Does God Have a Name?

A couple of Sundays ago, I spent the sermon time with the children in the Sunday School attempting to answer their questions. One six-year-old girl wanted to know who God’s father was. I think that was a pretty astute question for a six-year old. (By the way, I took her question as an opportunity to say that some questions can’t be answered, no matter how old, educated, or wise we might be. And, furthermore, it’s OK for us to ask questions that have no answers.)

A related question that many of us might have is “What is God’s name? When thinking about that question, I remembered the words of a minister friend of mine, spoken some thirty years ago: “God doesn’t exist, because God is not a thing, God is Pure Who.” I think that’s downright poetic, although I’m pretty sure I don’t know what it means - exactly.

Language is both wonderful and dangerous. It is wonderful because it has the capacity to provide elegant and poetic descriptions of reality. It is dangerous because its descriptions always fall short of the reality it attempts to describe. This dichotomy is particularly true when it comes to descriptions of, or names for, God.

For most people it appears that the designation, God, is sufficient to refer to the divine. (Perhaps it’s the only name they ever think to use.) Unfortunately, those powerful three letters are usually accompanied by a pretty concrete and detailed inner picture of who that God must be. (You can refer to my blogs on Images of God, June 4, 2008, or God Is Not a Being…, July 9, 2008 or my sermon, What’s in a Name?, March 8, 2009, if you choose. Sermons can be found at www.theparkchurch.org)

But for today, I want to focus what our names for God tell us. I think names can refer to the “identity” or activity of God, the presumed location of a particular revelation of God, or the nature of relationship with God– to name just a few. Let me give some examples: “God Sabaoth” could mean the God who commands the heavenly armies, or leads the heavenly council; “El Shaddai” means the God who is associated with the Mountain (Sinai?); and “Adonai” means Lord (not necessarily “lording over”), but possibly the one to whom I relate as the central author of the meaning of life.

When Moses asked about the divine name, he received an answer something like YHWH which seems to be a poetic construction meaning something like: “I Am What I Choose to Be, or I Create Everything, or even I Love. Clearly, Moses’ question was more than “What do you want me to call you?”

These examples of names for God do not mean that God is confined to a particular function, location, or relationship. In Christian Theology, we refer to the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who constitute in mystical symbolic fashion who God is. All these names are attempts to capture the nature of God in terms of human experience and relationship. Where conservative and liberal theology might part ways is around whether these symbolic representations actually say anything about God, or if they simply stand as our poetic, but limited, attempts to express the inexpressible.

Some of you might remember the Lenten Study we did in 2008 about how to understand the Lord’s Prayer from the perspective of Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke (Recordings of those classes can also be found at www.theparkchurch.org). In the Aramaic word for God, abwoon (a-bw-oo-n), each letter or two carries a particular meaning, so when we put them all together we get something like “Unity – Gives Birth – Via Breath/Spirit - To New Forms”. But, that expanded definition of the name is still limited to terms that come out of our own human experience.

Even though Jesus used a term similar to this for God (in Greek “abba” is a familiar form that could mean, Daddy), it seems to me that Jesus never got too hung up on identifying “correct” names for God. He mostly wanted people to know that they already belonged fully to Creation and that there was enough divine love for everyone to have an adequate share. He also made it clear that divine reality was most easily experienced in loving relationships among people - And that is why we come together as a congregation.

I guess an important question for me is to wonder about the degree to which your names for God are confining, or whether they point beyond their own limitations toward your experience or intuition of divine reality. This is not a test question. So, what do you think?

Wayne Gustafson
“God is Still Speaking”
The United Church__of Christ