Who is the God revealed in nature and conscience and more fully through the people of the Old Covenant and supremely in Jesus Christ, the Mediator of the New Covenant? Who is the God of whom the Bible speaks?
The teaching about God or the gods is central to and significant for any religion. Religions do not rise to heights above their conception of deity. Christian theology has no more basic task than the explication of the being of God.
The doctrine of God, according to Christian theologians, usually consists of at least two aspects:
The attributes, qualities, or perfections of God
The inner or Trinitarian relationships within the being of God
But before we enter into a discussion of divine qualities or attributes, we must deal with some prior considerations. The first of these is the existence of God.
I. THE EXISTENCE OF GOD#
A. ATHEISM AND THE BIBLE#
The biblical report of the denial of the existence of God (Ps. 14:1a; 53:1a) seems to reflect a practical atheism, that is, living as if God did not exist, rather than a more reflective or defensive atheism.
According to the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, belief in the existence of God is essential to a right relationship with God, because anyone who “comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him” (11:6).
B. MODERN ATHEISM#
The spotted history of atheism, especially in Western culture, included its intensity in ancient Greece, in modern revolutionary France, in nineteenth-century Germany and Britain, and in twentieth-century Soviet Union and China.
Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72) set forth an “anthropological” form of atheism. The idea of God was merely the prqjected wish of human beings. Therefore, what is claimed about God (theology) is only the extension of what is known about humans (anthropology).
Karl Marx expounded a “sociopolitical” form of atheism, as our earlier inquiry into dialectical materialism showed. From a materialistic base he saw in the history of class conflicts religion as a human fabrication and as “opiate” serving the “vested interest” of those in power.
Sigmund Freud represented “psychoanalytic atheism.” Belief in God is illusory or wishful thinking that marks the infantile stage of human development.
Jean-Paul Sartre was an atheistic existentialist. For him human beings become through free decision-making. Life is absurd and meaningless except as humans create their own values. For God to exist, according to Sartre, would mean for human freedom to be curtailed, and this cannot be.
Madalyn Murray O’Hair (1919-95), who was plaintiff in a famous U. S. Supreme Court decision on prayer and Bible reading in public schools 10 and who headed American Atheists, Inc., was a leading figure in political atheism.
Atheistic authors at the end of the Soviet era extended the earlier arguments for atheism and added such objections to belief in God as “the extent and intensity of human suffering” and “passivity” toward “injustice” and “opposition to social change.”
Christopher Hitchens (1949), British author /journalist now residing in the United States, indicts religions for misrepresenting the origins of man and the cosmos, combining “the maximum of servility and the maximum of solipsism,” fostering dangerous sexual repression, building on wish-thinking, and holding to such absurdities as blood sacrifice, atonement, and eternal reward and/ or punishment. Indeed “religion poisons everything.” It “comes from the period of pre-human history,” is man-made, produces no better ethics, and is a threat to public health. The historicity and morality of the Old Testament and the historicity and consistency of the New Testament are denied, and the Koran is found to have plagiarized from Judaism and Christianity. Miracles are delusions that do not vindicate religion’s truth claims. All attempts to reconcile science and religion have failed, including Stephen Jay Gould’s (1941-2002) “non-overlapping magisteria,” and intelligent design is “puerile tautology.
C. CHRISTIANITY’S RESPONSE TO ATHEISM#
The following seven considerations are typical responses by Christians to the claims of atheists and are designed to show the viability of belief in the existence of God.
Many human beings in today’s world actually do believe in God. Hence there are limits to the atheistic assertions about the experience of the absence of God.
Human beings, when they have rejected or failed to exercise faith in a personal God, tend to absolutize or make idolatrous something(s) or someone else. Whence comes this proclivity to worship?
Christian martyrs and other believers in God have suffered for and given witness to their faith in God, especially through his Son,Jesus Christ, often when renunciation would have prevented their deaths or alleviated their sufferings. The twentieth century was not only the time of the awesome Holocaust but also the century in which, it is reported, more Christians were put to death for their faith than in any preceding century of the Christian era. In the twenty-first century among the many Christians who continue to be put to death for their faith are those whom Muslim terrorists kill for being non-Muslims. Is such martyrdom to be explained as due to an illusion or the projection of human wishes?
Christian missionaries have given and do give their entire adult lives to the sharing of their faith in God as revealed in Jesus Christ with other human beings, usually crossing the barriers of language and culture.
Christians have been for centuries and are presently engaged in various ministries designed to meet human need and alleviate human suffering through hospitals, children’s homes, homes for unwed mothers, homes for the aged, and agencies for famine and disaster relief.
Christians have been and are at work to help effect societal reforms. Examples include prison reform, the abolition of slavery, the abolition of the Hindu practice of suttee, child labor laws, the turning of tribal languages into written languages, literacy work, Christian schools, and the Christian witness against war.
Christians continue to persuaded by the argument from design, which explains the complexity of the universe and of human life by a Creator/Designer rather than by a non-theistic spontaneous origination.
II. THE NAME AND THE NAMES OF GOD#
The method of the older systematic theologies in the commencement of their discussion of the doctrine of God to treat in some detail the various names of God, especially those found in the Old Testament, most of which were built upon the Hebrew Without disparaging such a study, one should take note of the emphasis which Berkhof and Emil Brunner placed during the twentieth century on the name (singular) of God as a theological topic.
A. THE NAME OF GOD#
Brunner found that the phrases “the name of God” and “the name of the Lord” and their variants were used in nearly 100 passages in the Old Testament and in more than 200 passages in the NewTestament.
“You shall not take the of the LORD your God vain” (Exod. 20:7)
“[I] will proclaim before you my “The LORD”… " (Exod. 33:19)
“How majestic is thy in all the earth” (Ps. 8:1)
“Hallowed be thy name (Matt. 6:9)
“I have come in my Father’s name” (John 5:43)
“I have manifested thy to the men whom thou gavest me out of the world” (John 17:6)
According to Brunner, the name of God “gathers up… certain decisive elements in the reality of revelation”; the name itself stands for the selfhood of God, and the manifestation of God’s name stands for the action of God.
The Swiss theologian identified three of these “decisive elements”:
The name of God means the possibility of divine revelation.
The name of God manifests the nature of God as Person. The naming of God suggests that God is a “Thou” and not an “it.” The God who manifests his name is described in the biblical books by means of anthropomorphisms, that is, ways of speaking about God after the form of human beings.
The naming of God is designed to lead human beings into communion or fellowship with God. To communicate one’s name is to disclose oneself; for God to manifest his name is for him to call on human beings to seek him and to enter into fellowship with him.
To Brunner’s three “decisive elements” a fourth may be added:
- The name of God intensifies the seriousness of blasphemy and cursing. In the Septuagint blasphemy “always refers finally to God.” “In the New Testament the concept of blasphemy is controlled throughout by the thought of violation of the power and majesty of God.”
B. THE NAMES OF GOD#
Along with an awareness of the theological significance of the name of God in the Bible some knowledge of the specific biblical names for God is needed.
1. The Old Testament
The two most frequently used names for God in the Old Testament are the general Semitic name for God, ‘El, and the special or covenant name, Yahweh.
a. ‘El amd Its Variants
‘El meant the strong or powerful God. It “belonged to the entire Semitic world, being found in Babylonian, Phoenician, Aramaic, and Arabic writings, no less than in Hebrew”
The name ‘El-Shaddai, or God Almighty, is used in Gen. 17:1; 28:3; 35:11; 43:14; 48:3; 39:25; and Exod. 6:3.
The name ‘El-Elyon is found in the Melchizedek passage (Gen. 14:18-20, 22).
The term ‘El-Hai or the living God is used in Deut. 5:26; Josh. 3:10; 1 Sam. 17:26, 36; 2 Kings 19:4, 16 (par. Isa. 37:4, 17); Hos. 1:10b; Jer. 10:10 and 23:36; Ps. 42:2 and 84:2.
The plural ‘Elohim has been said to be “the plural of majesty or eminence”, or “more accurately the plural of fullness ogr greatness”
b. Yahweh
The etymology of this word is somewhat uncertain, but it seems to be a form of the Hebrew verb “to be” (hayah). Old Testament theologians and other theologians differ somewhat in their definitions of the basic meaning of “Yahweh”.
For Andrew Bruce Davidson (1831-1902), the term had redemptive rather than ontological significance. “It does not describe God on the side of His nature, but on that of His saving operations, His living activity among His people, and His influence upon them.”
For Carl F. H. Henry “it is not the idea of continuous existenc~xistence self-complete, but of God’s comingto man, which is here conspicuous. "
According to Emil Brunner, the term, especially in Exod. 3:14, connotes God as “the Mysterious One … the Incomparable.”
Edmund Jacob (1909-) found the key idea in the name Yahweh to be God’s presence with his people.
Walther Eichrodt declared that “the most natural interpretation remains that which equates the Tetragrammaton with ‘He is’, ‘He exists’, ‘He is present’”.
Certain translations of the Bible into English have employed the word “Jehovah” instead of rendering Yahweh as “the LORD.” Moreover, the name Jehovah has come to be used in various English-language hymns. What is the relation of Jehovah to Yahweh?
After the Babylonian Captivity the Jews ceased to pronounce Yahweh orally, presumably out of their great reverence for that name, when they read aloud the Hebrew Bible, but instead they used the circumlocution Adonai or the Lord. About AD. 1520 Christians, following the lead of the Vatican, began to join the consonants from Yahweh with the vowels from Adonai to form the hybrid word “Jehovah”.
2. The New Testament
The name “God” prevails in the New Testament without any distinction comparable to the usage of ‘El and Yahweh in the Old Testament. Yet in the New Testament, the great analogical names for God, which were first used in the Old Testament, come to prominence.
Among the analogical names are Father, Shephere, Redeemer or Savior, Judge, Kingd, and Lord. The term Creator is less properly to be reckoned as analogous since the Hebrew word translated “to create” (bara) means “to bring into existence that which has not existed”.
3. Philosophical Usage
There is a marked contrast between the analogical terms for God used in the Bible, which serve to magnify the personal nature of the God of the Bible, and the more impersonal terms for deity used in the Western philosophical tradition.
The great philosophic writings are studded with names for God - Socrates’ Daimon, Plato’s Idea of the Good, Aristotle’s Prime Mover, Plotinus’ One, Spinoza’s Causa Sui, Hegel’s Absolute, and Spencer’s Unknowable.
Sometimes theologians have joined with philosophers in opting for impersonal language for God. Eunomius of Cyzicus, a fourth-century Arian, contended that the only name for God should be Ungenerated (that is, without origin). The tension between the more personal and the more impersonal names for God continues even to the present.
Thought that has been fed on philosophical abstractions therefore finds the concept of the Name of God, and the revelation of the Name, to be an anthropomorphic degradation, making God finite, which cannot be permitted.