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| Diagram showing the Overton window. Image source. |
One key thing that Christians believe about God is that God is not tied down to any time or place. God is not limited or restricted in that way. God is everywhere, outside of time, all-knowing. God is objective, God is the Truth.
But what does that mean? And is it even possible for humans to connect with Someone who is truly objective in this way?
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We can imagine many situations where one person, let's call them Person A, and another person, let's call them Person B, might be trying to communicate, but they are unable to understand each other. Perhaps they don't speak the same language. Or, perhaps Person A has studied and now can speak Person B's language, but the concept that Person A is communicating is something that Person B has never encountered in their own language/culture. For example, me in the grocery store in China, trying to buy cheese, because I was pregnant and sometimes when you're pregnant you suddenly need a very specific food, reading the Chinese characters on the packaging of various cheese-looking products, trying to determine what kind of cheese each of them was. And I can't figure it out! It just says the Chinese word for cheese! WHAT AM I MISSING HERE? WHAT KIND OF CHEESE IS IT? And I asked my husband, who is Chinese, help me figure out what kind of cheese this is, and he didn't really seem to grasp the monumental importance of the question "what kind of cheese is it" and he was just like "I don't know."
Most Chinese people are not into cheese at all, and have no familiarity with the different kinds of cheese.
(It turned out to be American cheese! Which was not what I wanted. Now you know! If you're in China, and you buy something that just says "cheese" but doesn't say what kind, it's lowest-common-denominator American cheese.)
(I just asked my husband if he remembered this, and he did not, then he said- and I quote- "I just don't get the point of cheese." Then he said, "I didn't like the cheese at our wedding" and I was like "there was cheese at our wedding?" I don't remember that.)
Or, when I first came to China and I was working as an English teacher, and sometimes I would do classes about what it's like to go to a restaurant in the US- and I had to teach the students about tipping. It's kind of difficult to explain... Technically you don't *need* to tip, BUT if you don't tip, you are a bad person. BUT ACTUALLY the problem is the restaurant not paying their waiters a living wage- it doesn't make sense that it then becomes the customer's responsibility to make up for that by tipping. Yeah, doesn't make sense, but that's how it is, so yes you do need to tip, or you are a bad person. In China they don't have anything like this- the price it says on the menu is literally the price you pay. No need to add on any tax or tip. This blew my mind the first time I came to China.
Then I brought my husband to the US, and he was extremely uncertain about how to tip. Of course he had heard about it, and how important it was, but the experience of actually doing it was so strange to him. He would always ask me, to make sure he was doing it right.
Or maybe Person A and Person B are living in different time periods from history- this is a post about God being outside of time, so yes it makes sense to bring in a sci-fi time travel example. The way people viewed the world was so completely different in different times and places throughout history. What was important to my ancestors 1000 years ago? If they could tell me about it, would it make any sense to me? If I could tell them what's important in my life, would it make any sense to them?
Or, we don't even need to bring in sci-fi time-travel for this. There are things that I remember being normal 20 or 30 years ago, which seem unthinkable now. Like, we all just lived our lives without carrying phones everywhere. What if someone needed to contact you? What if you had an emergency and needed to call for help? (What if you were waiting around with nothing to do except be alone with your thoughts???!!!) No, back then you just didn't. Back then, people were just unreachable if they weren't somewhere obvious like at their home, and that's just the way it was. Wild.
Also, remember how before we had the internet, if you remembered part of a song lyric but couldn't remember what song it was from, you would just have to live in ignorance? Or you would have to ask all your friends and see if they happened to know it. Yeah, you might be stuck just not knowing, for an indeterminate amount of time, and that's just the way it was. Maybe some of you are too young to understand this. Like if I tried to explain this to a teenager, would they be able to understand what it was like to live that way?
And there are even things that I had such completely different views on at different points in my life- could the past version of me and the present version of me even talk about it and understand each other? Not just the big obvious things like "I used to be evangelical" or "I used to not be able to understand Chinese" but also bizarre little things like, in college I thought it would be a great idea to ... not wash my dishes. ????? What? Why did I think that? Who can say? Obviously I was wrong, but how to meaningfully communicate about this, if I was in a time-travel movie and met my past self? Is there a way I could understand her reasons and convince her it was a bad idea? Or would it be just impossible to communicate on this issue?
Or maybe Person A and Person B are on different sides of some political issue, and they've both been living in their own bubbles where all they hear about is why their side is so right and the other side is so wrong. I've seen the way "pro-life" and pro-choice people totally talk past each other- like they're not even talking about the same thing, they're not at all engaging with the points that the other is making. "Pro-life" people make it all about "life begins at conception" even though the question of when "life begins" is not really a factor in pro-choice ideology. For pro-choice people, it's about bodily autonomy- but "pro-life" people would say the only autonomy that matters is that you had the autonomy to choose to not to have sex- once you've had sex, you don't get to have the autonomy to choose not to be pregnant. It's like, they don't understand each other, and they're not talking about the same thing at all. Is communication even possible?
(And yet, both sides are talking to God and thinking "God totally understands me.")
I grew up in a conservative Christian environment where obviously we were "pro-life." I never heard any arguments for the pro-choice side, not until I went to college- I couldn't imagine what such arguments might even look like. I just knew they were saying it's about "choice"- but that means nothing to the "pro-life" side because you should have just made the choice to not have sex- and they were saying it's about "women's rights"- but that makes no sense to the "pro-life" side because obviously it's not about women in general, it's only about those bad women who would want to have abortions, why are you lumping all of us good ones in with them?
Or, here's another example. I once went to a church and happened to meet someone who told me she was concerned because her son or daughter was dating a partner who was not a Christian. She was really really worried- it's common for Christians to believe this is a really bad thing, to be in a relationship with a non-Christian. So... obviously she has all these feelings, and she should have someone to care about those feelings and help her, but it can't be me because I disagree with the whole premise. My husband is not a Christian (this anecdote happened before we were married though) and I really find it offensive the way Christians talk about this issue, as if non-Christians are obviously less moral and we Christians are the true source of goodness, and your non-Christian partner will just drag you down. What on earth? Did it ever occur to anyone that non-Christians are good people and we can learn things from them?
So I'm coming at the issue with those kinds of feelings, and this mom I met at church is coming at it with feelings of truly being worried about her kid. How can we communicate on this? So I didn't try to say anything to her about it.
Communication is all about having some kind of shared background. Or, even if you don't have the *experience* of living in the way the other person has lived, to at least put in the effort of thinking about what it would feel like and what it would mean.
So what does it mean to talk to God? What does it mean to listen to God? What does it mean to know God? We all communicate with people and relate to people from the starting point of our own language and culture and time period. But God has no native language/culture/time. They are outside of all those things. They are objective. They know the truth, in some transcendental way.
What does that mean?
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Wikipedia defines the Overton window as "the range of subjects and arguments politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time." Basically, when a new political idea first appears, it seems so fringe that most people never give it any consideration as a serious policy. But over time, maybe things change, and more people begin to support this idea- so that most of the population still disagrees with it, but people are generally aware that it's a view that normal members of society might hold. People who hold this view get invited to give their opinion on talk shows or in debates, which shows people that, even if you don't agree with this, it's within the range of things that reasonable people might believe. And then from there it might become more popular, to the point where most people end up believing it, and it becomes actual policy.
When people talk about "shifting the Overton window" they mean taking ideas which are so fringe that most people wouldn't even consider them, and bringing them into the conversation, bringing them into the range of things that are seen as possible viewpoints for normal people to hold. This is an important first step on the road to writing the new idea into actual policy. Activists *want* to shift the Overton window to get their own "radical" ideas into the mainstream, and they raise the alarm when somebody is shifting the Overton window to make a dangerous idea seem acceptable.
I could give plenty of examples where some political idea is not going to get anywhere in the US, where it's seen as just impossible, meanwhile other countries are already implementing it and it's fine. Gun control, for example. Other countries don't have mass shootings all the time. But apparently, in the US we can't make laws to meaningfully stop these mass shootings because, reasons, I guess? Or another example, universal health care. Remember when the plot of the show "Breaking Bad" was that the main character starts to sell illegal drugs to pay for medical expenses, and Americans were all like "yes, this makes sense" and people in countries with better health care systems were like "WHAT ON EARTH?"
Or even looking at income tax rates over the history of the US. Here's a page with a chart about that. Current marginal income tax for the highest income bracket is somewhere around 37%, but it was at its highest in 1944, at 94%. (This is marginal income tax- that doesn't mean the tax was 94% of their income, it means 94% of the part of their income that was higher than some certain threshold. With the part of the income below that threshold being taxed at a lower rate.) If you try to argue now that rich people should pay more taxes, it's treated as absurd and impossible- but it used to be normal.
(I'm not saying we *should* now have the same tax policies as back then- this is a question that one would have to do a lot of research and analysis on, before giving a recommendation. My point is, current mainstream US political thinking is not doing any such analysis, not even considering it, because it feels so outlandish.)
So for humans, we live in a society, and our thinking about morality and/or societal functions is constrained by the range of ideas that our society sees as normal. But Christians believe that we can't just define morality by popular opinion, by the ever-changing trends of whatever culture we may be in. Christians believe there's a true morality, an absolute morality, an objective morality, and God knows what it is.
So, this means God knows the correct answer on what kind of societal policies should be implemented on every different issue. Whatever this ideal set of policies is, it's not constrained by any Overton window; it's objective. It's only based on what's really really right, not what people think.
(Or, perhaps there isn't an objectively right set of policies that societies are "supposed" to use? Maybe it depends on the specific circumstances.)
Slavery is an example of this. People ask, why is slavery allowed in the bible? Why didn't God tell the writers of the bible that slavery was wrong?
And Christians give all sorts of answers, some of them incredibly bad, like "slavery in the bible was a different thing than American race-based slavery. Slavery in the bible was not that bad." Okay yikes, very embarrassing to be a person who tries to argue for that.
Or, here's another common answer- Yes, of course God knew slavery was wrong, but back then ending slavery would have been such a huge change to their society, and they just weren't ready, and it wasn't practical for God to try to force them into that. So instead, God gave some laws about how they need to treat slaves better than how ancient societies typically treated slaves. In the long run, God *did* want us to abolish slavery.
I think that answer is also lacking, because it doesn't acknowledge how deeply we ourselves are rooted in what our own society sees as normal. This answer sort of assumes a simple linear timeline, like 'oh back then, they had slavery, they thought it was normal, but now *we* know the truth, we know that it's wrong and it's always been wrong and God has always agreed with us.' It feels inadequate to me because, okay yes it's correct on this specific issue of slavery, but it fails to realize the huge gap that likely still exists between our own views on morality (or our culture's views on morality), and God's perfect "correct" morality (if such a thing exists). It presents this like "oh those ancient people were wrong, but we are right, now we know God's position on slavery" without any awareness that there could be a massive list of other moral issues where we're getting it completely wrong, compared to what God thinks.
The things that really matter to this objective God are not whatever culture wars we're mired in at this specific time and place, where everyone is arguing "God says this" or "God says that." Why would they be?
The concept of the Overton window really is helpful for me when I think about this. You're a member of a society where there's some range of policy positions that are seen as reasonable, and anything outside that range is just unthinkable. And then in a different society, in a different time or place, the range is completely different. In one society, some idea is so normal that nobody even questions it, and in another time and place, it's unimaginable.
Maybe there were people in ancient times who recognized how horrific slavery was, but they thought, what's the alternative? How could you even have a society without slaves? How could that even work?
But the Overton window does not apply to God. They know the truth and They know what's right, what's really right in some objective sense, and it's just the pure abstract truth, not embedded in any kind of context, not subject to people's opinions on what's reasonable or normal or practical. What's that like? What even is an objective idea like that? Is it something that we could even understand?
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What do you do, if you're God, and you're trying to connect with people because you love them, but also they're doing things that are incredibly immoral, but they have no awareness at all. Their whole society views it as normal and not an issue at all. Like owning slaves.
If you're God, and you're trying to communicate with these people, do you try to say something to them about it?
Christians have argued that that's what God was doing, when They gave laws in the bible that said to treat your slaves not as bad as other societies treated them. Honestly I'm not impressed by this argument- it comes across like we're embarrassed about the bible's acceptance of slavery, and we're desperately trying to spin it like it's okay, but it's really not. I think God could have done a much better job, if They really wanted to communicate the message that slavery needs to be abolished.
What would I do, if I was a time traveler, and I went back in time to some society where everyone was doing something that we now know was a terrible idea, but they thought it was so normal, they never even questioned it? We don't even have to use slavery as an example. Could be like, using lead paint. Should the time traveler try to say something to them about it? But you know they're not going to listen, because they've never even heard of the idea that this normal thing they're doing might be bad. It's going to come across as so bizarre and fringe, if you try to say something to them, that they won't even be able to honestly consider what you're saying.
(But I'm oversimplifying it- many people throughout history very much DID know that slavery was bad. For example, the slaves.)
How can Christians think we know God's opinions on morality? You really think God would tell us everything? You really think your own mindset, rooted in the culture where you grew up/ where you live, is able to comprehend God's opinion on absolute morality?
If God reveals Themself to us at all, surely it must be only a side of Themself. Only a tiny part, based on how much we can understand.
It's like, when I talk to my daughter, who is a toddler, I have to talk to her about "what does the sheep say?" and other topics along those lines. She's not able to have a conversation about anything more complex than that. If I wanted to ask her, "How many disposable bibs do you think I need to pack for you when we go on vacation?" I mean, what, there's no use in asking a baby that. The baby has no idea. (Okay, you could argue that it's good to talk to kids about whatever, even if they don't understand, because that helps with language development.) My daughter knows me, but not all of me, just the side of myself that I show her. Where I have to pretend I like to make small talk about farm animals all the time. That's what you have to do with a toddler.
I'm not actually interested in discussing "the cow says moo." I just like her.
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I've written before about how I used to be really into the "personal relationship with God" thing, constantly praying, constantly obsessing over God and trying to figure out what God wanted me to do- and God never said anything to me about the existence of systemic racism. Yeah really, there I was, a white person in the US, thinking racism is not really a big problem now, thinking how it was so terrible when the US had racial segregation, like we learned in history class, but that was a long time ago and things are fine now.
And every day I set aside time to pray, to listen to God- God show me what to do, show me how to be more like you. I'll do anything for you. Show me if there's any sin in my life, I'll make it right, whatever it takes.
Every day, all in, striving to know God, to do whatever God wanted, to listen to God. And nope, he never told me about the reality of systemic racism. I benefit from white privilege, and I knew nothing about it. And because I didn't know anything about it, and had never spent time actually considering it, I held racist beliefs that I just subconsciously absorbed from the culture around me.
Wouldn't it have been better for everyone if God had just TOLD ME about systemic racism?
But no, I obsessed every day about whether I was good and sinless enough in my personal relationship with God, working so hard to try to be better and follow God's rules, and mainly he directed my attention toward my crushes. Like, oh, I have a crush on some guy, and I'm thinking about him a lot- IS THAT BAD? IS THAT A SIN? A lot of analyzing tiny little feelings and agonizing over whether they were okay or not. Trying to repress myself. *That* is what I thought God was telling me to do.
Didn't find out about systemic racism until I started reading feminist blogs, in college.
(Kind of seems less like an actual relationship with the living, powerful Creator of the universe, and more like a human-made system of control where they want you to be so busy worrying about whether your normal human feelings make you a bad person, that you don't notice the actual injustice actively being reinforced by those systems.)
People have made the argument, "well, God *did* tell you about systemic racism, by leading you to read those feminist blogs." I don't buy this. Why didn't They tell me earlier, if I really did have "a personal relationship with God"?
(But also, I know other Christians who have experiences which they talk about in those terms- "for so long I was wrong about [xyz] and then finally God helped me understand"... I shouldn't criticize someone who genuinely feels that it makes sense to frame their experiences in this way... I feel it doesn't make sense for me though.)
Well, one might argue, I "wasn't ready" to hear about it back then. I don't buy that either, but okay let's think about it. So for Christians who have a "personal relationship with God", there are TONS of things that would be extremely useful for you to know (perhaps life-changing) and God just withholds that information- even though you pray every day, and you sit quietly and listen, open to whatever God wants to tell you. This is what a "personal relationship with God" is? They just don't tell you things, because you're "not ready"? (Meanwhile, people of color don't have the luxury of just not knowing about racism if God decides they're "not ready.") To some extent you can make analogies with other kinds of close relationships where you don't tell people everything- plenty of things I don't tell my kids because they're "not ready." Still, I don't buy it. This "you weren't ready" seems like a justification made-up after the fact, rather than a coherent reasonable policy that describes how the "relationship with God" always works.
Let's be real; this isn't about God, it's about the conservative bubble I was in.
How does this "personal relationship with God" supposedly work? God only tells you things which are within the range of what your own little subculture believes? (Because you're "not ready" for facts that challenge your subculture's beliefs?)
Yes, I have heard plenty of examples where God told someone to do something that seemed crazy and radical- *not* something within the range of what's seen as normal. These stories are glorified in Christian culture. (See here and here.) I really don't think this adequately answers my objection... though I'm having trouble explaining exactly why. This is complicated- could be a whole other blog post...
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The idea of a time traveler going to a society which has a completely different view of what's right/normal- is that what it was like for Jesus? The Word became flesh and lived among us; God, the objective, abstract God, became a person with a physical body with specific physical characteristics, in a specific place and time. Were his identity and opinions shaped by his experiences as he grew up, like all of us? Or did he already know all the objective right answers, and didn't come to learn anything, just to teach us?
I think that, living life as an actual human, God did learn things.
And did he try to shift the Overton window at all? Well, there are bible passages where Jesus does things that come across as bizarre and not socially acceptable, like when he talked to the Samaritan woman at the well. She was surprised that he- a Jewish man- would talk to her- a Samaritan woman. When Jesus' disciples come back to get him, they are also surprised. Yes, there are many examples of Jesus treating someone with kindness and respect even though the social norms of that day would have said not to, because of racial differences, or the way women were not treated as equal to men, or because of illness or disability (which made someone "unclean"), or because they were seen as "sinners" (tax collectors, sex workers, etc). Not sure if this really counts as "shifting the Overton window" though. Christians always talk about being radical and loving everyone like Jesus did, but I still think our society's Overton window limits our thinking about what this means.
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How can people know God? What does it even mean to know Someone who is not from any time or place or culture, but is just objective, in everything, everywhere? How would you communicate with Them? How would you relate to Them?
I gave some examples earlier in this post, of how it can be difficult for people to understand and communicate with each other if they don't have a shared background. That doesn't mean it's impossible to know each other (though it does mean I need to enjoy cheese with other people, not my husband), but the more different you are, the less you can really know each other. And what do we have in common with this abstract, objective God? Nothing? How can we even talk to God?
(Honestly, this is one of the main reasons I don't pray.)
As I see it, the only way forward is that God has to come down to our level, and project Themself into something that we can relate to. We can know a small part of Them.
"So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them." All people are made in the image of God. Like a projection, like a small window into what God is like, the diversity, creativity, and love of God, you can experience this in every person you meet. God lives in all of us.
Every person in this world, every country and every language, every person who has lived throughout history, if you met them all you still wouldn't know all of God. I'm defined by my own background and experiences, but apparently God is not- there's more to God, some "objective" part outside of all that. What does that even mean though?
Is it similar to how a perfect mathematical object cannot really exist in the real world? There are no perfect circles that actually exist, but the concept of a perfect circle is embodied in all the imperfect circle-shaped things we have. Can God really exist as something "objective" and not attached to any time or place? Does God have to be embodied- incarnated- in some way, in order for us to experience Them? (And if so, what was God doing before the physical universe existed?)
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I've covered a lot of things here and I'm not sure how it all connects or what the conclusion is (also I may be conflating the Overton window with some other concepts? not sure on this), but I just want to try and describe how enormous the gap is between God and our own human ways of thinking. How alien God's thoughts and God's objectivity are. "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts."
We are all restricted by the experiences we've had, and the society we live in. Our opinions, our understandings of our own identities, they are all anchored on the range of possibilities that our own culture views as possible. But God shouldn't be limited in that way, right? God is outside of all that? But what does that even mean, to be outside of society and culture- could They even have an identity that makes sense to us? Could They even tell us anything about morality, that we could understand? Could we even know Them at all?
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Related:
Culture, Objectivity, God, and the Real Reason I Moved to China
My Racist Personal Relationship with God
An Invisible Virus and an Omniscient God
"The Author of Leviticus Would Have Been Cool With It"
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