Naming God. Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture. Janet Soskice. (Cambridge: CUP. 2023) 247pp.
The sub-title of this book indicates the scope of the volume: Naming God. Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture. Two short extracts encapsulate the burden of the book. "Naming God is indeed about knowing God but knowing too in the sense of 'being in relation to God', for what is vital to the believer is not to know a great deal about God but to be in loving relation to God."(6-7) Throughout, the book builds this case for a form of knowing and naming God that is profoundly and essentially relational, concluding on a clear affirmation: "To be a Christian, or a Jew, is to stand as one who has been addressed…The Christian life is one of call and response." (225)
The text and traditions surrounding Exodus 3 are fundamental to what Soskice is arguing. The name of God is God-given, itself an act of grace. The given Name is not a description but a statement of identity, divine accommodation as a concession to the inadequacy and indeed finitude of human language. Given the inherent limitations because of the created nature of human language, to address God the Creator, and to speak appropriately and meaningfully about God, requires analogy and metaphor, intellectual reverence and semantic reserve.
In her study of Augustine and Aquinas, Soskice engages in a wide-ranging conversation across the traditions of Jewish and Christian reflection on the Divine Names. On display is a career-long study of the philosophy of language, the use of metaphor, and the devout reticence of all who acknowledge the limits of human language:
"[Augustine and Aquinas] did not doubt God's existence nor invoke the inadequacy of our language in order to retreat from sceptical fire. That all our speaking falls short of the divine reality was not for them an admission of defeat but the primordial religious insight on which all our true speaking of God must depend. The background for this, in Judaism as in Christianity, is an overwhelming awareness mediated by Scripture of the holiness and Otherness of God before whom even the prophets speak as those of unclean lips." (105-6)
At this point, Soskice makes a move that is crucial to the case she is making, that naming God is a human impossibility without the divine intervention of a gracious God initiating the conversation by uttering the gift of God's name. Over recent years Soskice, along with others, has made a significant contribution highlighting the contemporary importance of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo in contemporary Christian theology. Through this quite specific form of the doctrine of creation Soskice identifies the fundamental reason for the frustrating linguistic impasse of human speech in relation to God.
"It is the teaching of creatio ex nihilo which makes the distinction between God and the world more radical (and at the same time the relation more intimate) than any to be found in the texts of the ancient philosophers — a distinction not just between God and the world but between Creator and creature. Strictly speaking, God cannot be said to exist, since this for us has the connotations of materiality and temporality. God is beyond existential categories, yet we do say 'God exists' and in so doing speak analogically." (105-6)
The writer asks, "how could we speak of One so wholly other as to be not a being at all?" Her own best answer to that question, still provisional as all such attempts must be, is the book she has written which is an extended progress report of a long journey still being undertaken. On the way she is in conversation, both critical and appreciative, with Jewish and Christian thinkers and traditions; Philo, Maimonides and Rosenzweig, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine and Aquinas, and several philosophers including Descartes and John Locke. It is here that Soskice demonstrates her capacity to listen carefully and read generously from such varied and substantial philosopher theologians. The book allows the reader to follow her steps from that burning bush in the wilderness to our own times of being addressed, and seeking to name and call upon the name of God.
The concluding chapter is the longest chapter, and I read it twice. Not because it was difficult and demanding; but because here are to be found the fruits of long study, disciplined reflection, and I daresay frequent and regular practice of calling on the name of God, and personal experience of calling and being called. It is a summary of findings along a research path still being walked.
Some brief notes on this concluding chapter might give a sense of why I (a pastor theologian) think this book is important. It is a significant contribution to philosophical theology which provides a well conceived systematic underpinning for the practice of personal prayer and the naming of God in the spiritual and pastoral care of praying with and praying for others.
1. From the start there is a quite deliberate challenge to any approach to God based on 'divine attributes', such as 'eternal', Almighty, 'infinite' and these used as abstract descriptors. "Better would be to return to seeing these not as free-standing philosophical determinations but as divine names profoundly anchored in Scripture." (198)
2. We are regularly reminded that a term only becomes a name when we use it as such. As in the Psalmist's invocations God is summoned, or praised, or petitioned by names such as 'my Refuge', or 'my Shepherd'. "Names do not name God. People using names name God." (199) This is put with succinct firmness early on: "The primary mode then for naming God is the vocative – calling, invoking, beseeching, praising." (34)
3. The question of how to name God, and whether a Christian can use a new name for God that arises out of their own life situation is answered in a qualified affirmative. This book has regular surprises as Soskice earths even the most exalted analytics in the more familiar everyday: "I may invoke God in prayer as 'my Carolina wren' and those who know me may understand something of its significance for me but it will not mean much – without a good deal of back story – in a sermon preached in Zimbabwe." (204) I so want to hear that back story!
4. Praise becomes an important key to understanding how and why we name God. "Our question should be what is the most appropriate name by which to praise God for God's gifts to us?" (207) That is an exact and exacting question, and throughout the book Soskice has been helping us address it. Reading the book acts as a quality check on the language we use in prayer, enhancing the tone of reverence by recalling us to the mode of wonder and awe that we are here at all, and that we are here because called into being, summoned into relationship with the One who creates, redeems and addresses us.
5. The name 'Being Itself', or 'the One Who Is', "have been understood to be divine self-designations - names which in Scripture, God was credited with giving to Godself." (208) This train of thought brings Soskice back to creatio ex nihilo as an explanation of the prime importance of God being named 'the One Who Is'. "From creatio ex nihilo comes this key understanding: all the world, 'all that is', is gift. Our own being and that of all creatures is gift. God alone 'is' and we (and angels, earthworms, stars and planets) have at every moment our own being from God." (211) To name God as 'Being Itself' is not an exercise in abstraction; it is a recognition that we are held in being by the 'One Who Is' and from whom and in whom we exist at all.
6. Throughout the book Christology is woven as a primary colour in the overall pattern of naming God. For example, Soskice comments on Aquinas: "For Thomas and all his contemporaries the 'I AM WHO I AM' is already Christ as witnessed in John's Gospel, Paul and in the Book of Revelation: the one who was, and is, and is to come. Christ is the God whose presence to us as the source of being is unfolded to us in those first questions in the Summa." (224)
I'll finish by quoting a key paragraph written with a rare combination of lucid analysis and theological excitement, as an author energised from her own position of faith seeking understanding.
"This calling and creating God can be with the people – indeed with all creatures and all creation – at every moment and in every place without ceasing to be the transcendent God. This, as I have argued, is not despite but because God is the Creator. God is not distant from creatures but wholly present to them in every moment, creating and sustaining them, which amounts to the same thing. God's ultimacy and God's intimacy are one. Christian belief is not a 'flight to another world', for the deity does not inhabit an elusive elsewhere. There is only 'all that is' and God is wholly present to 'all that is'. (228-9)
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