The Doctrine of God: A Global Introduction

© 2004, 2017 by Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen

Published by Baker Academic

a division of Baker Publishing Group

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Ebook edition created 2017

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

ISBN 978-1-4934-1025-5

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

Scripture quotations labeled KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture quotations labeled NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations labeled RSV are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Contents

Cover    i

Title Page    iii

Copyright Page    iv

Abbreviations    vii

Preface    ix

Introduction: God-Talk Then and Now    1

Part 1:  The Texture of Historical Developments    7

1. Biblical Narrative and Testimonies of God    9

For Orientation: God-Talk in the Bible

Old Testament: Jewish Monotheism

New Testament: Christian Trinitarian Monotheism

2. The Rise and Consolidation of the Christian Doctrine of God    35

Classical Theism: What Is It?

Early Fathers on God and Trinity

The Emergence of the Trinitarian Doctrine and Its Challengers

Patristic and Creedal Establishment of the Doctrine of God

3. From the Medieval to the Modern Quest for God    59

Mystical Visions and Sophisticated Doctrines of Medieval Times

The Zenith of Classical Theism: The Schoolmen on the Doctrine of God

The Rise of the Social Model of the Trinity

The Reformers and Their Followers on God

The Mystical Experience of God among Catholic Reformers

Post-Reformation Testimonies and Doctrines

God in Modernity

Reflections: Looking Back and Forward

Part 2:  God in Contemporary Theological Interpretations    89

4. Interpretations of God among European Theologies    93

God as the Wholly Other: Karl Barth

God as the Mystery of the World: Karl Rahner

God as Communion: John Zizioulas and Eastern Orthodox Tradition

God as the Power of the Future: Wolfhart Pannenberg

The Crucified God: Jürgen Moltmann

God’s Existence in Dispute: Secularism and New Atheism(s)

Reflections on Contemporary European Views of God

5. Interpretations of God from Diverse North American Contexts    121

For Orientation: The North American Mosaic

Rebuttals to Classical Theism: Secular and Process Theologies

Revisions of Classical Theism: Contextual Interpretations

Revisiting Classical Theism: Evangelicalism and Open Theism

Reflections on the North American Scene

6. Interpretations of God in the Global South    165

For Orientation: Theology Goes Global

God in African Theologies

God in Latin American Theologies

God in Asian Theologies

Reflections on Non-Western God-Talk

Part 3:  The Christian God among Religions    199

7. Christian Theology Faces Religious Plurality and Pluralism(s)     201

Religious Plurality as a New Challenge

Theological Responses to Pluralism(s)

How to Approach the Dialogical Comparative Task

8. The Gods of the Religions    215

Allah of Islam

The Deities of Hinduism

Any Deities in Buddhism?

Concluding Reflections on the Comparative Theological Exercise

Epilogue: The Future of God-Talk in the Third Millennium    241

Subject Index    245

Scripture Index    257

Back Cover    260

Abbreviations

Preface

For some time I had wanted to revise this textbook, written more than a decade ago. My initial plan was to correct some inaccuracies and poor formulations, update the references, and make documentation more detailed. However, having started planning for the work, it became clear to me that a virtual rewriting would be necessary because of the rapid growth of publications and proliferation of views in this field. Furthermore, when preparing for another textbook on a closely related topic a few years after the publication of this work—namely, The Trinity: Global Perspectives (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2007)—I was given another opportunity to continue investigating the topic. Even more important, recent sustained engagement with the doctrine of God in the context of both Christian tradition and four other living faiths, leading to the publication of Trinity and Revelation, the second volume of A Constructive Christian Theology for the Pluralistic World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), forced me to deepen my understanding, clarify some issues, and formulate my own current understanding. Hopefully, all these learning experiences have come to bear on this second edition.

At the same time, I have continued to teach theology students not only in the United States (Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California) and Europe (University of Helsinki, Finland) but also in various locations in the Global South. That long experience has forced me to think about how best to communicate these lessons to students and other interested readers. I have done my best in making the book more accessible and classroom friendly.

Throughout the text I have used insights and contributions from the most recent publications and research at the international and ecumenical levels. In addition to having revised the whole text, including taking stock of recent literature and adding a number of new references, I have also added a whole new section. Part 3 places the Christian doctrine of God in the context of religious plurality and focuses on perceptions and interpretations of the Divine among three living faith traditions: Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. It also attempts some important comparisons in relation to the Christian doctrine of God.

As it now stands, the text provides a concise introduction to biblical and historical developments in the doctrine of God as well as a wide survey of contemporary global diversity in both the Global North and South, including teachings of some living faith traditions. It seems to me that no other textbook attempts such a wide reach.

I am deeply grateful to Robert Hosack at Baker Academic, who helped me gain this opportunity for revision. Throughout the final editorial process, Baker Academic editor Eric Salo’s attention to details and need for clarity helped make the text more precise and user friendly. My Hungarian American doctoral student Viktor Toth checked all the bibliographic references and compiled the indexes. As always, I am deeply grateful to my wife of over three decades, Anne-Paivi, without whose support this book would never have seen daylight, either in its first or second edition.

To God be the glory!

Introduction

God-Talk Then and Now

The Obligation—and Impossibility—of God-Talk

Augustine of Hippo, the great theologian and philosopher of the Christian church from the fifth century, set the tone for any inquiry into the mystery of God. In his celebrated De Trinitate (On the Trinity), the bishop penned:

Further let me ask of my reader, wherever, alike with myself, he is certain, there to go on with me; wherever, alike with myself, he hesitates, there to join with me in inquiring; wherever he recognizes himself to be in error, there to return to me; wherever he recognizes me to be so, there to call me back: so that we may enter together upon the path of charity, and advance towards Him of whom it is said, Seek His face evermore. And I would make this pious and safe agreement, in the presence of our Lord God, with all who read my writings . . . because in no other subject is error more dangerous, or inquiry more laborious, or the discovery of truth more profitable.1

As theologians, we are bound to talk about God, not only because theology as talk/speaking (logos) about God (theos) inevitably deals with God, but also primarily because essential to every religious system is the belief that reality is more than what is perceived, that sensory experience communicates only a superficial appearance of what is really real. Thus beneath, underneath or above what we see and hear is a transcendent yet present reality that is suprasensory, supranatural, spiritual, divine, or all of these.2

We are confronted, therefore, with the obligation to speak of God while at the same time acknowledging the impossibility of that kind of discourse. No one expressed this dilemma more powerfully than Karl Barth, the church father of the twentieth century: As ministers we ought to speak of God. We are human, however, and so cannot speak of God. We ought therefore to recognize both our obligation and our inability and by that very recognition give God the glory. This is our perplexity.3

We could, of course, try to avoid this challenge simply by pulling together biblical materials relating to God. Theology, however, by its nature goes beyond the Bible and addresses questions that the Bible does not address (even though the practice of theology involves looking at the biblical materials and assessing to what extent biblical guidelines were honored in the theological discourse). Donald G. Bloesch, the premier late North American evangelical theologian, put the matter in a proper perspective:

In the awesome attempt to define God, theology must do more than simply repeat the mainly figurative language of the biblical narrative. It must also draw upon the conceptual language of philosophy in order to illuminate the mystery of the God who revealed himself in biblical history and most of all in Jesus Christ. The Bible is not a treatise on metaphysics, but its affirmations have ineradicable metaphysical implications. It does not present us with a full-blown ontology, but its depictions of God have an unmistakable ontological cast.4

Thus theology is left with the virtually impossible task of speaking about God. How do we do this at the beginning of the third millennium?

New Horizons for God-Talk

Living as we do at the beginning of a new millennium, we are faced by a most creative paradox. On the one hand, there is no denying the seemingly insurmountable problems associated with talk about God following the Enlightenment and especially the advent of postmodernism. Although belief and faith have not disappeared in the beginning of the third millennium, traditional confidence in the reliability—often even in the meaningfulness—of Christian talk about God is seriously shaken.5 If any discourse is highly suspect, it is certainly talk about God. Add to that the profound challenge coming from religious plurality and interfaith issues: to many it seems impossible to even begin to talk about the one and only God, the true God. On the other hand, ironic as it may sound, there is no denying the fact that toward the end of the second millennium the doctrine of God, in both philosophical theology and systematic theology, has taken on new relevance. Numerous exciting developments are taking place, many of which are highlighted in this book.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Scottish theologian James Orr, in his celebrated Progress of Dogma,6 made the claim that various doctrines were at the forefront of discussion in different times and contexts. Students of the history of theology know that christological and trinitarian debates, coupled with a growing interest in aspects of the doctrine of salvation, took the upper hand during the first centuries. In medieval times, the doctrine of atonement was in vogue. The doctrine of the church lay dormant until the Reformation. Toward the end of the second millennium, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit took on a new significance, so much so that we can even speak of a pneumatological renaissance.7 Along with the interest in the Holy Spirit, desire to know deeper the mystery of the Trinity emerged,8 and—related to that inquiry—a robust search for new insights into the doctrine of God, especially the relationship between God and the world, was initiated.

New proposals for understanding the God-world dynamic were suggested, such as those coming from American process theology and forms of panentheism.9 The boundaries of God-talk began to be challenged by new interpretations ranging from secular to death-of-God to political to—most recently—ecological or green theology. Women joined the discourse about God with the emergence of feminist and other female theologians’ movements. They challenged the sexist, as they saw it, talk about God as Father. A growing body of literature from non-Western contexts came into focus beginning in the early 1970s. Latin American liberation theology talked about God in relation to social, political, and economic issues; African theologies rooted God-talk in the culture of ancestors, spirits, and communalism; and Asian interpretations of God took their departure in the mystical, aesthetic, and pluralistic context of Asia. Most recently, a rich and variegated investigation of the relation of the Christian God to deities of other faiths has taken center place. In sum: the doctrine of God is alive and well at the beginning of this millennium!

So here we are in the midst of a most exciting, challenging, perhaps even disturbing renewal of the discourse about God. This book offers a survey—or takes stock—of most of the important developments regarding the doctrine of God. But how do current developments relate to what has come before? In other words, what is the relationship between Christian tradition and current interpretations of God? This question is crucial for the following survey and also guided the selection of materials.

Classical Theism under Attack

In systematic theology, it has become customary to use classical theism as a generic term designating traditional approaches to the discourse about God. The meaning of this widely debated term will become evident later in the discussion; for now, a tentative description suffices. Classical theism denotes postbiblical developments of early Christian theology as it sought to express faith in the biblical God with the help of Greco-Roman philosophical categories. These developments reached a peak in the highly philosophical, speculative systems of medieval Scholasticism and were further refined particularly by post-Reformation Protestant orthodoxy.

The picture of God that emerged from that philosophical and speculative gristmill, while suited for the purposes of early apologetic and later speculative philosophical theologies, has, since the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, come under criticism by a number of theological movements. Complaints have been many: the God of classical theism as an Unmoved Mover, while enjoying his own perfect fullness of being, is distanced from the world, unaffected by the happenings of history, unrelated to Christian life (let alone social and political struggles), and so on. Furthermore, say critics from a wide variety of traditions, that kind of God is also far removed from the dynamic, narrative, life-related discourse of the Bible, especially in the Old Testament. Bloesch summarized succinctly the implications to current theology (without necessarily endorsing all of them himself):

Much of the reinterpretation of the doctrine of God can be traced to a rising reaction against classical theism—the legacy of Hellenism that has left an indelible imprint on Christian theology. Here God is depicted as immutable, self-contained, all-sufficient, impassible, supremely detached from the world of pain and suffering. How can this kind of God be reconciled with the biblical God who earnestly cares for his people—even to the extent of taking their pain and guilt upon himself in the incarnation and atoning death of his Son?10

Consequently, the present book has two main purposes: first, to survey interpretations of God throughout Christian history, including the biblical testimonies, and second, to let the classical theistic tradition and its challengers converse with one another. There is a plurality of testimonies concerning God and God’s relationship with humans, beginning from the biblical testimonies; rather than suppressing that plurality, we need to listen carefully to the rich symphony of voices. This survey, therefore, attempts to be comprehensive by including all major interpretations, whether biblical, historical, or contemporary (both mainline and contextual, such as the voices of women and other minorities). It follows the exciting and winding developments of the doctrine of God in Christian theology by highlighting the sometimes radically contrasting views.

A Brief Description of the Book

The plan of the book is as follows. Part 1, The Texture of Historical Developments, begins by delving into biblical testimonies concerning God in light of recent scholarship. A lengthier historical survey of diverse interpretations of God linked with classical theism follows. That survey alone should caution the reader not to be fixated on too simplistic a view of the ways that Christian tradition understood God in various times. Whatever classical theism may mean, it never was uniform.

Part 2, God in Contemporary Theological Interpretations, discusses contemporary interpretations of God, the primary focus of this book, and is divided into three main sections: European theologies of God, interpretations of God from diverse North American contexts, including the contextual ones, and views of God in the Global South (Africa, Asia, and Latin America). During the time when most Christians live outside Europe and North America, it is scandalous that African, Asian, and Latin American theologies are hardly mentioned in textbooks, let alone given a fair treatment. This book considers them not only as interesting additional spices on top of the meat, as it were, but also as key ingredients in the menu of contemporary Christian theologies.

Part 3, The Christian God among Religions, concludes the book by opening windows into the world of other religions. It places the Christian doctrine of God in the context of religious plurality and focuses on perceptions and interpretations of the Divine among three living faith traditions: Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. It also attempts some important comparisons in relation to the Christian doctrine of God.

1. Augustine, On the Holy Trinity 1.3.5 (NPNF¹ 3:19).

2. Ted Peters, God—the World’s Future: Systematic Theology for a Postmodern Era (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 83.

3. Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man, trans. Douglas Horton (1928; repr., New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), 186.

4. Donald G. Bloesch, God the Almighty: Power, Wisdom, Holiness, Love (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1995), 31.

5. See Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Trinity and Revelation, vol. 2 of A Constructive Christian Theology for the Pluralistic World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), chap. 9.

6. James Orr, The Progress of Dogma (1901; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1952).

7. See Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Holy Spirit: A Guide to Christian Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2012); Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, ed., Holy Spirit and Salvation: The Sources of Christian Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010).

8. See Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, The Trinity: Global Perspectives (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2007).

9. Different from pantheism, which virtually equates God with the world, the neologism pan-en-theism implies pulling God and the world close together yet maintaining the distinction (to a lesser or greater extent).

10. Bloesch, God the Almighty, 21.

Part 1

The Texture of Historical Developments

The first part of this book discusses the rich narrative of biblical testimonies of God and the ways they are interpreted in contemporary scholarship. This is followed by a lengthier historical survey of theological interpretations of God. Alas, such a historical survey has to be selective rather than comprehensive. The special focus of this discussion is the meaning and implications of what in academic theology came to be called classical theism. Both its meaning and diversity of interpretations will be highlighted.

1

Biblical Narrative and Testimonies of God

For Orientation: God-Talk in the Bible

Who is God according to the Christian faith? What characteristics does God possess? What distinguishes the Christian God from other gods? The simplest way to address these questions is to guide the inquiring person to the Bible. After all, Christian churches at all times have claimed to found their faith on the biblical revelation. Yet declaring that the Bible is the guide to the doctrine of the Christian God—as if a careful reading of the biblical text coupled with a thorough and systematic classification of relevant passages would answer all questions about God—is a claim in need of qualifications.

First, the Bible is not a collection of ready-made doctrines, even though preachers and teachers of the church since ancient days have often handled the Bible as though it were. Rather, the Bible is a compilation of testimonies about God from various contexts and perspectives. Most of the Bible, and certainly the Old Testament, is in the form of stories, testimonies, chronicles, worship hymns, questions to God, and so on. Therefore, it is only by carefully listening to the narrative of the Old Testament that we gain a perspective on who God is. This issue has not always been acknowledged by Christian theologians. The reminder of John Goldingay, an Old Testament theologian, merits attention:

Christian theology has not regularly talked about God in narrative terms. The creeds, for instance, are structured around the persons of Father, Son, and Spirit, and systematic theology has often taken God’s trinitarian nature as its structural principle. Before the revival of trinitarian thinking in the late twentieth century, systematic theology often emphasized the fundamental significance of attributes of God such as omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, and perfection.1

Second, as a book written and edited by a number of people over many centuries, the Bible cherishes a plurality of voices. It is not a homogeneous book, nor is it supposed to be read in a univocal way. Take for instance the existence of four Gospels or two sets of historical books covering basically the same materials (Samuel-Kings and Chronicles). The Christian church claims that there is a common core, a set of shared convictions among the legitimate plurality, rather than a cacophony of disconnected voices. At the same time, the church seeks to embrace the whole diversity of biblical revelation’s voices, testimonies, and insights. An apt illustration of the Bible would be a symphony with numerous melody and harmony variations.

Third, God’s revelation in the Bible has a developing, growing, evolving nature. When we open the Bible and start reading about God the Creator in Genesis, we do not have all the perspectives we have by the end of the book of Revelation. To do justice to the Bible’s view of God, we need to be patient and follow the various streams that run through the canon.

For our purposes here—a book about systematic rather than biblical theology—the task of looking at the biblical data is even more demanding. Systematic theology should always take a hard look at the biblical data, but by nature its task is to go beyond—hopefully not against—the biblical revelation and then, at the end of the day, to double-check whether theological ideas are in harmony with biblical orientations. Systematic theology asks many questions about which the biblical revelation is silent. With regard to the doctrine of God, take these for example: How do we address God the Father in an inclusive way? What is the influence of particular worldviews and philosophies on the doctrine of God? How can we speak of the Christian God in a way that relates to other living faiths?

Old Testament: Jewish Monotheism

God through the Lens of Narrative, Testimonies, and Disputes

The Old Testament’s narrative and nonsystematic presentation of God is profoundly honored in the leading American Old Testament theologian Walter Brueggemann’s theology. Having stated that the primal subject of an Old Testament theology is of course God, Brueggemann issues a statement very similar to the one by Goldingay cited above:

But because the Old Testament does not (and never intends to) provide a coherent and comprehensive offer of God, this subject matter is more difficult, complex, and problematic than we might expect. For the most part, the Old Testament text gives us only hints, traces, fragments, and vignettes, with no suggestion of how all these elements might fit together, if indeed they do. What does emerge, in any case, is an awareness that the elusive but dominating Subject of the Old Testament cannot be comprehended in any preconceived categories. The God of the Old Testament does not easily conform to the expectations of Christian dogmatic theology, nor to the categories of any Hellenistic perennial philosophy. . . . The Character who will emerge from such a patient study at the end will still be elusive and more than a little surprising.2

In keeping with the narrative, dynamic understanding, in the Old Testament God is known by what God does.3 This simple yet profound insight forms the whole structure and leading motif for the first volume of Goldingay’s Old Testament Theology. In that narrative,

God began;

God started over;

God promised;

God delivered;

God sealed;

God gave;

God accommodated;

God wrestled;

God preserved.4

Brueggemann’s Theology of the Old Testament expresses the same approach by employing court terminology, as expressed in the subtitle of his magnum opus: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy. Israel’s Core Testimony (the title of part 1) comes in three forms, all of them directly or indirectly related to what God does: testimonies in verbal sentences (testimonies to God’s mighty deeds), testimonies in adjectives (testimonies to what God is like when one considers his actions), and testimonies in nouns (testimonies concerning how to name the God who acts and saves).

Let us follow the methodological desiderata of these two Old Testament scholars and seek to paint a dynamic and lively picture of who God appears to be in the first part of the Christian Bible, which is Israel’s Tanakh (aka Old Testament). A fitting place to begin is the central Old Testament idea of God, that is, strict monotheism, a core conviction of all three Abrahamic faiths.

The Emergence of Jewish Monotheism

The term monotheism (from the Greek monos, one, and theos, God) is best illustrated in the famous Shema, Israel’s confession of faith: Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one (Deut. 6:4). Quite early, the Israelites left behind henotheism—the belief that other gods exist but that only their God is to be worshiped—and embraced monotheism. Whatever other influences there might have been, there is no doubt that the great monotheistic religions, including Islam, owe their theological understanding primarily to the witness of the biblical texts.5 Notwithstanding continuing scholarly disputes about historical details, including whether the Israelites ever were polytheists (believers in several gods), most scholars of religion accept the early existence of monotheism among the Israelites.6 What really made Israel unique among the neighboring nations such as the Hittites and the Edomites, who worshiped their own gods, was Israel’s uncompromising acknowledgment of only one God. That is more than the general idea of a high God. Part of Israel’s preservation of monotheism was the refusal to erect any statues or create any pictures of God, a common feature in the history of religions.

Furthermore, the Israelites’ conception of their God’s activity in the world set it apart from other nations:

Other nations of course described their goddesses or gods as acting in history; Marduk, for instance, helped the Babylonians secure prosperity and defeat their enemies. And Israel saw Yahweh at work in the world of nature and the cycle of the seasons. But Yahweh acted primarily in the great events of the nation’s history, while the deities of neighboring nations generally had more to do with safeguarding the repeated annual cycle of vegetation. That meant that, in contrast to divinities whose function was to guarantee that the same thing would keep happening—the yearly flood of the Nile, the appearance of spring—Yahweh made new things happen. His people escaped Egypt, they settled a new land, and so on.7

In other words, Israel’s religion took a particular interest in historical changes and world events. Israel’s God, unlike most other gods, was not only the guarantor of moral norms but could also guide and criticize the monarchy. God was not in the service of the people; the people were subject to God.8 At the same time, God was to be trusted in all events and under all circumstances. Out of that trust emerged some well-known descriptions of God’s character, such as the one found in Exodus 34:6–7:

The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.

The biblical descriptions of God are as much a confession of faith as statements based on observation. They point to the trustworthiness and reliability of God. At the same time, these expressions are highly relational: they articulate the ways in which Yahweh relates to ‘us,’ to Israel, to whomever is Yahweh’s partner in a particular testimonial utterance.9

Names and acts of God are major elements of identifying and narrating about God in the Old Testament. Furthermore, a number of metaphors are used in describing God’s character and workings. Let us highlight some of the most pertinent ones in what follows.

The God Named

The First Testament introduces its main character’s name abruptly: "In the beginning God [Elohim] . . . No apologies, no apologetics, just plain talk. Genesis does not start like a modern legal document, with a preamble defining key terms. It begins in the middle of things, like the narrative that it is. God is a fully realized character" even though people discover that only by attuning to the story.10

The general name Elohim11 (rendered God in most English translations) and the uniquely Israelite Tetragrammaton, YHWH (usually transliterated Yahweh or Jehovah and translated LORD in English Bibles), are the first names to be introduced in the Bible. The latter nomenclature relates to the special covenant between Israel and God. There is thus both universality (Elohim) and particularity (YHWH), a dynamic that characterizes the rest of the biblical narrative of God.

Particularity comes to the fore in the all-important self-identification of Israel’s God as YHWH in Exodus 3. Although the name has already been in use from the first pages of the Bible, only here, in a personal encounter with Moses, is its significance in focus. This somewhat mysterious self-designation YHWH is theologically important because it further indicates the actuality of personal meeting. It proffers no new propositional information, but is a crucial revelation of the speaker’s identity as the one who has related to Moses’ people in the past. This is no new God, even if this is a new revelation for Moses and his contemporaries.12