Far from being unable to escape God, there is a very real contingent of non-believers, and I would count myself among their number, who are unable by any means to discover him, who seek and do not find, who knock and receive, as it were, no answer. This strange phenomenon is known as the problem of divine hiddenness. If there is a God, then simply, why is he hidden from so many of us so much of the time? I have looked in poetry, I've looked in the Psalms, I've looked in Job, I've looked in Ecclesiastes, I've looked in Dostoevsky, I read C.S. Lewis, I listened to worship music, I prayed, I studied the gospel, I even got an actual degree in theology from a university. And nothing, nothing, not once, not nearly, not ever, not even briefly, have I experienced anything that speaks to the existence of a God in the universe. If theism is to offer a sufficient account of reality, then it must offer an account of what J. L. Schellenberg has famously labelled non-resistant non-belief.
SPEAKER_03That's Alex O'Connor powerfully putting the problem of the hiddenness of God. And my point for this video is that we must make sure that the hiddenness of God is a problem, and that's why we need Jesus. My name's Glenn Scrivener from Speak Life. We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus, including this problem, the problem of divine hiddenness, made famous by J.L. Schellenberg in his book from 1993, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason. He says there's a problem that there are non-resistant non-believers in God. And if God were all loving as we are led to believe by Christians anyway, then the existence of non-resistant non-believers is not what you would expect to see if Christianity is true. I want to press into the problem of non-resistant non-believers. And I want to leave us with the issue that there is in fact a problem, and that is why we need Jesus. Now, this video is only short. There is a much longer conversation that I have with the agnostic philosopher Joe Folly. We've just released it on our channel. It's a fantastic conversation. Do go and check it out. Joe Folly, aka Unsolicited Advice, and I. We speak about morality and evil and consciousness and the Tom Holland thesis, and we begin by talking about the problem of divine hiddenness. Here is how Joe sets up the problem.
SPEAKER_02The kind of divine hiddenness problems is sometimes known, uh, comes from a thinker called Jale Schellenberg. And uh he puts this forward uh as kind of an analogous problem to the problem of evil. So he effectively he draw he's drawing upon the idea of an all-loving God. So if you don't think that God is all loving, then it's just not a problem at all. He effectively argues that if God is all loving and desires a relationship with us, and he would desire a relationship with us were he all loving, as part of kind of the cons the the constituents of or of of of being all loving is desiring a relationship with with every being. And if that were the case, well, a very plausible precondition for having a relationship with a person is them knowing that you're there, right? Like it's you know, it sounds very strange to say out loud because it seems so obvious, right? So you know, I couldn't be meaningfully said to have a relationship with someone if my entire connection with them consisted of me hiding in cupboards around their house or something like that. I mean, we we would quite rightly say that's a very strange sort of sort of relationship and not a relationship at all, in fact. Schellenberg's argument largely focuses on non-resistant non-believers, so people who don't, you know, are not opposed to the idea of of there being a God, uh either epistemically or emotionally, but uh to whom God has not presented himself.
SPEAKER_03As ever, Joe Foley brings crystal clarity to the subject. I'm really grateful for that. What I want to do just in this video, we're not gonna cover everything about the problem of divine hiddenness, of course not, but I want to make three clarifications about the problem. I want to make two intensifications of the problem and deal with those. And I want to make one response. We're gonna go in three, two, one. Here are the three clarifications. If we're going to have a problem with non-resistant non-believers, let's just press into those three issues. And the first thing we need to press into is is there a problem with divine hiddenness? Here's what I say in my conversation with Joe. You began by saying this is not a problem if God is not good. And I think I think that's that's kind of where I sit with the the hiddenness issue. Like I don't want to solve the problem so much as to give you grounds for actually asking the question with the kind of seriousness that I that I think we do naturally ask the question. Um I don't want heaven to be empty because I I want you to be able to shake your fist. Right, right. And if if there's a if there's a sense of where are you, um, that does sound quite resonant with scripture. It does sound quite resonant with the sorts of things that uh you know that the teacher in Ecclesiastes, you know, might might uh say or the psalmist might say in the in in the middle of the Bible. And so I think my first move with with the hiddenness of God is not to try and solve the problem. And this is this is similar to actually the the problem of evil that I want to get to as well. Um I want people to be able to have a problem with evil, and I don't think people sufficiently have a problem with evil, and and really I want to invite them to Jesus to have that problem. I think the same thing with hiddenness. I think the felt absence of God is such a problem that I almost think it it would be an illegitimate solution to this problem to say, ah, but there's X, Y, and Z. And when you add X, Y, and Z together, it outbalances, you know, and so therefore it is entirely justified and there's no real problem with hiddenness. Does that make sense? We feel the issue of the hiddenness of God as a problem. Is that what you would expect to see on atheism? If the heavens are empty, if there's no such thing as heavens, and if we are not souls who are made for this kind of relationship, who are feeling the lack of this kind of relationship, then why do any of us experience the problem of the hiddenness of God as a problem? That's the first of three clarifications I want to make. If there's a problem with non-resistant non-believers, let's make sure it is a problem. And I think it's properly a problem if there is such a loving God who seeks communion with us. And I don't want to minimize the problem of the hiddenness of God, because I don't want to minimize the goodness of the God who genuinely desires communion with us. According to the Bible, we are intended for face-to-face communion with the Lord Jesus Christ in the bond of the Spirit as he brings us before the Father. And I don't experience that the way I want to experience that right now, and I'm a Christian, and I feel that as a problem, and throughout the Bible, people feel that as a problem. So the last thing I want to do is solve the problem, because to solve the problem really would be to wish away that there is such a God who desires such communion with us. I want to pay attention to the problem. And my issue with atheism is it doesn't allow me to have a sufficiently great problem with divine hiddenness. That's clarification one of three. We need to press into is there a problem of non-resistant non-believers? The second clarification we need to make is are there such things as non-resistant non-believers? Here's what I say to Joan. I do want to think about non-resistant non-belief, because I think I'm resistant all the time. You know, and as you're saying, you know, it's it's it's a problem for for believers as as well as non-believers. Um but I I think every time I hold a grudge, every time there's unforgiveness nurtured in my heart, every time I yell at my kids, right, every time I'm impatient, every every time I'm not walking the way of Jesus, I think that genuinely costs me in terms of my experience of Jesus in the moment. And and so if it's possible for me as a paid-up Christian, professional Christian, professional God botherer, if it's if it's possible for my resistance of God costing me a you know a certainly a sense of the personal nearness of this God, um, surely that scales to everybody else. I am continually resisting the way of Jesus with every selfish act, with every proud thought, with every slander, with every arrogance, with every foolish thing I do, with every impatience, with all my lust and anger and greed and self-sufficiency, I have a stubborn, ingrained anti-Christ tendency, actually, that constantly costs me a relationship with God. That constantly costs me a sense of the nearness and a sense of that communion with Jesus by the Spirit. I am not non-resistant. How much less non-resistant is Joe Folly or Alex O'Connor or anyone else out there in the world? In the Christian story, humanity is so resistant to God that when he shows up as love incarnate, spreads his arms to the world, we think, good, and we pin him to that piece of wood so that we can do away with him. That is the decisive revelation of who God is. It's also the decisive revelation of who we are. We are not eager seekers after God. We do what Adam did, which was hide in the garden, as God comes walking in the cool of the day. It is God who is always the seeker, us much less so. So that's the second clarification to push into. Is there a problem with divine hiddenness? Are we really non-resistant? And are we non-resistant non-believers? Because I think that belief is something that is baked into our human experience in every waking moment of our lives. Here's what I say to Joe. What do you think Schellenberg would say if I just said to him, um, you're having an experience of God right now? Or if I say to you, like, what what do you think this is? You know, here we are. We are these lightning strikes of magic meat. I'm a center of personal consciousness, you're a center of personal consciousness, we're having a conversation that uses reason, reason, rhetoric, emotion, all these immaterial kinds of capacities and realities. Um, you you you bring that alongside the scriptures that say, in God we live and move and have our being. Why isn't this a divine experience? And why isn't this a quite profound and remarkable divine experience? Now Joe has a really good question at this point. If I live and move and have my being in God, is that really a personal kind of a relationship? That that seems like an impersonal thing. But the Christian position is not that God is less personal, it's that we are less personal. If God is like Shakespeare and we are like Hamlet, then Hamlet's incomprehension at Shakespeare is not because Shakespeare is less personal than Hamlet is. Hamlet is less personal than Shakespeare is. But maybe it is the nature of the case that there is something unavoidable about God and something invisible about God, just as it is the nature of the case that there is something unavoidable as well as invisible about Shakespeare to Hamlet. And Hamlet in a very profound way is never not having an experience of Shakespeare. And I don't think any human being is never not having an experience of the triune God. Now, is that an experience of close, warm, face-to-face fellowship as a friend with the living God? No. But we'll get to how we can have that close relationship in a minute. Those are the three clarifications. If there's a problem with non-resistant non-believers, let's make sure it's a problem. Let's question whether there are such non-resistant people. And let's also question whether there are non-believers. I think we all are in the realm of belief in every aspect of our lives. We are all having a divine experience right now. Those are the three clarifications. Here are two intensifications of the problem of evil. I was very grateful that Joe brought up this question about the spread of faiths. It's one way of intensifying this problem of divine hiddenness. Let's hear him make the point.
SPEAKER_02And you know, you can frame the problem in a number of ways, right? So perhaps one of the most uh striking ways of phrasing this problem is to talk about uh the geographical uh spread of different faiths. So one way you could, I think uh a guy called Stephen Mateson has put it like this more recently, um which is that imagine that uh you know we know that for any particular religion it has noticeable geographical bounds. So you you could do this with Islam, you could do this with Christianity, you could do this with particular sex of Christianity, right? So if you if you're born in Rome, you're much more likely to be a Catholic uh than if you're born in Moscow or St. Petersburg or Berlin. You know, the the the faith, even within faiths, is is geographically unevenly distributed. And Maton says, well, it's sort of not on the face of it, it seems very implausible that people's resistance to God will be so unevenly distributed, right? Like for instance, you know, people in Sweden have one of the highest rates of non-belief in the world. Do we just think that it is of the constitution of a Swede that they are they are less likely to be open to a relationship with God? Are they less deserving by virtue of their birth or something like that?
SPEAKER_03That's how Joe Folly talks about the spread of faith. Uh here is how Alex O'Connor puts that question when he was in debate with the Connectolis.
SPEAKER_01Why is a person's geographical place of birth a statistically reliable indicator of how likely they are to be safe? This is Stephen Mateson's argument. The populace of Connecticut is around 70% Christian, let alone theistic, whereas the populace of Thailand is 95% Buddhist, and therefore at best five percent theistic. I'm told by St. Paul in Romans that, quote, what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities, his eternal power, his divine nature, and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. Why then should I expect this God to provide more compelling evidence to those in New England than to those in Southeast Asia? Or are the tie just orders of magnitude more naturally incredulous? And if so, why? How lucky Cliff and Stewart must feel to reside in a stronghold of the one true religion, given just how much variance there is out in the world.
SPEAKER_03How fortunate that we have access to the true and living God, and so many in the world are left in ignorance. That's the way that uh Alex frames the issue. Now let's think about this question of the spread of beliefs, because if the spread of beliefs makes a certain worldview more likely than another, well, you can't go past Christianity, actually. Christianity really is the only truly global faith. Uh Islam, 95% of Muslims live in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, 88% of Buddhists live in East Asia, 92% of Hindus live in India or South Asia. Compare that to the fact that 25% of Christians live in Central or South America, 22% in Africa, 15% in Asia, 12% in North America, and 20% in Europe. Christianity is head and shoulders above the rest when it comes to a truly global worldview. If the spread of a global worldview commends itself to us, then you can't go past Christianity. And interestingly, the spread of faith is to be contrasted with the narrowness of the modern secular worldview. The modern secular worldview is a post-Christian development that is overwhelmingly represented by white Europeans and the Anglosphere. If global spread is an advantage, then it's an advantage for Christianity over and above other faiths and over atheism. But a second intensification of the problem of divine hiddenness comes when you consider judgment. Are we really saying that somebody who has never heard the gospel before is going to be judged according to their knowledge of a specific doctrine called the gospel and potentially consigned to outer darkness for all eternity when they could have been nothing other than ignorant of that gospel? Now, if that were the case, I do think that would be a significant problem for Christianity. But for me, that is that is not where I go with my theology. Where I go with my theology is to trust Jesus. And my claim is not to know where people go up or down at the end. My claim is to know the person who makes such a call, and you will not find a more qualified judge than Jesus. The judge who stepped down from the judgment seat into the dock, gave himself the harshest sentence there could ever be, in order that no one need ever go to hell. I don't know who goes up and down at the end of all things. I don't claim to know. What I do trust is the person who is making that call. And in the words of Genesis chapter 18, will not the judge of all the earth do what is right? And while we're thinking about judgment, let's think about the alternative to Jesus being the judge. You have two alternatives to that. Somebody else is the judge, or there is no judge. If somebody else is the judge of all things, then that person will not have as global an influence as Jesus, and I don't think they could have as great a compassion as Jesus. Like I say, the judge who is Jesus is the judge who has been judged for us. I don't know anyone else who's even pretending to be the judge, who has even pretended to have that kind of qualification. Is the judge of all the world somebody other than Jesus? I don't think that's an improvement. Or is there no judgment at all? In which case the injustices of this world will never be compensated. But if there isn't such a thing as cosmic injustice, why do we feel the injustice? I think injustice and inequalities is a problem, but it's not a problem if there is no judge. So once again, this is not about solving the problem. It's more a case of ensuring that we are naming the problem rightly, and I do think that Jesus enables you to name the problem of injustice rightly, and in Jesus you have a judge you can trust. So we've thought about three clarifications, two intensifications, and let's think about one kind of response we can make to this problem of divine hiddenness. Sorin Kierkegaard wrote the parable of the king and the pauper as a way of making sense of the hiddenness of God as a way of him approaching us. Because the Christian story is that God is like Shakespeare, we are like Hamlet. But then God writes himself into the story as though William Shakespeare becomes a character in Denmark in order to approach Hamlet. Jesus is that kind of flesh and blood person who we can know. But why does he show up in such humility? Well, Kierkegaard told the story of the prince and the pauper. There was once a king who set his affections on a bride. We've done an animated version of the story if you go to 321cour.com. I'll tell you about details of 321course.com in a minute. But in episode eight, we retell the story. There was once a king who set his affections on a pauper, and we don't know why he loved her, but if he is to woo his bride, he has a problem. Because with all royal prerogatives, if he shows up, then she has no choice really in actually giving her hand in marriage. It would seem like a royal summons more than a proposition of marriage. So he lives the life of a pauper with her, and he really has to get his hands dirty. He really has to share in her kind of life to win her trust. And then on their wedding day, it is revealed that he was this royal figure all along. He had shared in her kind of life in all its ignominy so that she can share in all his life, in its royal dignity. And the cloaking of such royal glory underneath the robes of a commoner is so that the commoner can have this kind of relationship with royalty. And Kierkegaard says, think about it. If the royal figure wants to have a commoner as his bride, he has to do this. If he is to seek her consent, then he has to woo her by stooping to her level. And therefore, think about it. Maybe it is the nature of the case that if the God of the universe wants to have a relationship with you, he has to approach you in just this way. It's worth considering. Anyway, we've thought about three clarifications, two intensifications, and one possible response to divine hiddenness. Do you want to do 3-2-1? You can encounter this very parable in episode 8 of 3-2-1. Why don't you go to 321course.com to discover life according to Jesus? We'll go through all this stuff in much greater detail across eight different videos. We'll explain Jesus' vision for God, Jesus' vision for the world, Jesus' vision for you. And it all ends with us being one with the Son of God, having that relationship that we were intended to have. You might consider yourself a non-resistant non-believer. Well then, there's nothing stopping you. Go to threetemoncourse.com, start an account, and we'd love to show you life according to Jesus. Now, if you've got this far in the video, we'd love you to like it, to share it around the place, and give the channel a subscribe so we can catch you on the next video. God bless.