Who is God

Abstract

The Hindu Brahmanas record that God’s reply to the question ‘Who are you?’ was simply ‘Who’: ‘Who is the God whom we should honour with the oblation’: an indicative, as well as interrogative! Might this also be what Aeschylus intended by his reference to ‘Zeus hostis pot’estin’ (Zeus, whoever He is): not an expression of doubt, but of acknowledged mystery? The name by which He is to be called, perhaps (‘if it pleases Him’), is not ‘Zeus’ but, exactly, ‘Whoever’. And most famously the God that Moses encountered, asked who He is, answered only ‘I am’. What does this apparently evasive response imply for worship and theology in the light of David Hume’s enquiry, how an unknowable God differs from an equally unknowable non-God? Rather than asking what God is we can investigate instead what worship is, perceiving our response to the Unknown as itself a revelation. In Orthodox terms, what we can share with God is not His Essence, but His Energeiai: not what He Is, but what He does.