Personal & Geographical Gods: Mystery

This is the third in a series on the implications of having a personal God over one tied to a place, as explored in Joseph Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity.

In the last two posts, we looked at how, for Joseph Ratzinger, the seemingly simple choice observations concerning Israel’s choice for a personal God had massive implications for the way humans apprehended God. In the first week, we look at how a more personal God is a more intimate God, while in the second, we considered how a numen personale makes more credible the notion of a transcendent God.

There was also a subtle third upshot that flowed from these two, which I thought warranted its own post, and this concerns the apprehension of God as mystery.

Ratzinger covers this point when looking at the names of God in his Introduction, in particular the name of YHWH (which was communicated to Moses in Exodus 3). We Christians have said this name of God so often that we often forget its depth and significance.

In the Exodus account of Moses and the Burning Bush, YHWH was the name given to Moses when the latter asked for the former’s name. This response by God to say “I am that I am” (YHWH), many Catholics who are more philosophically minded might just reduce to God giving an account of his essence. However, Ratzinger notes that, far from aceding to the request to give his name, God appears to be giving a rebuff. For Ratzinger, YHWH “seems more like a refusal to give a name than the announcement of a name”. In pondering why God so refuses, Ratzinger wrote that this was one way of distinguishing the God of Israel from those of the other nations (86). In Ratzinger’s words:

In the gesture of rebuff…there is a hint of a God who is quite other than ‘the gods, the explanation of the name Yahweh by the little word ‘am’ thus serves as a kind of negative theology. It cancels out the significance of the name as a name.

This then brings Ratzinger to the juicy point. This refusal by God to give a name also has the added function of drawing us out, for in the face of this refusal, we still harbour the desire to know his name. To this, Ratzinger says that in the refusal to give a name:

it effects a sort of withdrawal from the only too well known, which the name seems to be, into the unknown, the hidden. It dissolves the name into the mystery, so that the familiarity and the unfamiliarity of God, concealment and revelation, are indicated simultaneously.

In other words, in refusing to give His name, God is also drawing us out of our familiar surroundings and into the realm of mystery.

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