Objectification of God

Is God an object? Most Christians would say, of course not. But, putting it more precisely: Can God be an object of thought, of emotion? What about an object of perception? These are puzzling questions.

Whenever I talk or speak about God, or have an intentional emotion directed at God, God is an object as opposed to me a subject, at least in the logical sense of the term. So, in religious language or directed emotion, one can not escape this minimal objectification of God. Jewish theologian/existentialist Martin Buber and Christian theologian/existentialist Paul Tillich pointed out that this very usual, unavoidable and innocent (on the surface) feature of theistic religions involves a nasty problem - more of a religious problem than a philosophical one, although it is both.

Buber's insistence that we can relate to God only in terms of I-Thou (Ich-Du) relationship, that is, directly and personally-experientially, is a protest against a modernistic objectification of God, either in theological talk, worship, or in emotions and in thinking in general. God can never be an "it" for a human being, always a real, honest "You". Otherwise, it simply is not God.

Another much older tradition in Western Theology (Christian, Jewish, and also Muslim), namely the mystical way of via negativa, insisted rigorously that we can say nothing at all determinate or exact about God (human language is inadequate, always approximate and inherently unstable in its referring). God as-he-is-in-himself is beyond all human descriptions. Most radical proponents of via negativa even claimed that we can't say neither that God exists nor that he doesn't exist - the meaning of the word "exists" itself is derived from the "known", from the things, objects and events of our experience and knowledge of in-worldly things, so the word "exists" is not, strictly speaking, adequate when applied to God. That's what the author of The Cloud of Unknowing says, for instance (See the Penguin Classics edition, where there are other works of the same unknown author included; The 5th Chapter of the Mystical Theology of St Denis is a particularly striking example of via negativa).

All this sounds far too radical to most Christians ears today. But even of one does not accept the whole view, there is an important lesson we can learn from via negativa, an important point which a mature Christian should, I firmly believe, take on board and always be aware of it. And this lesson is that God surely is beyond all human descriptions and concepts. Even more than that: God may be seen more like a context of our life experience ("Living in God", or "being brothers in Christ"), a certain reading of our existential feelings and changes in them, than an object of any of our experiences or thoughts. When we objectify God, speak or think about "him" or even sing about, and feel emotional feelings towards God, we are necessarily involved in human constructions. Nothing wrong with that - in any speech, thought or expression which involves language we are embedded in human constructions.

But, however necessary that is for any religious endeavour, isn't the most profound temptation one can think of exactly the one of taking our conceptions and objectifications of God as an ontological reality outside of human world? Our need for a clearly objective measure for humanity makes us push all our human constructions of God, all the worlds created through religious language, outside of humanity as well. But this is of our doing.

A Protestant Reflection on Pope's Visit

Watching Pope delivering a Mass at Westminster Cathedral I can't help being overwhelmed by the aesthetic/spiritual experience of the liturgy, especially the combination of the Choir's excellent singing together with the sound of the Orchestra, and the incredible architectural features of the largest Catholic Cathedral in England.

The events of Papal visit in Britain make me think of my attitude towards Catholicism. Coming from an atheist family, growing up in the secularized surrounding where the largest faith is Roman Catholic, and thinking as someone who has initially converted to a quite anti-Catholic form of Protestantism and has gradually become a moderate into my theologically adult life, I can only offer a highly coloured set of impressions.

While I am constantly discovering 'new' resources in Catholic tradition for my own thought and religious experience (in terms of music, architecture etc.), I am in a deep disagreement with Catholic version of Christianity. It is not just the RC stance social issues which are constantly flagged up in the media, like the simplistic rejection of women priests, gays, condoms and alike which I find troublesome. More problematic are the very basic beliefs in the authority of Roman Bishop, Roman Catholic Tradition (so clearly led by earthly powers of most oppressive kinds), the theological views on other Churches and Christians who are "extra-ecclesiam", naive metaphysical realism and a reluctance of Roman theology to incorporate the relevant insights of contemporary culture. Medieval essentialist views on human nature, cosmos and God are over and out for centuries. Christ-event, salvation and "living, moving and being in God" as real, experiential dimension of faith life today cries very loudly for different philosophical underpinnings than those offered by official Roman Catholic theology.

Of course, there are Roman Catholic thinkers who do engage with culture, science, with faith experience and God-reality in new and creative ways which rise above the traditional metaphysics to which traditional Roman Catholic Church teaching is enslaved. Charles Taylor, Tomas Halik (whom I 'discovered' quite recently, I am ashamed to say), and indeed, my superviser Mark Wynn, are among such Catholic thinkers which I really admire and learn from. But I see them, similarly as some liberal protestants, as walking on the edges of Catholic faith and expanding the very notion of Roman Catholicism.

I suppose that the main issue is still to what extent one can believe that Roman Catholic tradition contains by and large a correct, or at least a credible interpretation of God, Jesus, the Bible and the continuing manifestation and work of the Holy Spirit in the world and Universe. The British Conservative MP Anne Widdecombe has explained it very well, I think, as she was commenting the preparations for the Pope's mass in the Westminster Cathedral. She said that the crucial decision is whether you believe that the Pope really speaks the Truth when he speaks Ex Cathedra, and whether he therefore offers the proper interpretation of Christianity. Understandably, she said that this step, to accept the authority of the Pope, is the most difficult but crucial step from which everything else follows.

I am utterly unable to accept any kind of authority in theological matters in this way, "across the board", so that the interpretations and teaching will be true BECAUSE the person or organization whom I accept as authoritative teaches so. And there are simply so many reasons why not to believe that Pope has this kind of authority. So, while it is not so so hard to understand why those theologians and philosophers today who have 'always been' Roman Catholic still work inside their tradition (usually not accepting all, or many RC teachings) and in so doing actually enable its possible future development (if they are not virtually 'banned' inside the Church like Hans Kung, for ex.), it is not clear to me that honest thinking and openness for any kind of truth can be sustained, in a longer term, with a conservative, authoritarian interpretation of Christian faith offered by the official Roman Catholic teaching.

Grace Jantzen, "Self" and Philosophy of Religion

Reading the book Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion by the late philosopher and theologian Grace Jantzen was an interesting and challenging experience. Being "forced" to honestly rethink so many features of the anglo-saxon (and, to a notable degree also my own) tradition of thinking about God - especially about knowledge of God - has been useful in many ways. The influence of patriarchal society, misogynist prejudices and characteristically male ways of relating to life, sexuality and the world, which Jantzen explores in her book, appear to shape the very foundations of this philosophical tradition, as she sees it.

For me, especially interesting was her critique of the structures of epistemology as these have been engraved into Western mind especially by the Enlightment philosophy (empiricist and rationalist, and later analytic philosophy). Jantzen has an issue with the assumption of the unproblematized subject, as she calls it: the presupposed rational, thinking self which was a taken-for-granted and stable starting point of any epistemology from Descartes and until 20th century. She emphasizes that feminist thinkers in particular have

“raise(d) the question of the materiality and physicality that subtends consciousness itself: the physical world and Descartes’ own body, without which he could never have developed consciousness and rationality. Descartes seems never to have asked himself how he became a conscious, rational subject, how he was born and brought up and nourished. ... His subjectivity, like everyone else’s, emerged out of his bodily development that had its origins in his mother’s womb...” (Jantzen, Becoming Divine, 33)

The lack of raising this question of development of the human thinking self or subject is symptomatic, she thinks, also for Anglo-Saxon (analytic) philosophy of religion as a whole. She accepts Lacan’s interpretations of Freud and of the empirical evidence of early childhood development which hold that self is “much trickier and more complicated than western philosophy has recognized” (ibid.). She summarizes Lacan’s position thus:

“the subject, far from being an autonomous self, is constituted by a rupture, an internalized otherness. It involves the enactment of the subject/(m)other division. We are long way from Descartes’ confidently rational cogito. ... Instead of fixed identity that subject simply has/is, subjectivity is something that is achieved not once and for all, but in fragile and fluctuating fragments. Moreover it is achieved only by repression and the splitting of the self, which is thus precisely not transparently rational.” (Jantzen, Becoming Divine, 37)

Of course, if this is true even in part, it has important implication for philosophy of religion, including (or especially) for any epistemological account of religious experience. I think Jantzen's critique is consistent with a sociological-constructionist argument that, since the language, concepts and norms significantly co-shape everything one thinks and does, the very notion of self or subject is likewise co-formed (significantly) by the community. The thinking (and perceiving) subject then, is not simply a stable given which could be taken for granted. It is unstable, fragmented, and “exists” as a unitary entity on the expense of repressed desires and feelings.

It seems then, that Anglo-Saxon epistemology of religion (and epistemology of rel. experience in particular) has some deep problems which it fails to address properly. But I think that here in fact lies also a possibility of a different kind of philosophy of religious experience, a more sensible one that the analytic epistemology of rel. experience (Swinburne, Alston, Yandell, and similar): if the subject is in important respects unstable and constructed, we should take seriously the claims of many mystics and some liberal theologians (Schleiermacher, but also the likes of Tillich and even Rahner in 20th cent.) that authentic God-experience in important sense transcends the subject (self) itself, or more precisely, the "subject-object structure". It is here that Jantzen meets Schleiermacher - very intimately in fact - although in her short treatment of Schleiermacher in Becoming Divine she is mostly critical of his experiential subjectivism (pp. 116-119) and of the privatization of religion he supposedly advocated (which is a questionable interpretation).