John A. Hutchinson - "A Matter of Names" (November 22, 1959)

Download
- Rights
- No Re-Use
  In Copyright
  More Rights Info
- Files (1)
- MP3
- Please be patient with media downloads. They are often large files.
Share

Embed Code
<iframe src='//idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4vt1mr18?embed=true' height='125px' width='100%' frameborder='0' marginwidth='0' marginheight='0' scrolling='no' allowfullscreen></iframe>
Permalink

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4vt1mr18
Skip to Item Info

Loading the media player...

Files for this Item

Transcript

Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.

-	Some of us have been talking together	0:16
	for the past few days	0:18
	about the nature of religious language,	0:19
	for religion is among other things, language.	0:24
	It is the language of prayer, of liturgy,	0:28
	of song and dancing.	0:32
	The Bible from which I was reading the lesson	0:34
	a few moments ago is language.	0:37
	At our house,	0:40
	we read the Bible at dinner time each night.	0:40
	And one of my young children recently remarked very sagely,	0:43
	"The Bible is just full of language."	0:47
	This sermon which I am just beginning, again, is language	0:50
	and I have often found myself in the midst of a sermon	0:55
	asking myself just what kind of language it is	0:59
	and what sort of language it is that goes on here.	1:03
	It seems to me a fair question	1:07
	and one which in its way can help to eliminate	1:09
	both the nature of our religious experience	1:12
	and the nature of our human speaking.	1:15
	This morning however, I want to focus our attention	1:18
	upon just one element of language, namely, proper names.	1:22
	And I want to begin by telling you an experiment	1:27
	that I performed recently on my five-year-old daughter.	1:30
	I asked her if she would mind changing her name.	1:35
	She stamped her foot indignantly and replied,	1:38
	"My name has always been Ruth and always will be."	1:41
	Her mother and I smiled	1:45
	recalling that we had actually considered	1:47
	several other names before we'd given her that one.	1:49
	This simple episode illustrates two widely different views	1:53
	of names and indeed of language	1:58
	held by students of the subject.	2:01
	On the one hand,	2:03
	there's a large group of students and inquirers	2:04
	who tell us that a name is simply a conventional label	2:07
	which we paste on a person or on a thing.	2:11
	So, parents are able to choose names for their children	2:14
	or a man is even able to change his name	2:18
	by appropriate legal procedures.	2:22
	This is true, we are told,	2:26
	not only of persons, but of objects.	2:27
	New chemical elements when they are discovered	2:31
	are given names.	2:34
	In this connection, there's the old story	2:37
	about the lady at the astronomy lecture	2:40
	who asked how the scientists can possibly know	2:43
	the names of the stars.	2:47
	Well, this, in general, is the approach to names	2:50
	illustrated by the little girl's parents.	2:54
	But there's another	2:57
	and a radically different view of this matter	2:58
	represented by the little girl herself who was, so to say,	3:00
	on the inside of the situation.	3:04
	She stamped her foot and replied in indignation.	3:07
	Now, evidently, something of significance to her	3:10
	was at stake in all this.	3:14
	It was, I suggest, her whole sense of identity	3:16
	and meaning expressed in her own name.	3:20
	She could no more imagine herself with another name.	3:24
	Then she could give up her own sense of being herself.	3:28
	Now, at a somewhat different level	3:33
	of intellectual sophistication,	3:35
	there is a large group of students of language today	3:37
	who are pointing out to us	3:42
	the significance of just this sense of personal identity	3:44
	and meaning.	3:48
	Actually, I think there is much of value	3:50
	in both approaches to names and to language.	3:52
	But this morning,	3:56
	I want to focus attention on this second approach.	3:57
	We find here the whole issue of personal,	4:01
	or if you will, of existential meaning.	4:04
	The meaning of our human life	4:07
	not viewed from the grand stands of detached observation,	4:09
	but from the actual playing field of human action.	4:14
	It is easy and it is altogether proper.	4:20
	And at times to sit in a comfortable classroom or study	4:22
	and to reflect an uncommitted detachment	4:27
	and objectivity on matters such as this.	4:30
	But outside the classroom,	4:34
	in the arena of action, we take another and a different view	4:36
	of all our human concerns.	4:41
	We ask with a poignancy and an urgency	4:44
	which cannot be denied.	4:47
	Who am I?	4:48
	And whence do I come?	4:49
	And whether do I go?	4:51
	And why am I here?	4:53
	And in fact, the very course of our lives	4:56
	is a statement in deed and in life	4:59
	to answer these questions.	5:03
	It's a kind of answer	5:06
	which finds expression also in our name.	5:08
	The history of religions	5:13
	provides us with many illustrations of this attitude.	5:15
	For example, in the ancient Near Eastern world	5:19
	out of which the Bible came,	5:22
	a person's name often included	5:23
	the name of the God he served.	5:26
	And that wasn't just a literary convention,	5:29
	but rather a literal expression of the supposed identity	5:32
	between a man and his God.	5:37
	In the same world, there were political struggles	5:41
	in which the king was overthrown,	5:44
	and in which he was victorious enemies	5:46
	proceeded literally to blot out his name	5:49
	to deface it from all the records.	5:52
	And then when the rebel in his turn was overthrown,	5:55
	his name in turn was expunged from the records.	5:58
	So, you see when the Bible speaks of a man's name	6:03
	being blotted out or destroyed,	6:06
	it is not speaking hyperbole, but literal fact.	6:09
	For in this ancient view,	6:13
	a man's name was somehow an expression of his power,	6:16
	of his own personal essence, of his spirit or soul.	6:21
	At an even more primitive level,	6:27
	the magician who by incantation or a spell	6:29
	seeks to do you harm or pretends to do you good,	6:33
	weaves your name into his magic pattern of words	6:37
	for he believes that if he has your name,	6:41
	he has power over you.	6:44
	He has hold of the essence of you, of your soul.	6:47
	There's a somewhat similar view of names	6:52
	in the story of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis.	6:54
	After God has finished creating the animals,	6:59
	He brings them all before Adam so that Adam can name them.	7:03
	As a child, when I read that story,	7:07
	I used to wonder how Adam knew what names to give them all.	7:09
	Now, perhaps you're saying to yourself	7:15
	that this is all sheer primitive superstition,	7:18
	and you have a point.	7:21
	Now, there's a good deal of word magic	7:24
	and name magic in the history of religion.	7:26
	And let's say it bluntly and frankly,	7:29
	there are many instances of it in the Bible	7:30
	and in the history of Christianity.	7:33
	And yet I should suppose that in mid 20th century	7:36
	on the campus of a great modern university,	7:39
	it is hardly necessary to disavow attitudes such as these.	7:43
	However, mixed with the draws of magic and superstition,	7:48
	there's another attitude about which we will do well	7:52
	not to be so lofty and so scornful.	7:55
	Let us call this other element	7:59
	of strong sense of personal identity	8:01
	and meaning and of personal or face-to-face	8:05
	communication with other human selves.	8:08
	And I suppose the gist of what I have to say to you	8:12
	this morning is that there's a truth here,	8:15
	which we can separate out from the magic	8:18
	and the superstition and which we can lay hold upon	8:20
	as a valuable element of our moral and religious life.	8:24
	This element, again,	8:29
	is precisely the sense of personal identity and meaning.	8:30
	Now, students of the Bible	8:37
	have for sometime been reflecting upon these matters.	8:39
	And prominent among them	8:42
	has been the famous Jewish philosopher,	8:44
	theologian Martin Buber,	8:46
	who has written widely of I-Thou	8:49
	or person-person relations	8:52
	as he has found them in his own Jewish tradition	8:55
	informed and guided as it is by biblical images	8:59
	and biblical faith.	9:03
	Now, according to Buber,	9:06
	an I-Thou, or a person-person relation	9:08
	is very different from an I-it	9:13
	or a person-thing relation.	9:16
	This like kind of relation I sustain to the pulpit,	9:19
	which holds my notes	9:23
	or to the watch with which I'm timing my sermon,	9:25
	or to this microphone which hangs about my neck.	9:28
	They're all objects, which I can use as means to my end,	9:32
	but how profoundly different is my relation to any of you,	9:38
	even in a group as large as this.	9:42
	For if I seek to treat you as things,	9:45
	you resist and properly sell.	9:49
	For example, if you even suspected me	9:53
	of seeking to manipulate your minds,	9:55
	rather than appealing to you through rational persuasion,	9:59
	you would resist.	10:03
	At least I hope you would.	10:04
	In other words, I must respect and affirm your personality,	10:07
	your nature as persons.	10:11
	Now, it is this relation of person to person,	10:13
	and that one's own identity is to be found within.	10:19
	As Buber has eloquently put to matter,	10:23
	I become I in relation to thou.	10:26
	I discover my own identity	10:31
	in what Buber has called the life of dialogue.	10:34
	Now we do not have to read very far in the Bible	10:39
	to see these elements of which we're speaking.	10:43
	As Buber has put it, the Bible is a deeply dialogical book.	10:46
	Its characters are I in the presence of thous.	10:52
	Many of the Bible's most expressive images	10:58
	are attempts to catch this personality of man.	11:01
	And so, the Bible speaks of a man's face,	11:07
	of his presence and of his name.	11:10
	Thus, for example,	11:14
	God tells Abraham that in his name	11:15
	will all the families of the earth be blessed.	11:19
	And so, the New Testament Christians,	11:23
	approached God in the name of Christ.	11:26
	And so, the men of the Bible sought	11:30
	to preserve their names,	11:31
	and they feared lest their names would be blotted	11:34
	from off the face of the earth.	11:37
	The Bible takes the name of God, very seriously.	11:41
	We all recall that famous passage in the book of Exodus,	11:45
	in which God,	11:48
	in which Moses asks God for his name.	11:49
	Later in biblical history,	11:53
	the divine name became so very sacred	11:55
	that human lips did not dare to utter it.	11:58
	And so, devout Jews used synonyms or paraphrases	12:01
	like the Most High or the Almighty.	12:07
	And to this day,	12:10
	when the name of God, Jehovah, or Yahweh is mentioned	12:11
	in the text, devout Jews verbalize it	12:15
	as Adonai, My Lord.	12:19
	Indeed, I've had many exam papers	12:23
	and religion from devout Jewish students	12:24
	in which they have sought to express	12:27
	the name of deity as G, blank, D.	12:30
	Last year, I received such a paper,	12:35
	in which was this rather mixed up statement.	12:37
	The student said,	12:42
	I have come to disbelief in the existence of G, blank, D.	12:42
	Now, we miss the point of our lists	12:51
	if we regard these as the subjects of ancient history	12:53
	and ancient scripture, and not a present reality,	12:58
	for they are present realities.	13:01
	For instances, as I worked on this sermon,	13:05
	my senior high school son brought home the proofs	13:07
	for his yearbook pictures,	13:11
	pondering them with all the anxious concern of adolescents.	13:13
	I engaged him in conversation	13:18
	and I saw in those rather mediocre photos,	13:20
	a person's whole self image,	13:23
	his sense of personal meaning and relation	13:26
	to the community of his peers.	13:30
	Again, a friend from your faculty sent me a clipping,	13:34
	not so long ago of your university news,	13:38
	from your university newspaper	13:41
	of a student here at Duke, who stood in line	13:43
	to receive bids from fraternities	13:46
	and who, when he came to the head of the line,	13:49
	could not recall his own name.	13:51
	The story was reported as uproariously comic,	13:55
	and yet, I suppose it does not take	13:58
	more than a second glance	14:00
	to see how serious it may well have been	14:02
	to the person involved.	14:04
	As I read it, my own mind went by,	14:06
	went back to a time 30 years ago,	14:09
	when I stood in a similar line	14:10
	and found no bids in my envelope.	14:13
	And I recalled the despair that clutched at my throat	14:15
	at that time.	14:18
	Now, it's of course,	14:20
	easy enough to say from a secure adult perspective	14:21
	how silly can a person be, how juvenile,	14:24
	but the point is I didn't	14:29
	and couldn't say it then any more than this other student	14:30
	could remember his own name.	14:34
	Well, the conclusion is that personal identity	14:38
	and meaning are not things easily and once for all come by,	14:41
	not automatically given to us at birth rather than matters	14:46
	for a lifelong struggle and achievement.	14:51
	It's not easy to be a person	14:54
	and to sustain and maintain one's personhood	14:57
	against all the forces that threaten it.	15:02
	To be a person, to achieve and maintain one's humanity	15:05
	is a matter of courage, as Paul Tillich put it,	15:11
	of the courage to be.	15:14
	Or as Christian faith	15:17
	has traditionally put the same sentiment,	15:18
	a matter of faith or conviction.	15:22
	And conversely, how much of traditional faith,	15:26
	has properly been concerned	15:30
	with sustaining and renewing	15:32
	meaningful humans' selfhood and identity.	15:35
	There's another issue of selfhood involved in names,	15:41
	which is illustrated in Thomas Mann's book,	15:45
	"Felix Krull Confidence Man."	15:48
	In a very long passage in that book,	15:51
	a long passage so typical of the author,	15:53
	Felix Krull expresses self disgust	15:57
	and self-loathing at his name,	16:00
	which by the dubious course of his life,	16:03
	he has brought into such bad repute.	16:06
	His name is hateful to him	16:09
	and he would like to be rid of it.	16:11
	He would like to find refuge in anonymity	16:13
	or in some other name.	16:17
	We'll call this attitude self-loathing,	16:20
	call it as other authors do nausea or self alienation	16:24
	or call it by its traditional Christian name of sin,	16:29
	the personal substance or reality involved as the same.	16:33
	Well then, not only faith,	16:39
	but sin finds expression in one's relation to one's name.	16:41
	Indeed, I think all the significant moments	16:47
	or aspects of personal life	16:49
	and destiny find expression here.	16:51
	In addition to faith and sin,	16:55
	there is the problem of God.	16:57
	I've been speaking rather equivocally	17:00
	about meaning and meaningful life.	17:02
	Now, the whole conviction that life has meaning	17:06
	and is not meaning less,	17:09
	is an important part of what our Christian tradition	17:11
	has meant by God and faith in God.	17:15
	So, let us turn briefly then from the name of man	17:19
	to the name of God.	17:23
	It's an important theme in the Bible.	17:27
	Man, the Bible assumes stands in an I-thou relation to God.	17:29
	God is, according to the Bible and I, an not an it,	17:36
	He is personal.	17:41
	We can speak to him in prayer	17:43
	and we can hear him speak to us.	17:45
	He has a name according to the Bible.	17:48
	Now, I think there's a very important issue here,	17:52
	but I also think it's one of the most misunderstood	17:56
	in the whole field of religion,	17:59
	misunderstood by adherent and critic alike.	18:01
	For example, I know people and I've read books,	18:05
	which put the question is God personal, meaning by it.	18:09
	Is there some head man or some head spirit somewhere	18:14
	just beyond the furthest telescope whose darlings,	18:19
	whose favorites we human beings are.	18:23
	Now, to this question,	18:28
	the religious adherent answers. Yes.	18:29
	And the critic, the unbeliever answer's no.	18:33
	And so the argument is giant.	18:37
	I think they both radically misunderstand	18:40
	the nature of the personal relation between man and God	18:44
	for they think of it as Reinhold neighbor	18:49
	has acidly remarked as man's right to lobby	18:51
	for special favors in the carts of the Almighty.	18:56
	And that seems to me,	19:01
	not only intellectually unjustified,	19:02
	but religiously repugnant.	19:05
	To think of God as personal,	19:09
	seems to me to mean something radically different from this,	19:12
	we take person-person relations toward each other	19:17
	as it were on a horizontal level.	19:21
	And so, we discover their meaning	19:24
	and we discover the meaning of our lives in these terms.	19:26
	But then, in vertical relation,	19:32
	we face the problem of our attitude toward the Almighty	19:37
	toward ultimate reality,	19:42
	as indeed all men have faced this problem	19:44
	and no men have ever avoided it.	19:47
	Now, the heart of faith in God,	19:51
	I believe is to take toward ultimate reality,	19:54
	toward the almighty.	19:57
	Fraught as this question is with mystery,	19:59
	involving so much	20:03
	that is forever past our human finding out.	20:05
	To take toward the almighty.	20:08
	Justice, attitude of personal faith or trust.	20:11
	Such an attitude is the essence	20:17
	of what our fathers would have called faith in God.	20:19
	If we read our Bibles with sensitivity and perception,	20:24
	we will see justice relation expressed in the Bible's	20:29
	reference to the name of God	20:32
	and to the name of Christ.	20:35
	The New Testament Christians greeted	20:38
	and blessed each other in this name.	20:42
	And what is more important,	20:45
	they approached God in the name of Christ.	20:46
	And this expressed for them,	20:51
	the attitude of personal trust and conviction and faith	20:52
	and ultimate reality.	20:58
	It is this meaning,	21:00
	which comes through to me in the Ephesians passage,	21:02
	which I read as our scripture this morning.	21:06
	It speaks, you recall,	21:09
	of the measurable greatness of the divine power,	21:10
	which has raised Christ from the dead,	21:14
	which has made him to sit at his right hand	21:17
	in heavenly places.	21:19
	Far above all rule and authority and dominion	21:21
	and above every name that is named not only in this age,	21:26
	but in that which is to come.	21:30
	Let us pray.	21:33
	Oh thou eternal spirit in whom we live and move	21:46
	and have our being,	21:49
	we commit ourselves onto thee	21:52
	in faith and in trust in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord.	21:54
	And now may the Lord bless you and keep you,	22:01
	the Lord make his face to shine upon you	22:04
	and be gracious unto you.	22:07
	The Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you	22:09
	and give you peace.	22:13

Item Info

Title:

John A. Hutchinson - "A Matter of Names" (November 22, 1959)

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4vt1mr18

Date:

November 22, 1959

Speaker:

Hutchinson, John A.

Contributor:

Duke University. Chapel

Identifier:

UA.17.01.0003 RR-0086
ref5373_hs8
uachapelsermaud
duke:628376
dcrau002116
ark:/87924/r4vt1mr18
b2656620-c888-4b67-b62b-f47bb1b3f8ba

Digital Collection:

Duke Chapel Recordings

Source Collection:

Duke University Chapel recordings, 1954-2005

Related Resources:

See below

Language:

English

Location:

United States
North Carolina
Durham (N.C.)

Format:

Provenance:

The Duke University Chapel Recordings were transferred to the Duke University Archives beginning in 1970.

Rights:

No Re-Use

In Copyright

Rights Note:

This material is made available for research, scholarship, and private study. Copyright in this material has not been transferred to Duke University. For reuses of this material beyond those permitted by fair use or otherwise allowed under the Copyright Act, please see our page on copyright and citations: https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/research/citations-and-permissions.

Sponsor:

Sponsor this Digital Collection

John A. Hutchinson - "A Matter of Names" (November 22, 1959)

Transcript

Item Info

1. John A. Hutchinson - "A Matter Of Names" (November 22, 1959)

Duke University Archives

More Info & Options

John A. Hutchinson - "A Matter of Names" (November 22, 1959)

Transcript

Item Info

Related Item

Duke University Archives

More Info & Options