“Call me Ishmael.” This opening line, one of the most famous in literature, is actually a rather strange turn of phrase, considering that Ishmael appears to be the narrator’s real name. In normal speech, we don’t say “Call me ____.” Instead, we say, “My name is ____.” We only ask people to call us a certain way when our given name does not match what we want to be called. Imagine a college student introducing herself at orientation saying, “My name’s Elizabeth, but call me Liz” when her parents and everyone else who knew her up to that point called her “Beth.” Assuming she’s successful in getting her friends to call her Liz, what has she done? Is it a momentous change, or fairly trivial? What if she chose a completely different name for her new friends to call her, like, “Brittany?” Is that different? In short, what are we doing when we try to change our names? I submit that we are attempting to play God.
God is the supreme “namer.” He named day and night (1:5), Heaven (1:8), Earth and Seas (1:9), and he named Man (1:26). From the beginning, mankind names creation as an act of dominion and image-bearing. Adam named the animals that God brought to him, and those were their names. (1:19-20). In the act of naming the animals God brought to him, Adam became wiser to their nature. He became aware that there was not a helper fit for him among them. In Adam’s most significant act of naming, he named the woman that God had formed from his ribs. In doing so, he also penned the first poem, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” (2:23).
A careful reading of scripture, especially the book of Genesis, reveals that names are vastly important. Names reveal covenant significance as well as character. In some cases, a person arrives on the scene with a name that already says something about their character. For example, James Jordan has pointed out that Rebecca’s name is a pun with the Hebrew word for “myriads.” She was providentially named that before any human thought that she would be part of the covenant line. In other cases, God renames the person. When God renames the person, it is generally in the context of cutting a covenant. Whenever God gives a person a new name, God’s renaming is efficacious. That is their name. Abraham is Abraham; he is no longer Abram. Sarah is Sarah; she is not Sarai.
God also names and renames Himself to His people. He is “the LORD God” (YHWH Elohim), “God Most High,” “YHWH,” “The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” “the First and the Last.” It is beyond the scope of this piece to catalogue God’s names, but there are principles for us to learn from God naming Himself. The first thing for us to learn is that God is not given a name; He names Himself. He says, “I AM who I AM.” The second thing to learn is that God is the only one who can name or give new names to Himself, by Himself.
As Uri Brito recently wrote, Naomi attempted to rename herself at the beginning of Ruth. She told her two daughters-in-law to no longer call her Naomi (“pleasant”), but Mara (“bitter”). Unlike God’s renaming, Naomi’s renaming was not efficacious. She is forever known as Naomi, not Mara, because Naomi was not able to define her story. God wrote her story.
We can extrapolate a general principle from this that is intuitively true. Naming is never a singular activity. If I woke up one morning and decided that I wanted to be called Steve, I would have a difficult time of it. First, I would have to inform my wife of the happy news. “Good morning, my name is Steve.” My wife would presumably think I’m crazy, so I’d talk to my parents, my siblings, and my friends about it. “Don’t you think I look more like a Steve?” Suppose that, despite my best efforts, no one wanted to call me Steve. Then, suppose I went even further and legally changed my name. After that, it would say “Steve” on my driver’s license. If the only evidence of my new name were a plastic card with my picture on it that said “Steve,” would I be Steve?
Consider a second hypothetical. I inform my friends and family that I wish to be called, “The Edge.” The scenario is laughable. I would not get very far, not just because my nickname was already taken, but primarily because I would have missed the point of a nickname. The point of having a nickname is that someone else gave it to you. Someone else, or some group of people, discerned something in your character, your appearance, your occupation, your gifts that they thought merited giving you a new name to add to your old one. Jesus Himself gave nicknames to some of His disciples. He called Simon, “Peter,” meaning “rock.” He called James and John “Boanerges,” the “Sons of thunder.” He was supremely more qualified to give them these names than any human in history.
Not surprisingly, renaming, or rebranding, is easiest when it involves people with whom we are already anonymous. A legal name change is successful because the people in charge of it do not care what we are called, so long as we are called that consistently. Informal name changes work according to the same principle. The college student in the example given above was probably successful in getting everyone to call her by the new name because their knowledge of her was deficient. As a side note, the same principle probably would not apply to nicknames. If our hypothetical college student took the regrettable path of informing her new friends that everyone at home called her “Starlight,” they would probably say to themselves, “do they really?” They might not know her very well, but perhaps they know human nature well enough to know that she probably made that one up. The same principle of anonymity applies to stage names. A pop artist is able to rename herself because that’s the image that she’s able to project to the world, and the world does not know her any differently.
This has significance for us as Christians. We should wish to be named first by the One who knows our inward hearts. That is, we should wish to be named as God’s covenant people. We should wish to be named second by those who love us. That is, we should want to be called the name that other people give us, not ourselves. We need to be careful here to not find a command where scripture is silent. I do not offer this in the spirit of discovering a negative command, but in explicating a principle.
That principle is that we try in vain to name ourselves. I say that we should wish to be named by those who love us, but it turns out that God has graciously ordained that to ordinarily be the case. Despite that, there may be various reasons we may want a new name. Some names make unfortunate puns. Others later become notorious as the names of celebrities or high-profile criminals. In any case, if we wish to be called a different name, other people must participate. We can’t name ourselves. Not being a parent myself, I humbly submit that parents need to be careful about participating in their children’s wishes for a new name. There are doubtless many occasions when it is acceptable for parents to call their child something new. I see no indications that C.S. Lewis, for example, was in rebellion when he wanted to be called “Jack” as a child. But parents need to be wary that their child’s desire for a new name is not born out of that primal rebellion – that desire to be like gods. Adults need to bear the same considerations in mind. An adult who wants a new name should ask, “Is my desire for a new name, at heart, really a rebellious desire for autonomy?”
All of this runs counter to the culture of individualism that pervades our society. The spirit of the age says that we can be whoever we want to be. As Christians, though, we must place our names in submission to God. We are His. In the end, naming is an image-bearing, creative, act. In the case of Christian parents, it is an act of naming the child as a child of God – a child of the covenant. Accepting a name is to deny autonomy. It is to say, “I am not my own, and I did not choose what I would be called.” May we all call ourselves what God calls us.
Rob Noland grew up attending Providence Church in Pensacola, Florida. He received his bachelor’s from New Saint Andrews College and his J.D. from the University of Mississippi School of Law. He and his wife, Amber, attend a PCA church in Atlanta, GA where he works as a lawyer.
Incisive and right-on, Rob!