Called by a New Name: Naming, Power, and Possibility

The following is an excerpt from Interpreting Your World: Five Lenses for Engaging Theology and Culture by Justin Bailey ©2022, used by permission of Baker Academic, a division of Baker Publishing Group. It has been edited for clarity and brevity for the purposes of this post.

Meaning making always has a power dimension. An essential part of the “dominion” entrusted to humanity in the early pages of Scripture is the power to name the world: “Whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name” (Gen. 2:19). Naming here represents the attempt to find a connection between the sound of the word and the sense of where each named thing fits in the world. As Hans Rookmaaker puts it, “The uniqueness of [humanity’s] relationship to both God and the world is at once apparent in the name-giving with which man started his activities, for giving a name is more than just labeling things in an arbitrary way. It means ordering, finding relationships, and perceiving individual qualities. It means discovering, not inventing (for man does not really invent anything), what the created world in its inexhaustible multiformity and variety has to offer.”

The larger point: original power is fundamentally the exercise of creativity, and this power exists for the sake of the flourishing of creation. Naming is an exercise not of raw power that confers identity but of creative agency that discerns identity among ordered relationships. Prior to humanity’s estrangement from God, there is a sense of harmony between the world and the way humans name it. The world yields itself to humanity for naming, just as the ground offers itself for gardening. To name the world is to tell the truth about it, as carefully and clearly as we can.

But outside Eden, the task of naming becomes fraught with trouble. The creational call for loving dominion gives way to a sinful lust for domination. Creativity gives way to coercion. Rather than seeking lovingly to unfold the potencies of creation, we use our words in service of our own survival and success, seeking power over other image bearers. We cannot help but name the world. But our naming often only captures our own self-serving perspective, failing to discern right relationships within the created order. Apart from divine intervention, we name the world as those estranged from the God whose creational intent gives our meaning its ground and coherence with reality. Indeed, now a malignancy – sin – has been unleashed in the world. Human rebellion reaches a climax at the tower of Babel (Gen. 11:4), where divine judgment falls on human words, confusing their languages, and scattering them.

The confusion—intended as both judgment and mercy—remains with us in a multilingual, multicultural world. As a resident of the midwestern United States with dark hair and brown skin, I can’t count the number of times I’ve been asked some version of the question, “Where are you from?” (Kansas!) or even more explicitly, “What are you?” (human!). I take these questions to be primarily a matter of curiosity, a desire to place me, even to hear a bit of my story. But when you are repeatedly asked these questions wherever you go, you begin to get the sense that although you are welcomed, you are still counted as an outsider, someone who is “not from here.”

These smaller slights are given out of ignorance rather than malice. But it is also the case that those who consider themselves to be insiders (closer to the center of power) often use their words to reinscribe the lines of belonging. There is clearly a battle over how we name the world (e.g., What pronouns should we use? Should our politicians say “illegal immigrant” or “undocumented person”?). All words have histories, and meaning is constantly updated by use. Certain words and names should never be spoken—even in playful jest—because of the way they have been used to demean, degrade, and dehumanize image bearers.

This history should humble us. It testifies to the way that we have misused our power as stewards of creation in the attempt to be petty sovereigns, wannabe rulers accountable to no one but ourselves. It is no surprise that human culture from the time of Cain and Lamech is characterized by taking, killing, and empire building. Nor is it a surprise that naming becomes an exercise of raw power, either of self-assertion or domination.

Nevertheless, the whole of human life consists of more than oppression and subversion. The desire to dominate may situate our meaning making, but (against the masters of suspicion) it is not the sum of human desire. There are more dimensions of life than the political, and we can see the range of this as we consider the way naming works in the pages of the Bible. Naming is primarily conceived of as a way of making sense of experience, as in the forty or so instances in the Bible where a child is named to express gratitude, hope, or some other circumstance attending birth. Naomi, bereaved of husband and sons, renames herself Mara because of the bitterness that has befallen her (Ruth 1:20). Other times in Scripture, having multiple names is the result of inhabiting multiple cultural spaces (e.g., James/Jacob, Tabitha/Dorcas). And then there are the names given by conquerors to the conquered, as when Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah are carried into exile by the Babylonians, and as part of a forced cultural assimilation are renamed Belteshazzar, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego (Dan. 1:7). And yet, even as these characters are in danger of losing their cultural and religious identity, they assert their agency in resisting the logic of the empire.

And yet, the most important names are never the ones conferred by those in power. Nor are they even the identities that we take up for ourselves to assert our agency and resist assimilation. The most important names are the ones offered to us by God. The most important perspective that Scripture has to give us on the power of names comes from those parts of the story where God steps in to offer a new name. Here we could mention Abram (renamed Abraham), Sarai (renamed Sarah), or Jacob (renamed Israel). We can also consider the promise of the prophet Isaiah to the inhabitants of Jerusalem:

You will be called by a new name,

which the Lord’s own mouth will determine.

You will be a splendid garland in the Lord’s hand,

a royal turban in the palm of God’s hand.

You will no longer be called Abandoned,

and your land will no longer be called Deserted.

Instead, you will be called My Delight Is in Her,

and your land, Married.

Because the Lord delights in you,

your land will be cared for once again. (Isa. 62:2–4 CEB)

Similarly, Paul tells the Galatians, “All of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:27–28). Being “clothed” with Christ does not rewrite our prior history or remove all markers of difference. Rather, it bestows a new primary identity, reconfiguring our relationships, especially where power differentials exist.

A new name signifies the hope of a new future, new possibilities, and an identity that is neither an achievement by the powerful nor an act of self-assertion by the oppressed. It is an identity received as a gift, one that calls into question the names given to us by others, as well as the names that we take up for ourselves. It is altogether fitting that people self-identify, naming their own experiences with the language that is available to them. But these names are not fixed simply because we find them to be resonant. All the identities we own must find their ultimacy in response to the names offered to us by God. The names we give ourselves may be descriptively accurate in our cultural setting, but they are also provisional, open to the possibility of divine intervention and surprise. In her despair, Naomi wishes to be renamed; but the God of Israel had other plans. Her bitter self-identification is a moment that is heard, recorded, and taken seriously. But it is not definitive, because God reserves the right to enter and redeem her story in an unexpected way, through Ruth, the Moabite outsider.

The fact that the ultimate power to bestow identity rests with God means that it does not belong to any one culture, nation, or group. And yet we have at times so thoroughly mixed Christian faith with culture that we are unable to tell the difference. The confusion led well-meaning Christians, upon entering new lands, to seek to replace foreign cultural sensibilities with their own. As Willie Jennings writes, “Indeed, it is as though Christianity, wherever it went in the modern colonies, inverted its sense of hospitality. It claimed to be the host, the owner of the spaces it entered, and demanded native peoples enter its cultural logics, its ways of being in the world, and its conceptualities.” This stands in stark contrast to the posture of “the Son of God, who took on the life of the creature, a life of joining, belonging, connection, and intimacy.” We should lament how often Christians—in positions of privilege and power—have set themselves in God’s place, taking for themselves the right to give the final names to their fellow image bearers. This is a matter not just of injustice but of idolatry. And idolatry calls for iconoclasm.

The above is an excerpt from Interpreting Your World: Five Lenses for Engaging Theology and Culture by Justin Bailey ©2022, used by permission of Baker Academic, a division of Baker Publishing Group. It has been edited for clarity and brevity for the purposes of this post.