Update November 22, 2017: I’ve simplified, clarified, updated, and improved this post. Read this version in stead.
Hardly anybody ever mentions it, but two of the most well-known verses in the Old Testament have significant apologetic implications, lending support to the Bible’s supernatural origins. One of them I’m sure will be a surprise to many readers here; the other might also.
I will preview the argument before telling you which verses they are. In brief form it goes like this.
The ancient Hebrews’ conception of God and his relation to his creation was vastly different from that of others in the Ancient Near East. From a philosophical perspective it has been exceedingly successful for millennia since then: it was, in that sense, very highly advanced philosophy. Such uniquely prescient and enduringly successful thinking is not explained by any prior tradition, for there is no indication of advanced thought leading up to it either among the Hebrews or in any neighboring culture. Did it come from nowhere at all? Or did it come by revelation from God?
Or:
The ancient Hebrews were astonishingly advanced metaphysical thinkers. They produced a monotheism that stood in complete contrast to all other systems of thought at the time, that still works philosophically, and that today remains coherent within its own framework. How did these Bronze Age nomads and farmers accomplish that?
I have often heard it asked, “why should we look to ancient Bronze Age or Iron Age nomads/sheepherders/farmers for wisdom? What could they possibly say to us who have the advantage of so much more knowledge and science?” Good question. How could they have known anything at all that would stand the test of centuries of inquiry? But our two “overlooked apologetics verses” have done that. They are, as I said, very familiar:
Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
Exodus 3:13-14a “Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.”
The creation account in Genesis is astonishingly different from all other creation stories. Quoting from page 32 and following of Paul Copan and William Lane Craig, Creation out of Nothing: A Biblical, Philosophical, and Scientific Exploration:
Genesis is quite unlike the Mesopotamian cosmogonies [accounts of the origin of the cosmos], for instance, which are intertwined with theogonies—accounts of the origins of the gods. In them, we are not told so much about how the universe came about—the origin of the worlds is really accidental or secondary in ANE [Ancient Near East] accounts—but how the gods emerged. And in addition to the fact that these Mesopotamian cosmogonies are really concerned with the ancestors of the gods and how they got themselves organized, they do not even identify these gods as creators. So when it comes to the elements of the universe (the waters/deep, darkness), a deity either controls one or is one….
Further, Yahweh simply speaks, thereby creating; in other ANE cosmogonies, deities struggle to divide the waters. Also in Genesis 1, the astral bodies are not gods (as in ANE accounts) but are creations.…
Gerhard von Rad makes the powerful point that Israel’s worldview, as reflected in Genesis, drew a sharp demarcating line between God and the world. The material world is purged of any quality of the divine or the demonic….
In Genesis, we read of something marvelously different than in [Ugaritic cosmogony], with its gods and hostile powers (darkness, the waters/the deep): “These cosmic monsters are no longer primordial forces opposed to the Israelite God at the beginning of creation. Instead, they are creatures like other creatures rendered in this story.” Genesis 1 depicts a “divine mastery” over these forces….
In contrast to ANE myths, there are no rivals to the Creator in Genesis [chapter] 1—let alone preexistent matter…. There is no cosmic dualism or struggle at all.
There is more but I think you can see the point: the Genesis view of God and creation is starkly different from all other views of cosmic origins and of deity. This point extends beyond ANE cosmogonies. I believe it is the case that no other independently developed creation account is even remotely similar to that in Genesis. In all other accounts, either the material world is pre-existent along with the gods (there is something like this even in Plato), it is an emanation of some god or gods, or it is illusion.
Genesis is significant simply for its utter uniqueness. There’s something there that begs for explanation. But the argument I’m presenting is not just that. There is more to be said. It will fit better, however, once we have look at our second “overlooked apologetics verse.”
We need to approach the Exodus passage through the route of a question. How are humans known? From where do we derive our identities? The answer is, through relationships. First of all we’re known by our families. “Who is your father?” was the question in the ANE; today we’re still identified through our family names and our family heritage. We’re identified by our relationship to maleness and femaleness. As we grow and develop, our personalities are formed in relation to our relatives, our friends, even our foes or (if your school experience was like many) tormentors. Our identity is tied also to the land, also a relational matter (“Where are you from? What nationality are you?”) and to our work (“What do you do for a living?”).
How are gods known in myth? In exactly the same way: by relationship to one another and to the created order, and by what they do. Their identities too are relational.
And so it is with identity in every case. It is always relational. This is what makes Yahweh’s answer in Exodus so remarkable. In biblical culture much more than today’s, a person’s name and identity were wrapped up together with each other. God was known to the Hebrews by many titles, most of which had to do with his role or way of relating to creation: The Almighty, the Lord of Hosts (Armies), The Provider, and so on. But in Exodus Moses was apparently asking for something more: God’s actual name, which would reveal his full identity, his full relatedness. God consented to answer. And to what relationship did he point? “I AM WHO I AM.” He pointed to himself. No other relationship could be adequate to identify him. He was (and is) just who he was (and is).
Down the centuries since then much has been said about monotheism. Much philosophical and theological work has been plowed into exploring what it must mean that there is one God. Now for apologetical purposes we cannot assume that monotheism is true; that would be begging the question most illegitimately. But we can examine its implications: what if it is true? This kind of examination has been done for centuries. One of its most solid conclusions is that God is “self-existent.” He is what he is, without reference to any other being whatever. He is being itself. Blogger niwrad put it this way:
What theology calls “God,” metaphysics refers to as “Being.” And what we call the “universe” or the “cosmos” is simply the “universal existence” or “manifestation” of Being. The universal existence is everything that exists….
In metaphysics it is important to conceptually distinguish between the verbs “to be” and “to exist,” although in everyday language this difference doesn’t matter very much. The verb “to exist” (from the Latin “ex-sistere“) etymologically means “to stay outside.” Thus a thing exists when its principle or “sufficient reason” or cause stands outside itself. This is precisely the situation for all the things in the universe. On the other hand, the ontological verb “to be” has a nobler and more powerful meaning than the verb “to exist,” and for this reason it should be applied to the principle or cause of all that exists, i.e. Being, the First Cause.
The auxiliary verb “to be” is, logically and linguistically, the more important verb, as a consequence of its ontological supremacy. Every other verb, as well as any word or logical term whatsoever, presupposes the verb “to be,” and is, as it were, its consequence or effect.
That’s a very clear introduction to a very technical discussion, ending in the conclusion, God is he who is, to whom the verb to be applies uniquely. “I AM WHO I AM.” It couldn’t be said any better than that.
Whether a technical discussion like niwrad’s is clear to you is not as important for our purposes as this: advanced philosophical reflection concludes that a Bronze Age sheepherder’s name for God is as accurate a name as could possibly be advanced for a monotheistic God. The name of God Moses delivered was God being self-identified in terms of himself, for nothing but God himself is adequate for him by which to identify himself. God IS (from his first-person perspective, “I AM”). The verb to be there is the only one that suffices to describe the pure Being of God.
It would have been easy for Moses to tell the Israelites, “I was sent to you by God, and his name is ___. (Fill in the blank with any name of your choosing, or with a title like The Lord.) He didn’t do that. He said, “I AM has sent me.”
God’s name, his revealed identity, I AM WHO I AM, has never failed from within the context of monotheistic thought. It has stood many centuries’ test of philosophical and theological coherence.
This ties back to Genesis 1:1: God created the heavens and the earth from nothing. Besides himself, nothing was. There was God as pure Being, the totality of all reality. Creation had to be ex nihilo—from nothing (no preexisting matter, no material cause)—if there was to be any creation at all.
There is much I must leave unsaid about these philosophical and theological reflections upon God, and I do not suppose that what I’ve written in these prior paragraphs will be adequate or even understandable in this bare form. Suffice it to say that a very large body of literature has tested conceptions of what God must be like in his being, if there is one God; and although this literature exceeds the Old Testament in technical depth and complexity, and though we learn further aspects of God’s holy character from other biblical revelation, with respect to the being of God, the whole of all these years of reflection amounts to nothing more than footnotes to “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” and “I AM WHO I AM.”
I will recap the argument here.
- The idea of monotheism entails certain metaphysical and theological implications.
-
These implications have taken centuries to sort out and to refine, so that we can legitimately take it today that the art of thinking on monotheism has reached an advanced stage.
-
These centuries of work have confirmed the insights of the author of Genesis and Exodus on God’s self-existent eternal nature.
-
Genesis and Exodus are unique in their statements on these matters. No other ancient cosmogony or theology has had a view remotely similar to that of the books of Moses.
-
The question then is, from where did they derive an insight that would so successfully anticipate such advanced thinking, and endure for more than three thousand years?
Or in short: they did pretty well for simple Bronze Age farmers, coming up with metaphysical insight that would stand for more than three millennia. I think they had help.
I want to anticipate two objections. The first one I expect will go like this: “How can you say they anticipated such an advanced view of metaphysics and theology, when this supposedly advanced view is what you’re trying to prove in the first place? If your assumptions of monotheism are wrong, then monotheism isn’t advanced thinking, it’s just wrong thinking!”
The second objection is, “But of course modern monotheism is consistent with ancient Hebrew monotheism—all the monotheistic thinkers have based their work on the Old Testament; how could they possibly have come to any different conclusions?”
I can treat the two together easier than separately. Philosophical monotheism has many streams feeding it and a multiplicity of lines flowing out of it. Thinkers in this tradition have not only depended on the Old Testament, they have also put the Old Testament to the test. They have examined monotheism’s implications in terms quite foreign to the Bible’s language; for example, God is “that than which no greater can be conceived or could be.”
Even with these varied and complex approaches, the biblical view of God holds up. Consider the question, “what must be true of monotheism, if monotheism is true, based on our most advanced reflection upon the question?” The passages I’ve cited are astonishingly consistent with what has been discovered in pursuit of that question.
Tom: “the Genesis view of God and creation is starkly different from all other views of cosmic origins and of deity.”
It was this observation that set me on the path, during my university studies of world religions, to becoming a Christian. It is indeed a powerful apologetical stepping-stone. My path was:
1. A creator exists — no cartoon without a cartoonist; we are more complex than a cartoon figure.
2. Genesis observation you have highlighted, leading to…
3. Christ, and the words of Christ, e.g., “I am the way, the truth, the life”; “Come unto me…” I reasoned these words were not merely the words of an historical person who died, but were cosmic, universal, supra-historical in character; the person who spoke these words MUST BE LIVING. If living, then Lord.
That’s an interesting chain, Richard, and it makes sense. Thanks for sharing it.
Tom,
On the question of identity, it seems clear that the large majority of names for Yahweh are relational. In fact, it could be argued that all but the single one you mention are relational. So why should we focus on the one identification when it seems clear that, besides the one exception, God describes himself as a relational being? I think this goes somewhat into your preemptive argument against the first objection: you are assuming monotheism and divine independence and thereby placing emphasis on the exception when the general rule seems to be unabashedly and unapologetically relational. It is a similar thing in relation to anthropomorphism: God overwhelmingly describes himself in human terms, yet traditional Christian theology focuses on the very few exceptions as the truth and thereby has to severely qualify the general rule.
This isn’t problematic, even as a surface level?
What’s the problem? God relates to his creation, as I wrote in the post. I have several names: Dad, hubby, Son, and Tom, to name some of them. There is one that most uniquely identifies me, Thomas A. Gilson. My having one name that most uniquely identifies me is not obviated by my also having some names that don’t do that: Dad, husband, son. In fact, my having a unique identifier (full legal name, date of birth, social security number) is not even slightly diluted by my having other identifiers. My unique identifiers are exceptional: No one else possesses them. And their being exceptional makes them very important to me and to others who really need to know exactly who I am.
God has a very unique identifier which (contrary to what you wrote) is relational, in relation to himself. That fact is not obviated or diluted by his being known in other ways as well. This unique identifier is exceptional, which makes it appropriately important in knowing God.
By the way, I’m not “assuming monotheism and divine independence” for these purposes. I am taking that as knowledge, not as assumption.
“What’s the problem?” That was my reaction; I assumed I was missing something.
The atheist’s name for God is the “you’re not” — the diametric opposite of his self-declared “I AM”, and a denial of his most essential attribute. Talk about taking the wrong side on an important issue!
Also: Kevin, do you know what name of God the Jews have regarded for thousands of years as the name of God?
Tom,
Identity
Yes, but even your “unique identifier” has an apparent relational character, not only to your family with your surname, but with your wider culture at large (it’s an English name), the historical period in which it was given (names are more popular and acceptable at some times, like nowadays few people would choose Dorcas, and similarly with shortened versions, nicknames, formal vs. informal, etc.), etc.
But even you, a lowly human being, can go even further, which relates to your primary point in the post. You say,
Isn’t that exactly your own point with bringing up your name: yes, you could go through a practically infinite list of relationships that are part of who you are, but ultimately, in the end, all you can say is, “I am,” or, more colloquially put, “Here I am,” or, both more colloquially and poetically put, “Here I am, just as I am.” Yet this does not imply “advanced metaphysical think[ing]”, as you’re trying to say the Hebrews are implying when referring to God. There is absolutely nothing in this designation that implies necessary or self-existence from God’s own being, with no relationship with another. It is simply the end result of interrogating identity: ultimately you just get to the thing’s existence. This isn’t insignificant (in fact, it’s incredibly significant), but it doesn’t in any way entail, let alone require, the significance you claim it does.
I don’t know which name is the oldest, but I would imagine it is YHWH, which is probably what the answer in Exodus is derived from, which means “to be”, but could also be “He who lives”, particularly relevant as God is the font of breath, and hence life. I’m not arguing against any of that, but of the incredible jump across an infinite ontological divide from these designations to essential self-existence, which has no explicit presence in the Biblical text (it must be invoked as implicit at best or, with the Catholic approach, that such is an addition from the community of faith that need not be imputed to the Biblical authors themselves). In fact, there is no apparent presence of explicit ontological modalities or any such intricate philosophical concepts within the Biblical text itself and their imputation to that text seems incredibly anachronistic and eisegetical. Yes, we’ve gone over this ground before, but I thought I’d go ahead and say it again anyway.
Creation
No doubt this will create “here he goes again” moans from some of the regulars, but the best counter-interpretation, along with arguments, I can give is from the work of another (don’t worry, it’s not incredibly long): read from “3.0 The Biblical Doctrine of Creation from Pre-existing Chaos”. Within that section are responses to each of the points raised by Copan and
Craig (though from The New Mormon Challenge, though they are the same points). Taken with the previous arguments, I don’t see the great metaphysical intricacy or innovation of the Hebrews, though I will grant it to those philophiles (meant descriptively, not as an insult) in post-NT Christianity who imposed their philosophies on the Hebrew texts.