We must not help our neighbor for Christ, but in Christ. […] In general, the expression “for God” is a bad one. God ought not to be put in the dative.

One of the more difficult, perhaps the most difficult, challenges to learning Polish was getting accustomed to its inflected nature. In English, we tell who did what to whom in a sentence by syntax, where it appears in relation to other words. In the sentence “The dog bites the man,” we know who is doing the biting and who is being bitten by the order: subject verb object; biter bites bitee. Polish and other inflected languages determine these things by adding endings (inflections) to the words. Instead of meaning coming from word order (subject verb object), it comes from word endings. The different meanings are called cases. The subject of a sentence is in nominative case. The direct object is usually in accusative case in most inflected language, but Polish is an odd ball because some direct objects are in genitive case, and all direct objects of negative verbs are in genitive case. Indirect objects, to whom or for whom (i.e., “We gave the dog some treats.”), are in the dative case. In Polish, that usually means adding “-owi”, “-ze”, “-u”, or “-i”to the end of the noun. In English, we just slip it between the verb and the direct object.

So what puzzles me about Weil’s contention that we shouldn’t put God in the dative is how it seems to fly in the face of so much we hear in contemporary Christianity in America. We have “10 Things Young People Can Do for God” and “How to Work for God Effectively” and “Working for God in the Public Square” to name a few articles one can find easily enough. Indeed, it seems to have a Biblical basis. So I wondered what Weil might mean. Perhaps it’s a case of not limiting oneself to the dative case but also the instrumental, accusative, genitive, locative, and vocative cases.