Why Is God Hidden?

No sceptic has said that God is hidden more frankly than the Bible says it. 'How long, O LORD? Will You forget me forever? How long will You hide Your face from me?' (Psalm 13:1). 'Why, O LORD, do You stand far off? Why do You hide in times of trouble?' (Psalm 10:1). 'Wake up, O Lord! Why are You sleeping?' (Psalm 44:23). Job cries, 'If only I knew where to find Him' (Job 23:3), and searches east, west, north and south without seeing him. Isaiah resolves, 'I will wait for the LORD, who is hiding His face from the house of Jacob. I will put my trust in Him' (Isaiah 8:17). And the anchor verse is spoken in the middle of a chapter about God saving his people through Cyrus, a Persian king who did not know him (Isaiah 45:4-5). God is the Savior, and he works in ways no one watching would recognise.

The tradition took this seriously. Martin Luther, especially in The Bondage of the Will (1525), distinguished God hidden from God revealed. There is God as he is in his unsearchable majesty, whose purposes we cannot see; and there is God as he has made himself known, clothed in his word and above all in Christ crucified. Luther told troubled believers not to speculate about the hidden God but to flee to God revealed in the cross. In the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518 he had already argued that God is truly known not in displays of power but in the suffering and shame of the cross, which is itself a kind of hiddenness, God revealed under his apparent opposite.

Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician who left his notes for a defence of Christianity unfinished at his death in 1662, made hiddenness part of his argument rather than an objection to it. In W. F. Trotter's English translation of the Pensées, he wrote that God being thus hidden, 'every religion which does not affirm that God is hidden, is not true'. A God who could be seen at a glance would not be the God scripture describes, and a religion that claimed he could would be false on that point at least. Pascal also wrote that there is 'enough light for those who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition.' On his view God gives evidence enough to find him for those who want him, and not so much as to force himself on those who do not.

That is the inheritance a Christian brings to this objection. The Bible does not deny that God is hidden. It says so repeatedly, in prayers of people who loved him. It also says that God has spoken, 'On many past occasions and in many different ways', and 'in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son' (Hebrews 1:1-2), and that 'No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is Himself God and is at the Father's side, has made Him known' (John 1:18). The question the modern argument presses is whether that combination makes sense: whether a God of perfect love could be both revealed and, for some people, beyond finding.

The Canadian philosopher J. L. Schellenberg first set out the argument in Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (1993) and restated it, more simply, in The Hiddenness Argument (2015). It has become, alongside the problem of evil, one of the most discussed arguments against God in the philosophy of religion. Schellenberg is careful to say what it is not. It is not the complaint that God has failed to perform a spectacular miracle on demand. It is not an argument from suffering. And it is not made by a hostile naturalist: Schellenberg describes himself as a religious sceptic who thinks that some deeper religious reality might exist, and who argues only that the personal, perfectly loving God of theism does not.

In simplified form, the argument runs like this. First, if a perfectly loving God exists, he is always open to a personal relationship with every finite person capable of one; he need not force it, but he would never put it out of reach. Second, a conscious relationship with God requires believing that God exists, since you cannot knowingly relate to someone you do not believe is there. Third, so if a perfectly loving God exists, no one capable of such a relationship would ever be in a state of unbelief through no resistance of their own; God would make sure that the evidence was available to anyone not resisting it. Fourth, there are such people: nonresistant nonbelievers. Fifth, therefore no perfectly loving God exists.

Everything depends on the fourth premise and on the first, and Schellenberg gives each its support. For the fourth he describes kinds of people. There are former believers who loved God, prayed, searched, and lost their belief against their own will and with grief. There are lifelong seekers who would welcome God and find no evidence that persuades them. There are people raised in cultures with no concept of a personal God, who never had the opportunity to resist. And there were, he argues, many generations of early human beings who lived before any idea of a single loving God had appeared anywhere on earth. For the first premise he appeals to what love is. A loving parent who could be present to a child does not hide from her, and a parent who let a child grow up unaware that her mother existed, when the mother could easily have made herself known, would not be acting in love.

The argument is strong because it does not claim to know what God would do in detail. It claims only that perfect love would at least make relationship possible for those willing to have it. It is also strong because it turns a Christian conviction into an objection: the Christian says that God is love and desires to be known, and the argument asks why, if so, there are people who want to know him and cannot. That is a question believers themselves have asked. Do not answer it with a shrug.

The first family of replies challenges the fourth premise: it doubts that there are any truly nonresistant nonbelievers. Its texts are Romans 1, where 'what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them' (Romans 1:19), so that people suppress the truth and are without excuse; and Psalm 19:1, 'The heavens declare the glory of God'. Calvin, in the first book of the Institutes, spoke of a sense of the divine, sensus divinitatis, planted in every human being, and of human sin as the force that dulls and distorts it. Some Reformed philosophers, drawing on Calvin and on Plantinga's account of belief in God as properly basic, argue that if belief in God is natural to human beings when their faculties work as designed, then nonbelief is always, at some level, a malfunction for which sin, our own or our culture's, is responsible.

Critics reply that this premise does a great deal of work and is hard to believe in particular cases. A pastor who has sat with a grieving former believer, who prayed for years and lost his faith in tears, may find it impossible to tell him that he is secretly resisting. Critics also argue that Romans 1 describes humanity as a whole, turning from God through history, not a verdict on every individual's inner state. Defenders answer that resistance need not be conscious or deliberate, that it can be inherited and cultural rather than personal, and that scripture's own account of the human heart, as 'deceitful above all things' (Jeremiah 17:9), warns against taking anyone's self-report, including our own, as the last word. The disagreement is real, and the apologist should be very slow to use this reply on a person rather than about an argument.

The second family of replies grants the premise and argues that hiddenness serves goods that love would want. Michael Murray, in a 1993 article titled 'Coercion and the Hiddenness of God', argued that if God's presence were as obvious as the sun, together with his promises and warnings, it would act like a loaded gun held to the head, and that free and morally significant response to God requires that he not overwhelm us. Richard Swinburne argued similarly that a measure of hiddenness gives creatures the opportunity to seek God and to choose the good for its own sake rather than under his visible gaze. Paul Moser, in The Elusive God (2008), argued that the evidence God gives is purposively available: not spectator evidence for detached observers, but a call that is received by those willing to be changed by it, so that Jeremiah's 'You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart' (Jeremiah 29:13) describes the way the evidence works. And Jesus praises his Father for hiding these things 'from the wise and learned' and revealing them 'to little children' (Matthew 11:25).

Schellenberg's reply to this family is pointed. These goods, he argues, could all be had within a relationship: a loving parent does not hide from her child to give the child room to choose, she stays present and lets the child choose within that presence. And the people his argument concerns are not refusing God; they would welcome him, and so are not the people for whom evidence must be held back to avoid coercion. Defenders answer that a relationship with God is not like a relationship with a parent in every respect, since God is not one more object in the world, and that the goods of seeking, trust and moral freedom may require a kind of distance no human relationship requires. The exchange is ongoing.

The third family of replies challenges the first premise. Michael Rea, in The Hiddenness of God (2018), argued that Schellenberg's picture of divine love is drawn too closely from human love. God is not a human parent, and his love need not take the form of being always available in the way a parent would be. Rea suggested that divine silence may express something about God's own personality, as a profoundly different and transcendent person, rather than a failure of love, and that God's presence is in fact offered in ways people often do not recognise, in scripture, in the sacraments and in the life of the church. Others argue that a relationship can be begun at any point in a person's existence, including after death, so that God's openness is not refuted by a person's unbelief during one stage of life. That connects this argument with the question of those who have never heard in lesson 4.

Sceptical theism, met in lesson 1, applies here as well. If God has reasons for permitting suffering that we cannot see, he may have reasons for permitting hiddenness that we cannot see. Critics give the same answer they gave there: the reply can be made to anything, and it seems to drain the word love of the content that made the Christian claim mean something. Defenders reply, again, that admitting we do not know God's particular reasons is not the same as admitting we do not know what his love is like, since we have seen it in Christ.

That brings out the specifically Christian answer, which is less a philosophical rebuttal than a change of focus. The Christian does not claim that God is plain to every observer in nature. He claims that God has made himself known decisively in a particular person, in a particular place, in history: 'Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father' (John 14:9). The evidence for that claim is historical as well as personal, and modules 2 and 3 set it out. Jesus himself refused to give the spectacular sign some demanded: 'A wicked and adulterous generation demands a sign, but none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah' (Matthew 12:39), the sign of death and resurrection. So the Christian answer to hiddenness points away from the sky and toward an empty tomb, and it invites the seeker to look there. It does not explain why that evidence persuades some honest people and not others.

Put the replies together and be honest about what they do. The first, that all nonbelief is resistant, would settle the matter if it were true, and many Christians doubt it can be shown true of every person. The second shows that hiddenness serves real goods, and Schellenberg's reply that those goods could be had another way has not been answered to everyone's satisfaction. The third questions what love requires, and it is strongest when it points to the cross, where God's love is shown in a form no human love quite matches. None of them makes the experience of God's silence disappear. The argument has made Christian philosophers think harder about the nature of God's love, and that is no small result.

The hiddenness argument is about nonbelievers, but the hardest form of the problem is lived by believers. Psalm 88 is a prayer that ends in darkness: 'You have removed my beloved and my friend; darkness is my closest companion' (Psalm 88:18). It begins by addressing 'the God of my salvation' (Psalm 88:1), so its author has not stopped believing; he has stopped hearing. On the cross Jesus prays the first line of Psalm 22, 'My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?' (Matthew 27:46). The Son of God himself prays from inside the experience this lesson is about. That does not explain it. It means that no believer who prays from that place prays alone.

The church has names for this. John of the Cross in the sixteenth century wrote of the dark night of the soul, a season in which a person who loves God loses all sense of his presence. The Puritans spoke of desertion. When the letters of Mother Teresa of Calcutta were published in 2007 as Come Be My Light, readers learned that for decades she had lived with a painful sense of God's absence while continuing her work. The Japanese Catholic novelist Shusaku Endo made God's silence the subject of his novel Silence (1966), set among missionaries and Japanese believers during the persecution of the seventeenth century, who are tortured while heaven seems to say nothing. Believers in persecuted churches today do not need to be told what the novel is about.

A minister must keep two things apart that this lesson has put side by side. One is the intellectual argument from hiddenness, which belongs to the lectern and deserves the kind of careful answer sections 3 and 4 give. The other is the experience of God's silence, which belongs to pastoral care and needs a different response: patience, the lament psalms, the company of the church, and often a long time. The Pastoral Ministry and Care track has a lesson on this, Caring for the Doubter, in its module Long Care, which sets out how Jesus treated doubters, the different kinds of doubt and how to walk with a doubter over months. Read it before you try to answer someone whose question is not an argument but a grief. 'And indeed, have mercy on those who doubt' (Jude 1:22).

What can be said plainly, whatever one makes of the argument? God's hiddenness is affirmed by scripture, not discovered by its critics. God has spoken, in the prophets and finally in his Son, and the evidence for that claim can be examined. Seeking is commanded and promised: 'You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart' (Jeremiah 29:13). Doubt is not the same as unbelief, as the father who cried 'I do believe; help my unbelief!' (Mark 9:24) shows. And 'blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed' (John 20:29). What cannot honestly be said is that every person who does not find God has secretly refused him, or that the silence will always lift in this life. Psalm 88 is in the Bible to stop us saying that.

Add the fifth sheet to The hardest objections. On the first line, write Schellenberg's argument in five numbered steps in your own words, and underline the two premises everything depends on. On the second, write how the question is actually asked where you live. In some places it is an intellectual objection; in many it is the question of a believer who has prayed and heard nothing, or a persecuted Christian asking how long. Write the form you meet most. On the third, write in a sentence each the three families of reply, and mark the one you find strongest. On the fourth, write what that reply does not show.

On the fifth line, write Isaiah 45:15 and Jeremiah 29:13 in full. On the sixth, write the sign that tells you a question about God's hiddenness has become a question of grief, and the title of the Pastoral Care lesson you will reread before you answer it.

Then do the work that prepares the capstone. Lay your five sheets side by side: evil, hell, the conquest, the only way, hiddenness. Ask two or three believers in your church, and if you can, one person who does not believe, which of these questions they hear most often or find hardest. Write their answers down without names. Then rank the five, together with any objection from earlier modules, by how often they are raised where you live. The top three are the ones you will write up in full in the last lesson of the track. On each of your top three sheets, write one sentence at the bottom: the thing you most want the person asking to know about God, whether or not they accept your argument.