Divine Hiddenness: Why Is God Hidden from Us?

Divine hiddenness is the apparent absence or silence of God, felt by believers in lament and pressed by the philosopher J. L. Schellenberg as an argument that a perfectly loving God does not exist. Our answer is that God's hiddenness is not absence or indifference but a deliberate holding back of His full, unveiled presence in this age, because unmediated glory would overwhelm the finite frame and leave no room for a free response. To earn that answer we take Scripture's laments first, then Schellenberg's argument at full strength, then the replies of John Hick, Blaise Pascal, the skeptical theists and Michael Rea, and finally the reading of Frame-Indexed Classical Theism, which keeps what each of them gets right.

Key takeaways

• Divine hiddenness names two things: the believer's lament that God seems absent, and Schellenberg's argument that His hiddenness counts against His existence.
• Schellenberg's argument is about relationship, not proof. A perfectly loving God would always be open to relationship, so no one would fail to believe without resisting Him.
• Every reply pays a price. Hick's epistemic distance and Pascal's hidden God assume goods that relationship could supply; skeptical theism offers no positive account.
• Frame-Indexed Classical Theism reads hiddenness as forbearance. Against Schellenberg and against Rea's apophatic reply, it holds that God withholds His unveiled presence so that a free response can still be given.

What is divine hiddenness?

Divine hiddenness is God's apparent absence, silence or failure to show Himself to people who would, it seems, receive Him. The entry on the hiddenness of God in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy separates two senses. The first is existential: "ancient Hebrew texts lament God's failure to show up in experience or to show proper regard for God's people or some particular person," and two Gospels portray Jesus, in his "cry of dereliction on the cross", as abandoned by God.

The second sense is philosophical. Since 1993 the phrase has named an argument from the fact that some people do not believe in God. That is a different question from the problem of evil. Evil concerns what God permits us to suffer; hiddenness concerns whether God is available to be known and loved at all. The two meet in the life of the sufferer who prays and hears nothing, but they are distinct arguments, and Schellenberg insists on the distinction.

The hiddenness of God also presses on the doctrine of His nature. Classical theism teaches His omnipresence: there is no place where God is not. Yet a God present everywhere is perceived almost nowhere. Any account of the attributes of God must say how both can be true.

Free — the complete book

Get Book 1: Resolving the Free Will Dilemma free when you enter your name and email.

This essay takes one piece of it. Resolving the Free Will Dilemma takes the whole dilemma from first axiom to conclusion — the complete book, free.

No spam. Unsubscribe in one click.

The Many Beings series takes up both senses, beginning with the frame-indexed position itself.

Does the Bible say God hides himself?

Yes, repeatedly, and the texts are addressed to God. Scripture does not report His hiddenness; it speaks it to His face. David's complaint in Psalm 13 is the plainest:

"How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me?" (Psalm 13:1-2)

The psalm does not end there. Four verses later it turns: "But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing to the LORD, for he has been good to me" (Psalm 13:5-6).

Psalm 22 goes further into the dark, and Jesus takes its first line on His lips at the cross (Matthew 27:46):

"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, and am not silent." (Psalm 22:1-2)

Its turn names the very thing the opening lamented: "For he has not despised or disdained the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help" (Psalm 22:24). The cry of dereliction belongs to the question of the crucified God, but it is not where the psalm ends.

Isaiah supplies the verse the tradition named itself after:

"Truly you are a God who hides himself, O God and Savior of Israel." (Isaiah 45:15)

Read in context, this is a confession, not a complaint. It follows the nations' acknowledgment that God is with Israel (verse 14), inside an oracle about His hidden way of saving through a pagan king, Cyrus. Four verses later the LORD says, "I have not spoken in secret, from somewhere in a land of darkness; I have not said to Jacob's descendants, 'Seek me in vain'" (Isaiah 45:19). God hides His providence, not His willingness to be found.

Scripture never treats God's hiddenness as evidence that He is not there. It treats it as something to say to Him.

Volume II sets out the larger question of suffering and God's goodness in full.

What is Schellenberg's hiddenness argument?

J. L. Schellenberg's Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (1993) turned the lament into an argument, and its main form is short:

(1) There are people who are capable of relating personally to God but who, through no fault of their own, fail to believe.

(2) If there is a personal God who is unsurpassably great, then there are no such people.

(3) So, there is no such God (from 1 and 2).

Fault is hard to see from outside, and Schellenberg came to agree: "I now see this focus on culpability and inculpability as a mistake." The latest version, which the Stanford entry gives "slightly condensed," turns on resistance instead:

(4) Necessarily, if God exists, then God perfectly loves such finite persons as there may be.

(5) Necessarily, if God perfectly loves such finite persons as there may be, then, for any capable finite person S and time t, God is at t open to being in a positively meaningful and reciprocal conscious relationship with S at t.

(6) Necessarily, if for any capable finite person S and time t, God is at t open to being in a positively meaningful and reciprocal conscious relationship with S at t, then, for any capable finite person S and time t, it is not the case that S is at t nonresistantly in a state of nonbelief in relation to the proposition that God exists.

(7) There is at least one capable finite person S and time t such that S is or was at t nonresistantly in a state of nonbelief in relation to the proposition that God exists.

(8) So, it is not the case that God exists. (from 4 through 7)

The key term is nonresistant nonbelief: not believing that God exists while doing nothing to shut out a relationship with Him. He pictures that openness through an imagined person, Anna:

"But unless Anna is resistant in this way at a time, she will find it possible to participate in personal relationship with God, and to do so then. Never will she find the door to such relationship closed. This, at the very minimum, is required if God unsurpassably loves Anna in a manner aimed at personal relationship with her."

Premise (6) rests on what a relationship is: "a personal relationship is a conscious, reciprocal relationship, and a conscious relationship is a relationship one recognizes oneself to be in," and so "one clearly cannot even get started in a personal relationship without believing that the other party exists."

Volume I, free to download, begins with the freedom on which the freedom replies to this argument depend.

Why would a loving God stay hidden?

On Schellenberg's account He would not, and that is the force of the divine hiddenness argument. It has to be felt before it is answered, because most popular replies answer an easier argument than this one.

Notice what it does not ask for. It does not demand a theophany over every city, or a God who compels belief, or faith from people who are running from Him. It asks only that the door be open to those who would walk through it. Schellenberg describes his deepest claim as being "about the connection between love and openness to relationship," and that is a claim about love before it is a claim about evidence.

He has also closed the most obvious exit in advance. Against appeals to goods we cannot see, he replies (in the summary of the argument from nonbelief on Wikipedia) that we have known reasons to expect a perfectly loving being to be open, that relationship with God is the greatest good a creature can have, and that every good, known or unknown, is finally found in God, who could supply it without hiding.

Two of his claims are true, and we grant them. Love aims at relationship. A conscious relationship requires believing that the other party is there. Any reply worth making has to be measured against those two truths rather than around them.

The FICT overview sets out the position this article brings to Schellenberg's argument and to Hick's reply.

Does God hide to protect our freedom?

That is the oldest family of replies, and it is right about something real. The most influential version is John Hick's. In Evil and the God of Love (1966) Hick drew on the Irenaean tradition's notion of epistemic distance: God remains less than overwhelmingly evident so that our turning to Him is our own. As the Wikipedia summary of the Irenaean theodicy puts it, epistemic distance "would ensure a free choice in belief in God," and Hick argued that "a genuine relationship requires the possibility of rejection." That clause is the heart of libertarian free will.

Michael Murray has pressed the same worry. On the Stanford entry's summary of this line of reply (citing Hick, Murray and Richard Swinburne), a person's "moral autonomy, freedom, or moral development would be objectionably thwarted or reduced" if God brought her to belief too soon. Revelation of enough force would coerce, and coerced love is not love.

Blaise Pascal put a hidden God at the centre of his apology. In the Pensées (fragment 430 in the Trotter translation, at Project Gutenberg) God "so regulates the knowledge of Himself that He has given signs of Himself, visible to those who seek Him, and not to those who seek Him not. There is enough light for those who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition." Pascal was confident enough to make it a test: "every religion which does not affirm that God is hidden, is not true" (584).

Each reply names a genuine good: uncoerced love, owned faith, humility before God. The weaknesses are just as real. The Stanford entry records the critics' answer that such goods "can be accommodated within a developing, positively meaningful, reciprocal, and conscious relationship with God," and that "it's doubtful that any single one of them offers a total explanation." Pascal's light is measured to the seeker's disposition, which assumes that those left in obscurity are fleeing, and Schellenberg's nonbeliever is by stipulation not fleeing.

Volume I, which costs nothing, shows how genuine freedom and God's full sovereignty are both true.

Can we know God's reasons for hiding?

The skeptical theist says we are in no position to tell. The Stanford entry notes that this reply "has its parallel in the problem of evil literature where it is (badly) named 'skeptical theism'," and that Daniel Howard-Snyder and, jointly, McBrayer and Swenson have applied it to hiddenness.

The reasoning is modest and therefore strong. An intellectually humble inquirer should doubt that she can survey every reason a perfect being might have for permitting nonresistant nonbelief for a time. If she cannot tell whether such reasons exist, she cannot affirm premise (5) with confidence, and the argument stalls. It requires no theodicy and no claim about any particular nonbeliever.

The cost is the same one it pays elsewhere. Schellenberg answers that he has given known reasons for openness, and unknown goods do not outweigh known ones when the known good is God Himself. The deeper worry is that a scepticism strong enough to block this inference threatens ordinary moral inference too, and it gives no positive account of why hiddenness takes the form it does. That debate is argued in full in our piece on God and suffering.

Volume II meets the same inference where it first arose, in the argument from suffering.

Could a timeless God be near at all?

Here the classical theist and the theistic personalist collide, and the Stanford entry leaves the collision unsettled. Some critics of Schellenberg note that "many 'classical theists' affirm a conception of God according to which God is transcendent, ineffable, and/or extracategorical, and so beyond all human comprehension, and so neither personal nor non-personal, and so neither loving nor non-loving." On that view premise (4) uses "love" in a sense that was never true of God, and the argument fails at its first step.

This is the tradition of apophatic theology and divine simplicity. Michael Rea presses a related point: on the Stanford summary, God's transcendence and His personal nature may determine, together with His love, how open He is.

The theistic personalist sees the cost at once. Brian Davies coined the label for those who model God as a person like us without our limits, and its defenders, R. T. Mullins among them and the open theists Gregory Boyd, Clark Pinnock, John Sanders and William Hasker beside him, argue that a timeless and unchanging God cannot be in a reciprocal relationship at all. If so, the classical escape wins the argument by giving up the relationship Christians claim.

The Stanford entry concedes the worry: "It is certainly less than clear whether a conscious, reciprocal personal relationship with the God of apophaticism is possible." On this reading the classical God is hidden by nature, and the classical theist has made the problem of divine hiddenness worse.

The personalist pays too. A God who must change in response in order to relate receives the relationship piecemeal rather than whole. And a God who can respond, yet stays silent, is back inside Schellenberg's question.

Each side sees the debate from one frame. The personalist reads God's love from ours; the classical theist reads it from His.

Volume IV, Resolving Immutability and Interaction, takes up the relationship between a changeless God and a changing world.

How Frame-Indexed Classical Theism answers

Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) is a research program in analytic theology that resolves classical theological dilemmas by diagnosing them as artifacts of a single formal error. God and the creature differ in nature, so they differ in frame: God knows reality whole and eternally, and we know it in sequence and in part. Words such as "love," "presence" and "relationship" are true of God and of us analogically, and predicating them univocally across the two frames is what the series calls the Many Beings Fallacy. Schellenberg's argument and Rea's apophatic reply each commit it from one side.

Aquinas gave the principle its classical form: "God cannot be seen in His essence by a mere human being, except he be separated from this mortal life. The reason is because, as was said above (Article 4), the mode of knowledge follows the mode of the nature of the knower" (Summa Theologiae I, q. 12, a. 11). His sed contra is Exodus 33:20: "you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live." That Thomism is FICT's starting point.

Volume I draws the conclusion. Divine hiddenness emerges "not as divine indifference or absence, but as a necessary corollary of God's forbearance during this epoch of indeterminacy," the present age in which each person's response to God is still being given. It is "a deliberate withholding of the full, immediate manifestation of His absolute presence and power," which preserves our finite frame and the genuine exercise of finite free will. Unveiled holiness meeting unholy natures would not produce faith. "God's holy presence would necessitate final judgment," for "our 'God is a consuming fire'" (Hebrews 12:29).

The holding back is God's permissive will at its most patient: "The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9).

Against the personalist and the apophatic reply at once, Volume IV holds that "for the relationship to be genuine from both sides, each party must relate according to its own frame." "Demand mutual becoming, and it becomes unreal for God. Demand static completeness of the creature, and it becomes unreal for us." James 4:8 is true in both frames: "Come near to God and he will come near to you." Of the prodigal's father, who ran "while he was still a long way off" (Luke 15:20), the book says, "It was already there, watching the road."

That locates Schellenberg's error. Read from God's frame, premise (5) is true: His openness never closes, for "he is not far from each one of us" (Acts 17:27). Premise (6) crosses the frames. It takes openness at a time to require settled belief at every instant of our frame, where the relationship is a story still being written. Demanding God's whole presence at every time is demanding the end of the time.

FICT keeps Schellenberg's premise that love aims at relationship, Hick's insistence on room for a free response, Mullins's demand that the relationship be real from our side, and Rea's transcendence, and gives up univocal love. Its price is plain: it does not explain why a particular person lacks belief at a particular time.

The full chapter on divine hiddenness is in Volume I, free to read.

When will God stop hiding?

At the consummation. Paul sets the present and the future side by side: "Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known" (1 Corinthians 13:12). Volume I ends its chapter in the same place: the period is finite, and at its close "hiddenness will vanish in the full revelation of His glory."

What changes is not God but the creature who receives Him. Volume II describes the present as a condition of "mediated knowledge of God," and the glorified as living in "direct presence with God," with a healed nature that freely holds to righteousness. The books do not say the saints lose their freedom there. They keep a real power of choice, and the freedom of heaven is exercised in sight of the Good rather than at a distance from it.

That confirms the thesis from the other end. The unveiled presence that would overwhelm a fallen nature now is the beatific vision of a nature made able to bear it. Hiddenness is indexed to this age, not to God.

Volume II, Resolving the Problem of Evil, closes with the nature of heaven.

How the answers compare

Frequently asked questions

Why is God hidden?

God is hidden because He withholds His full, unveiled presence during this age, not because He is absent. Where Schellenberg reads hiddenness as absence and Hick as epistemic distance, Frame-Indexed Classical Theism holds that this presence would overwhelm a finite, unholy nature and bring judgment rather than faith. The hiddenness of God is His patience: the time in which a free response can still be given.

What is a nonresistant nonbeliever?

A nonresistant nonbeliever, in J. L. Schellenberg's term, is a person capable of a relationship with God who does not believe God exists and is not resisting such a relationship. Schellenberg first spoke of nonbelief "through no fault of their own," then dropped fault for resistance, because fault is hard to judge. The existence of such people is premise (7) of his argument.

Is divine hiddenness the same as the problem of evil?

No. The problem of evil asks why God permits suffering; divine hiddenness asks why God is not more evidently available to be known and loved. Schellenberg keeps the two arguments apart, and a world without suffering could still contain hiddenness. They meet in lament, when a sufferer prays and hears nothing, which is why the Psalms hold both.

Why does God hide His face in the Psalms?

The Psalms ask why does God hide himself, and they ask it of Him, which already assumes He hears. Psalm 13 turns at verse 5 to "your unfailing love," and Psalm 22 ends by saying God "has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help." The lament is a form of the relationship, not its absence.

Does Frame-Indexed Classical Theism blame nonbelievers?

No. Unlike the reply that all nonbelief is secret resistance, FICT does not deny Schellenberg's premise that nonresistant nonbelief exists, and unlike Rea's apophatic reply it does not deny that God's love aims at relationship. It locates the problem in reading God's openness from one frame. It makes no claim about any person's final state, and the doctrine of God does not license one.

Living with a hidden God

Divine hiddenness is felt long before it is argued, and Scripture gives the believer words for it that are honest without being hopeless. The psalmist who asked "How long?" was still speaking to God, and four verses on he could say "I trust in your unfailing love." It is what a relationship sounds like when one party is waiting for the other to be seen.

The God who hides has also said, "I have not said to Jacob's descendants, 'Seek me in vain.'" The door Schellenberg asks to be open is open. What we lack in this age is not access but sight, and sight is promised.

The chapter on divine hiddenness, with the argument behind everything here, is in Volume I, which you can download free.