God is greater than his word. God has not confined himself within the limits of the word. God’s supreme attribute is his freedom.30
Here enters the problem. The hidden God might just override the “unconditional salvific will” of the revealed God. Hiddenness and revelation are no longer equated but may be diametrically opposed. “But can the unity of the godhead still be maintained under such conditions? . . . Has this not made revelation illusory?”31 What happens to the certainty of salvation that the Christian had received?
Loewenich says that the key through this conceptual bog is in the role of faith. Faith knows that God exists beyond the revealed word, but does not seek God in that beyond. In fact, the experience of God’s hiddenness from all sight is precisely the thing that calls for faith to cling to the God clothed in the word. Faith, by its very nature, is for Luther trust in what one cannot see. If we are to believe in God’s goodness, then we must not be able to see it clearly or no faith would be required, but only sight. The same is true when the faithful confess their belief in the church. The church is not equated with that which holds itself before our eyes as church, but is a concealed and hidden reality inviting faith in the unseen. Also the righteousness of God must be incomprehensible so as to require faith. Thus, argues Loewenich “we can conclude that if the revealed God is really to be present for faith, he must also be the hidden God. Consequently the revealed God would be none other than the hidden God.”32 A shift has taken place in the meaning of the hidden God. “In the former the idea of the hidden God means that revelation in principle is possible only in concealment; in the latter it means that also in the revealed God secrets remain. Both lines intersect in the concept of faith.”33
We shall return to the importance of faith shortly. First we need to note the function of the hiddenness of God in The Bondage of the Will. The hidden God is a “warning against all too confident arguing with God’s thoughts. . . .”34 It checks human assertions about their knowledge of God as well as their assertions about the faithfulness of the visible church. The hidden God introduces the element of tentativeness and risk into all human claims about God.
Loewenich finishes his survey of this concept with Luther’s lectures on Isaiah (1527–1530). Many of the themes already discussed endure in these lectures: God is incomprehensible until “covered”; faith sees God where God is so deeply hidden as to appear nothing; the papacy trusts in its own great visible power. Yet the simultaneity of hidden and revealed give way to a dynamic of succession. The God who first seems hidden becomes visible for us through our perseverance in prayer and faith. Once again, Loewenich insists that the heart of Luther’s theology of the cross is revelation. The question remained for Luther: how will we properly know God? The error of many interpreters is to lose this epistemological thrust and to drag Luther’s understanding into the realm of metaphysics. In that case the continual tension and movement required by the faith that knows of God’s broken presence is supplanted by “a rigid side-by-side relationship of two hypostases.”35 This error only occurs when the later emphasis on hiddenness as absence is not understood in relation to the more fundamental understanding of hiddenness in suffering as seen by the eyes of faith.
Faith is related to hiddenness, yet Luther has an even broader understanding of it. The eyes of faith look upon the cross and “a radical reversal of all existing orders of precedence and relationships take place.”36 The “crucified God . . . signifies the great No to reality.”37 As such, the crucifixion stands over and against human reason, understanding, and experience. Yet when faith clings to the cross, a whole new reason, understanding, and experience are the result for the believer. Faith equals understanding in the life of the Christian. Thus “[faith] is not only the negation of human possibility, but its realization as well.”38 We recall Luther’s earlier contextual observation that philosophically driven scholastic theology was the epitome of human reason in his day. Yet it avoided human groanings and the cross in favor of glorious speculation. “One who has caught something of the wisdom of the cross knows that reason is a ‘dangerous thing’ (WA IX, 187, 5ff).”39 But when faith clings to the cross it receives a whole new, wholly reversed reality.
Thus we come to Loewenich’s final point. Knowledge of God hidden in suffering corresponds to the new life that is given for the faithful to live. The epistemology is to be embodied in “practical suffering.” This suffering is summarized in four points:
1. Our life will be one of lowliness and disgrace.
2. Christ calls the Christian to a discipleship of suffering, trusting that it is in suffering that God meets us.
3. The “true meaning of Christ’s suffering can be discovered only in the act of experiencing, acting, and suffering.”
4. We are conformed to Christ as we experience the fact of the cross in our own lives.40
This brings Loewenich back full circle to Luther’s critique of the church of his day and its way of knowing. The suffering of the Christian life exposes the falsity of the church of his day41 that rejected the “treasure” of suffering that God offered to it. The church ignored the suffering of the neighbor, suffering that, more often than not, the church itself had inflicted upon him or her.
Loewenich has understood the theology of the cross in terms of its relationship to the conflict Luther had with the institutional church. Though Loewenich is helpful in this sense, does he goes far enough in mapping out the total conflictive context in which this thought takes place? Furthermore, is Loewenich right in his claim that Luther continues throughout his career to ask the same question in relation to the hidden God? Do not his shifts in the concept of the hidden God indicate shifts in broader commitments within Luther and his movement? Is it not the case that similar concepts came to function in very different ways as both the context and Luther’s own commitments within it underwent a change?
Althaus
In 1926, three years before Loewenich’s book was first published, Paul Althaus wrote an article titled “Die Bedeutung des Kreuzes im Denken Luthers.”42 The themes expressed in that paper have continued to be present in Althaus’ whole lifetime of work. Resonances with Loewenich and his interpretation are quite clear in Althaus’ career and at times Althaus’ own relationship to Loewenich is explicitly mentioned. His best work on the theology of the cross that has been translated into English translation is found in The Theology of Martin Luther.43
Resonating with Loewenich’s epistemological concern, Althaus locates the theology of the cross under the rubric of “The Knowledge of God: the Word of God and Faith.” Althaus begins the section with a footnote marking his conversation with Loewenich for his particular understanding of the Luther’s theology of the cross; this is rare in a book whose footnotes almost exclusively reference the reformer’s own writing. Althaus also follows Loewenich in holding up theses 19 and 20 as the heart of the Heidelberg Disputation. These, again, define the theologian of the cross and the theologian of glory in contradistinction. The two kinds of theologians are marked by different epistemological priorities. The first
