Deus revelatus

In Christian theology, God is presented as revealed or Deus revelatus through the suffering of Jesus Christ on the cross.

[2] The term is usually distinguished from Luther's concept of Deus absconditus, which affirms the fundamental unknowability of the essence of God.

[3] This distinction which permeates his theology has been the subject of wide interpretation, leading to controversy between theologians who believe the terms to be either antithetical or identical.

These two conflicting strands of thought present the main problem when interpreting Luther’s doctrine of the Revealed God.

[3] Luther thus proposed that God’s ultimate self revelation is in hiddenness, ‘namely, in weakness, in folly, in the incarnation and on the cross’.

[3] Because of this, Luther’s theology states that any individual outside of a Christian community of faith do not experience his self-revelation and do not know his attitude towards them.

Source:[1] The Revealed God contributes to debate in Philosophy of Religion whereby philosophers such as J. L. Schellenberg have used it to support the view of atheism.

Luther’s depiction of ‘deus absconditus’ can be found in his work Bondage of the Will (De servo arbitrio).

Theologians who believe the terms are antithetical include Hendel, Theodosius Harnack, the two Ritschls, Reinhold Seeberg, Hirsch, Elert, and Holl.

Such theologians argue the dualistic nature of the terms and state that the two differing views of God they produce cannot be reconciled.

Scientific discoveries continue to uncover violence as a marker of the origin of the world, from the ‘movement of fault lines in the earth to the extinction of species’.