The Hiddenness of God

by Michael C. Rea

The Hiddenness of God addresses the problem of divine hiddenness which concerns the ambiguity of evidence for God's existence, the elusiveness of God's comforting presence, the palpable and devastating experience of divine absence and abandonment, and more; phenomena which are hard to reconcile with the idea, central to the Jewish and Christian scriptures, that there exists a God who is deeply and lovingly concerned with the lives of humans. Michael C. Rea argues that divine hiddenness is not a problem to be explained away but rather a consequence of the nature of God himself. He shows that it rests on unwarranted assumptions and expectations about God's love for human beings. Rea explains how scripture and tradition bear testimony not only to God's love, but to God's transcendence. He shows that God's transcendence should be understood as implying that all of God's intrinsic attributes--divine love included--elude our grasp in significant ways.

Genres: Philosophy, Theology, Religion, Christian

224 pages, Hardcover

Published October 30, 2018

Reviews

[Lydia Hight]

I never would have thought Michael Cera is both a great actor AND a writer about divine hiddenness?!

In all seriousness, this is the most satisfying answer I’ve heard to the problem of divine hiddenness—even more so than the popular level books on this topic. A bit challenging at parts since I don’t have a background in philosophy, but worth rereading to get to the bottom of it. (And I will definitely be rereading!)

[John Martindale]

It was interesting revisiting this topic, and thinking again about divine hiddenness. I like how Rea built his argument, and how he often raised the questions and objects that arose in my mind towards the end of each part and then continued to address them in the following section. I don't think I am quite satisfied with how he concluded, it raises more questions in my mind, but as often is the case, to fully express and interact with his argument, I'd likely need to revisit the book.
In light of the subject, I'd like to share a poem I wrote a number of years ago. For so many years, I understood the power of perception and interpretation (as the author spoke of), and I kept trusting I didn't have the big picture, and I'd think of ways of translating God's silence not as indifference and lack of concern, but in ways to see how he still loved me deeply, and I'd build up theories to see how His hiddenness was somehow for my highest good, that God had good reasons to not allow me to experience Him, to leave me to try in my own strength and fail, and to not provide me with the will and ability to obey the impossibly high standard set in the New Testament. But years upon years I trying to spin and believe things in what seemed to be the teeth of the evidence, eventually resulted in a number of poems like the follow:

“My heavenly father, you played your part in my conception
But with your job done, it seems you were anxious to be leaving
I suppose you had more important places to be heading
Then lingering in the house and wasting time with parental doting

You send a check in the mail with a note of dos and don'ts 
Contained in a card full of promises that daddy's coming home 
You once made surprise visits, precious, though short lived
Yet these became less frequent and now they simply don't exist

Maybe your off doing good elsewhere in the world
Taking care of orphans and comforting widows 
Maybe you're less like a God and more like a man
That's why you aren't with me when your with other men and women

Maybe you believe your absence will make me fonder 
Your not being here, means my roots must grow deeper
You must think that I'm less a man and more like a god
That I have faith made of iron and hope that can't be undone

Once you occasionally responded to my letters
Sending back notes to reassure me that things would get better
But now its been years since you sent a reply
Maybe you've changed addresses or maybe you died

Maybe its my fault,  I just didn't quite live up
To your high standards that Jesus set up for us
Maybe Your ashamed to call me your son
I am such a delinquent, I deserve to be abandoned”

As I have come to in my own reflections, the author cautions us from holding too fast to metaphors that suggest God's love is that of the ideal perfect parent, lover, friend or monarch. For indeed God is radically other and this is important to keep in mind. It, of course, brings to my mind the problems with the bible (which the author didn't fully address), for the bible, especially the New Testament set me up for radical disappointment, it lead me to hope that God would be something God was either never will or able to be. Indeed I think one of the most harmful aspects of trying to shape our beliefs about God from scripture is we're conditioned to hope, expect and long for a loving God, whose love is somehow analogous to that of the perfect parent, love, friend and lord. The amount of pain I've experienced and so many other have too because of these bad analogies is great, our faith has been put on the rack and I know of many that didn't survive the ordeal. For reality, the cold and hard and unrelenting reality is like continuous erosion to these understandings of God, for so many of us. If God really is anything like a parent, lover, friend or monarch, for many of us the only adequate adjectives in the end are indifferent, sadistic, Machiavellian and cruel, rather than loving, caring and good.

But if we ditch this notion that God's love for mankind is analoguous to human love for other humans, but instead is like that of a “love” of one creature and an utter different and alien creature, like the “love” of a goldfish for a human being (whatever that would even mean), then we needn't have any expectations of intervention, guiding, provision, feelings of love, fruit of the spirit, protection, comfort, motivation, hope, healing, strength, etc... but I suppose if we want to sit in front of the tank, we can enjoy the fish's beauty and think how in some way that goldfish loves us in its utterly alien goldfish way. But no hard-will towards the goldfish when life goes wrong, we feel lonely, and when we don't hear the goldfish speak and when it won't even look our way while swimming in the tank.

Another poem of mine, how God is like a cat

“God you're not a fortune teller
Who for a small fee will reveal our future
God you're not a pimpled faced lover
With an adolescent obsession for the beloved
God You're not the house butler
Who ever lives to serve the other  
God You're not a Jack Russel Terrier 
Who is always loyal, obedient and a pleasure
God You're not pages covered in ink
Waiting on the shelf for when we need to know
God You're not the family shrink
Setting up appointments to solve our woes

God You are as independent as a cat
Wow, You know what? That it!
I don't mean this with disrespect
But this clears up a little bit

You will come to me on your time, if you come at all
But most definitely never, ever, ever when I call
I don't deserve Your time, you don't owe me a thing
I to stop thinking I'm entitled to you being near me

I've always known cats act as if they're god
But I never noticed that maybe this is because
well, Maybe God really acts like Lion of Judah”

[Joseph Bradley]

Ok, this was interesting. Rea proposes an alternative approach to responding to the hiddenness argument by appealing not to comfort or the goodness of God. Instead, he approaches it by merely refuting the idea that divine silence means God’s love is up for debate. He instead argues that given God’s desire for relationship, those who are open to and attempt to seek God will, at minimum, have genuine divine encounters.

He argues it well, and he makes his point clearly, but it is not for those looking for an apologetic that addresses emotional problems of evil or suffering. Overall, I appreciated the work!

[David deBruyn]

Rea's academic and professional approach will be irritating to many, though he is eminently a terrific logician and practiced theologian. His argument boils down to the idea that we should not expect a transcendent God to love as we do; and we should relate to God as we do to other minds.

[Carina]

This is the first book I have read on the problem of divine hiddenness, and I sat in on a graduate-level reading group with philosophy profs and PhD candidates. Needless to say, the discussions were definitely over my head... so it was a bit tough for me to grasp all of his arguments. I think Rea makes some very interesting points and takes, but I'm not altogether convinced by them. I appreciated this insight into a problem that I don't think about quite often, and also how divine hiddenness overlaps with the problem of evil (even though that doesn't seem like Rea's intent in his writing). Reading this has reminded me that to get smarter, you need to feel dumb first!

[Paul Burkhart]

I am genuinely shocked that that is what I just read. If you are going into this book thinking that it will offer any sort of comfort or frameworks to help you understand or explain the phenomenon of the hiddenness of God, let me encourage you to go elsewhere. This here is a book length argument simply for why God's apparent hiddenness does not necessitate God's non-existence.

One of the downsides of listening to an audiobook, especially when each chapter is a separate track, is that you don't really have an ongoing intuitive gauge for how much of the book is left, like you would for a physical book. So I did not know that what I thought was the necessary brush-clearing that these kind of books must do to get some preliminary concerns out of the way, was in fact the entirety of the book.

Fundamentally, I realize how that the book is a polemic--not seeking to advance its own framework or idea, but simply trying to respond to and counter other ideas he disagrees with. On that metric, Rea is largely successful. Not having dived too deeply into the literature around the hiddenness of God, I was not aware that the idea had largely been engaged in terms of God's existence rather than our experience. Now, to be clear, Rea does not offer any sort of argument for the existence of God. He believes it and presumes it. He is simply trying to show the inadequacy of apparently widely known arguments against the existence of God based on his hiddenness.

And while Rea is philosophically successful in showing that there can still be a deity--indeed, even the Christian one--even in light of the phenomenon of God's hiddenness, speak to the emotional or human existential aspects that arise from God's hiddenness. And this was the entire reason I came to this book in the first place.

When it comes to understanding or explaining or offering any sort of positive account of God's hiddenness, Rea's argument is almost literally the following ideas: God is transcendent and we are not, so we are probably defining how "un-hidden" God should be based on wrong human ideas. God probably has other things to think about and do than make himself present to us all the time, because we are not the center of his universe. And either way, there are people out there that experience God pretty regularly, so your mileage may vary and that doesn't speak to God's existence or not. Yet still, God is fine with us lamenting, so that's good.

In short: "God's hiddenness is more your problem, humans. And not god's. And I have no idea why God is so hidden."

It is so unsatisfactory emotionally, theologically, and existentially. He spends so much time going through the minutiae of points that I feel are oretty insignificant and then kind of shrugs and offers vague statements about more substantive things. At length, he gives an in in-depth treatment of why all humans have the capacity to try and form a relationship with God. Notice that the argument is not that all people can have a relationship with god. Just that they simply can try and have one. He literally says nothing about whether or if those attempts at a relationship would, should, or could be successful. He spends page after page going through this. And yet when it comes to something like his idea of transcendence, or how we should understand the problem of evil and God's invitation to lament, he just says other ideas that other thinkers have had in the past, says he doesn't agree with half of them, and then moves on, not trying to explain or argue for any of them or offer his own.

On one hand, I get what he's doing. The thing I appreciate the most about this book is how ecumenical and measured it is. He is saying that these atheist arguments are wrong and for those that want to believe in God there are a whole range of optional frameworks that can employ to do so. I imagine he feels it is against his intention with the book to argue for specific theological, denominational, or sectarian commitments. And yet he still freely offers what he feels are limitations to those other optional perspectives that he disagrees with.

One maddening example of this is when he outlines several different theological perspectives on how to understand the book of Job. Some of them are astonishingly beautiful when he explains them, only for him to say that he disagrees with them and then sensibly outline why those perspectives are inadequate. Why would he do this? Only offer perspectives you think are valuable options, or just saying what you have found helpful and think is true.

Part of what really frustrates me about this book is that I can almost since what could this book have been. I see that Rea has an incredible pastoral sensitivity, ecumenical sensibility, sharp theological acumen, and a wide breadth of knowledge and sources. I bet he really could give a fuller account of his understanding of why God remains hidden, or at least that we experience God in that way. I understand that's not the purpose of his book here, but I think that it could have been. And it would have been incredibly helpful. He has a deep concern and graciousness to those that have experienced trauma, especially religious trauma, and how that creates a roadblock to people experiencing God. I just wish that heart for other humans and the clear articulation of ideas he can offer would have resulted in a book that spoke more to The human experience rather than just argued with some other academic philosophers.

In the end, I think my biggest frustration is that the book has a midleading title. The hiddenness of God is not, in fact, it's aim, it's topic, nor what it is "about". It is about one conversation that one smaller group of people have been having about the hidden this of god, and one set of conclusions some people draw from it. That discussion is not really all that interesting or helpful to me. But what I thought the book was, really would have been. And I hope Rea considers offer it to us sometime.

[Declan Ellis]

Riddle me this: all divine encounters can be explained entirely by natural causes, yet if God providentially intended for humans to experience these natural causes as divine encounters, these divine encounters are authentic. Moreover, they are universally available.

"The Hiddenness of God" contains many an interesting argument, although it is not entirely satisfying.

Recommended.

[Pat Reeder]

These are Rea’s Gifford lectures. The philosophy—clarity, dialectical finesse—is predictably good, given that it’s Rea. Nevertheless, I was a bit floored when I read his interpretation of Old Testament theophanies, viz. that, e.g. the Decalogue came from literal thunder but that Moses has a special spiritual experience of it. I can see the philosophical advantage in the context of the Hiddenness argument but it’s frankly biblically indefensible without distorting the text beyond recognition. Put another way, the philosophy is driving his biblical interpretation, not the other way around. Of course there is give and take there between these as with any interpretation but this idea seems not to respect the data of scripture. Maybe Rea doesn’t care—I don’t know how “orthodox” he is—but I do.

[Nathan Suire]

2.5 Stars. This books over promises and under delivers. Other than talking about divine transcendence and analogical language for God, Rea says little more than that the hiddenness of God rests on unmet expectations that humans have for how a perfect being would act. Serious students of theology, especially those familiar and catholic theology and Aquinas will not find anything novel. I guess you could say Rea did not met my expectations for a Oxford press publication. Also I found that Rea departs from classical theism and metaphysics assumed by the early church creeds and councils in subtle but significant ways.

[AH]

I think a certain bit of originality is evident in his approach to the argument. Having said that, I find some interpretations to be a bit far fetch and of course I have serious reservations on key points of his take on the whole issue but this is still a really great and also informative book.

[Tynan Brooks]

Pretty compelling arguments against the idea of God's hiddenness here, especially in the chapters that broaden the understanding of what it would mean to communicate with God and feel His presence.

[Purple Vendetta]

The author seems to love the word "salient" very much.