These definitions explain the book's vocabulary. Biblical and historical terms retain their contextual ranges; Greek and Hebrew forms are transliterated where helpful.
Abductive alignment. Comparative explanatory fit weighed against rivals and costs. Compatibility alone supplies no discriminating confirmation. See Public explanatory fit.
Acquisitions. Learned capacities, habits, projects, roles, and understandings of oneself that belong to a person's history without exhausting that person's nature or identity. Their loss or correction does not by itself end the person.
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 death within the Adamic condition, joined to alienation, accusation, judgment, and propagated corruption. Death's reign also shapes the living before dissolution or personal ratification. Enslaving fear can extend this bondage without constituting death's whole reality.
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). The governing claim that creation receives existence, intelligibility, good, and ordered ends under the personal Logos. The book defends it through the connected philosophical, moral, and historical account. Typed purposes and nonfungible goods prevent outcome from becoming intention. Chapter 42 makes it the basis of the whole-account comparison: a connected account weighed against the strongest rival explanations.
Body. Material creaturely life in sensation, action, need, vulnerability, place, relationship, and resurrection hope; constitutive of human life.
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 within growing understanding and responsibility. Chapter 40 develops a renewed beginning in the same person, whose ability to receive and understand her history can grow through healing.
Claim Card. A record connecting a claim with its evidence, scope, dependencies, alternatives, consequences, and conditions for revision.
Cognitive Resonance Model (CRM). A proposed decision aid distinguishing prediction error and meaning pressure, then examining trust, capacity, agency, and the object of repair. Appendix D specifies the separate tests of its distinctions and practical benefit.
Communion. Differentiated giving and receiving in truth and love, with boundaries, correction, and repair. Theologically, gracious participation in God through Christ in the Spirit.
Conditional destruction. A competing account in which an unreconciled person's life permanently ends after resurrection and judgment. Chapter 40 instead argues for the person's restoration through real loss.
Confessional adequacy. Whether an interpretation preserves the Christian identity and action it professes to describe, judged through text, context, canon, and received teaching. It differs from a public argument for the truth of that confession.
Confidence. The strength of a claim's warrant within its stated scope. Confidence about a reported event, its cause, and its interpretation can differ.
Constrained generativity. The formation of new organization through lawful possibilities, particular states, relations, boundaries, flows, and feedback.
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. Adamic death names that embodied loss under Sin's historical-covenantal reign; the distinction concerns its relation to God and its final horizon.
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 judgment. Answerability proportioned to received light, power, participation, capacity, and history. Shared membership alone supplies no identical verdict on every person.
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. Clarification under corrective pressure that preserves the canonical-apostolic subject and its relations while sharpening vocabulary. New wording and a changed confession require different judgments.
Doctrinal warrant. Support from Scripture and faithful reception for Christian confession. Empirical conclusions attached to that confession require independent empirical warrant. See Confessional adequacy.
Durable disposition. A relatively stable learned tendency of attention, trust, valuation, judgment, feeling, or action. It is neither an essence nor a literal machine weight.
Embodied fruit. What a teaching becomes in conduct, worship, counsel, and institutional power, assessed through truthful love, protection, repentance, justice, and repair. A beneficial effect supports that application without verifying every belief associated with it.
Emergence. Typed descriptive, epistemic, organizational, causal, or strong ontological novelty arising in organized relations. Its explanation specifies the base, macrovariable, scale, timescale, intervention, boundary, and conditions.
Empirical instantiation. A pattern actually established within a field through observation, mechanism, intervention, or practice.
Experienced continuity. The person's reception of a later life as the recognizable fulfillment or continuation of the life already being lived. It differs from numerical identity and need not mean unbroken wakefulness.
Experiential cessation. The ending of a governing organization of lived selfhood that cannot carry forward into healed life. The same human being continues through a new beginning and can come to recognize the earlier history without resuming its corrupt rule. Chapter 40 distinguishes this from personal extinction.
Explanation and justification. Explanation makes events or relations intelligible through causes, history, constitution, or ends. Moral justification assesses whether an action or permission was right. An answer to either question can inform the other without settling it.
Explanatory power. An account's supported scope, depth, coherence, ability to distinguish alternatives, and consequences, weighed against its commitments and unanswered questions.
Faith. Whole-person trustful response to God through warranted recognition, testimony, repentance, worship, patience, and love. Recognition and allegiance differ.
Fear. A creature's response to perceived threat. It can protect a genuine good or become an instrument of bondage through shame, coercion, and distrust. Its moral significance depends on its object, conditions, and exercise; remaining anguish does not by itself establish culpable refusal.
Final judgment / anti-communion. Final judgment is God's truthful account of persons and histories, effective answer to wrong, and defeat of evil. Anti-communion is culpable opposition to truthful life with God and neighbor, distinguished from incapacity and nonrecognition. Chapter 40 argues for the continuing person's restoration through real loss, distinguishing numerical identity from experienced continuity and requiring adequate redress of the history.
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). A time-indexed description of a person's dispositions, trust, valuation, habits, capacities, and circumstances.
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.
Good. The real being, powers, and fitting fulfillment a creature receives under the Logos. Created goodness, a local benefit, moral rightness, and final communion have related but distinct predicates; an act can use real good powers in a wrongful order. Divine goodness in this book is recipient-directed: it is measured by what actually reaches each creature (see Knowing generosity).
Grace. God's saving initiative and gift through Christ in the Spirit. Pardon changes standing, adoption establishes belonging, and renewal enables the person's own response. Chapter 23 distinguishes the beginning of reception from mature participation.
Heart. Contextual biblical language for inner orientation, including reason, will, memory, affection, and allegiance, rather than emotion alone.
Hiddenness / unequal light. Unequal access to, and recognition of, God. Nonculpable nonrecognition can deprive a person of relationship without constituting refusal; present relational deprivation remains real and is not answered by dependence alone. Love is measured by God's treatment of each person within the situation that person actually has, so an unequal start in the conditions of recognition is not itself a wrong; a willing person's long wait remains adverse evidence (Chapter 27).
Hostile spiritual powers. Created personal agents in rebellion, subordinate to God and defeated in Christ; their attribution in a particular case needs evidence.
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.
Inferential status. What a claim's premises establish: entailment, exclusion, explanatory preference, compatibility, underdetermination, tension, or contradiction. This differs from confidence and from how fully an inquiry has been tested.
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 interval between bodily death and resurrection, whose mode is disputed. Chapter 38 compares conscious presence, unexperienced waiting, a materially realized intermediate life, and a genuine gap without a continuing bearer. Each account must explain how the person who died is the person raised.
Inward life. Thought, desire, will, memory, conscience, imagination, attention, affection, and allegiance within the whole person. Biblical descriptions overlap, and source contexts determine their exact use.
Judgment. God's disclosure, verdict, and effective answer concerning persons, acts, and propagated histories; punishment, redress, and final boundary remain distinct relations.
Judicial forfeiture. A warranted withdrawal or transfer of a specified entrusted good or associated title in response to attributable wrongdoing. An enduring forfeiture requires its disposition to remain operative. Healing, pardon, and new commissions are distinct from reinstatement of that particular good.
Kingdom. God's effective reign, the life received under it, and participation in its good. Particular royal commissions belong within this wider meaning; entering the kingdom is not uniformly a technical expression for appointment to office.
Knowing generosity. The book's name for the Creator's act: God knows the good of each creature and gives it being and powers for that creature's own sake. Goodness so understood is directed to the recipient, which is why the account is answerable to what actually reaches each creature, and why unanswered suffering counts against it.
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). A domain, scale, channel, dimension of reception, discipline, or level of authority, identified according to the inquiry. It is not a separate reality by default.
Lesser or local good. A finite good real in its fitting place, such as pleasure, safety, knowledge, recognition, or authority. Corruption lies in treating it as ultimate or pursuing it through a defective mode or relation; restoration makes its fitting participation actual.
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.
Logos. The personal Son, the Word who is God and became flesh, through whom created reality receives existence and intelligibility.
Meaning pressure. An event's challenge to identity, duty, hope, loyalty, or vocation, called meaning gap in the original framework. Anticipated loss can exert great pressure without prediction error, and a commitment under pressure can remain true. The proposed distinction is qualitative and requires empirical testing.
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.
Nature. The kind of being a creature is, with characteristic powers, dependencies, and ways of developing. Nature, currently available powers, and acquired formation differ; human standing is not a test of their present exercise.
New birth. The Spirit-given beginning of saving life in Christ, from which mature formation grows.
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. Participation is receiving and enacting a good one does not originate absolutely while remaining a distinct acting creature. Theosis is gracious sharing in God's life through Christ in the Spirit, 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.
Prediction error / expectation mismatch. A difference between what was expected and the evidence encountered. CRM uses this as a qualitative evidential distinction, not as a measured neural quantity; the person need not yet recognize the mismatch.
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.
Primitive numerical continuance. A candidate account treating numerical identity as irreducible and nonbranching. It allows two routes: a continuing incomplete bearer whose embodied powers God restores, or identity between the earlier and later bearer across a genuine gap in existence. Identity across that gap is an additional disputed possibility. The resurrection promise requires the same person without selecting either route; Chapter 38 compares this proposal with subsistent-form and animalist accounts.
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 obstructs a person's agency or access to help.
Providence. God's continuous sustaining and wise governance through real created causes and free action, wider than intervention or miracle.
Provisional legal permission. An authoritative allowance governing an existing condition within a history of formation and reform. Its actual legal force differs from identifying the arrangement as creation's fulfilled good; faithful exercise remains answerable to the person's standing and the fuller duties of care. Chapters 18 and 31 develop the distinction through commands, concessions, supported release, and changed legal relations.
Public explanatory fit. How well an account explains publicly assessable evidence in comparison with strong rivals, considering supported connections, scope, discrimination, contrary evidence, and added commitments.
Punishment. A fitting judicial consequence imposed on a responsible agent for a wrong; its object and mode require local textual warrant. Desert gives punishment its measure, while protection and the person's standing limit its means (Chapter 32). Anguish from resistance is a possible partial account of final punishment, 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.
Receiver. One embodied living person receiving bodily, inwardly, and under God's address. The word names the openness of a whole person; these overlapping dimensions are not components.
Redress. A truthful, effective, receivable answer to wrong suffered by its actual bearer. Vindication requires truthful attribution, restored powers require usable reception, and enduring communion requires continuing participation. Received repair, secure communion, and a later responsible refusal are distinct claims. The injured person's own guilt in other matters does not cancel the injury; an unrelated benefit cannot substitute for the good its repair requires.
Repair. Restoration of damaged good in a continuing subject or system. Compensation can answer loss without reversing history; the sufferer remains nonfungible.
Restoration. The same bearer receiving damaged powers and relations in their fitting good. In salvation, Christ accomplishes the restorative life and the Spirit gives personal participation; corrupted acquisitions can end while the actual creature is healed. The past remains true.
Restorative consummation. The account Chapter 40 defends: the human person continues through judgment, corruption's rule ends, and Christ completes each person's communion with God, through experiences of judgment that range from welcome fulfillment to a painful beginning again. Its universal scope is abductively preferred with less confidence than personal continuance; Justinian's edict of 543 condemns that scope, and the chapter weighs the condemnation.
Reward and entrusted service. Recognition of faithful participation and the further good entrusted to a person within given life. Restoration fulfills the person; reward answers actual faithful work, itself enabled by grace. Greater responsibility serves more good without conferring greater personal worth.
Rival-account test. Comparison with a strong, recognizable alternative on shared evidence, weighing each account's achievements and added commitments.
Rule of faith. Early public summary of apostolic confession preserving one Creator, Christ, Spirit, embodied restoration, judgment, and communion against secret novelty.
Salvation. Deliverance through Christ from Sin and Death into communion with God. Its gracious beginning, healing, mature exercise, and consummation are distinguishable within one received life. Vocation expresses that life in service.
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.
Shared memory. Histories made available through testimony, records, learned practices, institutions, and their continuing effects. A preserved account remains distinguishable from the past it describes.
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 or mind, nor a detachable component of the person. A subsistent formal principle through death is a possible additional account, not entailed by this book's definition of the whole embodied human.
Source contact. Access to a source's wording, testimony, mechanism, experience, reception, or analysis.
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.
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.
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 Father, Son, and Spirit's undivided creating and restoring action, confessed through canonical and apostolic witness.
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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