As a little boy, I looked forward to the annual network television broadcast of Cecil B. DeMille’s epic The Ten Commandments. Before the age of digital content and streaming, we could see such classics only when the networks aired them, usually on a well-advertised Sunday night.
While watching the annual broadcast as a youngster, God’s declaration from the burning bush that He would be known as “I AM” puzzled me. “Why not just say your name?” I wondered. I have since pondered, “Why would the great Jehovah be so coy on Mount Sinai?”
“I AM THAT I AM” (Exodus 3:14) may be among the most widely pondered utterances in human history. Over millennia, assorted theologians and philosophers have offered sagacious interpretations. Theologians like Aquinas, Augustine, and Maimonides argued along philosophical lines, asserting that “I AM THAT I AM” emphasized God’s existence, that God is the necessary, non-contingent being that must be for every other form of being to exist. This interpretation is similar to Aristotle’s well-known notion of the “unmoved mover.”
Other biblical scholars charted a historical tack, contending that the name of God suggests that He will reveal His identity over time. This explanation accords with the alternative translation from the Hebrew, “I will be what I will be,” which ostensibly conveys that God had yet more work to do in the lives of human beings and accentuates that His character will be revealed through His actions.
This explanation tied to history reflects the central point elaborated in Thomas Cahill’s “The Gifts of the Jews.” The book’s subtitle summarizes the main message: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels. The monotheistic God of the Old Testament is a singular being who starts and renews conversations with humankind and commits to intervene in history. Cahill contends that acknowledging a concerned, loving God who reaches out and intercedes within human affairs constituted a new and radical worldview.
Rather than the impersonal, capricious gods of the prevailing pagan cultures, gods who may or may not respond to ceremonial rituals and incantations on whim, the Jehovah of the Old Testament initiated a face-to-face friendship with his creations from the burning bush, as He had with Abraham and others before Moses. Suddenly, with a God engaged again in dialogue with His children, anything was possible. The wearying, ancient cycle of “wake up, toil, grind, sleep, wake up, and repeat” was over. Hope for the hopeless had sprung from the desert. This optimistic prospect kicked off with God’s explicit concern, expressed to Moses, for the plight of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt. God had “heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows” (Exodus 3:7). Someone in the cosmos cared.
More recent scholars (e.g., Karl Barth, Roger Scruton) have synthesized these two interpretations (i.e., philosophical and historical) of the words voiced from Mount Sinai in Exodus 3:14, pointing out that the “I AM THAT I AM” God is willing to enter into relationship with humanity. As a relational God, He can be entreated to make His will known and even to change it. Such a God cannot be “boxed in” by the confines of human speculation about Him, but rather reveals Himself to humankind through His actions as history unfolds. An element of coyness certainly manifested here, as though God, in saying “I will be what I will be,” was emphasizing that “there is yet more to come so hang on and be patient because I will surprise you over and over again in the future.”
As persons we are accountable for our actions and we hold others accountable for theirs.
This first-person case potentially conveys a multitude of meanings. Perhaps most importantly, it situates God as a subject in the world of objects, as a divine being with a particular point of view. The first-person singular also suggests that God is not an ephemeral essence or force; rather, it presents Him as a divine personage who makes a one-to-one relationship possible (traditional trinitarians would likely take issue with this conception of divine personage if it involves embodiment). It follows that with such a Being, love can be exchanged, loyalty can be cultivated, and covenants can be forged.
Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher best known for his 1923 book I and Thou, memorably explored the substantive differences between an “I to thou” encounter (i.e., first-person to first-person) versus an “I to it” engagement (i.e., first-person to third-person), arguing that we can fully realize the potential of human relations only when we treat others as another subject (i.e., a “thou” and not an “it”) who deserves reciprocal respect, honor, and dignity. Buber contended that a human life that maximizes the genuine “I to you” encounters is the life that brushes up against the divine. And, of course, first-person to first-person interaction can also extend to our relationship with God (i.e., “I to Thou”).
Speaking of the first-person perspective, English philosopher John Locke eloquently argued that the concept of a “person” contains a “forensic” dimension. By this he means, in part, that as persons we are accountable for our actions and we hold others accountable for theirs. As rational, moral beings endowed with conscience (i.e., the “Light of Christ” in Latter-day Saint parlance, or the “moral law” in the words of Kant), we innately hold certain expectations regarding our own behavior and the actions of others. We feel pangs of regret and guilt when we fall short of our personal aspirations to live a moral life. Similarly, we experience feelings of sadness and even anger when others disappoint us with their trespasses. As persons, we are always “in court.”
We find a simple, quotidian example of the person as a forensic concept in the practice of queuing. We bristle when someone “jumps” the line while the rest of us patiently await our turns. To be a subject in the world of objects, a first-person singular being, is an exercise in judging and being judged. As persons, in all our human relations, we are forever subject to others’ assessments, and we also appraise them. As persons, we understand ourselves, and we relate to others from the first-person singular perspective, our personal worldview.
This forensic quality of being implies that our interactions with others, our “I to you” encounters, always necessitate explanations. As persons, others expect that we can offer a “why” to explain our thoughts, words, and actions. This expectancy is a function of the “intentionality” that characterizes a distinctive feature of human consciousness. As creatures of language, humans can articulate justifications for behavior and intentions in a way that a non-linguistic animal cannot. We expect no explanation from a lion at the zoo that attacks and devours a goat released into its cage at feeding time. Animals live in a profoundly different world than humans, a world more heavily governed by instinctual behavior. Because they have no words, animals cannot express to us the “whys” that justify and explain their conduct.
Only in the first-person case can a human take responsibility for actions that have not yet occurred.
To situate human beings more prominently in the world of objects, albeit as advanced objects, is to relegate them to the world of animals, in which their behavior is a function of random, unguided evolutionary forces, as manifested in the neuroscience of the brain. Some experts have informally referred to this view as the “nothing buttery” position—that is, that human thoughts, views, abstractions, and intentions are “nothing but” the firing of neurons across synapses in our brains—that nothing spiritual or metaphysical is going on. The “nothing buttery” term was coined by British neuroscientist Donald MacKay decades ago as a pejorative critique of this kind of absolute, reductionist materialism. Nonetheless, a surprising amount of neuroscience literature exists along these lines in which scientific materialists confidently opine that humans are actually just biological zombies, that the apparent human consciousness is really just an illusion enabled by complex neurochemistry in the brain.
Strikingly, the first-person singular case arguably exposes a fundamental difficulty with this counterintuitive possibility, as it demonstrates a form of intentionality largely absent from the rest of the animal kingdom. Something special unfolds in human relations, something that is bound up in the first-person singular case. It is the first-person, subjective experience (i.e., what it is to be me as I relate to you with all its “forensic” implications) that the “nothing buttery” neuroscientists fail to explain.
In this manner, the first-person singular, in contrast to the second-person and third-person cases, constitutes a special, privileged circumstance in human relations. With rare exceptions (e.g., severe mental illness), when speaking in the first person, we can represent to others what we think and feel without any supporting evidence. We can speak with authority about ourselves. Without any research, we can immediately muster our views and intentions and speak authoritatively about them because we are the sole owners. We are a unified subject, a single center of consciousness, over space and time. I can only postulate or guess what you (second-person) or they (third-person) are thinking or intending, but I can generally be confident of my own state of mind (even if my thoughts are misguided or wrong).
Presumably for these reasons, Roger Scruton and other philosophers have argued that a distinct and peculiar aspect of the first-person case bears emphasis. Only in the first-person case can a human take responsibility for actions that have not yet occurred. The person can commit to climbing that mountain, standing up to that schoolyard bully, mastering the guitar, asking that special girl out on a date. This intentionality is different from a prediction; it is a decision, a state of mind, that reflects our freedom to act as subjects in the world of objects.
As a first-person singular, divine personage, God has a particular point of view and certain expectations of His children.
That God referred to Himself in the first person as “I AM” but immediately thereafter acknowledged His third-person name, YHWH (at least in the Hebrew version), is noteworthy (Exodus 3:15). Without the first-person declaration, our conclusions about the nature of God might be different. Telling Moses that “YHWH” sent you (third-person) is fundamentally different from saying “I” sent you. The first-person case confirmed the intentionality of divine personhood, a relational God. Instructing Moses, “Tell them YHWH sent you,” would have left open the possibility that God was an impersonal, ephemeral essence or power of some sort.
Our interactions with God, the “I to Thou” encounter, thus embody the forensic properties of personhood. As a first-person singular, divine personage, God has a particular point of view and certain expectations of His children. Speaking in the first-person singular, He has made His intentions clear: “[T]his is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man” (Moses 1:39). And He has committed to assist His children along the covenant path: “for he remembereth the house of Israel, both roots and branches; and he stretches forth his hands unto them all the day long” (Jacob 6:4). God’s mercy and power are continually available, most prominently through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Pointing to this miraculous gift, He invites us to enter into a covenant relationship with Him.
In a similar way, as first-person singular beings, we can leverage the “I to Thou” encounter by making our intentions known to God by making and keeping covenants with Him. Baptism, the weekly sacrament, and temple covenants are key opportunities. Speaking of the gate on this covenant path, Alma rhetorically asked his congregation, “…what have you against being baptized in the name of the Lord, as a witness before him that ye have entered into a covenant with him, that ye will serve him and keep his commandments, that he may pour out his Spirit more abundantly upon you?” (Mosiah 18:10). A key supposition motivating our actions is that if we stay on the covenant path, we can be sure that God will come through on His promises. He has assured us that He keeps His promises. “I, the Lord, am bound when ye do what I say” (D&C 82:10).
The practice of making covenants with a relational God thus constitutes a foundational element of Latter-day Saint doctrine. In recent years, Church leaders have consistently underscored the significance of the “covenant path,” a word pair that has now emerged as a buzz phrase within the faith. In his October 2019 General Conference address, “Two Great Commandments,” President Dallin H. Oaks described Christian discipleship as “keeping the commandments and walking the covenant path, while loving our neighbors along the way,” thus underscoring that the covenant path is a way of living rather than just a sequence of ecclesiastical ordinances.
From a Latter-day Saint theological perspective, to the extent we keep our covenants, we can remain entirely in the privileged position afforded by the first-person singular case; we can remain a subject to act in the world of objects, an agent, free “to act for themselves and not to be acted upon” (2 Nephi 2:26). When we fall short of the covenant, the consequences of our choices may increasingly constrain our freedom to operate, leaving us more vulnerable to becoming an “object to be acted upon.” Our first-person, subjective intentionality and freedom thus have limits based on what the Book of Mormon prophet Jacob referred to as the “things as they really are,” boundary conditions that impose constraints on our freedom through the outcomes of our choices. Latter-day Saint theology is a remarkable affirmation of the concept of human beings as aspiring subjects in the world of objects, free agents with responsibility and duty, not just free will.
Understanding God as a first-person singular being, a divine personage who initiates conversations with His creations, commits to intervene benevolently in human affairs, and invites His children to enter into covenant with Him, constitutes a secret to apprehending God’s providential, divine nature. It is the “I to Thou” encounter that presents the stunning opportunity to make, through the gift of our human consciousness and agency, our intentions known to God through covenant. At baptism, in the temple, and in personal prayers, we make commitments and enter into relationship with the divine; acts that constitute a holy contract (that of course we have absolutely no legal standing to expect). It is God’s benevolent intentionality as a first-person singular being, His unconditional love, that makes this astonishing gift possible. It is little wonder the Great Jehovah told Moses to tell them, “I AM” sent you. I think we can be sure He said that intentionally.
