W HAT IS God's name?In the Biblical book of Exodus God said to Moses: "I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: 'I am has sent me to you.'" He adds, "I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob," and says "I will be with you." I am who I am, translated from the Hebrew four-letter-word YHWH, stems from the root "to be." So what, then, is God's name? Certainly not what we have been calling him. The dictionary defines "anthropomorphism" as the "attribution of human motivation, characteristics, or behavior to inanimate objects, animals, or natural phenomena." This is precisely what we have done. We have turned I am into an anthropomorphic God.
Janet Soskice, who presented her Page-Barbour and Richard Lecture Series this week, began this Tuesday with a lecture entitled "Naming God at Sinai: or 'Is the God of classical Christianity a metaphysical monster?'" The lectures, which ended this past Thursday with "Naming God and Following God: from spirituality to ethics," addressed the subject she researched for her upcoming book, Naming and Names of God.
"This is an extremely rare case," says Soskice of the burning bush textual scene. "There are only a few places [in the Bible] where God names God." The meaning God intended for Moses, however, isn't something you can easily wrap your mind around.
"A name that is not a name," comments Soskice. "God names Himself as the history of Israel. The past [God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob], the present [I am] and the future [I will be with you]." What the text does indicate, however, is that God cannot be compared to any created thing. He can only be named and defined in terms of himself. I am who I am. In using this name, God indicates that he does not depend upon anything else to name Himself.
Where then, have all these names for God come from? "Names aren't necessarily descriptions," says Soskice. And yet most of the titles we assign to God are attributes.
"We tend to put the concentration on how we know God exists," explains Soskice. "As Father, Eternal, Omnipotent, All-Mighty..." By assigning to God these adjectives, however, not only do we bring Him down to our level, but we define and delineate Him; Him who cannot be defined.
Language is what shapes our reality. Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher, stated in his "Letter on Humanism" that language is "the house of being," that is, it creates the environment in which we live and move and be. If there is no word for something, it doesn't exist. This, however, creates the threshold for misnaming.
According to Soskice, this was the fear of many of the Christian philosophers. "How can he [Augustine] name God without misnaming him?" she asked. "To name God is to risk making Him into an idol for it's containing Him within a name."
It's hard, however, to figure out what God's own, self-declared name really means for us, because it isn't just something God is called. "I am" carries the essence of the God who is. The names we attribute to God, then, have come to be projections: the things we admire and fear the most in men.
"The evolution of religious names is the evolution of flattery," says Soskice. "Of metaphysical grovelings. Good becomes the greatest of good which becomes the only good... Similarly, first He is praised as a god among gods, then as the one God, then the perfect God..."
The Oxford Dictionary of The Christian Church states that "Scripture, especially in the earlier books of the Old Testament . . . in order to be intelligible to less developed minds, frequently uses anthropomorphic language, which is in most cases clearly metaphorical." Although to say that God is a mighty fortress might just be a metaphor, it still reduces God to a human-made structure that can be created and destroyed.
Paul Tillich, a Christian existentialist philosopher of the 1900's, saw it differently. In the essay, "Yahweh and the God of Christian Theology," he is referred to as having said "God is a symbol for God," meaning that the God we speak of, the God to whom we attribute all these metaphors, adjectives and anthropomorphisms is really a stand-in for the God beyond: the unexplainable, unnamable God. He is what God has chosen to reveal of Himself.
"God named Adam and Eve: naming is a gift conferred by God," says Soskice. That may well be, but it wouldn't be a bad idea for us to think twice before naming God back.
God is not a creature, an object or a place, and by attributing to him such anthropomorphic characteristics, we are making out of Him, not a god, but a sort of extended shadow of man. Form implies limitation, and a beginning as well as an end. The belief in such anthropomorphism, then, makes God similar to us, thus impeding our own progress and aspirations towards something greater.
Language has its limits and we cannot speak of that which we cannot comprehend in terms that we can understand. God is. Isn't that enough?
Andrea Arango's column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at aarango@cavalierdaily.com.
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