For when God seems absent (which feels like most of the time).

10 min. to read if you read all the footnotes, too.

There’s a problem many modern Christians have when they read scripture. Every part of the Bible was written in a culture and time when everyone knew that everything happened because God willed it thus. Good things were God’s blessing. Bad things were God’s punishment.

When everything from the weather to invasion is seen as the direct will of God, prayer often becomes an attempt to persuade God to stop the bad and give more of the good. But most of us don’t live in that world anymore.

In a world where every single thing that happened was God’s immediate intervention, God seemed profoundly present all the time. Sometimes terrifyingly so! Our ancestors, who saw God’s presence and activity in every circumstance and event, had a sense of God’s nearness — but they also very often had a sense that God was capricious and even vengeful. How could they not? Every terrible thing that happened was the direct will of God. When crops failed. When enemies invaded. When children died young of disease, or lived in crippling poverty — all of it, God’s will.

Following the Enlightenment, there has been a shift in our understanding of how the universe works. Some academics and theologians refer to this shift as “the disenchantment” of the world. Before this shift, most people defaulted to a religious, mystical, or magical explanation for why things happened. Following this shift, many (primarily Western) people now tend to default to a materialist explanation. The core modern assumption is that everything that happens can be explained by physics, biology, or psychology.

This “disenchantment” has many implications, both good and bad, but one thing is sure. For most, it makes God seem more distant. If you don’t believe God actively wills every aspect of daily life, where is God? But there is a benefit as well. There is no need to blame God for all the bad things that happen. This opens up a new space of understanding and relating to God that most of our ancestors could never have imagined.

Certainty is its own theological limitation.

Our ancestors’ certainty about God’s direct action in the world was, in itself, a theological limitation. Looking at the pain in the world around them and accepting that this pain was God’s will led to the development of the picture of God as an arbitrary judge doling out punishments according to inscrutable standards. This picture of God requires appeasement and propitiation. It also means the only reasonable posture toward God is ultimately one of fear.

There were always theologians who wondered about this, finding it incompatible with the nature of God demonstrated in the life and teachings of Jesus. They wondered if God could be reduced to the simple cause-and-effect relationship we expect. Folks like Gregory of Nyssa and the author of Pseudo-Dionysius doubted this kind of fearful certainty. They proposed that God must exist not only beyond our mental frameworks of blessing and punishment, but beyond our capacity to define and explain with words at all.

This way of thinking about God came to be called the via negativa or apophatic theology. In simple terms, the via negativa proposes that we can only talk about God in terms of what God is not. We can’t say, “God is Good,” because that is too vague a category, and ultimately God’s nature would transcend anything we could explain as goodness. We could say, in contrast, “God is not evil.” We could say, “God is not finite,” or “God is not limited by a body, by location, or by time.”

This may sound like academic word games, but it opens up a new way of immediately experiencing and knowing God. Unlike our ancestors, who saw God as the cause of every circumstance — even tragedies, the via negativa allows us to say, “I don’t know exactly how God works, but I know God is not arbitrary. I know God isn’t unkind. I know God is not absent, even though circumstances suggest this.” We are no longer obligated to force the painful reality of our circumstances to conform to the certainty of our theology. We can leave room for sacred uncertainty. This kind of uncertainty is not faithlessness at all, but a kind of faith that respects the transcendence of God. In fact, this is one of the failures of fundamentalist views of God. The required level of certainty always, in the end, reduces God to a kind of superhero, a different class of creature than us – stronger, smarter, older, holier – but a creature all the same.

The apophatic tradition offers a different way of thinking about God. God is not somewhere in spatial terms, requiring our attendance at that special place, or causing us to invite God to be with us. God does not will things in the way we understand human volition, which would require us to convince God to act through our prayer or good behavior. God does not intervene in the way we often conceive of the powerful bending circumstances to their will, which raises questions of how one might get God on their side. When we have a sense of God’s absence, rather than our sense saying anything about God, we can, without losing faith, see it as simply the experience of our own expectations not being met.¹Which, it should be noted, God is not obliged to fulfill.

This becomes the place where we enter into a new kind of experience of God. Gregory of Nyssa called this the “dazzling darkness,” where we most deeply experience God beyond the light of certainty.²Discussed in this excellent paper, Kariatlis, Philip. “Dazzling Darkness”: The Mystical or Theophanic Theology of St. Gregory of Nyssa. n.d. The author of Pseudo-Dionysius referred to this same experience as “the darkness of unknowing.”³Pseudo-Dionysius. “On the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology.” Translated by C.E. Rolt. Theologians like these suggest that God is not revealed by adding more light, but by going more deeply into darkness. It is our false certainties that obscure the reality of God.

When can you see the stars?

I was reflecting on the disenchantment of the world on a recent camping trip in central Oregon. We were far from the ambient light of the city. The sky was a deep, velvet darkness. Set on that fabric, the stars glowed with such clarity. They weren’t just visible. They seemed close, even though I know the mind-boggling distance between us.

I cannot see the stars most of the time from my home in Portland. The light of day and nighttime light pollution obscures them. This may be true where you live as well. If our senses are to be the judge of the matter, it might seem as if there are no stars at all. Even our language is revealing. We say, “The stars came out.” But the stars have been there the whole time; only our perception has changed. That moment when you lie in the darkness under the velvet of true night, the stars are so present you feel like you can almost touch them. They are obviously, unquestionably, tangible. Despite our perception, there never was a time when the stars weren’t there.

Modern Catholic theologian, Catherine Mowry LaCugna, following the wisdom of the apophatic theologians, comments: “The darkness of ‘unknowing’ is not a kind of disbelief but a type of knowing. The via negativa leads not into absence or nothingness, but into the presence of the God who surpasses thoughts and words and even the desire for God. Moses’ vision of God at the top of Mt. Sinai took place in the cloud of darkness (Exod. 20, 24, 34). Greek patristic writers favored this text to describe to us the utter brilliance of God, the effulgence of God’s glory, that can appear to us only as darkness.”⁴LaCugna, Catherine Mowry. God For Us: The Trinity and Christian Life. 1st ed. HarperSanFrancisco, 1991. 326.

There is undoubtedly a kind of comfort that comes from tangible experiences we interpret as God’s presence. But that comfort is limited because it requires just the right circumstances. You have to come down from the mountain, or summer camp, or that incredible concert, sooner or later. And what about those of us who live with depression, or who find ourselves in terrible circumstances that cannot be God’s will? The truth is that some of us live in places where the light pollution blocks out the stars.

The via negativa would suggest that those “tangible experiences” of divine presence are not God. Those experiences are finite, temporal, and circumstantially dependent — none of which are true of God. God is not comfort, nor experience. God is not the emotions we associate with the sacred. This doesn’t diminish such experiences, but recognizes them as signs which point beyond themselves toward the God who infinitely exceeds all experience. As Pseudo-Dionysius taught, God is beyond both being and non-being, beyond presence and absence.

The apophatic theologians were convinced that God pervades all of experience and is present even in those places where God’s absence seems most acute. My experience of the stars in central Oregon is a parable of how our perception is simply not the truth. Like the stars, God is present in a way that transcends even our ideas of presence. It’s just that so much of our life obscures that presence from us. The via negativa invites us to shift our attention. We begin to practice looking at the world around us, the spaces where we once thought God was absent.

If the darkness feels close, look again.

You may not need this strange encouragement. Perhaps for you, God seems present and active in your day-to-day. But many of the folks I talk with these days are somewhere in the process of deconstructing the religion they grew up with. They’ve found themselves in a wilderness without certainty, without the comfort of affirming community, without the clarity that comes with rituals and routines. This deconstruction process is its own kind of disenchantment. When we deconstruct, we are systematically negating the false certainties we’ve held about God and the universe. We are stripping away these conceptual idols, finite ideas we have mistakenly identified with the infinite God. The wilderness we find ourselves in can seem a dark place.

In this space, the wisdom of the apophatic theologians can help. The darkness we find ourselves in is only darkness to our perception and in light of the certainties we’ve let go of. As the Psalmist said, speaking of God, “Darkness is not dark to You.”⁵Psalms 139:12. This sense of absence we experience can be a place of “Divine darkness” where we encounter a God who is not our projections, not our theological systems, and not our inherited certainties.

Let your eyes adjust. The God who is only ever love is there, even in those dark places. You can learn to pay attention, and when you do, you may be surprised at how close God seems.

• 1
  Which, it should be noted, God is not obliged to fulfill.
• 2
  Discussed in this excellent paper, Kariatlis, Philip. “Dazzling Darkness”: The Mystical or Theophanic Theology of St. Gregory of Nyssa. n.d.
• 3
  Pseudo-Dionysius. “On the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology.” Translated by C.E. Rolt.
• 4
  LaCugna, Catherine Mowry. God For Us: The Trinity and Christian Life. 1st ed. HarperSanFrancisco, 1991. 326.
• 5
  Psalms 139:12.