Editor’s Note: Modern Reformed Theologian Peter Leithart (Ph.D. Cambridge) quoting Christopher Seitz raises an important question about how we so freely use “inclusive” language in our attempts to describe God. Our internal conflict over the issue is only possible because one side feels itself free to create names for God while the other reckons that the knowledge of God’s name and nature are the benefit of God’s self-disclosure and nothing to be tampered with. Both the Evangelical and Reformed and Congregationalist forebears of today’s United Church of Christ shared the recognition that the knowledge of God’s name came as a divine gift as part of God’s gracious covenant union with His covenant people. Because the right to speak God’s name comes as a gift, our forebears would likely discuss this issue under their exposition of the Decalogue (Ten Commandments). For example, we read the following in the Heidelberg Catechism:
Question 95. What is idolatry?
Answer: Idolatry is, instead of, or besides that one true God, who has manifested himself in his word, to contrive, or have any other object, in which men place their trust.
For them, to claim the right to choose names for God other than those revealed in Holy Scripture was to engage in the sin of idolatry.
Likewise they reckoned that only by submitting our reasoning to scripture could we avoid this destructive idolatry.
Question 99. What is required in the third commandment?
Answer: That we, not only by cursing or perjury, but also by rash swearing, must not profane or abuse the name of God; nor by silence or connivance be partakers of these horrible sins in others; and, briefly, that we use the holy name of God no otherwise than with fear and reverence; so that he may be rightly confessed and worshipped by us, and be glorified in all our words and works.
At what price will we continue down this path? And how long will be continue to protest that we are the legitimate heirs of the reformation tradition of the Congregationalists and the Evangelical & Reformed witnesses to Christ?
Feminist theology overtly objects to masculine names for God, but Christopher Seitz says that the debate goes much deeper: “what is at stake in modern debates is not whether God is father or can be addressed as ‘he.’ Rather, what is at stake is whether we are entitled to call God anything at all. The proper question is whether we have any language that God will recognize as his own, such that he will know himself to be called upon, and no other, and within his own counsel the to be in a position to respond, or to turn a deaf ear.”
Used with permission Peter Leithart (c) 2008>
