energeō

The verb is built on ἐν plus ἔργον, and the whole cluster carries the idea of effective, potent operation rather than mere activity. Aristotle coined the abstract noun ἐνέργεια as a technical term for actuality set over against δύναμις (potentiality), and whether that metaphysical background actively shaped Paul is disputed: BDAG, Bertram (TDNT), and Spicq derive Paul's usage from popular Hellenistic "effective operation," while Bradshaw argues that, through Stoic and Philonic mediation, the weightier philosophical sense enters Paul and later underwrites the Cappadocian and Palamite theology of the divine energies. Moulton and Milligan note that in the documentary papyri the verb "always has the idea of effective working," and LSJ observes that even in classical prose it clusters around divine or supernatural action. The word group is strikingly rare in the translated books of the Septuagint (Proverbs 21:6; Isaiah 41:4, of God alone) and concentrated in Greek-composed works, above all Wisdom of Solomon, which normalizes it both for divine activity and for the operation of impersonal cosmic forces, the double register Paul inherits. The central modern discussion is J. Armitage Robinson's 1904 observation, now often called Robinson's Rule, that Paul uses the active only of personal supernatural agents (God, Christ, the Spirit, and once Satan in Ephesians 2:2) and the medio-passive only of impersonal subjects, from which Robinson, and later Kenneth W. Clark and, on James 5:16, J. B. Mayor, argued the medio-passives are true passives with a suppressed divine agent. The current majority (BDAG, Bertram, and the mainstream commentary tradition including Moo, O'Brien, Fee, Bruce, Wanamaker, and Beale) reads them as intransitive middles, while granting that a personal agent is implicit in the context, so the theological substance is largely shared even where the grammatical analysis differs. Because middle and passive are identical in form in the present system, the question cannot be settled by morphology and turns on context.