What wasn't made clear was the major theological difference in reading "Kingdom of heaven" or "Kingdom of the heavens." There isn't one. This same individual also taught that the word "perish" in John 3:16 means "come to ruin" because he had an a priori theological view of God's judgment that needed to be defended. He did a word study of the possible meanings for the word "perish" found one that fit his doctrinal framework and presented it.
The problem is that he completely ignored the context of the passage in which the word is found. The old saying is true- context, context, context. Words are to be determined by their context. Example: I love my wife. She let me decide where we were going to eat and I chose the place I love the most- Paradise Burger. It is obvious from the two uses of the same word "love" that I love my wife in a different way than I "love" the restaurant. In fact, the second use of the word "love" means more like to "really like" and not love.
Word studies are indeed good and helpful but in and of themselves are not final. The etymology (study of it's origins and history) of words is extremely helpful in that it helps limit the possible meaning of a given word. Yet there must also be caution in the etymology of words.
D.A. Carson explains:
One of the most enduring of errors, the root fallacy presupposes that every word actually has a meaning bound up with its shape or its components. In this view, meaning is determined by etymology; that is, by the root or roots of a word.*
I hasten to add three caveats to this discussion. First, I am not saying that any word can mean anything. Normally we observe that any individual word has a certain limited semantic range, and the context may therefore modify or shape the meaning of a word only within certain boundaries. The total semantic range is not permanently fixed, of course; with time and novel usage, it may shift considerably. Even so, I am not suggesting that words are infinitely plastic. I am simply saying that the meaning of a word cannot be reliably determined by etymology, or that a root, once discovered, always projects a certain semantic load onto any word that incorporates that root. Linguistically, meaning is not an intrinsic possession of a word; rather, "it is a set of relations for which a verbal symbol is a sign." In one sense, of course, it is legitimate to say "this word means such and such," where we are either providing the lexical range inductively observed or specifying the meaning of a word in a particular context; but we must not freight such talk with too much etymological baggage.
Finally, I am far from suggesting that etymological study is useless. It is important, for instance, in the diachronic study of words (the study of words as they occur across long periods of time), in the attempt to specify the earliest attested meaning, in the study of cognate languages, and especially in attempts to understand the meanings of hapax legomena (words that appear only once). In the last case, although etymology is a clumsy tool for discerning meaning, the lack of comparative material means we sometimes have no other choice. That is why, as Moises Silva points out in his excellent discussion of these matters, etymology plays a much more important role in the determination of meaning in the Hebrew Old Testament than in the Greek New Testament: the Hebrew contains proportionately far more hapax legomena."The relative value of this use of etymology varies inversely with the quantity of material available for the language."And in any case, specification of the meaning of a word on the sole basis of etymology can never be more than an educated guess.*Soli Deo Gloria!
For His Glory,
Fernando
*D. A. Carson. Exegetical Fallacies (Kindle Locations 181-183). Kindle Edition.
* Ibid, Kindle Locations 224-229.
*Ibid, Kindle Locations 229-236.
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