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HeyJ LIV (2013), pp. 252–260

INCARNATION AND THE DIVINE

HIDDENNESS DEBATE
HUNTER BROWN
King’s University College at Western University
London, Canada

This paper examines the debate that has arisen in connection with J. L. Schellenberg’s work on
divine hiddenness. It singles out as especially deserving of attention Paul Moser’s proposal that the
debate distinguish more clearly between classical theism and Hebraic theisms. This worthwhile
proposal, I argue, will be unlikely to exert its full potential influence upon the debate unless certain
features of Christian incarnation belief are recognized and addressed in connection with it.

In his 1993 book, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason,1 and more recently, in the 2007
sequel, The Wisdom to Doubt,2 John Schellenberg has argued that the search for God by
apparently honest human beings so often ends in failure that one must conclude either that God
does not exist or has chosen for some reason to remain hidden. If God exists and is hidden, a
plausible explanation of such hiddenness can be legitimately expected from theists who believe
that God would wish to be found so that the kind of fulfilling relationships upon which the
well-being of creatures purportedly depends could be established.
Many theists have responded to the Schellenberg challenge. Some have invoked features of
the belief state, arguing, for example, that the culpability or inculpability of particular cases of
theistic unbelief is difficult to assess, given the wide range of cognitive, volitional, social,
psychological, and other elusive conditions involved in belief. Other respondents, including
Schellenberg himself, have considered the possibility that at least some instances of unbelief
may conceal an implicit theism of the kind proposed, for example, by Karl Rahner in his
account of anonymous Christianity. Arguments have also been offered suggesting various
divine motives for withholding evidence sufficient to underwrite theistic belief. Perhaps, for
example, God has lovingly limited such evidence in order to prevent the formation by some
individuals of morally and spiritually damaging negative responses to divine initiative. Perhaps
the withholding of evidence prolongs a religious search which deepens commitment and insight
and moves people to be more empathetically disposed to the shortcomings of their fellow
human beings. Perhaps the insufficiency of evidence impedes the theological shallowness
which might occur in the absence of the struggle with religious diversity. Perhaps it forces
individuals to join with one another in their search for meaning, acquiring, as they do so, a
deeper appreciation of the communitarian aspects of truth-seeking. An extensive updated
review of these and other lines of response has been provided by Schellenberg in Courage.
What one would expect of God depends, of course, upon one’s conception of God. On this
count Schellenberg is clear throughout his work. God is to be understood, he says in both books,
as impassably great, entailing at least that God is the ground and source of all being, has the
capacities for intelligence, affectivity and agency normally associated with personhood, is
omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good.3 Wisdom frames such a position in terms of divine

© 2012 The Author. The Heythrop Journal © 2012 Trustees for Roman Catholic Purposes Registered. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600
Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
 INCARNATION AND THE DIVINE HIDDENNESS DEBATE 253

ultimism more than was the case in Hiddenness but this change does not substantially alter
Schellenberg’s commitment to the ‘traditional idea of God’4 according to which God is
‘completely unlimited and unbounded – and unsurpassably great in every respect’.5 Schellen-
berg rightly anticipates that such a position will be ‘accepted by the majority of contemporary
theologians and philosophers of religion’.6
Notwithstanding his adoption of such classical theism, however, Schellenberg is critical of the
way in which widespread familiarity with such theism among philosophers so often leads to a
shallowness of appreciation of what is being asserted by it. ‘Most of us have become so used to
existing propositional formulations – for example, definitions of “God” in the West – that we are
only paying lip service to the idea of the Ultimate when we say we are talking about an ultimate
reality; we do not feel in our hearts what we are talking about.’7 Many philosophers, he regrets,
fail to recognize that an appropriate grasp of what is involved in the idea of God in classical theism
requires us to ‘strain our intellect and imagination to the utmost . . . and to extend this notion
boundlessly in every conceivable direction’.8 It is only through such expenditure of effort,
moreover, according to Schellenberg, that one can even begin to appreciate the limits of human
intellectual capacities at this relatively early stage of human history on earth. ‘Certainly we can
say that we are talking about something metaphysically and axiologically ultimate, and this has
some comprehensible content, but when it comes to filling out the idea, we are simply out of our
depth – or, at least, this is true for all we know.’9 Much of what Schellenberg says in these respects
has for centuries been a central theme not only of mystical literature but also of the apophatic
approach to analogical thought about God characteristic of the Catholic tradition, an approach
which underscores the great limits of human understanding in the case of God. Reminders such
as Schellenberg’s, however, can do no harm from time to time since these features of the tradition
seem to be easily eclipsed by the familiarity of classical theism.
Schellenberg’s cautions about classical theism are not replicated, however, in connection
with the ways in which familiarity also tends to encourage shallowness regarding well-known
theological ideas such as those, for example, about incarnation. His primary concern in con-
nection with theology, rather, is to ensure that any consultation of theological traditions will be
confined within proper philosophical terms of reference. Such terms of reference would be
represented by William Alston’s portrayal of philosophy of religion as ‘the enterprise of
providing support for religious beliefs by starting from premises that neither are nor presuppose
any religious beliefs’.10 Schellenberg’s attempts to include love among the divine attributes, for
example, exemplify such allegiances. Anticipating that his position in this respect may be seen
by philosophers as an intrusion of theology – as something that ‘only Christians have any reason
to accept’11 – he reaffirms his commitment to theological detachment. The inclusion of love
among the divine attributes, he argues, can be established on the purely philosophical grounds
that a divine being who lacked love ‘would be a being whose greatness could be surpassed’.12
Schellenberg’s adoption of classical theism and his commitment to theological detachment
cast the die for a widespread replication, in the hiddenness debate, of argument patterns familiar
in connection with suffering and evil. Hiddenness, that is, like suffering and evil, is not
something one would expect to find in a cosmos created and governed by the God of classical
theism. Faced with this challenge, many of Schellenberg’s interlocutors find themselves
attempting in various ways to illustrate how hiddenness, like evil and suffering, may be
instrumental in the achievement, by such a God, of otherwise unattainable ends. In this respect
the hiddenness debate often travels along recognizable paths.
One notable exception to this pattern is Paul Moser’s response to Schellenberg. Moser
attempts to avoid yet more rehearsals of such familiar arguments by challenging the widespread
equation of classical theism and Christian monotheism. The hiddenness debate, Moser pro-
254 HUNTER BROWN

poses, might well benefit from a closer consultation of actual theological traditions which center
upon Hebraic theism rather than classical theism, for classical theism, he claims, is not as
reconcilable with such theological traditions as many philosophers of religion, including Schel-
lenberg, assume it to be. This shift of focal point would allow for the use of the term God, in the
hiddenness debate,

not as a personal name but as a supreme title, in keeping with one long-standing use. This use
of the term requires of any possible holder: (a) worthiness of worship and full life commitment
and thus (b) moral perfection and (c) an all-loving character. One might use the term in a
different manner, but then one will not be talking about the kind of God central to the
monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Lacking a better candidate for
titleholder, let us consider the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jesus. We thus shall speak of
the ‘Hebraic God’. We shall also speak of ‘Hebraic theism’ as the view that the Hebraic God
actually exists.13

The problem of divine hiddenness, on this Moser proposal, takes a distinctive form. Given the
apparent hiddenness of God, the question to which philosophers need to attend is this: ‘Does our
evidence regarding God . . . make it reasonable to believe that the Hebraic God does not exist?’14
Such a shift toward specifically Hebraic theisms, understood as distinguishable from clas-
sical theism, faces three challenges. First, that shift must vindicate, to the satisfaction of more
philosophers of religion than is presently the case, its contention that the God of the Abrahamic
traditions is as distinguishable from the God of classical theism as it claims. Second, its
invocation of Hebraic theism must be squared more clearly with the commitment among most
philosophers of religion to resisting theological influence except when such influence has been
justified in advance by Philosophy. The third challenge, to which the remainder of this essay
will be devoted, involves the idea of ‘Hebraic tradition’ itself. In matters of detail there are
significant differences among Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theisms which will affect the
application of those traditions to the hiddenness debate, on the Moser proposal. Since Christi-
anity has played the dominant role in the discussion of Schellenberg’s work, and in Moser’s
response, I will single it out in developing my account of, and response to, this third challenge.
In doing so I will propose that there are two hitherto neglected forms of divine hiddenness
which will have a potentially disruptive impact upon the otherwise positive prospects of the
Moser program unless these are anticipated and accommodated.
In Christianity, the attribute of divine love, which figures prominently in Schellenberg’s
work, not only has a central role in the concept of deity but plays that role in concert with the
idea of incarnation in ways that are difficult to spell out clearly. Generally speaking, the
normative fourth and fifth century Nicene and Chalcedonian conciliar statements on incarnation
assert a union of two natures in one person, Jesus. As depicted by those councils, this union is
neither a monophysite reduction of the two into one nor a radical isolation of each from the
other. Such claims turned out to be difficult for the church fathers even to articulate clearly,
much less to explain in a metaphysically satisfactory way. Faced with such difficulty the
Chalcedonian fathers at one point resort to negative language, describing the relation between
natures as being ‘without confusion, without change, without division, without separation
[in duabus naturis inconfuse, immutabiliter, indivise, inseparabiliter], the distinction between
the natures in no way abolished by the union, but rather the character of each preserved in one
person [prosopon] and one hypostasis’. No assistance is provided by the council for under-
standing what such language would entail metaphysically. The assertions of the Council, rather,
are a collection of conclusions that had been reached in a series of well-known controversies
leading up to it, and it is easy to link those assertions back to such controversies.
 INCARNATION AND THE DIVINE HIDDENNESS DEBATE 255

Notwithstanding the resistance of the conciliar statements to metaphysical elaboration the

general upshot of what they are driving at is reasonably clear. They are intent upon preserving
the idea that neither nature is compromised by the other, a point made repeatedly, in different
ways, throughout the Chalcedonian text especially. The council fathers did not hold them-
selves responsible for spelling out what this meant philosophically, but bequeathed to subse-
quent Christian history the task of exploring the intelligibility of what they had merely
asserted in a brief and cryptic manner. The community has since struggled long and hard to
think through the conciliar assertions. That struggle has most often involved the confluence of
classical and Hebraic theisms, giving rise to certain familiar conceptual patterns which remain
widely influential today. The gist of those patterns, from a philosophical point of view, goes
something like this: Chalcedon’s main assertion regarding Jesus boils down to a statement of
identity: the human person, Jesus of Nazareth, is identical to the second person of the Trinity.
In accordance with the principle of indiscernibility of identicals, this means that any exception
to a full-fledged commonality of properties between the two would negate the truth of the
identity statement.
It is often assumed by philosophers that classical theism provides the knowledge of divine
properties required to think through such a position. Such knowledge, in other words, is thought
to be accessible independently of the canonical Jesus, and available to be imported into a
reading of Chalcedon. The Chalcedonian fathers, however, as Grillmeier, Norris, and other
formidable patristic scholars have emphasized repeatedly, saw their principal job as represent-
ing not classical theism but the canonical tradition about Jesus, and doing so primarily for
pastoral purposes. Rather than the Hebraic message being hellenized by the use of their
language, in other words, hellenistic language was forced into the service of the Jewish
canonical message of the early Christians. This is a common occurrence in patristic thought,
exemplified by the rejection of Arius’s theology on account of the way in which its underlying
Neo-Platonism was thought to have distorted its representation of the canonical tradition.
Unfortunately, the canonical allegiances of the Chalcedonian fathers have often been
eclipsed historically by the domination of classical theism in reflection upon incarnation. The
question raised by the canonical sources – who is the God made known in the life and death of
Jesus of Nazareth – has been displaced by questions about how to square Jesus with classical
theism. When one imports into the interpretation of the canonical Jesus and the Chalcedonian
statement an understanding of divine and human properties derived from classical theism and
philosophical anthropology certain distinctive conceptual obstacles arise. According to the main
lines of classical theism, as exemplified in Schellenberg’s work, for example, God is not just
accidentally but essentially omniscient, omnipotent, impassable, immaterial, and so forth.
According to the main lines of philosophical anthropology, the human being is no less essen-
tially limited in knowledge and power, is passable and material. The challenge of Chalcedon
then, given such terms of reference, becomes the challenge of vindicating the coherence of a
view of Jesus which involves an imputation to him of what appear to be mutually exclusive
properties. Historically, the resolution of conflict among such properties has often tended to
drift toward favoring divinity at the expense of humanity, as Karl Rahner warned in his famous
essay, Current Problems in Christology,15 written to mark the 1500th anniversary of Chalcedon.
His warning has been reiterated in subsequent decades by many major theologians.
Such docetically-inclined incarnationalism is the first form of unanticipated divine hidden-
ness which I propose will potentially sabotage Moser’s efforts to reorient the hiddenness debate
by separating classical and Hebraic theisms. Here, the divine attributes lie hidden behind the
human attributes of Jesus with which they are, on a number of counts, irreconcilable. This
problem arises because incarnation has been made into a Trojan horse for classical theism,
256 HUNTER BROWN

resulting in a position reminiscent of Bultmann’s description of ancient gnostic anticipations of

a son of God ‘who is sent forth from the world of light disguised as a man’ (emphasis added).16
There is another form of unanticipated incarnational divine hiddenness which has emerged
of late in some theological scholarship connected with patristics. It has been described this way:
If Nicene orthodoxy is still the official definition of the faith of the Christian Church, its critics
are more vocal than ever. Indeed, it sometimes appears that the defining character of much
modern theology is a shared determination to distance itself from the Nicene affirmations.
There is a widespread insistence that the ancient affirmations of the Nicene Creed constitute
pre-scientific mythology from which an enlightened and inclusive Christian faith come of age
is obligated to liberate itself.17

By characterizing the main lines of the conciliar tradition as ‘prescientific mythology’, with the
obvious negative philosophical connotations conveyed by such a designation, this position
essentially portrays divinity as hidden behind that inadequate mythology.
In sum, then, there are two specifically incarnational forms of what could be described as
divine hiddenness which commonly arise in connection with familiar patterns of thinking about
incarnation. The first of these, assuming that we have from classical theism a source of reliable
knowledge about divine attributes, imputes these attributes to Jesus and is then forced to think
of them as hidden behind Jesus’s human attributes with which they conflict. In the second, the
divine attributes are thought of as lying hidden behind an antiquated mythology. If Moser’s
program of approaching the hiddenness debate by separating classical and Hebraic theisms is to
unfold fruitfully, the impact of classically theistic terms of reference which leads to such ways
of thinking must be explored carefully.
To be sure, few Christian philosophers of religion see themselves as docetic. Nonetheless, it
remains a fact that there is nothing close to consensus among philosophers about how to deal
metaphysically with the challenge of Chalcedon when that challenge is articulated in terms of
a confluence of canonical and classically theistic terms of reference. What one often finds,
rather, is recourse to mystery and paradox. Such recourse accepts that Chalcedon is asserting
something true but, in characterizing such truth as a matter of mystery or paradox, depicts what
is occurring in incarnation as lying beyond the capacities of natural reason. In what way,
however, are the capacities of reason exceeded here? It cannot be a matter of contradiction.
Contradictions do not lie beyond the powers of natural reason; natural reason is quite capable
of recognizing them for what they are, and rejecting them as such. Presumably, then, the
incomprehensibility of incarnation involved in the purportedly mysterious confluence of mutu-
ally exclusive properties involves only the appearance of a contradiction among those proper-
ties. An apparent contradiction, however, is by definition a paradox. The appropriate
philosophical response to a paradox is certainly not the same as the response to a contradiction.
While reason ought rightly to reject genuine contradictions there is no reason why it should
behave in this way in response to apparent contradictions. It has surely been the business of
Philosophy throughout its history to unmask and respond to misleading appearances with the
aim of exposing the illusions involved, thereby providing greater clarity for reason. If, then,
Chalcedon is asserting a mysterious confluence of apparently incompatible properties then one
can reasonably be held responsible for identifying the source and nature of the ways in which
this confluence gives rise to such a misleading appearance. If the mutual exclusivity among
divine and human attributes, in other words, is only apparent – paradoxical – then the appro-
priate philosophical response would be to discover what it is about conventional ideas of
humanity and divinity which give rise to such misleading impressions, and where these ideas
are in need of amendment.
 INCARNATION AND THE DIVINE HIDDENNESS DEBATE 257

One of the few philosophers to take the bull by the horns in this respect has been Thomas
Morris. On the one hand Morris is a staunch classical theist whose understanding of the divine
attributes is in line with Schellenberg’s. The roots of Morris’s theism lie in his well-known
position on Anselmian intuitions. These intuitions about divine nature, he argues, are as entitled
to function foundationally, in philosophy of religion, as certain moral intuitions that are widely
allowed by professional philosophers to function foundationally in moral philosophy. Such
Anselmian intuitions about divine nature lead to what Morris characterizes as a ‘modally
exalted’18 classical theism. Alongside such a modally exalted theism in Morris’s work, however,
lies a no less prominent attentiveness to the canonical and patristic traditions about incarnation.
If the canonical and patristic traditions assert that there has in fact occurred a confluence of human
and divine natures in the form of the relationship described by Chalcedon, Morris recognizes, and
if this conflicts with classical theism, then there is no escaping the need to address that conflict
clearly. One aspect of Morris’s classical theism which is helpful in this connection is his
contention that Anselmian intuitions enjoy only a prima fascia benefit of the doubt; they are
defeasible. There is a malleability in his classical theism, in other words, which leaves it open to
amendment. Such amendment normally occurs in discussions among philosophers as they
analyze individual divine attributes in the attempt to develop a coherent understanding of those
attributes, and the congruence among them. Such discussions often require revisions in how such
attributes are to be understood. There remains even now within the community of philosophers
of religion a considerable diversity of views in this respect, which Morris welcomes.
Less common among philosophers of religion, however, is Morris’s willingness to confront
the pressure placed upon classical theism by its conflicts with the canonical and patristic
sources. According to the canonical tradition, ‘in the incarnation God the son humbled himself,’
and ‘his humbling consisted . . . in rendering himself vulnerable to the pains, sufferings,
aggravations, and agonies which became his as a man but which, in his exclusively divine form
of existence, could not have touched him this way.’19 Morris sees two ways of responding to this
idea. One is to develop a view of Jesus which follows a two-minds path – which he prefers – and
the other is to develop a view of Jesus building on the idea of kenosis. I will focus upon the latter
because of what I see as its distinctive relevance vis-à-vis the hiddenness debate.
The idea of kenosis – self emptying – has its roots in Paul’s Letter to the Philippians. The
main idea here involves the purported divestment by God of certain divine attributes in order to
become fully human, although some exegetes would take issue with a reading of Philippians
along metaphysical lines. Nonetheless, discussions of kenosis among some theologians and
philosophers have seen it as providing a strategy for possibly mitigating the conflict between
classical theism and the canonical Jesus by having classical theism yield, in certain respects, to
the canonical picture. The possibility of using kenosis in this task became the object of debate
on two occasions during the modern period. 17th century discussions between Tübingen and
Geissen, it is widely agreed today, failed in their attempts to make use of the idea successfully
for this purpose. Such a judgment is also commonly associated with 19th century efforts
involving Thomasius, Gess and others. In the 1980’s, work by Davis, Feenstra, and a handful
of other philosophers20 sustained efforts to keep the exploration of kenosis alive, but without
decisively successful results. Morris concurs with the majority opinion that what he calls the
standard kenotic view involved in these debates failed to do the philosophical work required of
it in attempting to reconcile classical theism and incarnation.21
There is, however, Morris proposes, a ‘nonstandard’22 version of kenoticism which is
more promising, although most critics, he judges, have ‘failed to appreciate the subtleties of
a limited kenotic picture’.23 The distinguishing feature of this limited, nonstandard view is the
way in which it allows classical theism to be amended not by the traditional subtraction from
258 HUNTER BROWN

classical theism of certain incarnationally problematic divine attributes but by the addition, to
the assertions of particular divine attributes in classical theism, of what Morris calls a kenotic
clause. This clause qualifies the imputation of each attribute to God, in classical theism, by
appending to that attribute the caveat that it is possessed by God ‘except at any time [that
God] freely and temporarily chooses to restrict its exercise’.24 Such a strategy does not call
for a modification of the attributes themselves but introduces in connection with each the
provision that God possesses the attribute ‘unless-freely-and-temporarily-choosing-to-do-
otherwise’.25 Such a qualifier will, in each case, ‘link up with or operate upon that standard
divine attribute to form the distinctive property which itself will then be claimed to be the
only necessary requisite of deity’.26 This amended version of kenoticism relieves it of having
to explain how the incarnation would involve a divestment of properties, in the case of Jesus,
which would normally be seen by classical theists as entailing a clear loss of divinity. On the
revised kenotic view the transient divestment of such properties, in the case of the canonical
Jesus, is congruent with an amended classical theism. This, Morris thinks, leads to the
‘strongest and most sophisticated form of the kenotic approach to reconciling the divinity of
Christ with the evident limitations evinced in his earthly career’.27
Such a simple amendment of classical theism, however, is more difficult to execute in
connection with some divine attributes than with others. It is more readily accomplished in the
case of divine knowledge, for example, than in the case of divine eternity. Even a temporary
divestment of eternity by God would require a period of nonexistence after which God would
then have to come into existence, a claim on behalf of which no plausible philosophical
justification suggests itself. The only recourse available in response to such a challenge,
therefore, thinks Morris, is a reconsideration of the human side of the ledger. Is there some way
of accommodating divine eternity within the terms of reference of genuine humanity?
On this subject, as Morris points out, not all of the many properties that human beings share
in common, are on account of their commonality essential to being human – and Chalcedon
claims only that Jesus was ‘fully’ human, not ‘merely’ human.28 What, then, asks Morris, would
count as essential human attributes, not just common ones, and why? Might it be possible, for
example, for a particular human being to have attributes that would be congruent with divine
eternity but that, notwithstanding their uncommonness among other humans, would not impair
such an individual’s full humanity? If Jesus, for example, possessed certain states of conscious-
ness and belief on account of having existed prior to his human birth, would this necessarily
compromise his full humanity, notwithstanding the uncommonness of such conscious states? The
philosophical literature on personal identity, given its resistance to a wholesale identification of
personhood with particular conscious states, would seem to leave some room to work here.29
There are many such challenges facing a forthright philosophical engagement of incarna-
tion along the lines laid out by Morris. My purpose, however, is not to address these spe-
cifically but to underscore the general pattern, in Morris’s work, of clearly responding to the
conflicts between classical and canonical theisms which so often remain deeply embedded
within conventional ideas of incarnation. Theistic philosophers, thinks Morris, have to engage
more directly the possibility that the canonical and Chalcedonian traditions might turn out to
trump classical theism in fundamental, philosophical ways. This prospect, Morris cautions,
should have ‘considerable, even decisive weight for the Christian theist’.30 Few theists,
however, Morris observes, seem to be interested in seriously engaging this possibility.31 More
philosophers, he argues, must consider the prospect that ‘perhaps standard accounts of pre-
cisely what properties are logically ingredient in deity, metaphysically strong conceptions of
divine immutability, and what I have been calling the modally exalted claims for deity, are
not properly to be brought within the province of a distinctively Christian conception of God,
 INCARNATION AND THE DIVINE HIDDENNESS DEBATE 259

taking as one of its controls the doctrine of incarnation.’32 A renewed kenoticism driven by
pressure from incarnation, in other words, may well require ‘a real departure from what most
theists, Christian as well as non-Christian, have wanted to say about the nature of God’.33
Whether a modified kenoticism is useful here or not remains to be seen.
For present purposes, however, my proposal involves an alignment of Morris’s work in this
connection with Moser’s attempt to shift the direction of the hiddenness debate by challenging
the commonplace association of classical and Hebraic theisms. It is difficult to see how Moser’s
proposal to shift the hiddenness debate away from classical theism and toward actual religious
traditions such as Christian incarnationalism can be accomplished if it does not include a clear
engagement of this challenge. Without such an engagement the invocation of incarnation will
continue to end up supporting Schellenberg, in the end, because such incarnationalism is
implicitly classically theistic, as is Schellenberg’s position. Just how far such metaphysical
analysis of incarnation can or should go is not entirely clear. On this topic Sarah Coakley’s work
on Chalcedon is especially thoughtful.34
The canonical and patristic sources hold that the paradigmatic self-disclosure of God his-
torically – the emergence of God from hiding, as it were – takes an altogether unexpected
incarnational form, and that in this event divinity is not hidden behind the humble life of Jesus
but is to be seen clearly in it. Such a claim makes it incumbent upon one, as Morris puts it in
connection with his preferred two-minds view of Christ, ‘to take seriously the limitations of
Jesus’s career’35 in the formation of the concept of deity, or else to concede that Chalcedonian
incarnationalism is incoherent, which moves it off the philosophical map. It is a remarkable
feature of the hiddenness debate, however, that in two formidable books which are much
influenced by the Christian tradition and the idea of divine love, Schellenberg has never
addressed incarnation in anything even close to a sustained way. Moreover, notwithstanding the
Christian allegiances of so many respondents to Schellenberg, no sustained objection to
the hiddenness challenge has focused on the idea, upon which the entire debate hinges from the
outset, that God is hidden.
There is throughout Christian history, to be sure, a deeply apophatic vein which safeguards
the mysteriousness of divinity in the spirit of Schellenberg’s sensitive treatment of divine
ultimism. The tradition on this count, however, is one whose subtlety can easily be missed in
contemporary Philosophy which sees intelligibility and mysteriousness as related inversely:
the more one understands something the less mysterious that something becomes. As Walter
Kasper has pointed out, however, this is not representative of what the Christian tradition
wanted to say about the relation between mystery and intelligibility in the case of Jesus.36
The Christian tradition has been persistent in maintaining the deeply countercultural idea that
the hiddenness of God, if one is going to speak in such terms, is a hiddenness in plain sight.
In the incarnation, divine nature is made known – brought out of hiding – in a way which is
said to occur in, not behind, or in spite of, or transiently or anomalously, in connection with
the lowly humanity of Jesus. What is plainly disclosed here can come to be known without
ceasing thereby to be mysterious. This has little resemblance to the much more common
invocation of mystery to avoid grappling with apparent conflicts between human and divine
attributes in conventional incarnationalism.
The Moser program’s potential for having a significant impact upon the hiddenness debate
by invoking the Hebraic tradition of Christian incarnationalism would be much improved if its
recourse to that tradition involved a clear grasp of this deeply challenging canonical and
patristic theme of hiddenness in plain sight. An alliance of the Moser program with Morris’s
work, and perhaps with recent scholarship on kenosis such as Exploring Kenotic Christology:
the Self Emptying of God,37 might potentially serve this end effectively, and allow the Moser
260 HUNTER BROWN

program to avoid running aground on the unanticipated forms of incarnational hiddenness to

which I have called attention.

Notes

1 J. L. Schellenberg, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
1993).
2 J. L. Schellenberg, The Wisdom to Doubt: A Justification of Religious Skepticism (Ithaca and London:
Cornell University Press, 2007).
3 Schellenberg, Hiddenness, p. 10; Wisdom, p. 195.
4 Schellenberg, Wisdom, p. 196.
5 Schellenberg, Wisdom, p. 51.
6 Schellenberg, Hiddenness, p. 10.
7 Schellenberg, Wisdom, p. 57.
8 Schellenberg, Wisdom, p. 51.
9 Schellenberg, Wisdom, p. 52.
10 W. Alston, Perceiving God (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 289.
11 Schellenberg, Hiddenness, p. 10.
12 Schellenberg, Hiddenness, p. 11.
13 Paul K. Moser, “Divine Hiddenness Does Not Justify Atheism,” in Michael L. Peterson and Raymond J.
Vanarragon (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion (Blackwell, 2004), p. 42.
14 Moser, Hiddenness, p. 43.
15 Karl Rahner, “Current Problems in Christology,” tr. Cornelius Ernst, in Theological Investigations I
(Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1961), pp. 149–200.
16 Rudolph Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology, in Schubert M. Ogden (ed.), New Testament and
Mythology and Other Basic Writings (Fortress Press, 1984), p. 14.
17 Alan Torrance, “Jesus in Christian Doctrine,” in Markus Bockmuehl (ed.), Cambridge Companion to
Jesus (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2001), p. 200.
18 Thomas V. Morris, The Logic of God Incarnate (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 94.
19 Morris, Logic, p. 104.
20 Stephen T. Davis, Logic and the Nature of God (London: Eerdmans, 1983). Ronald J. Feenstra, “Recon-
sidering Kenotic Christology,” in Ronald J. Feenstra and Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. (eds.), Trinity, Incarnation,
and Atonement: Philosophical and Theological Essays (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989),
pp. 128–52.
21 Morris, Logic, p. 96.
22 Morris, Logic, p. 97.
23 Morris, Logic, p. 92.
24 Morris, Logic, p. 98.
25 Morris, Logic, p. 99.
26 Morris, Logic, p. 100.
27 Morris, Logic, p. 100.
28 Morris, Logic, p. 65.
29 Morris, Logic, p. 90.
30 Morris, Logic, p.102.
31 Morris, Logic, p. 107.
32 Morris, Logic, p. 101.
33 Morris, Logic, p. 100.
34 Sarah Coakley, ‘What Does Chalcedon Solve and What Does it Not? Some Reflections on the Status and
Meaning of the Chalcedonian “Definition,” ’ in Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, S.J. and Gerald O’Collins,
S.J. (eds.), The Incarnation: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Incarnation of the Son of God (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 143-63.
35 Morris, Logic, p. 107.
36 Walter Kasper, The God of Jesus Christ, tr. Matthew J. O’Connell (New York: Crossroad, 1984), pp.
269–71.
37 C. Stephen Evans, (ed.), Exploring Kenotic Christology: the Self Emptying of God (Oxford University
Press, 2006).
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