A defining force in many worldviews is the acceptance of a supreme being; a deity who shaped the world and, per some theologies, created the rules by which it is governed as well. The concept of Godhood (singular or collective) is so potent and compelling that it seems to be an integral part of most ideological frameworks and has been so for untold ages.
It seems as though the idea of God is engraved upon the human mind somehow.
But along with the notion of the gods comes an urge to understand them. If God is out there, who is this entity and what does it want? If the concept of a supreme or superior being is to be accepted, it must be defined and clarified in some manner for our understanding; thus a litany of superlatives and adjectives are attached, whether deserved or not, to our image of a creator. The difficulty in this is that it threatens the very possibility of understanding such an entity. In 1923 a Hebrew philosopher named Martin Buber published an analysis of the mechanics of dialogue and interaction, and having recently become aware of Buber's perspective I couldn't help but be struck by how I feel it impacts the act of explaining the concept of God... these principals apply to the very nature of understanding and perception, and in the case of God perception often seems all we have to go on.
To apply these views to concept of God, we must first understand their application to ourselves; Buber’s ideas demonstrate a fascinating perspective of the nature of human interaction. In effect, for dialogue to exist we must acknowledge and except the personhood of “thou” or the other… if we allow ourselves to reduce them to our created image or perception of them, we diminish the personhood of the other to the cold utility of an “it” or object, and thus undermine the legitimacy of their understanding and circumvent the need for us to recognize them as a person. In order to truly reach a point where dialogue can flourish, we must steadfastly avoid this… a task that may or may not be altogether impossible to achieve, let alone maintain. Unfortunately, as difficult as it is to reach such a state as this in day to day interactions with those we meet, it seems all the more difficult to apply this to the people we do not directly interact with. People in other countries are all too easy to objectify and reduce; the ideas, beliefs, and traditions of another nation are defenseless from our criticism without their adherents and practitioners on hand to stand up for their reasoned legitimacy. From the comfort of our homes we blast the ideas of those across the world without a second thought because they are not here to confront us, and faced with this barrier it is difficult to accept the reality of their inherent humanity or personhood; they become a legion reducible to the notion of “them” opposed to the ideas of the surely more rational collective “us” (itself perhaps an equally demeaning notion, diminishing our own peers to the status of accrued assets supporting our way of life). So if all of this is as it seems what of our efforts to reach our hands out and touch the heavens? Can we ever even hope to interact with the gods at all? Is it possible to understand and except the personhood of a being or beings for whom we have little to no frame of reference to understand?
All of the above would naturally seem to apply equally well to an analysis of the personhood of the divine. God is as easy to put in a box and commodify as any man or woman, if not more so due the gap between humanity and divinity; it is a dangerously simple thing to reduce the notion of god to “the supreme it” given our apparent lack of dialogue. What is god like? What does god want? What is the character of this person and how does it drive their actions? These question are fair and inevitable, but in striving to answer them it is easy enough to fall into the pit of boxing the divine in to our own limited image… we create the gods to mimic our own beliefs and bolster our own philosophy, rather than seeking to understand the possible nature and purpose of such an entity. Utilizing Martin Buber’s notion of I-Thou interaction one could reasonably surmise, then, that we walk a dangerous line as we reach out to God that risks shattering the very possibility and viability of doing so in the first place. We feel we must have some basis for understanding the idea of god, and thus we create an image that defines the whole of the concept for us… the rules we ascribe to the divine may not at all be reflective of reality. God is love, God is just, God is merciful, God is all-knowing and all-powerful… these attributes paint a picture that I feel we have fashioned into an ideological idol which many worship for lack of a truer picture; God the Greatest Thing becomes substitute for God the person, to whom all these superlatives need not necessarily apply at all. In effect, it seems like we destroy the very possibility of understanding the divine and interfacing with the person of god by attempting to understand the nature of god in the first place.
In a philosophical sense it is as though we try to kill God and replace this being with god, our imagined authority to whom we defer as a front for the defense of our own beliefs and justification for our ideologies.
We seem very much inclined to commit intellectual deicide, more attracted to the concept of the divine than the personhood of the same, and willing to sacrifice the possibility of touching the hand of the creator if it provides a means to instead bolster our conceptualized understanding of the world around us. God viewed thus becomes the ultimate tool… more specifically the ultimate philosophical club, wielded to beat down all of those (or more acutely in this essay, “them.”) who disagree with our moral constructs and accepted values. God becomes an asset, and a commodity to be traded or sold… we wantonly peddle this gilded idol of an idea, prostituting the very notion of the divine as a means to our own philosophical ends, and reducing the creator to a series of rules and condemnations reflective of our own desires and judgments. We project subconsciously our fears and hang-ups before the face of God, obscuring the truth of God’s own personhood behind a façade of self-righteous indulgence. This is a horrible thing and perhaps the root justification (note that I will not call it the cause) of much of the violence and suffering in our world today and throughout history… but is it a death knell to the very idea of understanding God? I would argue that it isn’t enough to warrant that we shouldn’t try.
Martin Buber is not arguing that dialogue or relationship with others is impossible, and he does elaborate that through such relationships we might even attain relationship with the Great Other, or God. The exact dynamics of this seem rather difficult to grasp, however… especially when weighed against the difficulty of avoiding the pitfalls of objectification in our interactions with one another, let alone the concept of the divine. Perhaps in all of the furor in applying Buber’s concepts it is easy to demonize the idea of conceptualizing anything ourselves; the word objectify has a dirty and inherently negative feeling about it, and it does seem evident that Buber means it in a negative sense as an obstacle to dialogue and understanding. However, I do not believe it is possible for us to escape this mechanism; we intellectually box ideas and store them up as a means of interpreting a world about which we do not fully understand… it is a sort of self-defense system for the rational mind, allowing us to build up an understanding of people, places, ideas, and things. The unfortunate side effect of this phenomenon is that it perhaps over simplifies our perceptions and thus influences our understanding in a manner that may more often than not stunt its growth, but this does not mean we are incapable of altering our conceptions and reordering the boxes. Through this dialogue and understanding are possible, and the quest for the divine becomes not unlike the paradox of truth itself; we must reach out for it, but we cannot necessarily reach it (or at the very least all of it) in our lifetime.
Defining God is risky, but not an innately damned undertaking despite the obvious peril. We must be open to the reality that our attempts to do so may be altogether inadequate, and understanding of the likelihood of amendment is vital to maintaining the personhood and being of what we hope to understand. Perhaps the answer, then, is to approach God as one might any other person… in full recognition of both the flaws and graces of human dialogue.
