The name of God: ‘I am who am'

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The name that God reveals to Moses, when Moses encounters God in a burning bush that is never consumed, is a verb: “I am who am” (Ex. 3:14). Other ways of translating this passage is: ‘I am the one who is. I am Being itself. I am who I am. I am he who is.’

As philosophers have observed, this means God is ‘being’ itself. It is a way of saying ‘I am what it means to be’. ‘I am the Being that is the source of all other (animate or inanimate) beings.’

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Jewish and Christian theologians, and philosophers influenced by them, have commented on this for centuries. Is it a riddle? When Moses pleads with God to tell him who he should say sent him to bring God’s message to his people, it is not clear what exactly Moses wanted. Earlier in the passage from Exodus that forms this Sunday’s first reading, God gave a slightly longer identification: “I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”. This is the ‘pedigree’ that identifies God by reference to his creatures, the way an indigenous North American woman will be (re)named for the eldest son she has borne.

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Can we name God?

The Jewish religion forbids using the name of God revealed to Moses – which is written, like all Hebrew words, with only the consonants יהוה (the reader has to supply the vowels, in later Hebrew aided by signs placed around the words)?

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Since it consists of four letters, it is referred to as the ‘tetragrammaton’. Transliterated into English as YHWH, it would be pronounced, if it were allowed to be pronounced, roughly as ‘Yahweh’ (there was an attempt, now considered misguided, to use that name of God in an English Bible translation (the Jerusalem bible – and in some hymns based on it, like Dan Schutte SJ’s ‘Yahweh, I know you are near’ – with the paradoxical idea that this would be closer to the Hebrew/Jewish original). But of course this would be profoundly shocking to Jews, who when they see the tetragrammaton, read aloud Hashem (the Name), Adonai (the Lord), or Elohim (God).

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The principle that the name God revealed is so sacred that humans may not speak it aloud in prayer, discussion or reading has even led to some Jews to do the same with the English name, sometimes writing ‘G-d’ rather than writing out the word in full with its vowel.

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Why is this name so much more sacred and therefore revered/unutterable than ‘the God of your fathers…’? The latter identifies God in relation to the created world, to human history. But of course the Eternal existed long before there was an Abraham, an Isaac or a Jacob (John 8:58: “Before Abraham was, I am”).

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However, what Moses may have had in mind is a ‘name’ in the way that the ancient pagan gods had names, like Baal, the Canaanites’ all-powerful god (2 Kings 21:3, Jeremiah 23:13, etc.).

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But God doesn’t have that kind of proper name. In God’s answer to Moses when he asks God for his name, God helps Moses know that this divine Being whose voice he hears (but whom he does not see) in the burning bush is the same God who created the world, who called Abraham and gave him the descendancy that formed the core of the chosen people: his son Isaac and grandson Jacob.

In ancient cultures, and even today in more family and tribally oriented cultures, a person is identified by his or her ancestors, brothers, sisters, etc. Our surnames often derive from the same

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effort - Johnson was the son of John, Peterson the son of Peter, etc. In Iceland, people today still only have a given (first) name, and their last name simply indicates whose son or daughter they are – Karl Palsson or Puri Palsdottir, and that will therefore be different for each member of the family, but the same for siblings.

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However, YHWH, ‘I am who am’, is a more profound self-definition of God, and so is the one that is revered and analysed by philosophers and theologians. God is being itself, and every other being has its existence thanks only to God. ‘In Him I live and move and have my being’(Acts 17:28), St Paul said in a sermon to the Athenians, adding that even the pagan poets had said as much about the deity (and quotes the Greek poets Aratus and Epimenides).

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One philosopher, the Anglican Bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753) took this to the logical extreme with the idea that the only reason anything continues to exist is that God constantly sees us and thus sustains us. Should God avert His ‘eyes’ from us for even a second, we would cease to exist and fall into the void.

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”To be is to be perceived…. So long as things are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some Eternal Spirit”, i.e. God.

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The early 20th-century Oxford don, Catholic priest and theologian (and author of detective novels!), Monsignor Ronald Knox summed up Bishop Berkeley’s philosophical argument in a handy limerick:

There was a young man who said "God Must think it exceedingly odd If he finds that this tree Continues to be When there's no one about in the Quad." "Dear Sir, your astonishment's odd; I am always about in the Quad And that's why this tree Will continue to be Since observed by Yours faithfully, God."

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On a more serious note, the Church Father St Augustine commented in his Confessions (Book 3, chapter 1) that God is ‘being’ itself, and that we all have being not only because God created us, but we continue to exist every minute of our lives because God continues to “hold us in the palm of His hand” (listen to Michael Joncas’ “On Eagle’s Winds”, based on Psalm 91).

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St Thomas Aquinas, learned as he was in the philosophy of Aristotle as well as in Scripture (being a Dominican friar and preacher), wrote in his great compendium of theology, the Summa Theologiae (I.13.11):

“God revealed his name to Moses as HE WHO IS. And this is a most appropriate name inasmuch as it derives not from any particular form but from existence itself, and is manner of expression does not, as other names do, delimit God’s substance, and represents God’s existence in the present tense as knowing neither past nor future.”

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God cannot be named – ‘negative’ theology and mysticism

However, Christianity – especially in the Orthodox east - has produced another approach to theology, one that finds it more important to emphasize how little we can, of our own intellectual efforts, know about God. Anything we can affirm about God (based on revelation in the Bible) could just as easily, or perhaps even more appropriately, be denied about Him.

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If we are confident in describing God with human qualities, even the most sublime ones, drawn from biblical language – God is almighty, eternal, all-knowing, patient, compassionate – we must acknowledge that God has those qualities in a manner and form that is far beyond what we, humans, understand by power, knowledge, patience or compassion. The practitioners of ‘negative’ (or ‘apophatic’) theology would therefore say that it is even truer to say God is not powerful, knowing, patient, compassionate – at least not in the way we humans are those things.

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“God is infinite and incomprehensible and all that is comprehensible about Him is His infinity and incomprehensibility.”

(On the Orthodox Faith, St John of Damascus)

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“Unknowing is not ignorance or absence of knowledge as ordinarily understood, but rather the realization that no finite knowledge can fully know the Infinite One, and that therefore He is only truly to be approached by unknowing, or by that which is beyond and above knowledge.”

(Mystical Theology, chap. 1, by Pseudo-Dionysius a 5th-century Syrian monk and theologian who took the name Dionysius the Areopagite (one of St Paul’s 1st-century disciples)

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Though if we took this approach to its logical conclusion, we would have no insight at all into “who God is” – the question Moses asked – and we would be unable to pray to God, to have a relationship with Him. It would be, in an extreme form, to deny Revelation, what God wanted us to know about Him and His plan for humanity and for each of us personally.

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However, theologians and spiritual writers have emphasized that this approach, as a complement to our more usual ‘positive’ theology, is a healthy reminder that we can never truly define God, if defining means delineating, setting boundaries around, and fully understanding what is being defined.