these four words.
The first and the most direct is a call to halt! halt, for you have taken the name of God upon your lips. Do you know what ye have done? Perhaps the noblest thing that a man can do, perhaps the meanest; perhaps the saving act of humility and knowledge, perhaps the act of immeasurable conceit and haughtiness. What have we to do with God? Praying is not a work like other works. “Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground!” The name of the Lord is to be hallowed. Otherwise prayer is not prayer. Pray that you may pray aright, that you will actually pray to God. Then perchance you will learn further how to pray; and, while you pray, ye are heard already because you have prayed to God.
One cannot walk so easily on a straight and even path, into the presence of the Father in heaven, not even through Christ—above all, not through Him! Only when one has become severely and unequivocally serious with the hallowing of the name of God, then in Him, that is in Christ can he come to the Father. The name of God is the name of God. It is repellent, stern, yes, terrifying. That is the “strong tower” of our text. Later we are told one can flee to it and be exalted by it. But first one must have discerned how like a tower, like a rock, how threatening He rises ahead of him. He who has never fled before Him, cannot flee unto Him. And he who there has not been humbled, cannot there be exalted. But, once again, what is meant by “the name of the Lord”? The name of a thing or a man is the symbol by which we are taught that this is this, he is he; the limits by which we distinguish persons or things, that are equal or similar, from one another. So it is with the name of God. It is the mark of God’s separateness and otherness over against everything that is not God. He who speaks the name of God makes use of this mark.
But there is another trait peculiar to the name of God. In the beginning of the Bible (and what we read there is full of meaning) we are told that man, by God’s command and yet by his own free and rational judgment, gave names “to all cattle and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field;” and finally he named the woman, the creature of his own kind. That reminds us that the names we give, the limits and distinctions we draw (between the creatures themselves and between men and other creatures) are valid or invalid according to the accuracy or the error of our insight. They are not worthless but meaningful and useful; we must not be astonished, however, because these limits are so easily defaced and changed, and, in the last resort, so questionable and frail that the names we give and those we hear are not holy but in the end—here the poet is right—are mere sound and breath. But one is wrong when one says this of the name of God. For man did not, and does not, give God His name. The distinctive thing that separates God from every other, also from us men, man is not able to measure; nor can he see the mark that indicates the distinctive thing in God, that divides God’s land from man’s land.
The divine right of giving names belongs not only to man. But as the Bible tells us (again rich in meaning): Only God Himself can call Himself by name, and when men know His name, they know it only (with fear and trembling) because God Himself has revealed it to them—first to Abraham: “I am God almighty!” then to Moses: “I am that I am!” But God has not revealed it that men, again unafraid, may take the name of God upon their lips; but that when men give a name to God according to their own, free, rational judgment, however well or ill they may understand it, they at the same time can and shall keep in mind the name that God has given and gives Himself. It was, therefore, a fine custom of the ancient Jews (and I do not make light of it!) that they refrained from taking the revealed name of God—“I am that I am”—upon their lips; but, filled with awe, they felt that it did not become man to pronounce God’s name and therefore substituted man’s name for God—“the Lord.” By this reserve they were constantly reminded that God Himself was and is He who reveals to His people the unique and distinctive being that He is. At least one may question whether the unrestrained freedom of speech of Christians about the ultimate and deepest being of God ought more to be commended than the diffidence and restraint of the ancient Jew. The revealed name of God, which one keeps in mind but which actually cannot be spoken by human lips, is not mere sound and breath but an eternal name. It is the landmark set by God between Himself and all creatures visible to men, indicating that He is always God and not a creature. This mark of separation is not changeable and perishable, but, in the words of the text, is a strong tower, holy and terrible; therefore, for us He is the strange, the new, the beyond, the above, never from us, never in us, yet to be feared, loved, praised, and invoked by us.
If you will again ask me: what is the name of God and where and how shall we seek it? I can only reply that we usually do not seek Him, but only find Him; or far rather, only those, who already have found Him, can seek Him. He lets Himself be found—that’s it. Where? What else shall I say than what has been said of old: “there where a man sees that he is a sinner, that he must die, that his world passeth away.” There God sets bounds to the endlessness of the sinner’s sin and death, the transitoriness of his world and says: “I, the Holy One, I, who live and reign in eternity, I, the Creator and Redeemer of this world!” This “I,” which is the boundary of man’s land, is the name of God. But God Himself must utter this “I”; otherwise it is vain fanaticism.
But how does He speak this “I?” Again I shall say naught but what has been said of old. There is a witness concerning this “I,” this revealed name fixed for all of us; though we cannot comprehend that the “I” is spoken. The witness tells us that this “I” has been seen, heard, and handled among God’s people and in His only begotten Son; this we are able to hear and to hold for truth. Jesus Christ the boundary of the evil endlessness of man’s land! Jesus Christ, who is, in this man’s land and for all its inhabitants, the spoken “I”! Jesus Christ the name of God! God Himself must bear testimony to His witness—the testimony of the Holy Spirit in the inner man, so that we can and must hold for truth the outer testimony, the witness of the Scripture. Else it is man’s work in man’s land like every other work of man. Thus the “name of God” lets itself be found; so it is with the “strong tower,” that, according to the Lord’s Prayer, stands at the beginning of all praying. It is “strong” because it is wholly built by God himself.
We are told in our text, “the righteous runneth into it.” Mark well, running is not an evidence of strength and virtue, not even when one flees to “the name of the Lord.” We should like to represent the coming to the heavenly Father in another way: as a soaring up and breaking through, as a battle won and a triumphal entry. But we are not to come in this way; for only as the “righteous runneth into it” will God’s name be hallowed. A man who fulfills the first petition will not cut an imposing figure. He is a fugitive: he runs to the strong tower—from which he hears the cry of warning: “Halt! what seekest thou here?”—only because he cannot be at rest anywhere else; because he is pursued and driven from every other place and has no other resort than to seek refuge in the name of the Lord. This is not an uplifting sight. He who “runs” will be called a weakling. Therefore, for example—I say this to the students who are present—theology, in distinction from other sciences, is not a great and honored science, not an advance but a retreat; it is in essence a flight from all human names (also from the human names of God!) to the revealed name of the Lord.
Theology, therefore, does not cut a fine figure. All this must be so. One cannot be, in the words of the text, “the righteous” and at the same time present an imposing spectacle. Here one must make a choice. To “the name of the Lord” we can only “run.” He who walks triumphantly goes where he is exalted; only the humble “run.” He whom this name draws nigh will find all names given of men, spite of all their worth, to be nothing but sound and breath. A man’s confidence in his own understanding and comprehension must be so completely shaken that he cannot keep himself from taking a last impossible step into the darkness in which he and all that he has will be lost forever, unless he believes that through the darkness he will approach the light of God. Believe! That means defeat and flight. How remarkable, how questionable is a man who believes! How great is the danger of conceit, of self-deception through a wish-dream, of a leap which can only be a leap into death! He who believes must drop all these considerations. In this manner
