The Origins of YHWH and the Truth of Christianity

A thoughtful question was posed about how progressive Christians like myself reconcile the historical development of YHWH from ancient Near Eastern religious traditions with our Christian faith. Here's my perspective:

I'm completely comfortable with the scholarly consensus that the worship of YHWH emerged within the broader religious context of the ancient Levant. The Hebrew Bible itself hints at this development. Israel's theological journey from polytheism to henotheism to monotheism can be traced through its pages.

But here's the key: My faith doesn't hinge on YHWH being utterly unique or appearing ex nihilo. Rather, it centers on the explosive claims of Jesus of Nazareth and his earliest followers—that this tribal deity of a small Near Eastern people was in fact the one true God of all creation, most fully revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

In other words, I believe the God that developed out of early Yahwistic worship, shaped by encounter with Canaanite religion and other ANE influences, turned out to be the actual Creator and Sustainer of all things. The fact that human understanding of this God evolved over time through cultural interaction doesn't negate that reality.

This is the scandalous particularity of the Christian faith—that the universal God chose to be known through thoroughly particular human cultures and contexts. The development of YHWH-worship isn't a problem for Christian faith—it's a feature of how God works in human history.

Like Jacob wrestling with God at Peniel, Israel wrestled with neighboring religious traditions as it came to know YHWH more fully. And Christians believe that wrestling ultimately led to Jesus, in whom we see God's true face.

I find this understanding more compelling than either fundamentalist denial of religious development or a skeptical dismissal of all truth claims. It takes both history and theology seriously while maintaining intellectual integrity.

This understanding also frees us to recognize God's revelation in other religious and cultural traditions without anxiety. If God was willing to be known through the messy religious development of ancient Israel—including its interactions with Canaanite, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian cultures—then surely God continues to make Godself known through various cultural and religious contexts today.

The particular Christian claim isn't that God is only revealed through Christianity or that other traditions have nothing true to say about the divine. Rather, our claim is that in Jesus, we see the fullness of God's character embodied in human form. As Hebrews puts it, Jesus is "the exact representation of God's being." This doesn't negate other ways God has revealed Godself, but it does mean that we interpret all divine revelation through the lens of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection.

This is deeply liberating! We don't have to fear comparative religion or plug our ears when studying other faiths. We can engage Buddhist insights about suffering, Muslim devotion to prayer, Hindu understanding of divine immanence, or indigenous wisdom about creation with genuine openness and appreciation. We trust that the God revealed in Jesus is big enough to speak through many voices while maintaining that in Jesus we see God's clearest self-disclosure.