A Hidden God?
In the early 2nd century a Greek opponent of Christianity named Celsus argued that Jesus could not be God because there was nothing visibly divine about him. Celsus writes:
“If there were a divine spirit in the body of Jesus, that body would of necessity vary in some respect from other bodies…in size, in beauty, in strength, in voice. It would have something attractive in its characteristics for it’s impossible that the body having something of the divine nature should in no way differ from other bodies. But Christians say that the body of Jesus was not at all different. Indeed, they so claim that it was small, ill-favored, and unsightly.”1
Surely the divine cannot “fit” inside the human. Wouldn’t God have to become less than God to become human? Wouldn’t he have to undergo some sort of metaphysical surgery to “fit”?
In Celsus’s mind humanity and divinity are polar opposites. Time and eternity, finitude and infinitude, death and life—how could these opposites hold together in Jesus?
And yet this is the central claim of Christianity: God is the one who became human in Jesus Christ. Christians are those who look at the little baby in the manger and the bloodied man on the cross and say: “This is God.”
This bring us to a central theme within Christian theology that is usually referred to as “the hiddenness of God.” Christian theology throughout the church’s history has generally agreed that there is a hiddenness to God even in his revelation. When you look at the baby in the manger or the man on the cross you cannot simply see with your eyes that this is God. There is a hiddenness, an incognito.
But the real question is in what way is he hidden? There’s more than one way to be hidden.
A Kierkegaardian Parable
The Danish Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard told a story that cuts right to the heart of the way God is hidden in the incarnation of Jesus. It goes something like this:2
Once upon a time there was a beautiful peasant maiden who worked in the fields gathering wheat. One day as the prince of the kingdom was walking on the parapet of the castle he noticed the young maiden. As he watched her work he was captured by her beauty. It was love at first sight.
He decided in his heart that he would marry the young maiden. But he immediately recognized a problem. The prince knew that because he had power over all the land the maiden would marry him even if she didn’t love him. He knew that his power as the prince would coerce her into marriage. But he didn’t want that. He wanted her to genuinely love him in return.
So, he devised a plan. He would disguise himself as a peasant and hide his true identity. He put on the brown, tattered clothes of a peasant over the top of his royal purple garments; the purple hidden by the brown, the royalty hidden by the poverty.
Kierkegaard notes that this kind of a story grabs our attention. It’s a classic romantic drama. But, he says, what holds our attention in the story is not whether or not the beautiful peasant maiden will fall in love with the prince. That’s a foregone conclusion. He is noble, he is handsome, he is a prince, we know how these stories go.
What really holds our attention is not whether she will fall in love with him, but rather when he will reveal to her that he is actually the prince. When will he take off the brown peasants’ clothing and reveal the royal purple robes underneath? When will he come out of hiding? And how will she respond?
Perhaps he will tell her his true identity after they have worked together in the fields for several weeks and months. Maybe during a break in their work he will declare his love for her and reveal to her his true identity.
Or maybe he will wait until their wedding day, after she says “I do,” so that he knows she genuinely loves him. Maybe then he will rip back the brown clothes and reveal the purple. Perhaps he will even wait until after the wedding night. Maybe they will spend their first night together in a humble cottage and at breakfast the next morning he will turn to her and say, “You have not only become my wife, you have become the princess of the entire kingdom! Tonight we will sleep in the palace.”
Stanley Hauerwas says that Kierkegaard’s story reveals the way we think about Jesus and the hiddenness of God. Generally speaking, there are two ways Christians have thought about the way God is hidden: 1) “Concealing” and 2) “Revealing.”3
1) Concealing. The first way would say: Before the Son of God became incarnate he was robed in royal purple. He was eternal, infinite, all-powerful, all-knowing, and omnipresent. But when he became human, he laid aside some of these things in order to truly be a human being. In the incarnation he becomes finite, weak, limited in knowledge, etc.
In other words, the prince has to stop being the prince (in some capacity) for a time in order to become a peasant. The resurrection, in this view, is the “rip” of the brown clothes to reveal the purple.
That is, obviously, a type of hiddenness. God hides himself by concealing his true identity.
2) Revealing. The second way to think about this, as Hauerwas says, is that in Jesus there is no purple underneath the brown clothes. The brown clothes of the servant are actually the true clothes of the prince. This is who he is. He is the prince not despite appearing as a servant—he is the prince as a servant.
In Jesus there is no other royal purple robes hiding elsewhere. His purple robes are his slave clothes.
But this, too, is a type of hiddenness. God isn’t hidden because he conceals his true identity. Rather, God is hidden in that he actually reveals his true identity. God does not hide himself from us, he reveals himself to us. But it is precisely his revelation that hides him.
Robert Jenson summarizes the two ways of conceiving of the hiddenness of God like this:
“In one way or another, western theology has tended to construe Christ’s human sufferings and death as clues to the character of his hidden divine presence. According to Luther, they are his divine presence among and for us. All orthodox theology is agreed that God remains hidden even when revealed; Luther goes beyond this to insist that it is precisely his revelation that hides him… Traditional theology has tended to say that God is hidden by his metaphysical distance from us, across which we must peer; Luther says that what hides him is that his revealed presence is so unavoidably in our face.”4
The first way (concealing) can fall prey to the assumption that Jesus is really a king in the way the world knows kings. The only difference is that he hides it under his slave clothes for 33 years. With his understanding the incarnation is God acting out of character (and/or nature). For the duration of Jesus’ earthly life he conceals himself, but hiding under the brown clothes is really power as we all know it and want it. We can easily start to think that the purple Jesus really has is no different than the purple that Herod or Caesar wears.
I’m convinced the second way (revealing) is the faithful way to understand God’s hiddenness. God hides by revealing himself.
We actually don’t know what divinity is really like. We don’t know what real power is. We only know cheap, earthly imitations of both divinity and power. But in God’s revelation of himself Jesus shows us that the true God is a crucified God; that real power is the power of the cross.
To put it back in the terms from Kierkegaard’s story: True purple is not Caesar’s purple. True purple is the crimson of the cross. God is hidden in his revelation. But the way he is hidden is different than we would ever imagine. He does not hide himself, he reveals himself. But what he reveals turns out to hide him from us because it is not anything close to what we would expect. What he reveals is that he is essentially humble and lowly.
Kenosis, Humility, and Humiliation
Biblically, the rubber meets the road in how we read the Christ hymn in Philippians 2.
“Although [or “Because”] being in the form of God, He did not consider his equality with God as something to be exploited for his own advantage, But emptied himself [kenosis], By taking the form of a slave, By being born in the likeness of human beings. And being found in human form, He humbled himself By becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and given to him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:6—11).
The hiddenness of God is directly tied to what Paul here calls “emptying” (or in Greek “kenosis”). The question is who is being emptied of what and when?
The typical understanding of the sequence of events of the Incarnation would be something like this:
God → humiliation → Human
In this way of construing the matter, becoming human is a humiliation for God. God’s self is hidden in the act of becoming human because he has to lay aside his divinity in order to become human. He has to give up “the form of God.” He has to undergo metaphysical surgery—a “divinectomy” of sorts.5
But then we are left with a major problem. If Jesus has to empty himself of the “form of God,” then his life isn’t really isn’t revealing to us who God actually is. He is hiding the purple divine garment underneath the brown human garment. We still don’t know what the purple garment looks like.
In his Christology lectures, Dietrich Bonhoeffer6 suggests that we understand the sequence of events differently:
God → Human → humiliation
Jesus’ divinity is seen in his humanity, not despite it. For God to become human is not a humiliation for God, it is a revelation of God. God’s becoming human is the most fitting thing for him because he is the God-human.
Chris Green summarizes Bonhoeffer’s point:
“As Bonhoeffer reminds us in his christology lectures, the incarnation is not a humiliation for God—it is not as if God finds it unbecoming to take humanity as his own! The incarnation is a humiliation for us, because God comes among us as one without beauty, without desirability or comeliness, making nonsense of every frame of reference, every standard of judgment, every order and scheme we have devised for ourselves as a means of giving our lives significance and stability.”7
God does not have to become less God in order to become fully human. Jesus is not emptying himself of divinity, rather he is revealing to us that it is the nature of the true God to empty himself. This God is God as human. Or as Luther often said: “I point to this human being [on the cross] and say, this is God!”8
This is the mystery of the Triune life. In Jesus’ humiliation we are seeing God’s exaltation. Jesus isn’t humiliated in order that he can then be exalted. His humiliation on the cross is his exaltation.
Put differently, the throne of God and the cross of Jesus are not two separate things, but one single reality. Jesus tells us this in John’s Gospel: “‘And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’ He said this to show the kind of death he was going to die” (12:32–33).
There is a humiliation in the incarnation, but it is not that God would become human. Rather the humiliation, the scandal, is that God would be human in this way: lowly, humble, suffering, shameful, dishonored, and defiled.
Unveiled Faces
Scripture is full of instances in which creatures come in contact with the face of God and they have to hide their own faces. It is too much for them to take in.
In the visions of Ezekiel, Isaiah, and John we see the cherubim/seraphim (those closest to the throne of God) continually hide their faces with their wings. They veil themselves from the glory of the face of God.
But why?
In Ezekiel’s vision as he looks upon the throne of God he sees something odd: the one seated on the throne has the appearance of one a son of man—a human being. But why does the one on the throne look like a man? Christian theology must answer: because the second person of the Trinity is a man–Jesus of Nazareth.
Gregory the Great (6th century) describes Ezekiel’s vision like this:
“We should observe how the order is maintained… For above holy men still living in the body are the angels, and above the angels are superior angelic powers closer to God, and above the powers is…the man Christ Jesus.”9
That which is most exalted, even above all the angels, rulers, and thrones is the humiliated, crucified man of Golgotha. That is the stumbling block. The Exalted One is the Crucified One.
The the highest is also the lowest. And it is highest by being the lowest.
This is why the angels hide their faces. It’s not simply because God’s glory is so much higher than the glory of the angels (though it is). It’s that the way it is higher is precisely in that it is lower. As Bonhoeffer says, “God glorifies himself in the human being.”10
But angels aren’t the only ones to encounter God’s immediate presence. Elijah and Moses also see God in his glory, and they both do so on the top of mountains.
Moses is on the mountain of the Lord and he asks to see God’s glory. God tells him that he cannot look on his face and live, but that he will pass before Moses while Moses is in the cleft of the rock. God covers the cleft with his hand so that Moses can only see his backside.
Moses sees not the face, but the backside of God. Martin Luther notes that “the backside” (or “posterioria” in Latin) is the shameful side of God. Luther then suggests something provocative. What is the shameful “backside” of God except the cross of Jesus? Moses sees the lowliness of God, but in that lowliness he sees God as he truly is. Moses sees Jesus: He sees God in shame, dishonor, and suffering. He sees the Crucified God.
But Elijah also encounters God on a mountain (perhaps the same one):
“A great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice. And when Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.” (1 Kgs 19:11–13).
God comes in a still small voice. Not in the thundering power of the earthquake or the wind, and not in the glory of the fire. God comes in weakness because this is how God always comes to us.
But there is a difference between the stories of Moses and Elijah.
Elijah veils his face just like the angels do. He cannot bear to look on the one who comes in the weakness of the still small voice. But Moses does not. Moses speaks to God face to face as a man speak to his friend. Moses only veils his face with the Israelites, but with God he takes the veil off.
Moses knows that the truth of God’s glory is that he is humble. Moses knows (somehow, someway) that God is the God-human. Moses unveils his own face and the face he sees looking back at him is the face of Jesus of Nazareth. That’s God’s glory.
The question posed to us is whether or not we will veil our face when we are confronted by the cross. The cross is too much for us to take in because we expect God’s “purple” to be higher than us. But God’s royal purple robes are lower than us, and that’s the block we stumble over. This stumbling stone is precisely what creates faith in us.
Will we veil our faces in his presence or will we take our veils off?
In 2 Corinthians Paul tells us what we are called to do: “And we all, with unveiled faces, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another…” (2 Cor. 3:18).
But here is the the good news of the gospel: Even if we veil our faces in the presence of this lowly king, he still meets with us. He will continue to meet with us until the veil is removed from our face. He did it for Elijah, and he will do it for you.
The gospel of Luke tells us that Moses and Elijah both met Jesus on a mountain, the mount of transfiguration. Jesus appears in his glory before Peter, James, and John and there he is with both Moses and Elijah. Jesus speaks with the two prophets about his departure, his exodus, his crucifixion. His lowliness.
This is his “backside.” This is the “still small voice.” And on the mount of transfiguration both Moses and Elijah turn to the Lord with unveiled faces because God has turned toward them in his meekness.
The veil that covers our face is our own embarrassment over the fact that God is this humble, this lowly.
Take off the veil like Moses did. Turn to the Lord today. But even if you delay taking off your veil like Elijah, the promise we are given is that one day it will be removed and you will see the Lord high and exalted and your knees will bow.
But your knees will not bow in terror or fear, they will not bow merely because he is so much higher than you are, but because he is so much lower. Your knees will bow because the God you will see is that God whose knees are already bowed down in order to wash your feet.
And when you bend down to meet him there, the veil will finally be removed. But not until you meet him down low.
Or as Maggie Ross writes, “Behold the God who is infinitely more humble than those who pray to him, more stripped, more emptied, more self-outpouring…The scandal of the incarnation is not that we are naked before Emmanuel, God with us, but God is naked before us.”11
Quoted in John Behr, John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel.
My recounting of Kierkegaard’s story is loosely based off an essay by Stanley Hauerwas, “The Interpretation of Scripture: Why Discipleship is Required.”
These are my ad hoc terms. They may prove to be unhelpful.
Robert Jenson, Lutheran Slogans: Use and Abuse, pp. 40—41 (emphasis added).
And if I might be so bold to suggest that we read his last few words as holding a double meaning. God’s presence is “in our face” in that it is right in front of us, but it is also “in our face” in that Christ is filling all things with himself and, so revealing himself in our own faces. Looking into the faces of other human beings, especially the poor and the suffering, is a revelation of the face of God.
I would love it if I just coined this word. History will tell.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Berlin: 1932-1933, DBW 12, pp. 347—348.
The diagrams are mine, but I think they are faithful to Bonhoeffer’s words.
Chris E.W. Green, Surprised by God, p. 22.
Martin Luther, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church
Quoted in Robert Jenson, The Triune Story.
DBW 12, p. 355.
Maggie Ross, Writing the Icon of the Heart, p. 11.
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