One Who Comes

Sean McDonough’s YHWH at Patmos (1999) is a 250+ page book about a single verse, Revelation 1:4. Really, only one phrase of that verse: “He who is and who was and who is coming.”

McDonough traces the pre-history of the phrase to the name Yahweh. More surprisingly, he finds precedent for the name in Greek literature, all the way back to Homer and Hesiod but most clearly in statements like this from Pausanias: “Zeus was, Zeus is, Zeus shall be (Zeus en, Zeus esti, Zeus essetai, quoted on p. 49). Even Plato, who “eschews the words ‘was’ and ‘will be’ for true being,” uses something like this formula in other settings. Plato claims in the Timaeus that the paradeigma remains eternally, the copy “is through all time, continually having existed, existing, and being about to exist” (gegonos te kai on kai esomenos; quoted 47).

Ultimately, John’s Dreiseitenformel is “quite at odds with Parmenides’ and Plato’s descriptions of ultimate reality” (41). For both, “it is precisely ‘eternal duration’ that lifts ‘the totality of history’ beyond the merely temporal” (57). For Greeks, the apparent introduction of temporality  into the very name of God would have been nonsensical, if not offensive.

And John doesn’t simply expand the name of Yahweh into three tenses, but uses “coming” (erchomenos) not “will be.” As McDonough says, this has profound theological consequences: “God defines his own future not as an infinite extension of existence but as the deliverance of his people.” God’s coming in Christ for final salvation is no “incidental attribute” but “part of his name his identity,” the “inevitably consequence of God’s being who he is.” He quotes J. Comblin to the effect that for John the coming of God is implied by his existence: “Aussi vrai que Dieu existe, il viendra” (217).