As you read this, I will be coming home from the Assemblies of God Scholars’ Forum in Costa Mesa, California—an event which I am highly unqualified to attend!
Most of the reading I have been doing lately has been in Lutheran theology—the work of American Lutheran Gerhard Forde, the multi-author Christian Dogmatics edited by Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson, and also the sermons of Luther himself, among other things.
One little book I have been enjoying quite a bit is Gerhard Forde’s Where God Meets Man. It’s a simple book, written for a popular audience back in the 1970s. It’s also a controversial book, highly criticized by more conservative confessional Lutherans such as Jordan B. Cooper. And I’ll admit, it took me a few passes to really appreciate and understand the book. As a non-Lutheran, of a different generation, beginning reading was like walking into a conversation that was already going on, or like overhearing only one side of a phone call. But as I took multiple passes through the book (I am a slow reader, and a re-reader, which is why I could never be a real academic), the more I came to appreciate what Forde is saying.
One point about Luther’s thought that Forde emphasizes is the idea of the hidden God, the Deus absconditus. God, said Luther, is hidden. I remember reading Luther’s Bondage of the Will decades ago and being struck by his statement that the space God leaves between what he says (say, about his love for us) and what he does (say, allowing us to suffer) is the space God leaves for faith. Similarly, as Forde points out, Luther insisted that we cannot know God “in himself.” We cannot see God as he is in heaven. When we look at the world, we cannot know for certain what God is up to. He is hidden, and his purposes are often hidden as well. We can only know God as he has revealed himself to us in Christ. Scripture is the cradle that holds Christ, and the “two words” of Scripture—the law and the gospel—point us, respectively, to our sin toward God and neighbor which makes us need Christ (law) and the salvation won for us by the death and resurrection of Christ (gospel).
The point, emphasizes Forde, is that we cannot speak very much about God in the abstract. Most talk of God is speculative, built around our own notions of morality, power, spirituality, etc. The way we actually know God is to look at Jesus. Beyond Jesus, we don’t (and can’t) really know God.
At first blush, this felt to me like a contradiction of Karl Barth’s similar-sounding principle, summarized by his student Thomas F. Torrance, that “there is no God behind Jesus’ back.” For Barth, who himself was drawing from Luther and the Reformation, God cannot be known outside of Christ because all of God is revealed to us in Christ. True, the humanity of Jesus both veils and unveils. Unbelief looks at Jesus and sees only a man. Revelation opens our eyes to see God. But having had our eyes opened to God in Christ, we can now see that all of God has been revealed in Christ. To know what God is like, we look at Jesus.
In Forde’s take on Luther, it felt to me that he was saying there may be more to the character of God than we see in Jesus, but all we have is Jesus so we just have to trust. Upon further reflection, however, I believe the emphases dovetail.
For Barth, Jesus is how we see all of God. We only know God as Father because we see that he is Father of the Son. We know the Spirit, also, as the Spirit who comes to us through the Son. The character of God is the character we see in the person of the Son. And so on.
For Forde, all we can do is trust in the Son. Beyond the Son, outside the Son, God is hidden. But seeing what God has done for us in the Son, we can trust that the hidden God is for us and loves us. Whatever life throws at us, whatever sins and failures overwhelm us, the cross tells us God loves us. It tells us God forgives us and redeems us. The crucified and risen Jesus reveals the hidden God.
A Witness 