The Eternal Identity of the Second Person of the Trinity and the Covenant of Grace
R. KENDALL SOULEN
“It is only when one knows the unutterability of the name of God that one can utter the name of Jesus Christ.”
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer
1. JUST SUPPOSE
Suppose that instead of there being just one most appropriate way of naming the persons of the Trinity, there were actually three. Each way of naming the Trinity told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but each did so with a vocabulary that tended to place the whole mystery of the Trinity and of salvation in the light of one person in particular.
Suppose furthermore that one of these three ways of naming — say, the one with a special affinity for the first person — became largely invisible to Christians on account of the church’s ancient alienation from the Jewish people. What, in that case, might be the consequences for the doctrine of the Trinity?
One answer might be, “Not much.” After all, the church would still have two other ways of naming the persons of the Trinity, and these together would more than ensure the basic soundness of Christian worship and reflection.
On the other hand, perhaps the consequences would be more worrisome after all, at least in certain respects. Perhaps problems would arise from time to time that would be hard to solve in terms of the familiar patterns of naming alone. The church’s relationship to the Jewish people might be an example. But perhaps the absence of the neglected pattern of naming the persons of the Trinity would prove consequential in other areas of faith and practice too.
As you no doubt guess, the scenario I just sketched is one that I myself think is true. I think Holy Writ gifts the church with three equally basic ways of naming the Trinity, that Christians have often been color-blind to one of these, and that this has created problems for Christian theology that can be resolved by becoming more sensitive to the neglected pattern.
I wish I had time to persuade you of all that — but I don’t.1 What I can do, however, is suggest the relevance of my thesis for one hotly debated issue in contemporary theology. The controversy I have in mind concerns the relationship between Trinity and election: Is the Trinity “complete in itself from all eternity and apart from God’s determination to become incarnate in Jesus Christ, or is it constituted by the eternal decision of election?”2 The question arises in two contexts. First, what was Karl Barth’s view of the matter, and second, what should be a Christian’s view of the matter, regardless of what Barth thought?
As is well known, formidable theologians have lined up on both sides of these questions, and the battle has been intense. My own view of the matter is quickly stated. I believe that the Trinity is eternally complete in itself apart from God’s eternal election of grace in Jesus Christ. I believe that this is so, both in the writing and intention of Karl Barth and according to the merits of the case.
At the same time, I think that proponents of the opposite view, such as Bruce McCormack, are on to something crucially important in this debate. In his doctrine of election, Karl Barth was trying to wring the ambiguity out of how Christians think about the eternal Trinity as the subject of election. As I see it, theologians such as McCormack are champions of this worthy Barthian impulse. The thing is, there is another and better way of achieving what Barth was after. Rather than make the Trinity dependent on the covenant of grace, as McCormack proposes, we should instead reclaim a neglected scriptural pattern of naming the persons of the Trinity, a pattern whose special charism lies in expressing the incomparable uniqueness of the triune God — in time and in eternity.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me back up and introduce our three patterns of naming the persons of the Trinity, before focusing more closely on the neglected pattern.
2. THREE PATTERNS OF NAMING THE PERSONS OF THE TRINITY
Sacred Scripture, I suggest, gives us three equally important ways of naming the persons of the Holy Trinity. Each is rooted in the Old Testament, comes to full flower in the New, and is evident in Jesus Christ’s own characteristic ways of speaking about himself, the Spirit, and the God to whom he prays.
One way Jesus speaks about these three is by means of kinship terms. He address the one to whom he prays as “Father,” an address that entails a corresponding way of identifying Jesus himself, as “Son.” The terms also suggest a related way of thinking about the Spirit, as the Spirit of this particular kinship relation, of the Father and the Son.
Another way Jesus typically speaks of God, himself, and the Spirit is by means of a variety of common nouns drawn from everyday life and thought. We see this pattern of speech exemplified by Jesus’ parables of the kingdom of God and by the wisdom hymns of the epistles and the Gospel of John, where Jesus (to speak only of him) is called “Word,” “Image,” “Reflection,” “Imprint,” and so on. Saints and theologians have further developed this pattern of naming the Trinity by a countless host of ternaries, such “God, Word, and Wisdom” (Irenaeus); “Sun, Ray, Apex” (Tertullian); “Lover, Beloved, Love,” and “Unity, Equality, Connection” (Augustine); “Rose, Blossom, Fragrance” (John of Damascus); and so on.
The third and final way Jesus speaks about God is less familiar than the previous two, in large part because of this curiosity: it revolves around a word that Jesus never says. That word, of course, is the Tetragrammaton. The Tetragrammaton is neither a kinship term like “Father,” nor a common noun like “God” or “King.” It is a personal proper name, constituted by the four Hebrew letters yod, heh, vav, and heh (הוהי; hence Tetragrammaton). From remotest antiquity to the present day, this name is the most sacred term for God known to Jews, by a wide stretch. This is not because the name has a particularly remarkable meaning, or indeed any certain meaning at all. The famous “I am” of Exod 3:14 is an elucidating pun on the Tetragrammaton, not the Tetragrammaton itself. Rather, the Tetragrammaton’s significance resides in the simple fact that it refers exclusively to the God of biblical attestation. Unlike appellative names and titles such as God, King, Father, which apply to many besides the one true God, the Tetragrammaton applies to God alone. It is the only personal proper name of the biblically attested God, and it refers to none but him.
Significantly, the Bible knows of no point in time or beyond it when “the LORD” (a common surrogate for the name) became the bearer of the personal proper name yod heh vav heh. The LORD becomes “the God of Israel” through a gracious act of election. He becomes the Creator by deciding to create. But the Bible never suggests that the LORD ever becomes the LORD. Of course, this is not evident from the word Lord itself, which much rather implies a contingent relationship of superior to inferior into which God enters at some point in time. But that is just the point: LORD is a surrogate for the divine name, not the name itself. Here the elucidating pun of Exod 3:14 has its relevance: “I am who I am.” The LORD simply is the bearer of this name. “I am the LORD; that is my name! I will not yield my glory to another” (Isa 42:8).
In the Old Testament, the divine name appears some six thousand times, vastly more often than all other designations for God put together. In the New Testament, the Tetragrammaton does not appear a single time. Instead, in conformity with the custom of Second Temple Judaism, the name is evoked indirectly, by means of a variety of surrogates, circumlocutions, and silent allusions. One of these is “Lord” (κύριος), but there are many others, including “Name,” “the Power,” “the Blessed,” “Majesty on High,” “Holiness,” “I am,” “He who is, who was, and who is coming,” “Alpha and Omega,” the divine passive, and so on.3 By one estimate, the New Testament contains some two thousand instances of such speech. Allowing for differences of length, this means the density of allusion to the Tetragrammaton is about the same in the New Testament as in the Old, if not greater still.
Even by the exacting standards of Second Temple Judaism, Jesus of Nazareth appears to have been exceptionally zealous on behalf of the divine name. He longs for the eschatological vindication of its holiness, as indicated by the first petition of the Lord’s prayer: “Hallowed be your name.” Jesus’ own speech is especially dense with silent allusion to the divine name, especially in the form known to biblical scholars as the divine passive. Jesus, we surmise, refrains from pronouncing the divine name, not for custom’s sake alone, and still less out of fear, but as a humble but eloquent token of his reverence for the name and its bearer.
Given Jesus’ reverence for the divine name and its importance to Second Temple Judaism generally, it is not surprising that the writers of the New Testament expressed their trinitarian convictions by evoking the unspoken and unwritten Tetragrammaton. One way they do this is by citing Old Testament verses that contain the name YHWH. They apply these verses to God (e.g., Matt 4:10; cf. Deut 6:13), to the Spirit (e.g., Luke 4:18; cf. Isa 61:1), and — astonishingly — to Jesus Christ himself, as though he himself were bearer of the divine name YHWH (e.g., Rom 10:13; cf. Joel 2:32.) The Synoptic Gospels begin with a programmatic: “Prepare the way for the Lord” (Matt 3:3 par.). Note that God sends John to prepare the way of the Lord, not Jesus. God sends Jesus to be, in some extraordinary sense, the saving advent of the Lord himself.
But how can this be? How can Jesus be sent by the Lord (cf. Luke 4:18), be anointed by the Spirit of the Lord, and yet himself be the Lord of Old Testament attestation? Some New Testament passages make little apparent effort to answer this question, but merely affirm that it is so. Prominent among these is Paul’s creed-like reformulation of the Shema, that “for us there is but one God . . . and . . . one Lord, Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 8:6). This confession, among the oldest in the New Testament, simply places Jesus inside Israel’s ancient confession of faith alongside the one God.
Other New Testament passages, however, do shed light on how both Jesus and the God to whom he prays can bear the same divine name. Key to these passages is the affirmation God has given his own personal name to Jesus, with the result that God’s saving self-manifestation to creation transpires in and through the recognition that Jesus is Lord. We encounter this astonishing idea in one of the oldest writings in the New Testament: Phil 2:5 – 11.
Have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:
Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own
advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death —
even death on a cross!
Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
Over the centuries, Christians have interpreted Paul’s reference to “the name that is above every name” in different ways. Some have held that it referred to God’s namelessness; others, the word “Lord”; and still others, the name “Jesus.” When one takes into account the passage’s Jewish context, however, a far more likely possibility suggests itself. “The name above every name” refers to the Tetragrammaton, the name that first-century Jews — whether Christian or not — referred to obliquely, by means of phrases such as this one. If this interpretation is correct, then Paul in Philippians 2 uses oblique reference to the Tetragrammaton to identify all three persons of the Trinity. He identifies the first person as the one who gives the divine name, the second person as the one who receives it, and the third person as the one who awakens its acknowledgment, in the second person, to the glory of the first. True, the text does not explicitly mention the Holy Spirit, but its activity is implied by the cosmic acclamation of Jesus as “Lord” (another conventional surrogate for the divine name), a cry that Paul says elsewhere is possible only as a work of the Spirit (1 Cor 12:3).
Impressive though it is, the trinitarian “grammar” of Phil 2:5 – 11 exhibits a worrisome feature, at least when judged from the perspective of the church’s mature doctrine of the Trinity. It seems to suggest that Jesus became the bearer of the divine name after his exaltation from the dead.4 Presumably, God — the first person — always bore the divine name, but even he became its giver at a certain point in time. Taken at face value, this seems to point in the direction of adoptionism rather than Nicene Christianity. At the very least, it certainly does not invite us to conceive of the giving and receiving the divine name as an eternal relation between the first and second persons.
Not so the Gospel of John. Unlike the Christ hymn of Philippians, John knows of a giving and receiving of the divine name that is manifested in time, but that takes place before the foundation of the world.5
John 17 records Jesus’ prayer in the upper room, on the eve of his crucifixion. At the beginning and end of the prayer, Jesus speaks of himself as having revealed the divine name, which he refers to as “your name” (τὸ ὄνομα σου), the name of the One to whom he prays (17:6, 26). In the middle of the prayer, however, Jesus expresses a still more intimate relationship to the divine name. Twice he calls it “your name you gave me” (17:11, 12, italics added). I judge this phrase to be one of the most profoundly illuminating affirmations in the entire New Testament. It depicts the mutual relation of God and Jesus in a way that coincides substantially with the kinship vocabulary of “Father” and “Son” and the wisdom vocabulary of “God” and “Word,” even as it uses a distinctive vocabulary of its own, focused on the giving and receiving of the divine name.
But just what is this name? Might it not be “Father,” or just a synonym for God’s reputation, as has been suggested? Not likely. Jesus’ name is not “Father,” nor is it possible to peel away God’s reputation from God’s canonical name in such a casual manner. We draw closer to John’s majestic vision when we understand “your name you gave me” in light of Jesus’ solemn declaration, “I am” (ἐγὼ εἰμί).
Recall that over the course of the Fourth Gospel repeatedly Jesus declares the words “I am,” and he does so in two different ways. Seven times Jesus says “I am” followed by some predicate of salvation, such as “the bread of life” (6:35), “the light of the world” (8:12), and so on. But seven times Jesus simply declares the words “I am” without any predicate at all. The words just hang there, as odd sounding in Greek as they are in English.
Jesus’ absolute “I am” statements in the Fourth Gospel are as decisive for the New Testament as the theophany at the burning bush is to the Old. By declaring “I am,” Jesus reveals his identity as the one who has been given the divine name and who makes it known (cf. John 17), even as he does so in a way that continues to honor the custom of avoiding the direct use of the Tetragrammaton itself.6
It would be fun to dwell on the “I am” statements in greater detail, but time requires that we limit ourselves to two passages. The first is this:
“Very truly I tell you . . . before Abraham was born, I am!” (John 8:58)
What can this mean except that he who speaks these words receives the divine name before the world began? Like the Father’s begetting of the Son, or God’s speaking of the Word, the giving of the divine name is eternal. Indeed, these are really just different ways of saying the same thing. To say the Father begets the Son is to say God speaks the Word is to say the LORD gives his name to another.
At the same time, each way of speaking has a special charism of its own. In my judgment, the special charism of the vocabulary of the unspoken divine name is to emphasize the uniqueness of the divine life. This uniqueness encompasses mystery and identifiability in equal measure and is ultimately rooted in the first person, the primordial bearer of the divine name that Jesus receives and reveals but neither writes nor speaks. What makes the persons of the Trinity one and equally worthy of worship is the one name they share. What distinguishes them is the different ways they share it, one as its giver, one as its receiver, one as the Spirit of its glorification.
The other passage I want to examine briefly is this.
Jesus, knowing all that was going to happen to him, went out and asked them, “Who is it you want?”
“Jesus of Nazareth,” they replied.
“I am he,” Jesus said. (And Judas the traitor was standing there with them.) When Jesus said, “I am he,” they drew back and fell to the ground.
Again he asked them, “Who is it you want?”
“Jesus of Nazareth,” they said.
Jesus answered, “I told you that I am he. If you are looking for me, then let these men go.” (John 18:4 – 8)
What I find extraordinarily fascinating here is the interplay between “I am” and the name “Jesus” itself, which of course means “YHWH is Salvation.” The soldiers know perfectly well whom they are looking for, this man who has been stirring up trouble, this Jesus of Nazareth. But the soldiers do not really know who Jesus is until he reveals himself by declaring “I am,” a revelation that forces them to the ground. “Jesus” and “I am” refer to the same person, but they are not exactly synonymous, any more than are “Son of God” and “son of Mary.” Jesus of Nazareth, I propose, is “I am,” the receiver of the divine name YHWH, in every possible world. He is Yeshua, “YHWH is Salvation,” in every world into which he is sent to save.
3. RELEVANCE TO TRINITY AND ELECTION
Back to the contemporary debate concerning Trinity and election. Many talented theologians have spilled a lot of ink on the topic, and to suggest at this late date that biblical exegesis might help nudge things forward is to risk being lambasted by all sides. Still, that is basically what I want to do. First the debate itself.
Theologians today are discussing Trinity and election because of Karl Barth. Specifically, they are doing so because of Barth’s decision to subject the inherited doctrine of double predestination to a massive reworking in Church Dogmatics II/2. Karl Barth was motivated to undertake this revision because of a single overriding concern: the inherited doctrine left the identity of the eternal triune God, who was the subject of election, shrouded in obscurity and ambiguity. The doctrine of election could not be good news because the God at its foundation was not manifestly the God of the gospel, the God of Jesus Christ. Of course, this is not to charge the tradition with having a completely naked and undetermined concept of the electing God. It certainly did not. The tradition affirmed with all clarity that the Holy Trinity is the eternal subject of election, and it filled out its concept of the Trinity with a host of biblically attested names, such as Father, Son, Spirit, God, Word, Image, not to mention a bristling army of elucidating concepts such as logos asarkos, ensarkos, incarnandus, and so on. Still, in Barth’s view, the resulting portrait of the Trinity as the subject of election remained dangerously ambiguous and underdetermined.
Dangerously underdetermined from what point of view? On this point Barth is crystal clear: underdetermined from the point of view of the name of Jesus Christ. This point is worth emphasizing. To a truly remarkable degree, Barth conceives and executes his doctrine of election as a sustained reflection on a single biblically attested name. Barth had done this once before in the Church Dogmatics, in his doctrine of the Trinity. In that case, the name around which everything turned was Yahweh-kyrios. This is interesting in itself, of course, and I will have more to say about this curious and fateful quasi-name later. In the doctrine of election, however, Barth makes no mention of Yahweh-kyrios. Instead, he insists, as emphatically as possible, that the doctrine of election is to be unfolded as meditation on the name Jesus Christ. The light of this name, Barth trusts, will banish the obscurity that has clouded the identity of the electing God and will disclose the God of love and freedom revealed in Jesus Christ himself.
Seen against this backdrop, there is a certain inevitability to Barth’s thesis that Jesus Christ is the electing God and the elected man. The thesis is stunning in its simplicity and power. Certainly it accomplishes what Barth wanted to accomplish. It makes the name of Jesus Christ decisive for our reflections on the doctrine of election, and it banishes all obscurity from the eternal identity of the electing God.
And yet, for all that, there is something troubling — almost eerie and disconcerting — about the claim that Jesus Christ is the electing God.7 I at any rate remember feeling that way when I first encountered the thesis as a graduate student. A friend and I chewed over it one sunny afternoon for what seemed like hours. I do not recall that we ended our conversation any more enlightened then when we began.
One of the merits of the vigorous debate conducted by Bruce McCormack, George Hunsinger, Paul Molnar, and others is to have clarified our understanding of the basic issues at stake. Here we can take our starting point from Bruce McCormack’s formulation of Barth’s insight: “The second person of the Trinity has a name, and his name is Jesus Christ.”8 But the thorny question is this: How does the second person of the Trinity become the bearer of this name? Does it belong to him by virtue of the same divine act by which the second person simply is the second person? Or does it belong to him by virtue of a logically and ontologically subsequent divine act, by virtue of which the second person chooses to be the second person for us and for our salvation? Or, to put the matter as simply as possible, might the second person of the Trinity have been the second person without being Jesus Christ? And if so, who would he then have been?
Now here is my contention. Our efforts to give a satisfying answer to these important questions are in some substantial measure hobbled — not crippled, but hobbled — precisely insofar as we have become color-blind to the scriptural pattern of naming the Trinity that orbits the unspoken Tetragrammaton.
Suppose we say, with Paul Molnar and George Hunsinger, that the second person of the Trinity could have been the second person without bearing the name Jesus Christ. This contention has the important and, to my mind, decisive advantage that it preserves the freedom and gratuity of the covenant of grace. Nevertheless, the position has an Achilles’ heel. The difficulty appears when we try to speak in a biblically convincing manner about who the second person is prior to and apart from the name Jesus. It is not that we lack a biblical vocabulary to answer this question. The problem rather is with limitations inherent in the vocabulary itself. We may say that the second person is the eternal Son, Word, Image, and so on, and we may buttress this by speaking of the other persons of the Trinity as Father, Spirit, Love, Gift, and the like. But the difficulty is that kinship terms and common nouns are applicable by nature to endlessly many subjects in heaven and on earth. History teems with fathers, sons, and spirits who have been worshiped and adored. So long, then, as we are content to specify the Trinity’s eternal identity by means of such generic terms alone, we are left with a version of the problem that troubled Karl Barth in the first place. We are left with a picture of the eternal subject of election that is — I will not say false — but rather ambiguous and underdetermined.
But suppose we say, with Bruce McCormack, that it is essential and necessary to the second person to bear the name Jesus, that he bears this name by virtue of the same act by which he is the second person. This contention has the advantage of addressing full throttle the problem of an underdetermined picture of the eternal Trinity. But it is an overcorrection that comes at an exorbitant price. As many have pointed out, it makes the eternal Trinity wholly contingent on the decision to be for us and for our salvation, and so impoverishes our ability to express the freedom and gratuity with which the biblical God creates, redeems, and consummates. This is a remedy that is worse than the disease it is meant to cure.
In passing, I would like to register a further concern I have about McCormack’s position. He supposes, and invites us to suppose, that it offends the nature of the biblical God to try to speak meaningfully about who God is apart from his decision to be the God of Israel. I believe this is exactly wrong. The glory of the God of Israel is that he makes abundantly clear who he is prior to and apart from his gracious decision to be the God of Israel. He is the LORD, yod heh vav heh. He is this already in himself, prior to and independent of his gracious decision to become “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” and “the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Affirming this has nothing to do with buying into metaphysics ancient or modern, essentialist or historicist. It has to do with harkening to the voice of the burning bush. That voice distinguishes with all clarity between who God is in se and who God is pro nobis, between “I am who I am” and “I am has sent me to you.” The staggering thing is — the voice in both cases is the same, the voice of the LORD.9
What then should we want to say? With Paul Molnar and George Hunsinger, we should want to say that it is possible to speak meaningfully about who the second person of the Trinity is prior to and apart from the decision to bear the name Jesus Christ. Yet with Bruce McCormack, we should want to speak about the eternal second person in a way that leans maximally on the unsubstitutable specificity of the personal proper name Jesus Christ. We do both of these things simultaneously when we supplement our talk about the eternal Trinity by drawing more vigorously on the neglected pattern of naming the Trinity to which I previously drew attention, the pattern that orbits the unspoken Tetragrammaton. Before he is Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity is the eternal Son of God, the eternal Word of God, the eternal Image of God, and — the eternal recipient of “the name above every name,” given to him by the Father of lights. Jesus of Nazareth is Ye-shua, “the LORD is Salvation” because he is first of all the LORD.
4. WHY DID BARTH FORGET A NAME HE HAD PREVIOUSLY DISCOVERED?
In the final section of this essay I want to engage in a brief bit of genealogical work. Hitherto I have suggested that in his doctrine of election, Karl Barth paid insufficient attention to a pattern of naming the persons of the Trinity that orbits the unspoken Tetragrammaton, and that this in turn has had a hobbling effect on our contemporary debate about Trinity and election. But there is a puzzle here. Karl Barth was scarcely ignorant of the Tetragrammaton or its importance for Christian theology. As I mentioned earlier, in the Church Dogmatics, Barth goes so far as to single out the name Yahweh-kyrios as the key to the whole doctrine of the Trinity, declaring that it “does not seek to be anything but an explanatory confirmation of this name.”10 But then why does Barth himself neglect this name when he comes to write the doctrine of election only a few years later? Why does Barth himself not invoke it as a way of specifying the eternal identity of the electing God revealed in the name Jesus Christ?
While I think there are many correct answers to this question, I want to draw attention to one in particular: Barth was misled in his exegesis by the influence of an early modern esoteric tradition, the Christian kabbalah. While little noted by interpreters of Barth, the subterranean influence of the Christian kabbalah goes at least some way toward explaining why Barth accorded the Tetragrammaton the role he did in his doctrine of the Trinity, and the role he didn’t in his doctrine of election.11
The kabbalah (Heb. “tradition”) is a form of Jewish mysticism that is centrally concerned with the Divine Name, the Tetragrammaton. Christian Europe took little notice of the kabbalah until the late 1400s, when a circle of Renaissance humanists began to popularize it in a modified Christian form. The Christian kabbalists celebrated the kabbalah both for what they supposed were its ancient roots, and because they believed it gave external evidence for Christianity’s superiority to Judaism.
According to the Christian kabbalists, the Tetragrammaton is indeed a name of surpassing significance. But to understand it rightly, one must interpret it, as Christians do, in light of the distinction between the Old Testament and the New. To wit (and this is their problematic thesis) the Tetragrammaton is a temporary prophetic forerunner of a greater name yet to come. Like circumcision and other ceremonies of the Old Testament, it is destined to be fulfilled according to the spirit and rendered obsolete according to the letter. The provisional nature of the Tetragrammaton is evident in the fact that Jews recoil from pronouncing it and are (by their own confession) ignorant of the name’s true meaning. What is that meaning? The Christian kabbalists actually knew of two possibilities. One was the name “Jesus,” and the other was the name “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” In either case, they supposed, the pronounceable names of the new covenant take the place of the unpronounced name of the old covenant and consign it reverently but firmly to the past.
Turning to Karl Barth, one detects little evidence of the influence of the Christian kabbalists in his earliest runs at the doctrine of the Trinity, for the simple reason that the early Barth does not yet assign much weight of any kind to the Tetragrammaton. He is instead much preoccupied with one of its common surrogates: “Lord.” In The Christian Dogmatics (Barth’s abortive first-run at a multivolume dogmatics), Barth unveiled his famous thesis that the root of the doctrine of the Trinity is the affirmation, “God reveals himself as Lord.” But what exactly does “Lord” mean? In an important discussion, Barth explains that biblical scholars of the day were divided on the point. Some maintained that kyrios was “a translation [sic] of the Old Testament name of God Jahweh,” while others that it was “the fervent trumping of everything which the world of Hellenistic religion worshiped in the way of gods, half gods . . . lords, and lordships.” Barth concludes that either way “Lord” really means the same thing. He explains:
In either case, it [i.e., Lord] means a reality that one conceives personalistically, before which one bows in awe, thanksgiving, love, trust, petition, obedience. . . . One bows before the Lord, because the quintessence of superiority, power, and dignity is present in Him. (233)
For the Barth of The Christian Dogmatics, then, “Lord” gets its meaning from the existential encounter between God and humanity. So long as this is clear, it is a matter of indifference whether one traces it back “the Old Testament name of God.”
When Christian Dogmatics in Outline appeared in print, it met a barrage of withering criticism. A particularly juicy target was Barth’s doctrine of the Trinity. Barth had castigated others for deriving their concept of the Trinity from common experience (the notorious vestigia trinitatis). But what was Barth’s thesis “God reveals himself as Lord” other than his own vestigium trinitatis, drawn from idealism and foisted on the Bible? Barth evidently felt the justice of the criticisms, and he abandoned the Christian Dogmatics as a false start.
Several years later, Barth published a revised version of his doctrine of the Trinity in the first volume of The Church Dogmatics. He sticks to the thesis that “God reveals himself as Lord” is the root of the doctrine of the Trinity. But now Barth declares that this “root” actually rests on something even more basic: “the revealed name Yahweh-Kyrios.” In fact, Barth claims, the whole doctrine of the Trinity is nothing but an “explanatory confirmation” of this name.12
The point of Barth’s revision is clear and utterly laudable. Barth means to anchor the affirmation “God reveals himself as Lord” in the uniqueness of the biblical God, not in human religious experience generally. Barth appreciates now (as he previously did not) the singular role played by the Tetragrammaton in demarcating the uniqueness of the biblical God. This is exactly the insight that I have urged throughout this essay.
Yet a funny thing happens to Barth’s insight that sadly prevents it from having a lasting role in The Church Dogmatics. In the course of Barth’s exposition, the name “Yahweh-Kyrios” changes into something else, like a potion in an alchemist’s bottle. Specifically, the first half of the name, “Yahweh,” dissolves away. What takes its place seems to shimmer a bit in Barth’s mind. At times it seems to change into the name “Jesus.” More often, it dissolves into the master concept “Lordship.” Of course, both of these do play outsized roles in the Church Dogmatics. But in either case the Tetragrammaton itself is left behind. A particularly important passage is this.
Into the place . . . of the name of Yahweh that in the end really dwells in Jerusalem in a house of stone — there now comes the existence of the man Jesus of Nazareth, “My Lord and my God.”13
Stripped to its basics, the sentence exactly echoes the favorite motif of the Christian kabbalists, with a slight “existentialist” twist. According to Barth, the Tetragrammaton is replaced by Jesus’ “existence,” not by his name. But having said that, Barth then embraces the latter view, too, because of course Jesus’ existence is denoted by his name. As Barth writes a few sentences later, the name Yahweh is replaced by “the historical figure of this Man on his way from Bethlehem to Golgotha, the ‘name’ of Jesus.”14
We now have our answer to why Barth’s “discovery” of the Tetragrammaton in his doctrine of the Trinity bears no fruit in his doctrine of election. He has been led astray by the Christian kabbalists. Like them, Barth confines the divine name to the Old Testament and imagines that it has been superseded by a different name in the New Testament. He fails to see that the divine name is the preeminent sign of God’s uniqueness throughout the Christian canon, Old Testament and New. Barth fails to see this because, like the Christian kabbalists, he is predisposed to think of the Tetragrammaton as a Jewish symbol inherently foreign to the New Testament, and because he is largely color-blind to the very Jewish way Jesus and the apostles signal their reverence for the divine name, by avoiding its pronunciation.
Can we rescue what Barth says about Jesus and the divine name in the brief quotation I cite above? Yes, easily. We need only make one change. The Old Testament reality superseded by the name “Jesus” is the stone temple in Jerusalem, not the divine name that dwelt therein. The divine name itself is never superseded, though now it dwells in a temple of flesh, the man Jesus, who freely reveals the secret of his identity to all: “I am.”
CONCLUSION
I would like to return in closing to a claim I made at the beginning of this essay: there are three equally basic ways of naming the persons of the Trinity. I have emphasized one in this essay, not because I regard it as more important than the others, but because I believe its retrieval will ultimately redound to the health and vitality of all three.
1. I discuss the thesis at length in my book The Divine Name(s) and the Holy Trinity, vol. 1: Distinguishing the Voices (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 2011).
2. Michael Dempsey, ed. Trinity and Election in Contemporary Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 1. The book provides an excellent introduction to and anthology of relevant literature.
3. See The Divine Name(s) and the Holy Trinity, 193 – 212.
4. A similar issue presents itself in other New Testament passages. Examples include Paul’s use of kinship terminology in Rom 1:4 (Jesus becomes “Son of God” by resurrection), and the Pauline use of wisdom vocabulary of Col 1:15 (Jesus as “the firstborn over all creation”). In my opinion, an “adoptionist” interpretation of these passages falls short of their intention, which is to express Christ’s dignity in the strongest available terms.
5. My account of the Tetragrammaton in John has been especially helped by Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John (AB; New York: Doubleday, 1970), 2:754 – 56; Charles A. Gieschen, “The Divine Name in Ante-Nicene Christology,” VC 57 (2003): 115 – 58; and Richard Bauckham, “Monotheism and Christology in the Gospel of John,” in Contours of Christology in the New Testament (ed. Richard N. Longenecker; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 148 – 66.
6. The Old Testament provides abundant grounds for drawing a connection between “I am” and the Tetragrammaton. There is Exod 3:14 – 15, of course, but there is also God’s ubiquitous declaration “I am the LORD!” which the LXX typically renders ego eimi kyrios, and which is especially characteristic of Ezekiel and Isaiah 40 – 55. Significantly, Isaiah several times reports God’s self-declaration “I am the LORD” in the abbreviated form “I am!” (41:4; 46:4; etc.). In such cases, the short form is materially identical with the longer one, i.e., “I am” = “I am the LORD.” On three occasions, the LXX renders God’s self-declaration with the extraordinary phrase, “I am I am”! (LXX: egō eimi egō eimi; Hebrew MT ʾanōkî ānoki hûʾ). So, for example, Isaiah 43:25 (LXX) reads: “I am I am (Gk: egō eimi egō eimi, lit: “I am I am”) who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.” In this and similar passages the author of Second Isaiah creates a virtual synonymy between the phrase “I am” and God’s personal proper name, which is implied rather than explicitly stated. While Second Isaiah wrote before the practice of avoiding God’s name became customary, the synonymy he created has obvious relevance for understanding the Gospel of John, written during the Second Temple period when the custom was universally normative among Jews. Distinct from God’s personal name yet closely linked to it, the words “I am” permit one to evoke God’s name while leaving the name itself unspoken. For further discussion, consult the literature cited in the previous footnote.
7. According to Bruce McCormack, Barth himself did not settle on the thesis until after 1936. Bruce McCormack, “Seek God Where He May Be Found: A Response to Edwin Chr. Van Driel,” in Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 262.
8. Ibid., 266.
9. McCormack admits that Christians must be able to say “God would be God without us” in order to preserve the gratuity of God’s grace, but insists that they must refrain from trying “to specify precisely what God would be without us” on pain of obscuring the identity of the biblical God with “metaphysical speculation” (cf. ibid., 274.) But the real question the Bible invites us to ask is: “Would YHWH be YHWH without us?” (“God” of course is an appellative name that stands throughout the Bible for the proper name YHWH.) And the difficulty I see with McCormack’s position is that it does not allow him to answer this question acceptably, either way. If he says (as I believe he should), “Of course YHWH would be YHWH without us!” then he must abandon, or at least substantially qualify, his premise that it is impossible to speak meaningfully about the identity of the biblical God apart from his decision to be “for us and for our salvation.” But if cleaves to that premise and says, “God would be God without us but he would not be YHWH,” then he posits a divine agent antecedent to YHWH. This would be to engage in mythology and metaphysical speculation at once. It would reanimate a conception of God as the un- and underdetermined “x” whose banishment from Christian theology was the animating purpose of McCormack’s position in the first place. (McCormack might also say, “God would be God but we cannot say whether or not he would be YHWH,” but this would merely be a version of the second answer).
10. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics (ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance; trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), I/1, 348.
11. Barth’s exposure to the ideas of the Christian kabbalists was likely mediated by figures such as Luther and the German idealists. On the Christian kabbalah, see Soulen, The Divine Name(s) and the Holy Trinity, 83 – 104; Joseph Dan, ed. The Christian Kabbalah: Jewish Mystical Books and Their Christian Interpreters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); G. Scholem, “The Beginnings of the Christian Kabbalah,” in Dan, The Christian Kabbalah, 17 – 51; George F. Moore, “Notes on the Name YHWH,” American Journal of Theology 12 (1908): 34 – 52.
12. Barth, CD I/1, 348.
13. Ibid., 318.
14. Ibid. (italics original).