To name someone – or even an animal – is close to what we mean by acknowledging them as a person. Naming is an ethical thing, that is to say. To reduce someone to merely a number is deeply dehumanising of them. A noun can also be a common or generic noun. A noun like this tells you what sets a person belongs to. To be a dog identifies you as belonging to the class of things also called ‘dog’. It answers the question ‘what kind of thing are you?’ ‘What is your nature?’

1. Who?

The promises of God are the promises of God. But who is this? Who is God?

The word ‘God’ does not tell us very much. It is a common noun performing duty as a proper noun, a name of a kind. Since in Judaeo-Christian thought there is only one god, to make ‘God’ a name works functionally as an identifier. However, in the post-Christian world there is more than one contender for the title. There is Allah – a word that in its original Arabic is as generic as ‘God’, but in English is unmistakably Islamic. What are Christians in Arab-speaking lands to call the one they worship? They have traditionally spoken of Allah; but this is now contested by Islamists in some parts of the Islamic world, since they claim that Allah specifically identifies the God of the Quran. There is also the god of generic theism, the ‘god’ of the philosopher’s puzzle ‘does God exist?’ or the atheist’s claim ‘I don’t believe in God’. What the word ‘God’ lacks is particularity – it does not tell us which god is meant.

And this matters a great deal if we are going to claim that God makes promises. The identity of the maker of promises is crucial to the validity and the reliability of the promise. The answer to the question of ‘who is it that promises?’ is essential because the person making the promise is the guarantor of the promise. We need to know, as those to whom a promise is made, whether the one making the promise is, first, able to carry out the thing they promise and second, speaking of their true intention to carry it out. I can promise to give you the moon, and fully intend to give it to you, so overwhelmed by love for you am I – but I have no capacity actually to do it, so you shouldn’t believe me. Or I may promise to repay you the $50 you loaned me, but not intend to do it. In both cases, knowing who I am is an essential component of the trustworthiness of the promise.

How do we go about identifying ourselves, or anyone, or anything? It is a matter of words, and how our words describe what we encounter in the world. Now the classification and identification of things and persons in the world has its theological foundation in the opening pages of the Bible. In Genesis 1, the world is created by God by the arrangement of the creatures of the world ‘according to their kinds’. Then, when Adam is introduced to the animals in Genesis 2, he is invited by God to name them. And whatever name the man gives the creatures ‘that was its name’. The human being is uniquely gifted in the task of seeing and ordering the world in which he (and then, she) has been put and of which he is part. He not only sees the order already given to the creation but also brings his perception of its order to it.[1]

To identify things, then, we use our words: nouns proper and common, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and demonstratives. I am here using the parts of speech as a way of thinking about how – and classifying the ways in which – we identify someone. These are the possible answers to the question – who?

 2. Nouns.

A noun can be a proper noun, a Name. A name can be almost arbitrary: it is a sound that is associated with that person. My name is Michael, but that name tells you almost nothing about me. It is a sound tag by convention associated with me since birth so that I didn’t get confused with the other baby boys, and so that I could be addressed by other humans – at first my parents, and then others. A name of course may say more than that, but perhaps not. By names we can distinguish, up to a point, what generation or ethnicity or even social class a person belongs to.

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