Chapter 14 · ~13 min read
In the Name of
epikaleō and what calling on his name meant
Most Christian prayers end with a small phrase that’s come to feel like punctuation. …In Jesus’s name we pray, amen. It’s so familiar that it can land like the yours sincerely at the end of a letter — a polite closing, a verbal signature, a way of marking the end of the prayer. We say it because we were taught to say it, and we move on. The phrase has become, for most of us, a habit before it’s anything else.
It wasn’t always a habit. In the world of the New Testament — and behind it, in the world of the Hebrew Bible — the name of God, and the act of calling on that name, carried a kind of weight that English readers can feel only with a little excavation. When the apostles wrote about the name, they weren’t reaching for a verbal flourish. They were reaching for one of the oldest and most loaded ideas in scripture, with a thousand years of Israelite worship and covenant-making piled inside it. And when Christians, in the second half of the first century, began to apply that idea to Jesus — when they spoke of calling on the name of Jesus, and of being called by his name — they were doing something that, in their Jewish ears, was world-changing.
To get there, we have to go back to a single sentence near the beginning of the Bible.
In Genesis chapter 4, after the long account of Cain and his violent line of descendants, the narrator turns to Cain’s brother Seth and Seth’s son Enosh. And then comes this:
Seth also had a son, and he named him Enosh. At that time people began to call on the name of the LORD. (Genesis 4:26, NIV)
It’s one of the quietest verses in Genesis, and one of the most important. Right after the first murder, right after the first city, right after a long catalogue of human violence and ambition, the text records that somebody started praying. People began to call on the name of the LORD. The Hebrew is qara b’shem YHWH — to invoke, literally to cry out in the name of, the four-letter name of God we’ve already met (in Chapter 12) at the burning bush. To call on God by name is, in the Hebrew Bible, the first and most basic act of organized worship. It’s what Abraham does, repeatedly, after he arrives in the land. He pitches his tent, builds an altar, and calls on the name of the LORD. It’s what Isaac does in Beersheba. It’s what the psalmists do — I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the LORD. It’s what the prophets describe as the mark of God’s people.
What is this calling on the name? It isn’t magic, and it isn’t just speaking the name out loud. In the world of the ancient Near East, to invoke a god’s name was to claim relationship with that god. It was to publicly identify yourself as one of his — to step inside the covenant, to ask for help on the basis of the relationship, to declare in front of witnesses I am with this God, and this God is with me. You didn’t call on the name of a god who wasn’t yours. You didn’t call on the name of a god you hadn’t been brought into relationship with. Calling on the name was a covenant act, and it was a public one.
The flip side of the phrase is even more striking. Throughout the Hebrew Bible, God’s people are called by his name. The book of Deuteronomy promises that Israel, if she keeps the covenant, will be a people called by the name of the LORD (Deuteronomy 28:10). The famous prayer in 2 Chronicles begins, if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray… (2 Chronicles 7:14). The prophet Isaiah, speaking for God, says of Israel: everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory (Isaiah 43:7). The prophet Amos, in a much-quoted verse, looks forward to a day when all the nations that bear my name will turn to the LORD (Amos 9:12).
To be called by God’s name is to belong to him. To call on his name is to belong to him publicly. Two directions of the same covenant. The name is the bridge.
For most of the Hebrew Bible, the name in question is one name — YHWH, the LORD, the God who spoke to Moses out of the bush. And then, in the New Testament, something extraordinary happens.
It’s centered on a single Old Testament verse — Joel 2:32 — and the way the apostles read it after the resurrection. Joel, an Israelite prophet writing centuries before Christ, had given Israel a promise about the day of the LORD’s salvation:
And everyone who calls on the name of the LORD will be saved. (Joel 2:32, NIV)
The Hebrew, again, is qara b’shem YHWH. The Greek translation of Joel that first-century Jews used (the Septuagint, the same Greek Old Testament we’ve met in earlier chapters) renders this epikaleō to onoma Kyriou — to call on the name of the Lord. Kyrios, that loaded Greek word for lord that we explored in Chapter 3, doing its work again here as the standard Septuagint substitute for the divine name YHWH.
Now jump forward a few centuries. It’s the day of Pentecost, in Jerusalem, fifty days after Jesus’s resurrection. The Spirit has fallen on the disciples, and Peter stands up to explain to a stunned crowd what they’re witnessing. He preaches the first Christian sermon. And in the middle of it, he quotes Joel 2:32:
And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. (Acts 2:21, NIV)
What’s striking isn’t the quotation. What’s striking is what Peter does with it. He goes on to identify the Lord whose name the prophet promised would save — not with the Father (as Joel’s audience would have heard), but with Jesus. God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah, Peter says a few verses later. And by the end of the sermon, when the crowd, cut to the heart, asks what they should do, Peter tells them: Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins. (Acts 2:38). The Joel promise — whoever calls on the name of the LORD — has, in Peter’s hands, become an invitation to call on Jesus.
A few decades later, the apostle Paul does the same thing. Writing to the church in Rome, he quotes Joel 2:32 again:
For “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” (Romans 10:13, NIV)
And in the verses immediately before this one, Paul has been talking about confessing Jesus as Lord and believing that God raised him from the dead. The Joel passage is, again, applied to Jesus. In Romans 10, the name of the LORD in Joel and the name of Jesus in the church’s preaching are the same name.
The American New Testament scholar Richard Hays, who taught at Duke Divinity School and whose major work Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul essentially established the modern study of how the New Testament writers reread the Old Testament in light of Christ, argued that this kind of move was one of the most theologically loaded things Paul ever did. When Paul reads a YHWH passage from the prophets and puts Jesus’s name in the place where YHWH stood — without explanation, without apology, as if the substitution were obvious — Paul is making a claim about Jesus that he never makes explicitly in so many words. He’s identifying Jesus with the God of Israel. The Joel quotation, transposed onto Jesus, is one of the boldest examples. Calling on the name of the LORD in Joel and calling on the name of Jesus in the early church are, for Paul, the same act. The same name. The same God. The same salvation.
This is why the apostles can speak the way they do throughout the New Testament book of Acts. The first Christians are described, again and again, as those who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 1:2). When the apostles heal, they heal in the name of Jesus. When they cast out spirits, they cast them out in the name of Jesus. When they baptize, they baptize in the name of Jesus. The phrase is everywhere. And the phrase isn’t a verbal flourish. It’s the New Testament equivalent of the Hebrew Bible’s calling on the name of the LORD — a public claim of covenant belonging, an invocation of relationship, a declaration that we are his and he is ours.
There’s one more piece, and it brings the picture together. In the Old Testament, Israel is called by God’s name — the covenant relationship runs in both directions, both calling on and being called by. In the New Testament, the same pattern shows up, transposed onto Jesus.
At the council in Jerusalem, recorded in Acts 15, the question of whether Gentile believers need to keep the law of Moses is settled by the apostle James, who quotes from the prophet Amos:
After this I will return and rebuild David’s fallen tent… that the rest of mankind may seek the Lord, even all the Gentiles who bear my name, says the Lord, who does these things. (Acts 15:16–17, NIV, quoting Amos 9:11–12)
The Gentiles, James says, are now bearing the name. They are people on whom the name has been invoked. In the letter of James — written a few decades later — the same image returns: Christians are people who have had the noble name invoked over them at baptism (James 2:7). The Old Testament’s called by the name of the LORD has become the New Testament’s called by the name of Christ. The covenant hasn’t been replaced. It’s been extended. The same name. The same belonging. The same God.
This is what Christian means as a name. The Greek word Christianos — first applied to Jesus’s followers in Antioch, according to Acts 11:26 — literally means one of Christ’s people, one who bears Christ’s name. The early believers didn’t invent the title for themselves. It was applied to them, in a city outside Israel, by outsiders who noticed that this group was constantly invoking the name of someone called Christos. The name was their distinguishing mark. The name was what they were called by.
With that pattern in your ear, the small phrase at the end of so many Christian prayers becomes something other than punctuation. To pray in Jesus’s name isn’t to add a verbal stamp at the end of a request. It’s to invoke the covenant relationship the New Testament writers cared most about. It’s to do, in miniature, what Abraham did when he built his altar and called on the name of the LORD. It’s to identify yourself, publicly, as one of his. It’s to claim the relationship. It is, in a real sense, the original Christian act — the one Peter offered the crowd at Pentecost when they asked what shall we do? The answer was, and is, call on the name. Repent and be baptized. Be brought into the covenant. Bear the name. And when you pray, pray in that name — because the name is the bridge between you and the God of Israel, the same God who heard Abraham and answered Joel and raised Jesus from the dead.
There’s also something practical worth noticing. When a diplomat speaks in the name of the country he represents, he isn’t casting a spell. He’s exercising delegated authority. He’s acting under the assumption that the country backs him up. The phrase in the name of in scripture has some of the same weight. When the apostles heal in the name of Jesus, they aren’t using Jesus’s name like a magic incantation. They’re acting as his representatives. The healing is his work, done through their hands, with his authority. Their authority is borrowed. The name is what makes the borrowing real.
This is why the New Testament is so careful about the difference between using the name and bearing the name. The sons of Sceva, in Acts 19, try to use the name of Jesus like a formula — they cast out spirits in the name of Jesus whom Paul preaches. The spirit they’re addressing answers back: Jesus I know, and Paul I know about, but who are you? The formula doesn’t work for people who haven’t been brought into relationship with the one whose name they’re invoking. The name isn’t a tool. The name is a relationship.
Reading this yourself
The next time you pray, and you come to the end, slow down at the closing phrase. In Jesus’s name. Let it stop being punctuation. Hear it as the Hebrew prophets would have heard qara b’shem YHWH — a public claim of covenant belonging, an invocation of relationship, a declaration that I am one of his and he is mine. Then, if it helps, look up Genesis 4:26 and read it slowly. At that time people began to call on the name of the LORD. The line that has connected your prayer to Abraham’s altar — to Joel’s promise — to Peter at Pentecost — to Paul writing to Rome — to every Christian who has ever bowed their head and asked anything in the name of Christ. Two thousand years of the church doing what Enosh’s neighbors first started doing in a chapter near the beginning of Genesis. Calling on the name. Belonging by the name. Walking with the God whose name is given to those who are his.
In English, in the name of Jesus sounds like a small piece of devotional vocabulary, slipped in at the end of prayers because we were taught to slip it in. In the Hebrew Bible’s vocabulary, and in the apostles’ transposition of that vocabulary onto Jesus, it’s the central act of the covenant. The act that began with Enosh and Seth. The act Joel promised. The act Peter offered the Pentecost crowd. The act that, in Antioch, gave a movement of believers their name — people of the name, Christians. That’s what the apostles were doing every time they said it. The next time you pray it, pray it knowing what you’re doing. You are calling on a name your ancestors in the faith have been calling on since the fourth chapter of Genesis. You are stepping inside a covenant that hasn’t stopped extending its welcome. And the same God who heard the others is hearing you.