Adam, Where Art Thou?
Hiding from God in the Secular Age
Why do we think that if we hide, consequences will go away? Yet we conceal, we camouflage, we disguise, and we even attempt to disappear. The tragedy of The Invisible Man (H.G. Wells, 1897) is that the protagonist, Griffin, descends into an irreversible madness from an isolation of his own making. How poignantly recognizable. You and I can seek anonymity until we find it. The problem is that we are not and can never be anonymous in the sight of our Creator. We didn’t really disappear any more than God did. I will seek to explain what I mean.
“Daddy! You are not there!”
There was a father who witnessed this very phenomenon with his daughter. In this case, a father did not allow his five-year-old daughter to play outside with the neighbor's children. A storm threatened the previously cloudless sky. “But that is not fair!” responded the little girl. “Sweetie, I am sorry, but there is lightening. I can’t allow you to go outside. And I am sure the other children will also have to go in now.” “Daddy, it will pass. There is no bad weather now!” "Her irrational reasoning caused the father to pause. It meant so much to her, but she could not see the possible consequences. The father bent down to his daughter's level and tried to embrace her. She resisted, growing angry. A void appeared between father and daughter. The father spoke into the void to reach his daughter: “Honey, I am so sorry, but Daddy knows best. I don’t want anything to happen to my sweet girl.” But that was not good enough. Whether it was too much sugar, food coloring, not enough Marmite on her toast (or Vegemite, if you prefer), or (more likely) an inflamed Augustinian theological strand in her nature coming to the surface, the wee lass decided that it was time to “pitch a fit.” She slammed her feet down in protest against her father’s decision. Then, this beautiful little creature placed her hands over her ears and closed her eyes so tightly that it disfigured her countenance. The man’s little daughter shouted, “I can’t see you! I can’t hear you! You are not there!”
Lest we think too harshly of the little girl, we should remember that defacing God—creating a void between the Lord and ourselves—is a human adaptation first appearing in the Mosaic account of the Garden of Eden:
“And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden. And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou” (Genesis 3:8,9 AV).
Faded Faces
Of course, the Lord knew where Adam was. He knows where you are—an incomprehensible Jehovah-Jireh GPS based on the immutable algorithms and innate rights of the Creator over creation. His question, “Where art thou?” is a secret indictment and a profoundly moving lament when one considers the relationship at stake. The Creator, omniscient and omnipresent, is speaking to His creation. The Lord’s question does not suggest a question of God’s limitations. The voice of God is the sound of the Divine echoing through the scandalous void canyon of sorrow created by Adam. The question is rhetorical. The answer is axiomatic. And the scene is painfully familiar. There could not be a more tragic scene than the pathetic image hiding from the Source only to disappear forever or to lose so much saturation of the Real that he becomes a ghost in the distance, faded and forlorn.
The One who is I AM will not disappear because we prefer it to be so. Yet, humans can and do act as if He is not there. It is the most foolish thing imaginable: to deny, deface, or defile the Source to liberate the Reflection.—M. A. Milton.
God cannot be removed. He cannot be unseated. He is eternal le Dieu souverain. Yet, He often orders providence through prayer. The Triune God, three in one—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—is entirely independent. And, yet, He is not a mere nameless self-generating, self-sufficient force, unseen Mover, or anything of the sort. The One who is I AM exists and will not disappear because we prefer it to be so. Yet, humans can and do act as if He is not there. It is the most foolish thing imaginable: to deny the Source to liberate the Reflection. This led the late English philosopher Sir Roger Scruton to locate and name the great affliction of our age, defacing God:
“You might wonder how people can deliberately turn away from a thing they believe not to exist. But God is in an intimate relationship even with those who reject Him. Like the spouse in a sacramental marriage, God is unavoidable or avoidable only by creating a void. The void opens before us when we destroy the face—not the human face only, but also the face of the world. The godless void is what confronts us when our surroundings are defaced. I do not deny that atheists can be thoroughly upright people, far better people than I am. But there is more than one motive underlying the atheist culture of our times, and the desire to escape from the eye of judgment is one of them. You escape from the eye of judgment by wiping away the face.”1
The Resiliency of Christianity
But we do, don’t we? Nevertheless, to attempt such madness in Western Civilization, we must (or will) recognize that there is a dominant force (still) at work: Christianity. As Dr. Tom Holland writes in his splendidly researched work Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, Christianity, Jesus Christ, and His disciples so disrupted and redefined every facet of life that even enemies of Christ are defined by Him. Whether Secularism or Satanism, quantum physics or veterinary science, Constitutional law or crime and punishment, we in the West measure and are measured by the life, teaching, and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth and the Christian message that revolutionized Western Civilization. Holland, a Cambridge classicist, came face-to-face with the historical fact that the world we know today is not the product of classical antiquity as much as he wanted it to be.
“Holland writes that Christianity continues to infuse people's morals and presumptions ‘so utterly that many failed even to detect their presence. Like dust particles so fine as to be invisible to the naked eye, they were breathed in equally by everyone: believers, atheists, and those who never paused so much as to think about religion.’”2
We must credit the French atheist Michael Foucault (1926-1984) with this, at least: he urged the deconstruction of every idea and. institution in the West because he knew that such pillars were constructed with Christian fabric—not classical Greek or Roman, not pre-Christian northern European paganism. Foucault, the antagonist in the crusade to advance neo-Epicureanism at the expense of self-destruction, if necessary—a self-fulfilling tactical reality in his own life and in the abbreviated days of Frederich Nietzsche (1844-1900), his intellectual mentor—is, in the applied philosophical argument of Holland, merely a tiny bit player in the “Greatest Story Ever Told.”3 The Gay Pride campaign, a colorful, flammable façade that covers a societal house of horrors, can only be fully understood as a response to the immovable ethics of Christianity. Even denominational activism to remove the unambiguous teaching of the One whom certain religious groups purport to follow is a delusional enterprise that attacks the source of its existence. This insight explains the inevitable decline of mainline Protestant denominations (including the Southern Baptist Convention). Likewise, as Holland points out, Human Rights, so eloquently embedded in the U.S. Constitution (a Reformation idea hidden in the language of the Enlightenment, as Zwartz has rightly opined), English Law, art, and literature (and no one has established the link between beauty and Jesus Christ than Sir Roger), are each and all understood about Christianity. As a dominant sun in the West recedes, it is diminishing because of distance from the gravitational power of its source: Biblical Christianity.
Mercifully, God welcomes those who have hidden from Him or attempted to muddy the water, as if distorting the reflection will remove the Real. The Church rolls are filled with such people. And I don’t mean just Paul or Augustine; I mean all of us. We are born spiritually predisposed to stomp our feet, cover our ears, and shut our eyes. Sinful acts are symptoms, deadly to be sure, but second effects emanate from a more primal, systemic pathology. Hiding from God is a family trait, more appropriately, a “defective gene” of the soul.4 It won’t go away by itself anymore. To face Jesus by faith and without a mask is a transformative event. To confess the reality of God and embrace His revealed covenant of grace through His Son, our Savior Jesus Christ—viz., Jesus’ life for mine in both the requirement for righteousness (His unblemished life) and for sin (His substitutionary atonement on the cross)— is to have faces again. It is to respond to God’s question, “Where art thou?” It is to respond, “I am here, Lord.”5
Roger Scruton, The Face of God: The Gifford Lectures (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2012), 1, 2.
Tom Holland, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (Hachette UK, 2019). The quotation is from Barney Zwartz, “Christianity Still Shapes Modern Western Mortality,” The Sydney Morning Herald, November 15, 2019.
Holland, 17.
This is not a statement on the doctrine referred to as Traducianism (or other theories of the soul). That God created the soul (ψυχή, psuchê) is enough. That the Bible teaches that humanity inherited sin from Adam is indisputable. For arguments for traducianism consider Oliver D. Crisp An American Augustinian: Sin and Salvation in the Dogmatic Theology of William G. T. Shedd, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2007, p. 18. For arguments against (the creation of the soul at conception), see Louis Berkhof. Manual of Christine Doctrine, Christian Liberty Press, 2007, p. 46. Augustine and Luther were undecided.
My allusion, “to have faces again,” is to be fully human, an existential yet metaphysical transformation informed by Clive Staples Lewis. Till We Have Faces. San Francisco, HarperOne, 2017.