God Needs a Name

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In her book, And God Spoke to Abraham, Fleming Rutledge recalls the confirmation program in the parish where she first preached. The group of thirteen year olds met every week for seven months. At the start of the course, Fleming prompted them with a simple exercise.

She asked each confirmand to draw a picture of God.

The results were not surprising.

“All sorts of things emerged,” she writes, “clouds, suns, circles, triangles, and a preponderance of old men with white beards.”

Once the confirmands completed the illustrations— idols— the class sat in a circle and took justifying their depiction of God. “At this point,” Fleming recalls, “a clean, empty wastebasket was brought in and set down in the middle of the circle.”

She then instructed each confirmand, one by one, to tear up his or her picture of God and throw the pieces in the trash. As they did so, the Bible was opened and the Second Commandment read solemnly, "Thou shalt not make for thyself any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth."

The law provoked silence from the students who had just trespassed against it.

The turn came, Fleming writes, when she then asked the students the question at the heart of biblical faith: "If we can't draw a picture of God, and if we don’t know what God looks like, and if God isn't like anything in heaven or earth, then how can we know anything about God at all?"

While the students pondered the question, the teacher turned to an earlier chapter in the Book of Exodus, the story of the LORD encountering Moses at the Burning Bush.

As Fleming remembers it:

“We did this exercise every year at Christ Church, and every year the Lord was good enough to give us one or two bright-eyed young people who would catch on. Let me read the crucial parts again. Remember the question: How do we know anything about God? In the light of the Second Commandment, how do we know anything about God? That was the question. Every year, the story of the Burning Bush would elicit this answer from one or another boy or girl, ”He tells us! God tells us who he is!" It was always a magical moment in the class for those who "got it.””

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Unique against all other religions, the scriptures of Israel and the Church introduce a great contradictory interpretation of reality: God has told us who he is.That is, unlike all other putative gods the true God has a proper, personal name.Just so, God likewise has an identifying description.

The proper name Jason Micheli conveys an identifying description (e.g., the handsome fellow who loves Woody Allen movies). So too, the LORD’s name comes with a correlative identifying description; he is whomever raised Israel from slavery in Egypt.

Because God has a proper name and an identifying description, the word God is inadequate to speaking Christian, for it is neither a name nor a description.

It is a noun and an abstraction.

In common religious discourse, the term God has no particular definition other than the eternity which makes life in time possible. This is precisely why we prefer the general term God and its cognates (Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer) to the particular name of the LORD/Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

If God does not have a proper name and a particular identifying description, then we can project onto him whatever prejudices we may harbor about deity.

For instance, if I simply address the pilot of my Southwest flight as Pilot, then I can entertain the fantasy that he is a fan of the Washington Nationals. Once I learn he’s Larry from the Southside of Chicago; however, I am forced to reckon with the knowledge that he is instead, regrettably, a fan of the White Sox. Thus, the proper name introduces the potential for irreconcilable differences between the LORD and what others call God. And difference— conflict—- is exactly what strivers in a secular culture want most to avoid.

Once again—

In that the scriptures of Israel and the Church posit the LORD’s proper name and a personal history, they insist upon a great contradiction of conventional religion.

Because his name is Yahweh, whenever believers in the scriptures hear a functional atheist protest, “I don’t go to synagogue or church, but I believe in God,” they should respond by querying, “Which god is the god in whom you believe— the God who sent Israel into exile because she’d cheated on him? Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim?” 

With the claim that the LORD has a proper name and an identifying history, the Bible contends that all religious uses of the word God are but the verbal equivalents of the pictures Fleming once consigned to the rubbish bin.

Some may be nearer to the truth than others; nevertheless, they are projection not revelation. This is stern stuff perhaps, but there is a reason Israel has suffered persecution from the time God chose her (simply because he had fallen in love with her). Even when the Israelites were willing to go so far as to change their Hebrew names to pagan ones (Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego), they would not call Yahweh by one of his false rivals masquerading under generic nouns.

Yahweh is “the name above every name.”Yahweh is not the name that is equivalent to any other name.

We make a fatal mistake if we use the word God with others under the assumption we’re all talking about the same person(s).

The scriptures use the generic noun LORD not as a way to accommodate all other names but out of reverence for the exclusivity and power of the true God’s proper name, “God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM.... Say this to the people of Israel, I AM has sent me to you." God also said to Moses, "Say this to the people of Israel, `The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob has sent me to you: this is my name for ever.”’

”He tells us! God tells us who he is!"

The true God has a proper name and an identifying history.

Still more importantly, you need the proper name if you are to trust the identifying description:

The Promise Needs a Proper Name

The generic noun in a slogan like, “God loves you,” is mere sentiment. “Who loves me?” the hearer would be right to wonder, “The Inner Self? The God of Trump’s “God Bless America?” The Invisible Hand of the Free Market? The distant First Mover of Jefferson’s Deism?”

Only knowledge of the proper name supplies an affirmative and trustworthy answer, “The God who raised Jesus, who came announcing pardon for sinners, loves you.”

Apart from the proper name, there is no absolution.

Precisely, if we are to utter a promise about God— if we are to gospel another— it must be a promise made in God’s name.

Only the proper name carries with it a particular history by which the recipient can assess its intelligibility and trustworthiness.

Can it be promised that Allah forgives all your sins, gratis?

The Law Needs a Proper Name

God’s moral will— the law— also requires a proper name. For God to have a discernible moral intention for his creatures, he must have previously revealed and displayed it. He must have told us what his will is. That is, he must also have an identifying history.

The god of “In God we trust” very much wants me to covet my neighbors’s possessions. Our economy runs on such envy and fear of scarcity. Meanwhile, the LORD of the Exodus commands me not to covet, to seek him as my treasure and to trust him to provide for my needs.

The moral will of God must be proclaimed as a particular will if we are to follow it.

If it is not a particular will, then our morality will invert the story of Abraham’s visitation and we will discover that we have only been worshipping ourselves unawares.

Straightforwardly, this is the standard Paul sets out in Philippians, “Have this mind among yourselves.” Paul does not exhort believers to have amongst them the mind of God. Rather, Paul implores the Philippians to “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who…” and the whither of Paul’s counsel goes on to narrate the history which identifies and describes the name of Jesus.

The Future Needs a Proper Name

The news that Saddam Hussein lives with death behind him in the Last Future where will one day gather around him would be bad news not good news.

But the news that when you die you will spend eternity with God is every bit as frightening for its ambiguity.

The eschatological promise is only good news because of the name named in it, Jesus Christ the Friend of Sinners. As the End is the Fulfillment of the covenant, it makes all the difference that we know who is the God who has made this promise of the future to people of the long ago past.

An anonymous God cannot make an unconditional promise.

The nub of the matter is simple if seldom examined.

We pray to God (the Father) with the Son and in Jesus’s Spirit.

As Robert Jenson writes:

“The decisive gospel-insight is that if we only pray to God, if our relation to God is reducible to the ‘to’ and is not decisively determined also by ‘with’ and ‘in,’ then it is not the true God whom we identify in our address, but rather some distant and timelessly uninvolved divinity whom we have envisaged…the particular God of scripture does not just stand over against us; he envelops us. And only by the full structure of the envelopment do we have this God.”

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