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The Hiddenness of God

 

 

God is King.

People are his subjects.

God's authority is the sword.

When the people are good, that is loyal and obedient, the sword protects them. It brings life.

When the people are bad, that is disloyal and disobedient, the sword punishes them. It brings death.

 

This rather simplistic lining out of the theology of God the King lies at the basis of many people's convictions. The goal of religion is the reward of eternal life and the avoidance of divine punishment.

 

This picture quickly generates the problem of theodicy. In this life, the righteous often die at the hand of the wicked. Does this mean that God the king is capricious?

 

This picture is also one that seems antithetical to the vision of shalom for the peace or prosperity offered by the king comes at the price of coercion and represents God's power over us.

Sallie McFague in her work Metaphoric Theology calls for the heightened consciousness that all religious language is a metaphor and that all is threatened by death. Our habits of discourse and use can lead to religious literalization and death of symbolic sensibility. This is nowhere more evident than in the language of God as male and Father and King   Once this literalism sets hold the language becomes a stumbling block to communion or worship. McFague also argues that he model becomes an idol. The distance between the image and the reality collapses. Father becomes God's name rather than a euphemism for God's name.   McFague points out how most of the dominant metaphors that we use are part of elaborate systems that are generated by what McFague calls "root metaphors."

The Bible makes dramatic claims about God's sovereignty. The prophet Isaiah expresses this in a number of ways:

 

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. Isaiah 55:8-9

 

 

I am the Lord, and there is no other. I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the Lord do all these things. Isaiah 45:6-7

 

We can point to Genesis as an attestation of this sovereignty. We can recall the dramatic theophanies of the Exodus or the resurrection of Christ as proof of God's claim.

 

But these events are few and far between. The Bible doesn't lie about life. It is routine. We are born and we die and in between we experience war, sickness, joy ....

 

Martin Luther and Martin Buber write of the "Hidden Rule" of God. God's rule is hidden in daily life.

 

Walter Brueggemann, in his Old Testament Theology, identifies three categories of this hiddenness: order, ethics, and aesthetic. We will look at the first two.

 

God as hidden guarantor of order

 

God is not the constant causal agent. He establishes creation as a network of cooperative, interrelated parts that works. The sustenance that we draw from this order is therefore God's gift. Something for which we give thanks. Examine Ps 104 in its entirety. (cf. Psalms 65:9; 78:20; 145:15-16)

 

Psalm 104

 

1- 13 Weaves together images of majesty and creation

 

14-30 Draws the connection between the food that we grow and eat with God's act of creation so that we acknowledge that direct causal relationship.

 

31-34 Expresses gratitude for the gift of our prosperity.

 

35 Abruptly petitions God to let sinners be consumed.

 

The prosperity or wellness or shalom is not a reward for our goodness. It is part of the hiddenness of God. The rain falls upon the righteous and sinner alike.

 

Matthew 5:43-48

You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy." But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not event the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

 

This view of nature seems obvious to us because it stands in agreement with our biological and physical sciences. What we must not forget is something that Brother Astronomer, Guy Consolmagno, pointed out to us last fall. We arrive at this science through the biblical tradition not in spite of it. The ancient world view is often described as pantheistic. The gods are causal forces in nature. A safe sea voyage did not depend upon the weather but upon the capricious god who could hold back or unleash his wind or the God of the sea who could still the waters or generate waves.

 

Einstein describes his reaction to the scope of the universe as:

... rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law which reveals an intelligence of such superiority, that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.

Einstein saw in the objective world:

.. a high degree of order that we were, a priori, in no way authorized to expect. That is the 'miracle' that is strengthened more and more with the development of our knowledge.

Cited in Lewis S. Feuer, Einstein and the Generation of Science (Transaction Publications, 1982)

 

God as the hidden guarantor of norms

 

God establishes what is good at creation. What is good is God's will, not the chaotic and coercive powers of human will. Might does not make right. Right makes right.

 

Klaus Koch points to the hiddenness of God as guarantor of ethics in Proverbs ("Is There a Doctrine of Retribution in the Old Testament?" Theodicy in the Old Testament. James L. Crenshaw ed. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983. Pp. 57-87.) The Book of Proverbs teaches that deeds have consequences. Punishment comes in the form of the logical consequences of our actions not by God's hand striking someone down. If one lies, one loses the trust of others. If one is lazy, they do not provide for themselves.

 

 

Proverbs 5:20-23 (Words to Bill Clinton?)

 

6:6-7 (Words to the student who does not study?)

 

14:29-32 -- A few examples of common sense

 

 

Whoever is slow to anger has great understanding,

but one who has a hasty temper exalts folly.

A tranquil mind give life to the flesh, but passion makes the bones rot.

Those who oppress the poor insult their Maker,

but those who are kind to the needy honor him.

The wicked are overthrown by their evil doing,

but the righteous find a refuge in their integrity.

 

Brueggemann's last category, the aesthetic, looks at how the Bible encourages us to take delight in God's sovereignty.

 

What is the consequence of having a hidden God.

What sort of God do we ask God to be in our prayers?

 

Where are you? How long do we have to wait?

Are you there? Make yourself known!

 

Even Jesus prays, "My Lord, why have you forsaken me?"

 

The Hiddenness of God means that faith in God is a free response and not a reflexive response or a coerced response. Faith and love are not coerced. They are not based upon appearances.

 

Peace cannot be coerced; it cannot be imposed.

 

We must be persuaded. God's weapon is speech.

 

The Bible asserts that there is an inherent relation between the way that God is known and the way that God creates:

 

Jer 51:15

Ps 136:5

Prov 3:19-20; Prov 8:22-31

John 1:1-18

Rom 11:33-35

1 Cor 1:18-25

 

Walter Brueggemann points to the importance of maintaining a balanced understanding of God's hiddenness, "The propensity of church interpretation is to accent the ethical in a way that drives out the aesthetic and produces a coercive harshness." (p. 341) Words can be turned into weapons.

The Crucified God

 

The New Testament tells the story of God crucified. The ultimate contrast between how the world works and how God works can perhaps be seen in the claim that God is willing to submit to the violence and coercive forces of this world in order to triumph over them.

 

The significance of this theology for biblical themes of peace comes into clearer focus, perhaps, when set in the context of the Ancient Near East. When one stops to consider the fact that the Israelite people are making these attestations about God from a position of powerlessness and possible the oppressed, the assertion that God is the creator of the world, that creation is a gift for all to enjoy and from which to prosper, and that right is not determined by might, becomes a protest against the assertions of empire in which might does make right and one group by the assertion of its power can make sole claim to the fruits of creation.

 

Simone Weil, "The Things of the World"

 

God himself cannot prevent what has happened from having happened. What better proof that the creation is an abdication?

What greater abdication of God than is represented by time?

We are abandoned in time.

God is not in time.

Creation and original sin are only two aspects, which are different for us, of a single act of abdication by God. And the Incarnation, the Passion, are also aspects of this act.

God emptied himself of his divinity and filled us with a false divinity. Let us empty ourselves of it. This act is the purpose of the act by which we were created.

At this very moment God, by his creative will, is maintaining me in existence, in order that I may renounce it.

God waits patiently until at last I am willing to consent to love him.

God waits like a beggar who stands motionless and silent before someone who will perhaps give him a piece of bread. Time is that waiting.

Time is God's waiting as a beggar for our love.

The stars, the mountains, the sea, and all the things that speak to us of time, convey God's supplication to us.

By waiting humbly we are made similar to God.

God is only the good. That is why he is waiting there is silence. Anyone who comes forward and speaks is using a little force. the good which is nothing but good can only stand waiting.

Beggars who are modest are images of Him.

Humility is a certain relation of the soul to time. It is an acceptance of waiting. That is why, socially, it is the mark of inferiors that they are made to wait. "I nearly had to wait" is the tyrant's word. But in ceremony, whose poetry makes all men equal, everybody has to wait.

Art is waiting. Inspiration is waiting.

He shall bear fruit in patience.

Humility partakes in God's patience. The perfected soul waits for the good in silence, immobility and humility like God's own. Christ nailed on the cross is the perfect image of the Father.