ris3n's Apologetics Codex

Concept

Lesson 4.2, Divine Hiddenness

Intro

There are ads on our codex that pay for hosting and keep the codex free. If you can, please consider whitelisting ris3n.com or allowing scripts to support the work.

Sponsored

The complaint sounds reasonable. If God exists and loves us, why is He so hard to find? A loving parent does not hide from a child who is reaching out. Yet plenty of people say they have searched honestly and come up empty.

This is the divine-hiddenness argument, made sharp by philosopher J. L. Schellenberg in 1993. The fact of willing non-belief (people who say they would believe if they could and yet do not) is treated as evidence against a loving God.

The Christian response is not to pretend hiddenness is fake. Scripture itself uses the language. "Truly you are a God who hides Himself" (Isaiah 45:15). What we say is that the hiddenness is not random and not cruel. It is shaped by what God is actually trying to do in human lives.

Pascal put it like this: there is enough light for anyone who wants to see, and enough darkness for anyone who does not. A God who blazed in the sky like the sun would not invite love; He would force compliance. Genuine love requires room to say no. So God reveals Himself in ways that reward seekers and leave non-seekers room to walk away. He does not overwhelm.

Michael Murray pushed the same point harder. For a free moral choice to be a real choice, God has to stand back enough that the choice belongs to you. A constantly visible, audibly speaking God would override both moral struggle and personal growth. The hiddenness is the condition that makes the kind of relationship God is offering even possible.

Jesus' own teaching ties hiddenness to seeking. "Seek and you shall find" (Matthew 7:7). "The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field" (Matthew 13:44). The hiddenness has a shape, and that shape rewards a particular posture: humble, persistent, willing.

The lesson below works through the formal argument, Pascal's response, Murray's response, and the Romans 1 reading (which adds a second layer: hiddenness is partly what people do, not only what God does). Each step builds on the last.

Required reading

The Christian response is not to pretend hiddenness is fake. The Bible itself treats God's hiddenness as a real and named pattern. Truly you are a God who hides yourself (Isa 45:15). The work of this lesson is to show that the hiddenness the Bible describes is on purpose, built into the kind of relationship God is calling people into, not the cold cosmic randomness the objector needs.

Required reading

  1. Divine Hiddenness, the master concept hub. The argument's structure, the standard answers, and the Romans 1 reversal.
  2. Innate Knowledge of God, the sense of God / Romans 1 framework. Without this, the hiddenness argument cannot be answered at its root.
  3. Suppression of God Thesis, the second half of the Romans 1 reading: hiddenness as something the person does, not only something God does.
  4. Romans 1.18-21, the key text.

The argument, formally

Schellenberg's 1993 version (the one philosophy departments take seriously):

  1. If God exists, God is perfectly loving.
  2. If God is perfectly loving, God makes sure there are no willing non-believers, no people who are open to a relationship with God but cannot believe enough to be in one.
  3. There are willing non-believers.
  4. So God does not exist.

Each step has real weight. Step 1 is something most theists agree on. Step 2 follows from comparing God to a loving parent (a loving parent does not hide from a child who is reaching for them). Step 3 is empirically obvious. There are people who say they would believe if they could and do not.

The argument has to be answered at step 2 or step 3. Both moves are available, and both show up in the literature.

Standard responses

Response 1, Pascal's purposeful hiddenness

Pascal: there is enough light for those who want to see, and enough darkness for those who do not. God's hiddenness is not random. It is tuned to the kind of creature God is calling into relationship. A God who was as obvious as the sun would force belief, not invite love. Force is not the relationship God wants.

This pushes back on step 2. A loving God would not necessarily make belief obvious. A loving God would make sure the right kind of relationship was possible, which requires enough evidence to trust him, but not so overwhelming that it overrides the moral and personal sides of conversion. Hiddenness, on this view, is not the absence of love. It is the shape of love when the goal is a free response.

Response 2, Murray's room for response

Michael Murray developed the room for response answer: for a free moral choice to happen, God has to stand back enough that the choice is really yours. A God whose presence was overwhelming, visibly enthroned, audibly speaking, impossible to deny, would force both belief and behavior. The very hiddenness the objector complains about is the condition that makes the kind of moral and spiritual growth possible. Remove the hiddenness, and you lose what makes the relationship worth having.

Response 3, the cost-of-following reading

Jesus' own teaching ties hiddenness to seeking. Seek and you shall find (Matt 7:7); the kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field (Matt 13:44); I praise you, Father, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned and revealed them to little children (Matt 11:25). The hiddenness of God to the casual or self-sufficient seeker is itself part of the design. It is the resistance against which real seeking is built. The God who reveals himself does so to those whose posture matches the kind of revelation he is giving. Hardness and softness of heart are not random biographical accidents in the New Testament. They are categories Jesus himself uses to explain why two people hear the same message and respond differently.

Response 4, the Romans 1 reversal (step 3)

The most aggressive move attacks step 3 directly: there are no truly willing non-believers in the sense the argument needs. Paul's claim in Romans 1.18-21 is that the knowledge of God is built in (Innate Knowledge of God) and that unbelief is not a passive state but an active suppression of truth in unrighteousness. This is not pop psychology. It is the official Christian account of why people do not believe. The objector who insists there are willing non-believers is taking the would-be believer's self-report at face value, when the Christian doctrine of sin gives reason to think the self-report cannot be trusted on this exact question.

This move is the strongest available, but you have to use it carefully. You cannot make it as a personal attack ("you are suppressing the truth"). You have to make it as a structural claim about the category. You are not in a position to judge the heart of the specific person in front of you. What you can do is question whether the category of step-3 willing non-believers is really as full as the argument assumes.

Hiddenness as evidence, the counter-move

The mature apologist makes one more move. The kind of hiddenness Christianity describes is itself evidence for the kind of God Christianity teaches. Think about it:

  • An impersonal cosmic-clockwork God would be expected to be either obvious to everyone or absent from everyone. The actual pattern is neither.
  • A personal-relational God who is calling specific people into specific covenant relationships would be expected to be differently revealed, clear to those who seek, hidden to those who do not, painfully present to some, absent to others.
  • The biblical pattern fits the second case with striking precision. God reveals himself to Abraham and not to Hammurabi; to Saul on the Damascus road and not to most of Saul's contemporaries; to Cornelius's household and not to Caesar's. The pattern is not random. It is the pattern of a person making particular relational moves.

The hiddenness objection assumes a God who is not the God of the Bible, a God whose default mode is broadcasting to everyone rather than addressing specific people. Once you spot that assumption, the objection has less force than it looks like. The fact that some people experience God and some do not is closer to what Christianity predicts than what atheism predicts.

Key takeaways

  • Schellenberg's argument is real. Steel-man it. The street-level "if God exists why doesn't he show himself?" is the weak version. The philosophical version is sharper.
  • Hiddenness is on purpose, not random. The Pascal / Murray / cost-of-following line works at step 2: a loving God might have reasons to stay hidden from people who would not respond well to overwhelming revelation.
  • Romans 1 flips the burden. Christianity does not say there are no non-believers. It says there are no willing non-believers in the sense the argument needs. The knowledge of God is built in; unbelief is active suppression.
  • The Christian God is differently revealed by design. This is not a bug. It is the shape of a personal-relational rather than impersonal-cosmic God.
  • Be gentle with the individual person. Make the structural argument, not the personal accusation.

Worked example, the sincere-seeker objection

Objection (steel-manned):

I had a friend who wanted to believe. She read C. S. Lewis, went to church for two years, prayed every night, asked God to show himself. Nothing happened. She finally decided the honest thing was to stop pretending and accept that the evidence was not there. If your God exists and loves her, why did he not meet her? Telling me she was suppressing the truth is insulting and impossible to disprove.

Response, in the apologist's voice:

Let me start by saying I take your friend's experience seriously, and I am not going to tell you she was secretly hostile. I do not know her heart. Christianity does not require me to know it.

What Christianity does say is two things. First, the knowledge of God is built into image-bearers (Romans 1.18-21), and the question is not whether the knowledge is there but how it is being engaged. Second, and this is the part the philosophical argument usually skips, the relationship God is calling people into is not a relationship of overwhelming evidence followed by automatic response. It is a relationship in which the seeker is shaped over time by the seeking. Many honest seekers I know say the moment of breakthrough came not at the peak of intellectual study but at a moment of moral or personal surrender, Lord, I will follow you even if I never get the answer I asked for. That is a different posture from Lord, prove yourself and I will follow.

Your friend's two years of effort are not nothing. Christianity has a category for the long seeking that does not get resolved quickly. It is not a failure. It is part of the design. Some people, like Augustine, looked for fifteen years before the moment of breakthrough. Some people, like the prodigal son, took longer than they should have to come home. Some people meet God in this life; some, the New Testament hints, meet him in ways that are not visible to us. I do not know which of these is your friend's story.

What I do not believe, and what the Christian gospel does not require me to believe, is that her experience is a refutation of God's love. The hiddenness she felt is real. The hiddenness she felt is also a feature, not a bug, of the God who is calling her. The right move here is not to declare her case closed. The right move is to keep praying for her and to keep being available to her if the questions come back.

Reflection questions

  1. What does it feel like when God is hidden in your own life? Have you been through long stretches of unanswered prayer, unbroken suffering, or unanswered questions? How did you respond?
  2. Can you state Schellenberg's argument from memory? Drill until you can. The strongest objection on a topic is the one whose structure you can repeat back without looking at notes.
  3. Where does the Romans 1 move land in conversation, and where does it backfire? When is it the right structural argument, and when does it become an unfair personal attack?
  4. What would you have said to the friend in the worked example? Try writing it. Compare yours to the response above.
  5. What is the difference between evidential hiddenness and felt hiddenness? Some people have evidence and no felt sense of God; some have a felt sense and no evidence; some have neither. Are these the same problem?

Practice exercise

Read Pascal's Pensées §149 (the famous fragment on hiddenness, if there were no obscurity man would not feel his corruption). Write a paragraph in your own words on what Pascal is claiming. Then write a paragraph showing how Pascal's framework engages Schellenberg's step 2. The exercise forces you to think about hiddenness historically, not just analytically.

Next lesson

→ Lesson 4.3, Old Testament Difficulties, the conquest, the laws, the curses, the binding of Isaac.

See also