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6 Breakthrough: From the Hidden to the Revealed God Contemporary Questions Luther, like most of his contemporaries, assumed as given something that is not a given any longer: that God exists. Under that assumption one could discuss where God was revealed or to what extent God remains hidden. At present many people are not curious about God at all, whether hidden or revealed. It is often said that Luther was concerned about whether God is gracious, while today the question is simply whether God is. The question of a merely existent but otherwise irrelevant God, however, has been settled. From that point of view classic atheism has long since ceased to be a problem. It appears, we might say, to have dissolved along with belief in God. When aggressive advocates for atheism speak up nowadays their interest is not so much in God as in battling religion and piety. Religions have too often misused the name of God for their own inhuman purposes for us to say that this protest is unjustified. Can Luther’s distinction between God in God’s hiddenness and in God’s revealedness be of any help in this situation? The Reformer spoke of a “hidden” God. That could mean that God was still “present,” even though hidden. But today’s sense is more of an “absence” of God, which can, but need not, imply God’s “death.” It is perhaps still conceivable for our contemporaries that the idea of God—in whatever manner and in whatever unexpected form—might return to human consciousness, and in light of neuro-physiological processes might even be found to fit within that consciousness. That this idea could have found a historically tangible and normative interpretation two thousand years ago in the person of Jesus of Nazareth is an idea that is difficult to accept today. Does Luther’s theology offer some approaches to the idea that God could make Godself present, and thus “revealed” today—perhaps in a way that transcends all previous images of the world and of God? If God exists in hiddenness—or as “absent”—we can only know of God or at least suspect something about God if God occasionally or to a certain degree 101 102 The Theology of Martin Luther shows the divine self. The religions speak of such self-revelations of deities or the divine, though the Buddhists prefer to speak of awakening rather than of transcendent existence. For Christianity as a whole the question is why it should be only the man from Nazareth who makes Awakening possible, and not Buddha Shakyamuni; why Christians can trust that Jesus Christ is the one in whom God reveals Godself, and not Vishnu or Krishna or the message of the prophet Muhammad. Does Luther have an answer for that? Finally, in this connection we should listen to another objection from classical atheism. If in the figure of Jesus Christ a hidden, almighty God is really made present, how can we explain all the misery that fills the world—the immeasurable misfortune of individual human beings, natural catastrophes like droughts, earthquakes, tsunamis, and the infinite suffering human beings have imposed on each other and continue to bring about? Luther speaks about sin and the wrath of God. How can his answers take us forward in the face of these questions when, in fact, they only lead to new questions? How, given the assumption of the existence of an almighty and loving God, can evil and sin exist; how could there be an “original sin”? How does God’s all-powerful love jibe with the idea of a wrathful God whom we know not only from the Bible but also in the history of religions, and whom we are tempted to interpret as a projection of human passions? The distinction between the hidden and the revealed God seems further burdened in a twofold respect: the suspicion of dualism and the idea of a determinism that cannot be theologically justified. The very terminology, “the revealed God/the hidden God” suggests that we should think here of a twofold, self-contradictory will in God, if not of two different deities in Marcion’s sense. But the hidden God who, impenetrable to human perception and immune to human influence, fatally determines and shapes all events seems to leave no room for a loving will in God that would contradict that other. Is the Reformer’s thought lacking all stringency here? Hence it is not surprising...

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