Asbury Theological Seminary

https://place.asburyseminary.edu/ecommonsatschapelservices/8644/thumbnail.jp

Barnes, Matt

Know your role

Schendel, Joshua D.

Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian 
Philosophers 
Volume 41 Issue 2 Article 8 
4-1-2025 
Janet Soskice, NAMING GOD: ADDRESSING THE DIVINE IN 
PHILOSOPHY, THEOLOGY, AND SCRIPTURE 
Joshua D. Schendel 
Yellowstone Theological Institute, jschendel@yellowstonetheology.org 
Follow this and additional works at: https://place.asburyseminary.edu/faithandphilosophy 
Recommended Citation 
Schendel, Joshua D. (2025) "Janet Soskice, NAMING GOD: ADDRESSING THE DIVINE IN PHILOSOPHY, 
THEOLOGY, AND SCRIPTURE," Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers: Vol. 
41: Iss. 2, Article 8. 
DOI: 10.37977/faithphil.2025.41.2.8 
Available at: https://place.asburyseminary.edu/faithandphilosophy/vol41/iss2/8 
This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at ePLACE: preserving, learning, and 
creative exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian 
Philosophers by an authorized editor of ePLACE: preserving, learning, and creative exchange. 
BOOk Reviews 293
pp.293–297 FAITH AND PHILOSOPHY Vol. 41 No. 2 April 2025
doi: 10.37977/faithphil.2025.41.2.8
All rights reserved
of the oppressor, or those who are complicit in oppression, too, if only we 
should try and see it.
Now, maybe it is misguided to think about mystical experiences as be-
ing subject to ordinary standards of credibility at all. However, there is 
value in seeing mystics as, on the whole, generally credible according to 
the consistency of and similarity in their experiences, of love and strength 
and Grace, across cultures and conceptual frameworks. These experiences 
can act as evidence, if not for proof of the existence of God, at least not 
for the truly skeptical who may remain unmoved, but of who God is, as-
suming God does exist. What Prevot’s book reveals is that The Christian 
God wants to be with their creation, as evidenced not always or primar-
ily through robust arguments, but in the flesh and blood of human lives, 
transformed by love.
As a final thought, I wonder: if the idea of suffering is such an import-
ant avenue to mystical experience, what precise obligation do we have to 
alleviate such suffering in others? Might we be taking away potential op-
portunities for divine union by intervening? I think Prevot’s answer to this 
would be that the heart’s call to alleviate the suffering of others—which is 
perhaps itself still a type of grace—should always be prioritized, for while 
we cannot control others’ mystical experiences— these are graced from 
and of God, after all—we can try and control (in)justice in this world. To 
alleviate injustice then is to help fill the world with more grace, not less.
Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology, and scripture, by 
Janet Soskice. University of Cambridge Press, 2023. Pp. ix + 230. $39.99 
(hardcover), $29.99 (paperback).
JOSHUA D. SCHENDEL, Yellowstone Theological Institute
In Naming God, Janet Soskice questions the Modern division of “attri-
butes” of God into “metaphysical” on the one hand and “biblical” on the 
other. Still troublingly prevelant in current theological and philosophical 
literature, this division of attributes lies at the heart of the apparent oppo-
sition between the God of philosophy—often considered a “philosophical 
cuckoo in the biblical nest” (10)—and the God of the Bible. “What use in 
Christian life,” she asks from the perspective of those who side with the 
latter, “is one who is called ipsum esse subsistens or ‘Being itself’ whose at-
tributes are unfolded as simplicity, infinity, eternity, omnipresence and so 
on?” (11). Yet, according to Soskice, such a classification is too simplistic: 
Faith and Philosophy294
for “speaking of God as ‘eternal,’ ‘almighty,’ ‘infinite,’ ‘One,’ and even as 
‘Being itself’ [are] all appellations with biblical warrant” (198). The Bi-
ble gives to its readers names of God that are narratival, personal, and 
dynamic as well as names that are abstract and metaphysical. Within the 
Modern framework, readers of the Bible are forced to prioritize one cate-
gory until, starved under its canopy, the other dies.
Much of Modern theology has been exercised about this impasse:  either 
the God of the philosophers or the God of the Bible. But this has not al-
ways been so for theology. The key for us, argues Soskice, is first to recog-
nize these various names of God as just that, names. Hence, the majority of 
the book (chs. 3–8) consist of a “reclamation” of the “tradition of names.” 
By “names” Soskice points us to a “a much broader category than ‘attri-
butes’” (4). The narrowing of the scope of “names” of God to “attributes,” 
she claims, was an early-Modern mistake—chiefly made by Descartes 
(2–3) and Locke (85–86)—and corruptive of the names tradition as it had 
been practiced by Jewish and Christian thinkers for a millenium and a 
half. “Practiced” here is central to Soskice’s argument. “Names” in this 
tradition, she claims, were not—as they became in the Modern  period—
significations of ideas or concepts by which the knower comes to define 
the known. Rather, in Scripture and for pre-Moderns, “the primary mode 
then for naming God is the vocative—calling, invoking, beseeching, prais-
ing” (34).
Because naming is the practice of invocation, “one does not need to be 
in possession of a metaphysically or scientifically ‘correct’ concept, but 
only to know the commonplace meaning the word has in the community 
using it” (103). Naming is “as much concerned with address as with ref-
erence” (110). So framed, the reader of scripture need not choose between 
so-called “biblical” and so-called “metaphysical” attributes. Even the 
more philosophical of the biblical names, Soskice says, were also “invoked 
in prayer and praise.” These names were used to call upon the name of the 
Lord. Then, subsequently, they were “discussed philosophically” within 
the community. “[These names] were, in short, attached to practices of 
naming, and these practices were in turn embedded in sustained medita-
tion over many generations on the biblical texts and what it might be to 
name ‘the Holy One of Israel’” (35).
So what are the contours of these meditations and reflections? Soskice’s 
expertise is on display as she draws from appropriate representative fig-
ures: Philo, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, and Aquinas, while others like 
Dionysius the Aereopagite, Maimonides, and Paul Ricœur, often just be-
low the surface, make their apparence from time to time. Soskice points to 
several common themes developed by these writers. First, God is “in the 
strict sense unknowable and even unnameable by us” (50; cf. 88, 119, 150, 
186–87). “Names for humans and places may be of their nature ‘fitting’ to 
the essence of that which they name, but this cannot be so in the one spe-
cial case of naming God.” This is because God as creator of all is wholly 
other than all created. “No name can represent God’s nature, no name is 
BOOk Reviews 295
correct” (55). But that raises the question: “what justifies our language of 
prayer and praise and adoration?” (51).
Second, Soskice argues that, with the exception of Thomas Aquinas 
(185), the solution offered by these writers to this question is that our lan-
guage is justified because God gives to us, chiefly in scripture, names. He 
gives us these names not so that we can identify a list of attributes and 
thereby come to define him. Rather, by these names he situates us within a 
history of his revelation to and covenant with his people and provides us 
with appellatives by which we can call upon him. Within that context, or 
in that relationship (103, 109), Christians have reflected upon these given 
names, all the while with the awareness that “all our speaking falls short 
of the divine reality” (106). Here begins the process, we might say, of theo-
logical reflection.
Third, Christian reflection on these given scriptural names took place 
alongside the development of the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, 
which constituted “a revolution in western metaphysics” (80). This doc-
trine in particular “radicalized” not just naming but “all religious lan-
guage” (70). Cautiously “mining” the Greek philosophical tradition of 
natural theology and reflecting upon scriptural revelation—in particular 
the self-designation of God revealed to Moses—the fathers learned and 
taught the purgation of creaturely conceptions of God in the fires of nega-
tive theology. According to Soskice, the deeply significant achievement of 
this via negativa was the knowledge that the One who is for us in this his-
tory is, more fundamentally, the ‘One who is’ (cf. esp. 55–62). “It should be 
clear by now that it is not possible to maintain a strict opposition between 
philosophy and religion which puts all the metaphysics on the Greek side, 
and all the religion on the Jewish and biblical one” (77).
Thus, on Soskice’s account, to jettison so-called metaphysical attributes 
in search of the ‘biblical God’ is a mistake, not because we need to marry 
our metaphysical thinking with our biblical interpretation at some theo-
retical level, but precisely because these “abstract attributions” are “divine 
names profoundly anchored in Scripture,” and “take their place, not in a 
bare list of assertions but as fibres of a thickly braided rope of signification 
woven throughout and from the scriptural texts” (198).
As with any book of this breadth, there are claims with which to take is-
sue. For example, Soskice claims that because Dionysius was a “hallowed 
source” at the time of Aquinas, he would not have considered it appropri-
ate to “openly contradict” him. Instead, Aquinas at times more subtlely 
offers Dionysius’s views simply as foils in order to “qualify in an argu-
mentatively tighter direction” (171, fn. 8). But this claim seems to miss the 
point of Thomas’s own method for expositing the fathers (see, e.g., the 
prologue to his Contra errores Graecorum) and does not take into account 
the scholastic method of the quaestio.
A further example: Soskice claims that “the drive to transcendence 
presses Maimonides to an almost atheistic account of religious language,” 
insofar as he “treats all the positive names and even biblical names of 
Faith and Philosophy296
God with extreme austerity,” that is to say, only negatively (174). Yet, in 
the portion of Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed that Soskice cites in 
order to substantiate this claim (Part I, ch. 50), Maimonides is in fact ar-
guing for what Soskice has been arguing all along, namely that because 
God is supremely One, his essence is not a set of attributes that creatures 
may “pick out” with their names. Soskice is correct that Maimonides’s 
claim that rational creatures can only achieve negative knowledge of 
God is austere—and, as she notes, even Aquinas took issue with it. But to 
call Maimonides’s account “almost atheistic” seems at least rhetorically 
misleading.
A final example: as noted above, Soskice claims that Philo, Augustine, 
and Dionysius thought the problem of naming God was resolved by scrip-
tural revelation, in which God gives us names for himself (185). Thus, they 
“restricted their discussion of names for the most part to names given in 
the Bible” (203). This claim, while capable of being understood aright, is 
also open to misunderstanding: viz., as if the fathers believed that the dis-
tance between God and the creature is such that creatures have at best 
blurred vision concerning the divine but that God clears that up by divine 
revelation. Soskice seems to hint that she may take her own claim this 
way by her contrast of Aquinas with Philo, Augustine, and Dionysius on 
this point. While they “arguably” took “revelation, pre-eminently scrip-
ture” to be the solution to the divine naming problem, Aquinas, Soskice 
says, did not consider scriptural revelation “the entire solution, but a fur-
ther part of the problem” (185). This claim is correct with respect to Aqui-
nas, who held that all names derived from creatures, including scriptural 
names, which signify anything of perfection therein may be said of God 
(e.g., Contra Gentiles, I.30 and sententia d.22, q.1., aa.2–3). With respect to 
Augustine and Dionysius, however, the claim seems dubious. Soskice her-
self cites Augustine earlier in the book that “all things can be said of God” 
(104). Dionysius likewise claimed that because of the distance between 
God and creatures, “praise is most appropriately offered through the de-
nial of all beings.” Yet also, because God stands under all goodness as the 
cause of everything, “to praise this most beneficent Providence, one must 
turn to all of creation . . . the theologian praises [God] by every name—and 
as the nameless One” (The Divine Names, I.5–6). Soskice comes closer to 
 Augustine’s and Dionysius’ judgements on this matter when she says that 
“the canonical scriptures act not as a prison house of naming God but as 
the shared point of departure” (204).
These examples are not much more than quibbles with some of the de-
tails of the book. But this last example raises what is for this reviewer 
a somewhat larger concern. Throughout, Soskice affirms that the more 
philosophical divine attributions are not stand-alone deliverances from 
the natural light of human creatures but rather are derived from prayer-
ful reflection grounded in scripture. The import of her discussions of the 
“tradition of divine naming” is that philosophically it is right to conclude 
that as creatures we cannot name God, and so we must practice “means 
BOOk Reviews 297
of un-naming” and of “unknowing” (106–7). Yet for Soskice that is only a 
sort of first step. So bowed before the God who is not another being, we 
receive names from him, that we may call upon him, and subsequently 
come to some positive knowledge of God by theologically reflecting upon 
those names. This way of characterizing the tradition of naming comes 
out especially in her brief discussion of “Natural Theology or Scriptural 
Language,” in which she compares Aquinas and Barth. She concludes the 
discussion by affirming that “Barth should be in entire agreement” with 
Aquinas, not because Barth “should” be on board with the analogia entis 
but because, on Soskice’s reading—and seemingly inconsistent with pre-
vious claims about Aquinas—Aquinas affirmed that positive knowledge of 
God comes by way only of scriptural revelation (191–93).
Such a characterization of the tradition of divine names is, it seems to 
this reviewer, still set in a very Modern frame. Soskice is right to point 
to these authors as representative of that tradition. Her reproach of the 
Modern move from “naming” to “defining” is a step in the right direction. 
And her keen directive toward integration of philosophy and scripture is 
laudable. Yet, “nein” can still be heard echoing throughout, and the in-
stinct that all knowledge—positive knowledge—of God must be derived 
from scripture remains an obstacle to a fuller, richer reclamation of the 
divine names tradition. Soskice has pointed readers to one important as-
pect of that tradition, namely, invocation. For that, we should be grateful. 
What still remains for reclamation of the divine names tradition, indeed 
for  theology today, is—as Augustine put it—to say all things of God.


Janet Soskice, NAMING GOD: ADDRESSING THE DIVINE IN PHILOSOPHY, THEOLOGY, AND SCRIPTURE

https://place.asburyseminary.edu/ecommonsatsdigitalresources/1635/thumbnail.jp

Ro, Bong Rin

Asian church history: arise Asian church: outline and chronology (Supplementary)

https://place.asburyseminary.edu/syllabi/4224/thumbnail.jp

Chopp, Joel

Seminar in Theology

https://place.asburyseminary.edu/syllabi/4230/thumbnail.jp

Powers, Jonathan

Independent Study in Worship : Ethnodoxology

Ward, H. L., Jr.

Book Review: Generations: The Real Difference between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents – and What They Mean for America’s Future by Jean M. Twenge

Asbury Theological Seminary

Not a member yet

Know your role

Janet Soskice, NAMING GOD: ADDRESSING THE DIVINE IN PHILOSOPHY, THEOLOGY, AND SCRIPTURE

Asian church history: arise Asian church: outline and chronology (Supplementary)

Seminar in Theology

Independent Study in Worship : Ethnodoxology

Book Review: Generations: The Real Difference between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents – and What They Mean for America’s Future by Jean M. Twenge

Elementary Hebrew - One

Quiet, faithful obedience

Chaplains in Khaki: Methodist soldiers in Camp, on the Field, and on the March

Theology for Children and Youth

14,300

34,201