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.