By
Obododimma Oha
Human imaginations of the existence and actions of a Supreme Being (called “God” in English, “Chukwu” in Igbo, etc) have always found expression in the anthropomorphisms in our human narratives. The Supreme Being is made to be like us humans through His adoption of our linguistic and non-linguistic habits. Look at the title of this essay again. Did I not use the objective pronoun “Him,” in referring to God, as if he is my kinsman living just after my premises? In Genesis, we are told that: “God created man to his own image: to the image of God he created him: male and female he created them” (1:25, 26). From the standpoint of the semiotician, the human being is the iconic and mimetic representation of God, bearing a similarity or resemblance to the Almighty. I guess this iconicity is understood, from the perspective of Morris’ interpretation of the iconic sign, to be denotative. Charles Sanders’ Peirce is cited as suggesting that the iconic sign is, in fact, a copying of the object (Noth, 13). Related to the explanation of the signifying relationship between humans and God, the former are copies of the latter.
The following view on the humanization of God is arresting and to the point:
The word God has become a closed concept. The moment the word is uttered, a mental image is created, no longer, perhaps, of an old man with a white beard, but still a mental representation of someone or something outside you, and, yes, almost inevitably, a male someone or something (Tolle, 2004: 14).
That was from Eckhart Tolle's book, The Power of Now.
The title for this essay, as part of the design to enact surprise, brings up the following issues:
1. God does not possess a language or sign system;
2. God has been made by humans who thereafter try to give him one of their attributes – speech-using, since they themselves are homo loquens – otherwise, he could have other sign system or not have any at all, as in (1);
3. Making God (in our own image, linguistically) makes it possible for us to interact with him; and
4. Making God in our image makes it possible for us to privatise or claim him for ourselves.
Connected to my use of the pronoun “him” in referring to God, there is a reverse signification in which God is constructed in the image of the human, instead of humans being constructed in the image of God. This is understandable since we have to be familiar with the image of God first to be able to perfectly understand the biblical assertion, “God created man to his own image.” The book of Genesis did not describe God’s features as an antecedent to help us to understand the iconicity that was being presented to readers. God’s image remains an area of silence, perhaps an unspeakable, which is considered abominable to probe, represent, or utter in ancient Islam, Judaism, and so on. The Muslims would not want God to be represented in any form, even his prophets who obviously had perceivable forms. For early Judaism, only priests were allowed to utter the holy name, Yahweh, which is the origin of “Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain” (even when people were permitted, they were not to utter the name anyhow!). They should not pronounce it, at all!
The assumption in my use of “him” in referring to God is that God is male (has a penis, wears a beard, etc). But God, according to theologians and religious leaders, is spirit; what does a spirit need a penis for? What is the long beard for? In old catechism books in the orthodox Christian churches, drawings of God presented him as a very old male with long beard. Such representations are understandable; to suit the idea of God as the “ancient of days,” as well as reference to the Almighty as “my Father in Heaven” by Jesus Christ in his discourses in the Bible. The masculinisation of God has a lot to do with a patriarchal construction of God’s superiority. He has to be male in order to be superior in a patriarchal culture. This assumption, of course, is countered by matriarchal cultures and recent feminist theology which represent God’s superiority in terms of femininity.
The long beard given to the Almighty, apart from suggesting a masculinisation (see, I am already capitalizing “Almighty,” as if God is in sign!), also conveys the idea of “mightiness” in terms of wisdom. Sages in ancient traditions were often associated with long beards. For God to be the wisest of the wise or the source of all wisdom, he has to have a long beard, to attract the necessary human reverence.
Thus, human representations of God and his semiotic attributes suggest that, indeed, humans try to think of the Almighty in terms of what they are familiar with. There is also an interesting trajectory in this representation project that imagines God’s difference, complexity, and difficulty as means of narrating and consolidating his awesomeness. This short essay focuses on such unique representation of the Almighty, along the same discourse path of anthropomorphism, but this time around in terms of creating a semiotic system, a lect for God. Used as a reference point in this essay is an update on Physicist Page on Facebook which presents interesting issues about God’s speech and clearly foregrounds the differentia of such Godly communication.
How is language captured in the Bible in narrating our relationship with God? Indeed, language, a human vocal system of communication and cognition, is uniquely human. Other beings may be equipped with different means of transmitting and processing information. A particular creature in another world – in Heaven or elsewhere – does not need human speech organs to communicate. Saying “God said X” humanises the Supreme Being. It means God is like us and communicates by saying, using the so-called speech organs.
I guess the statement, “God said X,” assumes an understanding of God’s manner of communication and the ability to decode what God has communicated, apart from its implication of the idea of God as a language-using being. In the Bible, this language is central to God’s creation act and intervention in human affairs. God is:
(1) Represented as having created some things with logos, the word, in short, language. This idea that God spoke things into being conveys the magical or near-magical dimension to the act of creation. The other side of creation pictures God as a sculptor who actually uses materials to form something. God is said to have formed Adam, the first person, from the dust or mud of the earth. Adam’s creation was the following way: “Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” (Genesis, 2:7). For Eve, too, the creation was another form of sculptural technology, something more like modern medical transplant and/or engineering: “… the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping’ he took of his ribs and then closed up the place with flesh. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out from the man ….”God the surgeon and sculptor; a combination of both! That gives one an interesting idea of the progression of his technology: from the crude mud-using designing to a higher flesh medical tech.
(2) Represented as having caused many languages in the world to emerge, as a strategy for checking human incursion into his divine territory or acquisition of high powers: “less man be like us”! It is as if God does not want to share features or powers with humans! He would want them to remain different and mere creatures. That, at first, actually features in his punishment of Adam and Eve with exile from Eden: “And the Lord God said, “The man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live for ever” (Genesis, 3:22). In the Babel story, humans are represented as having one common language and were working with one accord to build a city. God saw it and didn’t like it:
Then they said: “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves, otherwise we will be scattered over the face ofu the whole earth.”
But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” (Genesis, 11: 4-6)
So, God did not want the humans to exhibit their creativity and make progress? And, does speaking many different languages and being scattered all over the earth prevent humans from making creative progress? Have these prevented them from going to the moon and even exploring outer space or making great inventions, using skills God endowed them with when he sculpted them?
He came down to the city they were building to see it? To see it? So, he was not aware of it? He, as one who knows everything and sees everything, did not see the construction work or the city from his palace in Heaven? God is obviously humanised greatly here, and equipped with human irrational tendencies.
Linguists state convincingly that language changes over place and time. Obviously, from a single Babel language, languages have diverged greatly, and some have gone extinct. It is hardly seen as the jealous action of a supreme being.
(3) Represented as making Adam, the first person, provide the names of things in the environment arbitrarily, just like Humpty-Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland. Humpty-Dumpty tells Alice that whatever he calls anything, that is its name and meaning too. Adam, in fact, was not just the first person; he was also the first Humpty-Dumpty naming things arbitrarily and imposing meanings of words he coined. Semiotically, he join Ferdinand de Saussure in saying that the relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary, the meaning of the sign conventional.
Now, let us turn to what God was constructed on Physics Facebook page as having said (he caused human languages to differ; now, they are using their science to report what a sample of his speech is like!):
Source: Physicist Page, Facebook.
What did God say? What God said to have said is put in a different “language” or rather in a different code, obviously to narrate God’s semiotic difference. What is the character of that semiotic difference and what does it suggest about God. First, what God said is esoteric, scientific (physicist), and we just cannot pronounce or translate or report it in our raw English. We can only report that “God said X and there was light.” God’s esoteric, scientific statement brought the Light, our enlightenment.
God is implicitly narrated as a scientist, precisely a physicist who utters the Light into existence, obviously a scientific re-interpretation of the Biblical account of narration. The Biblical account would not want to configure God as a scientist (maybe so as not to belittle the mighty creator). But God has, in fact, been presented as a scientist who creates and changes forms in nature, the mighty watch-maker.
The Physics Facebook text is deliberately parodic. It plays on or extends Genesis narrative in which God is reported as having said, "Let there be light" and there was light. Indeed, the narrative has many blank spaces. In which code or language did God say "Let there be light," and which sparked off light? If there was nothing called the "light" before then, how did God recognise it as the light? Difficult theological questions. But Physicist on Facebook would like to fill at least space and make language scholars uncomfortable! That THING that God said that caused light to be was scientific, maybe from electrical engineering!
What God said is deliberately made difficult to articulate, a mystification strategy. Why wouldn’t other professional groups re-identify God’s language as the language they themselves use in their own groups? Do the various religious groups try to identify God and characterise him in such a way that he takes sides with them – in wars, cultural values, et cetera? In the Old Testament of the Holy Bible, would the Jews like to share Yahweh (or Jehovah) with the gentiles? Do Muslims have the same attitude to the Jewish Yahweh as they have to their own Allah? Today, do some Christians or Muslims accept that Allah is God, that God is a translation equivalent of Allah? Is their argument not convincing, given that what the deity is presented as sanctioning in their holy books go against the interest of the other religion?
On 20 July, 2017, I attended a lecture presented by Kola Abimbola, the son of Wande Abimbola, and an Orisha priest and babalawo based in the United States. I was amazed, just like many people in the audience, when he declared that the God, as named in the English language, is not the same thing as the Yoruba Olodumare. He explained that Ajayi Crowther who was the first to use Olodumare for God did so strategically to make the indigenous Africans to whom Christianity was being preached to easily accept the new religion, thinking it was the same thing as their own, or that its deities were the same as theirs. Quite persuasive! He went ahead to explain how Olodumare could not be viewed as “the supreme Being” in the presence of other policing deity like Esu Elegba, that Esu would not even tolerate it. Thus, in the Yoruba pantheon, the deities just have their roles, and are in hierarchies as reinvented by the emergent Yoruba Christianity.
Returning to the representation of God’s signification as revealing that of a given profession, God therefore becomes for everybody, every profession, something we all want to identify with, something we want to have a share of, or do not want to share with others. If He is quoted somewhere as saying he is a jealous God (in the same effort to make him only our own), various appropriations of him suggest being jealous to share him with the other. God, therefore, is our major shibboleth, culturally and professionally. He is what we use in excluding and including others, in discriminating against others, even in justifying the physical elimination of others.
A simple semiotic description of the text above is necessary. It was shared on Facebook as a visual which contains signs in the symbolic mode, as Charles Sanders Peirce’s classification of the three modes of the sign would indicate. A simple explanation of symbolic signs or signs in the symbolic mode is provided by Chandler as follows:
… a mode in which the signifier does not resemble the signified but which is fundamentally arbitrary or purely conventional - so that the relationship must be learnt: e.g. language in general (plus specific languages, alphabetical letters, punctuation marks, words, phrases and sentences), numbers, morse code, traffic lights, national flags….
There is a good reason to present the symbolic signs to converge as a visual. There is an overarching idea about what God uttered (in God’s language) and the reporting act (human language, which happens to be English) to co-occur, one within the other. That brings up human reporting act as an important point worthy of consideration in this discourse. Interestingly, what is invented in the discourse of the visual as God’s text or God’s language, is still human symbolic communication, even though a specialized human symbolic communication, the language of the scientist – the physicist, specifically. That, too, is an important point worthy of consideration. Why is God given the symbolic language of the scientist? We will get to that issue shortly.
There is also the crucial need for a visualization, against a dark background, of both texts. The dark background reminds one of the disclosure in the Book of Genesis that before God created the heavens and the earth, everything was void. After creating the heavens and the earth, there was pitch darkness and God did not like it. So, he created light with the logos, the spoken word. He said, let there be Light and there was light. Later, he separated the light. But, there is an interesting metaphorical use of the dark background, not just its allusiveness. The dark background represents ignorance or lack of knowledge, which God’s text seeks to expel. God’s text, as a matter of fact, illumines the dark, really shining in dark space.
The representation of what God was said to have said is a dual symbolic text, with language (of the scientist) created out of everyday language. Godhood, is, therefore featured as a speech created from speech. Scientific symbols give us a level of narration and a higher speech, a god-speech! And God said X! You can’t vocalise the X, honestly!
But if the superiority of God is constructed this way through the language of science, do pastors not do a similar thing with glossolalia? Glossolalia is the language of the spirit, the language of the few who with it police the highway to Heaven. Same for its translation or interpretation. Only few filled with the spirit can understand or explain it. No wonder it could be a piece of drama, rehearsed and acted to make-believe.
Given the language that makes a scientist, has God not been honoured as a scientist (or the patron of scientists): God’s lect (idiolect and diatype) is scientific symbolic language. The rest of us who do not have access to his lect should not enter the ark yet; poor us!
The visual obviously suggests God’s awe as a scientist, the difficulty of comprehending him as an esoteric scientist, his scientific omnipotence, etc. How can we approach him unless we can communicate with him in his scientific speech?
The God-text always needs expert decoding, something similar to what pastors say about messages from God, especially in the form of glossolalia. Luckily, children studying leaves in the bush in Africa can see God’s esoteric hand on the leaves!
As children who played in the woods in the African countryside, my mates and I identified leaves with lines that looked as if an artist had drawn them as carrying Chukwu’s written texts. We were ignorant of the fact that those were lines were made by insect secretions but which, by coincidence, became interesting visual patterns. We did not think of any insect or animal drawing those designs, even though we knew that animals like termites, birds, rodents, etc exhibited interesting artistic skills in making their dwelling places. Why did we think of God coming down to earth to write on those leaves? What did God write on those leaves? We did not find answers to these and other questions, but took the difficulty in answering them as part of the wonders of God and His unknowable nature.
God’s handwriting on leaves! God could do that, anyway. Being the superior intelligence, God was literate and communicated in codes that were strange. After all, are all created things not God’s texts? In a sense, things created by this Supreme Being carry his handwriting or are His handwriting as a creative artist. The expanding universe is His canvass where He writes and draws, as well as draws in writing the complex text of a creation. Is the world not a complex text? And in the artistic writing of the universe, does this Supreme Being not maintain some kind of order, some kind of syntax in which this moon as a satellite has to maintain its route in revolving round the planet earth? Do the planets and moons and stars not maintain collocations with this and that heavenly body and keep to orbit along under certain conditions in time and space?
Funny and naïve our judgement about God’s handwriting may be, there are, indeed, insightful bases to think of God as a writer that uses codes or as an artist. Beyond this reasoning, however, is the God-code or the medium through which God expresses Himself. Many world religions attach themselves to particular (ancient) languages as the languages preferred by the Almighty in communicating with the world. Those languages are, as claimed, the languages God used in making revelations and instructing the world through certain chosen individuals, who are equally revered just as the language or code in which they received God’s message.
Oh God, you have been made in our own image, especially linguistically, diatypically and dialectally!
References
Chandler, Daniel (n.d.) Semiotics for Beginners. http://s3.amazonaws.com/szmanuals/bb72b1382e20b6b75c87d297342dabd7
Genesis, Holy Bible (NIV), Colorado Springs: Biblica.
Noth, Winfried (2015) “Three paradigms of iconicity research in language and literature,” in Hiraga, M.K., W.J. Herlofsky, K. Shinohara, & K. Akita (eds.) Iconicity: East Meets West, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, Pp 13 – 34.
Tolls, E. (2004) The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment. Nova to, CA: New World Library.
Obododimma Oha
Human imaginations of the existence and actions of a Supreme Being (called “God” in English, “Chukwu” in Igbo, etc) have always found expression in the anthropomorphisms in our human narratives. The Supreme Being is made to be like us humans through His adoption of our linguistic and non-linguistic habits. Look at the title of this essay again. Did I not use the objective pronoun “Him,” in referring to God, as if he is my kinsman living just after my premises? In Genesis, we are told that: “God created man to his own image: to the image of God he created him: male and female he created them” (1:25, 26). From the standpoint of the semiotician, the human being is the iconic and mimetic representation of God, bearing a similarity or resemblance to the Almighty. I guess this iconicity is understood, from the perspective of Morris’ interpretation of the iconic sign, to be denotative. Charles Sanders’ Peirce is cited as suggesting that the iconic sign is, in fact, a copying of the object (Noth, 13). Related to the explanation of the signifying relationship between humans and God, the former are copies of the latter.
The following view on the humanization of God is arresting and to the point:
The word God has become a closed concept. The moment the word is uttered, a mental image is created, no longer, perhaps, of an old man with a white beard, but still a mental representation of someone or something outside you, and, yes, almost inevitably, a male someone or something (Tolle, 2004: 14).
That was from Eckhart Tolle's book, The Power of Now.
The title for this essay, as part of the design to enact surprise, brings up the following issues:
1. God does not possess a language or sign system;
2. God has been made by humans who thereafter try to give him one of their attributes – speech-using, since they themselves are homo loquens – otherwise, he could have other sign system or not have any at all, as in (1);
3. Making God (in our own image, linguistically) makes it possible for us to interact with him; and
4. Making God in our image makes it possible for us to privatise or claim him for ourselves.
Connected to my use of the pronoun “him” in referring to God, there is a reverse signification in which God is constructed in the image of the human, instead of humans being constructed in the image of God. This is understandable since we have to be familiar with the image of God first to be able to perfectly understand the biblical assertion, “God created man to his own image.” The book of Genesis did not describe God’s features as an antecedent to help us to understand the iconicity that was being presented to readers. God’s image remains an area of silence, perhaps an unspeakable, which is considered abominable to probe, represent, or utter in ancient Islam, Judaism, and so on. The Muslims would not want God to be represented in any form, even his prophets who obviously had perceivable forms. For early Judaism, only priests were allowed to utter the holy name, Yahweh, which is the origin of “Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain” (even when people were permitted, they were not to utter the name anyhow!). They should not pronounce it, at all!
The assumption in my use of “him” in referring to God is that God is male (has a penis, wears a beard, etc). But God, according to theologians and religious leaders, is spirit; what does a spirit need a penis for? What is the long beard for? In old catechism books in the orthodox Christian churches, drawings of God presented him as a very old male with long beard. Such representations are understandable; to suit the idea of God as the “ancient of days,” as well as reference to the Almighty as “my Father in Heaven” by Jesus Christ in his discourses in the Bible. The masculinisation of God has a lot to do with a patriarchal construction of God’s superiority. He has to be male in order to be superior in a patriarchal culture. This assumption, of course, is countered by matriarchal cultures and recent feminist theology which represent God’s superiority in terms of femininity.
The long beard given to the Almighty, apart from suggesting a masculinisation (see, I am already capitalizing “Almighty,” as if God is in sign!), also conveys the idea of “mightiness” in terms of wisdom. Sages in ancient traditions were often associated with long beards. For God to be the wisest of the wise or the source of all wisdom, he has to have a long beard, to attract the necessary human reverence.
Thus, human representations of God and his semiotic attributes suggest that, indeed, humans try to think of the Almighty in terms of what they are familiar with. There is also an interesting trajectory in this representation project that imagines God’s difference, complexity, and difficulty as means of narrating and consolidating his awesomeness. This short essay focuses on such unique representation of the Almighty, along the same discourse path of anthropomorphism, but this time around in terms of creating a semiotic system, a lect for God. Used as a reference point in this essay is an update on Physicist Page on Facebook which presents interesting issues about God’s speech and clearly foregrounds the differentia of such Godly communication.
How is language captured in the Bible in narrating our relationship with God? Indeed, language, a human vocal system of communication and cognition, is uniquely human. Other beings may be equipped with different means of transmitting and processing information. A particular creature in another world – in Heaven or elsewhere – does not need human speech organs to communicate. Saying “God said X” humanises the Supreme Being. It means God is like us and communicates by saying, using the so-called speech organs.
I guess the statement, “God said X,” assumes an understanding of God’s manner of communication and the ability to decode what God has communicated, apart from its implication of the idea of God as a language-using being. In the Bible, this language is central to God’s creation act and intervention in human affairs. God is:
(1) Represented as having created some things with logos, the word, in short, language. This idea that God spoke things into being conveys the magical or near-magical dimension to the act of creation. The other side of creation pictures God as a sculptor who actually uses materials to form something. God is said to have formed Adam, the first person, from the dust or mud of the earth. Adam’s creation was the following way: “Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” (Genesis, 2:7). For Eve, too, the creation was another form of sculptural technology, something more like modern medical transplant and/or engineering: “… the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping’ he took of his ribs and then closed up the place with flesh. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out from the man ….”God the surgeon and sculptor; a combination of both! That gives one an interesting idea of the progression of his technology: from the crude mud-using designing to a higher flesh medical tech.
(2) Represented as having caused many languages in the world to emerge, as a strategy for checking human incursion into his divine territory or acquisition of high powers: “less man be like us”! It is as if God does not want to share features or powers with humans! He would want them to remain different and mere creatures. That, at first, actually features in his punishment of Adam and Eve with exile from Eden: “And the Lord God said, “The man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live for ever” (Genesis, 3:22). In the Babel story, humans are represented as having one common language and were working with one accord to build a city. God saw it and didn’t like it:
Then they said: “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves, otherwise we will be scattered over the face ofu the whole earth.”
But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” (Genesis, 11: 4-6)
So, God did not want the humans to exhibit their creativity and make progress? And, does speaking many different languages and being scattered all over the earth prevent humans from making creative progress? Have these prevented them from going to the moon and even exploring outer space or making great inventions, using skills God endowed them with when he sculpted them?
He came down to the city they were building to see it? To see it? So, he was not aware of it? He, as one who knows everything and sees everything, did not see the construction work or the city from his palace in Heaven? God is obviously humanised greatly here, and equipped with human irrational tendencies.
Linguists state convincingly that language changes over place and time. Obviously, from a single Babel language, languages have diverged greatly, and some have gone extinct. It is hardly seen as the jealous action of a supreme being.
(3) Represented as making Adam, the first person, provide the names of things in the environment arbitrarily, just like Humpty-Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland. Humpty-Dumpty tells Alice that whatever he calls anything, that is its name and meaning too. Adam, in fact, was not just the first person; he was also the first Humpty-Dumpty naming things arbitrarily and imposing meanings of words he coined. Semiotically, he join Ferdinand de Saussure in saying that the relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary, the meaning of the sign conventional.
Now, let us turn to what God was constructed on Physics Facebook page as having said (he caused human languages to differ; now, they are using their science to report what a sample of his speech is like!):
Source: Physicist Page, Facebook.
What did God say? What God said to have said is put in a different “language” or rather in a different code, obviously to narrate God’s semiotic difference. What is the character of that semiotic difference and what does it suggest about God. First, what God said is esoteric, scientific (physicist), and we just cannot pronounce or translate or report it in our raw English. We can only report that “God said X and there was light.” God’s esoteric, scientific statement brought the Light, our enlightenment.
God is implicitly narrated as a scientist, precisely a physicist who utters the Light into existence, obviously a scientific re-interpretation of the Biblical account of narration. The Biblical account would not want to configure God as a scientist (maybe so as not to belittle the mighty creator). But God has, in fact, been presented as a scientist who creates and changes forms in nature, the mighty watch-maker.
The Physics Facebook text is deliberately parodic. It plays on or extends Genesis narrative in which God is reported as having said, "Let there be light" and there was light. Indeed, the narrative has many blank spaces. In which code or language did God say "Let there be light," and which sparked off light? If there was nothing called the "light" before then, how did God recognise it as the light? Difficult theological questions. But Physicist on Facebook would like to fill at least space and make language scholars uncomfortable! That THING that God said that caused light to be was scientific, maybe from electrical engineering!
What God said is deliberately made difficult to articulate, a mystification strategy. Why wouldn’t other professional groups re-identify God’s language as the language they themselves use in their own groups? Do the various religious groups try to identify God and characterise him in such a way that he takes sides with them – in wars, cultural values, et cetera? In the Old Testament of the Holy Bible, would the Jews like to share Yahweh (or Jehovah) with the gentiles? Do Muslims have the same attitude to the Jewish Yahweh as they have to their own Allah? Today, do some Christians or Muslims accept that Allah is God, that God is a translation equivalent of Allah? Is their argument not convincing, given that what the deity is presented as sanctioning in their holy books go against the interest of the other religion?
On 20 July, 2017, I attended a lecture presented by Kola Abimbola, the son of Wande Abimbola, and an Orisha priest and babalawo based in the United States. I was amazed, just like many people in the audience, when he declared that the God, as named in the English language, is not the same thing as the Yoruba Olodumare. He explained that Ajayi Crowther who was the first to use Olodumare for God did so strategically to make the indigenous Africans to whom Christianity was being preached to easily accept the new religion, thinking it was the same thing as their own, or that its deities were the same as theirs. Quite persuasive! He went ahead to explain how Olodumare could not be viewed as “the supreme Being” in the presence of other policing deity like Esu Elegba, that Esu would not even tolerate it. Thus, in the Yoruba pantheon, the deities just have their roles, and are in hierarchies as reinvented by the emergent Yoruba Christianity.
Returning to the representation of God’s signification as revealing that of a given profession, God therefore becomes for everybody, every profession, something we all want to identify with, something we want to have a share of, or do not want to share with others. If He is quoted somewhere as saying he is a jealous God (in the same effort to make him only our own), various appropriations of him suggest being jealous to share him with the other. God, therefore, is our major shibboleth, culturally and professionally. He is what we use in excluding and including others, in discriminating against others, even in justifying the physical elimination of others.
A simple semiotic description of the text above is necessary. It was shared on Facebook as a visual which contains signs in the symbolic mode, as Charles Sanders Peirce’s classification of the three modes of the sign would indicate. A simple explanation of symbolic signs or signs in the symbolic mode is provided by Chandler as follows:
… a mode in which the signifier does not resemble the signified but which is fundamentally arbitrary or purely conventional - so that the relationship must be learnt: e.g. language in general (plus specific languages, alphabetical letters, punctuation marks, words, phrases and sentences), numbers, morse code, traffic lights, national flags….
There is a good reason to present the symbolic signs to converge as a visual. There is an overarching idea about what God uttered (in God’s language) and the reporting act (human language, which happens to be English) to co-occur, one within the other. That brings up human reporting act as an important point worthy of consideration in this discourse. Interestingly, what is invented in the discourse of the visual as God’s text or God’s language, is still human symbolic communication, even though a specialized human symbolic communication, the language of the scientist – the physicist, specifically. That, too, is an important point worthy of consideration. Why is God given the symbolic language of the scientist? We will get to that issue shortly.
There is also the crucial need for a visualization, against a dark background, of both texts. The dark background reminds one of the disclosure in the Book of Genesis that before God created the heavens and the earth, everything was void. After creating the heavens and the earth, there was pitch darkness and God did not like it. So, he created light with the logos, the spoken word. He said, let there be Light and there was light. Later, he separated the light. But, there is an interesting metaphorical use of the dark background, not just its allusiveness. The dark background represents ignorance or lack of knowledge, which God’s text seeks to expel. God’s text, as a matter of fact, illumines the dark, really shining in dark space.
The representation of what God was said to have said is a dual symbolic text, with language (of the scientist) created out of everyday language. Godhood, is, therefore featured as a speech created from speech. Scientific symbols give us a level of narration and a higher speech, a god-speech! And God said X! You can’t vocalise the X, honestly!
But if the superiority of God is constructed this way through the language of science, do pastors not do a similar thing with glossolalia? Glossolalia is the language of the spirit, the language of the few who with it police the highway to Heaven. Same for its translation or interpretation. Only few filled with the spirit can understand or explain it. No wonder it could be a piece of drama, rehearsed and acted to make-believe.
Given the language that makes a scientist, has God not been honoured as a scientist (or the patron of scientists): God’s lect (idiolect and diatype) is scientific symbolic language. The rest of us who do not have access to his lect should not enter the ark yet; poor us!
The visual obviously suggests God’s awe as a scientist, the difficulty of comprehending him as an esoteric scientist, his scientific omnipotence, etc. How can we approach him unless we can communicate with him in his scientific speech?
The God-text always needs expert decoding, something similar to what pastors say about messages from God, especially in the form of glossolalia. Luckily, children studying leaves in the bush in Africa can see God’s esoteric hand on the leaves!
As children who played in the woods in the African countryside, my mates and I identified leaves with lines that looked as if an artist had drawn them as carrying Chukwu’s written texts. We were ignorant of the fact that those were lines were made by insect secretions but which, by coincidence, became interesting visual patterns. We did not think of any insect or animal drawing those designs, even though we knew that animals like termites, birds, rodents, etc exhibited interesting artistic skills in making their dwelling places. Why did we think of God coming down to earth to write on those leaves? What did God write on those leaves? We did not find answers to these and other questions, but took the difficulty in answering them as part of the wonders of God and His unknowable nature.
God’s handwriting on leaves! God could do that, anyway. Being the superior intelligence, God was literate and communicated in codes that were strange. After all, are all created things not God’s texts? In a sense, things created by this Supreme Being carry his handwriting or are His handwriting as a creative artist. The expanding universe is His canvass where He writes and draws, as well as draws in writing the complex text of a creation. Is the world not a complex text? And in the artistic writing of the universe, does this Supreme Being not maintain some kind of order, some kind of syntax in which this moon as a satellite has to maintain its route in revolving round the planet earth? Do the planets and moons and stars not maintain collocations with this and that heavenly body and keep to orbit along under certain conditions in time and space?
Funny and naïve our judgement about God’s handwriting may be, there are, indeed, insightful bases to think of God as a writer that uses codes or as an artist. Beyond this reasoning, however, is the God-code or the medium through which God expresses Himself. Many world religions attach themselves to particular (ancient) languages as the languages preferred by the Almighty in communicating with the world. Those languages are, as claimed, the languages God used in making revelations and instructing the world through certain chosen individuals, who are equally revered just as the language or code in which they received God’s message.
Oh God, you have been made in our own image, especially linguistically, diatypically and dialectally!
References
Chandler, Daniel (n.d.) Semiotics for Beginners. http://s3.amazonaws.com/szmanuals/bb72b1382e20b6b75c87d297342dabd7
Genesis, Holy Bible (NIV), Colorado Springs: Biblica.
Noth, Winfried (2015) “Three paradigms of iconicity research in language and literature,” in Hiraga, M.K., W.J. Herlofsky, K. Shinohara, & K. Akita (eds.) Iconicity: East Meets West, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, Pp 13 – 34.
Tolls, E. (2004) The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment. Nova to, CA: New World Library.
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