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by name, and when men know His name, they know it only (with fear and trembling) because God Himself has revealed it to them—first to Abraham: “I am God almighty!” then to Moses: “I am that I am!” But God has not revealed it that men, again unafraid, may take the name of God upon their lips; but that when men give a name to God according to their own, free, rational judgment, however well or ill they may understand it, they at the same time can and shall keep in mind the name that God has given and gives Himself. It was, therefore, a fine custom of the ancient Jews (and I do not make light of it!) that they refrained from taking the revealed name of God—“I am that I am”—upon their lips; but, filled with awe, they felt that it did not become man to pronounce God’s name and therefore substituted man’s name for God—“the Lord.” By this reserve they were constantly reminded that God Himself was and is He who reveals to His people the unique and distinctive being that He is. At least one may question whether the unrestrained freedom of speech of Christians about the ultimate and deepest being of God ought more to be commended than the diffidence and restraint of the ancient Jew. The revealed name of God, which one keeps in mind but which actually cannot be spoken by human lips, is not mere sound and breath but an eternal name. It is the landmark set by God between Himself and all creatures visible to men, indicating that He is always God and not a creature. This mark of separation is not changeable and perishable, but, in the words of the text, is a strong tower, holy and terrible; therefore, for us He is the strange, the new, the beyond, the above, never from us, never in us, yet to be feared, loved, praised, and invoked by us.

      If you will again ask me: what is the name of God and where and how shall we seek it? I can only reply that we usually do not seek Him, but only find Him; or far rather, only those, who already have found Him, can seek Him. He lets Himself be found—that’s it. Where? What else shall I say than what has been said of old: “there where a man sees that he is a sinner, that he must die, that his world passeth away.” There God sets bounds to the endlessness of the sinner’s sin and death, the transitoriness of his world and says: “I, the Holy One, I, who live and reign in eternity, I, the Creator and Redeemer of this world!” This “I,” which is the boundary of man’s land, is the name of God. But God Himself must utter this “I”; otherwise it is vain fanaticism.

      But how does He speak this “I?” Again I shall say naught but what has been said of old. There is a witness concerning this “I,” this revealed name fixed for all of us; though we cannot comprehend that the “I” is spoken. The witness tells us that this “I” has been seen, heard, and handled among God’s people and in His only begotten Son; this we are able to hear and to hold for truth. Jesus Christ the boundary of the evil endlessness of man’s land! Jesus Christ, who is, in this man’s land and for all its inhabitants, the spoken “I”! Jesus Christ the name of God! God Himself must bear testimony to His witness—the testimony of the Holy Spirit in the inner man, so that we can and must hold for truth the outer testimony, the witness of the Scripture. Else it is man’s work in man’s land like every other work of man. Thus the “name of God” lets itself be found; so it is with the “strong tower,” that, according to the Lord’s Prayer, stands at the beginning of all praying. It is “strong” because it is wholly built by God himself.

      We are told in our text, “the righteous runneth into it.” Mark well, running is not an evidence of strength and virtue, not even when one flees to “the name of the Lord.” We should like to represent the coming to the heavenly Father in another way: as a soaring up and breaking through, as a battle won and a triumphal entry. But we are not to come in this way; for only as the “righteous runneth into it” will God’s name be hallowed. A man who fulfills the first petition will not cut an imposing figure. He is a fugitive: he runs to the strong tower—from which he hears the cry of warning: “Halt! what seekest thou here?”—only because he cannot be at rest anywhere else; because he is pursued and driven from every other place and has no other resort than to seek refuge in the name of the Lord. This is not an uplifting sight. He who “runs” will be called a weakling. Therefore, for example—I say this to the students who are present—theology, in distinction from other sciences, is not a great and honored science, not an advance but a retreat; it is in essence a flight from all human names (also from the human names of God!) to the revealed name of the Lord.

      Theology, therefore, does not cut a fine figure. All this must be so. One cannot be, in the words of the text, “the righteous” and at the same time present an imposing spectacle. Here one must make a choice. To “the name of the Lord” we can only “run.” He who walks triumphantly goes where he is exalted; only the humble “run.” He whom this name draws nigh will find all names given of men, spite of all their worth, to be nothing but sound and breath. A man’s confidence in his own understanding and comprehension must be so completely shaken that he cannot keep himself from taking a last impossible step into the darkness in which he and all that he has will be lost forever, unless he believes that through the darkness he will approach the light of God. Believe! That means defeat and flight. How remarkable, how questionable is a man who believes! How great is the danger of conceit, of self-deception through a wish-dream, of a leap which can only be a leap into death! He who believes must drop all these considerations. In this manner and mood one must run to the name of the Lord, not a name given of men, the boundary stone erected by God between man’s land and God’s land.

      How is this to be justified before the eye of man? The “righteous” is the man who has received new eyes to see the other in God, His might, His wisdom, His love. Not his way of flight makes a man “righteous”; he is righteous because all other ways are closed to him. Not his running makes him righteous, but the name of the Lord which is the only thing that is left him. Faith is his righteousness; not faith as his work, but faith that lays hold of and subjects him, faith that is a necessity from which he cannot escape. He cannot triumph, cannot be in the right, cannot make claims; for he is a wholly weak, dishonorable, sinful, and unrighteous righteous man. But in such righteousness, through such faith, the first petition: “Hallowed be thy name!” is fulfilled. For when a man “runs” to the name of God and thus gives honor and right to God, not in wisdom but in foolishness, not in power but in weakness, above all not in extreme piety but rather in extreme godlessness, and notwithstanding “runs” thither, lays hold of this name, says “yes,” then God’s name is known, the name revealed only by Him. In this way faith, for which we must pray, is the true hallowing of the name of God.

      It has often been said that our time, with the abolition and dissolution of so many human names, signs and boundaries, is especially favorable for understanding what is meant by running to and believing in the name of the Lord. True, in these years we all feel as if we were sailing hopelessly on a sinking ship and we take it for granted that it cannot be otherwise; so, with one accord, we cry: “Lord, how shall we comfort ourselves? we hope in Thee!” On the contrary this is not the real situation. The indications are that the ship may sink and is sinking; yet an ever increasing number of our contemporaries know how to comfort one another in the cinema or at the football game. Even if we, who are of the better sort, examine ourselves, we shall find that all of us at this time comfort one another, though it may be in a refined, spiritual and devout way. We know how to take courage without God, that we have not lost our confidence in others, in human names, and that much remains for us besides refuge in the name of God. Only let us not imagine that this will ever be otherwise! Things are thus because we are human. The ship may continue to sink for a long time, as deep as in Russia and even deeper—yet with the sinking and on account of it, flight into the strong tower and righteousness through faith will not come. If events and conditions, like these by which we are surrounded, cannot teach us faith, by what else can we be taught to believe? To speak as men, we can only say that we do not learn faith, never will learn faith, neither from ourselves nor under the stress of fate and evil times. Faith comes from God each moment, and when it comes we can say nothing else, astonished and perplexed, but: “I believe, dear Lord, help my unbelief!”

      And now, finally, it is said of the “righteous” who runs to the name of the Lord: “He will be exalted.” I cannot tell whether he will know himself to be secure. Perhaps he himself is not sure. The chief thing, at any rate, is not what he knows or imagines he knows, but what is, not in his own power nor in the power of the “certainty” of his believing, but in the power of the name of the

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