Divine names are linguistic objects that underlie the grammar of religious language. They serve as both representations and presentations of the divine. As representations, divine names carry information pertaining to God’s nature or actions, and his unique will, in a manner that adequately represents him. As presentations, divine names are believed to somehow effect divine presence in proximity to the believer, opening a path of direct connection to God. This paper seeks to analyze the interaction between presentation and representation concerning divine names in major trends within Judaism and Islam, from the Hebrew Bible and the Qur’an to medieval theological debates. It aims to demonstrate how central currents within both traditions shaped the intricate relation between divine presentation and representation through the prism of divine names. Whereas positions in philosophy of language focus on either the representational or the presentational functions of proper names, Jewish and Islamic theologies suggest ways to combine the two functions with regard to divine names.

The widespread Jewish sympathies for Lessing’s pre-Hegelian, pro-Jewish, progressive Deism from the Education of the Human Race spurred some Jewish authors to return to and discuss Lessing’s religious thought within the theological endeavors of the Wissenschaft des Judentums in nineteenth-century Germany. To be able to rely on Lessing, even retroactively, was welcome proof for Jewish Reformers that the humanistic approach to religious problems that stood at the very center of their project was at once Jewish and universal. It was the spirit of Lessing’s Education that was appropriated here for Judaism rather than Lessing’s letter. With Lessing in the camp of Reform Judaism the intended modernization of Judaism was safeguarded against the accusation of political and social egoism on the part of the Jews. It was the universal idea of religious progress that they shared with Lessing, not just the sloughing off of the yoke of outdated talmudic law.

This paper aims at delivering a definition of modernity as offered by modern Jewish theology: a theological capturing of the modern era as an epoch possessing its own unique and positive religious characteristics. This positive theological evaluation of modernity seems to derive uniquely from the Jewish perspective which sees in modernitas a hopeful repetition of the narrative of Exodus: the story of liberation and autonomous self-constitution of man helped by God who wished his subjects to stop being just subjects, but also wanted to offer them freedom. This emphatically affirmative definition of religious modernity has only one equivalent in Christian theology: the millenarist notion of a “new age” – die Neuzeit, or modernitas – as the third age of the spirit, which greatly influenced the most ambitious strain of modern philosophy: German Idealism and Hegel in particular. In referring to the writings of Jacob Taubes (most of all his Occidental Eschatology) I will attempt to show that the twentieth-century Jewish messianism tends to perceive modernity, also in its Christian version, as an epoch of the reawakening of the original spirit of the Hebrew revelation, conceived most of all as the emancipatory event of Exodus.