The following piece is adapted from a podcast series on the Problem of Divine Hiddenness. While my typical written work includes extensive citations, I have not added references to this particular post. In addition, I have largely preserved my manner of speech, which can be a bit more colloquial than my usual writing style. Perhaps, when time permits, I’ll revise this piece to accommodate a more formal tone with proper citations. But in the meantime, I trust my body of work should suffice to instill confidence that the philosophical, theological, and historical claims presented here are sound and can be verified by an investigation of the figures and sources referenced. If you have yet to read the first several pieces in this series, you may want to do so (links below). However, this particular post — and those to follow — wades into fresh waters, so one can likely dive in without looking back on the start to this series.
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Part 1: The Problem of Divine Hiddenness | When God Seems Silent
Part 4: Non-Resistant Unbelief
Part 5: Scrutinizing the Metanarrative of Divine Hiddenness
We began this series by examining Schellenberg’s early formulation of the hiddenness argument, which suggests that if there is a loving God, then there should be no such thing as rational unbelief. In our last two posts, we explored the updated formulation of the case, which adds to the argument the problem of rational non-resistant unbelief.
Throughout, we have scrutinized the underlying presumptions of the case, along with its underlying metanarrative, exploring what it tacitly presumes about God, world, man, hiddenness, and revelation.
I noted in prior posts that I take issue with the majority of the underlying presumptions within the argument. Today, I want to delve deeper into why. If the world, God, and man are not the way the objector presumes, then what are they like?
In what follows, I will explore an alternative metanarrative, offering a very different story about the world, about God, about man, and about divine hiddenness and revelation that offers some explanation for why our present experience is the way that it is. And to no surprise to my readers, this alternative will draw heavily upon the Eastern Church fathers.
On the Pursuit of the “Hidden” God
In my prior posts, I contested the premise that God is, in fact, hidden. As argued, I believe God has revealed himself in not-so-subtle ways throughout history. I believe many of the proofs for the existence of God are sound. But even more basic than these evidentialist approaches, I believe a great many of our basic human experiences — of the rational order of nature, of conscience, of the numinous, and more — all constitute direct access to the reality of the divine.
Rather than looking at the ways in which God has revealed himself, however, I want to consider here the question of how one might pursue God. Toward this end, I want to return to Alex O’Connor’s testimony about his own failed attempt at rational non-resistant belief.
By his own testimony, Alex has undertaken a variety of pursuits in an effort to find the hidden God — reading, debating theists, even securing a degree in theology. To this he has added prayer, listening to worship music, and living with Christians. When ushering forth this litany of efforts, Alex appears to presume that such efforts should lead him to knowledge of God if God is real. And the fact that he has done such things demonstrates that his is a non-resistant, rational unbelief.
Now, there are some questionable presumptions in the case. The first concerns timeline. Alex is a young man — only in his mid-twenties, I believe. Hence, his case presumes, first, that these sorts of activities should not only yield belief but yield it in a notably short period of time.
Many know all too well what it is like to spend decades wrestling with philosophical and spiritual questions before coming to a place of belief and faith. C. S. Lewis is one notable example. And my own story is another such example.1 Without any disrespect to Mr. O’Connor, I find the suggestion dubious that the most important matters in human existence — a fact admitted by the hiddenness argument — should also be matters easily buttoned up by one’s mid-twenties.
On this point, I would offer two observations. The first is that Mr. O’Connor seems to believe that if he has not arrived at belief by now, then he never will. Speaking as one who converted when I was a decade older than Mr. O’Connor is now, I’m unconvinced that’s true. We’ll return to the question of unremedied unbelief in the context of the Eastern patristic meta-narrative, but for now, let it suffice that unbelief in one’s mid-twenties hardly constitutes evidence for ultimate unbelief.
The second point concerns the value of a long journey of struggle. Early on in this series, I referenced the work of Paul Moser when discussing the usefulness of divine hiddenness — that struggle and striving are means of growth, the type of growth that produces the kind of faith that God desires. And to this point I appended the Eastern patristic case that process and growth are inherent to the nature of creaturely existence of metaphysical necessity. The combined case offers the alternative explanation for hiddenness, namely, that it is instrumental in the spiritual formation of the creature.
Such an explanation strikes me as more than plausible when considering those who have taken very long and tumultuous roads to arrive at faith. Already mentioned was C. S. Lewis. His life of study and skepticism before arriving faith shaped him into arguably the greatest Christian apologist of the twentieth century. One can hardly look at his very long journey as fruitless.
My hope is that the same might be said about my own life and journey. For someone like myself who spent decades agonizing over belief in God before coming to faith, I have no trouble seeing the wisdom of this long road now that I stand at journey’s end. All that I have learned about the history of ideas, about historical theology, about the pitfalls that threaten the spiritual pilgrim, and so much more has been harvested from the fields of struggle. And as painful as the road was, I would not trade what I’ve reaped for an easier road.
From where I presently stand as one who has reaped this harvest, I can say with full confidence that I think it’s entirely possible that someone like Alex will come around to faith at some point. And I think it’s equally plausible that upon coming to faith, he may well look back at the years of journey and discover a storehouse of riches that he would never trade. In short, he may yet discover the value of the long and tumultuous road to faith.
Now, beyond the question of timing and the value of the journey, there are othe presumptions worth questioning.
First, there’s the question of what sort of unveiling someone like Mr. O’Connor wants, expects, or considers himself entitled to — presuming, of course, that God exists. In one of his interviews, Alex talks about how it wouldn’t have to be a booming voice from the sky, as Dawkin’s demands, just a flicker of light or some such thing — something subtle.
Now, I’m unsure why the demand for a flicker of divine light is any less of a demand than a booming voice, both behind a demand for a divine manifestation of some kind. But let’s set aside whether Alex’s demand is in fact less than Dawkin’s demand. Instead, I want to zero in on Alex’s request for divine light.
I find it intriguing that Alex’s request is for God to show him divine light, or light that has a divine origin. The reason is this. There is a fair bit of precedent within Eastern Christianity for the revelation of God via the “uncreated light.” And with this precedent there is a fair bit of guidance as to how one might obtain precisely what Alex desires.
By way of background, we need to look at the doctrine of the divine energies. The Greek term, energeia, has a long history, but for our purposes we need only understand a couple of points. The first is that the term refers to those operative powers by which a thing expresses its nature, or what it is. For example, the mind expresses its rational nature by operations of speech or analysis. Fire expresses its pyrrotic nature with operations of heating and lighting. In other words, there is a distinction between the nature of a thing — what it is — and the energetic expressions of that nature by which we come to know what it is.
This distinction paves the way for the second thing we must understand about the term. The Alexandrian Jews and early Christians — first St. Paul and then the Eastern fathers with him — observed that some “energies” are communicable, capable of being transferred from one being to another. Iron, for example, is naturally susceptible to the energies of fire. When the two commune, the pyrrotic energies of fire take up residence within the iron, causing it to glow and burn. The iron remains iron, of course, but it bears within its person, as it were, energies from a foreign nature.
The concept was critical to how Alexandrian Jews, St. Paul, and the Eastern Christians understood our relationship to the spiritual world around us. A human being is naturally an open system. Physically, we take in our environment — food, air, and water — and the things we imbibe become part of us. The same is true spiritually. We are made to be receptive to our spiritual environment. We are spiritually porous, you might say, imbibing the energies of the spirits that inhabit our world.
While the notion may sound strange, most intuitive understand the point in a certain context. Evident enough to most is that toying with black magic or the occult is dangerous, precisely because it opens one up to malevolent spirits. The notion of “spiritual energy” offers some explanation of why this is so. Just as breathing in toxic air or consuming rotten food can make one physically ill, so communing with demons can make one spiritual ill. Such was the more ancient understanding of demoniacs. Persons in communion with demons were not puppets but participants, taking into themselves the energies of demons, much like the way iron takes into itself the energies of fire. And the concept was not limited to dark spirits. In 2 Maccabees, several angels appear to protect the Temple from desecration, and they protect it by the “energies” of God.
Lest one recoil from such language, as sounding too “New Age,” this manner of speaking appears often in St. Paul. The Apostle speaks of himself being energized by God for ministry to the gentiles — and of the Apostle Peter being energized for ministry to the Jews. Paul also speaks of God’s energy working cooperatively with the energy of believers, making them “co-workers.” And much like in our above talk of demonics, Paul says the Children of Wrath are energized by The Devil.
This became the basis for many different things within Eastern Christian theology, including relics. For our purposes here, suffice it to say that according to the Eastern Church Fathers, when people see the glory of God or when God is robed in light, those are understood to be the divine energies. They are expressions or processions that exude from the divine nature. They are divine in origin, but they’re not the divine essence—the totality of God.
This is how Philo of Alexandria interprets God’s talk to Moses about his face versus his back, where Moses says, “Show me your glory,” and God says, “No man can see my face and live, but I’ll show you my back.” Philo interprets this distinction as God’s essence (no man can see God as he is behind the veil and behold the divine essence per se) versus the energetic expressions, the energies that exude from it. Those energies are the sorts of things we can encounter, perceive, and participate in—those expressions of the divine nature.
The reason I bring this up is that there is a long history of saints talking about seeing the divine glory or the uncreated energies—this divine light that people do end up seeing. There’s testimony after testimony about this sort of thing.
Perhaps, if I were to reframe what Alex wants, he wants a glimpse of divine energies. I think this is useful because it moves us into metanarrative territory. If we ask, “Okay, so there are lots of folks who have testimonies about seeing the uncreated light, seeing the divine glory, and there are lots of people who have testimonies of seeing saints illumined with or transfigured by that glory,” we can examine how they got there.
There are stories about Elder Porphyrios where, when he was confessor for somebody during confession, his face started to glow. There are stories like that about Elder Paisios. Obviously, within the Bible, you have Moses—his face glowing after he comes down from Mount Sinai. He has to put on a veil because people are freaked out by it.
There are plenty of indirect testimonies to this, but somebody like Alex is looking for direct access. He wants to see the uncreated light himself. The reason that specific request is useful is that we can look to the folks who have claimed to have gotten there—who claim to have seen it, who have themselves been illumined by it so that other people saw it through them. We can say, “Okay, so how did they get there?”
Did they get there by getting a theological degree and reading a bunch of books and putting on contemporary pop worship music? The answer is no. What we see is that they got there through a process of renouncing the world, repenting, baptism, being chrismated, partaking in the sacraments of the church, engaging in asceticism where they put to death the deeds of the flesh and turned their soul to God with perpetual prayer, fasting, solitude, stilling the body and turning the soul toward God. They did that for years and years, renouncing the world in order to pursue God toward that end.
I think that’s important because when we ask what it would take to find God—for God to unveil himself—we should ask questions like: Are there any requisite conditions? I mentioned this last time using the analogy of needing a telescope to see something in space. Those are important questions about what necessary conditions must be met to discover this thing.
Especially when you’re talking about a person—if you are exploring the question of whether God is not just an abstract principle but a person with whom you might have some sort of direct relationship, as the theist suggests—then it’s important to ask: Does this person make any demands? Does this person lay out a path by which I’m supposed to come to discover and know them?
Hats off to Alex for actually being proactive. I mentioned last time that there’s something problematic about passivity—suggesting that somehow it’s incumbent upon God to reveal himself to me. At least here, Alex is being proactive: “I’m going to pray. I’m going to ask God to show himself.” That’s good, because when we’re asking what it would take to find God, we should explore whether there are requisite conditions.
But part of the question is also: are you taking the right path to get there? It seems that if what you really want is the type of encounters with God that the mystics talk about—that the saints talk about regarding seeing the divine glory—then putting on some pop music and asking God to show himself is probably not the best way to get there.
This is really important because what this offers us is a pattern by which people have attained the very thing that Alex says he wants to experience—namely, to have this encounter with the uncreated light. If we look at that pattern laid out for us, it requires repentance and entrance into the church, the sacraments, renunciation of the world, asceticism, fasting, prayer, silence, and similar practices. Then there may be good reason why merely listening to worship music and asking God to reveal himself doesn’t do the trick.
We’re left with this question: Well, maybe that’s what’s required.
I anticipate the objection would be: that’s too much. God should be discoverable without having to go through all of that. If God is really that significant to my life—such that he is the highest good and the proper end of man—then that should be more evident to me without having to go through such drudgery, such lengths.
Here I’d say two things. First, I think the point can be simply inverted. If it’s really true that God is that significant to human existence, why shouldn’t it require great effort? Why shouldn’t we be willing to go to such great lengths to discover him? If it’s true that he’s the highest good and the chief end of man, then it would seem we should be willing to do whatever it takes to get to him.
The other thing I would say is that this goes to the metanarrative side of things, because it’s really suggesting that God has intentionally made it that difficult for us to discover him—that he’s making it unnecessarily difficult. Again, this goes to the underlying metanarrative: the claim that under the current state of affairs, God is hidden and could very easily create a lower threshold for discovering him with no negative effects. We’re back in metanarrative territory.
Here I want to move into the underlying metanarrative that I would advocate as an Eastern Orthodox Christian and philosopher of that tradition, because there are very good reasons why the saints believed such lengths were required to discover God in the way they hoped to discover God.
The Alternative Metanarrative: The Real State of Affairs
Let me delve into the alternative metanarrative—the one I think is the actual story of reality in which we live.
Let’s start with the whole notion of hiddenness. I contested the idea that God is hidden. I don’t think he is, or at least not in the way that advocates of hiddenness suggest. However, I do want to say that our experience with God is definitely limited in ways that are unnatural. This is something I talked about repeatedly in previous posts when I said I don’t want to normalize hiddenness. I discussed the abnormalities about our current state of affairs.
The fact of the matter is that yes, we are in an abnormal state of affairs. But what I’m going to suggest is that the state of affairs where God seems more distant than we would like has a metaphysical explanation. It’s explicable and arguably reflective of divine love. We talked about this last time when we discussed the divine elements of faith and love that God desires. Here I want to go into a more robust narrative regarding what that really means and looks like within our world.
The World Properly Formed
First, let’s talk about the world properly formed—the world pre-Fall. I’m laying out here, of course, a Christian narrative.
Within the Christian narrative, you have the world formed and created in a certain way that does not actually include evil. Things are properly formed. They’re not idyllic—within Eastern Christianity, there is still growth to be had to move the world toward its proper end, which we’ll discuss. But it is not sinful. There’s nothing in the sense of corruption yet introduced.
When we start with the world as it ought to be, let’s discuss the nature of a few different things.
Anthropology
The underlying anthropology here—the presumptions about the nature of man—includes several commitments found in the Eastern Church Fathers. There’s the commitment to the idea that knowledge of God occurs through the nous. I don’t want to get bogged down in this distinction, but nous in Greek simply means “mind.” Sometimes folks in the Christian East object to calling it “mind” because in the West, mind tends to be associated primarily with analysis—operations of intellect and analysis—and they want to say the nous is more than that. That’s true. The Eastern conception of mind is much more than just analysis. It includes analysis and the ability to reason and engage in logic. It includes the capacities of choice and will, but it is more than that.
To see the “more than that” and its significance within the Eastern Church Fathers, you have to entertain this other type of knowing that is non-analytic. Here’s one way I think is useful to explain this: imagine an infant child who has just been born and is drinking at his mother’s breast. Does that child know his mother? The answer is yes—in a very intimate, direct, deep way that’s beyond the sort of intimate knowledge that the majority of human beings have of her (unless she has other children who would have that sort of knowledge as well).
There’s a deep intimacy and connection and knowledge there with that infant, yet the infant couldn’t offer you any sort of conceptual apparatus or analysis to say, “Well, you see, I’m her son because I was gestated within her womb, then she birthed me and brought me here, and I feed from her body.” The relational properties, that entire analytic apparatus, that conceptual framework for understanding and explicating the underlying realities—it isn’t there. The infant doesn’t have a concept of that. Yet the infant has a deep connection, an intimate knowledge of his mother.
That more intimate knowledge, that deeper knowing, is the sort of thing the Eastern Church Fathers talk about when discussing us coming to know God. They’re drawing a distinction between, say, Aristotle’s knowledge of God, which is more of an analytic knowing about God, versus the intimate participation and connection with God that the Christian is supposed to have.
The reason this is significant is that they talk about the “eye of the soul”—the idea that the soul has this natural capacity to know and partake of and participate in God. Within man properly formed, unfallen, uncorrupted, there is this capacity of soul—an unclouded, uncorrupted capacity of soul to have that sort of direct knowledge and participation and intimacy with God.
Part of this narrative is also that man is a hybrid being. We have a higher and lower nature. You see this in the creation account, where God creates two different types of things, just like Plato discusses—these stable, unchanging, relatively immortal things like the angels, and then this shifting material, organic realm. The earth is the mortal, shifting organic realm; the heavens are the realm of the relatively immortal things. In the creation account, man is taken from the earth and breathed into from heaven and becomes a living spirit.
What you have is this hybrid of the heavens and the earth, of the mortal and the immortal—this microcosm of all that God has made. Within this microcosm, the proper order of things is that the higher nature—the more God-like nature—is an icon of God and thus rightly rules and orders and guides and caretakes for the lower nature, which is animal.
In this sense, man properly ordered is not just a hybrid but a properly ordered hybrid, where the icon of God—the rational spirit—governs and orders the lower nature and ultimately raises it up. The higher nature has access to God and the ability to imitate God and participate in God and partake of God. It also has the ability to raise up the lower nature, so that the whole man—higher and lower nature together—can all partake of God, participate in God.
The Nature of Creatureliness
Obviously, man is a creature, but this concept emerges within the Arian dispute. One thing that becomes very apparent within the Arian dispute—the first of the ecumenical disputes—is the nature of creatureliness per se. Within that dispute, Arius of Alexandria was arguing that the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, is actually a creature. He’s a very godlike creature, but he’s a creature, and only God the Father is God in the true sense.
The Orthodox position, represented by Athanasius of Alexandria and ultimately affirmed at Nicaea, was that no—he is divine. He is of the same nature as God the Father.
The reason this was significant in drawing out the nature of creatureliness is that what emerged in the discussion was the exploration of what is a creature and what is God. Within this discussion, according to the Eastern Church Fathers, the nature of creatureliness per se is that a creature is something that moves from potentiality to actuality, from unformed to formed—it moves through stages of becoming.
When you’re talking about a creature, you’re talking about a possible being that God draws into existence. There’s a transitional nature to it. For this reason—and this is something I discussed in the last episode—according to the Eastern Church Fathers, not even God can make a creature that is fully formed and immutable.
This comes out clearly in the Arian dispute, because the Church Fathers are arguing that Arius’s Christ would be mutable because he’s a creature, subject to corruption because he’s a creature, and so on. Arius wants to say, “Well, maybe God makes him just like himself—a creature who is immutable, fully formed, doesn’t undergo becoming, is incorruptible.”
As realists, they were saying that’s not possible. You’re talking about square circles. What a creature is is something that was a possible being and then moved into an actual being, that moved from potentiality to actuality. That is a transition. So creatures are inherently, by nature, as things that come into being, transitional. We are things that move through stages of development to reach a completed and perfect state, assuming we actually get to a properly formed state.
This is important because what you have is the idea that man isn’t just a higher and lower nature, but man is a developmental being—a being that undergoes stages of development and growth. It’s necessarily so because he’s a creature. Every creature per se undergoes that sort of thing.
The Uniqueness of Rationality
What you also have is the uniqueness of the fact that man is rational. I discussed this fact that one of the things clear within the Free Will Defense, and also relevant here, is this entire idea that moral properties are tied in with freedom and will and choice. A dog can’t have moral properties because it doesn’t have the necessary conditions of culpability—knowledge of what it ought to do and the freedom to do or not do it. It’s only because we have those capacities that moral properties adhere to our choices.
The reason this is significant—and this is a critical feature of the Eastern Church Fathers’ Free Will Defense—is that not even God can make a creature who is virtuous. To attain these sorts of moral properties of virtue and goodness and uprightness is something that requires the exercise of will and choice. That’s how moral properties adhere.
When making a being like man, which is a rational, moral being, you have this situation where, if man is supposed to be virtuous (which we are—that’s the proper exercise of our will and reason), God can’t complete the creating of man unilaterally. At some point, man has to actually participate to become the thing he’s made to become—to become upright and virtuous.
This is what gets you into the Eastern patristic distinction between the image and likeness of God. Within the Genesis creation account, God says, “Let us make man in our own image and according to our own likeness.” Then God goes on and makes man in his own image, and likeness isn’t repeated.
The image refers to the fact that man has reason and free will—these uniquely divine capacities that mirror the divine nature. With that, those create the capacity to imitate and mirror the divine energies. Think about it: I mentioned that the divine energies are the expression of the divine nature. With the Eastern Fathers, they actually identify the divine attributes of knowledge, mercy, justice, love as energies. They don’t identify those as aspects of the divine essence. They identify those as energies—in other words, God is what God is, but that nature, that underlying nature, expresses itself by executing justice, by executing mercy, by loving, by knowing things. They identify those as energies of God, the expressions of the divine nature, because they are activities. They are active.
With man, we have the underlying image of God that can’t be gotten rid of—it’s innate in our ontology. But we are called to imitate God’s likeness. How? Actively. This goes into the fact that man has to freely participate in the rest of his creation—the actualization of what he is made to become.
In Eden, the entire concept is this calling forth to complete the making of man—this calling forth to imitate God and thereby come to know and partake of God, and not just participate in God in his higher nature, but in his whole person, the higher and lower nature together partaking of the divine nature.
This raises an interesting conundrum within the Eastern Church Fathers, which actually precedes them—you see it in Philo of Alexandria: if Adam is this hybrid between the mortal realm and the immortal realm, was he made mortal or immortal?
The answer is particularly relevant because the standard answer you find in Philo, then echoed in the Eastern Church Fathers as early as Theophilus of Antioch, is that he was created neither—meaning he was potentially mortal and potentially immortal, and his will functioned like the fulcrum of a balance scale deciding which one he was going to move toward.
That’s the choice laid out in Eden: embrace the higher nature, obey God, move toward God, and be properly ordered where the higher nature comes to know God and imitate God and partake of God, and with it, raise up the lower nature. Or subjugate the higher nature to the lower nature and embrace the mortal things.
Obviously, we know how the narrative goes. Adam and Eve go ahead and subjugate the higher nature to the lower nature. In this way, the fall happens.
Continued in the final installment next week...
For a full account of my journey from wild-eyed heretical philosopher to an Eastern Orthodox Christian philosopher, see my essay, “My Journey to Orthodoxy (1 of 2)” and “My Journey to Orthodoxy (2 of 2).” You can also listen to this piece here: “My Wild Ride to Orthodoxy.”