Tag: Hiddenness

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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

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The God of the Gospel: Affirmation and Negation in Divine Hiddenness

One response to the mythological metaphysics of modernity has been calls to return to something like Aquinas or Pseudo-Dionysius’s analogical or mystical view of God.  Although both authors avoid a mythological view of God by removing him from the system of being, calls to return to mysticism or analogy misconceive the problem.  Sadly, those who call for such a return often view idolatry primarily as a confusion of creature and creator, rather than as an extension of the problem of self-justification.  Humanity only generates idols because self-justifying humans need a God who they can control with their good works or kill off with their denial. 

Those who idealize Aquinas’s or Pseudo-Dionysius’s approach to the problem of idolatry typically function within a legalist trajectory. These legalists employ the strategy of pressing the claims of divine transcendence all the harder in order to keep humans from confusing the creation with the creator.  Within Protestantism, this can also be observed in Zwingli and Calvin’s wrongheaded campaigns against church artwork and at times music.  Pressing the claims of transcendence all the more strongly does not cure human self-justification, it simply hardens it.  This is,, of course not to say that showing a concern for divine transcendence, or creator/creature distinction are mistaken.  Indeed, univocity and the immanentization of the divine create their own problems with self-justification and idolatry.  The key is that any biblically faithful and intellectually credible view of God must overcome antinomian and legalistic conceptions of God by making the law subordinate and penultimate to the gospel.

In order to understand the biblical teaching concerning God from the perspective of the gospel, we turn to Luther as our guide.  As we observed in an earlier section, both the pre-modern Greek and Latin theological traditions relied on a dialectic of “negation” (apophatic theology or the via negativa) and affirmation (kataphatic theology or the via positiva).  Lowell Green has noted that Luther’s doctrine of God also relies on a form of affirmation and negation, albeit a radically different one.  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. 

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The Pattern of Flight from Condemnation to Grace

God’s wrath is revealed to all outside the garden (that is, outside the sphere of divine grace and promise) through his creaturely masks. Indeed, God’s “invisible attributes [i.e., including his holiness and wrath], namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made” (Rom. 1:20, Emphasis added).[1] 

Nevertheless, God established a new word of promise in the form of the protoevangelium in Genesis 3:15.  The grace of the protoevangelium took on an even more definite form in the corporate life and history of Israel through the promise God attached to Abraham’s “seed” (Gen. 22:18).  This effective Word of promise pushed the history of Israel inexorably along to its fulfillment in the person of the Messiah, even in the face of human opposition.  Nevertheless, the movement of the divine Word toward its final fulfillment could often appear as a failure even as it succeeded.  When Moses pronounced the divine Word “Let my people go,” it appeared ineffective to both the Egyptians and Israelites.  Indeed, Pharaoh was apparently unmoved by the pronouncement of the divine deed-word and, in turn, increased Israel’s labor (Exod. 5).  Nevertheless, it was through Pharaoh’s very obstinacy that God worked his redemption and was finally able to bring a plague so horrific that Egypt expelled Israel.[2]  God likewise told Isaiah to speak a word of repentance to Israel that they would ignore, thereby ensuring their suffering in Babylon (Isa. 6:9-13).  But Israel’s destruction was be the occasion for their true repentance, something that would prepare them for the grace of restoration and the coming of the Messiah (Isa. 40).  Finally, God’s Word of redemption found ultimate fulfillment in the opposition and murder of Jesus by his opponents.  By killing God himself, Jesus’ enemies brought about the fulfillment of the very Word of God that they sought to thwart.  As Luther’s theology of the cross shows, God works under the form of his opposite.  

God fulfills his Word under the outward appearance of it having failed.

Likewise, throughout the history of Israel, God’s pattern of attaching his dual words of condemnation and grace to created masks continued.  By doing so, the Lord bid his covenant people to flee from the word of condemnation to that of grace.  Although Jacob is attacked by God in the night, he demands the name of the shadowy attacker and thereby hearkened back to the promise of blessing that God had made to him at Bethel (Gen. 32:22-32).[3]  Moses is also attacked by God on his return to Egypt but flees to the promise of grace found in circumcision of his son (Exod. 4:24-26).[4]  God threatened with death those who came near Mt. Sinai, the mountain where he gave his law (Exod. 19:10-13), but promised forgiveness and a share in his personal holiness to those who approached him through the sacramental channels of the Tabernacle/Temple at Mt. Zion.[5] 

This pattern of fleeing from condemnation to grace also continued in the life of Christ.  In the crucifixion, God designated Jesus and the sacraments of the New Testament, which flowed from his side (Jn. 19:34) on the hillock of Golgotha, as the new place of grace. Likewise, he designated the Temple mount and works connected with it as a place of condemnation (Gal. 4:25-6).  In his resurrection, Jesus insisted that the women flee his tomb (the place of death and condemnation) and instructed them to tell his disciples to meet him in Galilee.  In Galilee, Jesus told the disciples look for him now not in the tomb, but in the word and sacrament ministry of the Church (Mt. 28:8-10, v. 16-20).

[1] Steven Paulson, Lutheran Theology (New York: T & T Clark International, 2011), 70-4.

[2] Steven Paulson, Luther’s Outlaw God: Hiddenness, Evil, and Predestination, vol. 1 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2018), 229-43

[3] LW 6:122-55.

[4] Paulson, Luther’s Outlaw God: Hiddenness, Evil, and Predestination, vol. 1, 17-8.

[5] See good description in: John Kleinig, Leviticus (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2003).

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).

Image: Gustave Doré, Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, 1855.

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The Shape of Christian Life Part 2: Fleeing from God not Preached to God Preached

Throwback Post Part 2:

Within this situation, what is the Christian to do?  Luther tells us that the revealed God of the gospel (the God of grace) is God’s real self, despite what might be considered evidence to the contrary!  When we approach God hidden, or God under his masks of law, we can only find condemnation—something actually alien to God in his proper nature (opus alienum).  Consequently, we should flee from the God of hiddenness and wrath, to the God of grace. In other words, we must flee from God not preached to God preached.  Nevertheless, if both are God, how do we know that God preached is the more authentic of the two?  In the Galatians commentary, Luther talks about God in his hiddenness and wrath condemning and destroying Jesus who bears the sins of the world.  The law (in a sense) tries to destroy the promise by condemning Jesus who has entered into solidarity with those under the God of hiddenness and wrath.  In spite of this, Jesus atones for sin, undoes the power of the law, and reveal God’s true heart.  Jesus (the revealed God of grace) has gone up against the hidden God of wrath and law and come out the other side victorious. Therefore, those who are united with him by faith can also share in his victory and therefore have nothing to fear from God not preached. 

Faith clings to the revealed God against the hidden God, and therefore the shape of the Christian life is one of trust and flight from one to the other.  This can be observed throughout the history of salvation.  God establishes his relationship with Adam and Eve through two trees—the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  God attaches his promise to all the trees of the garden as means of mediating the good to Adam and Eve (“you may eat…”).  He gives them the tree of life as a sacrament of immortality.  Nonetheless, he also establish the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as an alternative to the means of his grace.  This was not a test (as John of Damascus and John Wesley have argued), or a means of earning their glorification (as Reformed Federal theology argues), but rather a manifestation of the irrationality of God not preached.  In other words, the tree is in a sense inexplicable.  Why put the possibility of becoming evil in the midst of the good creation?  It is a mystery, a manifestation of the hidden God.  Nevertheless, it was also formative of the obedience of Adam and Eve, which ultimately constituted a sacrifice of praise to God, as Luther argues.  Because Adam and Eve found God not preached in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the structure of their believing existence was the flight from God not preached (that is, the God of destructive condemnation) to God preached (that is, his manifestation in the other trees of the garden and the tree of life).  Adam and Eve only entered into sin and condemnation when they sought God not preached and ignored God as manifested to them in his Word.

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The Hiddenness of God and Theodicy

Under the veil of divine hiddenness and the false conjectures of fallen human reason, there is an aporia between the activities of the Father and the Spirit and with the universal and unconditional love revealed in the Son.  In light of this, human reason inevitably tries to rationalistically harmonize these disparate activities and peer into the hiddenness of God.  Nevertheless, all rationalistic theodicies ultimately fail because they try to justify God’s actions on the basis of the law.  Not only does this demand God justify himself when it is humans who need justification,[1] but because God’s will is not exhausted by the law, God can never be made completely explicable on the basis of the law.  The good news ultimately consists in the fact that although the law is God’s holy and eternal will, God possesses possibilities that transcend the law manifest in the atoning work of Christ.

Instead of creating a rationalistic/legalistic theodicy,[2] Christians must cling to the gospel-promise and operate on the basis of a theodicy of faith.[3]  On the basis of faith in the promise, the believer trusts that the divine love manifest in Christ has revealed the hidden coherence of the triune being in a preliminary sense in the means of grace.  Only at the eschaton, the will the full coherence of the works of the one God be revealed to believers.  Faith possesses the full confidence of the sacramental Word of God, in which the Son has revealed the Father’s true heart to faith through the power of the Spirit.  By holding onto the sacramental Word, faith comes into contact with the objectified gracious electing will of God and can be certain of salvation. 

[1] LW 12:311.

[2] Gottfried von Leibniz, Theodicy, trans. E.M. Huggard (New York: Cosmo Classics, 2010).

[3] Paul Hinlicky, Beloved Community: A Critical Dogmatics after Christendom (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2015), 72.  Though the general thrust of Hinlicky’s idea is correct, I do not endorse all details.

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).