There is a particular kind of prayer that goes out and does not come back. Not answered no, not answered yes, only unanswered, the way a letter is unanswered when you are not sure it was delivered. I have sat in that silence long enough to stop expecting it to break, and I no longer think the silence is a malfunction. I think it might be load-bearing.
This is a stranger problem than the problem of suffering, though it is a cousin of it. Suffering asks why God allows what he could stop. Hiddenness asks something more unsettling: why a God who supposedly wants to be known does not simply remove the possibility of doubt. He could. A voice audible to everyone, once, would end the argument permanently. He does not do this. The question is why.
The Reasonable Case for Silence
One answer is not foolish. Force a person to see and you have not given them faith. You have given them a fact, the way gravity is a fact. Nobody is grateful to gravity. The philosopher John Hick called this “epistemic distance”: God stays just far enough back that belief remains a free act rather than a coerced one. Certainty would flatten us into subjects rather than lovers. Love, to be love, needs the room in which it could have been withheld.
I find this argument sound and insufficient, the same way I found the standard theodicies sound and insufficient. It explains hiddenness in general and goes quiet in front of a particular unanswered prayer, made by a particular person, on a particular night. The architecture holds up from a distance. Move close enough and it stops explaining anything to the one who is actually waiting.
Isaiah’s Naming of It
What stops me from concluding that hiddenness is simply the absence of God is a strange verse in Isaiah, easy to walk past: Truly you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior. Not “you seem hidden.” Not a complaint wrung from someone at the end of his patience, though it may be that too. A naming. The prophet does not treat hiddenness as a problem to be solved before faith can begin. He folds it into the address itself: hidden and Savior in the same breath, as though the second word does not cancel the first.
This is the same move the whirlwind made with Job. Scripture keeps declining to resolve the thing we most want resolved, and instead keeps naming it precisely, as if precision were the more honest gift. A God who hides himself is not a God caught hiding. It is apparently who he is.
Hidden in the Ordinary
If this were the whole of it (a deity who withdraws and calls the withdrawal a virtue), I could not hold it either. But the Christian claim doesn’t stop at absence. The hiddenness is not only distance. It is disguise.
He came, in the telling, as an infant nobody important was watching for, in a town not worth naming twice. He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, Isaiah says of him later, and no beauty that we should desire him. Two disciples walked the road to Emmaus with him for miles, grieving his death to his face, and did not know him until the bread broke. This is not a God who was almost visible and missed. This is a God whose preferred mode of appearing is the one you can plausibly walk past.
I do not think this answers why the particular prayer went unanswered. But it relocates the question. The issue is not whether God is absent. The issue is whether I have been trained to recognize him only in the forms he has declined to take (the audible voice, the unmistakable sign) while he is, as usual, in the bread.
Learning to Read the Silence
I no longer treat the silence as evidence of nothing. I have started to treat it as a kind of literacy I have not yet learned, the way a person raised on one alphabet cannot read another that is, nonetheless, saying something.
This is not resolution. Isaiah did not resolve it either; he named it and kept praying anyway, in the very psalm of complaint that contains the naming. That may be the whole instruction available to us. Not to wait for the hiding to stop, but to keep addressing the one who is doing it, on the theory (unproven, and I mean unproven) that hidden is not the same word as gone.