If God Exists, Why Does He Hide?

A Reader Asks:

God, that is, the biblical God, exists. But then perhaps the protest of many, both yesterday and today, is understandable: why does He not manifest Himself more clearly? Why does He not give tangible proofs of His existence, accessible to all? Why does His mysterious strategy seem to be that of playing hide-and-seek with His creatures?

There are reasons to believe, granted; but – as the experience of history shows – there are also reasons to doubt, and even to deny. Would it not be simpler if His existence were evident?

Answer:

I think that the questions you raise – which, moreover, are those of so many others – refer neither to Saint Thomas nor to Saint Augustine, nor to the whole great Judeo-Christian tradition. It seems to me that they point rather toward another terrain, the purely rationalist one, proper to modern philosophy, whose history begins with Descartes, who, so to speak, detached thinking from existing and identified it with reason itself: Cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”).

How different is the position of Saint Thomas, for whom it is not thought that decides existence, but existence, esse, that decides thinking! I think in the way I think because I am what I am – that is, a creature – and because He is He Who Is, that is, the absolute uncreated Mystery. If He were not Mystery, there would be no need for Revelation or, better, speaking more rigorously, for God’s self-revelation.

If man, with his created intellect and with the limitations of his own subjectivity, could overcome the distance that separates creation from the Creator, the contingent and non-necessary being from necessary Being, “the one who is not” – according to the well-known expression addressed by Christ to Saint Catherine of Siena – from “He Who Is” (cf. Raymond of Capua, Legenda maior, I,10,92), only then would his questions be well founded.

The thoughts that trouble you, and that appear in your books, are expressed through a series of questions that are not yours alone; you want to set yourself up as spokesman for the people of our time, placing yourself at their side on the paths – sometimes difficult and tangled, sometimes apparently without exit – of the search for God. Your uneasiness is expressed in the question: why are there no surer proofs of the existence of God? Why does He seem to hide, as though He were playing with His creature? Should not everything be much simpler? Should not His existence be something evident? These are questions that belong to the repertory of contemporary agnosticism. Agnosticism is not atheism; it is not a programmatic atheism, as Marxist atheism was and, in another context, the atheism of the age of the Enlightenment.

Nevertheless, your questions contain formulations in which the Old and New Testaments resound. When you speak of the God who hides Himself, you use almost the same language as Moses, who desired to see God face to face, but could see only “his back” (cf. Exodus 33:23). Is knowledge through Creation not indicated here?

When, afterward, you speak of a “game,” you remind me of the words of the Book of Proverbs, which presents Wisdom as “rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the sons of men” (cf. Proverbs 8:31). Does this not mean that the Wisdom of God gives itself to creatures but, at the same time, does not wholly unveil His mystery?

God’s self-revelation is concretely brought about in His “becoming human.” Once again, the great temptation is to carry out, in Ludwig Feuerbach’s words, the classic reduction of what is divine to what is human. The words are Feuerbach’s, from whom Marxist atheism takes its orientation, but – ut minus sapiens (“I am speaking as a madman,” cf. 2 Corinthians 11:23) – the provocation comes from God Himself, since He truly became man in His Son and was born of the Virgin. Precisely in this Birth, and then through the Passion, the Cross and the Resurrection, God’s self-revelation in the history of man reaches its summit: the revelation of the invisible God in the visible humanity of Christ.

Even on the day before the Passion, the apostles asked Christ: “Show us the Father” (John 14:8). His answer remains a key answer: “How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? […] If not, believe because of the works themselves. I and the Father are one” (cf. John 14:9-11 and 10:30).

Christ’s words go very far. We almost have to deal with that direct experience to which contemporary man aspires. But this immediacy is not the knowledge of God “face to face” (1 Corinthians 13:12); it is not the knowledge of God as God.

Let us try to be impartial in our reasoning: could God have gone further in His condescension, in His drawing near to man, according to man’s cognitive possibilities? Truly, it seems that He went as far as was possible. He could not go further. In a certain sense, God went too far! Was Christ not “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23)? Precisely because He called God His Father, because He manifested Him so openly in Himself, He could not help giving the impression that it was too much… Man was no longer able to bear such closeness, and the protests began.

This great protest has concrete names: first it is called Synagogue, and later Islam. Neither of the two can accept a God so human as this. “This is not fitting for God,” they protest. “He must remain absolutely transcendent; He must remain pure Majesty. Certainly, Majesty full of mercy, but not to the point of paying for the faults of His own creature, for his sins.”

From a certain point of view it is right to say that God has unveiled Himself to man even too much in what is most divine, in what is His inner life; He has unveiled Himself in the very Mystery. He did not take into account the fact that such an unveiling would in a certain way obscure Him in man’s eyes, because man is not capable of bearing the excess of Mystery; he does not want to be so invaded and surpassed. Yes, man knows that God is the One in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts of the Apostles 17:28); but why did this have to be confirmed by His Death and Resurrection? Yet Saint Paul writes: “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14).

Source: Encuentra.com