Janet Soskice , University of Cambridge, England

I have been working on three books in the past years, all of which relate to the names and the naming of God, or to Sinai. Two have been published - The Kindness of God (OUP, 2007) and Sisters of Sinai, Chatto and Knopf, 2009). While at C.T.I. I hope to complete the trilogy with Naming God.

The study begins at Sinai with the burning bush and the ‘call’ to Moses. From close work on the Book of Exodus, and also subsequent interpretations of the Moses story in the Rabbis and Church Fathers, I turn to Philo and find in his writings the fusion of Jewish scripture and Hellenistic metaphysics that will go on to characterise the Christian tradition of ‘negative’ theology. I then turn to Gregory of Nyssa, especially his life of Moses but also other works, and, for a Latin voice, Augustine. A distinctive trajectory is disclosed which relates the knowing and the naming of God, philosophy and revelation, scripture and metaphysics. I allude to the contribution on ‘naming’ made by Ephraim in the Syriac tradition.

From this patristic base I go on to draw a contrast between the pre-modern Aquinas and the ‘modern’ John Locke on knowing and naming God, before turning finally to the New Testament for a study of the idea that Jesus Christ himself is the ‘Name’ of God.

Janet Soskice is Professor of Philosophical Theology and a Fellow of Jesus College, University of Cambridge. She was born in British Columbia, and studied at Cornell and Sheffield, prior to doing a doctorate in the philosophy of religion (religious language) at Oxford University. While the Gordon Milburn Junior Research Fellow and subsequently as a lecturer at Ripon College, Cuddesdon, she taught philosophy or religion, ethics and doctrine at Oxford University and philosophy at Heythrop College, University of London. She is a past-President of the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain and is currently President of the Society for the Study of Theology. She has been a visiting professor in Canada, Sweden and the United States and in 1997 was a McCarthy Visiting Professor at the Gregorian University in Rome. She is a past Board member of the international Catholic journal, Concilium, and is currently a member of the board of Modern Theology. Dr. Soskice is actively involved with the Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology, a Catholic house of study for women within the Cambridge Theological Federation, with Jewish-Christian relations, and with Anglican-Roman Catholic ecumenical discussions amongst other commitments. She is the author of Metaphor and Religious Language (O.U.P. 1984); The Kindness of God (O.U.P. 2007) and has edited (with Grant Gillett and K.W. Fulford), Medicine and Moral Reasoning (C.U.P , 1994) and with Diana Lipton, Feminism and Theology, Oxford Readings in Feminism (OUP, 2003). Her most recent book is Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Lost Gospels (Chatto, March 2009 and Knopf, summer 2009). She is currently editing, with Carlo Cogliati, David Burrell and Bill Stoeger, S.J., Creation and the God of Abraham, papers from a conference at the Vatican Observatory on creatio ex nihilo, in science and the three Abrahamic faiths.