Divine Hiddenness: Shouldn’t God Be More Obvious?

Nobody in my church was shaken by Richard Dawkins’s claim that God is a moral monster. However, Alex O’Connor explaining why he is not a believer by highlighting the problem of divine hiddenness hits much closer to home.

In the silence of seemingly unanswered prayer, could I be wrong? If God exists, why is it not more obvious?

In this article, I address key questions about divine hiddenness from a pastoral perspective and offer several ways Scripture equips us for faith in the presence of the hidden God.

What is the hiddenness argument?

Divine hiddenness refers to the lack of indisputable evidence for an all-powerful and all-loving God. If such a God exists, shouldn’t it be obvious?

Canadian philosopher John Schellenberg is a leading proponent of the hiddenness argument.¹ If God exists, Schellenberg says, he would be an “unsurpassably great person” who “could not be other than unsurpassably loving toward other persons.”² For Schellenberg, this means God must always be open to a relationship with anyone willing to be in such a relationship. Yet, Schellenberg claims, many people, although open to God, “lack the belief that there is such a reality and/or a true belief as to what it is.”³

Such nonresistant nonbelievers may even wish for Christianity to be true. This is not Dawkins’s disgust of theism but your open-minded friend seeking to know goodness, truth, and beauty. Divine hiddenness, therefore, seems incompatible with the existence of an all-loving and all-powerful God.

Schellenberg summarizes his argument in the form of a syllogism:

1. An all-loving God would not hide from people who are genuinely open to a relationship with him (“nonresistant nonbelievers”).
2. If an all-loving and all-powerful God exists, nonresistant nonbelief would not exist.
3. Nonresistant nonbelief exists.
4. Therefore, an all-loving and all-powerful God does not exist.⁴

The hiddenness argument targets apparent contradictions between our experience and biblical affirmations about God’s nature and God’s love. Would a loving God honestly hide from someone open to a relationship with him?

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The problem of God’s hiddenness is not new or limited to nonbelievers. Psalm 88 ends with the lonely lament, “darkness is my only friend” (Ps 88:18 CSB). Where skeptics may ask whether a hidden God even exists, Christians may ask whether a hidden God can really love them.

The experience behind the hiddenness argument is real, but is the argument sound and persuasive?

Is the hiddenness argument sound?

The hiddenness argument packs an existential bite. Certainly, we can sympathize with someone longing for indisputable proof of God only to be met by mystery.⁵

Yet the philosophical argument of the hiddenness problem itself is problematic. In particular, as Gavin Ortlund has explained, the hiddenness argument centers on unwarranted assumptions and unmet expectations about God’s love which respectively challenge key premises in Schellenberg’s syllogism.

Unwarranted assumptions

Schellenberg’s third premise regarding nonresistance assumes knowledge of someone’s inner life that we often lack of ourselves. How often do we hear people say things like “I never knew I thought that way” or “I didn’t think I’d ever do that.” Our inner lives, even to us, are complex and mysterious.

We may be open to God in specific ways but resistant in others. For example, you may be intellectually open to theism but opposed to the concept of God as triune. There might be a sense of openness, albeit not enough to call it nonresistant. Likewise, someone might be open to God’s emotional support during a loved one’s cancer treatment but resistant to God’s commands regarding sexuality. They are nonresistant to a specific kind of God, one with whom, to some degree, they can dictate the terms of the relationship.

The nonresistance Schellenberg’s argument requires is probably impossible to discern or prove.

Unmet expectations

The hiddenness argument rests on certain expectations about divine love imposed upon God by us.⁶ The “unsurpassably great” God becomes subject to the whims of every individual, which is deeply problematic for any argument resting on nonresistant nonbelief.⁷

Schellenberg treats God’s love as the best of human love, separating it from and elevating it over God’s other attributes such as transcendence, holiness, and incomprehensibility.

Perhaps the issue is not with God’s love but our expectations of what love requires. Human love is analogous to God’s love, not identical. God loves according to his nature, and some sense of divine hiddenness is fitting with the nature of a God who is both “with us” and “higher than us” (Matt 1:23; Isa 55:9).

How does the Bible address divine hiddenness?

Scripture is not silent about divine hiddenness, but it also doesn’t neatly resolve our discomfort when God seems absent. Instead, Scripture addresses divine hiddenness in at least four ways that strengthen our assurance of God’s love.

1. God’s nature

God desires to be known and makes himself known in creation (Ps 19), Scripture (2 Tim 3:16–17), and Christ (Heb 1:1–3). Sometimes sin causes divine hiddenness, as Isaiah 59:2 says, “Your sins have hidden his face from you.” Yet human sin is not the Bible’s comprehensive answer to divine hiddenness.

There is a tension between the clarity of God’s revelation and divine hiddenness. Consider Isaiah 45:

Yes, you are a God who hides,
God of Israel, Savior …
For this is what the Lord says …
“I have not spoken in secret,
somewhere in a land of darkness.
I did not say to the descendants of Jacob:
Seek me in a wasteland.
I am the Lord, who speaks righteously,
who declares what is right.” (Isa 45:15, 18, 19)

The God who hides has not spoken in secret.

We are confronted with a God who is mysterious and incomprehensible. Ecclesiastes 3:10–11 says:

I have seen the task that God has given the children of Adam to keep them occupied. He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also put eternity in their hearts, but no one can discover the work God has done from beginning to end. (Eccl 3:10–11)

God creates a tension in the human heart. We have a sense of eternity but are bound in time. No matter how sincere our search, or how wide its scope, in some sense God always confronts us with the mystery of his existence, his nature, and his work.

Has God contrived an elaborate game of hide and seek, going to places we cannot follow? I think not. Revelation corresponds with God’s nature and our need. The tension of divine hiddenness emphasizes God’s nature as the transcendent creator and our need for humility to know him (Ps 8; Isa 66:2; Matt 11:25–27).

2. The incarnation

The locus of divine revelation and love in Scripture is in the incarnation (John 1:14; 3:16). This is the heart of the biblical story of how the holy and transcendent God dwells with us. As John says, “No one has ever seen God. The one and only Son, who is himself God and is at the Father’s side—he has revealed him” (John 1:18; cf. Col 1:15).

God proves his love, as Paul says, “in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8). We know and experience God’s love personally through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ (1 John 4:8–9).

This does not remove all mystery. Many people watched Jesus do what only God could do, only to turn their backs or call him a demon (Mark 3:20–27; 8:11–13). In plain sight he was “hidden” from them. Knowing and experiencing God’s love cannot be manufactured or manipulated. It is a gift to be received in humility and sought by prayerful faith (Eph 1:15–19).

3. The cross and Holy Spirit

Apart from the cross, we could not find an emotionally satisfying reconciliation between God’s love and divine hiddenness. Divine hiddenness is answered for us in the cry of Jesus from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” (Mark 15:34). At the cross Jesus endured divine hiddenness for us.⁸ This is the objective ground of our assurance of God’s love.

In his letter to the Romans, Paul identifies two ways God communicates his love to us. First, in the context of intense suffering for Christ, he speaks about the assurance of God’s love because of Jesus’s death. “He did not even spare his own Son but gave him up for us all” (Rom 8:32), therefore,

I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom 8:38–39)

Just as children especially can feel the weight of their parents’ absence upon waking suddenly from a nightmare, only to be met by a dark room, so you probably feel the weight of God’s (seeming) absence most in the darkness of suffering. But the cross is God’s word to us that, hidden behind the darkness, he holds us in his love.

Second, God communicates his love by the internal witness of the Holy Spirit. Paul says, “The Spirit himself testifies together with our spirit that we are God’s children” (Rom 8:16). God’s love, proven in the death of Jesus, is implanted in us as the Holy Spirit testifies to us that we are children of God (Rom 5:5).

While our assurance of this love can be strengthened by apologetic arguments, our assurance comes from resting in the finished work of Christ confirmed to us by the Holy Spirit.

4. The Christian life

Wrestling with divine hiddenness is not uncommon in the Christian life. The nineteenth-century pastor Charles Simeon said, “Occasional suspensions, also, of the tokens of God’s love are the means whereby God perfects the work of faith in his people’s hearts.”⁹

Job experienced this hard token of God’s love. God permits Satan to test Job’s faith through a horrible series of events. Job loses his livestock and his crops. His children are killed and he gets incredibly sick. Through it all, he endures the miserable comfort of his friends, who blame his circumstances on his sin.¹⁰ His wife eventually tells him to curse God and die (Job 2:9). In his misery, Job does not hear from God. Everything behind the scenes, including God’s work, is hidden from him.

God permits Job to endure divine hiddenness, but not forever. In the end, God confronts Job with the comfort of divine glory (Job 38–41). The God who created and sustains all things is sufficient for Job. As Joseph Minich explains, this models a way for believers to endure divine absence.

Therein, God is portrayed as one who will allow his people to hit the bottom, but not without shepherding them to the conclusion that God (by himself) is enough, sans all, to satisfy human longing. Job was reoriented, as it were, to the gravity of God.¹¹

Seasons of divine hiddenness can be tokens of love, replanting our feet in “Christ’s love that surpasses knowledge” (Eph 3:19).

Conclusion

Divine hiddenness does not undermine God’s love. It is equally probable that divine hiddenness reveals a God who is unlike us and whose love can confound and surprise us.

The “hidden God” makes himself known and proves his love in Jesus Christ (John 1:18; Rom 5:8–10). The mystery of divine hiddenness is one the gospel equips us to endure by faith.

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1. Schellenberg’s major work on the subject is Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (Cornell, 2006). For this article, I will engage with other journal articles and more popular-level books where his argument is more succinct. This allows for an easier initial engagement in an introductory article on divine hiddenness.
2. J. L. Schellenberg, “Divine Hiddenness and Human Philosophy,” chap. 1 in Hidden Divinity and Religious Belief: New Perspectives, ed. Adam Green and Eleonore Stump (Cambridge, 2016), 17.
3. Schellenberg, “Divine Hiddenness,” 16.
4. “If God existed, there wouldn’t be any nonresistant nonbelief. But there is nonresistant nonbelief. So God does not exist.” J. L. Schellenberg, Progressive Atheism: How Moral Evolution Changes the God Debate (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 107. For his seven-step deduction to make this point, see Schellenberg, “Divine Hiddenness,” 24–25.
5. The experience of “resistant belief” provides an interesting counter-example, though. If an all-loving God exists, we might expect reluctant converts like C. S. Lewis. While several factors can convince someone to become a Christian, it seems dismissive to reject out of hand God’s existence as an explanation for such conversions.
6. “The problem of divine hiddenness, like the problem of evil, is fundamentally a problem of violated expectations.” Michael C. Rea, The Hiddenness of God (Oxford, 2021), 25. Rea also thoroughly engages with Schellenberg’s concept of ideal love.
7. A similar point could be made about the sufficiency of God’s revelation. As Joseph Minich says, “God’s revelation is about God’s rather than humanity’s goals. And it is not humanity, therefore who determines what a fitting amount of clarity might be.” Joseph Minich, Bulwarks of Unbelief: Atheism and Divine Absence in a Secular Age (Lexham Academic, 2023), 264.
8. “The historical Christ-event is, nevertheless, the moment of divine presence to answer all divine absence—warranting childlike and whole trust in God.” Minich, Bulwarks of Unbelief, 269.
9. Charles Simeon, Horae Homileticae: Psalms, I–LXXII, vol. 5 (London: Samuel Holdsworth, 1836), 127.
10. By contrast, since Satan’s attacks attempted to prove that “righteous” Job would curse God if all his possessions were taken away, Job suffers because of his righteousness, not because of his sin (see Job 1–2).
11. Minich, Bulwarks of Unbelief, 268.