Posted on by Jack Kilcrease

God’s Humbling Hiddenness and Revelation by Faith

Luther will guide our biblical explication of the God of the Gospel as both hidden and revealed.  As we observed in an earlier section, both the pre-modern Greek and Latin theological traditions relied on a dialectic of “negation” (apophatic theology, via negativa) and affirmation (kataphatic theology, via positiva).  Lowell Green has noted that Luther in his doctrine of God also relies on a form of affirmation and negation, albeit a radically different one.1  Luther’s affirmation is God hidden (negation) and God revealed (affirmation).  As we will also see, one could also add God’s appearance under the law as negation, and gospel as affirmation.  

It should be recognized that Luther’s concept of divine hiddenness is not just a matter of affirming that God is incomprehensible.  Of course, all orthodox Christian theologians have claimed this one way or another. Rather, following the biblical data (Isa. 45:15), Luther is clear that God actively hides from his people.2  Why and how this is the case is something we will explore below. 

Luther on Divine Hiddenness

How Luther talks about divine hiddenness is quite complicated because he applies the principle differently in different contexts.  The British historian of Christian doctrine B.A. Gerrish has thematized these disparate statements of Luther into two kinds of hiddenness: Hiddenness 1, where God is hidden in his revelation, notably in Christ.  Hiddenness 2, where God is hidden above and apart from revelation.3

In first turning to a discussion of Hiddenness 1, contrary to what is often asserted, it should be recognized that Luther like Augustine and Aquinas, accepts that there is a kind of analogy of being.  Indeed, as Katherine Sonderegger notes no Christian theology can function without some kind of analogy of being.4  Similarly, Paul Hinlicky observes that it cannot be denied that God is in some measure like his creation, and in other ways not.5  In this, if the Christian doctrine of creation is true, it must be the case that as far as God and his creation are similar, God must be properly what his creation is by derivation and participation. 

Indeed, this is precisely what Paul testifies to in affirming that God’s transcendental qualities are seen in those “things that are made” (Rom. 1:20).  Even the Eastern Fathers (who denied any knowledge of the divine essence was possible), allowed for an analogical knowledge of the “howness” of God as Trinity.6  Similarly, in the twentieth century, Karl Barth (who famously claimed that analogia entis was the doctrine of the Antichrist!)7 still allows for an analogia relationis, wherein the “howness” of the divine being (i.e., the Trinitarian relations) was analogically reflected in created being, albeit only recognizable by means of revelation.8 

Citing Romans 1:20 in the Heidelberg Disputation, Luther certainly holds that God’s transcendental qualities are knowable from nature.9  This knowledge of divine goodness and glory is nevertheless unprofitable for fallen humans, since they abuse it in the form of self-justification.  In the Genesis commentary of the 1530s, there is another even more intriguing development of a notion of analogia entis as essentially linguistic.  Luther takes with the utmost seriousness the biblical conception of God as a speaking God (Gen. 1, John 1), and creation as his speech.  Creatures are words of God in analogy to the divine Word: “God, by speaking, created all things and worked through the Word, and . . . all His works are some words of God, created by the uncreated Word.”10 

Elsewhere, in his sermon for Trinity Sunday 1538, Luther speaks of God’s being as Trinity as analogized on the basis of a linguistic agent: God the Father speaker, Son as word spoken, Spirit as hearing.11  Here Luther mirror’s Jesus’s own description of the Trinitarian relations in the Gospel of John (Jn. 16:13).  The Reformed theologian John Frame has made a similar analogy with reference to Psalm 33:6 and Isaiah 48:16. Here the Father is speaker, the Son is the Word, and the Spirit is the breath which carries the Word to the hearer.12

Because creatures are created words that analogize God’s eternal Word, and God’s eternal Word is an active word that creates what it speaks (Thettel-Wort),13 creatures are a medium of God’s actions.  In the Large Catechism, Luther speaks of creatures as “channels” through which God acts.  A mother’s breast may give a baby milk, but because God’s Word is constantly speaking his creation into existence, the milk’s ultimate metaphysical source is God.  The mother’s breast is but a channel through which God’s Word speaks into existence the created good and delivers it to the creature.14

Created Masks of God

Expanding on Luther, one could safely say that all creation possesses a kind of sacramental quality.  Although there is a very clear line between God the creator and his creatures, creatures serve as a kind of visible word (verbum visible) preaching God’s intentions to humans.15  The line between natural and supernatural theology is blurred to the extent that all reality is simply an encounter with God’s Word.  Nevertheless, there is a distinction between natural and supernatural theology because of the difference between God’s auditory and visible words (verbum audibile, verbum visible).  

Much as Luther defined the sacraments of the new testament as a physical medium with a word of promise attached to them, so too, God makes his intentions regarding what goods he wishes to mediate to humans through his visible words of creation by an auditory word.  God’s intended activity in a creature remains unrecognized “without the Word . . .”16 To all creation he attaches a word “very good” (Gen. 1).  To Adam in the Garden, he makes the promise “you may eat” (Gen. 2:16). 

God also attaches words of condemnation to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (Gen. 2:17).  In giving the Ten Commandments, one might also say that God indicates where he has attached his word of grace and his word of condemnation.  God not only attaches his word of blessing to male/female marriage (Gen. 1:28), but he attaches his word of condemnation to all other sexual relationships outside of the relationship of male/female marriage.  God is equally present and active in both words and through both mediums to work both grace and condemnation.

Hence, when speaking of God’s essence and attributes, Luther affirms a different kind of affirmation and negation than does the Dionysian and Thomistic traditions.  When speaking of God’s attributes revealed in his visible and auditory words, there is not affirmation in similarity and negation in even greater dissimilarity.  Rather, the negation is the fact that although God is present in his auditory and visible words, they are not him. 

Indeed, as Luther says in the Great Galatians commentary that all creatures are “masks of God” (larva Dei).17   In the Genesis commentary Luther states that “[i]t is . . . insane to argue about God and the divine nature without the Word or any covering.”18  When God reveals himself, he does so by hiding in a created wrapper or veil:

When God reveals Himself to us, it is necessary for Him to do so through some such veil or wrapper and say: “Look!  Under this wrapper you will be sure to take hold of Me.”  When we embrace the wrapper, adoring, praying, and sacrificing to God there, we are said to be praying to God and sacrificing to Him properly.19

From this, the Reformer concludes: “. . . those who want to reach God apart from these coverings exert themselves to ascend to heaven without ladders . . . Overwhelmed by His [God’s] majesty, which they seek to comprehend without coverings, they fall to their destruction.”20  

Hence, the “masks,” “channels,” and “wrappings” of God present him, but also conceal him.  As the later Lutheran philosopher Johann Georg Hamann comments in the spirit of Luther, God addresses the “creature through the creature.”21  In the present age before we see the Lord “face to face” (1 Cor. 3:12), God veils himself in his unveiling.  To return to the language of negation and affirmation, the negation is the covering over of the divine presence and therefore attributes/essence with the creaturely medium:  the affirmation is what God’s auditory word says he is doing through the created medium.  Through these mediums, creatures suffer God’s wrath, or his grace. 

Because the finite is capable of the infinite, there is not a mere analogical similarity between the created medium and God’s grace or wrath.  Rather, there is a kind of communicatio idiomatum between his created and uncreated words so that one directly suffers God through the medium.  The fact that God conceals his essence and attributes under created mediums humbles believers.  They must listen to the divine Word which has been attached to a visible medium to know what God is doing through it.  In this, they trust and receive what God offers there by faith alone in the promise offered there.  

  1. Lowell Green, Adventures in Law and Gospel: Lectures in Lutheran Dogmatics (Ft. Wayne, IN: Concordia Theological Seminary Press, 1993), 47-53.   ↩︎
  2. Steven Paulson, “Luther on the Hidden God,” Word & World 19, no. 4 (1999): 363. ↩︎
  3. B. A. Gerrish, “To the Unknown God: Luther and Calvin on the Hiddenness of God,” Journal of Religion 53 (1973), 263–293. ↩︎
  4. Katherine Sonderegger, Systematic Theology: The Doctrine of God, vol. 1 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 26. ↩︎
  5. Hinlicky, Beloved Community, 74-75.  ↩︎
  6. See examples in: Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 50, 207-208. ↩︎
  7. CD I/1. ix. ↩︎
  8. CD III/2. 220. ↩︎
  9. Heidelberg Disputation (1518). LW 31:52. ↩︎
  10. Lectures on Genesis (1535-1545). LW 1:47 ↩︎
  11. Paul Hinlicky, Luther and the Beloved Community: A Path for Christian Theology after Christendom (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2010), 130-135.  The section of the sermon that they refer to can be found in: Sermon for Trinity Sunday (1538). WA 46:433. ↩︎
  12. John Frame, Theology of Lordship, Volume 2: The Doctrine of God (Philipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 2002), 636. ↩︎
  13. See That These Words of Christ, “This is My Body,” etc. Still Stand Firm Against the Fanatics, (1527).  LW 37:180-188.  ↩︎
  14. LC I.1; CT, 587; LC II.1; CT 683. ↩︎
  15. Augustine, Tractates in the Gospel of John, 80. 3; NPNFa, 7:344. ↩︎
  16. Lectures on Genesis (1535-1545). LW 1:13.  ↩︎
  17. Lectures on Galatians (1531). LW 26:95. ↩︎
  18. Lectures on Genesis (1535-1545). LW 1:13. ↩︎
  19. Lectures on Genesis (1535-1545). LW 1:15. ↩︎
  20. Lectures on Genesis (1535-1545). LW 1:14. ↩︎
  21. Johann Georg Hamann, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, ed. Josef Nadler (Vienna: Thomas-Morus-Presse m Verlag Herder, 1950), 198.  Cited in Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation, trans. Thomas Trapp (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2008), 108. ↩︎

From the draft manuscript for Lutheran Dogmatics: The Evangelical-Catholic Faith for an Age of Contested Truth (Lexham Press).

Cover image from “What Does This Mean – The Hiddenness of God,” Messiah Lutheran Church, accessed February 23, 2023, https://messiah-nc.org/sermons/what-does-this-mean-the-hiddenness-of-god/.