The Hidden God: Luther, Philosophy, and Political Theology by Marius Timmann Mjaaland (review)

Marius Mjaaland has written an important book on Luther's Hidden God and the nature of modernity. This work differs from other approaches because it adopts a genealogical perspective, uses a variation of Carl Schmitt's research program into secularization, and focuses entirely on the uses Luther puts to the Hidden God to discuss Luther's political theology. This combined approach is what "political theology" means in the book, a coinage of Schmitt's that is only somewhat related to other uses of political theology that seek to show how theological positions may have a political effect. Mjaaland's work shows how the political is not purely secular but instead is theological in ways that Luther can criticize. In sum, "Luther thus draws the hiddenness of God into the praxis of reading and interpreting texts, as a condition of understanding" (173).

Mjaaland establishes the hiddenness of God as this pre-condition for thought, whether political or theological, in distinction from other modern ways of interpreting Luther's discourse on the Hidden God. These other traditions, associated with the names of Eberhard Jüngel, Karl Barth, and Gerhard Ebeling, reduce any divine hidden-ness to the revealed God. While these approaches to the Hidden God are undertaken for theological purposes, Mjaaland also objects to assimilating Luther too readily to the various positions on contingent and absolute power in late medieval theology. Yet another trajectory allies Luther with German mysticism or the Pseudo-Dionysian tradition; for these interpreters, Mjaaland has more sympathy. While Mjaaland's case is sharply presented, readers devoted to these alternatives may desire more substantial evidence and discussion of the positions Mjaaland sets aside.

To show that the Hidden God is the condition for political and theological thought in Luther, Mjaaland takes up the distinction between God in and outside of Scripture that Luther employs against Erasmus in the bound will debate. This distinction shows that one can neither abandon the Hidden God skeptically, acting as if hiddenness does not exist and adopting the motto "that which is above us, doesn't concern us," nor can one attempt to tame the Hidden God by reducing it to God in scripture. Mjaaland shows that the Hidden God as precondition of theology and the political alike does not rest in grasping, writing, or otherwise fixing the character of God or of political life. Such efforts are fleeting at best according to Mjaaland's Luther. For Mjaaland, God's hiddenness always destroys, destabilizes, and undermines the secular and religious alike. Thus, for Mjaaland the Hidden God is a genuine continuation of Luther's theologia crucis.

The Hidden God as the pre-condition of all thought gives way to a surprisingly incomplete discussion of God's grace as a gift. Mjaaland claims that the unconditionality of the Hidden God is a kind of pure or free gift. Owing to the substantial discussion of gift in contemporary theology and philosophy, sometimes directly dealing with Luther's work, Mjaaland's argument here deserves further development, especially since Luther prefers promise to gift in most of his articulations of God's graciousness.

In the course of this work, Mjaaland considers Luther's Heidelberg Disputation, his dispute with Erasmus on the bound will, and writings concerning the peasants' revolt. Mjaaland makes considerable use of the work of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and other philosophers to aid his argument. Written in the style of continental philosophy, this work should be considered by Luther scholars of all stripes, especially those interested in Luther's theology and its relationship to modernity. Mjaaland's approach to this relationship is especially valuable because he has shown how Luther's use of the Hidden God has been overlooked as a factor in the formation of modernity.