The Hiddenness of God, Michael C. Rea
The Hiddenness of God, Michael C. Rea
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The Hiddenness of God

Author: Michael C. Rea

Narrator: Chris Sorensen

Unabridged: 7 hr 34 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 12/18/2018

Synopsis

The Hiddenness of God addresses the problem of divine hiddenness which concerns the ambiguity of evidence for God's existence, the elusiveness of God's comforting presence, the palpable and devastating experience of divine absence and abandonment, and more; phenomena which are hard to reconcile with the idea, central to the Jewish and Christian scriptures, that there exists a God who is deeply and lovingly concerned with the lives of humans. Michael C. Rea argues that divine hiddenness is not a problem to be explained away but rather a consequence of the nature of God himself. He shows that it rests on unwarranted assumptions and expectations about God's love for human beings. Rea explains how scripture and tradition bear testimony not only to God's love, but to God's transcendence. He shows that God's transcendence should be understood as implying that all of God's intrinsic attributes—divine love included—elude our grasp in significant ways.

About Michael C. Rea

Michael C. Rea is a Professorial Fellow at the Logos Institute for Analytic & Exegetical Theology at the University of St Andrews, as well as Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame, where he has taught since 2001. He has written or edited more than ten books and thirty articles in metaphysics and the philosophy of religion, and has given numerous lectures in the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Russia, China, and Iran. He was the 2017 Gifford Lecturer at the University of St Andrews. His publications include Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology (coedited with Oliver D. Crisp), Philosophical and Theological Essays on the Trinity (coedited with Thomas McCall; 2009), and The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology (coedited with Thomas P. Flint; 2009). He is also the series editor of Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology with Oliver D. Crisp.

Reviews

Goodreads review by A.H.

The author is very rigorous and shows great clarity in expounding his ideas. I wrote a fair amount of notes whilst reading this book. As often done in academic philosophy there is a lot of "now I will explain x and having explained x will expand to explain y" and later "as you have seen I have expla......more

Goodreads review by John

It was interesting revisiting this topic, and thinking again about divine hiddenness. I like how Rea built his argument, and how he often raised the questions and objects that arose in my mind towards the end of each part and then continued to address them in the following section. I don't think I a......more

Goodreads review by Joseph

Ok, this was interesting. Rea proposes an alternative approach to responding to the hiddenness argument by appealing not to comfort or the goodness of God. Instead, he approaches it by merely refuting the idea that divine silence means God’s love is up for debate. He instead argues that given God’s......more

Goodreads review by David

Rea's academic and professional approach will be irritating to many, though he is eminently a terrific logician and practiced theologian. His argument boils down to the idea that we should not expect a transcendent God to love as we do; and we should relate to God as we do to other minds.......more

Goodreads review by Paul

I am genuinely shocked that that is what I just read. If you are going into this book thinking that it will offer any sort of comfort or frameworks to help you understand or explain the phenomenon of the hiddenness of God, let me encourage you to go elsewhere. This here is a book length argument sim......more

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