John A. Hutchinson - "A Matter of Names" (November 22, 1959)

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-	Some of us have been talking together	0:16
	for the past few days	0:18
	about the nature of religious language,	0:19
	for religion is among other things, language.	0:24
	It is the language of prayer, of liturgy,	0:28
	of song and dancing.	0:32
	The Bible from which I was reading the lesson	0:34
	a few moments ago is language.	0:37
	At our house,	0:40
	we read the Bible at dinner time each night.	0:40
	And one of my young children recently remarked very sagely,	0:43
	"The Bible is just full of language."	0:47
	This sermon which I am just beginning, again, is language	0:50
	and I have often found myself in the midst of a sermon	0:55
	asking myself just what kind of language it is	0:59
	and what sort of language it is that goes on here.	1:03
	It seems to me a fair question	1:07
	and one which in its way can help to eliminate	1:09
	both the nature of our religious experience	1:12
	and the nature of our human speaking.	1:15
	This morning however, I want to focus our attention	1:18
	upon just one element of language, namely, proper names.	1:22
	And I want to begin by telling you an experiment	1:27
	that I performed recently on my five-year-old daughter.	1:30
	I asked her if she would mind changing her name.	1:35
	She stamped her foot indignantly and replied,	1:38
	"My name has always been Ruth and always will be."	1:41
	Her mother and I smiled	1:45
	recalling that we had actually considered	1:47
	several other names before we'd given her that one.	1:49
	This simple episode illustrates two widely different views	1:53
	of names and indeed of language	1:58
	held by students of the subject.	2:01
	On the one hand,	2:03
	there's a large group of students and inquirers	2:04
	who tell us that a name is simply a conventional label	2:07
	which we paste on a person or on a thing.	2:11
	So, parents are able to choose names for their children	2:14
	or a man is even able to change his name	2:18
	by appropriate legal procedures.	2:22
	This is true, we are told,	2:26
	not only of persons, but of objects.	2:27
	New chemical elements when they are discovered	2:31
	are given names.	2:34
	In this connection, there's the old story	2:37
	about the lady at the astronomy lecture	2:40
	who asked how the scientists can possibly know	2:43
	the names of the stars.	2:47
	Well, this, in general, is the approach to names	2:50
	illustrated by the little girl's parents.	2:54
	But there's another	2:57
	and a radically different view of this matter	2:58
	represented by the little girl herself who was, so to say,	3:00
	on the inside of the situation.	3:04
	She stamped her foot and replied in indignation.	3:07
	Now, evidently, something of significance to her	3:10
	was at stake in all this.	3:14
	It was, I suggest, her whole sense of identity	3:16
	and meaning expressed in her own name.	3:20
	She could no more imagine herself with another name.	3:24
	Then she could give up her own sense of being herself.	3:28
	Now, at a somewhat different level	3:33
	of intellectual sophistication,	3:35
	there is a large group of students of language today	3:37
	who are pointing out to us	3:42
	the significance of just this sense of personal identity	3:44
	and meaning.	3:48
	Actually, I think there is much of value	3:50
	in both approaches to names and to language.	3:52
	But this morning,	3:56
	I want to focus attention on this second approach.	3:57
	We find here the whole issue of personal,	4:01
	or if you will, of existential meaning.	4:04
	The meaning of our human life	4:07
	not viewed from the grand stands of detached observation,	4:09
	but from the actual playing field of human action.	4:14
	It is easy and it is altogether proper.	4:20
	And at times to sit in a comfortable classroom or study	4:22
	and to reflect an uncommitted detachment	4:27
	and objectivity on matters such as this.	4:30
	But outside the classroom,	4:34
	in the arena of action, we take another and a different view	4:36
	of all our human concerns.	4:41
	We ask with a poignancy and an urgency	4:44
	which cannot be denied.	4:47
	Who am I?	4:48
	And whence do I come?	4:49
	And whether do I go?	4:51
	And why am I here?	4:53
	And in fact, the very course of our lives	4:56
	is a statement in deed and in life	4:59
	to answer these questions.	5:03
	It's a kind of answer	5:06
	which finds expression also in our name.	5:08
	The history of religions	5:13
	provides us with many illustrations of this attitude.	5:15
	For example, in the ancient Near Eastern world	5:19
	out of which the Bible came,	5:22
	a person's name often included	5:23
	the name of the God he served.	5:26
	And that wasn't just a literary convention,	5:29
	but rather a literal expression of the supposed identity	5:32
	between a man and his God.	5:37
	In the same world, there were political struggles	5:41
	in which the king was overthrown,	5:44
	and in which he was victorious enemies	5:46
	proceeded literally to blot out his name	5:49
	to deface it from all the records.	5:52
	And then when the rebel in his turn was overthrown,	5:55
	his name in turn was expunged from the records.	5:58
	So, you see when the Bible speaks of a man's name	6:03
	being blotted out or destroyed,	6:06
	it is not speaking hyperbole, but literal fact.	6:09
	For in this ancient view,	6:13
	a man's name was somehow an expression of his power,	6:16
	of his own personal essence, of his spirit or soul.	6:21
	At an even more primitive level,	6:27
	the magician who by incantation or a spell	6:29
	seeks to do you harm or pretends to do you good,	6:33
	weaves your name into his magic pattern of words	6:37
	for he believes that if he has your name,	6:41
	he has power over you.	6:44
	He has hold of the essence of you, of your soul.	6:47
	There's a somewhat similar view of names	6:52
	in the story of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis.	6:54
	After God has finished creating the animals,	6:59
	He brings them all before Adam so that Adam can name them.	7:03
	As a child, when I read that story,	7:07
	I used to wonder how Adam knew what names to give them all.	7:09
	Now, perhaps you're saying to yourself	7:15
	that this is all sheer primitive superstition,	7:18
	and you have a point.	7:21
	Now, there's a good deal of word magic	7:24
	and name magic in the history of religion.	7:26
	And let's say it bluntly and frankly,	7:29
	there are many instances of it in the Bible	7:30
	and in the history of Christianity.	7:33
	And yet I should suppose that in mid 20th century	7:36
	on the campus of a great modern university,	7:39
	it is hardly necessary to disavow attitudes such as these.	7:43
	However, mixed with the draws of magic and superstition,	7:48
	there's another attitude about which we will do well	7:52
	not to be so lofty and so scornful.	7:55
	Let us call this other element	7:59
	of strong sense of personal identity	8:01
	and meaning and of personal or face-to-face	8:05
	communication with other human selves.	8:08
	And I suppose the gist of what I have to say to you	8:12
	this morning is that there's a truth here,	8:15
	which we can separate out from the magic	8:18
	and the superstition and which we can lay hold upon	8:20
	as a valuable element of our moral and religious life.	8:24
	This element, again,	8:29
	is precisely the sense of personal identity and meaning.	8:30
	Now, students of the Bible	8:37
	have for sometime been reflecting upon these matters.	8:39
	And prominent among them	8:42
	has been the famous Jewish philosopher,	8:44
	theologian Martin Buber,	8:46
	who has written widely of I-Thou	8:49
	or person-person relations	8:52
	as he has found them in his own Jewish tradition	8:55
	informed and guided as it is by biblical images	8:59
	and biblical faith.	9:03
	Now, according to Buber,	9:06
	an I-Thou, or a person-person relation	9:08
	is very different from an I-it	9:13
	or a person-thing relation.	9:16
	This like kind of relation I sustain to the pulpit,	9:19
	which holds my notes	9:23
	or to the watch with which I'm timing my sermon,	9:25
	or to this microphone which hangs about my neck.	9:28
	They're all objects, which I can use as means to my end,	9:32
	but how profoundly different is my relation to any of you,	9:38
	even in a group as large as this.	9:42
	For if I seek to treat you as things,	9:45
	you resist and properly sell.	9:49
	For example, if you even suspected me	9:53
	of seeking to manipulate your minds,	9:55
	rather than appealing to you through rational persuasion,	9:59
	you would resist.	10:03
	At least I hope you would.	10:04
	In other words, I must respect and affirm your personality,	10:07
	your nature as persons.	10:11
	Now, it is this relation of person to person,	10:13
	and that one's own identity is to be found within.	10:19
	As Buber has eloquently put to matter,	10:23
	I become I in relation to thou.	10:26
	I discover my own identity	10:31
	in what Buber has called the life of dialogue.	10:34
	Now we do not have to read very far in the Bible	10:39
	to see these elements of which we're speaking.	10:43
	As Buber has put it, the Bible is a deeply dialogical book.	10:46
	Its characters are I in the presence of thous.	10:52
	Many of the Bible's most expressive images	10:58
	are attempts to catch this personality of man.	11:01
	And so, the Bible speaks of a man's face,	11:07
	of his presence and of his name.	11:10
	Thus, for example,	11:14
	God tells Abraham that in his name	11:15
	will all the families of the earth be blessed.	11:19
	And so, the New Testament Christians,	11:23
	approached God in the name of Christ.	11:26
	And so, the men of the Bible sought	11:30
	to preserve their names,	11:31
	and they feared lest their names would be blotted	11:34
	from off the face of the earth.	11:37
	The Bible takes the name of God, very seriously.	11:41
	We all recall that famous passage in the book of Exodus,	11:45
	in which God,	11:48
	in which Moses asks God for his name.	11:49
	Later in biblical history,	11:53
	the divine name became so very sacred	11:55
	that human lips did not dare to utter it.	11:58
	And so, devout Jews used synonyms or paraphrases	12:01
	like the Most High or the Almighty.	12:07
	And to this day,	12:10
	when the name of God, Jehovah, or Yahweh is mentioned	12:11
	in the text, devout Jews verbalize it	12:15
	as Adonai, My Lord.	12:19
	Indeed, I've had many exam papers	12:23
	and religion from devout Jewish students	12:24
	in which they have sought to express	12:27
	the name of deity as G, blank, D.	12:30
	Last year, I received such a paper,	12:35
	in which was this rather mixed up statement.	12:37
	The student said,	12:42
	I have come to disbelief in the existence of G, blank, D.	12:42
	Now, we miss the point of our lists	12:51
	if we regard these as the subjects of ancient history	12:53
	and ancient scripture, and not a present reality,	12:58
	for they are present realities.	13:01
	For instances, as I worked on this sermon,	13:05
	my senior high school son brought home the proofs	13:07
	for his yearbook pictures,	13:11
	pondering them with all the anxious concern of adolescents.	13:13
	I engaged him in conversation	13:18
	and I saw in those rather mediocre photos,	13:20
	a person's whole self image,	13:23
	his sense of personal meaning and relation	13:26
	to the community of his peers.	13:30
	Again, a friend from your faculty sent me a clipping,	13:34
	not so long ago of your university news,	13:38
	from your university newspaper	13:41
	of a student here at Duke, who stood in line	13:43
	to receive bids from fraternities	13:46
	and who, when he came to the head of the line,	13:49
	could not recall his own name.	13:51
	The story was reported as uproariously comic,	13:55
	and yet, I suppose it does not take	13:58
	more than a second glance	14:00
	to see how serious it may well have been	14:02
	to the person involved.	14:04
	As I read it, my own mind went by,	14:06
	went back to a time 30 years ago,	14:09
	when I stood in a similar line	14:10
	and found no bids in my envelope.	14:13
	And I recalled the despair that clutched at my throat	14:15
	at that time.	14:18
	Now, it's of course,	14:20
	easy enough to say from a secure adult perspective	14:21
	how silly can a person be, how juvenile,	14:24
	but the point is I didn't	14:29
	and couldn't say it then any more than this other student	14:30
	could remember his own name.	14:34
	Well, the conclusion is that personal identity	14:38
	and meaning are not things easily and once for all come by,	14:41
	not automatically given to us at birth rather than matters	14:46
	for a lifelong struggle and achievement.	14:51
	It's not easy to be a person	14:54
	and to sustain and maintain one's personhood	14:57
	against all the forces that threaten it.	15:02
	To be a person, to achieve and maintain one's humanity	15:05
	is a matter of courage, as Paul Tillich put it,	15:11
	of the courage to be.	15:14
	Or as Christian faith	15:17
	has traditionally put the same sentiment,	15:18
	a matter of faith or conviction.	15:22
	And conversely, how much of traditional faith,	15:26
	has properly been concerned	15:30
	with sustaining and renewing	15:32
	meaningful humans' selfhood and identity.	15:35
	There's another issue of selfhood involved in names,	15:41
	which is illustrated in Thomas Mann's book,	15:45
	"Felix Krull Confidence Man."	15:48
	In a very long passage in that book,	15:51
	a long passage so typical of the author,	15:53
	Felix Krull expresses self disgust	15:57
	and self-loathing at his name,	16:00
	which by the dubious course of his life,	16:03
	he has brought into such bad repute.	16:06
	His name is hateful to him	16:09
	and he would like to be rid of it.	16:11
	He would like to find refuge in anonymity	16:13
	or in some other name.	16:17
	We'll call this attitude self-loathing,	16:20
	call it as other authors do nausea or self alienation	16:24
	or call it by its traditional Christian name of sin,	16:29
	the personal substance or reality involved as the same.	16:33
	Well then, not only faith,	16:39
	but sin finds expression in one's relation to one's name.	16:41
	Indeed, I think all the significant moments	16:47
	or aspects of personal life	16:49
	and destiny find expression here.	16:51
	In addition to faith and sin,	16:55
	there is the problem of God.	16:57
	I've been speaking rather equivocally	17:00
	about meaning and meaningful life.	17:02
	Now, the whole conviction that life has meaning	17:06
	and is not meaning less,	17:09
	is an important part of what our Christian tradition	17:11
	has meant by God and faith in God.	17:15
	So, let us turn briefly then from the name of man	17:19
	to the name of God.	17:23
	It's an important theme in the Bible.	17:27
	Man, the Bible assumes stands in an I-thou relation to God.	17:29
	God is, according to the Bible and I, an not an it,	17:36
	He is personal.	17:41
	We can speak to him in prayer	17:43
	and we can hear him speak to us.	17:45
	He has a name according to the Bible.	17:48
	Now, I think there's a very important issue here,	17:52
	but I also think it's one of the most misunderstood	17:56
	in the whole field of religion,	17:59
	misunderstood by adherent and critic alike.	18:01
	For example, I know people and I've read books,	18:05
	which put the question is God personal, meaning by it.	18:09
	Is there some head man or some head spirit somewhere	18:14
	just beyond the furthest telescope whose darlings,	18:19
	whose favorites we human beings are.	18:23
	Now, to this question,	18:28
	the religious adherent answers. Yes.	18:29
	And the critic, the unbeliever answer's no.	18:33
	And so the argument is giant.	18:37
	I think they both radically misunderstand	18:40
	the nature of the personal relation between man and God	18:44
	for they think of it as Reinhold neighbor	18:49
	has acidly remarked as man's right to lobby	18:51
	for special favors in the carts of the Almighty.	18:56
	And that seems to me,	19:01
	not only intellectually unjustified,	19:02
	but religiously repugnant.	19:05
	To think of God as personal,	19:09
	seems to me to mean something radically different from this,	19:12
	we take person-person relations toward each other	19:17
	as it were on a horizontal level.	19:21
	And so, we discover their meaning	19:24
	and we discover the meaning of our lives in these terms.	19:26
	But then, in vertical relation,	19:32
	we face the problem of our attitude toward the Almighty	19:37
	toward ultimate reality,	19:42
	as indeed all men have faced this problem	19:44
	and no men have ever avoided it.	19:47
	Now, the heart of faith in God,	19:51
	I believe is to take toward ultimate reality,	19:54
	toward the almighty.	19:57
	Fraught as this question is with mystery,	19:59
	involving so much	20:03
	that is forever past our human finding out.	20:05
	To take toward the almighty.	20:08
	Justice, attitude of personal faith or trust.	20:11
	Such an attitude is the essence	20:17
	of what our fathers would have called faith in God.	20:19
	If we read our Bibles with sensitivity and perception,	20:24
	we will see justice relation expressed in the Bible's	20:29
	reference to the name of God	20:32
	and to the name of Christ.	20:35
	The New Testament Christians greeted	20:38
	and blessed each other in this name.	20:42
	And what is more important,	20:45
	they approached God in the name of Christ.	20:46
	And this expressed for them,	20:51
	the attitude of personal trust and conviction and faith	20:52
	and ultimate reality.	20:58
	It is this meaning,	21:00
	which comes through to me in the Ephesians passage,	21:02
	which I read as our scripture this morning.	21:06
	It speaks, you recall,	21:09
	of the measurable greatness of the divine power,	21:10
	which has raised Christ from the dead,	21:14
	which has made him to sit at his right hand	21:17
	in heavenly places.	21:19
	Far above all rule and authority and dominion	21:21
	and above every name that is named not only in this age,	21:26
	but in that which is to come.	21:30
	Let us pray.	21:33
	Oh thou eternal spirit in whom we live and move	21:46
	and have our being,	21:49
	we commit ourselves onto thee	21:52
	in faith and in trust in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord.	21:54
	And now may the Lord bless you and keep you,	22:01
	the Lord make his face to shine upon you	22:04
	and be gracious unto you.	22:07
	The Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you	22:09
	and give you peace.	22:13

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Title:

John A. Hutchinson - "A Matter of Names" (November 22, 1959)

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https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4vt1mr18

Date:

November 22, 1959

Speaker:

Hutchinson, John A.

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Duke University. Chapel

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UA.17.01.0003 RR-0086
ref5373_hs8
uachapelsermaud
duke:628376
dcrau002116
ark:/87924/r4vt1mr18
b2656620-c888-4b67-b62b-f47bb1b3f8ba

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John A. Hutchinson - "A Matter of Names" (November 22, 1959)

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