Following the Fall, the human reaction was to hide from God. When God calls to the man and the woman, the man announces he is hiding, ostensibly because of his nakedness — which he also was before he sinned — but really because of the guilt sin unleashed. It unleashed not only fear about what they had done but also about everything, including how they now saw each other. When one knows love, the shock of use is jarring.

This is not the only place in the Bible where this hiding reaction is found. Psalm 139 is an extended meditation on inescapability from God. Through various scenarios the Psalmist discovers he cannot evade God. God is closer to him than he is to himself (an insight St. Augustine later developed).

Indeed, the Bible treats the effort to evade God as futile. Revelation (6:16) makes that clear when sinners beg for an avalanche in the vain hope of hiding from God.

We cannot escape God. “It is not good for the man to be alone,” not without complementary human companionship and not without God. It is love that seeks communion, contact, which is why God looks for Adam in the Garden and why the Psalmist finds God wherever he flees. It’s not for nothing that Francis Thompson’s great poem calls God “The Hound of Heaven” (see here).

The German theologian Rudolf Otto described God as the Mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the Mystery that elicits two contrary human reactions — withdrawal and attraction. Man withdraws because he recognizes the disparity between the goodness and holiness of God and his lack in those regards. At the same time, there is something about God that draws him closer, attracting and fascinating him. The key to conversion is letting fascination overcoming the flight impulse, to heal and overcome it. Which means we are dealing with the fundamental human problem: sin. And the way we deal with that fundamental human problem is facing, acknowledging, and turning from it to be healed by God.

Hiding from God is a natural human reaction, but one that faces competition from a more nefarious variant: trying to put God in a box. What do I mean? Hiding from God in some sense acknowledges a real moral order, whose source and summit is God. There should be good. In God there is. In me there isn’t, so I withdraw.

But in recent centuries we have seen an alternate model: boxing up God. By boxing up God, I mean trying to lock Him within certain parameters wherein He can be excluded. If only we could put God in a box and tape it shut.

The deists were a great example of this. After God did the heavy lifting of creating and launching a world, He could be shunted off on an extended vacation, boxed off from His creation that should run exclusively on its own inherent laws, absent any further intervention from Him. This is why Jefferson rewrote the New Testament to excise Jesus’ miracles. It’s why many people have an atrophied sense of Divine Providence: Do you really believe history works out according to God’s plan?

Granted, the number of full-throated deists today is fewer, but modernity suffers a phenomenon called “moralistic therapeutic deism”  (see here). It reduces religion to a few (positive) moral precepts (“be nice!”) because God wants us to “thrive.” Other than that, it really leaves everything in your hands, God at best an encouraging sideline coach but rather more generally disengaged. I call it “God in a box” because its “spirituality” renders the Deity a fire alarm box: generally unnoticed but there just in case things exceed your capacities and you need to “break glass” and pull down from heaven.

There’s a “God in the box” misinterpretation of Christ’s words about “what belongs to God and what belongs to Caesar.” It treats reality as something to be divided between “the things of God” and “the things of Caesar,” divided by a “wall of separation” (preferably high and patrolled by the disestablishmentarian Stasi) that keeps each party on its own side. That model is wrong, of course, because God is not Caesar’s equal. Even what Caesar has is also and was first God’s. (For more on this, see here.)

And then there’s the “God in the box” of “the right to privacy” (see here) and “autonomy.” Pierre Eliot Trudeau’s slogan that “the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation” ultimately meant that God has no place there, either. Sure, the votaries of “privacy” will say that this is a “sanctuary” where God and the person are alone, and, in a sense, that’s true. But baked into that image is the idea that a split-personality God says one thing to the Church or Christian community at-large but apparently then whispers in the “privacy” of bedroom sanctuaries “fuggedaboudit, I was kidding!”

The “boxed off” God also generates a false notion of freedom, where liberty exists not as a means to make the good mine but is seen rather as a place of neutrality, situated between good and evil, with either “choice” equally valid as long as it’s my choice. (For more, see here.) Behind this, of course, is a switcheroo: good gets renamed as freedom.

The human tenants’ quest to fence off part of the Garden from its Landlord is a temptation as old as humanity. What makes it more invidious than merely hiding from God is that it displaces God. The fugitive in a sense “humbly” withdraws from the sacred, whereas the boxing agent wants to circumscribe the sacred, to declare an “autonomous” zone where the good (at least as God knows it) does not apply. The one hiding at least acknowledges sin is sin; the one boxing wants a “sin-free” zone not free of evil but of naming it as such.

One might argue these are some of the residual effects of nominalism. Nominalism, which reduced reality to labels, might have been plausible to some with an omnipotent and omniscient God. But when God is bracketed out and man substitutes, the new less than omniscient label-maker — drunk on his power — finds this town too small for him and God.

Hiders and boxer-uppers both resist God and, in that sense, end up in the same moral dead end. The futile hider at least recognizes he is trespassing in God’s Kingdom of holiness and truth; the prideful boxer-upper deems the land apportionment unfair and wants a different survey.