Date of Award

2025

Document Type

Thesis

Abstract

The term Deus absconditus comes from the Latin Vulgate translation of Isaiah 45:15. “Truly, you are a God who hides himself [ESV],” wrote the prophet. The history of understanding God’s hiddenness traces back to antiquity and is a theme frequented in the Bible. The scriptures repeatedly indicate that God’s presence is not entirely comprehensible. The early church explored the inaccessible attributes of God, and many church fathers wrote of the properties of God out of their meditations on His incomprehensibility. However, by the time of the medieval church, powerful Aristotelian logic had become the core tool of church theology, which could not satisfy the individual struggles of a certain Augustinian monk.

Martin Luther struggled to understand his own justification before God. None of his efforts revealed God’s grace to him; God remained hidden. His studies opened up key concepts of how God reveals Himself to humanity. This led him to introduce the Theologian of the Cross in his 1518 Heidelberg Disputation. The theologian compares all things to the cross, where God reveals Himself most clearly yet is hidden under creation and suffering. The cross is the primary tool of theology. The believer is continually challenged with this temptation to trust God or trust the world. Faith is required. For Luther, this exercise is actually critical for the arousal faith.

Karl Barth recognized similar theological failures in his post-enlightened, modern time. He witnessed his mentors reasoning their way to support an unnecessary war. This drove him to challenge their methodology of relying on natural theology. He presented a new starting point to think of how one comes to the knowledge of God. Humanity cannot know an incomprehensible God without God revealing Himself and God equipping humanity to recognize His revelation. God is hidden due to the wholly otherness of His being, and humanity receives God’s revelation through secondary objects. This viewpoint originated from the awareness that God is reality. God must loan the individual faith as a personal tool to apprehend and participate in the knowledge of God. Barth agreed with Luther; this metaphysical shift in understanding God and reality causes a crisis that arouses faith. But Barth added freedom to the human participation that is very applicable to each individual’s experience. At the center of all this deliberation regarding the hidden presence of God is practical relationship with our wholly other creator.

Comments

A thesis submitted for the degree of Master in Theology at Whitworth University.

Rights

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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