It is no accident that God is invisible
Why is God invisible? I was wondering about this when we sang the hymn Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise in church the other Sunday. I’m not sure that the lyrics make a very good job at explaining it.
The hymn is by Walter Chalmers Smith (1824-1908), a Church of Scotland minister. He got into trouble for some liberal words about the Sabbath and was “affectionately admonished” by the General Assembly in June 1867, which sounds unpleasant. He went on to become moderator of the assembly himself in 1893, not before getting into more hot water for his sympathy with William Robertson Smith, a fellow minister of great learning in Arabic and Hebrew, who failed to come up to scratch on the Book of Deuteronomy. Robertson Smith was an impressive figure, though I don’t go along with his drift in The Religion of the Semites.
None of this helps with God’s invisibility, except to suggest that Smith and his contemporaries were not idiots. Anyway, later on in the hymn, Smith says: “’Tis only the splendour of light hideth thee.” I don’t think that can be right.
The suggestion is that we are, as it were, blinded by the light, as one would be by staring at the sun. No doubt there are statements by Fathers of the Church, or even in the Bible, that say something similar. One that Smith echoes in his hymn is a verse in the First Epistle of St Paul to Timothy, which speaks of God as one “who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto; whom no man hath seen, nor can see”.
In the Bible, light is associated with God, whose favour is expressed by his face shining upon us. “Thou shalt no more have the sun for thy light by day,” says the prophet Isaiah, “but the Lord shall be unto thee for an everlasting light.” Literally, of course, God has no face to shine. Yet, if it is only by metaphor or analogy that we can speak about him at all, it does not mean that we are incapable of stating truly what he is not.
So our inability to see God is not because his light is on a wavelength beyond human sight. Infrared and ultraviolet equipment catch no glimpse of him either. The defect is not in our eyes. “If they wos a pair o’ patent double million magnifyin’ gas microscopes of hextra power, p’raps I might be able to see through a flight o’ stairs and a deal door,” said Sam Weller, giving evidence in court. But even with such microscopes we’d see no part of God.
Nor is it that God makes himself invisible just to be awkward, demanding faith while he hides himself. It is round the other way.
What sort of God would it be that was visible? A pretty low-grade god. Materiality is associated with change, decay and limitation. A material god could not be an agent creating all things from nothing. A material god would not be eternal. He would not be pure act, as the philosophers call him (indeed some have gone as far as to call him more like a verb than a noun). A material god could not help us, because he could not keep his promises, which require the power to do whatever he says he will.
Matter is a limiting factor because it catches a lively form of something or other and makes it individually rooted to a quantifiable lump. We rational animals with material bodies live our lives bit by bit; God has his all at once.
So it is consoling that God is invisible. We know that he is there out of sight because we see his glory in the world. It seems as though that is the whole purpose of the world: to be a visible revelation of the invisible God. The excess of his light does not hide God, but as the Psalmist says: “In thy light shall we see light.”