The absence of God
God himself, as God, does not appear in the world or in
human experience. He is not the kind of being that can be present as a
thing in the world. And yet, despite this necessary absence,
he is believed to be that which gives the definitive sense to
everything that does appear in the world and in experience. We first
learn about the Christian God in the course of Christian living. We
hear about him through preaching, we address him in prayer, and we
attempt to respond to him in our actions; however, we approach him as one who will always be absent to us while we remain in something we now must call “our present state.”Robert Sokolowski
Last February I preached on a text from Isaiah, using this quote
about the necessary absence of God. The sermon made a distinction
between what is immediately present and what is indirectly present.
The creation is immediately present to us — the Creator is not. I went
on to say there are certain ways we encounter traces of God, ways God
is indirectly present to us. That sermon generated more responses than
anything I’ve preached in a while, and it must be because I departed
from the usual banalities about the presence of God and took seriously
the absence of God.
