The Divine Name(s) and the Holy Trinity, Volume One

Distinguishing the Voices

R. Kendall Soulen

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781611641486
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Few things are so vital to Christian life yet so mired in controversy as the language we use to name the mystery of the Trinity. This project offers a fresh map of Trinitarian language that is simple, yet profound in its implications for theology and practice. Soulen proposes that sacred scripture gifts us with three patterns of naming the persons of the Trinity: a theo-logical pattern characterized by oblique reference to the Tetragrammaton (the divine name); a christo-logical pattern characterized by the kinship vocabulary of Father, Son, and Spirit; and a pneumato-logical pattern, characterized by the open-ended multiplicity of divine names. These patterns relate in a Trinitarian way: they are distinct, interconnected, and, above all, equally important. The significance of this thesis resides in its power to map the terrain of Trinitarian discourse in a way that is faithful to scripture, critically respectful of tradition, and fruitfully relevant to a broad range of contemporary concerns.

PART ONE

A Threefold Cord

The Name of the Trinity in Christian Tradition

Introduction to Part One

I do not aim foolishly to introduce new ideas; I want only to analyze and with some orderly detail to expand upon the truths set down by others.

—Dionysius, The Divine Names

What is the most appropriate way to name the persons of the Trinity? One way to set about answering this question is to investigate how people have named the persons of the Trinity in the past. Christians often meet new challenges, such as those we surveyed in the last chapter, by reexamining their past, seeking there clues that can provide a purifying critique of the present and a guide to the road ahead.

Part 1 explores how the Christian tradition has named the persons of the Trinity from its origin up to the present day. Obviously, we cannot cover this ground in anything like an adequate way, but instead must rely on a series of snapshots that focus on a few key episodes, figures, and schools. While the resulting picture will be incomplete and oversimplified at many points, it will suffice to show that Christians have seldom been content to name the persons of the Trinity in only one way, but instead have drawn upon as many as three distinct patterns of naming to articulate their faith in the Holy Trinity. A key variable in the story we are about to tell, therefore, is how Christians have configured the available patterns of trinitarian naming in relationship to each other. At signal points in its history, the Christian tradition has deployed the patterns in a way that implies their distinction, equality, and interrelatedness. More commonly, however, the Christian tradition has failed to sustain this richly threefold vision, a fact that has brought numerous problems and perplexities in its wake.

2

The Name of the Trinity
in Early Christian Creeds

The Emergence of a Threefold Cord

Behind and beneath all the primitive creeds of the apostolic and sub-apostolic era there stands the primal creed and confession of the Christian church, The Shema:

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord.”

—Jaroslav Pelikan¹

How did early Christians name the persons of the Trinity? One way to answer this question is by taking a look at ancient creeds. The brevity of creeds makes them a convenient object of study, and their continued authority makes them relevant for Christians today.

In this chapter we will focus on two early Christian authorities of very different kinds, the nomina sacra, a sort of visible creed encoded directly into ancient manuscripts of the Bible, and the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (381 CE), the church’s first ecumenical confession of faith. Different as they are, the two creeds tell a common story about the logic of trinitarian faith. Both are rooted in the Shema, the church’s “primal creed and confession,” and both branch out into different patterns of naming the persons of the Trinity. These patterns are only latently visible in the nomina sacra, but they come to explicit and enduringly beautiful expression in the Nicene Creed.

THE NOMINA SACRA: A VISIBLE CREED

In the ancient world, biblical scribes gave special treatment to certain divine names when copying the sacred Scriptures, setting them off from other names by the use of special orthography. Despite the fact that this practice appears in virtually all surviving manuscripts of the Bible, few people today have any knowledge of it. Since the advent of printing, Bibles have routinely stripped away the visual cues, and today even scholarly editions of the Bible preserve no trace of them. This is a great loss, not only because the practice is inherently fascinating, but also because it illuminates how early Jews and Christians experienced sacred Scripture. By singling out some divine names, while passing over others, the scribal techniques provided readers with implicit guidance about how to read and understand Scripture. Orthography provided, we might say, a kind of visible creed, encoded directly into the sacred text itself.²

The Representation of the Divine Name in Jewish Scriptures: A Visible Shema

One of the chief ways Jews of the first century expressed reverence for God was by according special treatment to God’s name, the Tetragrammaton. For example, Jews typically avoided pronouncing the divine name, and instead employed some surrogate in its place, such as “Lord” (Heb. ’adonai, or Gk. kyrios). What is less well known is that Jewish scribes also marked out the Tetragrammaton when copying the Scriptures, by writing it in a special way. Scribes used a wide variety of techniques for this purpose. Some used archaic Hebrew characters in texts that were otherwise written in the square Hebrew letters typical of the day. Others wrote the name using specially dyed ink, or replaced the name with a different symbol altogether, such as four dots or four diagonal lines. Whatever the method, the practice of singling out the Tetragrammaton clearly served a religious purpose. At one level, it expressed reverence for the divine name, and so also for the God who bears it. At another, it reminded readers not to pronounce the name when reading the Scriptures aloud. At still another level, the practice gave visible expression to a basic tenet of Jewish faith. For Jews of the Second Temple period, the most basic and common of all creedal confessions was the saying “Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone” (Deut. 6:4). Known as the Shema (Heb. shema‘, “hear”) after its first word, the saying was the Jewish daily prayer of the time (cf. m. Ber. 1:1–4:1). The scribal practice of representing God’s name with special characters reinforced the message of the Shema. It served as a kind of visible version of the confession. By underscoring the uniqueness and oneness of God’s name, it underscored the uniqueness and oneness of God.³

Significantly for our story, Jewish scribes continued to single out the Tetragrammaton for special treatment even when copying the Scriptures in Greek translation. One way they did this was by writing the divine name in Hebrew or Aramaic characters, even though the surrounding text was in Greek. The practice is very ancient. It appears, for example, in the Fuad (or Fouad) papyri, the oldest surviving Greek text of Deuteronomy that we possess, dating from the first or second century BCE. This Fuad papyrus (no. 266, of which only chaps. 17–33 survive) contains the divine name written in Aramaic. We can approximate the way it would have rendered the Shema by substituting modern English and Hebrew characters for ancient Greek and Aramaic, respectively:

Hear O Israel

is our God,

alone.

We can easily imagine the powerful didactic message that the visible Tetragrammaton would have conveyed to Greek-speaking Jews. Like its counterpart in Hebrew manuscripts, the practice would have functioned to visibly inculcate in readers a practical piety for God’s name, guiding them into a reading of Scripture centered in YHWH’s uniqueness. Even if hellenized Jews had little or no knowledge of Hebrew, they would have had no difficulty in recognizing the divine Name and the silent message it conveyed: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone” (Deut. 6:4).

In recent decades, many ancient Greek fragments of the Hebrew Bible have been found that render the divine name in Hebrew letters, suggesting that the practice was common among scribes both before and after the dawn of the Common Era. This knowledge requires a dramatic change in the way many of us picture how ordinary people of the first century experienced the Bible. In 1934, C. H. Dodd, a prominent biblical scholar of the day, wrote, “By merely eliminating the name of God, the [Septuagint] contributed to the definition of monotheism.”⁴ Dodd implies that the earliest Greek translations of the Bible introduced the God of biblical faith to the Hellenistic world as a deity with only a descriptive title (“Lord”) but no proper name. Although we do not know how the earliest copies of the Septuagint handled the Tetragrammaton (no manuscripts survive from that era), we do know that Dodd’s judgment gives a very misleading picture of the evidence known to us today. Far from having “eliminated the name of God,” the Greek Bible of the New Testament era accentuated it and held it forth as a visible creed.

The Nomina Sacra: “Embryonic Creed of the First Church”

Almost from the beginning of the Jesus movement, church-connected scribes developed their own distinctive counterpart to Jewish scribal practice. They consistently marked off certain words from their surroundings by abbreviating them and drawing a line over the characters that remained. These words have come to be known as the nomina sacra, the holy or sacred names. C. H. Roberts has suggested that the nomina sacra represent “the embryonic creed of the first church.”⁵ Though the origins of the practice cannot be dated with certainty, its ubiquity and relative uniformity suggest an extremely early origin indeed, in all likelihood well back into the first century, perhaps even “to a time prior to 70 CE.” ⁶

The nomina sacra differ from their Jewish counterparts in two important ways beyond their distinctive visual appearance (i.e., abbreviated words with a line drawn above them). First, Christian scribes marked out the Tetragrammaton by applying special orthography to the conventional oral surrogate for the divine name, “Lord” (kyrios), rather than to the divine name itself.⁷ We can visualize the difference with reference to Psalm 118:26. In a non-Christian Greek translation of the Bible, the passage would have appeared approximately as follows, once again substituting English characters for Greek:

Blessed is he who comes in the name of

.

In the Christian text, however, we would find the following:

Blessed is he who comes in the name of

⁸

This change is noticeable enough, and we will say more about it in a moment. First, however, let us note the other major innovation, which is even more dramatic. From the very beginning (so far as surviving evidence indicates), Christian scribes accorded special treatment not only to the customary surrogate for the divine name (i.e., “Lord,” Gk.: kyrios =

), but also to three additional words, which were also contracted in similar fashion, with a line placed on top:

Theos (God)	Contracted forms = and so on
I sous (Jesus)	Contracted forms = and so on
Christos (Christ)	Contracted forms = and so on

These four words, Lord, God, Jesus, and Christ, appear as nomina sacra in virtually all extant Christian copies of the Scriptures, Old and New Testament writings alike. The number of words treated as nomina sacra grew over time, but these four names formed the consistent core of the practice. As has rightly been pointed out, these earliest four words are not merely nomina sacra (sacred names), but rather nomina divina (divine names), in view of their central place in Christian worship.⁹

What was the nature of the relationship between the Christian nomina sacra and their Jewish counterparts? In the 1980s, George Howard proposed that the Christian practice represented “a clear break” with Jewish antecedents. He conjectured that it originated among non-Jewish scribes “who in their copying the LXX [Septuagint, Greek] text found no traditional reason to preserve the Tetragrammaton.” At first glance, Howard’s hypothesis seems plausible. After all, the Tetragrammaton makes no appearance in the Christian system, whereas it stands out in sharp relief in many Jewish manuscripts. Howard went on to suggest that “it is possible that some confusion ensued from the abandonment of the Tetragrammaton in the NT,” and implies that this in turn may have “played a role in the later trinitarian debates.”¹⁰ Specifically, the “removal of the Tetragrammaton . . . created a confusion in the minds of early Gentile Christians about the relationship between the ‘Lord God’ and the ‘Lord Christ,’” which led Christians to adopt a high Christology at variance with the views of first-century Christians.¹¹

Howard’s thesis, however, has won few adherents. Most scholars have perceived far stronger lines of continuity linking the nomina sacra with Jewish practice, seeing in the former a distinctively Christian form of piety for the divine name, not “a clear break” with it. Typical is the judgment of Larry Hurtado: “Jewish reverence for the divine name, and particularly the Jewish practice of marking off the divine name reverentially in written forms, probably provides us with the key element in the religious background that early Christians adapted in accordance with their own religious convictions and expressed in the nomina sacra.”¹² Still, it is not immediately obvious how the more common view could be correct. For the fact remains that the Tetragrammaton does not appear among the n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abstract
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Deep and Mysterious Subject
• Part One A Threefold Cord: The Name of the Trinity in Christian Tradition
• Part Two Distinguishing the Voices: The Name of the Trinity in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments
• Conclusion: The Most Appropriate Name of the Trinity
• Notes
• Index