It is the verb, in fact, that provides the clue. The Greek synergeō means, literally, ‘work with’. It’s the word from which we get ‘synergism’ – which has had a bad press in theological discourse, to which I’ll return presently, but there’s no getting away from its literal meaning. In the traditional translation, this was understood in terms of ‘everything working together’, that is, the different bits of life’s jigsaw coming together with one another, as it were automatically. But that is not quite what the word means. When Paul uses synergeō elsewhere it means, as the Greek implies, two
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