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Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.

Deborah Casewell: Is Luther right in saying that God has to remain hidden and the way in which God has to remain hidden has to be terrifying. There has to be this kind of background of the terrifying God in all of our relations with God. It's the God of love that is the God of grace that, that saves us. It's fundamentally incomprehensibility, that it's a way of keeping God incomprehensible and keeping reason away from God.

You are in a situation where God is both revealed and hidden and at sometimes the hiddenness of God may come to the fore and at sometimes the revelation of God might come to the fore because we live in a time bound world and so we can't necessarily comprehend or understand what lies beyond it and so that maybe is an aspect of our relationship with the hiddenness of God.

There is a tension there and there will be experiences and there will be dark nights of the soul and there will be states that you are in but tend you towards despair, but you've always got to keep the reality of faith, hope, and love. Keep hold of the fact that that is a reality, and that can and will be a reality, and not to try and justify it, not to try and harmonize it, but just to hold it.

I suppose. And hold it even in its contradiction.

Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. God is hidden. God is silent. Is saying that sacrilegious, or could it be the very ground of Christian faith? How do we make sense of what seems like a plain and obvious fact with the biblical record or the testimony of those who claim to see or hear God?

Maybe you've felt this yourself. But it turns out we're in good company. A psalmist anxiously prays, Do not hide your face from me. Jesus prays, Why have you forsaken me? And, after Mother Teresa died in 1997, some of her writing emerged that presented a very different picture of this canonized saint. Soon after hearing God call her into the service of the poor in 1946, God seems to have mostly disappeared, gone silent.

And she fell into a long, dark, night of the soul. Collected by Included in the volume of letters and journal entries entitled, Mother Teresa, Come Be My Light, she writes a raw and heartbreaking prayer that nonetheless may feel familiar to some of us. Lord my God, I that you should forsake me, a child of your love, and now become as the most hated one, the one you have thrown away as unwanted, unloved.

I call, I cling, I want, and there is no one to answer. No one on whom I can cling. No, no one. Alone. Where is my faith? Even deep down, right in there is nothing but emptiness and darkness. My God, how painful is this unknown pain. I have no faith. I dare not utter the words and thoughts that crowd in my heart and make me suffer untold agony.

So many unanswered questions live within me, afraid to uncover them because of the blasphemy. If there be God, please forgive me. When I try to raise my thoughts to heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul. I am told God loves me, and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that But nothing touches my soul.

Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the call of the Sacred Heart?

This passage very achingly captures the fact that, well beyond an academic question, the other side of divine hiddenness is human loneliness.

In this episode, philosopher Deborah Casewell joins me for a discussion of divine hiddenness. Deborah is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chester in the UK, author of Monotheism and Existentialism, And you would have heard her recently on the show talking about Simone Weil, the existentialist.

Together we discussed the difference between God's abdication of the world and the idea that he might abandon it, Martin Luther's theology of the cross, the differences between the epistemic, moral, and spiritual. and existential problems with the hiddenness of God. The terror, horror, and fear that emerges from the human experience of divine hiddenness.

The realities of seeing through a glass darkly while pursuing faith, hope, and love. And finally, what it means to live bravely in the tension and contradiction between the hiddenness of God and faith in God's presence. Thanks for listening.

Deborah Casewell, thank you for joining me again on For the Life of the World. 

Deborah Casewell: Thank you for having me again. 

Evan Rosa: The last time we spoke, it was about Simone Weil. I loved that conversation. And a fascinating thing about Weil is her concept of creation, decreation, and then abdication. And you helped me understand abdication as not a form of abandonment, but instead something that is sort of necessary in some sense for the world to be populated like it and hopefully flourishing people.

But I wanted to start this conversation on the hiddenness of God with a piece from Vey, and I'll read it. Uh, she writes in Gravity and Grace, the presence of God, this should be understood in two ways. As creator, God is present in everything which exists as soon as it exists. The presence for which God needs the cooperation of the creature is the presence of God, not as creator, But as spirit, the first presence is the presence of creation.

The second is the presence of de creation. He who created us without our help will not save us without our consent. And she references St. Augustine. Finally, God could create only by hiding himself. Otherwise, there would be nothing but himself. Now, as with most of Vey's writing, the first time you are exposed to it, it smacks of inscrutability and an obfuscation, but there's also something really interesting here as well.

So if this kind of sets forth both a problem and her own proposed solution to divine hiddenness, I don't want to jump too far ahead here because Hiddenness, it's a perceived problem. It's akin to the problem of evil or problem of suffering in that there's a kind of longing for God who is hidden and unknown and unperceived and mysterious.

I don't know, this is my kind of foregrounding of the problem of divine hiddenness, but I'm curious what are some of your starting points to understanding the problem or the question? 

Deborah Casewell: I think I first came across the theological discussion on divine hiddenness in relation to the theology of the cross, which is the idea you get in Luther that God is hidden there.

That the God, this God of kind of glory, power, majesty, omnipotence, so on and so forth, is hidden in the suffering and the economy of, of the cross, but that the cross is also the fault, is also the revelation of God as well. That God is simultaneous the God of power and glory and the God of suffering. And, you know, suffering and pain and humiliation as well.

So in that way, the glory of God is hidden in its opposite. So that's the first way you come, you kind of usually talk about it that God hides under God's opposite, which is what we don't expect to be associated with God. And for Luther, this becomes a way of contradicting people who want to associate earthly power and earthly glory with God.

Because he says, no, the revelation of God is God is suffering, is suffering and death. And humiliation instead. So, and, and as you say, it always relates in some way to evil and suffering in some way as a way of understanding it, of quite like God sympathizes, God understands what suffering is God's, what's going is, is what God goes through as well.

But also God is powerful but chooses not to be powerful. And, and that, that kind of links to Simone Bay thing as well, that God is powerful but chooses not to be in relation to us and we have to find God differently. 

Evan Rosa: So I wonder if you'd kind of share just as you first encountered it, and then as you think about it now, you know, I wonder if you describe what you notice as some of the sort of common experiences of hiddenness.

And in so far as you've thought of it, because you talk about, I mean, it's not just being hidden or veiled. There's also the concept of being alien or alienating. And then there's the concept of the terrifying, the, the, yeah, the terrifying God, as you put it. And so I'm wondering if you can kind of describe some of the.

So the human experience around hiddenness as it's been written about through history and as you think about it. 

Deborah Casewell: Yeah. I think in some ways you could probably detail three ways in which people talk about the hiddenness of God. There's the epistemic hiddenness of God, the idea that God is beyond human knowledge.

So the hiddenness of God has to do with the, you know, the capacity of human reason, the human thought to ever encapsulate God. So. God remains hidden even though God fully gives, is given in the incarnation or in creation because then, because if you were to grasp God with our minds, then we'd be denying the power of God.

So I think that's one, one aspect. Or 

Evan Rosa: denying our own limitations, perhaps. 

Deborah Casewell: Yeah, I'm kind of making ourselves an idol. I think that's what some, that's kind of, that's partly Calvin's concern with it, isn't it? Kind of, you know, making us ourselves into an idol. It's like, yeah, making our reason into an idol.

Again, Lucifer is also concerned that we make reason into an idol as well, that we can then sluice out the divine and know everything about it. So there's a kind of epistemic hiddenness and that can take several forms. You get that in kind of apophatic theology where you just, where you can't talk about God, you just can't talk about God.

And so you talk about God by not talking about God. Yeah. Well, kind of classic texts, like, you know, the cloud of unknowing. And, you know, if you talk about God, you enter into the cloud of unknowing. I think that's one kind of hiddenness. 

Evan Rosa: Fundamentally. Yeah. Yeah. All epistemic, you'd say. 

Deborah Casewell: Epistemic. Yeah. It's, it's, it's kind of, it's kind of the more appealing one, basically.

It's definitely the more appealing one, but then you get the, the moral hiddenness of God. And this is what people find really troubling in, I think, Calvin and Luther. I think that's what Garish points out as well, that there is a sense in which the way in which we understand, the way in which God reveals, is revealed, or the way in which God acts in the world has a kind of moral terror.

To it where the desires, the aims, the purposes of God are hidden in that and so looser, so, so Lucr finds this in predestination, the idea that God damns many and saves a few. He says That is terrifying. And that is, and that is part of the incomprehensibility of God, does that kind of moral aspect of it as well, right?

Think that's one way. And the third one, I'd say is a kind of existential. hiddenness of God, which is where you have, or a kind of even a phenomenological something, some kind of, you know, some kind of human experience where the hiddenness of God makes you feel terrified in some way. But that's also part, and sometimes that's part of the revelation of God, and sometimes it's part of the absence of God as well, as you were talking about, that God's hiddenness leads to anxiety, leads to that kind of terror as well.

Evan Rosa: With those three in hand, those three ways of approaching hiddenness, Um, it might make sense to sort of take them in turn and try to learn what we can from like how people have observed this phenomenon. And I think it's kind of, one of the ways I wanted to situate this is with respect to revelation as well.

Because when we think about. The story of theology, maybe the story of human reflection on the divine, which is based on, I think, some kind of story of human engagement and encounter with the divine. These things seem to be at odds when you begin to kind of work through them, that hiddenness in its epistemic and moral and existential forms, at least on its face, seems to be at odds with the concept of Divine revelation, whether it's general or special, through the use of reason or through the use of the scriptures or some other miraculous process.

experience. And I'm just curious what you make of that. 

Deborah Casewell: I mean, Luther's kind of the big authority on the hiddenness of God in the kind of the existential and moral sense. It's linked a bit with the epistemic, but I think he's the more kind of the moral and existential sense. For him, it's a way of making sense of the feeling of kind of terror, I think, that he feels around the of God, and for him, It almost seems like he, that the incomprehensibility of God in some way, should be one that evokes in you terror.

So in a way that the power of God is revealed. Not just in, I suppose, love, in grace, but you, but you're kind of reminded that what you're dealing with is God here, that it can't all be kind of, you know, sunshine and sunshine and flowers, that there is, that the nature of God is such that There is something terrifying about God.

I think it's, he's trying to express that there as well, so that God never becomes comfortable or God never gets accommodated to our, our measure. So, you know, and part of that is to make, is to be like, God has to remain terrifying. We have to remain, you know, able to be terrified of God so that we're never comfortable.

We never accommodate God. We never make God into an object of our reason and comfort.

Evan Rosa: That's so fascinating though, because I mean, I think some people will may find that counterintuitive to hear that, like, that it's important in some sense to retain that sort of sense of terror. And here I might ask you to offer some distinctions or whether you find any between terror and comfort.

Horror and fear. I'm not sure I could totally, uh, offer like clear distinctions between the three. I am thinking of a kind of, I mean, there's a sort of fear that can kind of get cast as reverence. There's a fear that can, you know, that just appeals to some kind of, kind of threat. But then when we elevate it to the sense of terror, It seems to kind of go to an existential place.

And then, and then when I'm thinking of horror, I'm thinking, I'm thinking of Marilyn McCord Adams and sort of like the meaning destroying nature of it as well. So this is all fear talk. And, and this does seem to be embedded in human nature in an important way that that which is hidden. We, we, yeah. It terrifies us.

Deborah Casewell: Yeah. It's like, we'll, terrifi the Sea, who knows what's down there? That kind of thing. It's that kind of relationship. Yeah. But the terror is also, or a 

Evan Rosa: deep cave or the thoughts in another person's mind. . 

Deborah Casewell: Yes. Or the, or the sublime or something. Yeah. But in some ways I of. That kind of terror means you respect it.

You kind of hold it in esteem because it is terrifying. 

Evan Rosa: Yeah, indeed. Yeah. Yeah. It, it, it, it demands a particular form of careful interaction. 

Deborah Casewell: Yeah. Yeah. So I think the problem that people have with LUSA, So the reason I'm coming back to Luther a lot is because he is the center of discussion. And when in the 20th century, people are trying to deal with Luther, they're just like, Oh, what's this weird thing about the hidden God here?

What's this weird thing about the left hand, like God's alien works and God's proper works? What's going on there? What do we do with this? And so some people try to like, ignore it. Some people try to like, be like, Oh, let's see if we can harmonize Luther's thought to make it such that he's not saying what he's saying, basically.

And some people are just like, well, maybe we should just try and, you know, what, what, Some people are like, well, what would happen if we just took it and said this is an aspect of what God is? And so I think that's why the terror is more important than the fear because I think lots of theologians would say, okay, that's fine.

Of course we fear God. God is powerful. God, you know, God can save us. But Lucid kind of goes, God is terrifying because God does save some of us and God does damn some of us. And the only way we can relate to that is with And that does terrify us. That is something that evokes in us a feeling of horror.

Yeah. Yeah. But in some ways that's the proper, and Luther's response to it in one sense is just to be like, we should just not pry into that. You know, he quotes this Socratic, that which is above us does not concern us. We should not pry into it. We should let God be God in that respect and leave it as that.

Whereas I think in the, What I've worked on specifically has been two attempts to harmonize that, or not even harmonize that, to just get around that problem. So both Bart and Luther find it interesting, but they also find it deeply problematic, a real problem in Luther, and they try to harmonize it.

through their relationship with contemporary, with the philosophy at the time. They see like particular philosophies at that time, essentially the kind of the alien work of God or they express the alien work of God appropriately. And interestingly, those are philosophies which dwell on like the terror and the anxiety of human existence in relation to this, the nothingness, the lack of meaning that there is in life.

Evan Rosa: Yeah, that's very interesting. So, so then. I mean, I would love to hear, you know, you articulate how you're trying to approach this and what you think is sort of like to this point, you know, like in, in taking 20th century theology into account and taking the history of theology into account, what questions surrounding this do you want to really focus in on in order to explore this area?

Deborah Casewell: I'd say one is, do you think that Luther is right, I suppose? Is Luther right in saying that God has to remain hidden? And the way in which God has to remain hidden has to be terrifying. There has to be this kind of background of the terrifying God in all of our relations with the God of love that is the God of grace that, that saves us.

That's one thing I think, is Luther right? Exactly.

Evan Rosa: Is Luther committed to the idea that God must stay hidden? Is it solely based on this predestination and, and the possibility of damnation? Or is it, or, I mean, you know, maybe you, I'm curious what you think about, you know, the difference between how. Luther and Weil might think about this. 

Deborah Casewell: I think for Luther, it's less, I mean, predestination is part of it.

It's fundamentally incomprehensibility, that it's a way of keeping God incomprehensible and keeping reason away from God. So that'd be the Socratic 

Evan Rosa: dictum then. 

Deborah Casewell: Yeah, the kind of Socratic dictum and where human reason is always trying to get control of things and, you know, categorize, bring things under its control, make everything rational, but it's a way of keeping God incomprehensible.

Evan Rosa: Yeah. 

Deborah Casewell: Both in an emotional sense and an intellectual sense as well. I'd say that's one of the main, the main reasons. 

Evan Rosa: Yeah. What's fascinating about that is The idea of keeping God incomprehensible is one way of saying, well, this is just a fool's errand in the first place. The very effort to make God comprehensible is perhaps as a form of idolatry.

It's at least foolishness and, and it certainly can't be done. 

Deborah Casewell: But then the question is, does he go too far the other way? Does he then leave his They leave his theology open to, I don't know, just incoherence in some sense. How can you have this God that is always hidden if God is Love. I mean the I, the I, most people just like, okay, the idea that God has revealed in the suffering of Christ, that's fine.

We can accept that most of the time. That's that, that, that, that's one way in which people say, okay, that's the one way. In which reason, wait, where reason can't get ahold of God because reason always glorifies itself and therefore anything contrary to reason, which is suffering and death andonly, that, that's kind of fine.

Do you then need, do you then need this God behind God? That is terrifying. Do you still need that? 

Evan Rosa: Yeah, it quickly becomes a puzzlement in my experience of, of, of. Socratic aporia and perplexity. It comes quick. I'm so confused by a lot of this as well, because, I mean, it seems plain that God is hidden and yet there's all sorts of people.

And then this is part of why I wanted to motivate it here. And like the kind of question of keeping God incomprehensible, you know, there's a lot of people in the world that just. that still claim very intimate relationship with God and suggest that God is in fact not hidden. And I mean, you can find this in a variety of Christian denominations, but, but also into plenty of other religious traditions.

Um, there's a book by the apologist Francis Schaeffer, for instance, there's a little book, he is there and he is not silent. And I've always thought about that title for the two claims that it's trying to argue against, which is God is in fact not there. And is silent. Yes. And so part of why I find this interesting, and it's, and this, I am speaking personally, is that we're trying to make sense of these two contrary, uh, experiences or two contrary thoughts.

And, and one is that if there is any kind of commitment to the idea that God is revealed in Christ or that God makes God self revealed in just any way, That is going to cross against a very powerful experience that I cannot see God and I cannot hear God. And the experience of God comes by way of some perceptual faculty that is very other.

And that is, you know, if it is, insofar as it's a human capacity, it's one that, that doesn't come easy and can in fact lead to confusion at times, but also it ends up being exploited in all sorts of terrible ways as well, and spiritually abusive ways, you know, speaking for God. So here, I'm only just trying to motivate sort of the force of the question, why it seems to matter to me.

Deborah Casewell: Because, I mean, I think some takes on the hiddenness of God would argue that even that God is hidden and it's a good thing in some ways, because it means the, the faith that you have in relation to God is a true faith because it's not based on that kind of transactional thing where you, where God is there and speaking to you and God gives you what you want and God does what you want.

So, so in a way it's a way of preserving, preserving the mystery and the non transactional nature that you, that you should have. have with God. So that's one way in which I can, I do sometimes see that it goes in, that we are unable to commodify God or trivialize God, which is what we sometimes, I think humans have the tendency to do.

Yeah. And in some ways then the experience of God that is hidden and terrifying and silent can be recast. I think it's what Luther tries to do a bit. He, he recast it as a good thing. Some ways it's a good thing that we are terrified. It's a good thing that we are abandoned. Sometimes it's a good thing that we go, that we have that experience.

Cause it, cause it, cause it, cause it sounds like some way that, that, that was linked to the idea of the kind of the anxiety, the effect on the suffering that he goes through. And he's like, it's a good thing that you have that in relation to God. 

Evan Rosa: So insofar as Luther thinks this is essential, this is certainly a different way of experiencing God.

This is a different form of spiritual experience and the sense in which we hone in on the terror that comes from this, let alone the necessity of that terror and the, the living with a faith and the acting, like the work of faith that is, is implied. in Christianity, at least, has to stand together with this hiddenness.

Deborah Casewell: Yeah, what I wanted to explore was how theologies that wanted this kind of complete revelation of God in Christ were both still fascinated by divine hiddenness, and they wanted to keep the complete revelation of God, but also the hiddenness of God in the event of revelation, but also not necessarily endorse Luther's terrifying God.

But the way in which they tried to deal with the hiddenness of God to say that Luther was in some ways right, that human existence is formed of experiences of suffering, of anxiety, of terror, 

Evan Rosa: of despair, 

Deborah Casewell: you know, meaninglessness, it deals with those things and it has to in some way combat these things as well.

And the way in which they wanted to kind of harmonize, harmonize Luther's terrifying God was to say that contemporary philosophies that had The key human feature, or the key human existential state is being that of anxiety and despair. They were, because they related that to man's encounter, humanity's encounter with nothingness.

This kind of void of being, of meaning, of every, of that kind of stuff, our desire to avoid nothingness, to do anything we could to avoid nothingness. In many ways, that's what it is. That became the way in which they were like, okay, that, that part of human existence is the work of nothingness and God has given the work of nothingness a place.

And that is the alien work of God. So you still have God terrifying us, but God terrifies us in a kind of manageable control manner that he's overcome. And then I, and what I wanted to argue was whether that was the case when that was overcome or not. That was my argument. I've been doing some more work on other other philosophical trends around that time.

And one of the interesting things about philosophical trends around that time, um, and also literary trends around that time as well, is there's a interest in the demonic and there's interest in the experience of terror or As a kind of preliminary step into a full religious or a proper religious experience of God, that you kind of have to go through this anxiety and terror and then the existence of God has to be harmonized with that anxiety and terror as well.

So it's I think it's a very, it's not so much a view. It's a view that gets replaced by a certain kind of optimism, I think, in faith. But whereas what I like about this grappling with it, even if the grappling with it isn't necessarily successful, I don't think, sorry, I don't think Barth and Jung are necessarily successful, but at least they grapple with it.

And I really appreciate that kind of attention to the fact that people, that human existence can be terrifying and meaningless sometimes, and we do have these experiences. So how do they fit into the relationship we have with God? 

Evan Rosa: Yeah, I suppose maybe we can end in this kind of vein because I think there's all sorts of scriptural indications here around the longing for God.

And I mean, descriptions of both, you know, the descriptions of prophets basically who do act as some kind of channel for divine revelation and divine operation all the way back, all the way back to, uh, Perhaps to Noah. Um, and then certainly in the kind of apparently face to face relationship that Moses has with God and then on forward.

And yet by, by the time you have David writing the Psalms, you just have a lot of longing for the human interaction with the hidden God. Do not hide your face from me. There's a, there's some sense in which that, that experience of evil, of suffering, of nothingness, despair, anxiety, that precedes the problem of divine hiddenness, because it feels as if in that moment, God is not there.

God is silent. God is not there. is not coming to my aid. And, and this is where like certain elements of the Psalms seem to kind of capture this very universal human experience of, of loneliness. This is, we haven't said that word yet, which is the other side of divine hiddenness is human loneliness. 

Deborah Casewell: Yes, and that's one of the ways in which came out in, in, I think, the engagement with the existentialist philosophers, that kind of loneliness, that despair, Barton Newell wanted to say that is what your life is going to be like without God.

That is the reality of your life without God. And in some ways you have the experience of the hidden God, of the hiddenness of God. in so that you know what life would be like if you did not, you know, enter into the faith, the kind of the new life of faith that could do it, that can change that, that existential situation that you're working, that you are in.

I don't know whether that's an adequate response, but that, but, but it does say that these questions, this desire for God, this feeling of loneliness, this, you know, engagement with God is in some way kind of like sort of it's always going to be a tension in the experience of faith that The faith doesn't necessarily obviate because we're not at the, because I suppose it's at the urgency.

You're not in the fullness of God's presence, but this is what the reality of life without God is. And the hiddenness of God shows you what the reality of life without God is. Often

Evan Rosa: associated this problem rightly or wrongly, so I'm happy to be corrected by a biblical scholar here. But, um, with first Corinthians 13. 12. Seeing through a glass darkly. Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know even as I also am known. And of course, like that precedes this comment on faith, hope, and love.

And that's a, that's fascinating. Those are the things that abide in the face of this kind of epistemic, moral, existential limitation or hiddenness, you know, curious if that resonates or if there's anything to draw from that particular comment seeing through a glass darkly. 

Deborah Casewell: Yeah, so I think that's what the hidden god in some ways Presents to the quality of human existence on earth.

You are in a situation where God is both revealed and hidden and it's sometimes the hiddenness of God may come to the fore and it's sometimes the revelation of God might come to the fore because of the nature of your existence in the world as it is your nature as a kind of temporal being who has to deal with the possibility of things, ending of possibilities, ending of thing of time that runs out and everything that we just exist in a different.

quality. The life we have is a different quality to, to, to what the opposite is, to what the eternal is, to what the constant renewal possibility is. We, we live in a time bounded world. And so maybe that, that's how I see kind of living. So looking through that glass darkly, that we live in a time bound world.

And so we can't necessarily comprehend or understand what lies beyond it. And so that maybe is an aspect of our relationship with the hiddenness of God. 

Evan Rosa: In the same way that you sort of admire. Luther, Barth, Jungel for their struggle with hiddenness. I think this is one of the takeaways for me, at least for the moment.

And of course, the inability for us to be able to answer such a, such a question, right, is being willing to stick with the struggle around it. And that the question of hiddenness isn't something to be erased. It's something that can't be answered. The very definition of answering it would to be God. And so it kind of lays bare the idolatry that comes from trying to provide a full answer or a full erasure of the problem.

I mean, it's fascinating, erasure, a full revelation of God in this sense. Um, so I wonder if you, if maybe if you have any closing words on the meaning of that struggle for the human, the human pursuit of faith. Hope and love. 

Deborah Casewell: Yeah, I think in my own relationship to thinking and to systems, I'm much happier now than I was a few years ago, I think, to let tensions be, I think.

And I suppose that's what I feel like in relation to the question of the experience, the actual experiential, existential, that quality of the hiddenness of God in relation to faith, hope, and love, that there is a tension there, and there will be experiences, and there will be dark nights of the soul, and there will be states that you are in that tend you towards despair, but you've always got to keep the reality of faith, hope, and love.

Keep hold of the fact that that is a reality, and that can be Canon will be a reality. And not to try and justify it, not to try and harmonize it, but just to hold it, I suppose, and hold it even in its contradiction. 

Evan Rosa: That's a wonderful, fitting way to end. Deborah, thanks for joining me. 

Deborah Casewell: Thank you very much.

Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Deborah Casewell. Production assistance by Emily Brookfield, Alexa Rollow, and Zoë Halaban. I'm Evan Rosa, and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu or lifeworthliving.yale.edu. There you can find all sorts of resources that help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity. If you're a new listener, remember to hit subscribe in your favorite podcast app, so you don't miss the next episode. And if you're a loyal supporter and a faithful listener, we'd love for you to share this episode and strike up an honest conversation with a friend about divine hiddenness.

Or, any of your favorite episodes that we've produced. Thanks for sharing and thanks for supporting, but mostly thanks for listening, friends. We'll be back with more soon.

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