GOD BY ANY OTHER NAME?

J. ANDREW FULLERTON
The Nature of Naming
In every maternity ward, new parents thumb through dog-eared books of
names. Their gaze shifts rapidly from pages with turned-down corners to
the infant face and back again, as though they were naturalists identifying
some rare species of bird or ower. It says here that Sophia means wisdom,
the exhausted mother declares. Lets just call her Sophia. Doesnt she look
wise to you? No, she looks like Winston Churchill, says the anxious father.
I still favour Dorothea. You know, from Eliots Middlemarch. They are
discomted, without directly saying so, by how arbitrary the act of naming
seems to be. For they dimly apprehend that names were once a mysterious
class of words, and perhaps their childs name ought to be more than the
product of parental whim and fancy. They subconsciously feel that naming
ought to be a portentous act, a registering of their infants character and
destiny. And this moves them to wonder if they ought to usher her to the
font after all, to hear her name uttered aloud by a priest in the equally por-
tentous act of baptizing her in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
But they are plagued by indecision about that too.
It is a sign of our (post)modern malaise that, however adept we are at
labelling things and coining new acronyms, we are rather clumsy at naming.
We behave as though names are surface appellations; signs appended to us,
but neither revealing nor touching our essence; adventitious, but disclosing
nothing of the mystery of who we are. It is an attitude that would portray
Adam, exercising his power to nominate, running about the Garden sticking
index cards on every animal that will hold still long enough to let him. It was
not always so. Jacob vainly tries to wrestle a name from the strange being
who tackles him alone at night, blesses him, and re-names him Israel. Why
do you ask my name?, the divine agent cries. The reader knows why. It is
Modern Theology 18:2 April 2002
ISSN 0266-7177
J. Andrew Fullerton
77 Centre Street, Stratford, Ontario, Canada N5A 1E4
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because to know a name is to gain entry to the inner mystery of that person
and so make him or her subject to your power and will. How like Jacob, the
manipulator, whose nerve stretches even to striving with God!
We only experience remnants of this mystery, this interpenetration of name
and person. The truth is that you are now more exposed to my manipulative
power if I know the secret number to your bank machine card than if I know
your name. And yet, if I see you on the other side of the street and I shout
your name aloud, I will, if only for a moment, arrest you. And in that
moment you do belong to me. Your name gives me access to your person.
You are in my power. I make you turn and look. That is why people some-
times change their names. They want to hide from the unwelcome access
others have to their person. Or they may wish to signal some deeper change
in their status or identity. A new name says I am not like I was before.
Your name shall no more be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven
with God (Genesis 32:28).
We may think names are arbitrarily appended at birth, but even so, their
adhesive is strangely strong. When used intimately, as forms of address, and
not bureaucratically, when a number will do just as well or better, names
do divulge intimations of personal identity. A t is soon established, and
we learn to wear our names like comfortable clothing. In fact, we grow into
our names at the same rate we acquire a biography, a narrative in which we
are both agents and recipients in the world in which we are set. By signing
our names to things, from guest books to walls of graffiti, we show that we
have been physically present. By putting our names to things like petitions
and contracts, we enact our commitments. By our names we are known, and
have commerce with the world. As we come to know each other, rst simply
by name and later more intimately, your name attaches itself more rmly
in my mind to the characteristic features of your person and narrative. Soon
your name no longer seems strange and arbitrary, but a tting sign of your
character and person. Your proper name may stand for you, yet I know you
not just by name, but by the particular narrative that you are.
Yet there is a deep reticence in Christian theology to name God, for fear of
intellectual idolatry and religious hubris. How then can we call upon the
name of Lord? We can observe what God does, assemble it into a narrative,
call it the economy of salvation, the story of Gods works, and make our
address to God with reference to that. Who then is God? We cannot answer
this by simply mouthing a name. We can only point to the narrative, and say
God is the one who . God is the one who created all things; God is the one
who rescued us from Egypt; God is the one who raised Jesus from death to
life, giving him the name that is above every name; God is the one who
claims us through the waters of baptism, and so on.
1
If so, then Father, Son
and Holy Spirit is not a proper name at all, but a little summary of faiths
narrative apprehension of God, a convenient designation for address and
reference to the transcendent mystery in which we live and move have our
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being. This is why faiths address to God can never precede but only follow
after Gods address to us; an address which is at the same time Gods own
self-identication through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. By naming
the transcendent mystery in relation to which he lived Father, Jesus there-
by qualied himself as Son. God is not everyones Father universally
and generically. God is our Father specically and only by rst being the
Father of Jesus the Son. (And this is also why faiths address to a generic
Father, when this is torn from its Trinitarian context, is troublesome.
The generic Father may be falsely construed as generically male.) The Holy
Spirit, in turn, is that power in which we come to know Jesus as Son and
address God as Father. When we cry Abba! Father! it is that very Spirit
bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God and joint heirs
with Christ (Romans 8:1517). Father, Son and Holy Spirit is therefore a
doxological convenience (and only subsequently a doctrinal one). More than
a tag or label but less than a proper name, it neatly encapsulates a mode of
reference to the transcendent mystery whom we meet in the economy of
salvation, and whose own reference point is condensed in Jesus person
and work.
Father, Son and Holy Spirit may not be a proper name (nor even a set
of three proper names, like Odin, Freya and Thor), but perhaps it gained
the status of a name through repeated and successful use (and did so early
enough to be included in the baptismal formula of Matthew 28:19). It has not
escaped the notice of those who insist that Father, Son and Holy Spirit
is Gods proper name that these are not names at all, but common nouns.
2
But common nouns can frequently function as names when they refer to
some leading quality in a person, or to an office they hold. Through repeated
use they soon refer successfully to the persons they denote, and in effect
become names.
3
St Thomas Aquinas simply called Aristotle the Philosopher.
One can spend a lifetime in a Cambridge college and avoid using anyones
proper name by recourse to their functional title instead: Master, Bursar,
Tutor, Dean, Head Porter, and so on. This aversion to proper names strikes
North Americans as oddly impersonal, yet in that setting those words do
become names, legitimate forms of address, even intimacy.
4
I greet the postman with a cheery Hello, Mr Postman, and later explain
to my questioning child that he is the one who delivers letters. But I would
be astonished to nd, as my child believes, that his surname really is Post-
man (though that is possible, remotely). In the same way, we can success-
fully use the Trinitarian formula as a name, but we cannot make the astonishing
claim that we thereby know it is Gods proper name, though it is of course
possible. God was known and addressed before Jesus advent. Until the
night when Jesus knelt in the Garden to address the darkness as Father ,
5
the Tetragrammaton revealed to Moses was perhaps the closest we had to a
name for God. I am who I am (Exodus 3:14). And since Jesus and Moses
are both actors within the one narrative of salvation, we dare not say that
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Jesus address to God simply trumps and cancels Gods theophanic address
to Moses; and this notwithstanding the fact that Jesus union with the one
who sends him is admittedly more intimate (indeed, hypostatic) than Moses.
The most we can claim (and it is a lot, in fact) is that we who stand within
the saving economy of Jesus Christ and his cross, who live in this setting,
have successfully known and addressed God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
This serves us truly as Gods name; but to say this truly is Gods name is to
claim more than we know.
It is in the narrow space opened by the difference between as and is
that I want to establish the theological ground for the possibility of alternative
names for God; other names for God that are just as true to the triadically
structured mystery revealed in the economy of Gods salvation as Father,
Son and Holy Spirit.
The Usefulness of the Well-Used Trinitarian Name
Jacob cannot wrestle a name from the nocturnal assailant who renames him
Israel. The nominee must ever limp after the nominator. Mary Magdalene
mistakes Jesus for the Gardener. Only when he calls her by name is she
able to know and address him correctly (John 20:16).
6
We are able to address
God, then, only because God rst addresses us, for the same reason that our
knowledge of God must follow in the wake of Gods knowledge of us.
Trinitarian theology derives from soteriology. It emerges the moment
we press beyond the work of God in the economy of salvation, and most
crucially in the crucixion and resurrection of Jesus, in order to draw a
hesitant conclusion about the identity of the God who stands behind and
above this work. From what God does, we infer who God is. Because it is
truly God whom meet in that divine economy, we are allowed to conclude
that what God does squares with who God is; Gods outward work cor-
responds with how God inwardly is. Barths principle holds here: Where
the actuality exists there is also the corresponding possibility.
7
Trinitarian
theology further reasons that because Gods work ad extra is triadically
structured, Gods inward self is triadically structured as well. The economic
Trinity, Gods face as it is turned toward the world, is grounded in the so-
called immanent Trinity, the plentitude of Gods being and life in its own
self-possession.
8
The point of Trinitarian theology, then, is to formulate faiths
discernment of Gods antecedent, pre-worldly identity within Gods
creative, salvic and sanctifying work. [The] immanent Trinity is the neces-
sary condition for the possibility of Gods free self-communication, as Karl
Rahner has argued.
9
It is as if Gods relations to us are internal to Gods self.
Trinitarian theology plays with this distinction-without-separation in
Gods immanent and economic life. And here is where I think the language
of Father, Son and Holy Spirit has been unexpectedly (and providentially?)
useful. The complaint is frequently and correctly made, for example, that alter-
native names or titles for God, such as Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer,
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or Sovereign, Saviour and Spirit, cannot provide all that is needed when
we address the Holy Trinity. This is true not only because these are
functional and generic titles that might apply to any number of different
gods, and not uniquely to the God of Jesus Christ (the same could be said of
Father, Son and Holy Spirit), but also because they refer only to Gods
economic life, and cannot be made to refer to Gods immanent life
without doing violence to Gods inward identity. God does not create,
redeem or sustain Gods self, but something other than God. The point is that
this outer work of creating, redeeming and sustaining (in which all three
persons of the Trinity co-operate) corresponds to those relations of person
which are Gods inner being and life. Therefore, to replace Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit with Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer is to neglect the
gracious truth that Gods work is to be trusted and followed precisely
because it veritably expresses and enacts who God is. Conversely, names that
refer only to the immanent life of the TrinityBegetter, Begotten and
Spirated One, for example (though I doubt it has been seriously proposed),
or Source, Logos and Spirit (which has)detach Gods being from its
concrete expression in salvation history and its enactment in the person and
work of Christ. And here is where the language of Father, Son and Holy
Spirit has served us so well. It allows us to slip back and forth between the
(so-called) immanent and economic Trinities without necessarily specifying
our reference. Father, Son and Holy Spirit can be comfortably used to refer
in either direction, economically or immanently. Its utility rests in the ease
with which we can use it simultaneously to address the identity revealed in
the economy and the economy expressed by the identity, without severing
the connection between them or cutting Gods acts loose from Gods being.
The question I am interested to ask is whether this utility is somehow
inherent in the language of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in these particular
words, or whether this capacity for two-way reference accidentally accrued
to these words through long use over time. And if time made them service-
able, then may time make them unserviceable, or at least amenable to alter-
native construal in a new cultural setting? More to the point, if this utility
is somehow inherent in this language, then is the masculinity of the names
also inherent, and genuinely expressive of Gods identity? Is God male,
in other words, because Jesus (the Son) addressed God as Father? Even
ardent traditionalists in matters of language back away from that conclusion.
Gregory of Nazianzus poured scorn on those who thought that God was
male because God is called Father.
10
So do modern defenders of Father,
Son and Holy Spirit language. The fatherhood of God has nothing to do
with maleness, says Colin Gunton, but has to do with patterns of relation-
ality revealed and realized in Jesus.
11
Ray Anderson is in substantial agree-
ment: Beyond the gender connotations in the words Father and Son lies the
essential core of Gods being as both origin or source of all being and
the response of all being to God It is this essential core of divine love that
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the terms Father and Son are meant to convey beyond male and female
gender terms.
12
This is very well said. But if the fatherhood of God has
nothing to do with maleness, and if the essential core of divine love is
beyond male and female gender terms, then why insist on the language of
fatherhood? Is Father, Son and Holy Spirit really the best designator for
this concrete relation of source and response? Those who insist it is often do
so on the ground that all other options are less satisfactory either because
they are less personal (Source, Wisdom, Spirit, for example) or less precise
(Parent, Child, Spirit), or because in the process of removing one gender
bias they simply import another (Mother, Daughter, Spirit). Better to leave
the traditional language alone, say these critics, and be content in knowing
that Father does not mean that God is male. I nd this to be technically
correct but pastorally nave. Rened theological minds may privately avoid
ascribing masculinity to God the Father when they use that phrase doxo-
logically, but the unspoken and deep impression made on many is that
Father is a generic name for God, and that God is indeed male.
If God is not male, then why insist on the language of fatherhood and
sonship? Robert Jenson gives a most telling answer. He insists that Jesus
naming God Father is an intra-Trinitarian event.
13
It matters to the identity
of God, in other words, that Jesus called God Father, not Manitou,
Mother or My Higher Power. This may strike us as a contingent, acci-
dental, culturally-conditioned act on Jesus part, and it surely is. But that is the
point. Jesus may not really have had to name God Father (although Jenson
advances his share of reasons for why it was jolly sensible of Jesus to do this),
but in fact he did. For Jenson, faith must affirm the historical contingency
upon which it rests: God might not have chosen Israel from the nations, or
Jesus from among the Israelites, or washing instead of incensing, or bread
instead of potato chips. But for Christian faith might not have been does
not at all decrease the authority of what in fact is.
14
So he rightly insists on
tying Gods identity to the concrete narrative of Jesus life as tightly as possible.
Jesus life is not merely illustrative but constitutive of Gods deity. Thus,
if Jesus said Father, then we obscure our knowledge of Gods identity if
we say instead Ground, Logos and Spirit, for this disrupt[s] the faiths
self-identity at the level of its primal and least-reected historicity.
15
It is to
embark on a search for alien gods.
I do not wish to question this line of theological reasoning, but only to
question its literalismat this point of naming and referring to God. Is Father
really and forever after Gods revealed name from the moment Jesus rst
utters it? Should we not apply here, as we do elsewhere in New Testament
exegesis, a more uid hermeneutic?
16
Bring Many Names
We ought to be able to make reference to God differently without referring
to a different God. But there are severe dangers. Here, in the act of naming
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and knowing, we walk the narrow precipice that connects the constructive
with the given, making with discovering, the projection onto transcendence
of the products of human imagination with the breaking of idols under
the constraints of revelation.
One might also say that God loves as Mother loves Daughter, Ray
Anderson concedes, but then there would be no ontological and semantic
link with these terms to the incarnation of God that took place in Jesus
the historical person who called God his Father.
17
The link is necessary, I
agree. Our address to God must heed and follow Jesus address to God. But
the semantic link between our language and Jesus the historical person
who called God his Father is established not by slavish imitation, nor exact
emulation, but by the work of the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit encour-
ages us in our liturgical weakness to make our address to God really become
our address to God, not a word-perfect reproduction of Jesus address to
God, nor an address that has nothing of us in it. If the Holy Spirits mtier
is to bear witness with our Spirit that we are children of God, joint heirs with
Christ, and to specify within us the contextual form of our Christian exist-
ence, our conformation with Jesus sonshipwe suffer with him so that we
may also be gloried with him (Romans 8:17)then our rational, critical
and imaginative powers, and so also our language, are legitimate material
for animation by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is in the language we use, not
travelling alongside it in unmixed conjunction. Otherwise our creaturely
and historically-situated nature is bypassed, or worse, suppressed, and we
become automatons of the Spirit. Every prayer, every performance of the
Eucharist, every calling upon the Holy One who has promised to be in
the midst of two or three who gather in the name of Jesus, happens with
the same kind of historical contingency as Jesus address to the Father in
Gethsemane, and follows in his wake. But the success of our address to God
is a pneumatological work. It is not the outright dictating of words that
may have become clich or, in the wrong hands, weapons of oppression, but
the conforming of our response to the paradigmatic response of Jesus. Our
speaking of God and to God may indeed be a dependent and responsive
mode of speech, but as Rowan Williams says, it is not a dictated or deter-
mined utterance: revelation is addressed not so much to a will that is called
upon to submit as to an imagination called upon to open itself.
18
If so, then
one might even say it is presumptuous to believe our address to God is
guaranteed simply by securing an isomorphic link with the material form of
Jesus address. Not everyone who says to me Lord, Lord, will enter the
kingdom of heaven (Matthew 7:21).
The parallel with artists work is instructive. Even the most realist artist
knows that mimicry and sheer imitation is a cheapening of our human
capacity to make and show some aspect of existence under a novel form.
Who played Bach like Glenn Gould? Who ever will again? What makes
Kenneth Branaghs performance of Henry V if not as denitive then at least
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as illuminating as Laurence Oliviers, each shedding new light on the play,
but also illustrating the specic psychology of the actors themselves and
anxieties of the times in which their lms were made? A true rendering of
anythingin art, literature, lm, music and (dare I say?) liturgyis never
simply a knock-off copy or clich imitation of what has gone before, but
always a new performance, a fresh rendering. No matter how mobile the
poetic line, says the poet Dennis Lee, the energies that attune it are multi-
form, more simultaneous than consciousness can hope to organize. Reality
is richer than all our formulations of reality.
19
And though he takes Friedrich
Hlderlin as his poetic mentor and example, he eschews the notion that
everyone else should try to sound like Hlderlin. God spare us another
orthodoxy, another sure-re technique The truest response is not to
imitate him but to attend to the polyrhythmic energy of what is. Given such
attending, many different musics can emerge within the syntax of compound
rhythm. To write like Hlderlin today would mean accepting the directive:
utter us utterly. With no blueprint for what the poem should sound like.
20
Yet Jesus Christ is more to the Church than Friedrich Hlderlin is to the
society of poets. This is true. Jesus response to the reality that is richer than
all our formulations of reality is unsurpassable and permanently paradig-
matic. The terms of our address to God dare not bypass or suppress this.
Otherwise we break the semantic link with him. I only wish to argue that
the semantic link is established by the work of Holy Spirit and need not be
accomplished by a word-for-word copying of Jesus address or the exact
formulae of subsequent liturgical tradition(s). So it does not necessarily
follow that by replacing a word Jesus used with one of our own devising
we immediately break the semantic link with him. After all, the statue of
the Crucied Woman that stands in the garden of Emmanuel College at
the University of Toronto caused commotion, not because the gender of the
body displayed there on the cross broke the semantic link with the nar-
rative of Jesus the Crucied, but because that link was all too clearly made.
21
To argue this way is not to fall back into our own subjectivity.
22
It is simply
to confess that the Holy Spirit may enlist our subjectivity, within this or that
historically contingent moment, and conform it to the sonship of Jesus Christ
in new and surprising ways. But it is the work of the Spirit. On its own, the
subjectivity of our response no more guarantees our address to God than
does, on its own, the parroting of an objective formula.
My argument, then, is that there is a perennial, Trinitarian structure both in
Gods life and Gods work (God is Trinity, the Trinity is God), and this
structure supports the basic grammar of our address to God. Our talk to and
about God must heed this structure, and submit itself to the work of the
Holy Spirit. And this, in turn, means that God can in principle be known and
successfully addressed by other names. A basic grammar of Trinitarian
address, far from restricting doxology to a single formula, will instead
welcome a diversity of expression, ways of naming that crystallize around
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this grammar and so remain faithful to the structure that transcends each
expression. The difficulty, of course, lies in discovering what alternatives
may full such stringent theological, cultural and ecumenical requirements.
The search for an other name for God may very well frustrate more than
inspire. It is also difficult to conjure up alternatives that have not already
been tried and found wanting in certain respects.
23
Except for its importation
of an illicit masculinity into the life of God, the language of Father, Son and
Holy Spirit scarcely bears improvement. Perhaps that is telling. Yet those
for whom the language of Fatherhood has become an intolerable impedi-
ment and stumbling block ought to be forgiven for refusing to give up so
easily. Let any who can formulate it better do so by all means.
24
NOTES
1 Cf. Robert W. Jenson, The Triune Identity (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1982), p. 3:
In general, proper names work only if such identifying descriptions are at hand. We may
say, Mary is coming to dinner, and be answered with, Who is Mary? Then we must be
able to say, Mary is the one who lives in apartment 2C, and is always so cheerful, and ,
continuing until the questioner says, Oh, that one! We may say, Yahweh always forgives,
and be answered with, Do you mean the Inner Self? Then we must be able to say, No. We
mean the one who rescued us from Egypt, and .
2 See, for example, Alvin F. Kimel, The God Who Likes His Name: Holy Trinity, Feminism,
and the Language of Faith, in Alvin F. Kimel (ed), Speaking the Christian God, (Grand
Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1992), pp. 188208.
3 The technical term for this process is antonomasia. See Christian J. Barrigar, Protecting
God: The Lexical Formation of Trinitarian Language, Modern Theology, Vol. 7 no. 3 (July,
1991), pp. 299310.
4 On the morning after his election, Jean Chrtien awoke to his wife asking, Would you like
breakfast in bed this morning, Prime Minister?
5 Nicholas Lash, All Shall be Well: Christian and Marxist Hope, in Theology on the Way to
Emmaus, (London: SCM Press, 1986), p. 215.
6 Though she doesnt use a proper name but the title Rabboni, teacher.
7 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, II/1, (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1957), p. 5.
8 The sharp distinction between the immanent and economic Trinities has been
perceptively criticised by Catherine Mowry Lacugna in God For Us: The Trinity and Christian
Life, (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1991). She rightly fears abstract speculation upon the
inner life of God that is divorced from knowledge of Gods economy. Nonetheless, while
theologia must be grounded in oikonomia there is a valid distinction to be made. One wants
to be able to say that what God does is expressive of who God is: God is Trinity, and does
not only perform in a Trinitarian fashion.
9 Karl Rahner, The Trinity, (London: Burns and Oates, 1970), p. 102, n. 1.
10 Catherine Mowry Lacugna, The Baptismal Formula, Feminist Objections, and Trinitarian
Theology, Journal of Ecumenical Studies, Vol. 26 (Spring, 1989), p. 241.
11 Colin Gunton, Proteus and Procrustes: A Study in the Dialectic of Language in Disagree-
ment with Sallie McFague, in Speaking the Christian God, p. 78.
12 Ray S. Anderson, The Incarnation of God in Feminist Christology, in Speaking the Christian
God, p. 310.
13 See The Triune Identity, pp. 120. Cf. also Alvin Kimel, The God Who Likes His Name,
in Speaking the Christian God, pp. 204205, who leans heavily on Jenson for this point: The
dominical naming occurs within the being of the Godhead. It is an event of the divine
biography, an eternal act of self-differentiation occurring in time. When uttered by
the incarnate Word, Father (dened exclusively by Christ himself in the totality of his lial
existence) is a creative, performative word of eschatological power which eternally calls
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into being the One who loves his Son beyond all imaginings, beyond all conditions and
limits. The Father receives from Jesus, through the power of the Spirit, his hypostatic identity
as Father.
While it may be correct to say that Father is dened exclusively by Christs lial
relation, it is impossible really to know what this precisely means, since all knowledge of
fatherhood is mediated socially and culturally, even when that knowledge stands under a
Barthian Christological critique. Cf. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, II/1, (Edinburgh: T. & T.
Clark, 1957), p. 229: [The] words father and son do not rst and properly have their
truth at the point of reference to the underlying views and concepts in our thought and
language [but] in their application to God, in the doctrine of the Trinity God himself
is the Father and the Son. This is compelling theological theory; yet in practice there is
always a backwash of meaning, and the mundane connotations of language travel willy-
nilly to the new theological arena where God enlists creaturely words to speak divine
truths. Robert Jenson admits as much: that we may not substitute for Father in the triune
name may mean only that the whole name is irremediably offensive. And the use of
Father within the trinitarian name cannot be altogether separated from its more general
use in Christian speech to and about God (The Triune Identity, p. 13). Nor, I would add, can
it be altogether separated from our cultural image of the masculine.
14 Robert W. Jenson, Visible Words (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1978), p. 9.
15 Robert W. Jenson, The Triune Identity, p. 17.
16 Jenson, of course, would say no. Father, Son and Holy Spirit is historically specic
and can be what liturgy and devotionand at its base, all theologymust have, a proper
name for God (The Triune Identity, p. 17). But is it a proper name for God? The Apostles
Creed contains three proper names, but they are Jesus, Mary and Pontius Pilate. Saul Kripke,
Naming and Necessity, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 48ff., calls
proper names rigid designators, arguing that they refer to the same object in any possible
worlds in which they have any reference at all. He contrasts them with descriptive or
accid designators that might refer to different objects in other possible worlds. Thus, for
example, the rst Master of Massey College (a accid designator) refers to Robertson
Davies (a rigid designator); for the rst Master might have been someone else, but
Robertson Davies could only ever be completely himself, as anyone who knew him can
attest. In the same way, suffered under Pontius Pilate, a accid designator, might not
refer to Jesus in another possible world. Pilate might have governed another province
instead. And Jesus might not have suffered crucixion. Jesus might have addressed God as
Friend or Holy One, as well. Jenson seems to be arguing, in effect, that though Jesus
utterance of Father is a contingent, historical utterance, and the designator Father
shares the properties of a accid designator, we ought to use it rigidly, as a proper
name. Yet the collect form of prayer normally addresses God accidly; not by name but
by a descriptive designation. O God but which God? who makest us glad with
the yearly remembrance of the birth of thy only Son Jesus Christ oh yes, that God. The
success of such prayers is secured, not by addressing God as Father, but by their
concluding supplication that the entire prayer be through Jesus Christ our Lord.
17 Ray S. Anderson, The Incarnation of God in Feminist Christology, in Speaking the Christian
God, p. 310.
18 Rowan Williams, Trinity and Revelation, in On Christian Theology, (Oxford: Blackwell,
2000), p. 147.
19 Dennis Lee, Body Music, in Body Music, (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1998), p. 220.
20 Ibid., pp. 220221. This why no teacher of literature, for example, wants to hear his or her
own assertions fed back, word for word, on essays and examinations. Perhaps some do.
But they are not good teachers. A good teacher would rather be surprised and enlightened
by novel questions and interpretations that lter through a students own responsiveness
to the work at hand.
21 See Doris Dyke, Crucied Woman, (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1991).
22 Ray S. Anderson, op.cit., p. 311.
23 The moment of baptism, for example, is highly charged, both liturgically and ecumenically.
In that moment God is explicitly named as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We walk to
schisms precipice if we suggest that God be named differently within this act. But why
must we insist that God be addressed only in words? May we not refer to God by gesture?
180 J. Andrew Fullerton
Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.
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Just as we lift up the cup of salvation to call upon the name of the Lord (Psalm 116:13),
may the Church successfully baptize by saying, I baptize you in the name of the God of
Jesus Christ or even I baptize you in the name of God while making the sign of the cross
(Which God? Oh, the crucied God!)? Just asking.
24 William Temple, The Doctrine of the Trinity, Studies in the Spirit and Truth of Christianity,
(London: Macmillan, 1914), p. 141.
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