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Divine Simplicity and Scripture: a Theological Reading of Exodus 3:14

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Divine Simplicity and Scripture: a Theological Reading of Exodus 3:14 Scottish Journal of Theology (2020), 73, 295–306 doi:10.1017/S0036930620000629 RESEARCH ARTICLE Divine simplicity and scripture: a theological reading of Exodus 3:14 Jonathan M. Platter* Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK *Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected] Abstract Exodus 3:14 had traditionally been taken as God’s self-identification as ‘being-itself’,and hence as a source for the doctrine of divine simplicity. I begin this essay by arguing that the appropriateness of this interpretation of Exodus 3:14 should be evaluated by attention to the judgements about God made within scripture rather than merely the semantic range of a few words. There are three questions elicited by Exodus 3:1–14, concerning God’sincom- parability, intimacy and ineffability, that are relevant to the significance of verse 14 for divine simplicity. Consideration of the kind of judgements these questions elicit about God allows a case to be made for the aptness of divine simplicity to hold the judgements together, thereby allowing for a more sympathetic retrieval of premodern uses of Exodus 3:14. Keywords: being itself; divine simplicity; Exodus 3:14; theological interpretation; Gerhard von Rad For much of Christian tradition, Exodus 3:14 has been understood as God’s self- identification with ‘being-itself’, and hence as a source for the doctrine of divine sim- plicity. However, recent linguistic studies have rendered the ontological reading of 3:14 as ‘I AM THE ONE WHO IS’ less plausible, in particular by arguing that the Hebrew is more faithfully rendered as ‘I AM WHO I AM’ or ‘I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE’. There have been a number of responses from theologians and philosophers of religion, and in this paper I contribute to the task of rearticulating the connection between Exodus 3:14 and divine simplicity.1 By ‘divine simplicity’ I mean the claim that God is not composite in any way: God does not have physical parts and is not spatially extended, but neither does God have metaphysical parts, as if God were ‘made up’ of more basic components 1E. L. Mascall suggests that, though the precise wording of Exodus 3:14 does not readily permit the more ontological interpretation, the latter can be developed out of the broader Old Testament witness to the uniqueness and power of God (E. L. Mascall, Existence and Analogy: A Sequel to ‘He Who Is’ (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1949), pp. 12–15). More recently, Katherine Sonderegger has proposed yet another way of reading Exodus 3:14 in line with the doctrine of divine simplicity in terms of the perfect identity of subject and object in God’s action and self-disclosure (Katherine Sonderegger, The Doctrine of God,vol.1ofSystematic Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2015), pp. 210–23; cf. pp. 80–2). Though I am sympathetic with Mascall’s and Sonderegger’s approaches, they also have limitations. Mascall’s approach requires sweeping – and therefore highly contestable – generalisations in OT theology; and Sonderegger’s approach does not relate directly (or at least explicitly) to the traditional connection of divine simplicity with Exodus 3:14 as formulated by the church fathers. © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.35.229, on 02 Oct 2021 at 05:19:05, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0036930620000629 296 Jonathan M. Platter or determinations of the divine being.2 One of the most radical articulations of divine simplicity also insists that with respect to God it is not possible to distinguish between either subject and existence or essence and existence. God is perfectly identical to the divine act of existence; for if there are no metaphysical categories more basic than God, then in God the distinctions between these categories break down, and what the categories express converge extensionally.3 I propose reading the self-designation in Exodus 3:14 within the broader scene of Exodus 3:1–14. First, I discuss some preliminary concerns of interpretation. I offer a summary of the criticisms of an ontological reading of Exodus 3:14 and then offer some hermeneutical reflections that will guide my reading of the text. Second, I present my narrative reading of Exodus 3:1–14 and find three questions present within the nar- rative that are significant for metaphysical discussion of the divine being. I argue that the text as a whole elicits questions of God’s incomparability, intimacy and ineffability. Third, I present the traditional doctrine of divine simplicity in discussion with these three questions. I argue that the form of divine simplicity presented in dialogue with Exodus 3:14 can be seen as in part a gloss on the perfect compatibility of God’s fiery presence in the burning bush with God’s transcendence. While this reading of Exodus 3 does not logically necessitate the doctrine of divine simplicity as I am articu- lating it, it does permit it. Further, the doctrine of divine simplicity and Exodus 3:1–14 are, on this reading, mutually illuminating. Preliminary considerations Among premodern theologians, the identification of God with being-itself was readily confirmed or even derived from God’s self-designation in Exodus 3:14. Authors as otherwise diverse as Philo, Augustine, John of Damascus, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Thomas Aquinas are in agreement that Exodus 3:14 identifies God as being itself. In biblical studies, beginning at least in the early twentieth century, this premodern interpretation has been diversely treated, though largely rejected as so much Hellenisation of Hebrew thought. One problem raised for our engagement with premodern exegesis is that their interpretation is based on the Greek and Latin translations of the original Hebrew. The Hebrew ’ehyeh ’ašer ’ehyeh is claimed to have less resonance with ‘being’ in an abstract sense than do the Septuagint’s ego eimi ho ōn and the Vulgate’s ego sum qui sum. This raises the question of what the Hebrew text is in fact doing if it does not license speculation about the being or exist- ence of God. An example of this critique of premodern readings of Exodus 3:14 can be found in Gerhard von Rad, who proposes a non-metaphysical reading: Nothing is farther from what is envisaged … than a definition of [God’s] nature in the sense of a philosophical statement about his being – a suggestion, for example, 2For an extended discussion along these lines, see James E. Dolezal, God without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of God’s Absoluteness (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2011). 3I insist that the convergence is only extensional and not intentional, at least to the extent that the cat- egories as we use them do not become synonymous. Or, in Thomistic language, there is always a distinction between the res significata and the modus significandi, so that all God’s names or perfections are identical in respect of the res significata but distinct according to the modus significandi. On Thomas’ use of this dis- tinction, see Gregory Rocca, ‘The Distinction between Res Significata and Modus Significandi in Aquinas’s Theological Epistemology’, The Thomist 55/2 (April 1991), pp. 173–97. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.35.229, on 02 Oct 2021 at 05:19:05, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0036930620000629 Scottish Journal of Theology 297 of his absoluteness, aseity, etc. Such a thing would be altogether out of keeping with the Old Testament. The whole narrative context leads right away to the expectation that Jahweh intends to impart something – but this is not what he is, but what he will show himself to be to Israel.4 For von Rad it is not only the case that the original Hebrew is not as exclusively oriented to the disclosure of the divine ‘being’ as in the later Greek and Latin translations, but that those later translations are in fact opposed to the meaning of the original text. Such a conclusion would seem to present a final verdict, foreclosing the premodern attempt to reconcile God’s self-disclosure with the speculative naming of God as ‘being itself’–that is, naming God as perfectly simple. However, there are problems with the argument as it stands, which have elicited several responses. Within the guild of biblical scholars, Andrea Saner has pointed out the problems of circularity in historical recon- structions on which arguments like von Rad’s depend.5 And both Michael Allen and Paul Gavrilyuk have posed serious challenges to the function of the ‘Hellenisation the- sis’ (i.e. that philosophical readings of scripture are corrupted by the influence of Greek thought) in claims like von Rad’s. Allen and Gavrilyuk argue that the Hellenisation thesis typically presupposes an overly monolithic understanding of Greek thought, an unsupported claim that early Christians used Greek thought uncritically and an unsus- tainable assumption that all cultural and philosophical borrowing is antithetical to the gospel.6 To this I add a further problem, especially relevant to von Rad’s claim. Von Rad’s interpretation of Exodus 3:14 in an explicitly non-metaphysical manner assumes a clear distinction between metaphysical and non-metaphysical judgements about God, attaching the former to later Hellenised thinking and the latter to Hebrew thinking.
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