FOREWORD

Christopher J. H. Wright

“And you call yourself a Christian!” That was about the worst thing we feared hearing as young Christians in my Northern Ireland childhood. If you were caught cheating on a test, or saying a bad word in your anger, or getting into a fight on the playground, or telling a dirty joke, or just showing off in front of the girls . . . whatever it was, the most stinging rebuke from other kids (or worst of all from a teacher) would be, “And you call yourself a Christian!” From another kid, that would mean, “See! You’re no better than the rest of us. Holier-than-thou. Hypocrite!” From a teacher it was more sobering: “That’s not the sort of behavior we expect from you of all people, Christopher.” Either way it was a pretty excruciating humiliation. There you were with your little Christian lapel badge for the Scripture Union or whatever, advertising that you were a Christian. But you’d let the team down again, let Jesus down again.

In our late teenage years the terminology changed a bit, but the inference was the same. There were many things that a “real Christian” simply didn’t do, places you didn’t go, music you shouldn’t listen to, clothes you shouldn’t wear, and so on, because if anybody saw or heard you, it would spoil your testimony. How could you bear witness to being a follower of Jesus, if you were just as “worldly” as all the other young folks?

Now of course I recognize that an unwholesome dose of legalism lurked in that kind of Christian culture, and sadly there were those who so reacted against it that they rejected the very faith it was trying to protect. But there was a genuine biblical truth underneath those assumptions and restrictions, namely this: how those who claim to be the people of God behave is an essential and inseparable component in the credibility (or otherwise) of what they say they believe about the God whose name they bear. If you call yourself a Christian, you’d better behave like one (or at least bear some resemblance to how people think Christians should behave). “Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity” (2 Timothy 2:19 KJV, emphasis mine), was a memory verse impressed on us and rightly so.

Learning the Ten Commandments by heart, word-perfect from the KJV, was also part of my upbringing. So we chorused, “Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.” And of course, we knew what taking God’s name in vain meant. It was using the name of God, or Jesus, or Christ as a swear word or in any kind of exclamation. So we just didn’t! And we tutted and frowned very disapprovingly at anybody who did.

Well, again, I don’t regret or reject those childhood admonitions to watch our language. But having now read this book by Carmen Joy Imes, I do wonder what difference it would have made if those renowned KJV translators had been more literal and rendered the verb in its natural meaning: “You shall not bear the name of the LORD thy God in vain.” It might, of course, have simply increased the agony of those “And you call yourself a Christian” moments. But if Imes is right, it would have been much closer to the strong ethical thrust of the commandment than merely verbal abuse or misuse of God’s name (not that that is a trivial matter by any means).

And I have to say that I am convinced that Carmen Imes is right. Her case in this book (and argued in great exegetical detail in her published dissertation, Bearing YHWH’s Name at Sinai: A Reexamination of the Name Command of the Decalogue), is that “bearing the name of Yahweh” is comparable in meaning to the High Priest bearing the names of the tribes of Israel on his breastplate and bearing the name of Yahweh on his forehead. He represents—in both directions—those whose name he bears. Similarly, those who bore the name of Yahweh, like those who bear the name of Christ, represented that name before the watching world. Israel was called to live in the midst of the nations as the people who bore the name of Yahweh and made Yahweh “visible” in the world by walking in his ways and reflecting his character. To bear the name of the Lord was not merely an inestimable privilege and blessing but a challenging ethical and missional responsibility. This makes eminent sense to me. And its New Testament parallels are obvious.

A little more of my own story may explain why I resonate so enthusiastically with the message of this book. My parents were missionaries in Brazil before I was born, so I grew up with a houseful of missionary artifacts and a headful of missionary stories. (“And you a missionary’s son!” was an even more stinging rebuke for the mildest bad behavior, since it felt like bringing disgrace on my own father, let alone the Lord Jesus.)

I studied theology in Cambridge University. But in my undergraduate years there seemed no connection between theology and my missionary interests. I then went on to do doctoral research in the field of Old Testament ethics. That was a rich field of exploration in which I became ever more convinced that much of the weakness of the modern church is owing to its neglect of the profound ethical message and principles that God has woven so pervasively into the life and scriptures of Israel—and that filter through into so much of the ethical teaching of Jesus and the apostles in the New Testament. But again, this did not particularly connect with mission in my thinking.

Then I went to teach the Old Testament in India for five years in the 1980s. I remember vividly the moment I encountered the remarkable divine soliloquy that is Genesis 18:18-19.

Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and all nations on earth will be blessed through him. For I have chosen him, so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing what is right and just, so that the LORD will bring about for Abraham what he has promised him. (emphasis mine)

There, in the three clauses of that single sentence of verse 19, with its two explicit indications of purpose (“so that”), we have God’s election (“I have chosen him”), and God’s mission (the fulfilment of God’s promise to Abraham that all nations on earth will be blessed through him), and right in the middle connecting both of those, we have God’s ethical demand (that Abraham’s community should walk in the way of the Lord—not of Sodom and Gomorrah—by doing righteousness and justice).

That verse united in my mind (and heart) the two great loves of my life in my biblical thinking and teaching: mission and ethics. They became like two sides of the same coin. God’s mission for Israel was simply that they should live as the people of Yahweh in the midst of the nations, bearing his name in their worship, prayer, and daily lives. And for that purpose, they must walk in the way of the Lord. And that was why God had chosen them in the first place, in Abraham, so that through them he could ultimately bring redemptive blessing to all nations. This single verse breathed missional election and missional ethics—and I was doing missional hermeneutics, though none of those terms seem to have been invented back then.

And that is what Carmen Joy Imes is doing in this book (though fortunately she does not use that kind of language!). She is helping us to relish once again the wondrous depths of truth and challenge that are there for us Christians in that great epic narrative of Old Testament Israel—whether those stories are familiar to us already or not. She not only shows what a horrendous and misleading fallacy it is when church leaders either ignore the Old Testament, or even worse, assure us that we can easily do without it and still be good Christians. The very idea would have appalled Jesus, Paul, Peter, James, and John.

Carmen also indirectly exposes the folly of some of the dichotomies that still plague the Christian West, particularly in the evangelical community—dichotomies I strive to overcome in speaking and writing. There is for example that tediously long-lived debate about whether “real mission” is primarily a matter of the evangelistically proclaimed word or also includes social, economic, and cultural engagement in works of compassion, justice, creation care, and so on. Why push asunder what God has joined together? For bearing the name of the Lord (in proclamation) will surely be “in vain” if it does not proceed from those who bear the name of the Lord also in lives and works that demonstrate his character. And then one hears of Christian pastors who never preach from the Old Testament or about any moral issues or even the ethical demands of Jesus and the apostles, for fear of undermining “the gospel” of justification by grace and faith alone. What do they think Paul means by “the obedience of faith” or “obeying the gospel” or being saved as “God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10), or “so that those who have trusted in God may be careful to devote themselves to doing what is good” (Titus 3:8)? The dichotomizing of so-called gospel and ethics is damagingly unbiblical and might be said to constitute in itself a form of bearing the name of the Lord in vain.

So you call yourself a Christian? I trust that reading this book will give you a deeper and more biblical understanding of what it ought to mean to bear that name, and not to bear it in vain.