Cross and Cosmos (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion) by John D. Caputo

Author:John D. Caputo [Caputo, John D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780253043153
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2019-07-23T04:00:00+00:00

9

DEUS ABSCONDITUS

A God Who Deconstructs Himself in His Ipseity

Thesis 20. A theologian of the cross calls a thing what it actually is. Martin Luther, Heidelberg Disputation

WE COME NOW TO A PIVOTAL POINT OF this analysis, following Luther to a place he did not intend to lead, to that point, which Luther himself exposed and laid bare under the name of the Deus absconditus, which poses, I propose, the true test of a theologian worthy of the name.

Deus Absconditus

As Alastair McGrath points out, one of the most vexing exegetical problems in Luther scholarship is that Luther uses the notion of Deus absconditus in two different ways.1

In the Heidelberg Disputation, he means that God is revealed in a concealed way, so that the wisdom and power of God are hidden from human wisdom under the cover of suffering, foolishness, and weakness. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2:8, had the rulers of this world, the satanic forces in the world, known they were laying hands on the Lord of Glory, they would not have crucified him (which actually would have frustrated the divine plan). But they were proved the fools while the wisdom of God was made manifest. In the Heidelberg Disputation, we remain within the logic of 1 Corinthians 1–2, which we discussed in chapter 1, in which God is revealed sub contraria specie, under a contrary appearance, beneath his opposite. Here the concealed God is identical with the revealed God; the two ideas are inherently correlated by a logic of reversal, and there is a sustaining dialectical tension between what we perceive with our senses (a crucified body) and what we see with the eyes of faith (God). God is concealed under his opposite or inverted image, which is why the theologians of glory are deceived into calling the good bad and the bad good. To say that God will use the weak to shame the strong makes sound, if paradoxical, sense, if you know how to read the story. While posing a quandary that tests our faith and confounds the world, the first sense of the Deus absconditus is not a contradiction in terms; indeed, it has a hermeneutical key, a legendum, where the power, wisdom, and being of God are coded to the corresponding form of weakness, foolishness, and nullity, and it is faith that holds the key (1 Cor 2:6).

In the second sense of the Deus absconditus, in The Bondage of the Will, the debate with Erasmus (1525), Luther means an absolutely hidden God, which is to be distinguished from the revealed God and is not keyed to anything we know. Luther here distinguishes the God who is “preached, revealed, offered” in Revelation from the God who “hides Himself, and wills to be unknown to us.”2 In the first sense, God is revealed in the concealment, and the two are one. In the second sense, God is, as it were, re-concealed behind the revelation and this concealed God is—well, God only knows! In the second sense, God is hidden not only from human wisdom but also from divine revelation.

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