On the Topic of Divine Hiddenness
December 10, 2024 | By David Woods TD ‘26
image description: looking up a well towards the sky
There are certain things that are simply unavoidable when you grow up in the middle of nowhere, and for as much as might you want to try and act like they aren’t a part of your identity when you move away, you’ll find that you simply can’t. Take me, for instance. I still find myself captivated by the scent of freshly cut grass that seems to waft through the air on some random spring days when the maintenance crew cuts stripes on the lawn on Old Campus.
Of course, I know as well as you might that the smells that drift off of the manicured turf don’t quite compare to Kentucky Bluegrass and Rye; they simply aren’t genuine in the same way that what I am familiar with would be, but I find comfort in the essence nonetheless. In fact, the same thing could be said for the shudders of warmth that race through my body at the most unpredictable times: perhaps when I’m strolling down Broadway and catch a glimpse of country music radiating from a nearby car’s radio or when I look up at the sky and am amazed to be able to see the stars through the light pollution of the city.
But I’m not blind. I know that I’m at least sixteen hours away (by car) from my humble home in Kentucky at any given time (trust me, I’ve driven the route more than enough times), I know that any semblance of the life that I used to have, of the easygoing days spent sauntering through meadows of native grasses without a care in the world, is packed away as tightly as the philosophy books in my backpack, and I know that I made the decisions that led me away from those beginnings, that it was my choice to pursue something different. But that recognition doesn’t stop me from searching, from looking for glimpses of what used to be life-giving (in a sense) and appreciating them for all that they’re worth. In fact, it's human nature to seek generative value in this way, especially in situations that manifest such dynamic differences, like mine. Yet, that idea, the weight I put on these tastes of home, got me thinking: do these same translative experiences apply to God?
When I first got to college, and I found myself immersed in Christian community, I felt no need to question the force of His will and direction over my life. It seemed that He had put me right where I needed to be, in a space that is open to the kind of exploration my heart desired to engage in to try and discern both who He was and who He is in my life right now. And indeed, for a while, this remained the case. I found myself diving ever-deeper into trying to understand what it meant to live a Christ-centered life, and I truly relished every moment that I was able to connect with Him. It was like I was chasing a perpetual cycle of thin spaces, where the boundaries between Heaven and Earth seem more permeable and God seems omnipresent in a way that my inattentive nature would not have allowed for previously.
And, after a while, I began to wonder if these feelings were real, if God had truly made Himself known to me in a way that was undeniable, or if I was simply juxtaposing figments of my past with my time at Yale. That is, in much the same manner that I wasn’t fooled by the turf on Old Campus or the country music on Broadway, I began to wonder if I was fooling myself with God, if I was artificially making reasons to believe to augment some gilded sense of reassurance and connection with the ubiquity of religion in my rural upbringings and the longing I felt for some air of familiarity (psychologists might call this a confirmation bias). But, the more I dove into scripture, the more uncertain I became about the presence of God, specifically why He chooses to remain hidden from the masses in a way that leads to ambiguity over His existence.
Romans 1:20 tells us that:
Ever since the creation of the world His eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things He has made. So they are without excuse.
And, truth be told, this seems like quite a lofty statement. If it is the case that we are without excuse to not know God, then it must also be the case that God’s existence is indisputable, but is this phenomenon really observable within the finitude of our world?
It can be a difficult thing, both for the Christian and the atheist, to wrestle with the idea that God exists. And, for as much as we like to believe, as Christians, that knowing God is something that’s done internally through the sorts of divine revelation that people like Saint Thomas Aquinas spoke of centuries ago, we cannot deny the curiosity that might lead us to think differently.
Even the most steadfast Christian, one who is not motivated to question their faith in the same way that an intellectual would, has to acknowledge that at some point, they wished that they had more concrete evidence for the existence of God, even if they do so simply out of a desire to know how to honor Him and His creation better. It is human nature to seek understanding and to be explorative, and we shouldn’t hide from that desire.
And so, the question remains: where is God, and why does He not make Himself more known to us? Why is it the case that I can’t have a conversation with God in the same way that I might call up one of my friends just to chat about life? And why must so many people in the world reject His teachings through Christ? Are they really all living life with the intentionality to specifically ignore God?
The rationale I laid out in the preceding paragraphs speaks to a philosophical question called the problem of divine hiddenness, which seems to stand in major contention with so many of the things that we, as Christians, come to know when we decide to let God enter our hearts and to live lives centered on the Gospel and the example of Christ. To put it bluntly, if God is omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient, then why is it the case that anyone in His kingdom does not know, for sure, that He is pursuing us with a fervent love that is otherwise inescapable? Indeed, as the Lord says in Ezekiel 34:11, “ I myself will search for my sheep.”
God is all-good, so why wouldn’t He want the best for those individuals that make up this earth? He is all-loving, so why doesn’t He desire deeply to make Himself known to those who love Him? He is all-powerful, so why doesn’t it seem like He has the ability to interact with us on our plane of existence? Above all, He is all-knowing, so can’t He see the contents of our hearts and our minds and recognize how much more meaningful and powerful our walks with Jesus would be, and how much more impactful our lives would be if only we could say for sure that He exists?
Aside from these obvious concerns, it actually appears that the atheist has a lot of weight in the argument from divine hiddenness, for it has not always been the case that God has been so out-of-touch (in a literal sense we could say) with this world. There are numerous examples of God using His powers to make Himself known to people, just like us, independent of their religious status, throughout the stories of the Bible. And indeed, it is this disparity between how things used to be, taking Biblical stories into account, with how things are now, that leads many to the conclusion that God is either dead or simply does not exist.
Take, for instance, the transfiguration that Moses and Elijah witness in the New Testament, [1], or really any story that the Bible tells about the life of Jesus. Barring the patent explanation that Jesus gave His life on the cross for us, that He is responsible for our salvation, and that He is going to return to the earth and mark the end of the world as we know it (according to Revelations), we still have reason to believe that there should be a more empirical sort of evidence to the existence of God.
The matter at hand is further complicated by the existence of miracles. Miracles have, and will always be, things of pure mysticism. They are defined internally by the fact that they violate the laws of nature because there are no physical explanations for their occurrence. This is a point that can be debated, as some choose to perceive miracles as occurring in different environments and for different reasons (or perhaps even involving different amounts of divine intervention), but, for the sake of this article, we shall assume that miracles are events that are supernatural.
Much the same argument against the existence of God—an argument, in turn, that complicates the hiddenness of God—can be made through miracles with very similar reasoning. In the Gospels, we see Jesus and His followers being able to perform miracles like healing the blind, curing leprosy, or parting the waters of a sea. But what about today? With the rise of inequality and the derision of justice—take, for example, the conflicts in Gaza, Afghanistan, Ukraine, or Yemen—the world is no less in need of the incontestable grace of God, yet we’re often left with a glaring question: where is He? And, if He does exist, is now not as good of a time as any to make Himself known, to save the masses from oppression, to empower His followers to fight for what is just, and to establish order in a world that’s slipped into an uncontested state of apathy?
While it might be easy for Christians to answer some of the conflicts that I raised already with optimistic visions of the good, of the ways that they are able to rest their trust in God and know that He is present even when He can’t be seen, it is not so easy for a non-believer to think through the same dissensions. And so, much of the rest of this article shall focus on that perspective, the one of the non-believer, because it is, in my opinion, just as important.
J.L. Schellenberg has perhaps the strongest argument for divine hiddenness, one that bolsters the position of the atheist, and it can be formulated as follows: If we assume that God is a perfect person insofar as He an ultimate being, then it is the case that He would also be perfect in the possession of the properties associated with persons, including (but not limited to) power, knowledge, creativity, and love. As such, it is then necessary to categorize nonbelievers into two main camps: the reasonable non-believers and the inculpable non-believers. The reasonable non-believers would be people who are indeed hostile towards religion, or those who take intentional steps to reject the will of God, whereas the inculpable—or non-resistant—non-believers are those who place no ill-will on religion, but who still have not had the light of faith revealed to them.
The argument continues that necessarily, God (as the ultimate, loving, and perfect being) would ensure that there are no non-resistant nonbelievers, which provides for the assertion that “…what a loving God has to reason to do is provide us with evidence sufficient for belief.” For, if God did not make Himself known, then there would be people—like you or I—that live their lives unable to reach a sense of ultimate fulfillment, trudging on, instead, through ignorance and the fear of damnation because God hides. And, while the most common response to this problem is to bring in free will and postulate that God cannot exist cohesively as an indisputable presence without violating the ability that we have, as agents, to make moral decisions, an omnipotent God would make it the case that “moral freedom…need not be infringed upon in order for God to be disclosed in a relevant sense.” [2]
So, where does this argument leave us? For me, it seems that the problem of divine hiddenness begs a much more relevant question than “where is God?” in a way that my prior self, the one who, unsure of whether he could trust his senses and be comforted by God’s presence, would not have known to ask. That is, what do we seek in searching for God?
1 John 4:6 tells us that “Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God,” which seems to stipulate that it is out of love and the earnest desire to know God that He makes Himself known to us. We do not choose to worship a God who forces us to believe in His supremacy and ultimate goodness. To argue that such a reality would be preferable might, in fact, demarcate and stunt the potential relationships we could ever have with God. God is the author of our fortunes, the only One who knows the content of our hearts and from whom we cannot hide, but there is something truly beautiful, and perhaps even unfathomable, about the way in which we come to know God on our own accord.
In open-ended terms, God is not the professor that seems to stifle your creativity, trying to make sure that you fit into the mold of contemporary academic society by handing you back critique after critique that causes you to upend your thought processes and spiral into a state of doubt and dread. He is much more like the academic advisor, the one with whom you’ve spent countless nights in the backroom at The Graduate; the one who, better than anyone else imaginable, can see your dreams and passions and know that, regardless of what kind of garbage seems to be on the pages of your thesis as it stands, you will accomplish the things that you set out to do, even if that involves stumbling along the way.
And from this idea, an important conclusion emerges, one that deals in belief. That is, God’s (or our academic advisor’s, professor’s, etc.) desire as to why we believe in Him seems to be more important than the fact that we believe in Him because God is a redeemer. God is not fixated on conformity or veracity, as the professor might be. God is willing to give you some room to breathe, to escape the insufferable weight of expectation, much like the kind-hearted academic advisor that genuinely believes in your potential, and this is where it becomes apparent that we cannot logically demand that God “unhide” Himself and at the same time retain our potential to grow:
The true God, morally impeccable, would always seek what is morally best for us, thereby giving us an opportunity to achieve, without coercion, God’s kind of moral goodness. God, in other words, would be a redeemer enabling us, through knowledge of God, to be rescued without coercion from our moral deficiencies and thereby to become morally like God. [3]
In other words, God cares not simply that we believe in His existence as a classical theist might; it is much more important that we believe in His existence and come to know and accept him as our Lord through our own experiences. Take, for example, the old adage “as you sow, so shall you reap.” There is no generative or constitutive beneficence to be found in demanding that God make Himself known, as it would, in fact, be a self-serving argument to make the case that divine hiddenness justifies disbelief in God. Indeed, providing proof of His existence would logically entail that God succumbs to our earthly concerns, thereby contradicting His goals of allowing us a path to sanctification in Him through the removal of our selfish and prideful tendencies. Thus, “…we truly come to know God only if we acknowledge our unworthiness of knowing God.” [4]
And so, while it might not be the case that I will be able tell people stories of my relationship with God based on concrete evidence that denies His hiddenness (take, for instance the phone call prayer mentioned earlier), I can, just like everyone else, admit to myself that I don’t need that kind of reassurance in my life. To concede limitations is to be human, and to let God work without demanding His presence is to be humble. Faith grows from a place of uncertainty and a lack of understanding, and besides it’s surprisingly liberating to live in a world not centered on the self.
1. Matthew 7:1-13.
2. J. L. Schellenberg. Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason. 2006.
3. Daniel Howard-Snyder and Paul K. Moser, eds. Divine Hiddenness: New Essays. 2001.
4. Ibid.