5: Names, Roles, Acts I

Question 1

What is a person?

Answer 1

1. The extended self
   
   • one who can perform the actions of knowing, thinking, speaking, planning, loving, and so on.
   • personal identity includes character and personal story (relationships and memory)
2. The centered self
   
   • isolated individual
   • psychological entity

Question 2

Is attributing personhood to God an anthropomorphism?

Answer 2

• He is not a person in the same way we are persons (human persons)
• God’s personhood is original and primary. Our personhood is secondary and derived.
  
  • It would be better to say that humans are theomorphic creatures.

Question 3

What does it mean to say that the anthropomorphisms about God in Scripture are real?

Answer 3

Although God is a Spirit and he does not have a body, the functions that the Scriptures ascribe to God are real, and therefore these are not metaphors.

Question 4

How can we affirm anthropomorphism?

Answer 4

• God manifests himself in human forms.
• The whole revelation of God is concentrated in the Logos, who became flesh and is, as it were, one single act of self-humanization, the incarnation of God.
• From creation, God condescends to his creatures and speaks and appears to them in human fashion.

Question 5

What is the role of the incomprehensibility of God?

Answer 5

• God is knowable, although we cannot know him exhaustively and completely.
• God can only be known as he enters and relates.

Question 6

What is the key to God’s identity?

Answer 6

1. God’s name or names
2. Mighty deeds (including God’s words about himself)
3. Historical roles and relationships
4. Character traits and personal abilities (attributes)
5. Persons (the Trinity)

Question 7

In Biblical times, what was in a name?

Answer 7

1. The communication of character
2. A name calls a narrative, a story.
3. Power, plan, commitment, demonstration of heart and soul

Question 8

What is Elohim?

Answer 8

• Generic word for gods (plural)
• could be derived from the root meaning “to be strong or powerful”
• emphasizes God’s transcendence

Question 9

What is the philosophical definition of the meaning of YHWH?

Answer 9

Aquinas: YHWH is a philosophical assertion of being. God is “Being” itself.

Question 10

What are some problems with the philosophical view of “I am that I am”?

Answer 10

1. Hebrews did not think abstractly, but functionally.
2. It fits with classical theism, but not with the context
   • how would the knowledge that God is ‘Being’ have encouraged the Israelites to expect divine deliverance?

Question 11

What is the meaning of “I am that I am?”

Answer 11

• Yes, it may mark the certainty of God’s existence
• But in the context of Moses’ missionary command, the issue is more the active presence of God than the being of God.
  
  • “as surely as I was with the fathers, and I am present with you now, I will be with you in Egypt.”

Question 12

How does Elohim relates to YHWH?

Answer 12

• Elohim = name that denotes power and transcendence
• YHWH = denotes covenant intimacy, immanence

Question 13

Why is access to God’s presence prohibited for the Israelites at Sinai?

Answer 13

• Primarily there is a creator/creation distinction
  
  • God is unsearchable, inscrutable, inexhaustible, exalted above all things
• This separation is rooted in human’s sinfulness.
  
  • being cleansed will eliminate this separation

Question 14

How can a holy God be with sinful people?

Answer 14

• By sanctifying them
• God’s holiness can be given away
  
  • as all that comes into proximity to Him becomes holy

Question 15

What does it mean to be holy?

Answer 15

1. Being distinguished from the common or the profane
2. Being free from moral impurity

Question 16

Would God still be holy if sin didn’t exist?

Answer 16

• God’s holiness is best described as his moral perfection
  
  • Love is his disposition towards his people
  • Holiness in his character

Question 17

What are some implications of God’s holiness for us?

Answer 17

1. God’s holiness places a demand upon his people: “Be holy as I am holy.”
2. The vision of God’s holiness is the basis for Christian service
3. Regulates and informs our worship

Question 18

What’s our part in sanctification? Doesn’t God do everything?

Answer 18

• Regeneration is unilateral
• Sanctification is bilateral
  
  • God sanctifies us, at the same time that we also participate in it.

Question 19

What is the closest thing we get in the Bible to a list of the attributes of God?

Answer 19

Exodus 34:5-7

5 The Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord.

6 The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,

7 keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”

Question 20

What are some passages in the NT that entails Jesus’s Lordship as the same as YHWH?

Answer 20

1. YHWH is Lord & Jesus as Lord = Jesus is YHWH
   
   • Shema // Rom. 10:9
2. “Before me every knee will bow; by me every tongue shall swear”
   
   • Isaiah 42: 21-23 // Phil. 2:11
3. “Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved”
   
   • Joel 2:32 // Rom. 10:13

Question 21

What are some passages in the NT that entails Jesus’s name as the same as YHWH?

Answer 21

God’s name is to be revered.

• When Moses asks to see his glory, YHWH expounds his name (Ex. 33:18-19)

The NT uses the same motif for Jesus’s name

• Acts 4:7-12
• Acts 9:21
• Acts 22:16

Question 22

How does Jesus’s “I am” sayings refer to YHWH?

Answer 22

• John 8:58 refers back to Ex. 3:13-15

Question 23

What is the importance of God’s action to his identity?

Answer 23

• Biblical theism is primarily historical
• The people in the Bible knew God existed primarily because he related to them and interacted with them through his actions in history.

Question 24

What are the two OT confessions?

Answer 24

1. Deuteronomy 26:5-9: the little credo
2. Deuteronomy 6:4-5: the shema
   
   • “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

Question 25

What are the primary issues of OT confessions?

Answer 25

YHWHism and the historical action of God on Israel’s behalf (esp. The exodus, yet always against the presupposition and confession that the redeeming God is the Creator).

Question 26

What is the similarity and difference of NT confessions?

Answer 26

• They too underscore the uniqueness of YHWH
• Nevertheless, Jesus becomes the center of YHWH’s historical acts

Question 27

What are some NT confessions?

Answer 27

1. Col. 1:15-20
2. Phil. 2:6-11
3. 1 Tim. 3:16
4. 1 Cor. 15:3-7

Question 28

What are the primary issues of NT confessions?

Answer 28

YHWHism and the historical action of God in Jesus of Nazareth (esp. The resurrection)

Question 29

How did the people in the Bible speak about God’s attributes?

Answer 29

Not in a cognitive, isolated way but stemming from their relationship with him

• He is faithful
• He is just
• He is loving

Question 30

What was Calvin’s method in attribution?

Answer 30

• to recognize God from his works
• “he is shown to us not as he is in himself, but as he is toward us”