“Truly with you God is hidden, the God of Israel, the savior!” So begins the canticle for Friday Morning Prayer, week I, drawing from Isaiah 45.
The text amounts to a powerful rebuke of pagans who “bear wooden idols and pray to gods that cannot save.” The speaker has just discovered that the living God does not lie naked before our gaze like a gilded statue wrought by human hands. Instead, the one true God is startlingly inconspicuous. “Truly with you God is hidden, the God of Israel, the savior!”
What was a cry of wonder by a pagan who just discovered the vanity of idolatry has become in our day a cry against the discovery. With anticipations in Nietzsche, the contemporary philosopher J. L. Schellenberg has even used God’s signature hiddenness as an argument against God’s existence and on behalf of a new pagan spirituality.
Schellenberg’s thought is that if God is all loving and all powerful, then he would ensure that anyone who sought him in earnest would immediately find him; but we all know that at least some people have sought him and yet did not immediately find him. Therefore, Schellenberg reasons, there can be no such God who is both all loving and all powerful.
Several responses to the argument have been formulated. Some deny that God is hidden. Others say that God is hidden simply because of our own moral failings. Neither response is particularly helpful for those who sincerely do not know how to find God.
As I write in my new book Divine Hiddenness, taking a cue from Sts. Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, God is indeed naturally hidden, not because he is insufficiently loving or powerful, or simply because of our faults, but because of what he is: the singular Creator of all things visible and invisible.
The Creator, just to be the source of all existence, must be beyond the created whole and must therefore be hidden to us existents within the created whole. Existence is a gift, not a given, and the giver is hidden behind the gift we have received. Fathom the gift as gift and then see the world as a pointer to God the Creator.
(Two classic books on this topic are Msgr. Robert Sokolowski’s The God of Faith and Reason, which elucidates this hiddenness and its implications for the life of faith, and Kenneth Schmitz’s The Gift: Creation, which explicates the causality of the gift of existence.)
Existence is a gift, not a given, and the giver is hidden behind the gift we have received.
Those like Schellenberg or Nietzsche who find God problematically hidden misunderstand the sort of thing God is. Precisely because he is the Creator, he cannot be found on hand in the clap of lightning or the temple perched atop a hill, or in some oceanic feeling or experience. To be the Creator is to belong to a different dimension than creation. If the latter is finite and temporal, the former must be infinite and eternal, which prevents a direct presentation of the Creator in the world.
The secularism of modernity heightened God’s hiddenness by rendering the path from creation to Creator harder to find, and as a consequence, God’s hiddenness has been on the Church’s mind in recent centuries. In fact, both Vatican councils clarified divine hiddenness, the first philosophically and the second theologically.
First, on the side of reason, Vatican I affirms that divine hiddenness is not intractable; human reason can indeed discern in the created world sure signs that there is a Creator who is divine. Such proofs do not make the hidden God manifest; rather, they reveal that the world itself, as a whole, is not self-explanatory. There must therefore be a first cause, a prima causa, that gives existence to all.
Second, on the side of faith, Vatican II makes the logic of revelation plain by underscoring the naturalness of God’s hiddenness.
In His goodness and wisdom God chose to reveal Himself and to make known to us the hidden purpose of His will by which through Christ, the Word made flesh, man might in the Holy Spirit have access to the Father and come to share in the divine nature. Through this revelation, therefore, the invisible God out of the abundance of His love speaks to men as friends and lives among them, so that He may invite and take them into fellowship with Himself. (Dei Verbum 2)
God’s persistent hiddenness provides no obstacle to the faith, for the very need for revelation presupposes that the invisible God is naturally hidden. Even the etymology of re-velation suggests a hiddenness unveiled that hides again.
Indeed, before the Eucharist, St. Thomas Aquinas suggests we pray, “O hidden God (latens Deitas), I adore you, who truly hides below these shapes.”
How then should the Christian respond to the contemporary atheistic argument against God’s existence? First, with agreement: God is indeed naturally hidden, for he is the Creator and we are all creatures. Second, with clarity of thought: God the Creator cannot be found within the created whole; in order to be found, he must be sought with the philosophical methods that take us beyond the whole. Third, with witness: by pointing to the revelation of the hidden God in Christ, the Word made flesh.
Rather than seeking God in private experiences of dubious merit or in public works made by human hands, we should look for God’s saving power in the sacraments that reliably make the hidden God present—in his hiddenness.