Review of Naming God, Janet Soskice: Part 1. By Way of Explanation and Appreciation.

Naming God. Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture. Janet Soskice. (Cambridge: CUP. 2023) 247pp.

There's a back story to this book review. In the mid 1990s I came across an essay by Janet Soskice, a Cambridge philosophical theologian whose name was new to me. The essay was entitled 'Love and Attention', which I discovered in Michael McGhee, (Ed.), Philosophy, Religion and Spiritual Life.(Cambridge: CUP, 1992).

It changed the way I as a minister and theology teacher thought about spirituality and the mundane and unavoidable demands of ordinary and everyday life for the vast majority of people, especially for women who are mothers. The mystic way as traditionally understood and prescribed is hard to follow in the chaos of feeding and comforting young children, changing and washing nappies and doing much else to make family life at least functional.

So there surely must be alternative approaches to how the spiritual life can be nurtured and sustained, if people who have major life responsibilities are to accommodate the essential human activities by which most people are required to live in our late modern and post-modern iterations of human culture. The traditional views of contemplative silence, a covenanted rule of life, and regular time-expensive forms of devotional discipline, are more likely to be guilt-making barriers than authentic paths to human growth in Christian spiritual maturity.

Traditional models are unrealistic to the point of unattainable for people caught up in the daily obligations of family, career and social obligation. That kind of common-sense, characteristic of much that Soskice writes, is very welcome in areas of life where unreal expectations and assumptions create unnecessary burdens by demanding ideals unrealisable for the great majority of ordinary folk seeking God in the mixture of chaos and order that is the life they are given to live. I've read that essay a number of times since, as an important reminder of pastoral realism as itself a spiritual discipline.  

Fast forward twenty years and in 2010 I am sitting at an illustrated lecture in the University of Glasgow, as Janet Soskice speaks about her recent book, Sisters of Sinai. Full disclosure – I count this book one of the most fascinating, informative, and straight out enjoyable books on the history of New Testament texts and the discovery of one of the most important extant NT manuscripts. More than that, it is a full account of how two Scottish sisters of financial means, became self-educated experts in Semitic languages and manuscript research, travelled and trekked Middle-Eastern deserts, and despite the rejection, patronising dismissals, and male academic snobbery of the age, became celebrated in their own right as major players in NT textual criticism and manuscript identification.

I have since learned that one of the purposes in researching and writing Sisters of Sinai, was the writer's long term research interest in Moses, in particular Moses' encounter with God as told in Exodus 3. Naming God by Janet Soskice, published in 2023, gathers years of research into metaphor and the use of religious language, into the meaning of prayer and responsiveness to God, and the understanding of God as One who creates 'all that is' ex nihilo, so that all existence and life is gift. This is the God who calls and addresses God's creatures, and whose name is 'I AM WHO I AM', symbolised in the letters YHWH.

This book has been a long time coming, and acts as a major status report on one philosophical theologian's study of the ways we name God, the limits of human language, and the search for a mode of speaking that avoids reducing God to manageable conceptual proportions, such as daring even the attempt to define the ineffable Being whom God is.

My next post will be a review of Naming God. It is less a critical review, and more an appreciation of what the book achieves in the reader upon a careful reading. It is also an affirmation of the importance of the work done on those 'borderlands of theology' (the late and redoubtable Professor Donald Mackinnon's phrase) where philosophy, theology and scripture come together and overlap in a Venn diagram of theological disciplines.