Names of God
In my last few postings I have been exploring our attempts to image God who ultimately is beyond our knowing and understanding. However, that is no reason for us not to use all the power of mind and heart to explore the mystery in which we dwell.
I think we have to confront two problems which we have made for ourselves: in the Christian tradition we seem to have reduced the images and names of God to one - Father; and we have a sense that we have ‘captured’ the heart and meaning of this Mystery. It is as if the Trinitarian mystery is too much for us to struggle with. Now, I don’t for a moment have a problem with the use of ‘Father’ - it is founded in the Scripture both as Father of Israel and ‘Abba’. It holds an important place in the tradition. However, to reduce the names for God is to actually do a disservice to the tradition of Scripture in which many names and images of God are celebrated.
Is ‘God’ a noun or a verb?
We use the word ‘God’ as if was a proper name rather than a class of beings that humans worship. It really does not tell us much about the qualities of this being. In these terms, our society worships many gods from success to fame to fashion to money. However, the great monotheist traditions claim that there is only one being in this genre we call ‘gods’ and that being alone must be worshipped.
Nicholas Lash in Theology for Pilgrims[i] asks the question, ‘Is the word ‘God’ a noun or a verb?’ He goes on to quote J.R.R. Tolkien who pointed out the tendency in English to turn verbs into abstract nouns e.g. ‘truth is the same word as ‘troth’, a pledge or promise. Lash quotes Franciscan Thomas Weinandy ‘Persons of the Trinity are not nouns; they are verbs and the names which designate them - Father, Son and Holy Spirit - designate the acts by which they are defined’[ii]. So, the names and attributes given to God in the Scriptures are more than names they indicate activity. In God the name and the action are inseparable. ‘The holy mystery of God simply is the giving, the uttering, the breathing, that God is said to be and do.[iii]
Scripture
The name God revealed to Moses (Ex. 6:2-3; Ex. 3:13-16) is generally translated ‘I am who I am’, however this does not do justice to the dynamics of the word. It is more a sense of one who brings things into being, an active being, a promise - ‘I shall be that which I shall be’. The names and qualities of God in the Hebrew Scriptures indicate action. For example fidelity is a central quality of God in the Scriptures. In fact, one could read the whole of Scripture as God’s fidelity to Israel and ultimately all creation; God the redeemer of Israel is also the faithful God; God the creator is also the faithful God. Even the biblical sense of God’s anger is an aspect of fidelity - it is always to call people or the nation to conversion.
In the Christian Scriptures, Jesus is God’s fidelity - and all that implies - made flesh and therefore action. So, if in God name and act are one thing, it is impossible that God be unfaithful to God’s self and God’s self-expression which is creation.
It is truly worth playing with the images we have had handed down in the tradition, even if it fractures the language. God fathers; God mothers; God faithfuls. So, when I name God Father or Mother, I am naming an act of sustained creation, protection, fidelity, tenderness - all that that act implies. When I name God Friend - as Jesus invited us to do - I am naming an abiding act of befriending.
The Scriptures represent people, over thousands of years, trying to name the Mystery that they experienced as one who called, adopted, and protected them. They used the images to hand in their culture and time. One of the images I like to ‘play’ with is ‘rock’. God is Israel’s rock and fortress. So, images of stability, eternity, strength etc. However, they knew nothing about tectonic plates and how they shift and change with huge continent-shaping effects - powerfully and inexorably. Now, think of that eliciting a quality of God: do we not have huge shifts that change our lives? Sometimes they are slow like the slow moving of continents; sometimes they will be like the clashing of land masses. Can this experience of ‘rock’ be God enticing, calling, and leading us to change and move from the known to the unknown, to become more human therefore more God-like?
While new times, experiences and cultures will change how we understand and image, we also need to use scholarship to understand the original context for the biblical images. Images such as redeemer and father have rich and socially important aspects of meaning throughout the history of Israel.
Because all names and images of God are poetry and analogy, they have the power to be constantly revitalised and therefore open us to the Mystery.
Incomprehensibility of God[iv]
This brings me to the matter of the mystery of God, the fact that God is and always will be impenetrable mystery even though we see God’s footprints in creation, in each other and above all in Jesus. The Hebrew Scriptures and St. Paul saw God’s creative action in the world as incomprehensible (cf. Rom 11:33-35 - the great doxology to God’s wisdom and mystery), later theology understood it as God’s nature and characteristic of God’s freedom. The danger is that we understand this as naming a remote God, a God unwilling to reveal the mystery fully and who keeps humans subservient. However, this quality of God should be understood in the context that God has indeed revealed the Mystery in Israel and in Jesus and we name this Mystery with words such as fidelity, redeemer, Father. God’s incomprehensibility touches on our finitude - we are limited, always ‘on the way’ to maturity.
We have very few models of reciprocal relationship between people. Adolescents perceive authority as oppressive; the slave had no freedom from the authority of his or her owner; and even the model of marriage as reciprocal relationship is a recent understanding. Our culture tends to frame unequal or authority relationships in terms of domination/submission. The startling thing about the God of Scripture is that God’s absolute power, freedom and mystery are the very ground of God’s loving self-communication in creation. We, in all our finitude are the manifestation of this mystery and in that relationship with Divine mystery we find our own freedom, truth and identity.
To return to the question of the grammar or God, God’s incomprehensibility or mystery is not simply an attribute of the nature of God, it is an aspect of every act of God, every name or quality we give to God. So, God’s fidelity is incomprehensible; God’s compassion, God’s justice, God’s redeeming and God’s love are such that they manifest the qualities that take us beyond what we know, they take us into the dark luminosity of Mystery where we find our own mystery.
In the incomprehensible freedom and love, God has communicated the Mystery which will be our journey for all eternity. We are the expression of this as I quoted in Link ‘The God who in and through Jesus reveals himself is human, and the human being who emerges in and through Jesus is divine.’[v] For this reason the great name of God for Christians is the God of Jesus.
Living the mystery
So, is this question simply a bit of academic esoterica with little or no relevance to our lives? As I wrote in a previous post Link the images of God deeply influence how we perceive reality, ourselves, our relationships.
In faith, we encounter a God who acts, whose actions and identity are completely congruent, who is true to God’s self. We learn trust, and that surrendering to this Mystery is in no way a loss of identity or freedom, rather it is the opposite - here we find our freedom and our true self. It is as if the whole of salvation history and the whole of our personal history are about learning to be who we are created to be - the image of God in creation. God is very patient.
Living the mystery in trusting surrender means that our faith, to be faithful, is about act. It is living out the name we bear. Maturity in faith means that who we are - created in the image of God - and what we do become more congruent - so our fidelity over time more closely resembles fidelity of God, our acts of justice and love more closely resemble God’s justice and love.
For this reason prayer and service are inseparable. Together they draw us into the Mystery and make the Mystery manifest in the world. Together they transform us personally and collectively. In the end, however, we will always be confronted with the incomprehensible mystery we name of God of Jesus and this mystery will have no end. When 1 John 4:8 calls God ‘love’, the writer is naming the very life of creation, the very being and breath of all that is, love. Even human love is ultimately mystery and the joy of love be it marriage, friendship, parenthood or the many forms love takes, is to explore the mystery and be delighted be each new insight.
Ephesians 5:1 urges us to ‘be imitators of God as dearly beloved children’.
[i] Nicholas Lash, Theology for Pilgrims, (University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana, 2008), p. 21f.
[ii] Ibid p. 23
[iii] Ibid p 23
[iv] Cf. Karl Rahner, ‘The Human Question of Meaning in the Face of the Absolute Mystery of God’, Theological Investigations, Vol. XVIII, tr. Edward Quinn, (London, Darton, Longman & Todd , 1983), pp. 89f
[v] Karl Rahner, ‘On the Theology of the Incarnation’, Theological Investigations, Vol. IV tr. Kevin Smyth (London, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1966) p. 116
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