Richard Bauckham, Who is God? Key Moments of Biblical Revelation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020; Paperback, 2025)
In this work, renowned New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham explores the question, who is God? To answer it, he examines key moments in the Christian Bible in which God reveals who he is: Jacob’s dream at Bethel (Genesis 28:10–22); God’s revelation to Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 3); and three events in St. Mark’s Gospel: Jesus’s baptism (Mark 1:9–11), the Mount of Transfiguration (Mark 9:2–8), and Jesus’s death (Mark 15:37–39). In the process, Bauckham interprets these passages in their own canonical literary contexts, avoiding lengthy and dense historical reconstructions. His goals are to demonstrate that God’s identity remains “consistent” in the Old and New Testaments and to allow readers to know him better (3). To accomplish these objectives, Bauckham divides his work into an introduction and four chapters as well as an index of biblical and ancient writings.
In the “Introduction” (1–3), he lays out the abovementioned summary of the volume. Bauckham’s first chapter, “The Revelation of the Divine Presence” (5–34), explores the revelation of God’s presence to the patriarch Jacob in Bethel, as he makes his escape from Esau to sojourn in Haran with his uncle Laban. He concludes that the object Jacob sees in his dream (Genesis 28:10–22) is probably a staircase and the remarkable thing about this dream is that God stands, not at the top, but beside the staircase and thus beside Jacob. At this point, God reveals that he will be “with” Jacob, giving the patriarch assurance that wherever he goes God will be there (Genesis 28:15). That God is “with” us, in Bauckham’s words, is “probably the most important discovery anyone can make, for, once made, it colors all of life’s experiences” (11). He, then, traces this “with-ness” of the divine presence from Jacob to Christians, who through Jesus, Immanuel or God with us (Matthew 1:23), the staircase of Jacob’s dream (John 1:51), and the New Tabernacle and Temple (John 1:14) make a way for God to be “with” us (22).
In the second chapter, “The Revelation of the Divine Name” (35–60), Bauckham investigates the revelation of God’s holy name to Moses, YHWH. He concludes that it probably means “I will be who I will be,” which indicates that God is “utterly self-determining” (42). It is this God who then commits himself to Israel and to his entire creation. Bauckham moves to the New Testament to connect the revelation of God’s Name to the Lord’s Prayer and Jesus’s petition that God sanctify his Name, which he proposes is the covenant name YHWH. What is more, Bauckham hypothesizes that Jesus’s own treatment of God’s Name in the Gospels demonstrates this sanctification of it and that Jesus’s frequent references to God as Father is his substitution for the divine name, YHWH. Moving to the early Christian movement, Bauckham contends that the references to Jesus as Lord in the New Testament are conscious attempts to show that Jesus belonged to God’s identity, which sanctifies God’s Name: “The revelation of God in the humanity of Jesus is the way that God’s identity comes to be universally known. So the confession that Jesus is the Lord redounds to the glory of God the Father. His Name is hallowed” (58).
The third chapter, “The Revelation of the Divine Character” (61–88), examines the revelation of God’s character to Moses in Exodus 34, which demonstrates what God is like. Bauckham draws out the context of this chapter, Israel’s shocking idolatrous act with the golden calf (Exodus 32:1–6), God’s desire to destroy the people for this sinful act (Exodus 32:7–10), and Moses’s successful mediation between God and Israel (Exodus 32:11–14). Given that God relented of the disaster, Moses requests that God disclose more about his divine self by revealing his glory to Moses so that the latter can see him (Exodus 33:18–23). God refuses this request but allows Moses to hear who he is: he is the LORD, which means that he is merciful, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in covenant love, and faithful to the thousandth generation by forgiving the sin of his people. However, God does not clear the guilty but visits the iniquity of the parents on the children to the third and fourth generation (Exodus 34:5–8). Bauckham notes that God’s mercy, grace, slowness to anger, abundance of covenant love, and faithfulness are relational terms describing how God interacts with his people, which in turn reveal God’s character. He, then, traces other references to this revelation of God’s character, sometimes adapted, in Joel 2:12–14; Jonah 4:1–3; Psalm 145, and in Jesus (John 1:14, 16–18). The latter event “reveals not only, as in Exodus 34, what God is like in his relationship with the world but also what God is like in his inner being. The eternal love between the Father and the Son is the source from which the love of God overflows into the life of the world” (85).
Who is God? is the type of book one expects from such a seasoned, thoughtful, and careful scholar like Bauckham. It is carefully argued, well-researched, and, despite the book’s small size (it is 110 pages) chopped full of too many exegetical insights to list in such a small review as this. It was a delight to read and, at the same time, encouraging. Certainly, Bauckham has achieved his desired hope of helping readers “know God better” (3). For these reasons, I highly recommend this work, especially in its new paperback format!
I am grateful to Baker Academic for providing me with a gratis copy of Who is God?, which is no way influenced by review of it.