Part I · Word and Christ
θεότης
Theotēs theh-OH-tays
deity, Godhead
“Deity Dwelling Bodily”
There is exactly one place in the New Testament where the word theotēs appears: Colossians 2:9. Paul writes, in Greek: en autō katoikei pan to plērōma tēs theotētos sōmatikōs. In English (ESV): “for in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.”
One verse. One occurrence of the word. The technical term for “Christ is fully God in His incarnation” appears just here, in just this verse, in the whole of the New Testament. The chapter could almost be written in a paragraph: theotēs means the very being of God — Godhead itself, the essence of what makes God God — and Paul says all of it dwells, all of it in Christ, all of it bodily.
But the verse has done immense work in the history of Christian doctrine. It anchors the Christological confession of the Council of Nicaea (“of one substance with the Father”). It anchors the four privative adverbs of the Council of Chalcedon (“without confusion, without change, without division, without separation”). It anchors the Augsburg Confession’s third article on the person of Christ. And — at the place where the Lutheran tradition and the Reformed tradition divide most sharply on Christology — it anchors the Lutheran insistence on what is sometimes called the communicatio idiomatum and what Lutherans summarize in a Latin slogan: theotēs sōmatikōs — deity, bodily.
A hapax legomenon can be a chapter all by itself when the doctrine it carries is large enough.
This chapter is about that word.
The Word
The Greek word is θεότης (theotēs), pronounced in the Erasmian convention as theh-OH-tays, with the accent on the second syllable. The word is a third-declension feminine noun formed from the root theos (God) with the abstract-noun suffix -tēs. The suffix produces a quality-noun: theos + -tēs = “the quality of being God,” or more simply, “Godhead” or “deity.”
English readers may find it useful to think of the -tēs suffix as parallel to the English -ness (so theotēs is “Godness” — the abstract quality of being God) or to think of the parallel in the Latin tradition (deitas, deity, the same construction).
The word family is the theos family treated in Chapter 1: theos, theiotēs, theios, theopneustos, philanthrōpia, and so on. The two abstract nouns at the heart of the family are theotēs and theiotēs, both meaning approximately “deity” or “divinity” but with shades of distinction that some scholars take more seriously than others.
The distinction goes back at least to the eighteenth-century Lutheran exegete Johann Albrecht Bengel. In his Gnomon Novi Testamenti (a verse-by-verse Greek New Testament commentary that remains in print), Bengel proposed that the two abstract nouns are not synonyms. Theotēs names the Deity itself — God in His very being, the Godhood that makes God God. Theiotēs names the divine attributes — the qualities or perfections that can be discerned as belonging to God, especially as those qualities are manifested in creation and providence.
In support of the distinction Bengel pointed to the only two New Testament uses of each word:
Theotēs in Colossians 2:9, applied to Christ: “in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.” Christ has the very Godhood of God.
Theiotēs in Romans 1:20, applied to creation: “his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.” Creation displays God’s divine attributes — the theiotēs, the divinity of God — sufficiently to leave the pagan world without excuse.
If Bengel’s distinction holds, the choice of theotēs at Colossians 2:9 is exact: Paul is not saying that the divinity (in the sense of divine attributes) dwells in Christ; he is saying that the Godhood itself, the very being of God, dwells in Christ. Christ does not merely manifest the qualities of God; He is God, in His incarnate Person.
Some recent scholars treat theotēs and theiotēs as near-synonyms with no significant distinction. The careful Lutheran tradition, following Bengel, has maintained the distinction. Either way, the doctrine of Colossians 2:9 is the same: the deity of God — whether named in its essence (theotēs) or its attributes (theiotēs) — is fully present in Christ.
The Septuagint background: theotēs does not appear in the LXX. It is a New Testament term, born in the apostolic generation when the church needed Greek vocabulary precise enough to confess what had become inescapable: that the man Jesus of Nazareth was, in His incarnate Person, fully and properly God.
Range of Meaning
The range of theotēs in the New Testament is, strictly speaking, a single point. The word appears once. Its meaning is fixed by its single context: Colossians 2:9.
But the concept the word names has a range. In Christian theological usage, theotēs and its Latin equivalent deitas cover:
The essence of being God. The abstract quality without which God is not God. What philosophers and dogmaticians call the divine nature or the divine essence.
The Godhead. An older English word that meant the same thing — the being-God of God. The Athanasian Creed speaks of “the unity of the Godhead” (using the Latin unitas Deitatis); modern translations sometimes substitute “Trinity” or “divine nature,” but the older term is exact.
Deity as proper to one being only. In Christian usage, theotēs is not divisible and not transferable. There is one Godhead, and it belongs to the one God. To say of Christ that the whole theotēs dwells in Him is to make a maximal claim: not part of the divine nature, not a derivative or analogical divinity, but the very Godhead in its entirety.
In post-apostolic patristic writing, theotēs is used more broadly, sometimes appearing as a near-synonym for theios or theiotēs. But in the New Testament itself the word is specifically Pauline, specifically Christological, specifically Colossians 2:9.
Where You’ll Meet It
The structure of this section is unusual. Since theotēs appears only at Colossians 2:9, the chapter treats that verse at length and then turns to passages where the same Christological doctrine is taught with related but distinct vocabulary.
Colossians 2:9. “For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.” The Greek deserves close attention: en autō katoikei pan to plērōma tēs theotētos sōmatikōs. Five elements, each one carrying theological weight:
En autō — “in him.” Locative. Christ is the place where the theotēs is found. Not also somewhere else; not partially somewhere else; here, in Him.
Katoikei — “dwells.” Present indicative active. Permanent dwelling, not temporary visitation. The same verb is used for the indwelling of the Spirit in the believer (Romans 8:11) and for the dwelling of Christ in the believer’s heart by faith (Ephesians 3:17). It implies settled, ongoing residence.
Pan to plērōma — “the whole fullness.” Not partial fullness; the entirety. Plērōma is the word treated in the next chapter (Chapter 6) of this volume; here it functions as a maximizing modifier — all of what the theotēs contains. Not some of the divine attributes; all of them.
Tēs theotētos — “of the deity.” The genitive of identification. The fullness IS the deity. There is nothing of God’s being that is not included.
Sōmatikōs — “bodily.” The adverbial form of sōma (body). This is the word that carries the Lutheran-Reformed Christological difference. Paul does not say the deity dwells “spiritually” or “by the Spirit” or “by way of indwelling presence.” He says bodily. In the body of Christ — in His incarnate humanity, not alongside or above it — the whole fullness of the Godhead dwells.
The verse is a one-sentence catechism on the incarnation. The whole Godhead — every bit of it, with no remainder — dwells in the incarnate Christ, permanently, in His body.
Colossians 1:19. “For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.” This is the parallel verse earlier in the same epistle. The Greek: en autō eudokēsen pan to plērōma katoikēsai — “in him the whole fullness was pleased to dwell.” The same vocabulary (plērōma, katoikēsai), the same locative (en autō). Paul circles back to this language in Colossians 2:9 and adds the specifying noun (tēs theotētos) and the specifying adverb (sōmatikōs). The two verses interpret each other: the “fullness” of 1:19 is the “fullness of deity” of 2:9; the “dwelling” of 1:19 is the “dwelling bodily” of 2:9.
Philippians 2:6-7. “Who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” The great Christological hymn. The phrase “in the form of God” — Greek en morphē theou hyparchōn — is one of the strongest New Testament confessions of Christ’s pre-incarnate deity. Morphē in Greek philosophical usage names not mere appearance but essential form. To be en morphē theou is to be God in the essential form of God. The hymn continues by tracking Christ’s voluntary movement from this divine form into the anthrōpos form treated in Chapter 4. The theotēs dimension and the anthrōpos dimension meet in the kenosis hymn (treated more fully in Chapter 7 of this volume, on kenoō).
Hebrews 1:3. “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature.” The Greek: apaugasma tēs doxēs kai charactēr tēs hypostaseōs autou. Apaugasma is the radiance or shining-forth; charactēr is the exact stamp or impression; hypostasis is the underlying being or nature (a word that will receive its own chapter in Volume One). Christ is not a reflection of God but the radiance OF God; not a copy of the divine nature but the exact impress of it. The author of Hebrews is naming, with slightly different vocabulary, the same doctrine Colossians 2:9 names: the deity of God is fully present and fully expressed in the Son.
Romans 1:20. “His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.” The Greek: hē te aidios autou dynamis kai theiotēs. The hapax of theiotēs — the companion word treated above in The Word section. Paul’s argument here is that the divine attributes (the theiotēs) are accessible from creation; the divine essence itself (the theotēs) is accessible only in Christ. Natural theology can reach the existence and some attributes of God; revelation in Christ is required for the saving knowledge of God’s actual Person and work.
What Confessional Lutherans Hear
Theotēs — deity, Godhead
Three emphases, the third of which is the most distinctly Lutheran and requires the most careful exposition.
The whole fullness, not less than the whole. Colossians 2:9 says pan — all, every bit, the whole. There is no fragment of the divine essence that is missing from Christ. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one God; the Son is fully God in His Person; the incarnate Son does not have less of the divine nature than He had before the incarnation. The Augsburg Confession Article III opens with this confession: Christ is “true God and true man… both natures, the divine and the human, inseparably united in one person, one Christ.”
This emphasis is the foundation. Without the maximal claim — the whole fullness of deity — every other Christological move collapses. If Christ has only part of the divine nature, He cannot save (the partial deity is the deity of a creature, and creatures cannot save other creatures). The doctrine of the deity of Christ requires the maximal claim, and Colossians 2:9 makes it.
Deity dwelling bodily, not alongside the body. The adverb sōmatikōs is exact. Paul does not say the deity dwells “spiritually” in Christ, or “by way of presence,” or “alongside the human nature.” He says bodily. The deity is in the body. The deity is in the incarnate humanity. There is no division here between a divine Christ above and a human Christ below; there is the one Person in whom the whole Godhead dwells in the body.
This emphasis matters because it grounds the central confessional Lutheran teaching on the communicatio idiomatum — the communication of attributes between the two natures in the one Person. Since the deity dwells bodily, the attributes of the divine nature can be predicated of the human nature in the union. We can truthfully say “God died on the cross” — not because the divine nature suffered death (it cannot), but because the human nature that died is united in one Person with the divine nature that dwells bodily in it. We can say “God was hungry,” “God was tired,” “God wept” — each statement true of the incarnate Person whose divine and human natures cannot be separated.
The Formula of Concord Article VIII develops this at length, distinguishing three modes of the communicatio idiomatum — the genus idiomaticum, the genus apotelesmaticum, and the genus maiestaticum. The first two are common to Lutheran, Reformed, and Roman Catholic Christology; the third is the distinctly Lutheran emphasis.
The genus maiestaticum (the “majestic genus”) teaches that the divine attributes are communicated to the human nature of Christ — so that the human nature, in the personal union, shares in the divine majesty, omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. The human nature does not become divine; it remains human. But in the union, the human nature shares in divine attributes that belong properly to the divine nature. The Lutheran tradition saw this as the necessary consequence of theotēs sōmatikōs: if the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily in Christ, then His body shares in what the deity has.
Against the extra Calvinisticum*.* Here the Lutheran position differs sharply from the Reformed. The Reformed tradition, following Calvin and developed by later Reformed theologians, taught that the eternal Logos was not bounded by the human nature in the incarnation. The Logos became flesh, yes — but the Logos also remained “outside the flesh,” sustaining the universe, present everywhere by His divine nature even while incarnate in Christ. The Latin slogan was etiam extra carnem — “also outside the flesh” — and the doctrine came to be called the extra Calvinisticum, the “Calvinist extra.”
Lutheran theology rejected this with the slogan Logos non extra carnem — “the Logos is not outside the flesh.” The Lutheran reading of Colossians 2:9 takes pan and sōmatikōs with maximal seriousness. If the WHOLE fullness dwells BODILY, there is no “extra” Logos floating around outside the incarnate Christ. The whole Logos is the whole Christ, in His body.
The disagreement is not about whether Christ is fully God — both Lutherans and Reformed affirm this — but about how to understand the relation of the divine and human natures in the incarnate Christ. The Reformed extra Calvinisticum protects the transcendence of the divine nature (it cannot be circumscribed by a human body). The Lutheran theotēs sōmatikōs protects the unity of the incarnate Person (there is one Christ, and where He is, the whole Godhead is).
The practical payoff is most visible in sacramental theology, which the next paragraph will treat.
The pastoral payoff is substantial — and the sacramental payoff is most concrete. The Lutheran doctrine of the Real Presence in the Lord’s Supper depends on theotēs sōmatikōs. Because the whole Godhead dwells bodily in Christ, where Christ’s body is, the whole Christ is — God and man, indivisibly. When Christ promised to give His body and blood in the Supper, He gave what He had: His body, in which the whole fullness of deity dwells. The believer who receives the bread and wine of the Supper receives Christ’s body and blood truly, and with them the whole Christ — theotēs and anthrōpos together. (Volume One’s chapters on sōma, haima, and artos treat the sacramental side at length.)
The Reformed doctrine of the Supper, by contrast, holds that Christ’s body is locally in heaven (since His humanity is finite) but that the believer is united with Christ by the Spirit’s work, lifting the believer to the heavenly Christ. This is internally consistent with the extra Calvinisticum — the divine nature is also outside the flesh, sustaining the elements and uniting the believer with Christ by spiritual means. The Lutheran doctrine, by contrast, is internally consistent with theotēs sōmatikōs — the body and blood are truly present in the Supper because the whole Christ is given where His body is.
The two views are not minor variations on the same Christology; they are two different Christologies playing out into two different sacramental theologies. Confessional Lutherans hold both halves of theirs together with full seriousness.
The full entry in Just Enough Greek, Volume Two continues with “Where People Get It Wrong,” “So What,” and “If You Want to Go Deeper.”