The word occurs only in the designation of God in 1 Timothy 6:15, ‘the blessed and only Potentate (δυνάστης), the King of kings, and Lord of lords.’ This is the only instance in the NT in which the word δυνάστης is applied to God. It occurs with tolerable frequency in this sense in the apocryphal books, e.g. Sirach 46:5-6, 2 Maccabees 3:24; 2 Maccabees 12:15, 3 Maccabees 2:3. It is characteristic of the Pastoral Epistles to set God in the foreground as the author of salvation, and the heaping up of attributes in this passage to denote the Divine sovereignty may be merely an instance of this tendency. Some, however, find underlying it a protest against Gnostic misrepresentations, or against the growing practice of Emperor-worship.
G. Wauchope Stewart.