Yahweh and the God of

ChristianTheology
DA YID CLINES

~ Old Testament theologians often find themselves in a defensive or apologetic

position when speaking of the God of the Old Testament. Is its image of God
not naiveand unsophisticated, even crude and degrading?
No doubt, the God of the Old Testament can be a somewhat uncom-
fortable deity, but I would rather go on to the offensive, and argue that it is
precisely where Christian theology believes it has progressed beyond Yahweh
that it has obscured the reality of the biblical God. This is, therefore, a
good-natured polemic against some aspects of the God of Christian theology
in favour of the confessional assertion by which Israel lived: Yahweh, he is
the God!

THE Nft~ME OF GOD

Somewhere between the fifth and the second centuries B.C. a tragic accident
befell God: he lost his name. More exactly, Jews gave up using God's
personal name Yahweh, and began to refer to Yahweh by various
periphrases: God, the Lord, the Name, the Holy One, the Presence, even
the Place. Even where Yahweh was written in the Biblical text, readers
pronounced the name as Adonai. With the final fall of the temple, even the
rare liturgical occasions when the name was used ceased, and even the
knowledge of the pronunciation of the name was forgotten.
Did the abandonment of the name Yahweh have any significance?
G. F.Moore rightly argued that it did not affect the essential characteristics
of the Jewish religion, which at all times recognized God as personal.' Yet
the name by which the deity is known is bound to influence to some degree
the impression worshippers have of their God. The French Protestant, in
whose Bible the divine name is consistently rendered as 'l'Eternel', must
develop a rather different image of God from that of the English reader
familiar with 'the LORD'. Any epithet by which God is habitually known
draws attention to one particular aspect of the divinecharacter.
A personal name is different. A personal name does not have any meaning
in itself, and even if its etymology is patent, nothing can be known about the
person from the name itself. The character of Frank or Felicity cannot be
discerned from the name, but is entirely to be inferred from what those
persons are and do. A personal name is thus at the same time a marker of
personal identity and a concealment of the true reality of the person. It
presents us with an individual, but does not 'give away' that person.
It is the same with the personal name Yahweh. Indeed, it sounds as
though it may have some connection with the verb hayah, 'to be', and could

Downloaded from tjx.sagepub.com at LAURENTIAN UNIV LIBRARY on June 5, 2016

324 David Clines
perhaps be the causative of that verb, meaning 'he brings into being, creates'.
Yet Israel itself did not recognize such a significance; there are, for example,
no word-plays on such a meaning of the name. Bernhard Anderson correctly
observed: 'The important feature of the name is not its linguistic value, but
its historical associations. Whatever it meant once, it acquired concrete
content through the historical experiences of Israel."
But is that then not the case also with the word 'God' now? Does not the
capitalization of 'God' turn it into a personal name? Not really. 'God' can be
a dictionary entry, but 'Yahweh' must be an encyclopaedia entry. 'God' can
be defined, more or less, as 'the highest being', 'that than which nothing
greater can be conceived', and so on. 'Yahweh', on the other hand, does not
mean anything to us but what Yahweh is and does in the Old Testament. The
name is nothing more than a referent to the person. While 'God' with its
capitalization respectfully acknowledges that there is only one true 'god', it
does not name him with his proper name, Yahweh.
The personal name of God is Yahweh. It is a foreign name, quite un-
English, and so unlike the good Anglo-Saxon word 'God'. For that reason, if
perhaps for no other, the name Yahweh must be preserved-lest it should
ever be imagined that God is an Englishman. He is a foreigner now to every
race on earth. The very awkwardness of addressing a God whose name is not
native to one's language in itself alerts us to the alienness of Yahweh to every
god created in our own image.
What use is to be made of the name Yahweh, then? I do not suggest that
God should be known by no other term than his personal name; the Old
Testament itself is rich in titles and epithets for Yahweh, all of which have
their value. At least in our translations of the Bible it should be made plain
(as the Jerusalem Bible does) when the personal name of God is being used,
rather than having it hidden by such an epithet as 'the Lord'. And the
introduction of God's personal name into Christian worship and theology
could have surprising and creative results.
But does not the absence of 'Yahweh' from the New Testament suggest
that the name has been superseded? That would be so only if the New
Testament as a whole may be said to have superseded the Old Testament,
rendering it passe, obsolete, and superfluous. Such a claim must be resisted,
and with it any argument that the New Testament's usage of the divine
names is regulative. In fact, it would have been strange if the New Testament
had persisted in the use of 'Yahweh' when in contemporary Judaism the
common use of that name was regarded as blasphemous. Now that we live in
an environment when not even Jews would, in the main, be offended by the
Christian use of the name, the situation is altogether different.
My point is this: in popular Christian theology the personhood of 90d is
less prominent than it ought to be because God is not referred to by his
personal name. The Old Testament's reiterated use of the personal name

Downloaded from tjx.sagepub.com at LAURENTIAN UNIV LIBRARY on June 5, 2016

 Yahweh and the God of Christian Theology 325
Yahweh is some safeguard against the transformation of God into a
philosophical abstraction.

ANTHROPOMORPHISM
One striking feature of Old Testament speech about Yahweh is the frequent
use made of anthropomorphic language. To him are attributed bodily parts,
human-like actions, and even human emotions: he rejoices, loves, hates, feels
jealousy and anger, and experiences change of heart (repentance).
Such anthropomorphisms have long been an embarrassment to Jews and
Christians alike. Already in the second century B.C. the Septuagint
translators removed many of the anthropomorphisms of the Hebrew Bible.
Philo too was affronted by them, writing in his On the Unchangeableness of
God that, although the Bible says both that 'God is not like a man' (Num.
23.19) and-by its anthropomorphisms-that he is like a man, 'the former
statement is warranted by firmest truth, but the latter is introduced for the
instruction of the many (hoi polloi)', those 'whose natural wit is dense or
dull, whose childhood training has been mismanaged, and are incapable of
seeing clearly'. To suppose, for example, that God really had second thoughts
about the creation of man (Gen. 6.6) would be blasphemy: 'what greater
impiety could there be than to suppose that the Unchangeable changes?"
While Christianity has produced some extremists who have believed, like
the Audiani," that the Biblical anthropomorphisms were to be taken literally
and that God must therefore have a body, the bulk of Christian thinkers have
tended in the oppositedirection.
One method of explaining away anthropomorphisms has been to say that
they belong to a primitive stage of revelation and are replaced later by more
'spiritual' and 'refined' conceptions of God. A second method is to regard
them as mere metaphors. Both these methods are employed in the short entry
in the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church under 'Anthropomor-
phism': 'Scripture, especially in the earlier books of the OT ... in order to be
intelligible to less developed minds, frequently uses anthropomorphic
language, which is in most cases clearly metaphorical." But the objections to
both these methods are overwhelming.
To the first method we can object that anthropomorphic language is not
confined to, or even most concentrated in, the earliest parts of the Bible; it is
in the prophets that we find some of the most striking anthropomorphisms,
God being depicted as a woman screaming in childbirth (Isa. 42.14) or as a
warrior red with the blood of his slain enemies (Isa. 63.1 f.). Nor is anthro-
pomorphism left behind when we reach the New Testament: 'God loved the
world', 'God sent his Son', are equally anthropomorphic: it is just that the
anthropomorphism is not so vivid.
To the second method the objection is that while anthropomorphisms
referring to the 'bodily parts' (hand or eye) of God can be understood as
metaphors for his activity, for what is the speech or love of God a metaphor?

Downloaded from tjx.sagepub.com at LAURENTIAN UNIV LIBRARY on June 5, 2016

326 David Clines
Anthropomorphic language is not some element in the Biblical texts for
which excuses have to be made, or a network of metaphors that must be
reduced to plain language, but part of the Biblical apprehension of God. It is
to be evaluated, not negatively as accommodation to human language or
divine condescension to human understanding, but positively, as a vital
element of our knowledge of God.6
A positive evaluation of anthropomorphism demands re-examination of
some deeply ingrained elements in our notion of God. There is, for example,
the matter of the infiniteness of God. In an article in Theology a few years
ago, Donald Mackinnon wanted to affirm yet again God's 'total freedom
from limitation'.' Anthropomorphic language, on the other hand, wants to
speak of a God who expresses himself precisely through his self-limitations.
When a poet determines to express himself in sonnet form or a composer in
sonata form, he takes upon himself a host of limitations which do not
diminish but only make possible the self-expression of the artist. Yahweh's
self-expression in anthropomorphicform can be regarded as having the same
character, quite differently from a mode of thought that argues that to
predicate anything of God is thereby to limit him. Always in metaphysical
theology, as Mackinnon says, agnosticism has been judged less perilous than
anthropomorphism, but my contention is precisely the opposite. It is better,
my argument would run, if crudely stated, to have a God who is imagined as
an old man with a long white beard sitting on a cloud than to end up with a
God about whomnothing can truly be known or said.
To take a further example: it is characteristic of Christian theology,
academic and popular, to affirm the timelessness of God. 'For him', says
Mackinnon, 'the distinction between past, present and future has no signi-
ficance of any sort whatever." Though a handful of Biblical texts may point
in that direction ('A thousand years with the Lord are as one day'), we may
ask more seriously whether it can truly be said of Yahweh, involved as he is
in the moto perpetuoof Israel's history, that he is beyond time. The Yahweh
of the Old Testament is not a static, timeless being; he is in constant
interaction with his people and with world events; he has a history, a
biography, a futurity, a past. His eternity is infinite duration, not a quality of
existence; his changelessness so-called is simply his faithfulness to his
promises, for he does change in response to the conversion of the Ninevites or
the repentances of Israel. He is acted upon and reacts. He promises,
threatens, reminds Israel of the past. He is the first and will be the last. He
will be whatever he will be. Of whomcould it be said with less truth that 'the
distinction between past, present and future has no significance whatever'?
Anthropomorphic language about God, rightly appreciated, is no distor-
tion, but a perception of his reality that challenges many of the categories of
traditional Christian theology.

Downloaded from tjx.sagepub.com at LAURENTIAN UNIV LIBRARY on June 5, 2016

 Yahweh and the God of Christian Theology 327
THE PERSONALITY OF YAHWEH
For many Christians, God is essentially loving, supportive, safe. Yet, if
Yahweh is God, the Old Testament makes sure that such a simple picture of
the personality of God is called in question. In the Old Testament neither the
loving nor the abrasive aspect of Yahweh's personality is so underplayed that
the one is swallowed up in the other. It is the experience of Israel that
Yahweh is a multi-faceted personality,complex and not entirely predictable.
Yahweh is experienced by Jeremiah, for instance, as both supportive and
oppressive. While he is dignified as a transmitter of the word of Yahweh, he
also knows that word as a fire in his bones. He knows himself to be Yahweh's
prophet, but equally he knows that it is only by dint of greater strength that
Yahweh has forced him into that role: 'Yahweh, you have persuaded me [to
be a prophet] and I was persuaded. You are stronger than I, and you have
prevailed' (20.7). Yet that oppressive strength that dominates him is at the
same time the source of his confidence in the face of persecution (20.11).
To the psalmist of Psalms 42-3, Yahweh is known under the figure of
water. At one time it is life-giving water, that the soul desperately thirsts for:
'As a hart longs for flowing streams, so long I for you, 0 God' (42.2). But at
another time God is experienced as destructive water: 'Deep calls to deep at
the thunder of your cataracts; all your waves and your billows have over-
whelmed me' (42.7). Or for the servant of Yahweh in Isaiah 53, Yahweh is
known not only as the one who elevates him to a position of pre-eminence so
that he is 'exalted and extolled and very high' (52.13), but also as the one
responsible for his humiliation and suffering: 'It was the purpose of Yahweh
to bruise him; he has put him to grief (53.10).
These have been some illustrations of aspects of Yahweh's personality that
could be called loving and abrasive. There are many other ways in which his
personality could be described: he is forever creative, dynamic; he is tender
and terrible, patient and impetuous, self-determining but open to scorn,
rejection and contempt, withdrawn and engaged, fresh with initiatives but
taken aback by human perversity. He can be laughed at by a Sarah, blas-
phemed by a Job, abused petulantly by a Jonah, and yet not find it necessary
to bluster or use force majeure. He is domineering and flexible; but above all
he is passionate. Nothing could be further from the truth about Yahweh than
Clement of Alexandria's affirmation that God is impassible, without anger
and without desire."
A Christian theology-perhaps any theology-does not care for these
fragmented glimpses of the divine reality. Nothing must be discrepant, no act
of God may sound wilful, everything must be shown to be purposive. All of
the abrasive aspects of the divine personality must in the end be subsumed
under the rubric 'love'. But the more that note is insisted upon, the more the
reality of such negative encounters with God that the Old Testament wit-
nesses to is set aside. And the more it is insisted that God is ever-loving,

Downloaded from tjx.sagepub.com at LAURENTIAN UNIV LIBRARY on June 5, 2016

328 DavidClines
ever-patient, ever 'positive' in his relationships with men, the more religion
becomes a cradle or a cocoon, and the less true it is to the reality of human
experienceof God.
By all means let it be affirmed that 'judgments are his strange work, but
mercy is his darling attribute', 10 but let it be affirmed that both alike are his
work. The Old Testament does not present us with a God whose personality
is essentially simple, and whose every action may be readily integrated with
the basic tenor of his personality, but with one whose judgements are
unsearchable and his ways ultimately inscrutable.

CHRISTOMONISM
One result of the absence of Yahweh from Christian consciousness has been
the tendency to focus on the person of Christ as the exclusive manifestation
of deity. Jesus has become, both in many circles of Christian piety, and in
some academic theology, virtually the whole horizon of the divine.
G.E.Wright devoted a chapter of his book The Old Testament and Theo-
logy" to this interesting deviation from Biblical and confessional theology.
Taking as his first set of examples the chorales and arias of Bach's St
Matthew Passion, Wright commented: 'Jesus is here the sole and sufficient
object of piety and devotion. Other dimensions of divine reality play no part.
Jesus is divine reality-and the theology can be called a devotional unitarian-
ism'."
A second sphere where the same Christomonistic piety can be observed is
that of a certain type of pietistic and devotional hymnology of the last
hundred years, still the staple diet of very much 'informal' religion. In hymns
like 'Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine', and 'What a friend we have in Jesus',
or in 'choruses' like 'Jesus loves me, this I know', we find in practice what
would be hotly denied in theory, a unitarianism of the second person of the
Trinity.
For a third illustration we may take an academic example, that of the
later Barth. Here the principle of Christocentricity becomes so developed as
to dominate the theologian's whole perspective. So, 'Everything which comes
from God takes place "in Jesus Christ", i.e. in the establishment of the
Covenant which, in the union of his Son with Jesus of Nazareth, God has
instituted and maintains and directs' .13 For Barth, the doctrine of man is
really an aspect of Christology.
It can be embarrassing to protest against excessive Christocentricity,.
because Christian piety naturally demands ascription of the highest possible
significance to Jesus. And although traditional confessional theology has had
no hesitation in recognizing that Christ is not the totality of what is meant by
God, what has tended to happen in practice is that trinitarian theology has
given a central place to the person and work of Christ. The roles of Father
and Spirit, whether in theology or in liturgy, have regularly been
subordinated to that of the Son.

Downloaded from tjx.sagepub.com at LAURENTIAN UNIV LIBRARY on June 5, 2016

 Yahweh andtheGod of Christian Theology 329
What 'Yahwistic' theology offers, by way of contrast, is a belief in God
that is non-trinitarian, or at least pre-trinitarian. May the unity of God
(frequently affirmed by Old Testament and New Testament alike) be a
matter not only of the oneness of God as contrasted with polytheism, but also
of his oneness as contrasted with his 'three-ness'? Even in Christian theology,
God, as well as being Father, Son, and Spirit, ought also to be recognized as
Yahweh, neither Father, Son, nor Spirit.

THE REAL VERSUS THE AVAILABLE GOD

Throughout this discussion, the question that has been lurking in the back-
ground is whether the Old Testament's picture of Yahweh is an authentic
picture of the true God or whether it needs correction from some other
source.
But is it not asking too much to demand a picture of the 'true God'? For,
we may argue, we do not have access to the 'true God', to God as he is in
himself, but only to some mental construct of him, whether that construct be
identified with what God has 'revealed' of himself, or whether it is an
amalgam of reason, experience, and tradition. The distinction of Gordon
D.Kaufman between the 'real' and the 'available' God is of value here. He
uses the analogy of an historical personage, of whom what was 'real' is by no
means what is 'available'. 'The real referent for "God'", Kaufman writes, 'is
never accessible to us ... It is the "available God" whom we have in mind
when we worship or pray.' 14 The concept of the 'real' God only serves to
relativizeour claims to theological knowledge.
Then what is the relation between the 'real' God and the 'available' God?
Tillich's aphorism may point the way to an answer: 'God is a symbol for
God'. The symbol, unlike the mere sign, 'participates in the reality of that for
which it stands', so that the available God, of whom we may speak, is
symbolic for the real God. Tillich himself stressed that 'Anthropomorphic
symbols are adequate for speaking of God religiously ... Nothing is more
inadequate and disgusting than the attempt to translate the concrete symbols
of the Bibleinto lessconcrete and less powerful symbols.' 15
In a word, if Yahweh is not himself the 'real' God, the God beyond God,
the ineffable God, the God as unknown or unknowable, or God insofar as he
is unknown or unknowable, he is the nearest we can ever get to that God. He
is, if one prefers to put it this way, what God has chosen to reveal of himself.
It is the anthropomorphicYahweh who has to be God for us.

David Clines is Readerin the Department of Biblical Studies at the Univer-

sity of Sheffield.

Downloaded from tjx.sagepub.com at LAURENTIAN UNIV LIBRARY on June 5, 2016

330 Valerie Hamer
Notes
1. G. F.Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era(1927), i, p. 423.
2. B.W.Anderson, Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible(1962), ii, p. 411.
3. Philo, QuodDeusimmutabilis sit, XI.53; XIV.63; V.22 (Loeb edition,iii, pp. 37,43,21).
4. Possibly a maligned rigorist sect; cf. H. H. Kuitert, Gott in Menschengestalt (1967), pp.
16 f.
5. F.L.Cross (ed.), The OxfordDictionary of the Christian Church (1957), p. 61.
6. 'One-sided opposition to anthropomorphism is always a sign of rationalism and religious
decadence' (G. van der Leeuw, Reallexikon Iiit Antike und Christentum, i (1950), col. 448).
'Wherever the naivete of the Old Testament [in which are included its anthropomorphisms] is
lacking, the exposition of the New Testament always runs into the danger of evaporating into
"spirit", "light", and "love"-the supreme expressions of a universality which is tenderly
cherished by natural theology as the most elegant form of night from the reality of God'
(Kornelis H. Miskotte, When the GodsareSilent (1967), pp. 177 f.).
7. D.M.Mackinnon, 'The Inexpressibility of God', Theology79 (1976), p. 202.
8. Art. cit; p. 203.
9. Cf. G.L. Prestige, Godin Patristic Thought(1936), p. 7.
10. Archbishop Robt. Leighton, cited from A.R. Vidler, Christ's Strange Work (rev. edn.,
1963), p. 4.
11. G.E. Wright, The Old Testament and Theology (1969).
12. Op. cit., p. 20.
13. K.Barth, Church Dogmatics 11/2, p. 8.
14. G. D.Kaufman, God the Problem (1972), pp. 85 f.
15. P.Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (1951), pp. 268 f.

'A Hair's Breadth' 1

v ALERIE HAMER

In a recent article in Theology.' Dan Cohn-Sherbok gave his reaction to the

view of Rev C. Schoneveld that dialogue is impossible between Jews and
Christians because of their conflicting theological presuppositions. Rabbi
Cohn-Sherbok examines the history of Jewish-Christian debate, noting
especially the complete unacceptability to Jews of the Christian doctrine of
the incarnation. He writes, 'Historically then, it can be seen that the central
obstacle to real Jewish-Christian dialogue has been the clash between
religious claims.' He therefore finds encouragement in the recent upsurge of
discussion within Christianity itself concerning the validity of its doctrine of
the incarnation: 'These liberal interpretations of the doctrine of the
Incarnation clearly remove the traditional impediment to authentic Jewish-
Christian dialogue.' Rabbi Cohn-Sherbok believes there is now 'a real
possibility of dialogue' since Jews and Christians no longer start from 'two
contradictory and mutually exclusive positions'.
Surely Rabbi Cohn-Sherbok is here falling into the same snare vis-a-vis
Christians as has for centuries entrapped Christians in their attitudes

Downloaded from tjx.sagepub.com at LAURENTIAN UNIV LIBRARY on June 5, 2016