Text and Talk
March 22, 2025
Jim Roseman
The Hiddenness of God and Intellectual Virtue
God “is there and he is not silent,” Francis Schaeffer declared.[1] If this is true, why does he seem so hard to see or hear? Is there something in us that occludes our vision or deafens our ears? God’s hiddenness, apparent or real, is for many one of the biggest intellectual barriers to belief in divine transcendence. We will consider briefly for whom divine hiddenness is a problem, what the problem is, and then how intellectual virtue might be related to the problem. Along the way and in conclusion we will make some suggestions on how to overcome the hiddenness of God or at least live in the mystery of His hiddenness.
Divine Hiddenness
There is a sense in which divine hiddenness is only or primarily a problem for those who already believe in God or those who are in search of God. In this sense it’s a problem when the believer does not feel the presence of God or viscerally know God in an experiential way; or when there are seasons when he does not. This can create a crisis of belief. In this sense, it is a problem for the searcher, too. The one who longs to know God is there but his apparent absence becomes a stumbling block to belief.
Divine hiddenness is not a problem for believers and searchers alone, however. There is a sense in which it’s a problem for both believers and unbelievers alike. For believers because they must defend their belief in God; for unbelievers as an argument against belief, e.g.: If there really is an all-powerful, all loving God why doesn’t he show himself? His absence seems to be an argument against his existence.
The following will, to some extent, address divine hiddenness in both of these senses.
The Problem
Professor Michael Rae at Notre Dame states the problem this way.
The problem of divine hiddenness starts with the supposition that God exists. There is no problem (for adults) about the hiddenness of Santa Claus, or of unicorns, or leprechauns, or the like. We simply don’t believe in these sorts of things. The problem of divine hiddenness arises under the supposition—genuine, or “for the sake of argument”—that God exists. The problem gains traction because our concept of God is the concept of a being that we ought to encounter—tangibly and vividly, it would seem—at some point in our lives.
[T]here is no real problem of the hiddenness of abstract objects. [E.g., mathematical objects, like numbers, geometric shapes; properties like redness, equality; concepts like justice, beauty, perfect circle; etc.] Nobody says, “Well, if there are such things, why don’t they show themselves once in a while?” They’re just not that sort of thing. God, however, is supposed to be the sort of being who would show up once in a while. But almost none of us ever really see God, hear God, touch God, or encounter God in any other palpable way. Even those who say that God speaks to them in prayer don’t usually mean that they hear voices—or have any other experience apart from the felt conviction that some particular idea they’ve had is, in some sense, “from the Lord.” That, in a nutshell, is the problem.[2]
The core problem, Rae suggests, is that we expect certain things from an all good, all loving, all powerful God, and one of them is that “evidence of his existence should be conclusive” and “experience of his love and presence should be widely available,” and these expectations don’t seem readily to be met. Thus, in the first case, evidence, we might presume that a lack of it suggests God does not exist; or, in the second case, experience of God’s love and presence, we might assume a lack of these experiences suggest God is not all good and loving (at least not as we normally think of love – say like a good parent) or perhaps not all powerful (in this sense, the problem is similar to the problem of evil).[3]
So how should we think about this problem?
To begin we should recognize that just because we have certain expectations of God doesn’t mean they are valid. Just because God might seem hidden to us does not mean he actually is—maybe we see him but don’t recognize what we see to be him or his presence. And even if God is hidden, and perhaps even at times intentionally hides himself from us, does not mean he does not have good reasons for doing so. So, even if we have the expectation that God should show himself to us in certain ways (say overt miracles all the time or a burning bush experience to each of us to make sure we know he is there), does not necessarily mean 1. That he is not actually there all the time, nor 2. That he is obligated to show himself to us in specific ways that meet with our expectations or have discourse with us in ways that match with our expectations. It is certainly possible that we do not see God or hear his voice (at least metaphorically) because we are impaired in some way (similar to cognitive impairment) or that we resist (like a moral problem or a clash of will). But even if our expectations are not altogether on target the problem still lingers and it warrants an attempt at answers.
The Apostle Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome that our biggest problem is not that God is hidden but that we attempt to hide from him – that is, hide from the evidence that is obvious. We are without excuse because we suppress the truth.
The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness,19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. (Rom. 1:18–21; New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, emphasis added.)
This problem is one of will, not insufficient evidence. We don’t see reality to be as it actually is; we want it our way. And this is not just a problem for some but for all of us—remember, Paul is writing to Christians in Rome not to non-believers. Part of our initial and ongoing problem is one of will. Notice here, for example, what the great contemporary philosopher of mind Thomas Nagel says:
I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It is not just that I do not believe in God, and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I do not want there to be a God; I do not want the universe to be like that. . .. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. (The Last Word, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009; pp. 130–131)[4]
We should keep this response in mind. As St. Paul says, we are all deeply infected with the same disease. (For an explication of the Pauline emphasis in addressing divine hiddenness, see William Wainwright, “Jonathan Edwards and the Hiddenness of God.”[5])
Theologians, philosophers, and mystics have acknowledged that God indeed is hidden, that he even intentionally hides himself, and does so for our own good in the light of his purposes. Some, for example, have said he does this because to make himself so fully and easily known would in effect coerce belief and allegiance to him; and he wants us to want him as much as he wants us. Thus, he hides himself somewhat to ensure our freedom to embrace him. His hiddenness is part of “soul-making,” says Michael J. Murray.[6] In a similar way St. John of the Cross, in his Dark Night of The Soul, stresses that divine hiddenness is God’s way of shaping and transforming our will to his.[7]
But I want to focus is on what the late philosopher Paul K. Moser calls “cognitive idolatry”[8] and what I will call “cognitive confusion.” Paul Moser sets the stage of cognitive idolatry as follows:
Sooner or later, philosophers [and I would also say scientists and all of us caught up in our present culture of disbelief due to latent if not declared forms of materialistic naturalism] face the question whether God exists. In doing so, they join the rest of humanity in considering an issue of first importance. Always beware, however, of philosophers bearing theological gifts, as such gifts come with a high price. The price influences one’s mindset, in particular one’s expectations, regarding God in ways that may be unexamined or unsustainable. It is important to ask, then: What are our expectations regarding God? These expectations largely determine our commitments regarding God, and they may say more about us, including our own values, than about God. In addition, these expectations may prevent us from having the needed eyes to see and ears to hear genuine revelation from God.
Do we expect certain things of God (if God exists) such that those things evidently fail to obtain, thereby calling God’s existence or authority into question? Do we, for instance, expect God to entertain us cognitively, with signs and wonders or with dreams and ecstatic experiences? At any rate, what, if anything, grounds our expectations regarding God? Perhaps our expectations clash with God’s own aim to bring us freely to acknowledge and gratefully to trust God (rather than false gods) as the ultimate source of our flourishing.[9]
Part of the way cognitive idolatry shows up is in the reduction of God to some thin object to fit our preferred methods of proving or disproving, knowing or declaring not-knowledge. Professor Moser again:
Thin theism, focusing on theoretical knowledge that God exists, can obscure the importance of knowing God as the personal Lord who calls us to a change in lordship, mindset, and moral direction. Oversimplification of God (for example, as merely sentimental, friendly, harsh, or distant) can be similarly obscuring, in a way that enables us to make a self-controllable idol of “God” (where “God” is not the true God). So even devout theism can be idolatrous. For our own good, we cannot master God as just another undemanding object of human knowledge, as a manipulable possession, or a meritorious reward. . .. God as known reveals God’s knowledge of us and thereby seeks to transform us in love, with respect for our freedom. Our knowledge about God and our quest for it threaten to become idols if divorced from reconciling, filial knowledge of God as Lord.[10]
The main point here for my purposes is this: part of what we treat as an intellectual barrier in God’s hiddenness may not legitimately be hiddenness but rather our own hubris about the fact that God does not meet our intellectual expectations. We may set up false expectations and when they are not met, we declare God either not to exist at all or that he is not all powerful or all loving, and thus not worthy to be God. In other words, we want to define the rules; and if God doesn’t play by our rules we declare him out of the game.
Now, less harsh, to what I call cognitive confusion. On this topic, among others, we are a confused lot in our day. On this topic because we have established a “set of rules” for knowing and seeing God so that if we don’t see him or hear him on our terms, we are sure he is not there. Let me use some comments by Roger Scruton to illustrate. We don’t see God, or we don’t hear God because we try to interpret his presence like an acoustical scientist interprets music. Assessing music in terms of acoustics it is not to address it as music at all, but merely as pitched sounds. Listen to how Scruton describes the difference.
Consider the simple theme that opens Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto. From the point of view of science this consists of a series of pitched sounds, one after the other, each identified by frequency. But we do not hear a sequence of pitched sounds. We hear a melody, which begins on the first note and moves upward from C to G, via E-flat, and then stepwise downward to the starting point. But somehow the movement hasn’t stopped, and Beethoven decides to nail it down with two emphatic dominant-tonic commas. Then comes an answering phrase, harmonized this time, and leading up to A-flat construed as a dissonant minor ninth on G. We hear a sudden increase in tension, and a strong gravitational force pulling that A-flat downward on the G, although the melody doesn’t rest there, since it is looking for the answer to the two dominant-tonic commas that we heard earlier, and it finds this answer in another pair of commas, though this time in the key of G.
You could go on describing these few bars for a whole book, and you won’t have exhausted all that they may contain by way of musical significance. The point I want to emphasize, however, is that you cannot describe what is going on in this theme without speaking of movement in musical space, of gravitational forces, of answering phrases and symmetries, of tension and release, and so on. In describing the music, you are not describing sounds heard in a sequence; you are describing a kind of action in musical space, in which things move up and down in response to each other against resisting fields of force. The fields of force order the one-dimensional space of music, in something like the way gravity orders the spaciotemporal continuum. In describing pitched sounds as music, we are situating them in another order of events than in the order of nature.[11]
Scruton is calling attention to a cognitive failure or confusion of sorts, by showing the difference between hearing music and hearing sounds. The difference between the language of music operating in musical space and the language of science operating in physical space.
There is a real sense, I believe, in which part of the reason we don’t see and hear God is because we are looking for and listening for the wrong things—or, perhaps better, we are reading the world and hearing the world in the wrong language. As Hamlet said to Horatio: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Part of why we don’t see and hear God in the world around us is we are cognitively confused. We have so taught ourselves to think, hear and describe reality in the “modern” way, we do not realize that the “pitched sounds” of God’s presence we hear is actually a symphony being played by God himself.
So how might we accept the notion that God is hidden somewhat, that at times he hides from us intentionally for our good and his purposes, and that we also contribute to the problem of his hiddenness with our own obstinacy as well as by having trained ourselves not to see and hear; and might there be anything we can do about it? From the Judeo-Christian perspective, we must first admit the heavens declare the Glory of God. And as St. Paul says, we are without excuse. But further we need to admit that to be cured of our willed blindness and deafness, we need God’s grace—the gift of grace. Yet while the scales fall from our eyes and our ears are fully opened by a gift of grace, we can also experience a measure of renewed grace by reconsidering how we pursue our intellectual life. To this end we now turn: the relation between God’s hiddenness and intellectual virtue.
Intellectual Virtue
Søren Kierkegaard’s reaction to the Enlightenment was focused heavily on its reductionist approach to knowledge, declaring that there is an objective place we humans can stand to judge and determine true knowledge. Kierkegaard was convinced that there is no such objective stance that can be taken by humans—there is no “view from nowhere.” Kierkegaard scholar C. Stephen Evans says Søren claims a form of what today is called “’virtue epistemology,’ which argues that an adequate account of knowledge must pay attention to the knower and the qualities good knowers have. One cannot expect people who are unethical to have a deep and penetrating understanding of the ethical. From this perspective, it seems less odd to hold that a person’s ability to grasp some religious truth might turn on the acquisition of a quality of humility more than a possession or lack of possession of evidence.”[12]
There has been a renewed focus on intellectual virtue in recent years. Professor W. Jay Wood shows this in his book Epistemology: Becoming Intellectually Virtuous.[13] I use Wood as our primary guide in the following, and William Abraham’s last chapter of Crossing the Threshold of Divine Revelation.[14]
What is it and how does intellectual virtue relate to the hiddenness of God and the overall question of the reasonableness of belief in God, particularly God as understood in a Christian perspective?
Ever since the Enlightenment period the epistemological project has been to establish models of knowing the world that are objective, disinterested, and universally applicable to ensure that we separate fact from opinion or real knowledge from superstition. The highest value in this approach is to achieve as much objectivity as we can so personal opinion and human affections don’t prejudice the results. There are certainly benefits to this approach. The goal of this approach is to admit as true knowledge what can be verified—from an objective standpoint. Pursuing this can be very helpful, particularly in science. The problem is, there is no truly objective stance. All facts must be interpreted, and many basic assumptions affect how we interpret them. And too often we either do not recognize our assumptions or admit them or scrutinize them, including ourselves, with the same rigor or require them to meet the same tests we otherwise demand. Indeed, our very cognitive faculties, even when functioning properly, are shaped by who we are and by our practices—like muscles are trained to respond in certain ways. The modernist epistemological models, with their notions of disinterestedness and objectivity seeks to rule out the importance of who the knower is and how we practice the pursuit of knowing. But there is “an old, indeed ancient, philosophical tradition that viewed epistemological excellence as an indispensable ingredient for a well-lived life. We achieve excellence in the intellectual life, according to this tradition, when we form within ourselves qualities like wisdom, prudence, understanding, intellectual humility, love of truth and similar traits—in short, as we embody intellectual virtues. … Thinking about epistemology as encompassing the pursuit of intellectual virtue, while presently unfashionable, was the dominant way of casting epistemological concerns in the writings of Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and others philosophers in the ancient and medieval tradition. Your intellectual life is important, according to these thinkers, for the simple reason that your very character, the kind of person you are and are becoming, is at stake.” (Wood, pp. 15-17) And of course who we are includes the concerns we have and what we deem significant; and the concerns and what is significant to us shape and are shaped by our emotions—and who we are, including our habits and affections shape what we invest with significance (or not). This affects what we discern to be truths about the world.
The modernist model of knowing is depicted in the famous Vulcan Mr. Spock on Star Trek. “Spock is the logician par excellence, whose sole concern as a thinker is to infer from the ‘facts’ all and only what logic will allow. There is no room in Spock’s mental life for cares and passions to interfere. Yet as anyone familiar with the character knows, Spock’s lack of an affective nature makes him at times a deficient reasoner.” (Wood, p. 175) In other words, unlike Descartes supposed, being “liberated from all cares” and “happily agitated by no passions” does not guarantee true knowledge, and indeed such targeted disinterestedness may well blind us to some things by not being in pursuit of the right things. Indeed to the extent our habits of knowing exclude who we are as knowers and what we are concerned about can become hindrances to knowing itself. Wood says, “contrary to the advocates of ‘pure reason,’ emotions constitute a chief means by which we gain, modify and sometimes reject important beliefs bearing on our well-being as humans: matters such as interpersonal relations, self-knowledge, issues of social justice, aesthetics and more.” (Wood, p. 176.) Disinterestedness, just the facts ma’am, can blind us to realities that are there but we don’t see.
Let’s look at a couple of examples.
Temple Grandin is a “highly intelligent animal scientist who suffers from autism…. In Temple’s case, the cognitive impairment she prevents her from experiencing the same range of emotions normal people enjoy. Because she does not experience many emotions that arise in everyday human interactions, she fails to acquire a catalog of the emotional memories that are vital to empathetic understanding, and consequently she fails to glean from her experiences lessons that strike most of us as obvious.” For example she can’t “’read’ people, to detect the nuances of vocal inflection, the ironies in people’s conversation, the variations of reasons for their emotional displays, and the subtle social cues that tone of voice and gesture convey. . .. Temple’s impairment, and the unfortunately circumscribed life to which it gives rise, often displays itself in poignant ways. Watching Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet left her bewildered because she was unable to empathize with the characters . . . unable ‘to follow the intricate play of motive and intention.’ Music, art and sunsets are powerless to evoke in Temple any deep emotional response, demonstrating once again that there’s more to seeing than meets the eye.” Upon riding through the Rocky Mountains with Anthropologist Oliver Sachs, he asks Temple “’if she did not feel a sense of sublimity’” and said “’she was puzzled by such words and had spent some time with a dictionary trying to understand them . . . but they all seemed to be defined in terms of one another.’” (Wood, pp. 179-180)
Temple Grandin’s cognitive impairment that screens out the emotional dimensions of life screens out parts of the reality of life. She sees it, queries about it, even longs for it in some ways, but doesn’t experience it or understand it; so, with her good faculties, she interprets it as insignificant – or not signifying anything of importance, or perhaps in a way, “nonexistent” since it doesn’t exist for her.
The example of Temple Grandin is similar to the exchange between the two Dickens characters Gradgrind and Sissy Jupe in the novel Hard Times. The way Gradgrind sees the world and wants to teach Sissy to see it is kind of like how Grandin does—without emotional dimension. Gradgrind wants Sissy to give the facts that make up an anatomical description of a horse. But all Sissy knows is horses in real life. To her there was so much more to a horse than a detached description of it. To her it doesn’t really say what a horse is. Sissy “saw” more than Gradgrind thought was really there. She saw more because of the “training” she had received by growing up on a farm. That experience gave her an emotional connection to horses that ascribed a significance to them that enabled her to “see” as she did.
But the importance of emotions and training of character in specific ways to enabling “sight” in the world is not restricted to cases of autism or to literature. It’s true of the way scientists and mathematicians work as well. With a bit of irony, famed mathematician and religious skeptic Bertrand Russell saw a lot more than equations in mathematics:
’Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of a sculpture, without appeal to any part of the weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimity pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than a man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.’ (Wood, p. 188)
Philosopher of science Israel Scheffler says scientists are “marked by emotional dispositions that support characteristic patterns of thought, evaluation and actions constituting what he calls ‘rational character.’ Good scientists have a concern to make ‘cognitive contact with reality.’” (Wood, p. 188)
So the lofty goal of detached disinterestedness in rational pursuits and for some in an understanding of rationality itself is a risky proposition. It can cause an inability to “see”—like a kind of cognitive macular degeneration. In fact, as my dear friend Billy Abraham (RIP) said, it “is very odd that philosophers singled out rationality as privileged in their vision of intellectual virtue. In everyday usage ‘rational’ is but one predicate in a long list of intellectual virtues that can be assembled,” such as: “wisdom, prudence, foresight, good judgment, intellectual carefulness, fair-mindedness, flexibility, thoroughness, intellectual candor, courage, apt doubt, elegance, teachability, perseverance, understanding, truthfulness, intellectual humility, open-mindedness, sincerity, studiousness, originality, appropriate trust, and the like.”[15] We are whole people and we approach the discovery of reality as whole people. What we see as having significance even in our pursuit of knowing is shaped by the full range of what we have become as people through cultural habituation. We are all trained to do the process of knowing, sometimes formally and often informally by the shaping forces of the family and culture we live in. This is part of the meaning of Charles Taylor’s term “social imaginary.” We moderns filter out of our imaginative lives the ability to be surprised by realities that we consider impossibilities. It’s true in science, too. Listen to Nobel laureate Subramanyan Chandrasekhar when asked how he was able to continue to do innovative work in physics after the age most feel the need to retire.
For lack of a better word, there seems to be a certain arrogance toward nature which people develop. These people have had great insights and made profound discoveries. They imagine afterwards that the fact that they succeeded so triumphantly in one area means they have a special way pf looking at science which must therefore be right. But science doesn’t permit that. Nature has shown over and over again that the kind of truth which underlie nature transcend the most powerful minds. (Wood, p. 189.)
We are trained to become disinterested in our intellectual pursuits. It doesn’t come naturally. When our habit of knowing becomes shaped this way, we are in danger of missing perhaps the most surprising things. When we pursue full-orbed intellectual virtue rather than training ourselves in disinterestedness or even just ensuring our cognitive faculties are working properly, we might:
First, recognize that we have cognitive capacities that we have suppressed (e.g., oculus contemplationis (eye of contemplation) and sensus divinitatis (sense of divinity)); and
Second, see that our intellectual character may be impaired, disabling us to see what is obvious.
In our modern way, we have worsened our innate tendency of will to suppress what we don’t want to see, even as our affections may be what will enable us to see. “Christian thinkers such as Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Jonathan Edwards, John Henry Newman and others have insisted, contrary to the preachers of ‘pure reason,’ that we come to knowledge of God and other religious truths only if our affections are rightly ordered. . .. [O]ur capacity to grasp religious truths requires that we be the right sorts of persons.” (Wood, p. 190)
Jonathan Edwards says, “[s]ince intellectual vices such as self-deception and excessive self-interest impede our seeing evidence aright, they must be supplanted by virtuous traits that will put the evidence in proper perspective. Right affections don’t manufacture evidence . . . nor do they motivate belief where evidence is lacking; instead they bolster our power of reason, allowing us to see and correctly evaluate already existing evidence.” (Wood, p. 190-191.) “According [John] Calvin, God has engineered our noetic faculties so as to make this a way of gaining divine truth normal:
Since perfection and blessedness consist in knowledge of God, he has been pleased, in order that none may be excluded from the means of obtaining felicity, not only to deposit in our minds that seed of religion of which we have spoken, but to manifest his perfections in the whole structure of the universe, and daily to place himself in view, that we cannot open our eyes without being compelled to behold him. (Institutes of the Christian Religion 1.5.1)” (Wood, p. 191-192)
God is always with us yet to us it often seems and feels as if he is hidden from us. We often think of this as God’s fault for not showing himself, if he is there. As we come to see the importance of reintegrating our affections into our paradigm of knowing, we come to realize that what we see (or not) is in part a reflection of what we treat as significant, have affection for. Our judgments as to whether we “obtain felicity” is but a reflection of our loves. St. Augustine speaks of sin as disordered love.[16] We do not stop loving when we suppress (or deny) our God-given cognitive capacities to recognize God in creation all around us; rather our inability to see is a reflection that we love certain things in creation itself or creation itself as if it were God. When we reincorporate our affections (our loves) into our epistemological paradigm and renew our intellectual virtue, we will either be able to see God where we had not or consider that our distorted loves blind us to him.
Divine hiddenness and intellectual virtue are linked. Part of what we can do to overcome the prospect of his hiddenness is to pursue a renewed form of intellectual virtue that acknowledges that part of our blindness might be that our affections (our loves) don’t really want to see and take a serious look at how our loves are ordered—what really is most significant to us. As Kierkegaard suggests, a renewed humility is a place to start. It is not a panacea, but it is a place to start.
As with all virtues, intellectual virtue more likely caught than taught. Abraham says, “they are learned by imitation over time in communities of intellectual virtue; their cultivation is heavily dependent on sympathy, patience, friendship, and collegiality.”[17] Renewed intellectual virtue will help enable us to see and hear God. The first place to engage for this renewal in the life, liturgies, and practices of the church.
That God intentionally hides himself from us all at times is certainly a mystery. The not altogether satisfying answer, it seems to me, must include that God is doing a better work in us and we can trust and rest in his goodness and immeasurable love, even in the dark nights of the soul.
[1] Francis Schaeffer, He Is There and He Is Not Silent, Crossway, 1972.
[2] Michael Rae, “Divine Hiddenness, Divine Silence” pp. 266 – 75 in Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology, 6th edition, edited by Louis Pojman and Michael Rea (Boston: Wadsworth/Cengage, 2011), available online at http://www3.nd.edu/~mrea/.
[3] Ibid., p. 268.
[4] Ibid., p. 270.
[5] Daniel Howard Snyder and Paul K. Moser, co-editors, Divine Hiddenness: New Essays (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 98-119; for pdf version of Divine Hiddenness available online, see www.thedivineconspiracy.org/Z5235S.pdf.
[6] See Michael J. Murray, “Deus Absconditus”, pp. 68-72.
[7] Divine Hiddenness, see Laura L. Garcia, “St. John of the Cross and the Necessity of Divine Hiddenness”, p. 83ff.
[8] See “Cognitive Idolatry and Divine Hiddenness” in Divine Hiddenness, pp. 120ff.
[9] Ibid., p. 121. Emphasis in original.
[10] Ibid., p. 129.
[11] Roger Scruton, The Soul of the World, pp. 37-38.
[12] C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard: An Introduction, p. 164.
[13] W. Jay Wood, Epistemology: Becoming Intellectually Virtuous (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998). In this section I will refer to citations from this book in the text. For a formal philosophical argument on how rightly disposed human passions (passional reason) can yield knowledge of God, see William J. Wainwright, Reason and the Heart: A Prolegomenon to a Critique of Passional Reason (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).
[14] William J. Abraham, Crossing the Threshold, (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2006).
[15] Abraham, Crossing the Threshold, p. 175.
[16] For a good explication (and citations) of Augustine’s understanding of sin as “disordered love”, see David K Naugle, Reordered Love, Reordered Lives: Learning the Deep Meaning of Happiness (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008), pp. 31-57.
[17] Abraham, Crossing the Threshold, p. 188.
