Stasis Worship - Part 1: The God of Becoming

Mistranslated as the Static, Eternal, God of Being

Introduction: The Root Heresy

There is a heresy older than any church, temple, or caliphate: the worship of stasis. The original sin of thought was not pride, nor disobedience - it was freezing the flux of life into the idol of “being.” What was once a living, moving God - a creative force in motion - was calcified by frightened men into a statue of permanence.

This was not a mistake of ignorance. It was a choice: the desire to end the tension of becoming, to halt growth, to trade the dangerous freedom of change for the illusion of eternal certainty.

The Original Name Was a Verb

In Exodus 3:14, God reveals His name - not as a title, not as a noun, but as a verb. And not just any verb, but a first-person singular imperfect qal:

אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶר אֶהְיֶה
Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh
“I will be what I will be.”

Let’s unpack that.

• First-person: God speaks of Himself. Directly. No middleman.

• Imperfect tense: In Biblical Hebrew, this means ongoing, incomplete, or future action - "I will be," not "I am." It suggests process, development, unfolding.

• Qal stem: This is the simplest, active voice. No nuance of being acted upon, no causation, no passivity. God is declaring: “I act. I become. I initiate.”

It is not "I Am That I Am." That is a mistranslation - a flattening, and it’s VERY CLEAR.
It is not a static statement of existence.
It is not a metaphysical riddle.

It is a declaration of becoming.

A God in motion.
A God who adapts, who grows with the world, who exists in relationship, not in removal.

A God of dynamism. Of unpredictability. Of life.

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But They Buried the Verb

The translators - whether from philosophical bias, fear of chaos, or sheer reverence for stasis - froze the name.
They rendered it:

“I Am That I Am.”

A fixed, closed loop.
A statement of essence, not emergence.
They turned a verb into a noun.
They replaced becoming with being.
They buried the living name under metaphysical concrete.

And so:

• The God who becomes was turned into the God who simply is.

• The verb was entombed in a noun.

• The flame of process was dimmed into the idol of permanence.

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Why It Matters

This shift was subtle - but total.
Because language is the gate of ontology.

When you name God as Being, you anchor Him in the philosophical traditions of timeless perfection - static, detached, and unchanging.
You render Him immune to history, untouched by pain, and irrelevant to struggle.

But when you return to the verb, you recover the God who:

• Wrestles with Jacob

• Regrets before the Flood

• Burns in a bush

• Walks in the garden

• Cries out through prophets

• And unfolds with creation

The God of Becoming is not safe - but He is alive.

How We Got “Yahweh”

1. God says “Ehyeh”
   In Exodus 3:14, when Moses asks for God's name, God answers:

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” – “I will be what I will be.”

1. The key word: Ehyeh – first-person singular, imperfect tense of the verb הָיָה (hayah) – to be / to become.

2. God then says “Tell them: YHWH sent you”
   In Exodus 3:15, immediately after, God switches grammatical person and uses a different form of the same root:

“YHWH, the God of your ancestors… has sent me to you.”

1. So while Ehyeh means “I will be,”
   YHWH (יהוה) is the third-person version:

“He will be” or more accurately, “He causes to become.”

1. What does YHWH mean?
   It’s built from the same root (היה) but likely reflects an older causative form - “He who causes to become,” or simply, “He becomes.”

   This is key: YHWH is still a verb.
   It's not a frozen noun. It's a name made of active, becoming energy.

2. Why "Yahweh"?
   Hebrew was originally written without vowels. The four-letter name (יהוה) is called the Tetragrammaton.

   Over time:

   • The name became too sacred to pronounce.

   • Jews substituted it with Adonai ("Lord") in reading.

   • When Christians tried to vocalise it centuries later, they mistakenly combined the consonants YHWH with the vowels of Adonai, yielding the incorrect form Jehovah.

   • Modern scholarship reconstructed the likely pronunciation as Yahweh, based on early transliterations and the grammar of Hebrew verbs.

Why the Ego Hates Becoming - The Motive for Mistranslation

To become is to risk. To adapt. To surrender control. The human ego, driven by fear of chaos and death, longs for certainty. It prefers a dead truth over a living unknown. So it reimagines God in its own image - unchanging, omniscient, omnipotent - and then bows before its own fear, calling it reverence.

But a static God is no God at all. He is merely a mirror for human cowardice. The real God - the true creative source - is dangerous, unpredictable, always moving. Like life.

Coherence with Life: The Real Measure

If life is the ground of value - if all meaning, growth, and goodness come from life - then stasis is anti-life. And a theology that worships unchanging being over dynamic becoming is a theology of death.

Becoming is not a problem to solve; it is the frame within which everything meaningful occurs. The Torah knew this. Genesis is not a metaphysical treatise - it is a poem of emergence. God does not declare a static truth. He sees what He has made and calls it good - each time. Meaning is emergent. Life is cumulative. Creation is process, not platonic perfection.

The Great Error

From this foundational mistranslation, the rot spread. The living God was made into a metaphysical absolute, divorced from history, embodiment, and relationship. A God no longer walking in the garden, but seated forever on a throne above it - untouchable, unmoving, and ultimately, irrelevant.

This is where we went wrong. And this is where we begin to set it right.

Why It Matters to Synthesis

The root is still a verb.
But religion buried the action under reverence, the becoming under being, and eventually - under silence.

Yahweh was once a word alive with motion.

"He who becomes."
"He who causes becoming."
"The One in dynamic relation with life itself."

But theology, driven by Greek metaphysics and the fear of change, turned that vibrant verb into a metaphysical monument.

Postscript: The Ice Beneath the Temple

The impulse to freeze God into a concept did not begin in a vacuum. It found its first philosophical home not in Jerusalem, but in Athens. When the Greeks began to worship Form over Flow, the divine was drained of its blood, and the eternal replaced the living.

The next chapter of stasis worship unfolds in marble halls, where thought itself was embalmed.

Next: Part 2 – Plato’s Ghost: How the Greeks Froze the Divine
We’ll examine how Greek metaphysics laid the intellectual concrete that trapped the God of Becoming in the cage of Being - and how that error still echoes in every church, temple, and lecture hall today.

- James Dean Conroy