No name can ever fully define God
In Genesis 2, God gives Adam the gift of naming all the creatures.
“...From the soil Yahweh God fashioned all the wild beasts and all the birds of heaven. These he brought to the man to see what he would call them; each one was to bear the name the man would give it.” (v. 19)
The name Adam does not appear until chapter 4 where it is at last capitalized as a proper name. Indeed, Adam is consistently referred to as “the man.” (Eve is already named by “the man” in chapter 3.) Adam is actually a collective noun meaning “is of the soil,” or adamah. If the Bible had retained the plurality of this noun, I wonder how it would have affected our consequent readings and interpretations.
Adam’s name, tied to the soil, really points to very humble beginnings for the human race. The word “humble” is related to “humus,” also meaning earth or soil. How powerful are the words we use and the meanings we attribute to them. Who names God? “In the beginning God created ...” (Gen. 1) The name is already there. It isn’t until Gen. 17 that God announces himself to Abram, saying, “I am El Shaddai.” El Shaddai is an ancient divine name of the patriarchal period and its probable meaning is “Mountain God.”
Alla Renee Bozarth has a wonderful poem in which she refers to God as Baker woman God. Given all we know of quantum physics (and all we don’t know) it seems to me we constantly have to revisit our concepts of God, as well as our names for God.
PBS recently broadcast a NOVA production celebrating the 25th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble space telescope. The photographs taken from the telescope of gaseous clouds in which stars are born every minute; the spiral nebulae; the millions of galaxies in an ever-expanding universe; all of it had me thinking more and more of God as Process. Birthing and dying, infinite creativity and destruction: that is the nature of the cosmos in which “we live and move and have our being.” (St. Paul) Could this, then, also be something of the nature of God?
God refers to himself as the Tetragrammaton, Yahweh, when he appears to Moses (Exodus 3:14): “And God said to Moses, ‘I Am Who I Am.’” Actually an archaic form of the verb “to be,” this name reveals the impossibility of defining or capturing in a word who or what God is — for good reason. The Hebrew people believed that knowledge of a name gave power over the thing named.
“The true God does not make himself man’s slave in this way by revealing a name expressive of his essence.” (The Jerusalem Bible, p. 81, footnote h.)
Much later it is Jesus who names God “abba,” which is the affectionate “daddy” a Jewish child gives his or her father. In the human relationship with God, it bespeaks a breathtaking intimacy. Indeed, God calls Jesus his son, the Beloved, in Luke 3:22.
What does Jesus call himself? “The son of man” is the phrase most often found in the New Testament. Could we interpret that as the son of adamah, of the collective noun first found in Genesis? If so, this casts a very different light on how Jesus saw himself.
Names can never capture the thing or person. I can say the word “tree” and you will conjure up a vague image of a tree. I can refine that by calling it a cedar or a eucalyptus and describe its characteristics but it will never capture the essence of its tree-ness. As with trees, so with people. I have what I think is a beautiful name but what does it say about me? Not much.
So many people have had real problems with the name of God. Jewish people use other names or write God like this: G’d. It is too holy a name to use. And so they have many other names for God.
We call God our Lord, or God, Father, or Jehovah. Those who practise an intentional prayer life may find that not only does the experience of God change over a lifetime, the name does too. I grew up with the Lord and started the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola with that name. During the intense prayer periods, that name became Beloved, speaking of an intimacy I could never have created myself.
At the same time that God became more and more immanent, I still needed a name for the unknowable, ineffable aspect of God. Theologian Paul Tillich coined “the ground of being” as a name for God. In my spiritual direction practice, I refer to the Holy, the Sacred, Blessed One, Holy Wisdom, Sophia-God. In my poetry and private prayer, I have used the Constant, the Ineffable, Holy Mystery, Creator God, Ultimate Potential.
Years ago a book called Your God Is Too Small came out. I was more impressed by the title than anything else. Indeed, we tend to think that by our prayers and supplications we have some control over God. But whatever or whoever God is, God-Is-Who-God-Is, and no name will ever capture that. In the end, perhaps a name can only offer a direction in which to look, to listen, to seek, and to explore. Antoinette Voûte Roeder is a poet and spiritual director in Edmonton. Her latest books, Poems for Meditation: An Invitation to Prayer, and The Many Singings, are available at Audreys Books and on Amazon.ca.