A Thinking Reed

Truly You Are a God Who Hides Himself

Written by

Lee M.

in

One story making the rounds today is that philosopher Antony Flew has gone from being a renowned defender of atheism to embracing some kind of theism or deism.

While interesting, this shouldn’t necessarily be taken as a victory for Christianity. Even if we could “prove” the existence of some kind of limited deistic god, that’s a long way from the God of the Bible. I like to recall these words from Pascal:

I admire the boldness with which these persons undertake to speak of God. In addressing their argument to infidels, their first chapter is to prove Divinity from the works of nature. I should not be astonished at their enterprise, if they were addressing their argument to the faithful; for it is certain that those who have the living faith in their hearts see at once that all existence is none other than the work of the God whom they adore. But for those in whom this light is extinguished, and in whom we purpose to rekindle it, persons destitute of faith and grace, who, seeking with all their light whatever they see in nature that can bring them to this knowledge, find only obscurity and darkness; to tell them that they have only to look at the smallest things which surround them, and they will see God openly, to give them, as a complete proof of this great and important matter, the course of the moon and planets, and to claim to have concluded the proof with such an argument, is to give them ground for believing that the proofs of our religion are very weak. And I see by reason and experience that nothing is more calculated to arouse their contempt.

It is not after this manner that Scripture speaks, which has a better knowledge of the things that are of God. It says, on the contrary, that God is a hidden God, and that, since the corruption of nature, He has left men in a darkness from which they can escape only through Jesus Christ, without whom all communion with God is cut off. Nemo novit Patrem, nisi Filius, et cui voluerit Filius revelare.*

This is what Scripture points out to us, when it says in so many places that those who seek God find Him. It is not of that light, “like the noonday sun,” that this is said. We do not say that those who seek the noonday sun, or water in the sea, shall find them; and hence the evidence of God must not be of this nature. So it tells us elsewhere: Vere tu es Deus absconditus.**

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*Matt. 11:27 “Neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him.”

**Is. 45:15. “Verily, thou art a God that hidest thyself.”

Comments

One response to “Truly You Are a God Who Hides Himself”

  1. Marcus

    Of course you are right about AF. His was apparently a relatively small change of mind, and no change of heart at all.

    Too, even if we confine ourselves to the Christians, Jews, and Mohammedans, there is not one God, but several, of the philosophers.

    Still, none of them, that I know if, is anywhere near as objectionable as what might be devised by a theology divorced utterly from philosophy and based solely on the Bible.

    If you think fundamentalism, infused as it is with the high, Nicene theology the early councils built by seeing the Bible and Greek philosophy each through the other, makes for an unacceptable religion, what do you suppose an innocent might think of the God of the Israelites and the Christians as presented only in the Bible?

    What of His making the world out of some murky but clearly already existing stuff?

    And what about that fit of temper by a God who walked in the Garden and thus had a body and feet?

    And, later, will He not show His back – or some other body part – to Moses? Thomas Hobbes was probably neither the first nor the last to think the Biblical God was corporeal.

    A God who had to find it out, and so did not know beforehand, that Adam and Even would eat of the tree?

    And there are a great many others among the events of Bible that He clearly is surprised, and often angered, to learn of.

    A God who in various fits of temper and at different times destroyed whole cities, and even the whole of the human race except for a single family? Anger Management, anyone?

    Who, like some sick and horrible character out of Stephen King, let Satan – whom he clearly could not control but was easily influenced by – torture mercilessly a harmless fellow, Job, and kill several others, merely to try Job’s love for God? Carl Jung had a good deal to say about this. It’s worth a look.

    And look again at the many vignettes in the New Testament that present Jesus as far from either the lamb of gentleless or the model of noble moral teaching so many like to say he was.

    If we deny that “the” God of the philosophers is the same as the God of the Bible and reject the crucial contributions of the philosophers to our understanding of God we leave a very unfortunate opening for unrestrained fundamentalist, and much worse than fundamentalist, theology.

    It is an old, old saw among the philosophers that “the poets tell many lies,” and the lies they tell about God are among the most disgraceful – and harmful – of all.

    Without the picture – or pictures – of God drawn by the philosophers and accepted by the theologians and at least the learned clergy and laity since the very earliest days of Christianity, how much license would we have to deny that whatever the Bible says is to be taken as it stands, with the hair on, warts and all, as the definitive picture of God for the Biblical religions?

    On what basis could we stand back from the text and declare that good parts of it cannot be taken at all literally, nor even as an accurate reflection of the moral nature of God?

    For that matter, could Paul have said, and what could he have meant by, his remarks about the law written in our hearts and the knowledge of God – the same God – taught by nature to the gentiles?

    The truth is that, while it is obvious that Christianity has watered and fertilized “natural theology,” the picture of God presented by the philosophers of, for lack of a more generic expression, Western theism, has been the normative conception of God through which theology and learned believers have read and interpreted the Bible.

    Be careful not to trust too much to these runaway mathematicians, eh?

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