing predicate.
Category clarity. Identification of the claim's kind so the evidence, inference, and action fit what is asserted.
Causality. Production or dependence under an appropriate account, distinct from correlation, meaning, intention, and purpose.
Channel. A created means carrying communication or shaping reception. Its existence, administration, and fidelity are distinct questions.
Childlike reception. Humility and receptive dependence compatible with mature understanding and responsibility; no prescribed final bodily age follows.
Claim Card. A record joining an exact claim to competent warrant, scope, dependencies, rival, consequence, and revision condition; shared rules can be inherited, local evidence cannot.
Communion. Differentiated giving and receiving in truth and love, with boundaries, correction, and repair. Theologically, gracious participation in God through Christ in the Spirit.
Constrained generativity. A revisable comparison of lawful possibility becoming historical actuality through state, relation, boundary, flow, feedback, and scale-dependent organization.
Corruption. Deformation of created goods and their mediated histories. Biblical phthora can also mean bodily decay; that broader range must be distinguished locally.
Counterfeit theosis. The culpable attempt to seize autonomously the likeness meant to be received through trust, grace, and participation.
Created agency. Real creaturely powers for action, formed through bodily and shared history. Human standing precedes demonstrated competence; responsibility requires occasion-specific inquiry.
Created bodily mortality / corruptibility. Finite embodied vulnerability and liability to dissolution. Its biological occurrence differs from death under sin's historical-covenantal reign.
CRM. A proposed aid for sorting prediction error, meaning pressure, trust, capacity, and action. It has no model-specific validation and does not govern doctrine.
Currentness. Naming source date, edition, version, and scope, especially where a changing field can invalidate a local claim.
Data. Recorded or selected differences offered as evidence, with a carrier, production history, context, method, and uncertainty.
Destruction. Ruin or loss with a specified grammatical object. Destruction of work, relation, city, or person cannot be silently interchanged.
Developmental incompletion. Good creaturely immaturity. A capacity not yet due is not a privation; incompletion alone is neither guilt nor diminished standing.
Devoted judgment / herem. Herem: devotion, ban, or forfeiture under YHWH's claim. Conquest use is a unique canonical boundary, never a Christian commission to coercive expansion.
Differentiated accountability. Answerability proportioned to received light, power, actual participation, capacity, and history, without a humanly calculable final sentencing metric.
Divine Design Framework. A Christian account of one created reality, received and formed through embodied history, corrupted by sin, restored in Christ, and ordered toward communion by the Spirit.
Divine permission. God's knowing providential relation to an event He does not command or intend as its wrongful agent does. Permission is not approval.
Doctrinal development / invariant-preserving refinement. Clarification under corrective pressure that preserves the canonical-apostolic referent and its relations while sharpening vocabulary.
Doctrinal warrant. Support from Scripture and faithful reception for Christian confession; independently required for doctrinal conclusions attached to empirical inquiry.
Durable disposition. A relatively stable learned tendency of attention, trust, valuation, judgment, feeling, or action; neither an essence nor a literal machine weight.
Emergence. Typed descriptive, epistemic, organizational, causal, or strong ontological novelty. Base, macrovariable, scale, timescale, intervention, and boundary must be specified.
Empirical instantiation. A pattern actually established within a field through observation, mechanism, intervention, or practice.
Explanatory power. An account's supported scope, depth, coherence, constraint, discrimination between rivals, and consequences, weighed alongside its commitments and unresolved burdens.
Faith. Whole-person trustful response to God through warranted recognition, testimony, repentance, worship, patience, and love. Recognition and allegiance differ.
Final judgment / anti-communion. Truthful final account and defeat of evil. Conditional destruction is the author's moderate preference; endless punishment is a serious rival; universal restoration remains a qualified hope.
Firstfruits. The risen Christ as the consecrated first portion of coming resurrection renewal, joining embodied fulfillment and the wider created horizon.
Formation. Historical change in a continuing subject's capacities through development, learning, practice, relation, injury, environment, and repair.
Formation state (analytic). The time-indexed map of nature, disposition, context, trust, valuation, habit, openness, and environment; distinct formation relations rather than fitted quantitative laws.
Fulfilled wholeness. The same saved subject's accomplished restoration in embodiment, agency, truth, love, and communion, compatible with further finite growth and lost acquisitions.
Godward addressability. Created standing under God's address, vocation, and judgment. It differs from measured spiritual performance and saving union.
Grace. God's saving initiative and gift through Christ in the Spirit, giving forgiveness, justification, incorporation, renewal, and life.
Heart. Contextual biblical language for inner orientation, including reason, will, memory, affection, and allegiance, rather than emotion alone.
Heart-mind / inner person. Overlapping inward thought, desire, will, memory, conscience, imagination, attention, affection, and allegiance; source contexts determine the exact use.
Hiddenness / unequal light. Unequal mediated access and recognition. Nonculpable nonrecognition differs from refusal; present relational deprivation remains real and unanswered by dependence alone.
Hostile spiritual powers. Created personal agents in rebellion, subordinate to God and defeated in Christ; their attribution in a particular case needs evidence.
Human receiver. One embodied living person receiving bodily, inwardly, and under God's address; these overlapping dimensions are not components.
Hypostatic union. The eternal Son's full divinity and complete humanity in one person; distinct from creatures' participation by grace.
Image and likeness. Created identity and vocation before God, whose expression and growth are wounded by sin and renewed in Christ, the true Image.
Incarnation. The eternal Son's assumption of complete human nature into His one personal life, without ceasing to be God or discarding humanity.
Incorruption. Freedom from decay in risen embodied life. The dead are raised; those alive in Christ at His appearing are transformed.
Information. Distinct measures and relations of uncertainty, correlation, description, physical implementation, coding, use, and meaning. Their conclusions are not interchangeable.
Inseparable operations. The external works of Father, Son, and Spirit are one undivided divine action.
Institution. Durable roles, rules, records, incentives, authority, sanctions, and practices enacted by agents, shaping later opportunities without becoming a personal soul.
Intermediate state. The real but incomplete condition between death and bodily resurrection, whose precise psychology and sequence remain open here.
Judgment. God's disclosure, verdict, and effective answer concerning persons, acts, and propagated histories; punishment, redress, and final boundary remain distinct relations.
Language. Embodied, inherited symbolic capacity for reference, coordination, reasons, promises, memory, teaching, translation, and public practices.
Law in Paul. Holy instruction that sin can exploit without making Torah evil; its inability to give fallen humanity life differs from contempt for its good.
Layer (typed shorthand). Provisional shorthand requiring identification as domain, scale, channel, receiver dimension, discipline, or authority level; never a separate reality by default.
Living identity. Historically continuous embodied organization maintained through turnover, metabolism, regulation, development, exchange, and repair. An abstract pattern alone is not an organism.
Logoi. Intelligible creaturely principles and purposes under the personal Logos, especially in Maximus's synthesis; not hidden software inside things.
Logos. The personal Son, the Word who is God and became flesh. Created intelligibility does not replace His identity.
Lover / Beloved / Love (secondary analogy). A secondary contemplative analogy for divine love. It neither replaces the scriptural names nor makes the Spirit an impersonal bond.
Mediation. Reception through created bodies and public channels, including words, instruments, practices, records, and institutions, acting on and through persons.
Miraculous sign. A marked divine act whose effect, timing, authority, or canonical role signifies revelation, mercy, liberation, judgment, or new creation; unexplained anomaly alone supplies no identification.
Misalignment. Loss of fitting relation to truth and good, able through actual agency to generate lies, injuries, and durable corruption. It is not a synonym for every kind of suffering.
New birth. A real saving beginning preceding mature formation. It does not independently decide perseverance, apostasy, or a literal return to childhood.
Obediential warrant. Examination through enacted repentance, protection, repair, worship, justice, and love. Fruit tests application without making false metaphysics true.
Offerings. Leviticus's differentiated ascent, gift, well-being, purification, and reparation offerings; distinct God-given forms of access and worship rather than generic payment.
Ordered appropriation. Fitting attribution of the one divine work from the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit, without separate jobs or ranked natures.
Participation / theosis. Creaturely sharing in God's life through Christ in the Spirit by grace, without absorption into or possession of divine essence.
Paschal economy. The connected saving action of incarnation, self-offering, cross, resurrection, victory, and gift of the Spirit; its distinct saving relations retain their predicates.
Path dependence. Dependence of later possibilities or stability on sequence and history. It conditions action without independently deciding attributable agency.
Present experience. Finite access to a person's actual life now. The subject and whole history exceed this access without becoming a hidden ideal copy.
Privation. Deprivation or disorder of a due good, dependent on the powers it damages. A first culpable defect requires no prior evil substance.
Proof. Demonstration within specified premises and a domain-appropriate standard. Formal proof, experiment, historical argument, and legal judgment establish differently.
Protective response. Protection and competent care where danger or coercion blocks responsible interpretation; a framework is no substitute for a case-specific response.
Providence. God's continuous sustaining and wise governance through real created causes and free action, wider than intervention or miracle.
Provisional bodily death / first death. Bodily death as a real rupture made provisional by resurrection. “First death” is framework shorthand, not Revelation's explicit wording.
Punishment. A fitting judicial consequence whose object and mode require local textual warrant. Anguish from resistance is a possible partial account, not its definition.
Reality contact. Allowing sources, facts, bodies, affected subjects, mechanisms, and correction to constrain an explanation.
Recapitulation. The Son's gathering and retracing of Adamic humanity in faithful obedience, victory, image renewal, and restored headship, especially in Irenaeus.
Redress. A truthful, effective, receivable answer to wrong suffered by its actual bearer. Other guilt neither cancels the injury nor independently proves adequate repair.
Repair. Restoration of damaged good in a continuing subject or system. Compensation can answer loss without reversing history; the sufferer remains nonfungible.
Rival-account test. Comparison with a recognizable strong alternative on shared evidence, granting its achievements and requiring warrant for every added commitment.
Rule of faith. Early public summary of apostolic confession preserving one Creator, Christ, Spirit, embodied restoration, judgment, and communion against secret novelty.
Scale. The level relevant to an inquiry, from molecular to cosmic. Eschatological judgment is a theological horizon, not one more empirical scale.
Second death. Revelation's image of final judgment after resurrection and account. Its lexical label alone does not settle mechanism, consciousness, or duration.
Semantic information. Information usable for an organized system's specified viability, function, goal, reference, or reason; propositional truth requires further relations.
Sin. Attributable rebellion that deforms good powers and relations; real as guilt, bondage, alienation, injury, and death while privative in ontology.
Soul. Context-sensitive language for living being, life, self, appetite, inward life, or rational soul. It is not a fixed synonym for heart-mind.
Source contact. The particular access a source supplies: wording, testimony, mechanism, experience, reception, analysis, or another specified relation.
Spirit-given communion. The Spirit's gracious incorporation of the whole person into Christ's life, bringing that person through the Son to the Father.
Stage-relative creaturely alignment. Absence of culpable contradiction to the good and vocation actually received at a developmental stage; distinct from maturity and saving communion.
Structural consonance. Comparable relations that illuminate while retaining different objects, mechanisms, and authorities.
Structural convergence. A nontrivial recurrence across independent fields with correspondences, differences, transfer, limits, and tests stated; no identity of essence follows.
Substrate language. Terms for patterns recognizable across created carriers. They do not establish transferable personhood or define incarnation and resurrection.
Technical source. A finite message origin within a communication system. This technical role does not define the Father or divine origination.
Temporal corporate judgment. A historical judgment on persons or corporate orders within mortal history. It does not alone disclose every subject's complete culpability or final destiny.
Torah. Instruction or law within received covenantal teaching, ordering worship, time, land, household, justice, holiness, and memory.
Transformation / resurrection / new creation. Resurrection restores the dead for life or judgment; saving transformation gives incorruptible life; new creation renews the whole order. Universal glorification does not follow from universal resurrection.
Triune ground of the governing movement. The Triune God's undivided creating and restoring action, confessed through canonical and apostolic warrant rather than inferred from created patterns.
True / alethinos, alethes. Alethinos and alethes: true, genuine, or real according to context. Covenant fulfillment is a further canonical inference, not their lexical definition.
Truth. What is so, reliable speech and fidelity, and God's self-disclosure; neither agreement nor comfort makes an assertion true.
Vocabulary resonance. Shared vocabulary prompting inquiry without independently carrying an inference between domains.
Warrant. The support permitting a claim to carry weight within a stated scope; its competence, inferential role, and limits must be identified.
Works / record / recompense. Embodied deeds; their truthful preservation in divine knowledge; and God's fitting answer. A complete record alone is not redress.
Wrath. God's holy opposition enacted in exposure, restraint, handing over, removal, recompense, or final judgment; more than mood or automatic consequence.
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