JanetSoskice, <i>Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture</i>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023, 256pp. $39.99

Soskice's Naming God considers the traditional attributes of God in light of neighboring debates about metaphysics and apophaticism in theology, the Hellenization thesis and the so-called classical theism. Sympathetic to traditional theology and its exponents, Naming God falls in broadly with the contributions of Katherine Sonderegger, Thomas Joseph White and Eleanore Stump who have all, in some way, resisted trends of twentieth-century theology and defended aspects of traditional theologia. Naming God is less a defense of traditional theologia per se and more a recasting of the debate's terms. Soskice wants to restimulate conversation between theologians, philosophers and biblical scholars. At stake for her is not only the bona fides of theological tradition, but a more religiously basic question: do terms like ‘eternal’ and ‘omnipotent’ render a good picture of God worthy of preserving or a problematic theology in need of revision? Soskice hears the concerns of those who have found in the God of classical theism a ‘metaphysical monster’ (p. 9), as well as those who sense a tension between robust divine perfections and severe apophaticism. And yet, Soskice also notes among the critics a conflation between the terms of patristic and medieval theology and the natural theology of Enlightenment philosophers. For the former, terms such as ‘eternal’, ‘being’ and ‘one’ were not attributes that a supreme being had, but names by which to call God based on his actions revealed in Scripture. Soskice is not the first to point out the early modern shift from divine names to divine attributes, but her particular question is ‘what is involved in the very activity of naming God?’ (p. 200). Thus, Soskice gives a ‘reappraisal’ of the divine names tradition, proposing to chart a course forward by reframing the divine attributes in the broader family of divine names. Her thesis is that naming is the foundational mode of theologia. This means the first question is neither ‘Does God exist?’ nor ‘What qualities must a supreme being possess?’ but instead, ‘Who is the God to whom we pray, give praise, and call upon?’ If theology begins in the vocative, as Soskice suggests, then effective use of the word ‘God’ does not depend on the possession of a coherent metaphysical concept—as is often assumed in philosophical debates. It requires only the common communal understanding of the name (p. 103). Naming also accounts for the ‘primordial’ place of apophaticism and analogy in theology (p. 106). Soskice takes Exodus 3 as the paradigm for her thesis (Chapter 2). God addresses Moses, gifting him with the name, ehyeh asher ehyeh. Soskice acknowledges the name's meaning is primarily ‘effective’, rather than metaphysical: ‘I am there’ (p. 22). It is rooted in the narrative of God and Israel, the address between God and God's people. But the primacy of naming here does not exclude metaphysical implications. How can YHWH always be called upon? Because YHWH is the creator of all things, the one from whom all Being has its being. This, Soskice suggests, is the original logic of the name ‘Being Itself’ for God. It is not a Hellenistic import or onto-theology, but an expansion upon creatio ex nihilo. Even a name like ‘Being’ begins not with a priori metaphysics, but by calling upon the God of creation and salvation. The meeting of the scriptural and metaphysical at Sinai is the common thread tying together Soskice's diachronic exposition of the divine names tradition, represented by Philo, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine and Aquinas. The four chapters (Chapters 3, 6–8) devoted to these thinkers feature lively expositions of primary texts in conversation with relevant scholarship. Pseudo-Dionysius and Maimonides appear as sources and the likes of Descartes and Locke as foils. Soskice's chapter on Philo deserves attention. She proposes Philo and his milieu of Alexandrian Jews were the fountainhead for apophaticism and the tradition of divine names not because of their commitment to ‘middle Platonism’, but because of their reading of Scripture, particularly Exodus. This is a serious historical challenge to claims that early Christians simply imported Greek philosophical monotheism. For Soskice, Gregory's Life of Moses and Augustine's Confessions model the Moses paradigm: metaphysical reflection in response to God's nearness. For Augustine and Aquinas, Soskice defends the infamous names ‘Being Itself’ and ‘He Who Is’, based on their rootedness in creatio ex nihilo. Soskice argues that analogy, in the Summa Theologiae, is neither natural theology nor an epistemological theory, but a semantic strategy. It answers not how God is known, but how it is that we use names—even biblical names—to refer meaningfully to God. Along the way, Soskice interjects a chapter on the lynchpin role of creatio ex nihilo (Chapter 4) and a philosophical treatment of naming (Chapter 5). She provides sharp—but never abstruse—concepts to distinguish her practice of naming God from defining, anthropomorphizing or objectifying God, the practices so often maligned in modern theology. Soskice concludes that we may, and must, ‘name God newly’, though how this ought to happen in relation to Scripture and theology is left undefined. She defends names with biblical warrant, but also warns against ‘biblicism’ that cages in the practice of naming for modern believers, for whom naming conventions change. But can new conventions of naming critique or contradict the traditional or scriptural? The examples Soskice gives for naming God newly are in poetic and liturgical contexts (p. 204), but what of the properly theological? For Soskice, Scripture is a ‘shared point of departure’ for the believing community (p. 204). This seems to differ from the role Scripture plays for the figures of the divine names tradition—though she does not explore this tension. On Scripture itself, she converses with Paul Ricoeur, not Nyssen or Aquinas. Additionally, those committed to trinitarian theology may wish for more on the trinitarian names. Soskice develops a minor christological theme through Augustine and Nyssen, but some questions remain. For example, is the naming of God in the baptismal formula (Matt 28:19) at all analogous to Exodus 3? And, though the trinitarian names signify relations rather than define God's essence (p. 122), do they disclose anything about God's inner life? Naming God is a ‘charting of the way’, weaving Soskice's previous contributions on religious language and creatio ex nihilo together with sympathetic readings of the tradition and an impressive range of secondary literature. Her book succeeds in defusing severe criticisms of the divine names tradition. She shows how the primacy of naming for classic expositions of the divine names distinguishes them from problematic treatments of God. The portrait of an anthropomorphized, metaphysical tyrant simply does not stick to the reverent, prayerful meditations of Philo, Augustine or even Aquinas. Naming God offers a provocative account of how the divine names and apophatic sensibilities can fit within a religiously warm, philosophically cogent practice of theology. Soskice's claim is not just that naming should be the primary posture of theologia, but that it originally was so for the architects of Jewish and Christian monotheism. Therefore, Soskice proposes we need not abandon terms like ‘eternal’ or ‘being itself’. But we must remember their primary vocative context, for without it, even the classical attributes will run into conceptual problems and lose their religious vitality.