QUOTES - NAMES OF GOD
The names of God are not of human invention, but of divine origin though they are all borrowed from human language, and derived from human and earthly relations (L. Berkhof, Systematic Theology).
The Name of God is His Being, not as He is in Himself, but as He is revealed to us (Herman Hoeksema, Reformed Dogmatics).
Where the name of God is not known, he himself cannot be known (John Gill, Body of Divinity).
This high significance is ascribed to the idea of the "Name of God" within the Biblical revelation because it gathers up, in a simple way which everybody can understand, certain decisive elements in the reality of Revelation . . . The "Name" of God covers both the revealed Nature of God and His revealing action . . . Thus the Biblical conception of the "Name", and the "manifestation of the Name", contains the meaning of the whole Biblical doctrine of God (Emil Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of God).
Thus the Name of God means the indissoluble unity of the nature of God with the revelation, not only in the sense that it is the nature of revelation, but that it is the nature of the God of revelation (Emil Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of God).
But if, on the other hand, the revelation of the Name is believed, then the autonomy of the cogito ergo sum is rejected; the Self is no longer the final court of appeal, but the Divine Thou (Emil Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of God).
Characteristically in Hebraic Scripture, God's being is revealed to us through sublime names that designate who God is. The revelation of God's personal character is closely connected with these names that reveal God's nature (Thomas C. Oden, Systematic Theology).
God has a name. This points to a key difference between persons and things. God is not a nameless energy or abstract idea (Thomas C. Oden, Systematic Theology).
Names in the Hebrew tradition were thought to reveal something decisive of the character of the person named and to convey something of the one named (Thomas C. Oden, Systematic Theology).
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