Surveillance and the All-Seeing Gaze of God

The eyes of the Lord are in every place, keeping watch on the evil and the good.

Proverbs 15:3.

Whether from the mouths of cautious parents or disgruntled siblings, the ominous words, “God is watching you,” shape the beginning of ethical reflection for many Christians from a young age. At first, it might seem rather obvious what this sentence means. However, a little unraveling of the context, “who said this and how?” or “why is this the way?” reveals rather quickly that this statement is very reductive even if it is not quite false. Much more can and should be said about God’s knowledge than these four words. To use the slogan as-it-says-on-the-tin might “work” for a time but its persistence into adulthood might create a manipulative, creaturely picture of God’s knowledge. Similarly, it risks idolatrous dishonesty about the limitations of human knowledge.[1] In an era dominated by surveillance capitalism, where our every move is tracked, recorded, and monetized, our theological reflections on divine omniscience take on a new dimension. This is not to say that the concept of divine omniscience or God’s knowledge is subject to our technological changes. God is God, neither a creature nor an algorithm. However, our creaturely (theological) thinking and desires, worship and prayer are radically impacted by the experience of being seen.

Surveillance and Digital Freedom

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.

George Orwell, 1984.

If someone knows everything about me, am I still completely free? The way we ask this question and what we mean when we think about omniscience informs our theological reflection. As Hanna Reichel points out, both the theologian and the data scientist are invested in the question of omniscience somewhere between the mind of God and mass data driven super-human machine intelligence. One of my English teachers at school had a unique ability to arrest any mischievous student with just one piercing look. She was an excellent teacher, and her superpower may have served the whole country well if she were in the police force. What was yet more paralysing, was the feeling that she might be staring at you whilst you were not paying attention. Like a “sixth sense” we seem to have this strange ability to “feel” when we are being watched, even without making eye contact. But digital surveillance bypasses this sixth sense. Online, we do not feel watched in the same way and paralysis seems impossible.

Surveillance capitalism thrives on the collection and analysis of vast amounts of personal data, creating detailed profiles of each individual, for targeted advertising and other purposes. Our modern relationship with technology has led to the constant generation of information footprints, which are observed, stored, and exploited by profit-driven companies. We never get to meet our digital avatars, even if we design our own virtual ones. Being online, which is supposed to feel like one of the highest modern exercises of freedom, is simultaneously a kind of enslavement. The information systems “know” things about us which we don’t know yet about ourselves. Were it not for the playful brevity with which we have to accept this surveillance, this would feel like a constant encroachment on our privacy and freedom.

Reality TV and Anxiety

Perhaps something is to be said here about how our entertainment culture has thrived on these kinds of encroachments. Playing with our fantasies, popular TV shows like Big Brother have been feeding our intrusive voyeuristic appetites since the 90s. We enjoy visually concretising our fantasies through the people we watch on reality TV. There is something addictive and inoculating about it.[2] Perhaps it’s the magical effortlessness of the viewing gaze. The daily mental task of reality-testing is tiresome and willingly gives way to pleasurably realistic fictions. By removing the feeling of obvious fiction involved in watching reality TV, Gogglebox took this to the next level, enabling us to watch people watching people on TV. This made the estrangement involved in spectatorship even more ordinary, cloaking it in the feeling of an even more personal engagement with ordinary people.

Subtly many reality TV series are designed to raise stress and anxiety levels which hooks the viewer in by making them look for resolution in the next episode.[3] It is fascinating how the TV shows bake stress and anxiety into the experience of relaxation so that we barely experience it.

Many psychologists used to believe that the difference between fear and anxiety is that fear has an object (we’re afraid of something) whereas anxiety has no object (we feel anxious). Therapists trained in Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory might draw a noteworthy link between anxiety and the feeling of surveillance. Against the status quo, Lacan suggested that anxiety does have an object. However, what makes anxiety uniquely troublesome is that even though there is an object we struggle to secure or locate it. This is why anxiety can produce the sense of looming dread and unsettledness whether the object is there or not. It’s a little like the feeling of being watched by a sniper: at any point the worst could happen, only you can’t tell the how, from what, or from where. The effect of surveillance is slightly weaker when you are sure you are being watched. The effect of surveillance is stronger when you are unsure about the “how” and the “from where”.  And if Michel Foucault is correct, it has won when it causes you to enact constant self-surveillance while surrendering freedom to whatever power it demands. From a digital standpoint, Foucault might indirectly offer a thought-provoking take on the nature of the selfie and its relationship to anxiety.

In any case, it is the power of the ever-watching eye which evokes this dystopian sense of dread and anxiety. This makes sense of the name of the TV show, Big Brother. It takes its name from George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. “Big Brother is watching you” is the shorthand reference to the surveillance and control of “The Party” a totalitarian regime which has all-seeing grip over its citizens. The idea of technological omnipresence is explored through the fictional “telescreens” through which everyone is observed whether in public or private and which can never be turned off.

Freedom & The Neighbourly Gaze

The temptation in all this is to associate the all-seeing watch of God with the gaze of a spectator. If we then add in the concepts of freedom and power we have an image of divine spectatorship; glorious, terrifying and distant. However, this cannot be an image of divine freedom. Neither does it help us to make sense of human freedom. For clarity, I do not frown at the idea of people watching Big Brother and I am not a reality TV Scrooge (at least publicly). However, I am interested in the sense of autonomy and distance we enjoy when surveillance becomes entertainment. The surveillance effect in reality TV helps us rehearse the non-neighbourly gaze as we relax. The distance, autonomy, and estrangement are made visible on-screen and yet by turning surveillance into entertainment, they’re rendered invisible all within the same viewing. The pressing issue is also a question which needs more reflection than answers: What does the non-neighbourly gaze rehearse in us and how might it shape our worship and ethics?

The power to be spectators rather than neighbours is an achievement of the digital screen. The distance and estrangement which surveillance affords might collude with the distance and estrangement which undergird our western practices of autonomy: Detached and semi-detached individualism might feel intuitively free, but this is arguably where many modern Western cultural contexts prize autonomy as freedom-from-the-other. This stands in direct contrast to Gospel notions of freedom in which being bound to God implies being bound to our neighbours. The Gospel proclaims freedom-from-sin not freedom-from-neighbour. No matter how one conceptualises the “church,” it must be more like bodily flesh than merely a collection of individual cells. It reflects the body which communes rather than a collection of people defined by their immunities and preferred visual objects. Church has to do with how Christians practice the gaze: Arguably, the desire to see God and to be seen by God is among Scripture’s central themes and this transfigures how we see and desire our neighbour.

Thus, surveillance capitalism competes as much for our desires as for our freedom. Many of us are unaware of the ways in which advertising and algorithms are designed to shape and manipulate our desires and what this means for human freedom.

Sicut Deus and Unconscious Desire

Humanity is described at their freest in the first scenes of Genesis where they enjoyed blessed communion with God and another and harmony with creation. At least until the serpent tempts the humans, saying “your eyes will be opened, and you will be (sicut deus) like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:5). The desire “to know” as God knows, and “to see” as God sees starts a fall into cursed disunity, cascading from chapter 3 through 11. The word “sin” appears first in chapter 4 portrayed as a beast with desires of its own, and the humans must learn not to fight God or each other but to have dominion over their sinful and conflicted desires.[4] This should not be misheard: Desire is not portrayed as inherently bad! Desire was intended for good! However, the human desire to free itself from God-given (true) freedom leaves human desire perennially conflicted, struggling to discern between good and bad desires, wise and foolish desires, timely and untimely desires & honourable and sinful desires.

But the desire to be “like God” is a good desire is it not? Were humans not made to image God? Yes! In addition, the forbidden fruit from the tree was good, desirable, and pleasing to the eyes. The Bible presents human (moral) psychology with a sophistication and nuance which is too readily overlooked. It is not oblivious to the fact that our desires can be manipulated, suppressed, and hidden from awareness. The Hebrew Bible already posits that after the fall, desire might feel freest when it is most deeply un-free. There are unconscious fears, wishes and desires which function like secrets kept even from ourselves. Scripture shows great awareness of the human ability to technologise wisdom, twisted words and to instrumentalise prayer.

Despite dismissing much of pious Judaism and religion as wish-fulfilment, it is perhaps not too surprising that one of the founding pioneers of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud’s work on the unconscious in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) bares similarity to the patterns of Jewish Rabbinic interpretation of the Hebrew Bible.[5] At a similar time, within Europe the “unconscious” gained theological traction from Swiss Lutheran theology to Dutch Neo-Calvinism. All this is to say, the ancient texts did not wait for European thinkers to develop a theory of the unconscious. The elusive nature of human desires and thinking is familiar territory to the ancient texts. The distressing point is that human desire is complicated enough without the large-scale influence that modern tech burdens us with.    

The question of what kind of freedoms survive inside surveillance capitalism is thus a pressing one. We tend instinctively to feel as though our desires are our own and known to us alone. But how private are our desires and are they really known by us alone? We touched briefly upon the pleasurable function of anxiety in reality TV. In the context of the digital, the troubling implication is that our moods are manipulable. The data collected about us and the algorithms which prime what we see, what we click, watch and desire are invisible. What’s intelligent about it isn’t the algorithm, that “intelligence” truly is artificial. It’s the assurance we’re fed that our authenticity and autonomy remain untouched and that our desires were ours all along. Whether digital or not, unbridled consumerism creates a culture in which our morals and desires can be harvested from us and then sold back to us cheap. Most of us are unaware of how our desires are shaped by advertising and subliminal messaging. In fact, we’re not supposed to be aware; that’s how advertising works. Nevertheless, this does say a lot about what “freedom” feels like. The success of Big Data lies in selling us digital un-freedom as consumer freedom.

Prayer, Selfies and Divine Omniscience

It might seem up to this point that Big-Data paranoia is the only given option. But this does not help me to think carefully about our relation to the non-human power (AI) which supposedly knows everything about me, my wants, and my needs. So, who really knows our desires and who gets to shape them? In Matthew 6, this question is met indirectly through the lens of prayer. Just before Jesus teaches his followers how to pray, he encourages them not to pray like hypocrites who as if inviting the surveillance of God and their neighbours, “love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others.” This kind of prayer functions like a camera-less version of a huge public selfie, followed by the sharing of the polaroids for all to gawk at. These kinds of prayer are not a moment of vulnerability.  They are a failed attempt at self-transcendence, hoping to wield the face of God for social status. Jesus instead goes on to encourage his followers to be unseen in prayer to the Father who also is unseen. “Do not be like them, for your father knows what you need before you ask him.”  

Prayer is hard because regardless of how unattractive, unwholesome, impure or unable we might find ourselves, we nevertheless present all that we are to holy God and open ourselves to change. Prayer is at least as difficult as emotional honesty.  Prayer requires a kind of vulnerability and honesty which is the opposite of the selfie. A sense of inability and vulnerability is woven all through Calvin’s doctrine of prayer. John Calvin’s theology highlights the non-self-reliant neediness of the one who prays. Seeking succour in her need, she must “go outside herself” and find it elsewhere (in God). But this going outside of oneself in prayer is the opposite of self-transcendence. The vulnerability and neediness in devoted prayer remind us that we are not God. The desire to be God is replaced with the desire to see God. Prayer mustn’t be conceived as the instrumentalising of God’s knowledge and power. Neither is it instrumentalised by God to simply edit our desires. However, God gifts himself in prayer and if we will receive the one in whom we pray, we might come to know that we have everything in Him.

If God already knows what I need before I ask, then surely I do not need to pray right? What’s the point? Well, if God is not just a mirror of my imagination but truly God and yet parentally loving, the logic must flow in the opposite direction. Precisely because God knows what we need, and sees us truly, we should ask in our need. If the selfie is symbolic of an act of technological self-transcendence, then prayer is the public confession that God alone is God. His closeness in self-giving grace to us needy children testifies to his transcendence. Indeed, God’s transcendence is not an abstraction, but implies His gracious presence and closeness. To be known by God is thus a comfort no matter how unlovable we might feel and how corrupt we might be. To be known by God is a comfort because there is much more mercy in Him than sin in us.[6] Calvin concluded, “we even rest fully in the thought that none of our ills is hid from him who we are convinced, has both the will and the power to take the best care of us.”[7] On the contrary, AI is stupid and remains stupid because it can neither be vulnerable nor hide secrets from itself, it can neither be anxious nor paranoid nor in need of grace. Freedom is bound up with vulnerability.  

Power and the All-Seeing Eye of God

Theologians have long asked about whether God seeing and knowing everything impinges on our human freedom and action. God’s knowledge is not like human knowledge, as it transcends the limitations of time, space, and human understanding. Cardboard definitions of “divine omniscience” typically refer to the perfect knowledge which God has about all things past, present and future and his own infinite self-knowledge. If God knows everything about me, and what I would do in any given situation, doesn’t that turn me into a kind of robot? Or worse, can’t all that knowledge be manipulated? 

It can be tempting to think of God’s knowledge in such a way that reduces knowledge to “information,” “data” or propositions. In these terms, God’s knowledge is a super-massive invisible database of all knowledge. If you add up all the knowledge in creation, “things seen and unseen,” all the knowledge of the universe, and all the knowledge that God has of himself, there you have it: God knows everything.  However, this is an unhelpful picture making God analogous with a super-bot. What might make us queasy about the idea of God as all-seeing and all-knowing is a sense of intrusion. Furthermore, knowledge can be manipulated or misused.

At risk of anachronism, Psalm 139 sets an emotional and spiritual question mark against the reader because verses 7-12 can feel like anything between deeply comforting to a profound violation.

⁷ Where shall I go from your Spirit?
    Or where shall I flee from your presence?
⁸ If I ascend to heaven, you are there!
    If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!
⁹ If I take the wings of the morning
    and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
¹⁰ even there your hand shall lead me,
    and your right hand shall hold me.
¹¹ If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
    and the light about me be night,”
¹² even the darkness is not dark to you;
    the night is bright as the day,
    for darkness is as light with you. 

Pslam 139: 7-12.

We are pointed in the right direction though if our reflections about what academic theologians call “the doctrine of God” is forced to return again and again to the character of God revealed in Scripture. The Psalm presses many questions upon the modern Christian. If they are prompted by these verses to ask “is God good?” over “is this really true?”, they’ll have rightly discerned that the language of the psalm is deeply personal. When the Psalmist in verse 23 implores God, “Search me and know my heart, test me and know my anxious thoughts” he is not installing divine surveillance cameras. God is not a divine information-database in the cloud (pun intended). A god like that would be incapable of giving grace and would not be inherently loving. This God would not be personal no matter how humanoid its design would be. This is precisely why we must not hand over the task of moral judgement over to smart-drones or AI, authorising lesser ‘gods.’ God’s knowledge is not technological, and it does not compete with the knowledge of creatures. Whatever we think we mean when we say, “omniscience” must be grounded by the wisdom and love which characterise God’s very being.

Omniscience and the Misuse of Power

Coming back to our previous question regarding the notion that God knows every thought and action I would do in any given situation. We have spelled out that God’s relation to creation is personal. God is not divine-mega-programmer or cosmic-tech-CEO, manipulating supermassive knowledge and data sets. God is not a creature, and his knowledge cannot be reduced to information. Neither can our knowledge of God be reduced to information. God does not depend on creation to be God. Neither does God’s knowledge of creation depend on creation. As Reichel aptly puts it, God’s knowledge does not depend on creation “it issues directly from God’s power…Reality is the effect and not the cause of God’s knowledge.”[8]

In Christian theology, the Triune God is personal and relational with regard to creation.[9] However, the nervousness we might feel about the other super-human “intelligence” stems rightly from our intuitive sense that knowledge and power are deeply connected. The Hebrew root, rāʾāh רָאָה (to see) sometimes brings this connection into focus such as in that odd story where one of Noah’s sons sees his dad indecently. The ambiguity deliberately suggests seeing a misuse of (sexual) power. Another example connecting sight and the desire to have God’s power is the catastrophic fall. The curse is a consequence of the humans unwisely doing “what is right in their own eyes”[10] just as Eve “saw that the fruit was good.” However these are human examples. Rāʾāh does not always reflect a misuse of power. In fact, God’s all seeing is tied to the divine power of God’s Word. Genesis repeats over and over that God “sees” what he has made and calls it good. The narrative praises the gaze of God upon creation without which nothing can live or flourish.[11] Visual surveillance brings power and knowledge together but in a very different way. But it also obscures it because we are supposed to believe that “data” and “information” are as neutral as the devices which capture that information. I would argue that technology is neither inherently good nor bad. As Susan Sonntag reminds us with the example of the camera, neither is it ever neutral. “Essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.”[12] This does not mean that we can blame the camera and make it responsible for human sinful practices. Quite the opposite, many of these technologies serve as prosthetics to some of our worst human inclinations on increasingly large scales.

We cannot be modern Christians without thinking in our church contexts about the ways in which cultures of surveillance inspire mistrust and suspicion between us. In Brian Brock’s words “What we learn in the gaze of the incarnate Christ as learned in the communion of saints is that there is good reason to risk trusting, bodily engagement with our neighbors, as difficult and messy as this will be.”[13] Most of our interactions in churches will be bodily rather than digital. This is a gift and an opportunity for us to receive one another as gifts. But it is also as Brock describes it, “messy.” Human relationships bring with them complex dynamics. If our churches can boast true diversity, we will have the poor among the wealthy, those with authority among those who are new to the faith and those who are impressionable among the experienced. Furthermore, these dynamics are further complicated in online space whether through virtual meetings or private WhatsApp™ groups. The kind of gazes we share as neighbours or abuse as siblings affect the spiritual and psychological atmosphere of our churches. To give an example, failure to entrust aspects of church life or ministry to others on the basis of race or ethnic background is contrary to what it means to be Christ’s body for one, and it is also an example of the racial gaze at work. Churches are spaces of potential intimacy and trauma. We need to keep each other safe and stay watchful even as we pursue a greater knowledge of ourselves, others, and God.

Safeguarding

Arguably, safeguarding in church should be considered “Gospel-work” and there is serious danger where it is not taken seriously. There is a challenging tension between fostering a family-like culture of trust alongside thorough safe-guarding protocol and sometimes scrutiny.  How each church works this out practically might vary depending on the number of safeguarding officers or equivalent, their relationships with people in church, and the church’s history and geography.  Safeguarding rightly sets up a paradigm of ethics in which everyone’s behavioural norm needs to shift to accommodate the few. In reality, it frequently turns out that “the vulnerable” are many and not a mere few. How can we foster brotherly and sisterly closeness, remain vigilant and not become overly suspicious of one another? How can we make sure that the tension remains fruitful?

Christology and the Racial Gaze

What we believe about Jesus Christ (Christology) is not a mere mental exercise. Our Christology is apparent in how we live in response to the Gospel through which Christ is made known: Our anticipation of God’s presence in worship, where we direct our prayer, who we associate with in church, the gazes we share with one another, all of these things say something about our Christology. “To confess one’s self a human member of the body of Christ is to confess that one must be traditioned in the gaze of the incarnate Christ.”[14]  Ministers, have you considered directly asking non-white disciples how they respond to white Western visual and cultural portrayals of Jesus (whether in our outside of church)? Do your congregants feel as though they are under surveillance?     

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References

[1] This limitation was arguably intended as gift.

[2] I am playing here with the etymological Latin roots in (in/into) + occulus (eyes)

[3]  Editing Reality : Throughline : NPR. September 29, 2022.

[4] See how Psalm 19:12-13 brings Genesis 4 into reflection.

[5]  The use of the idea of the unconscious for pastoral practical theology was developed by one of Freud’s friends the Swiss theologian, Oskar Pfister (1873-1956). They sent letters back and forth form as early as 1909. Having met Karl Jung in 1907, another Swiss theologian, Adolf Keller nurtured a deep interest in the unconscious through the lectures of Théodore Flournoy (1854-1920). His wife Tina was also psychiatrist. And then, completely independent of this, Dutch theologian Hermann Bavinck expressed deep fascination in the concept and lectured on it at the Free University of Amsterdam July 7, 1915. In the grand scheme things, these men arrived rather late to a “concept” of the unconscious which has a much longer history in older traditions.

[6] As the honey mouthed Richard Sibbes used to say.

[7] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Westminster Press, 1960), 851.

[8]  R. Hanna, “Worldmaking knowledge: What the doctrine of omniscience can help us understand about digitization (Part I),” Cursor Zeitschrift für Explorative Theologie 1, no. 3 (2019): 1-21.

[9] Talk about God’s knowledge of creation must be qualified by that fact that all creation was made through the Son. What is meant by “persons” within the Godhead cannot be explored here but is important within this kind of reflection.

[10] This is the opposite of wisdom, which is why this language is repeated all over the wisdom literature.

[11] Note, that the Psalmist’s picture of the most dreaded apocalyptic disaster would be if God turned his face away evoking imagery of exile and judgement.

[12] Susan Sontag, On Photography (Penguin Publishers, 1977), 58-59. Similarly, “Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one—and can help build a nascent one.” 19

[13] B. Brock, “Seeing through the Data Shadow: Communing with the Saints in a Surveillance Society,” Surveillance and Society 16, no. 4 (2018): 543.

[14] Ibid., 543.

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© Philip Miti, 2024.

This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Cover Image: Photo by the author.