Core Glossary
Core Glossary
translation_memory.json is the enforced glossary for every Phase 2 content-generation pass in this curriculum. This document summarizes its shape and the principles behind it; see the Glossary Risk Groups for the full per-term entries.
Composition
The glossary currently holds 47 terms spanning all four risk tiers, drawn from the doctrines identified in Doctrine Analysis and grounded in the cultural risks identified in Culture Analysis. Because English is the source language, every term entry’s translation field intentionally matches the term itself; the substantive content is instead in each entry’s:
- Doctrine risk tier (Critical/High/Medium/Low), reflecting communication risk within English rather than translation-fidelity risk
- Explicitly rejected alternatives — here, misleading popular substitutes or glosses drawn from secular, legal, or casual English usage, not foreign-language alternatives
- Notes explaining the specific false-friend drift, denominational contest, or obsolescence risk each term carries
Governing principles
- False-friend drift outranks obsolescence — a term with a strong, confidently-held wrong meaning (justification, election) is treated as higher risk than a term that is simply rare or archaic (sanctification, exhort), because confident misunderstanding is harder to correct than a flagged comprehension gap.
- Denominational transparency, not silent adjudication — where English-speaking Christian traditions genuinely disagree (grace and works, “being saved,” assurance, sainthood), this glossary states the curriculum’s chosen reading explicitly rather than assuming it is the only one an English-speaking reader would hold.
- Explanation over substitution — because there is no alternate English word to swap in for a false-friend term without losing established theological and translation-historical weight, this glossary’s strategy is exclusively explanatory: pair the term with clarifying context, not a different word choice.
- Version-controlled and append-only in Phase 2 — if a new potentially-ambiguous term is discovered during content development, it is added to translation memory and the version number incremented, never silently improvised per-document (see the AI Translation Requirements’ Translation Memory Load and Enforcement Instructions).
Relationship to the Doctrine Risk Registry
Every glossary term’s doctrine field links back to an entry in doctrine_risk_registry.json, so a term’s risk tier is always traceable to the specific doctrine it protects — the glossary flags vocabulary, the doctrine registry explains why that vocabulary matters, and for English specifically, whether the underlying risk is secular false-friend drift, denominational contest among English-speaking Christians, or simple word obsolescence.
Critical Risk Terms
Church
Approved rendering: church
Transliteration: church
Doctrine: Church as God’s People
CRITICAL: in the contemporary post-Christian West, ‘church’ increasingly carries negative or purely institutional connotations — declining attendance, high-profile clergy-abuse scandals, and a large and growing share of the population identifying as religiously unaffiliated (‘nones’) mean many readers’ primary association with ‘church’ is an institution in decline or under scrutiny, not Romans’ living, Spirit-indwelt people of God. ‘Going to church’ is also often understood as a passive cultural or family habit rather than active participation in Christ’s body. This curriculum must actively restore the doctrine’s relational, living, Spirit-filled sense rather than assume the English word still carries it for most readers.
Election
Approved rendering: election
Transliteration: election
Doctrine: Effectual Calling
Rejected alternatives: an election (the near-total dominant contemporary sense: a political vote, e.g. ‘the presidential election’)
CRITICAL FALSE-FRIEND DRIFT: in essentially all contemporary English usage outside specifically theological contexts, ‘election’ means a political vote. This is a near-total lexical takeover; readers encountering Romans 9’s election language without explicit signposting are highly likely to import a political-voting frame (majority choice, campaigning, competing candidates) that has nothing to do with God’s sovereign, prior, unilateral choice. This term requires more active reframing than almost any other in this registry.
Grace
Approved rendering: grace
Transliteration: grace
Doctrine: Grace
Rejected alternatives: elegance/poise (the dominant secular sense, e.g. ‘she moved with such grace’), a grace period (the dominant legal/financial sense, an extension of time, not unmerited favor)
CRITICAL FALSE-FRIEND DRIFT: ‘grace’ in ordinary contemporary English overwhelmingly means physical elegance or poise, or, in contracts and billing, a ‘grace period’ (a delay before a penalty applies) — a completely secularized sense with no theological content. CRITICAL DENOMINATIONAL CONTEST: English-speaking Christian traditions themselves disagree sharply on grace’s relationship to works and human cooperation (Reformed ‘grace alone’ vs. Wesleyan/Arminian synergism vs. Catholic sacramental ‘means of grace’ theology); this curriculum must state its own reading of Romans’ ‘apart from works’ argument (4:4-5, 11:5-6) explicitly rather than assume all English-speaking Christian readers already agree.
Justification
Approved rendering: justification
Transliteration: justification
Doctrine: Salvation
Rejected alternatives: justifying your answer / justifying an action (the near-universal everyday sense: giving a reason or excuse for something already done)
CRITICAL FALSE-FRIEND DRIFT: in everyday English, ‘to justify’ overwhelmingly means to give a reason or defense for an action (‘justify your answer,’ ‘how do you justify that expense’), a rational self-defense completely different from Paul’s forensic sense of God declaring a sinner righteous. This is arguably the single most confidently misread theological term in English Bible study, precisely because every reader already has a strong, wrong, ready-made definition.
Lord
Approved rendering: Lord
Transliteration: Lord
Doctrine: Lordship of Christ
Rejected alternatives: boss / master (attempts at modernization that lose the term’s exclusivity and worship-worthiness), a British Lord (the aristocratic title sense, especially salient for British/Commonwealth readers)
CRITICAL: ‘Lord’ has nearly disappeared from ordinary spoken English outside this specific religious usage, and where it does survive (British/Commonwealth aristocratic titles, ‘the House of Lords,’ fantasy fiction ‘dark lords’) it carries archaic or fictional-genre associations rather than lived, felt authority. Romans 10:9’s confession ‘Jesus is Lord’ risks landing with almost no emotional or volitional force for many contemporary English readers precisely because the English word itself has gone mostly obsolete in everyday use; this curriculum must actively restore its weight (total, exclusive, personal allegiance) rather than assume the English word still carries it.
Providence
Approved rendering: providence
Transliteration: providence
Doctrine: Providence
Rejected alternatives: everything happens for a reason (a common contemporary secular folk-spiritual idiom expressing impersonal fate rather than a personal, purposive God), Providence (the proper noun — the capital city of Rhode Island, USA)
CRITICAL: ‘providence’ is now a genuinely rare, archaic-sounding word in ordinary speech, and for many American readers the capitalized proper noun (the city of Providence, Rhode Island) is now the single most common encounter with the word string itself — an almost comically literal illustration of the term’s obsolescence in its theological sense. Separately, contemporary secular folk spirituality has its own popular substitute concept, ‘everything happens for a reason,’ which sounds similar to Romans 8:28 but generally implies an impersonal cosmic balancing mechanism rather than the personal, purposive care of the God of Romans; this difference should be stated explicitly.
Salvation
Approved rendering: salvation
Transliteration: salvation
Doctrine: Salvation
Rejected alternatives: being saved (contested denominational shorthand — see notes), rescue (too generic a gloss on its own)
CRITICAL DENOMINATIONAL CONTEST: English-speaking Christian traditions are themselves divided on ‘being saved’ — revivalist/altar-call traditions often treat it as a single, datable past-tense event (‘I got saved on such-and-such date’), while Catholic, Orthodox, and many mainline Protestant traditions treat salvation as an ongoing, lifelong reality worked out over time. This curriculum should state which sense a given Romans passage intends (e.g. 1:16 and 10:9-10 lean toward a decisive event; 13:11 points forward). Also guard against the fully secularized generic sense of ‘salvation’ as any rescue from a bad situation (‘a salvage/salvation operation’), which strips out the divine agent entirely.
High Risk Terms
Called
Approved rendering: called
Transliteration: called
Doctrine: Divine Calling
Context-sensitive: in 1:1 = called to apostleship; in 1:7 = called to be saints; in 8:28-30 = effectual calling to salvation. See ‘calling’ below for the specific modern secular drift risk.
Calling
Approved rendering: calling
Transliteration: calling
Doctrine: Divine Calling
Rejected alternatives: finding your calling (the dominant contemporary secular sense: career vocation or personal passion, discovered through self-reflection rather than received from God)
Modern self-actualization culture has repurposed ‘calling’ as career vocation (‘teaching is my calling’) discovered through introspection, which risks reducing God’s initiative in Romans’ calling language to an individualist project of finding one’s own purpose. The direction of agency (God calls; the person does not self-select) must be stated explicitly.
Covenant
Approved rendering: covenant
Transliteration: covenant
Doctrine: Davidic Covenant
Rejected alternatives: a restrictive covenant (the dominant contemporary legal sense: a binding clause in a property deed, employment contract, or loan agreement)
Most contemporary English speakers now encounter ‘covenant’ chiefly in real estate law (‘restrictive covenants’ in property deeds) or contract law (‘a covenant not to compete’), a technical legal-document sense that crowds out the relational, promissory, personal bond Romans and the wider Old Testament narrative intend. This should be actively distinguished, not assumed understood.
Faith
Approved rendering: faith
Transliteration: faith
Doctrine: Faith
Rejected alternatives: faith in humanity / a leap of faith (secularized idioms meaning generic optimism or an unsupported gamble, not trust in a specific person)
Contemporary English has largely detached ‘faith’ from any specific object: ‘keeping the faith,’ ‘faith in humanity,’ and ‘a leap of faith’ all use the word for generic hopefulness or an ungrounded gamble. Romans’ sense of specific, personal trust in Christ (not generalized optimism) must be made explicit in context every time.
Imputed Righteousness
Approved rendering: imputed righteousness
Transliteration: imputed righteousness
Doctrine: Justification by Faith
Rejected alternatives: earned righteousness / good-person status (the explicit rejected opposite — righteousness achieved by good behavior)
‘Imputed’ is a rare, technical, almost exclusively theological/legal word in contemporary English (obsolescence risk), which paradoxically makes it safer than ‘justification’ alone, since readers are less likely to already have a confident wrong definition. Still requires active teaching: credited righteousness, not the popular secular substitute of being a fundamentally ‘good person’ by behavior or intention, which contemporary moral culture (increasingly framed in terms of personal authenticity and good intentions rather than external moral law) tends to substitute by default.
Obedience Of Faith
Approved rendering: obedience of faith
Transliteration: obedience of faith
Doctrine: Obedience of Faith
Rejected alternatives: blind obedience / just following orders (negative idioms reflecting contemporary Western suspicion of obedience as servility or complicity)
Contemporary Western culture places very high value on individual autonomy and is broadly suspicious of ‘obedience’ as a virtue, often associating it with servility, lack of critical thinking, or even historical complicity in wrongdoing (‘just following orders’). Romans 1:5 and 16:26’s obedience that flows freely from faith, not external compulsion, must be carefully distinguished from this negative cultural default.
Resurrection
Approved rendering: resurrection
Transliteration: resurrection
Doctrine: Resurrection of Christ
Rejected alternatives: Easter (the commercialized cultural holiday sense — chocolate eggs, an Easter bunny — increasingly detached from the historical claim)
Contemporary post-Christian Western culture broadly treats the resurrection as a religious metaphor, myth, or seasonal cultural observance (heavily commercialized as ‘Easter,’ with imagery unrelated to the biblical event) rather than a claimed historical fact. Romans 1:4, 4:25, and 6:4-5 depend on a real, bodily, historical event; this curriculum should state the historical claim plainly rather than assume cultural familiarity implies belief in its factuality.
Righteousness
Approved rendering: righteousness
Transliteration: righteousness
Doctrine: Salvation
Rejected alternatives: self-righteous / holier-than-thou (the dominant connotation ‘righteous’ now carries in casual usage — smug, judgmental superiority)
In contemporary usage, ‘righteous’ and especially ‘self-righteous’ carry a strongly negative, sanctimonious connotation — nearly the opposite of Paul’s sense of a right standing before God received as a gift. Readers must be told explicitly that biblical righteousness is not moral smugness but a status given, not achieved or performed.
Saints
Approved rendering: saints
Transliteration: saints
Doctrine: Sainthood
Real denominational contest among English speakers: Catholic and Orthodox usage reserves ‘saint’ for a formally canonized, exceptionally holy figure (with a capital S and a title, e.g. ‘Saint Francis’), while Romans 1:7 uses it for every ordinary believer in the Roman church. Protestant/Evangelical readers are more likely to already read it corporately, but this curriculum should state the inclusive sense explicitly given the word’s split usage across the wider English-speaking Christian world.
Sin
Approved rendering: sin
Transliteration: sin
Doctrine: Universal Human Accountability
Rejected alternatives: sinfully delicious / my one sin (trivialized marketing and joking usage, e.g. dessert advertising)
Contemporary marketing and casual speech have trivialized ‘sin’ into a jokey synonym for a harmless indulgence (‘sinfully delicious chocolate cake’), and broader therapeutic and non-judgmental cultural norms are often actively resistant to guilt-based moral language generally. Romans 1:18-3:20’s weight of real moral guilt before a personal God must be restored explicitly, working against both the trivializing and the guilt-averse cultural currents at once.
Medium Risk Terms
Abba
Approved rendering: Abba
Transliteration: Abba
Doctrine: Adoption into God’s Family
Rejected alternatives: ABBA (the Swedish pop group — an extremely common, almost unavoidable secular association for contemporary readers)
For a very large share of contemporary English-speaking readers, ‘Abba’ is most immediately associated with the Swedish pop group ABBA, not the Aramaic term of filial intimacy Paul preserves in Romans 8:15. This association should be anticipated and explicitly set aside, however lighthearted it may seem, rather than assumed harmless.
Apostle
Approved rendering: apostle
Transliteration: apostle
Doctrine: Apostleship
Fairly stable technical term with limited competing everyday usage; main risk is treating ‘apostle’ as simply a job title (‘an apostle of free trade,’ a modern loose secular usage for ‘a leading advocate’) rather than a specific, foundational, non-repeatable New Testament office.
Father
Approved rendering: Father
Transliteration: Father
Doctrine: Adoption into God’s Family
Minor denominational note: in Catholic usage ‘Father’ is also the standard form of address for a priest, which could create ambiguity in mixed-denomination reading groups; also worth noting that for readers with painful or absent human father figures, ‘Father’ as a name for God may carry unintended negative emotional weight requiring pastoral sensitivity, not just doctrinal explanation.
Fellowship
Approved rendering: fellowship
Transliteration: fellowship
Doctrine: Christian Fellowship
Rejected alternatives: a fellowship (the dominant contemporary secular sense: an academic, research, or professional grant/appointment, e.g. ‘a postdoctoral fellowship,’ ‘a Rhodes Scholarship fellowship’)
In contemporary English, ‘a fellowship’ is more likely to be encountered as an academic or professional grant/appointment than as shared Christian communal life, which can flatten Romans’ relational, participatory sense into something closer to institutional membership or a funded program.
Gentiles
Approved rendering: Gentiles
Transliteration: Gentiles
Doctrine: Unity of Jews and Gentiles
Rejected alternatives: non-believers (a common but incorrect modern gloss — Gentiles are non-Jews, not necessarily non-Christians)
‘Gentiles’ is a low-frequency, almost archaic word in ordinary contemporary English outside Bible reading; many readers only vaguely know it means ‘non-Jewish people’ without grasping the specific rhetorical and covenantal stakes Paul assigns it. Should not be glossed as ‘non-believers,’ a common but mistaken modern conflation.
Glory
Approved rendering: glory
Transliteration: glory
Doctrine: Deity of Christ
Rejected alternatives: glory days (nostalgic secular usage for past success), a glory hound (a pejorative term for self-seeking attention)
‘Glory’ survives mainly in nostalgic (‘glory days’) or explicitly self-seeking, even pejorative (‘glory hound,’ ‘hogging the glory’) secular usage — nearly inverted from God’s self-existent, radiant, worship-worthy glory in Romans 1:23 and 9:5, which must be actively distinguished from these connotations.
God
Approved rendering: God
Transliteration: God
Doctrine: Deity of Christ
Rejected alternatives: a higher power (a common, deliberately vague contemporary substitute, e.g. in recovery-program language), the universe (a New-Age-influenced impersonal substitute, e.g. ‘the universe has a plan for you’)
Contemporary spiritual-but-not-religious culture often substitutes deliberately vague or impersonal alternatives (‘a higher power,’ ‘the universe’) for a personal, specific, self-revealing God; Romans’ God is not a placeholder concept but the specific God who raised Jesus from the dead (1:4) and is personally engaged with creation (1:19-20).
Gospel
Approved rendering: gospel
Transliteration: gospel
Doctrine: Gospel
Rejected alternatives: good news (acceptable as an explanatory gloss, but should not fully replace ‘gospel’ since it loses the term’s proclamatory weight)
Comparatively stable: the idiom ‘gospel truth’ (meaning absolute, unquestionable truth) actually reinforces rather than undermines the word’s authoritative connotation. Main risk is that ‘the Gospels’ (the four New Testament books) can be confused with ‘the gospel’ (the message itself) by readers with limited church background.
Holy Spirit
Approved rendering: Holy Spirit
Transliteration: Holy Spirit
Doctrine: Sanctification
Rejected alternatives: good vibes / positive energy (vague contemporary spiritual substitutes for a specific, personal, divine Person)
Contemporary ‘spiritual but not religious’ and wellness-culture language (‘good vibes,’ ‘positive energy,’ ‘the universe’s energy’) offers vague, impersonal substitutes for what Romans 8 presents as a specific, personal divine Person who intercedes, indwells, and gives life; this personal, Trinitarian sense must be actively taught, not assumed retained by loose cultural familiarity with ‘spirit’ language.
Holy
Approved rendering: holy
Transliteration: holy
Doctrine: Sanctification
Rejected alternatives: holier-than-thou (negative idiom for sanctimonious superiority), holy cow / holy moly (mere exclamations, entirely secularized)
‘Holy’ survives mainly in negative idiom (‘holier-than-thou’) or as a content-free exclamation (‘holy cow!’), both of which drain the word of its ‘set apart for God’ meaning; must be actively re-taught rather than assumed familiar.
Incarnation
Approved rendering: incarnation
Transliteration: incarnation
Doctrine: Incarnation
Comparatively stable and mostly encountered in explicitly Christian (especially Christmas-season) contexts, which is a mild asset. Minor risk: general secular usage of ‘incarnation’ as a loose metaphor (‘the incarnation of evil,’ ‘a previous incarnation of this company’) can dilute the doctrine’s uniqueness — Christ’s incarnation is not one instance of a general pattern.
Intercession
Approved rendering: intercession
Transliteration: intercession
Doctrine: Prayer and Intercession
A relatively rare, formal word in ordinary contemporary speech (obsolescence risk rather than false-friend risk); most common surviving usage is ‘intercessory prayer’ in explicitly religious contexts, which is actually a mild asset for this specific doctrine.
Israel
Approved rendering: Israel
Transliteration: Israel
Doctrine: Unity of Jews and Gentiles
Standard proper name; note the modern nation-state of Israel is a live, politically contested contemporary topic in English-language media and public discourse, so context should clarify when the biblical covenant people, not contemporary geopolitics, is meant.
Jesus
Approved rendering: Jesus
Transliteration: Jesus
Doctrine: Lordship of Christ
Rejected alternatives: Jesus (as a casual interjection/expletive, entirely secularized and disrespectful usage)
Widely used as a casual interjection or mild expletive in secular speech, a use this curriculum’s register should obviously avoid; otherwise the name itself is stable, though popular ‘historical Jesus’ framings (a wise moral teacher, a social reformer) often quietly strip out the divine claims Romans makes about him.
Kingdom Of God
Approved rendering: kingdom of God
Transliteration: kingdom of God
Doctrine: Kingdom Mission
Rejected alternatives: a fantasy kingdom (contemporary media associations from fantasy fiction, film, and games — Tolkien-esque realms, ‘Game of Thrones’-style politics)
For readers, especially younger ones, whose primary cultural exposure to ‘kingdoms’ is fantasy fiction, film, and games, ‘kingdom’ may evoke an imagined fictional realm rather than God’s actual present-and-coming sovereign reign; this curriculum should stress the kingdom of God’s real, historical, and ongoing nature.
Law
Approved rendering: law
Transliteration: law
Doctrine: Fulfillment of Prophecy
Contemporary Western readers live in a highly legalistic, litigious culture where ‘the law’ primarily evokes civil and criminal law and the legal profession; this is a partial asset for Paul’s legal-metaphor argument in Romans 2-7 but requires care to keep readers from assuming only contemporary secular legal categories are in view, and to avoid caricaturing ‘law vs. grace’ in a simplistic ‘legalism is always bad’ way that some popular ‘hyper-grace’ teaching in contemporary English-language Christian media encourages.
Messiah
Approved rendering: Messiah
Transliteration: Messiah
Doctrine: Messianic Promise
Rejected alternatives: a messiah complex (a pop-psychology pejorative term for grandiose self-importance)
‘A messiah complex’ is a common pop-psychology term of mild clinical mockery for main-character grandiosity, an association this curriculum should be aware could color the word negatively for some readers; the term’s specific, positive, Jewish-messianic-fulfillment sense in Romans 9:5 should be actively restated.
Mission
Approved rendering: mission
Transliteration: mission
Doctrine: Mission to the Nations
Rejected alternatives: a mission statement (the dominant contemporary corporate/organizational sense)
Contemporary English speakers most often encounter ‘mission’ in corporate or organizational branding (‘our mission statement,’ ‘mission-driven company’), a secularized strategic-goal sense quite different from Paul’s specific sense of gospel proclamation to the unreached.
Peace
Approved rendering: peace
Transliteration: peace
Doctrine: Peace with God
Rejected alternatives: world peace / inner peace (the dominant secular senses: political non-conflict or psychological calm)
‘Peace’ is heavily used in political (‘world peace’) and therapeutic/wellness (‘inner peace,’ ‘peace of mind’) senses in contemporary English. Romans 5:1’s specific relational, judicial peace with God secured through justification must be distinguished from both the geopolitical and the merely psychological senses.
Power Of God
Approved rendering: power of God
Transliteration: power of God
Doctrine: Power of God for Salvation
Contemporary secular discourse about ‘power’ is dominated by political, corporate, and interpersonal power struggles and abuse-of-power narratives, generally negative in connotation; Romans 1:16’s saving, life-giving divine power should be actively distinguished from this largely negative secular power discourse.
Prophecy
Approved rendering: prophecy
Transliteration: prophecy
Doctrine: Fulfillment of Prophecy
Rejected alternatives: a self-fulfilling prophecy (a common secular psychological/sociological idiom unrelated to divine revelation)
‘A self-fulfilling prophecy’ is a well-known secular psychological idiom describing a belief that causes its own fulfillment through behavior, unrelated to and potentially confusing alongside God-inspired predictive prophecy in the biblical sense.
Prophet
Approved rendering: prophet
Transliteration: prophet
Doctrine: Inspiration of Scripture
Rejected alternatives: a tech prophet / prophet of doom (secular usage for a confident forecaster or a pessimistic commentator)
Secular usage applies ‘prophet’ loosely to any confident public forecaster (‘a tech prophet,’ ‘a prophet of doom’), diluting the specific sense of one who speaks God’s own revealed word rather than making an educated guess about the future.
Sanctification
Approved rendering: sanctification
Transliteration: sanctification
Doctrine: Sanctification
OBSOLESCENCE RISK rather than false-friend risk: ‘sanctification’ is essentially unused in ordinary contemporary English outside specifically religious contexts, so most readers will have no ready-made (mis)definition to unlearn, but will need the concept built from scratch. Lower risk than ‘grace’ or ‘justification’ precisely because unfamiliarity prompts readers to ask rather than assume.
Seed Of David
Approved rendering: seed of David
Transliteration: seed of David
Doctrine: Davidic Covenant
Rejected alternatives: descendant of David (an acceptable modern-register gloss)
Romans 1:3; ‘seed’ in the sense of ‘offspring/lineage’ is archaic in ordinary modern English (where ‘seed’ otherwise means a plant seed or, colloquially, a starting input, as in ‘seed money’ or ‘seed an idea’); ‘descendant of David’ is an acceptable plain-language gloss, but the older King James-influenced phrase ‘seed of David’ is worth retaining alongside it given its familiarity in English hymnody and older translations.
Son Of God
Approved rendering: Son of God
Transliteration: Son of God
Doctrine: Sonship of Christ
Comparatively stable phrase, but contemporary secular ‘historical Jesus’ popular narratives (treating Jesus as merely a wise moral teacher or social reformer) can quietly strip the theological content from the phrase even when the words themselves are retained; the eternal, unique, divine sense must be actively taught, not assumed retained by cultural familiarity with the phrase.
Spiritual Gifts
Approved rendering: spiritual gifts
Transliteration: spiritual gifts
Doctrine: Spiritual Gifts
Rejected alternatives: gifted (the dominant secular sense: innate talent or high academic ability, as in ‘the gifted program’)
‘Gifted’ in contemporary English overwhelmingly refers to innate natural talent or academic aptitude (gifted-and-talented education programs), a merit/aptitude framework quite different from Spirit-given grace enablements distributed according to God’s will, not innate ability.
Low Risk Terms
Adoption
Approved rendering: adoption
Transliteration: adoption
Doctrine: Adoption into God’s Family
A rare case of a positive secular drift: increased public awareness and celebration of adoption (including high-profile celebrity adoptions and adoption-awareness advocacy) in contemporary culture generally supports, rather than undermines, Romans 8:15-17’s sense of full, permanent, loving family inclusion. Still worth stressing the full-inheritance-rights dimension, which is less commonly emphasized in everyday usage.
David
Approved rendering: David
Transliteration: David
Doctrine: Davidic Covenant
Standard proper name; comparatively stable, though most contemporary readers’ independent knowledge of David likely comes from the David-and-Goliath narrative alone rather than the covenant promise Romans 1:3 depends on, so that background should still be supplied.
Exhort
Approved rendering: exhort
Transliteration: exhort
Doctrine: Mutual Edification
OBSOLESCENCE RISK: ‘exhort’ and ‘exhortation’ are rare, formal, almost archaic-sounding words in ordinary contemporary speech; readers will likely need the word glossed (encourage, urge strongly) but are unlikely to actively misread it, since it has no competing secular meaning to interfere.
Thanksgiving
Approved rendering: thanksgiving
Transliteration: thanksgiving
Doctrine: Thanksgiving
Minor risk: capitalized ‘Thanksgiving’ names a major secular/cultural American national holiday (turkey, family gatherings, football), which could crowd out the general theological sense of giving thanks to God found throughout Romans; context (lowercase, general usage) usually disambiguates.
Referenced passages