Bruce V. Foltz

“The theologia crucis, proceeding from the Destrucktion, is now free to seek God not in what is beautiful, but in what is offensive and repellent; not in what is glorious and magnificent, but in what is weak—i.e., not in the created order as it has always seemed to manifest its Creator, but in the cross and suffering where God is “hidden.” That is, God chooses to reveal himself in suffering, weakness, humiliation, and crucifixion—things that are entirely contrary to the divine nature. But this means that God is not visible in nature at all, contrary to the ancient understanding of creation in both Jewish and Christian traditions; rather, God becomes visible only in the very elements that would serve to hide and obscure the divine being itself. That is, even within the radical immanence of the Incarnation itself, God reveals Himself as deus absconditus. The invisible God’s self-manifestation in visible creation is a revealing that is in fact a concealing, a non-presence, an absence. For Heidegger, then, this theologia crucis would count as nothing less than a radical destruction of what he would come to see as the metaphysics of presence. But what about the innumerable texts in the Old Testament (especially in the Wisdom Books) leading to the opposite conclusion—for example, in the Wisdom of Solomon (13:5), which insists that “through the greatness and beauty of created things, their Creator is correspondingly seen”? Or what of Jesus commending his followers to look at the glory (doxa) of wildflowers in order to see something”
― Bruce V. Foltz, The Noetics of Nature: Environmental Philosophy and the Holy Beauty of the Visible