#adonai and yhwh and yahweh and elohim and sophia and baal and chaos--god does not care what you call him only that you call him

[eesirachs]

is it theologically okay to refer to God by other names? my family is from Uzbekistan and lived through both the ban on religion under USSR rule and the violent crackdown on all religion that ensued after the USSR fell by the new government. like a lot of Uzbek Christians, we referred to God by the name Qora (the darkness that existed before the world was created in Uzbek indigenous mythology, and also a name that sounds like a bunch of not-religious totally innocent words so you can have plausible deniability if the wrong person overhears) and although we've since immigrated to the United States, I just can't deprogram my brain into using the word God 100% of the time and not Qora, the same way I can't force myself to think/speak in English 100% of the time without fail. is this okay? this feels vaguely like it shouldn't be since it's not God's actual name but a name given to God by humans for a certain context... but my just has a default it goes back to, and it's Qora.

even if god was, in scripture, adamant about being consistently called 'god,' circumstances of oppression, violence, and threat demand a theology that is flexible, that meets you where you are.

however, the god of scripture is clear--repeatedly clear-- that he is far-above positive/consistent signs, symbols, names. we in fact can identify various authors of the bible by the different names they use for god--here one author calls him elohim, here another uses yahweh. sometimes god auto-refers as baal, a different ane god and a fluid term for lord. in exodus he offers his well-known 'i am that i am' name--אֶהְיֶה‎. in the psalms he takes on femininity through sophia. rather than offering a single appropriate name for god, scripture reminds us again and again that god is less a name and more the act of naming. the act of knowing. qora is a beautiful, and meaningful, way of accessing god. thank you for sharing it with me