God as Object

Addressing the question of whether God is “object” to us, Jenson says that objectivity is essential to conversation: “In all true mutual discourse . . . each must be both subject for and object of the other.  As I am present to address you, I am a subject and you are my object.  But if this is not reciprocal, if I evade being your object and so frustrate your presence as subject, I enslave you.  Is God object?  Can God be an object?  That is, can he be in true and free converse with us”

Jenson answers in the affirmative, and gives a Trinitarian and incarnational account of God’s objectivity.   The question of God’s objectivity is the question of God’s bodily presence, and Jenson notes that God does have a body, and adds, “What must here be emphasized is that the discourse that is God’s life is not in fact another discourse than that between Jesus and his Father in their Spirit, in which we join.  That God is an object and so a partner of true free interchange is a fact not only of our converse with him but of the converse he is; and it is the one in that it is the other . . . . God gives himself to be our object, and the object that he gives to us is none other than the object as which he is given to himself.  God says at once to himself and to us: who I am is the Father of that man Jesus.  Because he says it first to himself it is true when he says it to us.”