Skip to main content

Martin O'Malley and the Hidden God

Image result for martin o'malley logo

I never post on Tuesday. This week, though, I think I'll make an exception.

As was widely expected, Governor Martin O'Malley has come in third in a three-candidate field in the Iowa caucus, part of the Democratic Party's primary campaign for its Presidential nomination. Worse, he received in essence no support and suspended his campaign before the votes had been counted.

I spare O'Malley a moment of thought today because of a brief remark he made during the "town hall" meeting that the three candidates for that nomination held, in as non-debate-like a format as could be arranged, one week before the caucus.

If I heard him right, O'Malley said that the difficulties faced by a progressive political agenda in the United States today are "the hidden God's way of letting us know the job is important." I hope I heard that correctly because it is a fascinating expression. One doesn't hear a politician use the phrase "the hidden God" very often.

The phrase has a tangled history involving Blaise Pascal in the 17th century, Karl Barth in the early 20th, Lucien Goldman and Martin Luther King Jr. in the mid 20th.

Theologians and philosophers who spoke of the "hidden God" meant that God's transcendence is logically prior to His immanence, and that his Utter Otherness renders him incomprehensible to humans. Attempts to comprehend Him, to get behind His hiding place in Infinity, are folly.

In 1952 Martin Luther King wrote a paper on Barth's conception of God, which you can find online here.  It consists largely of King's statement of his own view that God is very much immanent in His workings within this world, and can be understood as such.

I love the thought that O'Malley knows something of that history and briefly referenced it in the course of a campaign that he by then must have known was doomed. Presumably in context it means, "God cannot come out and explain why He makes these things so difficult, because for His mysterious reasons He is in hiding, but it is a reasonable inference that He wants us to understand the importance of the job."

Not exactly Pascal or Barth, but it was still great to hear the unexpected.

O'Malley will presumably be looking for that hidden God for guidance as he considers his next career steps. Good luck to him.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti
7 comments
Read more

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers
Post a Comment
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak
13 comments
Read more