John A. Hutchinson - "A Matter of Names" (November 22, 1959)
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
- | 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 |