Many readers of this review will be familiar with Janet Soskice’s Metaphor and Religious Language (1985). Now joining this classic in its field is a fresh intervention by the same author in the philosophical and theological question of how we speak of God. Taking her cue from the fact that philosophers and theologians in modern times (since Descartes, according to Marion) treat of the ‘attributes’ of God (eternity, omniscience and so forth), Soskice retrieves an older Christian and ultimately biblical tradition, but one by no means limited to Christians, of the ‘names’ of God (something more like what one finds in the O-Antiphons of Advent: Wisdom, Day-spring, etc.), which includes what have come to be treated as ‘classical attributes’.
Moreover, by focusing on the theological activity of naming God, a use of words that does more than just describe, her book is not merely a revival of an alternative method for processing the content of the doctrine of God but also addresses and expresses theology as a practice rooted in prayer and praise, calling on the name of the LORD. As far as Soskice is concerned, there is to be no gap, which we may perceive in the post-Cartesian philosophical approach, between talking to God and talking about God. At the same time, her book, which is shaped in part by an attentive linguistic philosophy of recognisably Wittgensteinian provenance, also holds together the fruits of biblical studies, patristics, and historical scholarship with the concerns of systematic, philosophical, and interreligious theology.
After she indicates how her book will ‘chart the way’ forward in chapter one, chapter two turns to God’s names as a series of divine gifts in the Bible by revisiting Moses’ encounter with God in dialogue with him at the burning bush and at Sinai. Soskice concentrates on the work of Buber and Rosenzweig to recover the impact of the Hebrew original of God’s naming himself. What emerges overall is a picture where Jews and Christians, by naming God from God naming himself, transformed Greek metaphysics rather than, as is so often thought, borrowed dangerously from it. This leads happily into chapter three on Philo from the age of both Jesus and Paul, the Jewish interpreter of Scripture—and Platonic philosopher—who exemplifies the characterisation of the God Who Is as both wholly other and nearer to us ‘than our own heartbeat’.
It is thus noteworthy that Soskice’s proposal is no reduction of the divine names to mere grammar or rules of speech unmoored from claims about the divine being of the God Who Is. Chapter four plays a crucial role in presenting the doctrine of creation out of nothing, shared with Jews and Muslims, as bringing about a revolution in Christian metaphysics that radicalises the naming of God, transforming what we predicate of him. For Soskice, biblical claims involve metaphysical positions on the relationship between God and his creation.
With this firm metaphysical and theological foundation in view, Soskice can tackle such questions as the kind of name ‘God’ is. This she does in chapter five. Set over against Locke’s option for identifying it as a common noun, Soskice refuses to treat the Creator God as the single member of some class but, rooting her answer in the invocation of God and our relationship to him who is the source of our being, asks what is involved in naming and referring to this God and teases out the word’s use as somewhere between that of common and proper noun. Here those seeking contributions to familiar questions will find some nuanced positions regarding the nature of apophatic theology, and of metaphor and analogy.
Subsequent chapters enrich and extend Soskice’s approach by drawing on Gregory of Nyssa and his Life of Moses, emphasising our need to follow God and not simply speak about him (chapter six), on Augustine and the search for God who is Being itself (chapter seven), followed up by a reading of the early questions of Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae as standing squarely, in contrast to Locke, in the divine names tradition, with Aquinas working within the context of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim sources who invoked the Creator God (chapter eight). Appreciative of the Summa’s structure, Soskice acknowledges how he treats the epistemological question of how we can know God and then the question of how we can name him from our knowledge of creatures. In Aquinas’s employment of analogy, that knowledge of creatures is ordered to the Creator, where ‘semantic and metaphysical points fuse’ in a ‘participational ontology’ in which certain names have their primary reference to the Creator and derivatively to creatures.
These theological practitioners are hardly the only figures whose contributions Soskice draws together in what is essentially an appeal to those addressed by God to act on the gift of naming him and to do so within that gift’s proper context, that is, of calling on the God we are called to seek and to follow.
