If What is His Name? is not a particularly easy book to read, it is especially difficult to review. Above all, it is hard to be scrupulously fair to a book which contains a great many good and useful things but which is marred, in the final analysis, by a preponderance of unacceptable conclusions. The critic’s task is not made any easier, either, by the author’s plea for “mercy rather than justice . . from his readers” (p. 19), and the reviewer can only hope that no gross injustice is done as he presents his impressions of this book and explains his mixed reactions to it.
Attempt at fairness
The reviewer can perhaps best give substance to his attempt at fairness by speaking, first, of some of the many valuable aspects of the book. As the author himself explains (p. 5), his conclusion, after all the extensive background work he has undertaken (and which he summarises as simply as he can in the book), is that
“the Names of God are not fundamentally mysterious, and that it does not require an elaborate study of Hebrew and Greek to get at their real significance to ourselves”.
The subject, in other words, is “not as formidable” as many have feared (p. 7), and Brother Norris has certainly done his best to ‘demystify’ a topic which has unfortunately tended to remain the preserve of far too few. The author also pleads on several occasions, commendably, for a non-partisan approach to this important subject, on which differences of view have sometimes led to unseemly exchanges. He asks (p. 29) for “healthy discussion” and for that “liberty to differ” which is owed charitably to all men; and he is surely right to maintain that “heavy dogmatism, or the exploitation of difference for partisan purposes, is out of place, even irreverent, in so recondite and yet exalted a subject” (p. 75). It is gratifying therefore that, notwithstanding a number of well-deserved strictures for any who would turn the study of the names of God from holy ground into battleground, Brother Norris is able to preserve an appropriate tone of reverence throughout his book.
Noteworthy, too, is the sense of fairness with which the author discusses the views of others.
He claims early on that he has sought to avoid any preconceived ideas, or “pre-emptive conclusions” (p. 19), in the analysis of his mass of Scriptural data. And though there are occasions (discussed later in this review) when the reviewer thinks that Brother Norris has not entirely succeeded in doing this, or has unfortunately failed to represent adequately a viewpoint which he does not share, it is important to acknowledge that he makes the attempt, and that he often shows himself willing to reproduce or summarise what others have said and is content to let the reader decide.
Thus the comments of “a kindly critic” are allowed to put the case for a more familiar understanding of the meaning of the name Shaddai as fruitful” (pp. 40-1); and four whole pages are given over to the published views of scholars who largely support the pronunciation Yahweh, which the author rejects in favour of Jehovah (pp. 163-6). Brother Norris’s opponents cannot, on the whole, complain that they do not receive a fair hearing, even if they might not like the final outcome of the analysis of their arguments.
Original and helpful research
The book also undoubtedly contains much original and helpful research; and even those who, in the end, reject the author’s main conclusions would do well to recognise and use what may still be of value in their own Bible study. There is, for example, an excellent in-depth study of the names of God in Job (pp. 29-35), which throws much light on the dating and structure of that intriguing book.
Brother Norris’s analysis suggests that the Prologue to Job (Chapters 1-2) and the Epilogue (Chapters 3842) “could easily have been written, say, by Moses” (p. 31), but that the Dialogue (Chapters 3-37) “is out of another world”, belonging to a Gentile context ( perhaps Edom) and contempor ary with, or even predating, patriarchal times. The section, however, illustrates both the strength and the weakness of the author’s largely historicostatistical approach to the study of the use of names in Scripture. The tables setting out the frequency and relative distribution of the names of God in Job highlight some remarkable peculiarities, from which a number of useful, but tentative, conclusions can be drawn; yet such statistics can be pressed, as here, too hard into service; they are, after all, only one element in the search for meaning, and they do not, on their own, establish what any particular term meant, or means. (This reservation will be developed more fully in due course, since the reviewer regards this point as a basic, and recurrent, flaw in the author’s chain of argument about the historical development of the principal names of God.)
There is a good deal of quotable comment by Brother Norris on the use and meaning of Yahweh Sabaoth(” the LORD of hosts”). All should agree with, and appreciate, the following paragraph:
“There is no need to define the ‘hosts’ over which God is Lord. To define is to limit, and there is no limit. All are His, and the term fittingly depicts His omnipotence. This is easy on the mind, but none the worse for that. All: heavenly bodies, heavenly ministers of His pleasure, conquering armies, coming multitude of saints which no man can number, from all nations (Revelation 7.9)—and all else imaginable, make up His myriads Whose voice is the voice of a multitude” (p. 39).
His comments, too, on Elyon (“Most High”, pp. 62-5) are excellent, and the section contains some of the best expository writing in the book. The ‘revival’ of the name in its Greek form (hupsistos), for use in the New Testament in connection with the Lord Jesus (Lk. 1:32), is a particularly important point to note because of the term’s early association with the priesthood of Melchizedek.
In a fairly long section entitled “The Father” (pp. 85-91) the author seeks to establish that the name Yahweh ( or Jehovah, as he prefers it) has been replaced under the New Covenant by the simple term Father. Brother Norris certainly writes well about the ‘Fatherhood’ of God in these pages; and there can be no doubt, as the Lord Jesus advised his disciples (Mt. 6:9), and as the Apostle Paul explained both to the Romans and the Galatians (Rom. 8:15 and Gal. 4:6), that “Father”—Pater, or Abba— is one of the ways in which we should address our God in prayer. And yet, as the author finds himself bound to admit (p. 86),
“God as a Father to Israel in some sense is certainly to be found in the Old Testament”;
so the name and the concept it embodies are not entirely a New Testament phenomenon, having already ‘co-existed’ with so many other Divine titles for many centuries before the First Advent of Christ.
Tables 40-43 (pp. 134-6) clearly show that the Fatherhood of God receives greater emphasis after the birth of His only-begotten Son; but this is to be expected and cannot be taken as proof that the older titles of God should no longer be used. Instead, the practical demonstration of God as Father, in His close relationship with His well-beloved firstborn, should be taken as an enrichment of our understanding of the Divine attributes rather than as an eclipsing of those for which our God has already rightly been revered for so long. In the ‘Jehovah (Yahweh) or Father debate’ the choice ought not to be simply an either/or.
As far as statistical data relating to the names of God in Scripture are concerned, there can be no doubt, either, that Brother Norris has put us greatly in his debt. His book contains no less than thirty-six pages of tables and explanatory notes, together with a further thirteen tables, including a useful photoreproduction of a complete register of the Divine names from Wigram’ s A Hebraist’s vade mecum (long since out of print), and two tables on the titles of the Lord Jesus in the New Testament.
These two latter items, which Brother Norris uses to fill out the final three pages of the book, are especially valuable for the way in which they chart the Saviour’s progress from mortality to victory and on to life eternal. It is plain that behind every table there is an enormous amount of hard slog on the part of the author; and although he is quick to pay “a grateful tribute” to the various compilers of concordances “who slaved to make available the information” on which his book is based (p. 6), he is surely putting it mildly when he describes the sifting-through and classification of over 10,000 words as “no light task” (p. 5). His book is clearly based on a labour from which many less dedicated Bible students would have shrunk at an early stage.
Questionable assumptions
Yet dedication is not the only prerequisite for success in Bible study, any more than in other worthwhile pursuits, and the author’s unquestioned commitment to his task does not always prevent him, in the reviewer’s opinion at least, from drawing conclusions which the Biblical material does not warrant.
To amass such a large quantity of data is an important first step; but the ground rules for the interpretation of the data still have to be laid, and it is here, sadly, that the reviewer has to find fault As early as page 6, for example, we are told (without any justification at that stage) that “the great truths of Scripture are to be discovered from Bible usage, rather than from linguistic analysis”, and that, as far as the Divine names are concerned, they “are not primary sources of truth”. Yet such bold and sweeping statements, though they may be right in some senses at least, require careful qualification and contain too Many implicit assumptions for them to be accepted as they stand without further question. In the first place, Brother Norris assumes throughout that Divine names—or indeed any other names in Scripture—are little more than labels, or simple devices for making distinctions between one person and another (this view is made explicit on p. 39).
Yet this is clearly not always the case, as shown by the very many examples in Scripture where names are chosen and used for a deliberate didactic purpose related directly to their etymology: the naming of Eve by Adam; the renaming of Jacob by God, and of Joseph by Pharaoh; the naming of Moses by Pharaoh’s daughter; and the memorialising of so many of the events of the wilderness journey in the names given to various places—all these, and many more, from earliest Biblical times onwards, show quite explicitly that names often did much more than merely refer or identify, and that they frequently served, quite contrary to Brother Norris’ assertion (p. 13), to convey an “actual verbal meaning”, based upon a clearly comprehensible use of language.
A further assumption, perhaps even more questionable, is that God, in respect of the names and titles He chooses for Himself, or permits men to choose for Him, is somehow limited by the weakness of human understanding or by the ‘normal’ processes of linguistic decay. Twentieth-century Englishmen may, as Brother Norris points out (p. 12), use the word ‘God’ without any awareness that it actually means ‘good’; but that does not make it’ right’ that they should do so, and it is certainly far from proving that Yahweh Elohim has no deeper meaning than the weakened sense of ‘the God Who exists and possesses all power’.
It is also quite misleading for Brother Norris to speak of the purely human use of names (such as the continuation of the name Alfred through five Norris generations) in the same context as the Divine use of names in Scripture, whether for God Himself or for others. There is a world of difference between a name chosen by men because of its pleasant sound or its fashionability and names selected or sanctioned by God because of their meaning, either as a memorial of particular events or truths or prophetically of future ones. It is only because he chooses to play down rather than highlight this difference that Brother Norris can sustain the view that “when a Jew of yesterday said Elohim’, he was saying what would be ‘God’ in English, and meaning the same thing” (p. 13).
It is undoubtedly true that in the normal course of the development of language, through a familiarity born of overuse, or through a lack of awareness with the passage of time, men do sometimes cease to appreciate the original sense of particular units of meaning; who, for example, in ordinary speech, now thinks of a ‘cupboard’ as a set of planks on which to shelve the cups? In such cases it is true that usage has determined meaning; as the author says, what a man “thinks the word means is what it does mean, to him” (p. 12).
But that is a very far cry from words which God has chosen and which are invested with Divinely-intended meaning. Thus the name Jesus, conveyed by angelic instruction to Joseph, meant, means, and will always mean, Yah is Saviour’, even though perhaps over ninety-nine per cent of those who still use it are ignorant of its true sense. To imply, therefore, as Brother Norris systematically does throughout his book, that the names and titles of God have somehow lost their original sense (or that they never had any except of a very basic kind) is to accept that Divine meaning is determined and limited by the weakness and ignorance of men.
By contrast, the reviewer believes that the words of God—and especially those which he has directed men, by commandment or by revealed example, to use about Himself—are fixed in meaning and absolute, and that they are intended by Him to instruct men about Him as an integral part of His inspired Word. That men generally fail to grasp this fact, and thus deny themselves access to the higher spiritual truths contained within His names and titles, is merely one aspect of the tragedy of a general ignorance of the many different ways in which God has revealed Himself And whatever modem Jews, or Christian scholars, ‘think’ Yahweh or Adonai orElohim mean, though not without interest, will be most unlikely to be wholly in line with those true doctrines of Scripture in which Christadelphians have been so thoroughly tutored.
Against God-manifestation
It is particularly unfortunate, therefore, that a number of the author’s principal conclusions, based as they are on what the reviewer believes to be false premises, run consciously counter to various aspects of the distinctively Christadelphian doctrine of God-manifestation. Thus, for Brother Norris, Elohim is not to be understood as God multitudinously manifested in ‘mighty ones’ (the angels, His Son, and the saints). Instead, he sees Elohim as a name used by the people of God to sum up, in a quasi-plural’ term with singular import, the power claimed for all their false gods by the heathen (referred to by them individually, as Eloahh—the singular form of Elohim). Hence, he claims, Elohim meant ‘God’ as “the Possessor of all might”, and came to be used “as naturally and unselfconsciously as we now use the term God’ ” (p. 22).
Following this early claim, based to a large extent on the increasing frequency of the use of the term from patriarchal to Mosaic times and beyond, Brother Norris subsequently advances various arguments against the traditional Christadelphian understanding of Elohim. On page 50, for example, he states that we should “not normally look upon ‘Elohim’, when used of the true God, in (a) composite light (that is, in any plural sense—R.P.C.) at all. If we speak of ‘Elohim’ as though it were a large company made up of a multitude of persons, each individually an ‘Eloahh’, we go right outside the usage of Scripture”. But there are at least two things wrong with this statement. The first is that what Brother Norris claims as the “nearly mandatory evidence” for it, is based on an analogy from ordinary linguistic usage which simply does not apply.
Whether deliberately or not, Brother Norris falls into the same mistake as most ‘orthodox’ theologians who, when confronted with the Christadelphian understanding of God-manifestation, form the (mistaken) opinion that Christadelphians believe in a multiplicity of ‘Gods’, simply because Elohim is construed as being in some sense plural in meaning (‘mighty ones’). But Christadelphians do not normally think or speak of every component part of the Elohim as an individual Eloahh. Even when speaking of the Lord Jesus as a manifestation of the Father, Brother Thomas is careful to speak of him as “ben Eloahh, Son of Power”, not as the Eloahh Himself, “the Supreme Power” (Phanerosis, 1954 edition, p. 30). And once the doctrine of God-manifestation is correctly grasped no violence is done to the undivided unity of God, Who remains One however many multitudinous manifestations are added to and included among the Elohim. To imply, as the author does, that because “Eloahh’ when used of the true God never appears as a component of ‘Elohim'” (p. 50) this doctrine is somehow discredited, is to misunderstand the doctrine itself, since it goes beyond the everyday language of mathematics. For Jesus to say “1 and my Father are One” may not make sense mathematically to a modern English reader, since one and one make two; but the doctrine of God-manifestation requires that we understand Jesus’ s statement to mean, among other things, that he is, in the appropriate sense, an indivisible part of the Elohim—` God manifest’ —as the angelic theophanies before him were and as the saints will be in the future. Being part of the Elohim, as Brother Thomas says, is an
“intimate relationship, so intimate as to constitute a Unity in plurality, but not a plurality in the absolute and primary Power the source of all” (Phanerosis, p. 31).
It is perhaps only to be expected, however, that Brother Norris, having once rejected (or misunderstood) this doctrine, should seek, as he does at some length (pp. 52-6), to reinterpret in the light of his own assumptions some of the passages in which the use of Elohim is often associated with the doctrine of God-manifestation in the angels (for example, Gen. 1:26; Heb. 2:6-8 quoting Ps. 8:5; Heb. 1:6). It is here that the author is at his most unconvincing; avoiding the full implications of the fact that Elohim in Psalm 8:5 is translated, by the Spirit itself, as angeloi (Greek for angels’) in Hebrews 2; seeking to prove that “God retains His singularity, and the angels remain His helpers” (p. 54) by virtue of the fact that the verb forms associated with Elohim when used of God Himself are not normally plural; and speaking of some of the other passages which also illustrate the doctrine of God-manifestation as” irregular cases” which “have no effect on (Brother Norris’s) conclusions” (p. 57).
The statistical approach
It is here, too, that the reader may begin to feel uneasy about the essentially statistical and historical approach adopted by Brother Norris, almost to the exclusion of other necessary considerations. Too much is read, in places, into the frequency (or rarity) of terms used in Scripture in respect of the names of God. The number of times a particular word occurs in the text of Scripture may to some extent help us to determine how commonly or otherwise it was actually used at that particular time in history ( although there will still be some uncertainty due to inadequate information about the representativeness of the available data samples); but it can never establish the actual meaning of the term. Yet this is something which the author glosses over.
It is, for example, statistically the case that Job uses the name Eloahh more often than all his friends (p. 48); but this does not by any means tell us, as Brother Norris suggests, that Eloahh has a more ‘personal’ meaning than the El which is mostly used by Job’s friends, with their “somewhat bloodless and clinical approach”. The fact is that Job’s speeches, as recorded, are more extensive, and we have no way of knowing whether the sample is statistically representative. And the numbers game’ would in any event show that Zophar’s references to God by the name Eloahh are proportionately similar to Job’s, thus knocking Brother Norris’s case on the head.
Even more seriously, statistics are also called upon by the author to support his view that Yahweh Elohim is not a unitary name” (p. 60), the fact that there are only thirty or so cases where the names occur together in “simple combination” being taken as justification for such a claim. But the argument could be stood on its head, and the comparative rarity of these occurrences could be seen as an indication of the special importance of the name, highlighting its unitary character and drawing attention to its prophetic significance.
The Memorial Name
Yet Brother Norris will have none of this, and does not even accept that Yahweh (Elohim) is the Memorial Name of God at all, rejecting this view by arguing that the “memorial consists in the assurance implicit in the Name, rather than the Name itself” (p. 83). But when this latter statement is analysed, it collapses under its own weight because it is self-contradictory. For if the name conveys an assurance (even implicitly), it must mean something in order to do this; and if the assurance comes from the meaning of the name, then the name itself constitutes that assurance, and is the memorial of it, as a straightforward reading of Exodus 3:15 confirms.
Of even greater concern, perhaps, are the lengths to which the author is prepared to go to deny that Yahweh has the prophetic meaning uniformly ascribed to it by Christadelphian writers since the days of Brother Thomas. According to Brother Norris, the name “has the same import, as ‘The ever-living and active One’ “(p. 77), and he is only prepared to concede that” ‘I WILL BE’, if this rendering is preferred, means ‘I will go on being’, rather than ‘One day in the far future I will be’.
But even overlooking the fact that this latter alternative is not a wholly accurate characterisation of our ‘usual’ understanding of the name, it is hard to understand the distinction which Brother Norris is seeking to draw here.
The standard Christadelphian interpretation of the Memorial Name is clearly expressed by Brother Thomas in Volume 3 of Eureka: “The ‘He who shall be’ promised to Abraham 430 years before the foundation of the world; and prophesied of to Moses in the ‘memorial’ apocalypsed at the bush, is the Eternal (italics mine—R. P. C.), by His power, incorporate and manifest, first in Jesus of Nazareth, and hereafter in his resurrected, accepted, and quickened brethren, ‘glorified together with him’ “.
In this, the first serious challenge to our communal understanding of the Yahweh name, Brother Norris fails signally to convince the reviewer that several generations of Christadelphians have been mistaken. And in the final analysis Brother Norris opts for a notion of ‘eternity’ implicit in the name (p. 77) which seems so close to the usual sense of ‘was, is, and will be’ as to make the reviewer wonder why he takes such pains to deny the prophetic view.
If Yahweh Elohim means that ‘God will continue to be Elohim’ (as he seems prepared to accept), then his modified view of the meaning of Yahweh hardly seems radically different, and the real argument centres more on the meaning of Elohim. And if, as the reviewer believes, Elohim refers to God as revealed in a succession of ‘mighty ones’, then the assurance given in the name Yahweh (Elohim), that God will continue to be the God revealed in such glorious manifestations of physical and moral power as His angels and His Son, leaves the traditional interpretation intact.
Other claims
Brother Norris, however, is not content to leave his views about the names of God at that point; and his book contains a number of other claims which the reviewer finds unacceptable. The most serious of these, perhaps, is the attempt he makes (pp. 92-6) to undermine the straightforward and obvious view that “I am” on the lips of Jesus is a claim on his part to be the bearer of the Divine name, and therefore a manifestation of God in his own person. Brother Norris does not, of course, deny that this latter fact is true; but he insists that we learn it from elsewhere in Scripture rather than from the phrase “I am”.
His explanation of Jesus’s use of ego (“I”) is that it serves to mark him out as ‘the unique one’: “The ‘Ego’ expresses Jesus’s claim to be the only Saviour” (p. 93). In arguing that ego eimi (“I am”) is standard speech, used by many others in the New Testament with no suggestion of any claim to a Divine Title, the author is again judging the words of inspiration by the criteria of ‘normal’ linguistic usage. But the point, surely, is this: that ‘ordinary’ forms of speech (if that is what Jesus’s use of ego eimi appears to be) are sometimes taken over in Scripture and invested with a distinctive overtone for special purposes ( as, for example, the use of the ‘ordinary’ term ekklesia (‘assembly’) for the New Testament ‘church’); and so “I am” on the lips of Jesus can be both ‘normal’ speech and a personal idiom referring back to the Memorial Name. It is different from other uses precisely because of who Jesus is. It is a prime example of what linguisticians themselves call `idiolect —an individual use of language to convey a special meaning. And Brother Arthur Gibson and others have convinced us often enough in the past in the pages of The Testimony for us to be sure that “I am” on the lips of Jesus is a deliberate Old Testament quotation of the name of God, whether Brother Norris will receive it or not.
Other uncertainties also surround the author’s dubious link between the use and meaning of Shaddai and Sabaoth (pp. 36-8), and his reasons for suggesting that Yahweh is not the form in which the name of God should be used today (pp. 25-6). In particular, his statement that “the New Testament as we have it contains no example of the Name” (p. 25) is most unsatisfactory, since it completely ignores the way in which Yahweh is embodied in the name Jesus, and the Divine purpose in the name is continued in the manifestation of God in His well-beloved Son.
The reviewer emerges from all this with the distinct impression that What is His Name? is not so much “a Biblical study” as an attempt, by means of a statistical and historical interpretation of Biblical data, to disprove a number of long and deeply held convictions about the names of God shared by so many Christadelphians over the years. And as far as the reviewer is concerned, in spite of the many useful things the book undoubtedly contains, it does nothing to disturb or replace the distinctive and spiritually satisfying teachings found in Eureka, Phanerosis, and Theophany, and since endorsed by so much other writing and study by so many of the Truth’s ablest thinkers and writers.
Review of “The Early Earth” by John Whitcomb (1972)