Hidden Face of God, The

By Friedman, Richard Elliot
Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1996, 352 pp., ISBN: 0316294349, $16.00

The Hidden Face of God, at once scholarly and popularly accessible, is packed with wonderful insights into scriptural narrative, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and cabala.

Friedman notes that the narrative structure of Hebrew Scripture is marked by a disappearance of God - God's hiding of God's face to see what our end will be - that corresponds to an increasingly important role for human beings, a "coming of age" in Bonhoeffer's apt and often cited phrase.

Each of the three parts of the book addresses a mystery related to the title (the disappearance of God in Hebrew Scripture, the death of God and madness in Nietzsche, and the relationship of religion to science), but it is the one mystery of the title, the disappearance of God, that binds the whole together. The disappearance is akin to what Thomas Sheehan earlier referred to as "the absolute absence of God," and it points Friedman toward a concluding moral reflection in which he maintains (as does cabala) that the structure of morality inheres in the structure of the universe. God's absolute absence is a paradoxical revelation: "There is some likelihood that the universe is the hidden face of God." BookList