What is God’s name?
Language in a new Lectionary
Last Sunday, the first Sunday of Advent, the Church began a new
liturgical year, and many parishes began using a revised version
of the New American Bible Lectionary which will become normative
for liturgical use in this country. Advent prepares us for the
celebration of Christmas, the first of the mysteries of Jesus’
life that we contemplate and celebrate throughout the Church’s
year of Grace. Jesus’ annunciation and birth, however, are events
in a long process of God’s self-revelation in human history. One
key to understanding this revelation is to look at it as a process
in the growth of intimacy between God and the human family as
God gradually taught us his name.
When God began to reveal himself in history, Abraham, who was
a polytheist, dared not ask God’s name. To give someone your name
is to open your existence to him or her. Centuries later, Moses
did ask for God’s name in the presence of a burning bush, and
God answered by calling himself “I am who am”. That enigmatic
name was so awe-inspiring to the chosen people that they replaced
it in writing with words like “Lord”. The people of Israel struggled
to remain faithful to God’s revelation while surrounded by fertility
gods and goddesses, by mythological figures and deifications of
political rulers, by idolatries of many sorts.
More centuries later, God revealed himself definitively in history
by sending his eternal Son who became incarnate of the Virgin
Mary through the power of the Holy Spirit (Luke 1: 32-35). Jesus,
whose name means Savior and who most often called himself “Son
of Man”, began gradually to increase our intimacy with God. He
told stories to show how God acts. He also spoke of the Holy Spirit
and called God his Father.
In the centuries since God’s self-revelation in Jesus, the Church
has preserved the stories Jesus told, rejoiced in his saving death
and resurrection, sacramentally celebrated his life in us, awaited
his return in glory and contemplated who God is. God is pure spirit.
As God, he is neither male nor female because he has no body.
He is, however, from all eternity the Father of his only begotten
Son, who has become in history Our Lord Jesus Christ. What a spiritual
and eternal engendering is and how it contrasts with a biological
and temporal engendering is part of the mystery of the Godhead;
but the eternal engendering is real and so is the name: Father.
Because we are “in Christ”, and only to the extent we are “in
Christ”, his Father really and not just metaphorically becomes
our Father.
Years ago in grade school catechism class, the Sister teaching
us explained very succinctly that God is a Father who is not a
male. We do not, therefore, look at males and extrapolate to a
divine biological progenitor. We look at Jesus, who shows us his
Father, who becomes intimately ours in the gift of the Holy Spirit
(John 14: 8-11). The mystery of the Blessed Trinity can never
be totally explained, but it can be partially grasped by living
God’s life in us and coming to know the Father, through the Son,
in the Holy Spirit. This is the core of Christian revelation.
Forgetting that God has revealed himself as three divine Persons
sharing one Being leads through the centuries to bizarre theories
about God. One that still floats around today and occasionally
appears even in theological circles conceives God as a kind of
unknowable Force which becomes pre-eminently visible in a human
person named Jesus, who is a prophet proclaiming values relating
us to one another in a spirit which unites us all to God. Religion’s
job, therefore, is to tell us we really are gods, that “the Force
is with us”, as George Lucas puts it popularly in the Star Wars
movies. In this vision of things, Jesus may be a prophet but he’s
not a savior, since we’re all gods to begin with. And since all
human language about this Force is merely metaphor, choose the
names for God that are meaningful to you.
Or, acknowledging the Trinity but unhappy with a hierarchy of
First, Second and Third Persons, some theologians have taken to
conceiving the Trinity as a society of equals with unknown inner
relationships. The preferred names for God are then non-relational
or even merely functional. Behind this theory lies the conviction
that the Church, icon of the Trinity, must be only a discipleship
of equals functionally related by various ministries. The Quakers,
it seems, are right and the apostles, captives of their hierarchical
culture, wrong. Proper Trinitarian language helps protect us from
this sort of heterodox theorizing about God or his people.
While these reflections might seem somewhat esoteric, buckets
of blood have been spilled over the ages on language about God,
because there is no subject more important. Neither God nor language
about him is to be played with lightly. God is not a mirror into
which we peer to see ourselves represented nor an idea we can
take apart and put together with impunity. The introduction of
a revised translation of Holy Scripture last Sunday in the Lectionary
used at Mass is therefore an important moment in the life of the
Church. It teaches us how to speak to and about God.
The new Lectionary is based on the revised version of the New
American Bible, which is the version already used in almost all
parishes in the United States. Its rhythms and cadences will therefore
be somewhat familiar, although the revision has been made not
only in the light of new manuscript study but also with an ear
for American speech at the end of the century. Since language
about ourselves, as well as about God, is something of a minefield
these days, not everyone will appreciate all its usages. The translation
tries to accommodate the sensitivities expressed in what has come
to be called “inclusive language”, where these do not lead to
betrayal of the inspired text itself. It uses grammatically masculine
pronouns for God, because the inspired authors used them and because
avoiding the use of personal pronouns risks reducing God to an
impersonal Force. To speak of ourselves, however, the usage is
inclusive where the text means to include everyone rather than
speak to or about only men or only women.
One of the weaknesses of the inclusivist idiom is that it is nominalist
and individualistic. Its universe contains only individuals and
groups of individuals, whereas Christian discourse predicates
natures as such (e.g., “He became man”). Inclusive language sometimes
resembles an artificial code more than a natural language, because
it presupposes that words have only one determined meaning (e.g.,
if you use a masculine pronoun you must be talking about a biological
male, although this presupposition seems to disappear when speaking
about wisdom as feminine). Despite the inadequacies of inclusive
language as language, some recognition of inclusivist concerns
is pastorally wise and, to an extent still to be determined, linguistically
apt.
In five years, when what is genuine development and what is only
faddish in current linguistic usage is better sorted out, the
Lectionary will be revisited. In the meantime, let us use the
new Lectionary well; it is not a manifesto but the Word of God
translated into our words in order to unite us in prayer and liturgical
proclamation to God himself. As we prepare for Christmas, you
and those you love are in my prayers to God; please keep me in
yours.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
