On Subjects and Objects

“I believe in subjects and objects,” writes David Martin at the outset of his Future of Christianity (4). He illustrates with a sociological example: He believes in “religious visions of the world to come and the objective status of the dynamics of social and political action.”

Martin intends to resist the twin reductionisms of subjectivism and objectivism, the notion that social life is all about unconstrained human choices, or the belief that human action is determined by external social realities. 

He’s right to resist, but his confession of faith exhibits a confusion, a common one. The illustration doesn’t help. What are these “dynamics of social and political action” if they aren’t patterns of action and reaction of persons. And if there are persons, there are also “subjective” visions of the world, perhaps also of the world to come. The objective dynamics are inevitably entangled with subjectivity.

On the other hand, other persons’ beliefs about the world to come are objects to me. If I grow up in a home full of millennial fervor, then that’s an objective factor in my upbringing. So subjectivity has objective features. The objects that surround me, further, bear the traces of their makers, and for a theist that includes natural objects, which bear the traces of the Maker.

Perhaps Martin would agree with this, but his dual belief suggests that social life is bounced back and forth between objects and subjects. That’s better than thinking we aren’t bounced. But in reality we are faced with complex subjective-objective things and situations whichever way we turn, never with one or the other in a pure form.

And now, can we all say together: Perichoresis?