a settled purpose reached by deliberation: a considered plan, counsel, or decision, whether God's or a person's
At its core this word names a purpose someone has thought through and settled on. It is stronger than a passing wish or an opinion: it is the plan a mind has decided to carry out. The same single meaning covers a person's resolve and God's design; what changes from verse to verse is not the meaning of the word but whose plan is in view and whether that plan holds.
The New Testament sets the two against each other. Human plans are made, and some of them fail:
- a council resolves on a course of action
- sailors decide to put to sea
- soldiers agree to kill their prisoners
God's plan, by contrast, is presented as fixed and saving, the design he is steadily working out in history and has brought to its center in Jesus. Luke in particular turns the phrase "the plan of God" into an almost fixed expression for that saving purpose, and he repeatedly shows human schemes unknowingly serving the very plan they seem to oppose.
A third, quieter use points inward, to the hidden intentions of the human heart that only the end of all things will bring to light. Here too the idea is the same: a purpose formed by deliberation, in this case one still concealed.
The word itself does not decide the large questions readers bring to it, above all how far God's plan determines events. It simply says that the purpose in view was arrived at by considered resolve. When the plan is God's, the biblical writers add that it does not waver and does not fail.
Nuances
What Luke means by God's "definite plan and foreknowledge" at Acts 2:23, and how far it determines events: an all-determining decree, a providential purpose carried out through genuine human choices, or a boundary-setting appointment of the outcome but not its agents.
- majorityA providential purpose carried out through, not despite, real human decisions and real human guilt ("you crucified").; C. K. Barrett, The Acts of the Apostles, ICC (T&T Clark, 1994-1998); I. Howard Marshall, The Acts of the Apostles, TNTC (Eerdmans, 1980); Darrell L. Bock, Acts, BECNT (Baker Academic, 2007); Craig S. Keener, Acts: An Exegetical Commentary (Baker Academic, 2012-2015)
- minorityLanguage approaching the fated inevitability of Hellenistic historiography, whether as theology or as a rhetorical strategy for historical credibility.; John T. Squires, The Plan of God in Luke-Acts, SNTSMS 76 (Cambridge University Press, 1993); Clare K. Rothschild, Luke-Acts and the Rhetoric of History, WUNT 175 (Mohr Siebeck, 2004)
- minorityA boundary-setting decree: God appoints that the event will happen but not the specific perpetrators.; John Sanders, The God Who Risks (InterVarsity, 1998); Gregory A. Boyd, God of the Possible (Baker, 2000)
Disputed
Whether βουλή carries a nuance distinct from θέλημα (will), namely deliberate and ratified resolve, or whether the two overlap so far in Koine Greek that their pairing in Ephesians 1:11 (the counsel of his will) is rhetorical emphasis rather than an analytic distinction.
- majorityThe two words overlap substantially in Koine, and stacking them is emphatic, doxological repetition, not a precise distinction.; Ernest Best, Ephesians, ICC (T&T Clark, 1998); Andrew T. Lincoln, Ephesians, WBC 42 (Word, 1990); Frank Thielman, Ephesians, BECNT (Baker Academic, 2010); BDAG, s.v. βουλή, θέλημα
- minorityβουλή names the deliberated, ratified decision that God's will has come to, as distinct from θέλημα as the underlying volition.; John Eadie, A Commentary on the Greek Text of the Epistle of Paul to the Ephesians (Griffin, 1883); C. J. Ellicott, St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians (Longmans, 1884); Harold W. Hoehner, Ephesians: An Exegetical Commentary (Baker Academic, 2002)