Exploring Divine Hiddenness Through Suffering and Absence

Are you there God? It’s me…

Why is God hidden? Why is God silent? And why does that matter in light of faith, hope, and love?

In this episode, philosopher Deborah Casewell joins Evan Rosa for a discussion of divine hiddenness. Together, they reflect on:

Simone Weil’s distinction between abdication and abandonment

Martin Luther’s theology of the cross

The differences between the epistemic, moral, and existential problems with the hiddenness of God

The terror, horror, and fear that emerges from the human experience of divine hiddenness

The realities of seeing through a glass darkly and pursuing faith, hope, and love

And finally, what it means to live bravely in the tension or contracdition between the hiddenness of God and the faith in God’s presence.

About Deborah Casewell

Deborah Casewell is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Chester. She works in the areas of philosophy and culture, philosophy of religion, and theology & religion, in particular on existentialism and religion, questions of ethics and self-formation in relation to asceticism and the German cultural ideal of Bildung. She has given a number of public talks and published on these topics in a range of settings.

Her first book. Eberhard Jüngel and Existence, Being Before the Cross, was published in 2021: it explores the theologian Eberhard Jüngel’s philosophical inheritance and how his thought provides a useful paradigm for the relation between philosophy and theology. Her second book, Monotheism and Existentialism, was published in 2022 by Cambridge University Press as a Cambridge Element.

She is Co-Director of the AHRC-funded Simone Weil Research Network UK, and previously held a Humboldt Research Fellowship at the University of Bonn. Prior to her appointment in Bonn, she was Lecturer in Philosophy at Liverpool Hope University and a Teaching Fellow at King’s College, London. She received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh, my MSt from the University of Oxford, and spent time researching and studying at the University of Tübingen and the Institut Catholique de Paris.

Show Notes

• Mother Teresa on God’s hiddenness
• Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, edited by the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk
• What does it mean for God to be hidden?
• Perceived absence
• Simone Weil on God’s abdication of the world for the sake of the world
• The presence of God. This should be understood in two ways. As Creator, God is present in everything which exists as soon as it exists. The presence for which God needs the co-operation of the creature is the presence of God, not as Creator but as Spirit. The first presence is the presence of creation. The second is the presence of decreation. (He who created us without our help will not save us without our consent. Saint Augustine.) God could create only by hiding himself. Otherwise there would be nothing but himself. — Simone Weil, in Gravity and Grace, “Decreation”
• Abdication vs. Abandonment
• A longing for God, who is hidden, unknown, unperceived, and mysterious
• Martin Luther’s theology of the cross
• “Hidden in the suffering and ignominy of the cross.”
• “God is powerful but chooses not to be in relation to us.”
• Human experiences of divine hiddenness
• Three ways to talk about hiddenness of God
•  
  1. epistemic hiddenness:  ”if we were to grasp God with our minds, then we'd be denying the power of God.”
• Making ourselves an idol
• The Cloud of Unknowing and “apophatic” or “negative” theology (only saying what God is not)
•  
  1. Moral hiddenness of God: “this is what people find very troubling. … a moral terror to it.”
•  
  1. Existential hiddenness of God: “where the hiddenness of God makes you feel terrified”
• Revelation and the story of human encounter or engagement with God
• “Luther is the authority on the hiddenness of God in the existential and moral sense.”
• The power of God revealed in terror.
• “God never becomes comfortable or accommodated into our measure.”
• ”We never make God into an object of our reason and comfort.”
• Terror, horror, and fear: reverence of God
• Marilyn McCord Adams, *Christ & Horrors—*meaning-destroying events
• “That which is hidden terrifies us.”
• Martin Luther: “God is terrifying, because God does save some of us, and God does damn some of us.”
• The “alien work of God”
• “Is Luther right in saying that God has to remain hidden, and the way in which God has to remain hidden  has to be terrifying? So there has to be this kind  of background of the terrifying God in all of our relations with the God of love that is the God of grace that, that saves us.”
• Preserving the mystery of God
• We’re unable to commodify or trivialize God.
• Francis Schaeffer’s He Is There and He Is Not Silent
• “Luther construes it as a good thing.”
• Suffering, anxiety, despair, meaninglessness
• Humanity’s encounter with nothingness—the void
• “Interest in the demonic, or terror, as a preliminary step into a  full religious or a proper religious experience of God.”
• Longing for God in the Bible
• Noah, Moses, David
• “The other side of divine hiddenness is human loneliness.”
• Loneliness and despair as “what your life is going to be like without God.” (Barton Newell)
• Tension in the experience of faith
• 1 Corinthians 13:12:  ”Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know even as I also am known.”
• Faith, hope, and love abides in the face of epistemic, moral, and existential hiddenness of God.
• The meaning of struggling with the hiddenness of God for the human pursuit of faith, hope, and love
• “Let tensions be.”
• ”But you've always got to keep the reality of faith, hope, and love, keep hold of the fact that that is a reality, and that can and will be a reality. It's, it's, not to try and justify it, not to try and harmonize it, but just to hold it, I suppose. And hold it even in its contradiction.”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Deborah Casewell
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Emily Brookfield, Alexa Rollow, & Zoë Halaban
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give