God’s Name

In Irrevocable: The Name of God and the Unity of the Christian Bible, R. Kendall Soulen adopts as his governing premise the proposition that God’s election of the Jewish people is irrevocable. This affirmation runs counter to a great deal of the Christian tradition, which sees Christianity as superseding Judaism (thus the term supersessionism). Soulen has long argued against the traditional view, most pointedly in The God of Israel and Christian Theology. Rather than rehearsing reasons against supersessionism, however, in this book Soulen shows the theological fruitfulness of presuming God’s ongoing love for his chosen people.

The fruitfulness arises from a focus on God’s name. “The golden thread that runs through all the chapters is the attention they pay to a single word: the Tetragrammaton, the four-lettered Hebrew name that is traditionally represented in English translations of the Bible in small caps as Lord.” It’s a fresh and needed emphasis, for few Christians are aware that God has a proper name. It’s revealed in the third chapter of Exodus, when Moses is given his task of leading the ­Israelites out of captivity in Egypt. He hears God’s voice in the flames of a burning bush that is not consumed. First, God identifies himself in terms of his covenant: “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” This is an instance of identification by relationship. Imagine a reception hosted by my wife’s law firm during which I introduce myself to her law partners as Juliana’s husband. The ­Bible’s regular evocation of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob works the same way.

This identification does not satisfy Moses. He presses for more. What if the Israelites ask for the name of the God who has sent him? The Holy One gathers himself and pronounces, “I am who I am.” The Christian tradition has interpreted this mode of self-identification as metaphysical. God is announcing that he is the source and summit of all that is. He is the High God, the Transcendent, the One who is and cannot not be. You might say this is self-identification by role or position, as when I introduce myself as the editor of First Things.

But relation, however intimate, and role, ­however exalted and unique, are not proper names. So, in a ­remarkable pivot from the most universal (“I am who I am”) to the most particular, God gives Moses his name, the Tetragrammaton, the four-consonant Hebrew word YHVH.

The main reason most Christians are unaware of God’s name is that, unless you are reading Hebrew, you never come across these four consonants in the bible translations we use. There’s a linguistic explanation for this omission. As is the case for other Semitic languages such as Aramaic and Arabic, only consonants are written in Hebrew. The vowels are spoken when words are read aloud, of course, but in the text they are absent. This can lead to ambiguity in some circumstances. Is it “none” or “nine” (to draw on an example in English)? In the case of something as important as the sacred text of the Hebrew Bible, ­traditions of pronunciation were carefully guarded, and in the latter half of the first millennium the rabbinic tradition produced manuscripts with vowel markings to establish an authoritative version. But in one case they refrained. YHVH was and remains without vowel markings.

Theological convictions drove this decision. In the rabbinic tradition, the name of God is surrounded by ritual caution, and it is never pronounced. We don’t know exactly what motivated this extreme discretion. Perhaps it arose out of the fear of desecrating God’s name by misuse. (See the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.) Or perhaps the prohibition against vocalizing the name of God arouse out of religious awe that shrinks from presumptions of intimacy. (See the biblical principle: Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.) Whatever the cause, by the time of Christ, YHVH had disappeared from the Jewish oral tradition, replaced by the Hebrew word Adonai (“My Lord”). The Septuagint, the influential third-century b.c. Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, renders YHVH as Kyrios (Lord).

In the Middle Ages, Christian scholars hired Jews to tutor them in Hebrew so that they could read the Old Testament in its original language. This led to the discovery of the Tetragrammaton, which in turn triggered speculations about its proper pronunciation. One popular approach was to combine the vowels from Adonai (the word vocalized when Jews read the divine name in scripture) with YHVH. Thus YaHoVaH, or, as it has come down to us, Jehovah.

Modern biblical scholars take a different approach. They focus on God’s metaphysical self-identification: I am who I am. The ancient Hebrew for “to be” is haway, which in the relevant tense can be construed as yahweh. Notice how the YHVH consonants dovetail with this construction: YaHWeH. Thus, many academics pronounce the Tetragrammaton “Yahweh.” Those who insist upon this as God’s name do so because they want to underline the crucial modern historical-critical presupposition that the Old Testament concerns the tribal god venerated by the ancient Israelites who produced, in various stages of composition and redaction, the Hebrew text.

A free and easy pronunciation of “Yahweh” runs counter to Christian practice. When we recite the Sanctus, the first line of which is drawn from Isaiah 6:3, we don’t say, “Holy, Holy, Holy, Yahweh God of Hosts.” Rather, as Soulen points out, for two millennia, Christians have followed the Jewish practice of masking God’s name with “Lord” and other formulations. This is the practice of the New Testament. There are many references to the name of God (“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord”). But the name itself goes unsaid.

Indeed, Soulen observes that, in the New Testament, God’s name is often hidden just around the corner, as it were. This happens far more often than I had recognized previously. For example, Jesus speaks in parables. “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field….” “The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls….” Soulen helps me see that in these parables “the kingdom of heaven” is a locution that masks God’s name. It leaves unpronounced the King who reigns in heaven. With this in mind, my reading of those parables is transformed. I had always thought of the Christian as the seeker who finds the treasure (Christ) and sells all to buy it (follow him). The same held for my reading of the pearl of great price, which I took to be Christ. But this human-centered interpretation runs counter to the overall pattern of this sequence of parables in Matthew 13. It is the King who is searching for us, not we for him. And he will sell all he has, taking on the form of a servant, humbling himself, even unto death.

Soulen points out that Jesus often uses the passive voice to evoke God without naming him. The ­Beatitudes illustrate this practice. They begin, “Blessed are . . .” The one doing the blessing goes unmentioned. With Jesus’s pious practice in mind, we can turn to the opening line of the Lord’s Prayer with fresh eyes.

Jesus teaches us to say, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” I had long thought that the petition urges me to venerate God’s name. In effect, I was reading the petition in this way: “Help me, O God, to be worthy of your name.” But I now see that this interpretation is wrongheaded in the same me-centered way as my lazy reading of the treasure in the field and the pearl of great price. When Jesus prays hallowed be, he is pointing to God as the agent, not me. “The first petition” of the Lord’s Prayer, Soulen observes, “is an appeal to God’s own zeal on behalf of God’s name.”

This reading of the first petition accords with the pattern of the Lord’s Prayer as a whole. The rest of the petitions ask God to act. And it echoes frequent references to God’s vindication of his name in the Old Testament. The example Soulen provides comes from Ezekiel, where God enumerates the sins of Israel, but nevertheless pledges loyalty to the covenant: “Thus says the Lord God: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name” (36:22).

The Gospel of John is “metaphysical” in comparison to Matthew, Mark, and Luke. But what do we mean by “metaphysical”? The Gospel of John is a narrative, not a treatise. It features no speculative arguments. Soulen’s focus on God’s name helps us see that John’s Gospel has a powerful upward thrust because of the prominence of the unspoken Tetragrammaton. To prepare his disciples for the road to Golgotha, Jesus declares, “For this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify thy name.” A voice comes from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again” (12:27).

The transcendent power of God’s name—its power was, and is, and is to be—echoes throughout ­Jesus’s High Priestly prayer in John 17. “While I was with them,” Jesus says to the Father, “I kept them in thy name, which thou hast given me.” Jesus bears the all-powerful Tetragrammaton. The very same affirmation is made in the second chapter of Philippians. Upon him is bestowed the name above all names, and in the Father’s name the Son is glorified, “so that at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow…and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord” (2:10–11).

This fusion of the name of Jesus with the Tetragrammaton, reinforced by the use of the surrogate word “Lord” in reference to Jesus, makes a more direct Trinitarian demand upon the Christian doctrine of God than does the Father-Son language so prominent in the Gospel of John. Soulen spells out a YHVH-driven account of God’s triune character in a richly developed chapter on the doctrine of the Trinity.

I have already digressed too extensively into biblical insights provided by attention to the unspoken YHVH in the New Testament. Let me end by echoing one of Soulen’s penetrating observations. In our affirmation of the Old Testament as God’s word, Christians must explain why the ritual laws of Israel are no longer binding upon us. Standard accounts make a distinction between the moral laws delivered to ­Moses that reiterate and reinforce the dictates of natural law, and the ceremonial laws concerning food, prayer, worship, and other ritual matters. The former bind the followers of Christ; the latter are fulfilled in him and no longer apply.

This is the view I have long accepted. But I now see that there’s something not quite right about it. Guided by the New Testament and Jesus’s own practice, Christians, like Jews, carefully (and rightfully) guard the name of God from misuse and defilement. This discretion is so deeply entrenched in the prayer of the Church that most Christians don’t know that God has a name. For two millennia our practice of prayer has refrained from pronouncing the divine name, relying instead on surrogates such as Lord, Father, and Almighty God. Or we pray to the Incarnate Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who bears the Tetragrammaton. In these ways, Christians have sustained at least one aspect of Jewish ritual law.

I don’t mean to assert that the two-thousand-year Christian obedience to the law concerning God’s name, unwitting but rigorous, entails adopting the entire sweep of Jewish law. Rather, as Soulen suggests, Christian discretion concerning God’s name, so deeply in accord with the Jewish approach, ought to make us wonder whether we fully understand salvation history, especially when it comes to the role of Jews after the time of Christ. Chapters 9 through 11 of Romans recount St. Paul’s meditation on the relation between Gentile belief and Jewish unbelief. It bears regular re-reading, especially a final verse that gives us guidance about how to approach that mystery: “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!”