God makes himself lower on our behalf and ‘transforms himself, as it were, assuming incongruous masks’ [et transformat se quoddamodo, dum induit alienas personas] (Calvin, commenting on Zph 3:17; see Shin 2005:87 for the quote).

Farewell from reformed ‘tamed’ theism, presupposes clarity on what we specifically mean by the untamed theism of Reformation times, from which the deviation occurred. Domestication of theism can also take on other forms, like the disappearance of the silent awe before the living God (see Van der Dussen 2019:19). In the framework of this article, however, untamed theism refers to the mysterious ‘medicine of divine masking’ (see Calvin 1970a:362–363), which God employs in the ‘wonderful and incredible’ way in which he works.

When, with good reason, Metaxas (2018:v, [author’s own emphasis]) can call Luther ‘the man who rediscovered God and changed the world’, this very rediscovery by Luther can be linked to a renewed theological accent on the hiddenness of God (cf. Paulson 2014; passim). Calvin, also in this regard a pupil of Luther (cf. Selderhuis 2000:191), shared this rediscovery wholeheartedly (see also Koči 2014:53, Shin 2005:2–123; Wallace 1997:2–16). Luther speaks of ‘the crucified and hidden God’ (Ebeling 1965:260). Luther (quoted in Volf 2010) could even say the following:

Already in the Old Testament, this hiddenness was demonstrated in an exemplary form by God’s passing of Moses, whilst that friend of God was stuck away under his Friend’s hand in a cleft, as if the Lord hid under a ‘mask of darkness’. After God had passed by, Moses was only allowed to get a faint and unclear glimpse of the Lord’s ‘backside’, the side of his ‘goodness’, as if ‘through a narrow and oblique window’. Thus, even in that glimpse, there was a kind of mask or veil covering God so that Moses:

Indeed, for the natural eyes [reason] the glory of Christ is hidden in the gospel. It is only through hearing God’s calling voice in the promises of the gospel, that faith and hope (not seeing the visible) ‘see’ the invisible glory of God (cf. Calvin commenting on Ex 33:21–23). The glorious Son of God was concealed in human flesh under a ‘mass of wounds’. ‘This is how we are healed; here is our true medicine’ (cf. Calvin 1956:75). He is the King, not absent but hidden under the figure of a crucified Blasphemer – who in his resurrection glory, still bears the indelible marks of his ignoble wounds. ‘The cross was as if it was engraved into the resurrected body of the Lord Jesus. The cross was his triumphal sign over grave and death and hell’ (Malan 1992:6). This signifies that the darkness of the via crucis [way of the cross] is simultaneously faith, hope, and love via lucis [way of the light]. The maxim soli Deo Gloria refers to this hidden Healer, whose glory is manifested in that grace upon grace, disguised under his kenotic self-giving unto death, yes, the death on the scandalous cross. ‘We must not hang back within the reach of our own grasp, judging as seems best to us’, as we contemplate ‘the intolerable blasphemy’ that the Son of God (or, we add, as 1 Cor 2:8 says: the Lord of glory himself) was deemed ‘the worst malefactor in the world’ (masked under the cross). ‘All men … do not judge him worth looking at but turn away their eyes as from something loathesome’ (Calvin 1956:48, 94, 95).

Referring to Romans 12:1, Calvin (1956:95) intimates that in this incredibly ugly, repulsive, ‘worse malefactor’ among criminals on the gallows, it is as if he (the Father) ‘laid bare to us his heart and set before us his inmost feelings’ of unfathomable love for us. All ideas associated with worldly glory are excluded from this hidden glory. Calvin here uses a very congenial translation of the Greek gut word, oiktirmoi, as ‘the bowels of the goodness and mercy of God’. Previously he brought out the shocking scandal of the cross by comparing it to the gallows (Calvin 1956:38, [authors own emphasis]). God ‘has changed his method and used, as it were, a kind of foolishness to teach us [1 Cor 1:21]’ (Calvin 1956:51). Welker (2012:173, 176–178) admits that the cross is a ‘complex revelation-event’, but rightly finds included therein a revelation of ‘the suffering of the trinitarian God’, of the pain of God and the weakness of God. Berkouwer (1974:375) emphasises that speaking of God, hidden under abject weakness as the revelation of his omnipotence, is not a ‘dialectical game’, but a deep astonishment about this unfathomable way of God (cf. Col 2:15; 1 Cor 1–4). In short, as formulated by Bakker (1988):

It is now necessary to investigate in brief the broad sweep of forgetfulness and even neglect of the Reformation emphasis on the mystery of God’s hiddenness. Our task here is to ‘excavate’ from under a thick layer of scholastic repression, traces of theologically ‘side-stepping’ a ‘dark side’ of God (cf. Peels 2003:22–40). Among earlier Dutch epigones of Calvin, the selling out to a rationalistic philosophy of the autonomous mind, as introduced by Descartes, was pervasive. The lure of a Cartesian mathematics-inspired clare et distincte-type of thinking, gradually invaded the lively ‘face to face wisdom-theology’ of a Calvin (cf. Polman 1950:27). There is good reason to exclaim with Jonker (1987:306): ‘Truly, amongst reformed people Descartes has conquered his ten thousands!’ Of course, employing the ‘immensily fertile’ concept of paradigm shifts (cf. Caputo 2013:236), we do not see this as a total break with the Reformation paradigm, but rather as an overlap into the emerging modern and a partial relapse into the older medieval paradigms (cf. Küng 1991:126; 1995:619–620). Yet, even at the Synod of Dordrecht (1618–1619), traces of scholastic, hyper-deductive reasoning already incipiently entrenched itself in much reformational thinking (cf. Van der Woude 1964:18–19). This was particularly prominent in a leading Dort theologian, Maccovius. He regarded anything that could be rationally deduced from Scripture through bona consequentia [good consequence], as having equal authority to Scripture itself (cf. Berkouwer 1955:16–18). The intellectual atmosphere among an influential segment of reformed people in the Netherlands around 1900, was such that a leading theologian, the son of the famous Kuyper, could hail Maccovius as the man who sounded the end of the Reformation-style theology around the time of the Dort synod, and – according to Kuyper Jr.: fortunately! – became the great inaugurator of reformed scholasticism (and therewith also its negligence of the hidden God) (cf. Veenhof 1959:288–289). Bavinck (1998:17–18; cf. also 1908:57), the great champion of the recovery of mystery and hiddenness in reformed genuine theism, however, on solid grounds found that the 17th century scholastic orthodoxy ‘among most people’, in fact, had ‘prepared the way for rationalism … religion became a matter of reason’. Orthodox faith largely lost its early Reformation tension with Aristotelian ‘reason’, and thus became a ‘conceptual bedrock’ – parallel to the Cartesian cogito – for the erection of a Protestant-scholastic ‘cathedral of systematic theology’ (cf. Raschke 2004:115). Important for the present research, is that the highly regarded book, Redelijke godsdienst [reasonable religion] of the theologian à Brakel [Father Brakel], trusted nearly blindly by many 18th and 19th century pioneer-Afrikaners as ‘orthodox’ (see below), was apparently not free from these tendencies. Van Lieburg (2019:352 and 370, [author’s own emphasis]) with good reason, finds that although à Brakel did not subsume biblical revelation under reason, his relating of religion to rationality ‘denotes the assent of rational Christians to the truths of biblical revelation’, as formulated in accepted creeds and catechisms but also as ‘experienced in the human conscience’. Recognising this widespread but also nuanced ‘Cartesian captivity’ of reformational God-talk, we should become hesitant to discard, out of hand, Nietszche’s well-known accusation: ‘the churches are the graveyards of God!’ A beacon of theistic insight in this overall landscape, however, is presented by Pascal’s (1956) famous observation:

In the present paragraph, our farewell of reformed tamed theism is given further historical relief, by placing it against the foil of a centuries-long drifting process towards the theological neglect of the deus absconditus in confessing the Deus revelatus [revealed God]. This down-spiralling initially dove-tailed with a preference for academic-acceptable speech-forms above biblically informed theological language. In his costly Gifford Lectures, Barth compellingly writes about the ‘divine’ power that such conceptual ‘costumes’ gradually come to bestow on the biblical core-insights, which they were meant to make more culturally acceptable. He likens it to the way that different costumes change the actors to different ‘persons’ in a theatre. In the present discourse, the author thus argues that bourgeois theism, in the ‘most lively way’, took (and takes) part ‘in this costume-play’ staged by Western people, who deem themselves ‘so called Gods’ (1 Cor 8:5; as Barth 1983:52–55 puts it). Indeed, as Barth explains further in this context, the moment that ‘our Western God’ began to be conceived of as a being who thinks and reasons in the way European humans do, his worship became that of ‘a being like ourself writ large, an idol that we have constructed like ourself’.

Among its other losses, popular ‘theism’ was thus gradually emptied of the gospel’s inheritance of concrete Old Testament metaphors, at least as far as the attributes of God is concerned; the ‘basic concepts’ of Greek theism originate from their way of describing their gods as beings who display magnified projections of human attributes (cf. Gunton 2002:3, 52, 60–63). It was, to put it mildly, a ‘hybrid deity’ that dominated Western Christianity ‘through most of its history’, as Gunton (2002:2) declares:

At least as far back as the 4th century AD, during and after the Constantinian settlement, the ‘Hellenisation of Christianity’ reached a ‘first climax’, at the Council of Chalcedon (Küng 1995:182). In considering ‘so complex a phenomenon’ as the Constantinian epoch, one cannot bypass, according to Pannenberg (1969:62, 72), ‘the paradigmatic significance and continuous impact’ that this incision had on the history of the church and its entwinement with politics, as it gradually morphed into civil religion during the early Middle Ages. Many Christians began to see Jesus ‘as little more than an abstract symbol of bourgeois complacency’(Villa-Vicencio 2021:81 [author’s own emphasis]). Despite countertendencies, including the minimising of Greek influences around the time of St Francis of Assisi in the 12th and 13th centuries (cf. Chesterton 2008:14–21), the general drift towards an abstracted, incipient bourgeois conceptuality of God seems to have been greatly reinforced in the late medieval era, when influential voices began to advocate univocal over and above analogical modes of speech in theology. The name of John Duns Scotus, around 1300, is inextricably bound up with this momentous change. He defined ‘God’ as a being within the same order of being as creatures – albeit in the most abstract, generalised way. There thus cannot be any transcendent and mysterious depths in God – like his hiddenness which surpasses anything that can be predicated on creatures. With good reason then, Gregory (2012:37–38) can claim that John Duns’s move was ‘the first step towards the eventual domestication of God’s transcendence’, which culminates in the cerebral manageable, mask-less God of modernity. After centuries it even bolstered a whole ‘universalized bourgeois culture’, which forms ‘part of the very air’ Western European and North American citizens inhaled (Dawson 2018:3). These centuries also saw the rise of a form of civil religion which came to be understood as that kind of religion that political leaders keep in place so that they can give legitimacy and continuity to their own political form of government (cf. Pannenberg 1969:72). The Constantinian symbiosis between throne and altar, starting in the 4th century, continued in an altered form in the West, until well after the caesura of the French Revolution. In the wake of that Revolution, the bourgeois class consolidated their position and gradually became the dominant force in colonialism and in empire-building, due mainly to their ‘never-ending thrust … for capitalist profits and accumulation and increased profits’ (Terreblanche 2014:129). It was mainly this modern form of civil religion that determined the religious face of the West in its downslide into the ghastliest forms of imperialism, Mammon worship, extermination of indigenous peoples, and ravaging of the ecology. Moreover, ‘the very idea of the Kingdom of God upon earth, in this three-dimensional material world’, says Berdyayev (1917:2 [author’s own emphasis]), ‘is a bourgeois distortion of a true religious expectation’. The ‘God’ of the highly influential 17th century Calvinistic poet Milton, for example became in his poetry the emaciated ‘doctrinal deity’, as he was being ‘filtered’ through post-Reformation orthodoxy, towards merely a being like us writ large. Armstrong (2019) concludes:

This ‘God’ was regarded as the ‘Highest Being’ in whose name also the ‘death camps’ (concentration camps) of the British during the Anglo-Boer War, were blessed. A complex interpenetration of Cartesian philosophy was at play in this development, including scientific reductionism, capitalist greed, and the isolation of human freedom from heteronomy. The hegemony of the bourgeois mind sustained and strengthened the notion of ‘God’ as a ‘Highest Being’, a summum ens within the universe (cf. Gregory 2012:55 and passim), the guardian of ‘Christianism’s’ status quo (cf. Cobb 2020:108, on this insipid, ‘bloodless’ kind of Christianity). It was the philosopher Hegel’s genius to gather, in a nearly unequalled systematic way, the 19th century bourgeois mind’s Promethean attempts, ‘to make a key to every lock’ (cf. Barth 1959:291). Thus, his bourgeois spirit attempted to unlock every space where ‘mystery’ or ‘darkness’ could still hide away from the ‘enlightening’ rays of modern instrumental reason. The great Russian author, Dostoevsky, senses in this nervous neglect of all things ‘tragic’, the repressive cover-up of a brooding and seismic nihilism, volcanically lurking under modern Western civilisation (cf. Girard 1997:55, 103–104). He regards Western Europe’s mechanistic, Euclidian culture of Newtonian rationality as a ‘grey hell’ – inter alia due to its arrogant, boring, small-horizon lifestyle. ‘Theism’ has degenerated into the understanding of ‘an object of analysis and control’ (cf. Tillich 1945:309). This made possible the ‘last man’, the bourgeois conventional Christian, according to Nietzsche (n.d.):

The ‘God’ of this arrivé civil Christian, had become ‘a purely notional truth’. He became fully domesticated and as such merely a dead projection of humanitarian virtues. Surely, in some cases perhaps inadvertently, he was still held upright under the façade of a Western, triumphalist political hegemony. Yet, this notional ‘god’ inexorably became a national ‘god’.

The trailblazing theological work on the coming of the kingdom of God by Snyman (1977:139–283), lays the solid foundation for many of his students’ thinking (also myself) and provides a costly legacy for the future of reformed theology in South Africa (cf. Van Wyk 1985: passim). Being a prominent and very congenial admirer of this pioneer, Van Wyk, who in fact gathers the gist of his own work under the title: ‘A theology of the kingdom of God’, respectfully criticises a view of Snyman (1977:170), that the kingdom of God is not about ‘a transformation of life-forms’, or the ‘changing of systems and external circumstances but a change of heart [metanoia]’. Whilst Van Wyk (1985:46) acknowledges that the expression ‘building up’ of the kingdom is unbiblical, he nevertheless, finds it a deficiency in Snyman’s thinking, that the human being’s ‘engagement’ [betrokkenheid] in such an activity does not become more transparent. Referring to Paul’s description of believers as ‘co-workers’ [sunergoi] of God in his visible church (‘you are God’s field, God’s building’), Van Wyk illegitimately draws a direct line from this concept to apply it also to human work in the kingdom. Paul applies it, however, explicitly to leaders in the visible, instituted church (cf. Pop 1974:73, on 1 Cor 3:9). Van Wyk contends for ‘Christian organizations … (in which) signs of the kingdom are present, because also there the royal reign of Christ is acknowledged and confessed’ (cf. Van Wyk 2015:219; [original emphasis]). A well-meant instance of such usage is, when Van Wyk (2020:311–321; [author’s own emphasis]), specifically addresses the issue of ‘reformation and education’. In a context which includes biblically founded appeals to do education before the face of God, he unfortunately also views ‘the Christian academy as a sign of the kingdom of God in this world’. He advocates that ‘small signs of the kingdom’ can be erected in the form of such academies, and also in the wider society, to ‘construct water pans in a great desert’ (cf. Van Wyk 2020:314, 315). Yet, ‘extensively and intensively the Kingdom is a hidden power’ (Ridderbos 1958:47). This is true, even when Van Wyk (2020:376) sees in the giving of a cup of cold water to one of these little ones’, the erecting of ‘a small sign of the coming kingdom’ (Mt 10:42). However, we should compare this statement with the much more extensive treatment of this point in Matthew 25:31–46 (cf. Ridderbos 1958:78–79, on the centrality of this passage in understanding Jesus’ whole preaching about the kingdom). Here, those who at the final judgement heard from the King that they truly gave to himself a cup of cold water, when they gave it to a little one, were totally surprised; they did not know it. They asked: ‘When …?’. Thus, this giving of a cup of cold water to a little one (with all the other deeds of mercy named in Mt. 25), cannot be regarded as the erecting of a sign of the kingdom. In sync with the tendency noted in this paragraph, Grové (2022:20, 30) inserts in his good handbook for the Reformed congregation of Wapadrant’s theme for 2022/2023 (‘City builders’ [Stadbouers]), a sentence like the following: ‘as city-builders, we must make God’s kingdom visible’ (Grové 2022:20, 30). Can one do that, when the kingdom in this age is only invisibly present in the crucified King, working in hiddenness through his Word and Spirit, and only having as visible signs the sacraments? (cf. especially Noordmans 1980:338–340).

The following words of a Dutch theologian and the famous Barth (1981), are relevant for all of us who seek to erect kingdom signs:

The main thrust of the above argument can be summarised, with reference to Calvin’s sublime commentary on 1 Timothy 5 verse 17, where Scripture says that God inhabits an ‘unapproachable light’ (see Calvin 1970b:2220; [author’s own emphasis]).

Firstly, he comments that ‘while we are surrounded by this mortal flesh we never penetrate into the hidden depths of God as to have nothing hidden from us’. We analysed how this accent has historically been widely forgotten, mainly through domestication, also under growing bourgeois influence in reformed scholasticism until about 1900. A resolute – though not resentful – plea is made to say farewell to this type of tamed theism (two Afrikaans-reformed examples are given).

Secondly, Calvin further comments that ‘by faith we enter into the light of God but only in part’. Through the Holy Spirit, we thus participate in faith’s partial entry and seek some understanding of this light, whom we, paradoxically, can never approach, even with our most understanding theology (theology as fides quarens intellectum). As Calvin finally confesses about our seeking of this divine Healer, who reveals himself under the cruciform, scandalous masking of his opposite (revelatio sub contrariis – Luther): ‘Still it is true that it is a ‘‘light unapproachable’’ by man’.