Cliff Mak

Our Name / His Name

— Posted July 21st, 2008 at 8:42 pm // Permalink

Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.

Before doing anything else, it seems fitting that we should at long last address the journal’s name, which I suspect has been too much of a shibboleth for some. As can be gathered well enough from our first issue or even this website, we mean To An Unknown God to stand as a forum, a medium, for those who seek to know something more about God, be he to you but a god or the All-Soul or even just “God.” Berkeley is nothing if not the somewhat delinquent Athens of our time and age, and as Paul before us, we stand in the midst and make Him known. We exist to foster conversation and plant the seeds of knowledge. Something like that, anyway.

Perhaps this bit from a certain Joseph Ratzinger on names is apt, yes, more than apt:

We could put it very simply by saying that the name creates the possibility of address of invocation. It establishes relationship. When Adam names the animals, what this means is not that he indicates their essential natures, but that he fits them into his human world, puts them within reach of his call. Having said this, we are now in a position go understand the positive meaning of the divine name: God establishes a relationship between himself and us. He puts himself with us and enables us to be in relationship with him. Yet this means that in some sense he hands himself over to our human world. He has made himself accessible and, therefore, vulnerable as well. He assumes the risk of relationship, of communion, with us.Joseph Ratzinger Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 143–144.

In order to discuss God and our faith in Him, though, we need to speak truly. And the language of speech is built upon naming, the act of articulating reality and truth — or, in our case, Reality and Truth — driving at our subject’s essence. But the Christian story doesn’t let us stop there; as the Pope explains, a Name means Relationship means Love means Risk.

And hence this journal, this blog, this briefly overheard snippet of the eternal conversation that is too overwhelming for the lot of us, never mind the few of us. Now there is no longer time to hesitate in speech and discussion. As writers of this blog, we have no such luxury. We can modestly deflect the demand to write, claiming we don’t know nearly enough to write anything of worth for others. Or instead, we can write in light of what we do not fully know in order that we might know. This means risking both the criticisms and misunderstandings of others, perhaps even their anger or disregard. But the God of Moses has already risked all that for us when He named Himself, since the

process that was brought to completion in the Incarnation had begun with the giving of the divine name. [...] What began at the burning bush in the Sinai desert comes to fulfillment at the burning bush of the Cross. God has now truly made himself accessible in his incarnate Son.Ibid.

Thus God answers the name of this journal and fulfills the Athenian altar with His own name, and only by diving deeper and more fully into the light of His name can we proclaim the truth of it to ourselves, to Berkeley, to the nations of the world. There’s an attendant risk in the whole venture, yes, but in this risk itself, in this surrender of one’s comfort and security to the fearsome crowd, there is already the act of Love and the declaration of His holy name.