Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture by Janet Soskice (review)

Reviewed by: Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture by Janet Soskice Jose Belleza Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture by Janet Soskice ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), ix + 247 pp. Like an inclusio encapsulating this lucidly written and rich exposition of what she terms "the divine names tradition," Janet Soskice in her introduction (chapter 1) and conclusion (chapter 9) of Naming God invokes a crucial historical observation: "At some time in the early modern period philosophers and theologians spoke less and less about divine names and more and more of 'divine attributes,' with these understood as features of the divine nature which could be determined by reason alone" (197). The dichotomization of faith and reason concurrent with such an approach is evident in the usual suspects: Descartes, Hume, Locke, Freud, and Lacan are not spared from Soskice's critical yet fair-minded judgment. Their shared modern posture, moreover, lies at the root of more recent Heideggerian denunciations of "ontotheology": a reductive focus on divine attributes as mere perfections graspable by natural reason, to the exclusion of the personal act of "naming," turns the three-personed God of revelation into an impersonal deity "before whom we can neither dance nor pray" (205). How, then, can the "divine names tradition" respond to this seemingly robust critique jointly posed by the moderns and their postmodern heirs, and thereby point the way to a living doxological posture not bifurcated between "the God of faith" and the "God of the philosophers"? Soskice proceeds to answer this question with the help of key ancient and medieval authors: Philo of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine of Hippo, Dionysius the Areopagite, and Thomas Aquinas. Grounding her following reflections, however, is a consciously biblical ethos, and chapter 2, "Naming God at Sinai," provides the scriptural scaffolding to bolster the rest of the monograph. The image of Moses ascending the mountain to converse with God and (later) to receive the Law runs throughout the subsequent End Page 681 chapters, and is re-narrated attentively by Soskice to show how "Exodus 3 marks the high point in a series of names and naming, of people and places, which began in Genesis with Abraham and ends with the first of the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20, 'I am YHWH your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery'" (20). Here we face the intimate, dynamic, and personal nature of divine naming which stands in contrast to the cold listing of divine attributes proper to mere "natural theology." God and Moses speak to each other, and the patriarch comes to know the Lord not by God's properties, but by the concrete historical lineage of deeds wrought for a chosen nation, a nation to which Moses, despite his foreign adoption, is himself inextricably bound. Yet the physical Mosaic ascent of the mountain mirrors another interior ascent; almost as if recognizing that the epithet "the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" remains a supplementary identification, Moses's insistent interrogative "who?" is at last met by the simultaneously revelatory and cryptic statement "I Am Who Am." Soskice unfolds a fuller consideration of this divine self-identification with the help of the aforementioned historical interlocutors. Chapter 3, "Philo on Knowing and Naming God," emphasizes the continuity of Jewish and early Christian reflection on divine naming. A contemporary of Christ and the apostles, Philo is a philosopher whose reflections, as Soskice correctly notes, evince the mutual influence of Middle Platonism and Judaism in the first century. Arguing against philosophers like John Dillon, who might claim that, "as a philosopher, Philo seems to say little that is original or novel" (41), the chapter suggests a different perspective. "Philo reads quite differently," writes Soskice, "if we approach him not as a mediocre philosopher but as an expositor of his own scriptures" (42). With this historical context, it is of critical importance to note how the ascent of Moses and the revelation of Sinai form the biblical background to Philo's synthetic link between knowing God and naming God, a connection which Philo is one of the first to make explicitly (42). "It is...