Rom 1:16 – ‘I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is God’s power for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.’

Because the Gk word for ‘power’ is ‘dunamis’ (from which we get the word ‘dynamite’), preachers have sometimes announced that according to this verse the gospel is the ‘dynamite’ of God unto salvation.  But this is exegetically naive, for several reasons.

Firstly, to make this connection is to commit the ‘root fallacy’ (the fallacy that the meaning of a word can be explained in terms of its original meaning.

Secondly, it is anachronistic to make this connection between ‘dunamis’ and ‘dynamite’ is misleading.  The English word actually comes from the Swedish word ‘dynamit’ (itself derived from the Greek word) by Alfred Nobel in 1867.  It is not possible that Paul had our modern meaning of ‘dynamite’ in mind when he used the word ‘dunamis’.

Thirdly, the supposed connection is misleading.  Even to mention ‘dynamite’ in connection with the gospel is inappropriate, since it obviously implies violent destruction.  The real meaning of ‘dunamis‘ is ‘the ability to accomplish something’.  The gospel is not power in its explosive, destructive, sense, but in its life-giving, resurrecting sense (it is the power of God ‘unto salvation’, and is connected with Christ’s resurrection, Eph 1:18-20).

(See Carson, Exegetical Fallacies, p34)