By the Gods!

Norse/Germanic mythology isn’t as clear cut as, say, Greek or Egyptian myth in this department. Loki is one of the divine/magic beings, as are the Aesir, the Vanir, and the Jotun.

“Aesir” (and the absorbed “Vanir”) are generally interchangeable with the term “gods” in Germanic myth. Loki helps the Aesir out from time to time, but of course he also hinders them fairly regularly, and sometimes performs outright dastardly deeds (like masterminding Baldr’s death). He’s a being of comparable power to many of the Aesir, so for this reason it’s reasonable to call him a “god.”

On the other hand, he ends up as a major adversary of the Aesir, condemned to a near-eternal torture until Ragnarok begins, when he will firmly place himself in the anti-Aesir camp for the final battle.

Another way to look at it, is that Loki does not have any domain that he oversees in the realm of men. By that I mean that he doesn’t have an area he’s seen as “master” of in the lives of the folk who wrote the myths. In battle sacrifices were made to Odin, prayers to Tyr and Thor. Sailors would pray and sacrifice to Njord, mothers to Frigg and young women to Freya. The people didn’t worship Loki, but simply acknowledged his role in divine developments.

The way I see it, we don’t have enough hard evidence on Germanic/Norse myth to be specific in our classifications. Most of what we’ve got is from Snorri Sturluson, as you mentioned, which was recorded centuries after the “golden age” of Norse/Germanic religious practice.

Loki was definitely an important figure; some people think he used to have a more important role, but his duties were relegated to other Aesir as the stories changed. There are some theoretical systems that believe Odin to be the only “god” figure in an essentially monotheistic Norse religion, with the rest of the Aesir being semi-divine, closer to “angel” status beings.