The Hiddenness of God

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.