JAJ Essay: Nicknaming God and Those Silly Presbyterians

Nicknaming God and Those Silly Presbyterians

Essay Posted June 23, 2006 by James E. Nelson

[ERRATUM: I made a mistake in the orignal essay. (The one posted below was corrected on 6/6/06.) I said spoke of Aquinas’s nominalism when I should have said, William of Ockham, who was the Scholastic Nominalist, not Aquinas. For a variety of reasons I associate Aquinas and Anselm, and that associatian led me to accuse the wrong scholastic.]

I feel the need to offer an interim essay today (ie, outside my regular publishing schedule). It might better be described as a rant or a theological critique. Mostly it's a clarification of something else of mine that was published in today's Sioux City Journal.

Background

On Tuesday the Journal published a distressing news item about shenanigans by the Presbyterians in Birmingham at their General Assembly. It seems the Presbyterians want to name God on their own terms. (More about that in a minute.) But what was even more distressing was the newspaper article headline: “Presbyterians May Ditch ‘Father, Son, Holy Spirit.’” My letter to the editor, published in today's paper appears below:

Your headline "Presbyterians May Ditch 'Father, Son, Holy Spirit'" in Tuesday's (6/20/06) paper is quite unbelievable. It's a remarkable piece of editorial bad judgment and I believe it is incumbent upon the newspaper to apologize to Siouxland Presbyterians for this egregious bit of mis-reporting. The headline flatly contradicts the body of the article, which clearly identifies this as a "study paper" which was received by General Assembly. In case it's not clear what that means, Nancy Olthoff was quoted in the article, "This does not alter the church's theological position . . ."

In short, all constitutional documents continue to refer to God as "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit." Along side the traditional trinitarian name of God, other metaphors or descriptions can be used, such as (according to the article) "Lover, Beloved, Love," "Creator, Savior, Sanctifier," etc. Again, I reiterate, this is about as far from "ditching" the traditional Trinitarian language as one can get. As a former Presbyterian I am deeply troubled that something that so fundamentally misrepresents the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and, which clearly says the opposite of the associated article, was allowed to slip through the editorial process. The Siouxland religious community deserves better.

I am deeply troubled by the Presbyterian’s decision, but the newspaper is not the place to get into an internecine theological fight, so for the letter to the editor I stuck to the issue of accuracy of reporting. Here I want to take the Presbyterians to task and offer some theological background on this particular heresy that is finally bubbling over in the PC(USA).

History

At the heart of the debate lies the question of the nature of language. For some quick background you might want to read the complete works of Jacques Derrida and his predecessor, Michael Foucault, and Louis Althusser, or some of the adherents of Phenomenology. (ha ha) This line of thought, which marks the beginning of modern Deconstructionism, says that we can say nothing real about God. All language about God is secondary level language. Our words about God are simply reflections of our perceptions about God.

Closely connected with this thesis is the whole line of Classical Liberal theological inquiry begun by Schleiermacher (nineteenth century). But Schleiermacher wasn’t working in a void. He essentially works out the logical implications of the theologians who derailed John Calvin, such as Zwingli and the Westminster Divines. That trajectory of thought says that all words about God have to be filtered through human reason and are therefore indirect discourse about God. (Of course, the Westminster Divines didn’t say that our God-talk is indirect discourse, but it is the inescapable conclusion of their theory of divine revelation and biblical inspiration.) In turn this whole school of thought is rooted in William of Ockham’s nominalism—an intellectual tragedy that the vast majority of Protestant thinkers were unable to escape. But there is another way of thinking about these things. Rather than Ockham’s nominalism, certain Protestant theologians turned to Anselm and his “faith seeking understanding” approach to divine revelation.

(And as an aside to my Orthodox readers. Anselm is unfortunately demonized by Orthodoxy for his very bad interpretation of the death of Christ as expressed in his book Why God Became Man. This book did indeed create havoc in Western theology with all that angry God stuff and his substitutionary atonement theory, but because of that demonization, they never bother to read his other magisterial work, Faith Seeking Understanding, which is a brilliant answer to Aquinas’ nominalism and remains one of the great Western defenses of a truly Orthodox understanding of faith and knowledge.)

Thus, there have been voices in the wilderness and there are current voices of sanity, such as Brian Gerrish of Oxford, Iain Torrance, president of Princeton Seminary, and Joseph D. Small, former head of the Office of Theology and Worship of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) I mention Small in particular because as long as he was at the helm of Theology and Worship, this current God-talk stuff happening in Birmingham never saw the light of day, although it has been floating around all the major denominations for a couple of decades.

Contemporary God-talk

I offer this brief history of the God-talk debate not to show off my theological expertise nor to drop names, but rather to say with as much theological precision as possible that the way we think about the Liberal/Evangelical (or Liberal/Conservative or Liberal/Fundamentalist) split in Protestantism is both wrong-headed and dangerous. The tragic fact is that American Evangelicals have this whole “God-talk” problem in common with American Liberals; it is a Protestant pandemic. The difference is that the Liberal camp is willing to talk about the implications of what Protestant Theology say while the Evangelicals pretty much put their hands over their ears while loudly repeating “Lord, I lift your name on high” over and over so they can drown out what everyone else is saying.

The Evangelical/Liberal divide has shown itself to be a falsehood (but that’s a whole ‘nother story, as they say). The Liberals have demonstrated that they are the precocious child of the Renaissance/Reformation and have simply managed to stay a couple of decades ahead in the process of theological implosion. The Evangelicals wrap their thoughts in much more pious sounding words, but when considered at a fundamental theological-phenomenological level, there is little difference between the local Praise and Worship Church singing the Michael Card song, “El-Shaddai, El-Shaddai, El-Elyonna Adonai, Age to age You’re still the same by the power of the Name . . .” and the Presbyterians praying to something as outrageous as “Mother, Child, and Womb” side by side with “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

How can I make such an accusation? It all has to do with the Protestant penchant for confusing the name of God with descriptions of God’s works. The Evangelical version of this problem is very subtle because they tend to misapply words straight out of the Bible while the Liberals make sure everyone is very clear about the mistakes they are making. God has one name. When God spoke to Moses, Moses asked who God was. God said, “I AM that I AM.” Tell the children of Israel that “I AM” sent you. (This is the root of the divine name “Yahweh.”) When we get to the new Testament, we discover that Jesus expands this understanding. Jesus (which literally means, “Yahweh saves”) claims to be the great I AM and in turn says that he is one with the Father and the Spirit. In that process, that first generation of believers discerned that the full name, the revealed name, the real name, of God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and in that name both the eternal (the I AM-ness) as well as the communal character of God are perfectly expressed.

Everything else is not a name, but a metaphor in that it expresses the works of God

By subsuming Old Testament descriptions of God’s work (such as the titles El-Shaddai, El-Elyona), generic words for gods, demi-gods, and sometimes even kings (Adonai—a term roughly equivalent to the English term “god” which can refer equally to the Buddhist higher power, the Greek gods, Shaquille O’Neil, and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) with the actual name of God, Evangelicals are falling prey to the Nominalist temptation and are on the same path as the liberals who think that coming up with threefold descriptions of God’s work (Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer, or Lover, Beloved, Love) is the same thing as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Naming God

The Nominalist temptation of confusing the name of God with the works of God has always been present in the West since the Great Schism, but in recent decades it has taken on a new dimension that is indicative of the sad state of Protestantism. It is a fairly recent heresy to think that we have the right to name God. This current affliction of the Presbyterians is the old idea of Frederick Schleiermacher, who decided to (1) dismiss the divine origins of scripture and therefore to (2) propose that scripture is simply a human attempt to describe an experience with God, and in turn, to say (3) that it is therefore us who gave the name “I AM” and “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” to God. Those are both human constructs of human experiences. Similarly, if my experience of God occurred at a youth group meeting where we had Coke and pizza, I might choose to name him “The Real Thing” instead of “I AM.”

In turn, since my neighbor’s father abandoned her as a child, it would be uncharitable of me to call God, “Father, Son, and Holy Spirt” around her. I might therefore substitute, “Mother, Child, Womb,” or if that is too radical, “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer,” or as was often said (in jest) at Bible College, “The Big Guy, The Kid, and the Spook.”—which is every bit as offensive (and maybe more so) as Mother, Child, Womb, even if it was repeated by a bunch of well-meaning Fundamentalist youth rather than evil liberal church-folk.

So the fallacy of the Presbyterians is not that they chose something as patently offensive as “Mother, Child, Womb.” It’s that they have followed the Evangelicals down the path of choosing their own name for God—something that the Presbyterians, for all their many faults, have resisted up until this point. Of course, in typical Presbyterian fashion, they’ve managed to do it in a gloriously outrageous way. And I have to admit, I continue have a soft spot for Presbyterians. When they do something bad, they generally don’t beat around the bush. They do it up right and put it right out there for everyone to see. Although Luther was talking about something a bit different, the Presbyterians remind of his statement, “Sin boldly!” At least they have that going for them.