I Am Who I Am

This is a Q & A blog post by our Visiting Scholar in Philosophy, William Lane Craig.

Question

I have heard some assert that “I AM” indicates an eternal now perspective for God. I don't think that an eternal now or other atemporal understandings make logical sense nor is generally required by biblical teachings. How do you understand the I AM name for God in relation to your views on time and eternity?

Michael, Chile

Dr. Craig's Response

Thank you for your question, Michael! In Exodus, God reveals his enigmatic name to Moses as “I am who I am” (Exodus 3.14).

Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I am has sent me to you.’” God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’: this is my name for ever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations” (Exod. 3.13-15).

It's significant that God’s name is not a name given by human beings to God but is revealed by God himself. Since proper names were understood in ancient Israel to reveal their bearer’s character, God intends thereby to provide a self-revelation to Moses.

The difficulty lies in understanding what the divine name was meant to convey. OT scholars have struggled to come to consensus concerning the import of the divine name revealed to Moses. Indeed, Brevard Childs comments that “Few verses in the entire Old Testament have evoked such heated controversy and such widely divergent interpretations.”[1]

From the time of the Church Fathers Christian theologians have interpreted the divine name to express the idea of God’s necessary existence. Although modern interpreters have largely dismissed the traditional exegesis of this passage to support divine necessary being as misled by philosophical interests, Childs insists that it is far from obvious that the ancient Hebrews had no concept of being, which seems to come to expression in the divine name. God’s name is revealed in v14a to be ’ehyê ’ăšer ’ehyê and then abbreviated in v.14b as simply ’eyeh. Although the full expression can be variously translated as “I am who I am,” “I will be who I will be,” “I will be who I was,” “I was who I will be,” etc., the present tense version deserves pride of place since the statement in v. 14b featuring the abbreviated name could hardly mean “‘I was’ or ‘I will be’ has sent me to you.”

It would be implausible to think that the divine name was meant to express timelessness, for that would be to import modern metaphysics into this ancient story. Although commentators have often seen the divine name as an expression to Israel of God’s abiding presence with them, such an interpretation does not exclude and might well comprise God’s eternal being as a precondition of his abiding presence. Although it would doubtless be anachronistic to read into the name an expression of God’s timelessness or necessary existence in a broadly logical sense, still ancient Hebrews in general and the Pentateuchal author in particular certainly had the conception of God as one who has never come into being and will never go out of being and therefore as eternal and necessary in the Aristotelian sense.

God’s timelessness and broadly logically necessary existence are thus properties which are underdetermined by scriptural data and therefore must be justified, if possible, along the lines of perfect being theology, if God would arguably be greater were he to exist timelessly and necessarily rather than everlastingly and contingently.