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Bulwarks of Unbelief: Atheism and Divine Absence in a Secular Age
How modernity creates atheists―and what the church must do about it.
Millions of people in the West identify as atheists. Christians often respond to this reality with proofs of God's existence, as though rational arguments for atheism were the root cause of unbelief. In Bulwarks of Unbelief, Joseph Minich argues that a felt absence of God, as experienced by the modern individual, offers a better explanation for the rise in atheism. Recent technological and cultural shifts in the modern West have produced a perceived challenge to God's existence. As modern technoculture reshapes our awareness of reality and belief in the invisible, it in turn amplifies God's apparent silence. In this new context, atheism is a natural result. And absent of meaning from without, we have turned within.
Christians cannot escape this aspect of modern life. Minich argues that we must consciously and actively return to reality. If we reattune ourselves to God's story, reintegrate the whole person, and reinhabit the world, faith can thrive in this age of unbelief.
Millions of people in the West identify as atheists. Christians often respond to this reality with proofs of God's existence, as though rational arguments for atheism were the root cause of unbelief. In Bulwarks of Unbelief, Joseph Minich argues that a felt absence of God, as experienced by the modern individual, offers a better explanation for the rise in atheism. Recent technological and cultural shifts in the modern West have produced a perceived challenge to God's existence. As modern technoculture reshapes our awareness of reality and belief in the invisible, it in turn amplifies God's apparent silence. In this new context, atheism is a natural result. And absent of meaning from without, we have turned within.
Christians cannot escape this aspect of modern life. Minich argues that we must consciously and actively return to reality. If we reattune ourselves to God's story, reintegrate the whole person, and reinhabit the world, faith can thrive in this age of unbelief.
320 pages, Hardcover
Published April 12, 2023
25 people are currently reading
306 people want to read
About the author
Joseph Minich
21 books19 followersJoseph Minich is a Ph.D candidate in Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas, and the Editor-in-Chief of The Davenent Press. His research interests include modern atheism, the nature of modernity, and the role of late modern technology in the formation of religious beliefs. Some of his writings can be found at The Calvinist International, Mere Orthodoxy, and in several edited volumes published by Davenant.
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
May 17, 2023
Bulwarks of Unbelief is a very sharply argued book - and an ambitious one (perhaps too ambitious, to my mind). Minich’s book looks at two related realities: first, our shared sense of divine absence, and, secondly, how our use of modern technology and our experience of modern labor reshapes our perception of reality. In sum, this last point is explained by our felt loss of agency in the world - and this in two ways: how technology mediates our access to the world and how modern labor alienates us from the world. This is significant because if his reading is correct, then the veracity of various arguments for atheism rests upon a distorted attunement to reality, one that is not necessary but historically conditioned. Minich’s book ends with a renewed vision for how classical Protestantism can reshape and renegotiate a world vision (to use a JH Bavinck term) that, more or less, accords with a theological phenomenology of the world. Minich’s most significant contribution in this area, to my mind, is how he overcomes the problem of alienation from history. Indeed, in a book that extensively lays out his argumentation, it is a positive feature that his final chapter reads as engaged as the bulk of the book. In no way does his positive account feel tacked on.
The short of this review, then, is that it is a serious book, seriously involved in its own arguments, and surprisingly original. I do believe Minich successfully argues his point as a theoretically plausible account of lived experience. That being said, this book is extremely dense and, to put it a bit more critically, not very well-written. Minich’s arguments are complex and subject to all kinds of detours. While it’s a rewarding read (and I hate to admit this), it’s a slog to get through, where some sentences read and feel like they’ll never end, and not all sections feel as if they cohere. Overall, though, this book is quite unique in what it offers and, importantly, how it offers its arguments. If you’re a fan of the cultural apologetics wave that formed in the wake of evangelicalism’s reception of Charles Taylor, you’ll want to read Minich’s book. Indeed, I think Minich proves to be a more insightful and astute reader of culture than most who aspire to the task. Lexham Press very kindly sent me this book, asking only for an honest review in return.
Before I engage more with the book, I’ll offer two brief criticisms:
As I mentioned, the book’s Achilles heel, in my estimation, is how uneven it is with respect to clarity. At one level, Minich’s book will always prove to be tough sledding. Long parts of his argument rely upon specific readings of Heidegger and other phenomenologists. But Minich’s writing often occluded his points. His thesis is simple. But his argument takes an extremely labyrinthine approach, etched across two chapters (which make up almost half of the book), which take an incredible number of detours.
Finally (and I kind of hate these types of criticisms), I was a little shocked to see the lack of engagement with phenomenologists like Michel Henry and Jean Louis Chretien. While I can understand that no book can pull together all thinkers, both of these are exceptionally germane to Minich’s argument, especially with respect to Henry’s notion of barbarism and its overlap with Minich’s of alienation, and Minich’s emphasis on speech and Chretien’s work on the “call-response” nature of existence. Henry’s work calls for the more immediate and affective self-relation in a world where science and technology have ascended as the one mode of rationality. Chretien’s work on hope and memory, also, dovetail nicely with some of Minich’s own suggestions for a path forward.
In the end, I really enjoyed this book, though I found it difficult to read. While I can appreciate that Minich’s argumentation would be significant and complex, his writing often suffered from a lack of clarity. This doesn’t mean the work is inaccessible - just that Minich’s writing often obscures his points and does not always facilitate understanding.
A Bit More Engagement
At the highest level, Minich’s book analyzes the modern phenomenon of “divine absence.” Though theologians and philosophers have been preoccupied with this question for thousands of years, Minich rightly notes that this has taken on a new shape in the 21st-century West. In other words, “How did atheism become a felt possibility?” (61). “Felt” is important as Minich is not interested in the theoretical articulation of atheism so much as the “pre-articulated experience of the world” (62). To make his argument, Minich draws together a seriously nuanced thread to examine the phenomenology of atheism. His argument looks at how late capitalism, urbanization, and modern technology have rewritten our basic experience of the world such that atheism becomes not just an option, but the obvious choice. In this respect, Minich is not diagnosing atheist consciousness so much as common Western consciousness, inundated as it is in these material realities. Minich is concerned with how our modern technoculture attenuates our perception of what makes a thing “real.” He argues that the way we use technology (not technology per se - an extremely important and well-made distinction) reinforces a certain way of experiencing the world: namely, that the world is “fundamentally a realm of manipulable material, meaninglessly arranged until the human mind imposes meaning on it” (65). In addition to this, our own alienation from the world through the rise of modern wage slavery disenables us from relating to the world as full of meaning. While Minich does not pretend these elements haven’t existed before the rise of technology and labor forces, he does argue that the rise of these two realities has significantly attenuated our experience of the world, in a way heretofore unknown. Hence, the obviousness of atheism, in a world whose historical record offers the clear and total opposite: the obviousness and assumption of supernatural realities.
Where Minich augments some of Taylor’s arguments is extremely helpful. Minich pays a bit more attention to the material culture of history than Taylor. Taylor’s Secular Age resides at the level of the intellectual/theoretical narrative of disenchantment of the world. Minich dives a bit deeper into the relationship between material culture and ideas. This comes out in his careful criticism of technoculture as opposed to technology. In this distinction, Minich reinforces his interest in the “concrete historical and cultural usage” (6), which, per his argument, actively shapes and reshapes the human’s perception of his relationship to the world, self, and others. Minich rightly focuses on the natural dialectic between material reality and intellectual culture and draws out the significance of this relationship for his own argument. Minich situates the origin not in the Enlightenment per se, but in the rise of the working class in Victorian England, and its proliferation in the postwar, middle class of the 1960s. Minich’s notion of technoculture is central to each of these eras, which were both “suspended atop periods of astounding technological development, and both involve an adjustment of labor patterns to this technology-as-used” (84). This milieu (Minich argues) is the proper starting point for discussion about divine absence - not in intellectual abstraction, but in the lives of those whose experience and language reflect already ongoing shifts in the perception of reality and the world. This is not to argue that these shifts caused atheism, but that there is a correlation between these realities.
Minich attempts an analysis of the causal relationship between these cultural/technological shifts and the rise of divine absence discourse. He does this by way of offering a theoretical and phenomenological account of what it is like “to dwell in the conditions associated with the rising plausibility of unbelief” (98). For him, above all, technology-as-used and labor forces insist upon a severing of a “primal world-relation” (100). In that world, humans experienced the world as personal and agentic. In this world, humans experience the world as impersonal, deterministic, and cut off from one another. It is this section of the book (which is unsurprisingly the longest) that feels the most unclear and cluttered. In sum, though, he argues this: “Because its agency is hidden, our world is one to which we relate predominantly via our will. But cultivated as passive participants in our own willing (because unengaged by the world), we tacitly perceive our own lack of true activity in the mirror of the world itself” (157). Divine personhood seems implausible because we experience the world fundamentally as impersonal, manufactured, and manipulable. This seems fundamentally right to me and, incidentally, accords with Hartmut Rosa’s notion of “resonance,” and how society’s structural ephemerality short-circuits personal, meaningful connection.
In the course of the above, Minich engages with phenomenological readings of “presence.” To his credit, Miinich is one of few evangelicals (of whom I am aware) that theologically engage with phenomenology in a robust way. While his engagement is limited to Heidegger mostly, it still forms a very significant core of his argument and he very obviously has a tight grip on Heidgger’s philosophical project. While absorbing many of Heidegger’s insights, Minich shows how God conceived as a “pure act of absolute communication” (174) essentially subverts Heidegger’s criticisms of Western theology/metaphysics. In this part of the book, Minich’s arguments are remarkably fresh and insightful - even as I probably understood very little of this part of it!
As Minich’s argument winds down, he offers a few significant ways forward. He offers a two-pronged approach, one that reorients the mind to the world, and one that reorients the body to the world. For Minich, this “internal forum” consists of “acts of remembrance” that help us to re-narrate our status in the world. These are remembering God’s being, created freedom, misuse of freedom, and acceptance of divine revelation and promise. These serve as portraits of how Christian doctrine (theology proper, creation, sin, and gospel) helps us to reorient ourselves in the world and access it as Creation. These pages (191-207) are excellent in that they show us how to faithfully press doctrine into phenomenological service.
Significantly, Minich argues (alongside Bonhoeffer) that “divine absence” (biblically construed) is actually a means through which God matures his children. “The opportunity of imposed agency, of un-homed juvenility, is that we can learn to grow up” (238). Rendered this way, divine absence is actually put into the service of Christian theology. Because divine absence is a part of the biblical story, it is not something that ought to be a source of anxiety. Instead, God’s absence “reveals presence to be more than a mere given. It is rendered a personal love, reliability, an agency that will never abandon us or fail to return, and so forth” (267). Rightly, then, Minich attenuates divine absence into a theological key, one that accounts for the very real lived experience of God’s absence, while also pointing out that this doesn’t entail God’s inexistence. He rightly notes that “it rather takes courage to say that, in spite of evil, in spite of war, racism, genocide, rape, and so on, that God is still to be trusted and adored . . . Perhaps, indeed, atheism is not bravery at all, but capitulation” (269). Of course, capitulation is the Christian story, and yet (to borrow Minich’s phraseology) it is God’s faithfulness in Jesus Christ that shepherds us to the conclusion. It is this that enables the Christian to faithfully attend to the here and now, in the face of evil, to answer the call of the Other in our neighbor (to borrow from Levinas), and live under “the proper and reverential recognition that when confronting others, we speak to kings” (272-73). Minich’s argument, then, is not the end of a debate, but a call to be re-attuned to reality and live according to the moral vision of Scripture, which he articulates in Lewisian terms: “The embodied enactment of which would simultaneously attune us to the echo of the divine in all beings, as well as help us to understand and endure our historical pilgrimage to Zion” (273)—a stirring reminder of what is at stake in Christian discipleship.
The short of this review, then, is that it is a serious book, seriously involved in its own arguments, and surprisingly original. I do believe Minich successfully argues his point as a theoretically plausible account of lived experience. That being said, this book is extremely dense and, to put it a bit more critically, not very well-written. Minich’s arguments are complex and subject to all kinds of detours. While it’s a rewarding read (and I hate to admit this), it’s a slog to get through, where some sentences read and feel like they’ll never end, and not all sections feel as if they cohere. Overall, though, this book is quite unique in what it offers and, importantly, how it offers its arguments. If you’re a fan of the cultural apologetics wave that formed in the wake of evangelicalism’s reception of Charles Taylor, you’ll want to read Minich’s book. Indeed, I think Minich proves to be a more insightful and astute reader of culture than most who aspire to the task. Lexham Press very kindly sent me this book, asking only for an honest review in return.
Before I engage more with the book, I’ll offer two brief criticisms:
As I mentioned, the book’s Achilles heel, in my estimation, is how uneven it is with respect to clarity. At one level, Minich’s book will always prove to be tough sledding. Long parts of his argument rely upon specific readings of Heidegger and other phenomenologists. But Minich’s writing often occluded his points. His thesis is simple. But his argument takes an extremely labyrinthine approach, etched across two chapters (which make up almost half of the book), which take an incredible number of detours.
Finally (and I kind of hate these types of criticisms), I was a little shocked to see the lack of engagement with phenomenologists like Michel Henry and Jean Louis Chretien. While I can understand that no book can pull together all thinkers, both of these are exceptionally germane to Minich’s argument, especially with respect to Henry’s notion of barbarism and its overlap with Minich’s of alienation, and Minich’s emphasis on speech and Chretien’s work on the “call-response” nature of existence. Henry’s work calls for the more immediate and affective self-relation in a world where science and technology have ascended as the one mode of rationality. Chretien’s work on hope and memory, also, dovetail nicely with some of Minich’s own suggestions for a path forward.
In the end, I really enjoyed this book, though I found it difficult to read. While I can appreciate that Minich’s argumentation would be significant and complex, his writing often suffered from a lack of clarity. This doesn’t mean the work is inaccessible - just that Minich’s writing often obscures his points and does not always facilitate understanding.
A Bit More Engagement
At the highest level, Minich’s book analyzes the modern phenomenon of “divine absence.” Though theologians and philosophers have been preoccupied with this question for thousands of years, Minich rightly notes that this has taken on a new shape in the 21st-century West. In other words, “How did atheism become a felt possibility?” (61). “Felt” is important as Minich is not interested in the theoretical articulation of atheism so much as the “pre-articulated experience of the world” (62). To make his argument, Minich draws together a seriously nuanced thread to examine the phenomenology of atheism. His argument looks at how late capitalism, urbanization, and modern technology have rewritten our basic experience of the world such that atheism becomes not just an option, but the obvious choice. In this respect, Minich is not diagnosing atheist consciousness so much as common Western consciousness, inundated as it is in these material realities. Minich is concerned with how our modern technoculture attenuates our perception of what makes a thing “real.” He argues that the way we use technology (not technology per se - an extremely important and well-made distinction) reinforces a certain way of experiencing the world: namely, that the world is “fundamentally a realm of manipulable material, meaninglessly arranged until the human mind imposes meaning on it” (65). In addition to this, our own alienation from the world through the rise of modern wage slavery disenables us from relating to the world as full of meaning. While Minich does not pretend these elements haven’t existed before the rise of technology and labor forces, he does argue that the rise of these two realities has significantly attenuated our experience of the world, in a way heretofore unknown. Hence, the obviousness of atheism, in a world whose historical record offers the clear and total opposite: the obviousness and assumption of supernatural realities.
Where Minich augments some of Taylor’s arguments is extremely helpful. Minich pays a bit more attention to the material culture of history than Taylor. Taylor’s Secular Age resides at the level of the intellectual/theoretical narrative of disenchantment of the world. Minich dives a bit deeper into the relationship between material culture and ideas. This comes out in his careful criticism of technoculture as opposed to technology. In this distinction, Minich reinforces his interest in the “concrete historical and cultural usage” (6), which, per his argument, actively shapes and reshapes the human’s perception of his relationship to the world, self, and others. Minich rightly focuses on the natural dialectic between material reality and intellectual culture and draws out the significance of this relationship for his own argument. Minich situates the origin not in the Enlightenment per se, but in the rise of the working class in Victorian England, and its proliferation in the postwar, middle class of the 1960s. Minich’s notion of technoculture is central to each of these eras, which were both “suspended atop periods of astounding technological development, and both involve an adjustment of labor patterns to this technology-as-used” (84). This milieu (Minich argues) is the proper starting point for discussion about divine absence - not in intellectual abstraction, but in the lives of those whose experience and language reflect already ongoing shifts in the perception of reality and the world. This is not to argue that these shifts caused atheism, but that there is a correlation between these realities.
Minich attempts an analysis of the causal relationship between these cultural/technological shifts and the rise of divine absence discourse. He does this by way of offering a theoretical and phenomenological account of what it is like “to dwell in the conditions associated with the rising plausibility of unbelief” (98). For him, above all, technology-as-used and labor forces insist upon a severing of a “primal world-relation” (100). In that world, humans experienced the world as personal and agentic. In this world, humans experience the world as impersonal, deterministic, and cut off from one another. It is this section of the book (which is unsurprisingly the longest) that feels the most unclear and cluttered. In sum, though, he argues this: “Because its agency is hidden, our world is one to which we relate predominantly via our will. But cultivated as passive participants in our own willing (because unengaged by the world), we tacitly perceive our own lack of true activity in the mirror of the world itself” (157). Divine personhood seems implausible because we experience the world fundamentally as impersonal, manufactured, and manipulable. This seems fundamentally right to me and, incidentally, accords with Hartmut Rosa’s notion of “resonance,” and how society’s structural ephemerality short-circuits personal, meaningful connection.
In the course of the above, Minich engages with phenomenological readings of “presence.” To his credit, Miinich is one of few evangelicals (of whom I am aware) that theologically engage with phenomenology in a robust way. While his engagement is limited to Heidegger mostly, it still forms a very significant core of his argument and he very obviously has a tight grip on Heidgger’s philosophical project. While absorbing many of Heidegger’s insights, Minich shows how God conceived as a “pure act of absolute communication” (174) essentially subverts Heidegger’s criticisms of Western theology/metaphysics. In this part of the book, Minich’s arguments are remarkably fresh and insightful - even as I probably understood very little of this part of it!
As Minich’s argument winds down, he offers a few significant ways forward. He offers a two-pronged approach, one that reorients the mind to the world, and one that reorients the body to the world. For Minich, this “internal forum” consists of “acts of remembrance” that help us to re-narrate our status in the world. These are remembering God’s being, created freedom, misuse of freedom, and acceptance of divine revelation and promise. These serve as portraits of how Christian doctrine (theology proper, creation, sin, and gospel) helps us to reorient ourselves in the world and access it as Creation. These pages (191-207) are excellent in that they show us how to faithfully press doctrine into phenomenological service.
Significantly, Minich argues (alongside Bonhoeffer) that “divine absence” (biblically construed) is actually a means through which God matures his children. “The opportunity of imposed agency, of un-homed juvenility, is that we can learn to grow up” (238). Rendered this way, divine absence is actually put into the service of Christian theology. Because divine absence is a part of the biblical story, it is not something that ought to be a source of anxiety. Instead, God’s absence “reveals presence to be more than a mere given. It is rendered a personal love, reliability, an agency that will never abandon us or fail to return, and so forth” (267). Rightly, then, Minich attenuates divine absence into a theological key, one that accounts for the very real lived experience of God’s absence, while also pointing out that this doesn’t entail God’s inexistence. He rightly notes that “it rather takes courage to say that, in spite of evil, in spite of war, racism, genocide, rape, and so on, that God is still to be trusted and adored . . . Perhaps, indeed, atheism is not bravery at all, but capitulation” (269). Of course, capitulation is the Christian story, and yet (to borrow Minich’s phraseology) it is God’s faithfulness in Jesus Christ that shepherds us to the conclusion. It is this that enables the Christian to faithfully attend to the here and now, in the face of evil, to answer the call of the Other in our neighbor (to borrow from Levinas), and live under “the proper and reverential recognition that when confronting others, we speak to kings” (272-73). Minich’s argument, then, is not the end of a debate, but a call to be re-attuned to reality and live according to the moral vision of Scripture, which he articulates in Lewisian terms: “The embodied enactment of which would simultaneously attune us to the echo of the divine in all beings, as well as help us to understand and endure our historical pilgrimage to Zion” (273)—a stirring reminder of what is at stake in Christian discipleship.
March 10, 2024
The most important book I’ve read in years. Very difficult to get through as the writing is quite dense. However the central thesis (God’s seeming absence/silence results from the tacit reality of modernity, and thus, atheism can take root as God’s felt absence shapes our precognitive attunement to the world) and its implications were striking. This was incisive, original, and a work I will be wrestling with and teasing out for some time.
Read
July 1, 2023Excellent content BUT I found it really hard to read, it often seemed quite unclear how Minich was developing his argument.
Minich's basic thesis
Modern technology and particularly the way we use that technology serves to divorce us:
- from nature
- from the effects of our own work
- from meaningful relations with others AND ultimately
- from ourselves and from history.
Minich argues that it is the context of that separation that makes the ordinary modern westerner feel as if God is not there.
Minich's proposed response
We should seek to reorient us to ourselves, to our neighbours, to the world and to the sense of an overarching history as the plan of God preparing mankind for the beatific as a way to counter this modern malaise and get us back in touch with reality.
My concluding thoughts
I think Minich's thesis AND his proposed answer is very helpful, I wish the book was easier to read, as is, I will continue to recommend his shorter work "Enduring Divine Absence" for those whom I think would benefit from his thinking.
I've not put a rating, because having struggled so much over reading it I feel ill equipped to rate it.
Minich's basic thesis
Modern technology and particularly the way we use that technology serves to divorce us:
- from nature
- from the effects of our own work
- from meaningful relations with others AND ultimately
- from ourselves and from history.
Minich argues that it is the context of that separation that makes the ordinary modern westerner feel as if God is not there.
Minich's proposed response
We should seek to reorient us to ourselves, to our neighbours, to the world and to the sense of an overarching history as the plan of God preparing mankind for the beatific as a way to counter this modern malaise and get us back in touch with reality.
My concluding thoughts
I think Minich's thesis AND his proposed answer is very helpful, I wish the book was easier to read, as is, I will continue to recommend his shorter work "Enduring Divine Absence" for those whom I think would benefit from his thinking.
I've not put a rating, because having struggled so much over reading it I feel ill equipped to rate it.
March 1, 2024
Excellent. A bit hard to follow at times, but the content and general thrust of his argument is compelling.
May 17, 2025
Very insightful. We need this book to properly engage with modernity.
October 5, 2023
Remarkable!
This week I finished Joseph Minich's latest book "Bulwarks of Unbelief: Atheism and Divine Absence in a Secular Age." This was not an easy book to read, but it was very rewarding. Advancing on the thought of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, Minich presents a phenomenology of divine absence in the modern era. Drawing upon thinkers such as Ellul, Marx, Heiddeger, Marcuse, Bavinck, Bonhoeffer, and C. S. Lewis (among others), Minich demonstrates how our present technoculture has alienated modern man from his labor, history, himself, and as a result even God.
Living in a world in which the "real" is mediated to us nearly entirely by manufactured objects, what feels natural is the sense that the world is essentially an inert object that is subject to our willful manipulation. What is real becomes what is quantifiable. Even if you are a Christian, you live in a world in which God just feels relatively absent. It is a common experience of the Western World.
Minich illustrates (borrowing from Taylor) just how contingent and recent this sense of divine absence is. Yet, it is also something that will likely not go away soon and it isn't something that we can simply think our way out of (Here's looking at you Christian Apologetics). The Christian faith will be lived out in receiving this condition and faithfully walking through it.
This week I finished Joseph Minich's latest book "Bulwarks of Unbelief: Atheism and Divine Absence in a Secular Age." This was not an easy book to read, but it was very rewarding. Advancing on the thought of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, Minich presents a phenomenology of divine absence in the modern era. Drawing upon thinkers such as Ellul, Marx, Heiddeger, Marcuse, Bavinck, Bonhoeffer, and C. S. Lewis (among others), Minich demonstrates how our present technoculture has alienated modern man from his labor, history, himself, and as a result even God.
Living in a world in which the "real" is mediated to us nearly entirely by manufactured objects, what feels natural is the sense that the world is essentially an inert object that is subject to our willful manipulation. What is real becomes what is quantifiable. Even if you are a Christian, you live in a world in which God just feels relatively absent. It is a common experience of the Western World.
Minich illustrates (borrowing from Taylor) just how contingent and recent this sense of divine absence is. Yet, it is also something that will likely not go away soon and it isn't something that we can simply think our way out of (Here's looking at you Christian Apologetics). The Christian faith will be lived out in receiving this condition and faithfully walking through it.
Want to read
September 19, 2023
January 18, 2025
Minich has written a book that needed to be written. The question he seeks to answer is, “Why is God’s existence not felt to be as obvious as it was to previous generations?” In other words, what has changed that makes belief in God, at times, difficult rather than our default position, as it was in the past? There are many ideological “fall narratives” out there, but I agree with Minich that while explicit philosophies have certainly contributed to our current predicament, they are in no way sufficient to bring about such a cataclysmic change in our general orientation to the divine.
He summarizes his position as follows: “My own hypothesis is that the salient factors that explain the relationship between divine absence and modern atheism are located at the intersection of the vast proliferation of modern technoculture, the way the world seems it manifests to correspondingly alienated laborers, and the resultant loss of a sense that one belongs to, and is caught up in, a history that transcends one” (6). From Heidegger to Ellul to Marx, Minich dives deep into historic diagnoses of the ailments of the modern world to build a coherent case that these factors are not only correlative (chap. 2) but causative (chap. 3).
Further, Minich does not leave his readers without suggestions for a way forward for Orthodox Protestantism. In so doing, he rejects reactionary and Luddite proposals and argues that we must come to see our current moment as an intentional stage in God’s plan of redemption - that it is not something to be feared as much as it is something to strengthen our faith. I struggled with some of the claims and proposals of Chapter 4, but overall, they challenged my inner assumptions concerning the way forward as it pertains to the proliferation of technique and the reclamation of our historic plausibility structures (what one could call my Wendell Berry sympathies).
This book was incredibly dense (it’s a publication of his dissertation), but it was also incredibly enlightening. I’ve been waiting to find a book that tackles this question in this way for a while now, and Minich’s work did not disappoint. Additionally, I’m looking forward to diving into much of the literature that he cited in this book.
He summarizes his position as follows: “My own hypothesis is that the salient factors that explain the relationship between divine absence and modern atheism are located at the intersection of the vast proliferation of modern technoculture, the way the world seems it manifests to correspondingly alienated laborers, and the resultant loss of a sense that one belongs to, and is caught up in, a history that transcends one” (6). From Heidegger to Ellul to Marx, Minich dives deep into historic diagnoses of the ailments of the modern world to build a coherent case that these factors are not only correlative (chap. 2) but causative (chap. 3).
Further, Minich does not leave his readers without suggestions for a way forward for Orthodox Protestantism. In so doing, he rejects reactionary and Luddite proposals and argues that we must come to see our current moment as an intentional stage in God’s plan of redemption - that it is not something to be feared as much as it is something to strengthen our faith. I struggled with some of the claims and proposals of Chapter 4, but overall, they challenged my inner assumptions concerning the way forward as it pertains to the proliferation of technique and the reclamation of our historic plausibility structures (what one could call my Wendell Berry sympathies).
This book was incredibly dense (it’s a publication of his dissertation), but it was also incredibly enlightening. I’ve been waiting to find a book that tackles this question in this way for a while now, and Minich’s work did not disappoint. Additionally, I’m looking forward to diving into much of the literature that he cited in this book.
July 23, 2025
If the title strikes you as odd, no worries! It’s a riff off of Charles Taylor’s phrase, “bulwarks of belief”.
First, this book is a great primer on Marxism, its tenets, and (some of) its key players. I would highly recommend it to anyone seeking to learn more about that school of thought.
Second, this book focuses in on our current technoculuture and how that culture has rendered it increasingly plausible to reject any notion of God, specifically the “exclusive”, Christian belief in / about God
Third, this book explores the theme of divine absence and its prevalence in arguments against God by modern atheists
Fourth, in my opinion, this books delivers a mammoth blow to any worldview built upon a foundation of unbelief. Unlike most modern rebuttals to atheism — you know, the ones that play by the rules, terms, and conditions set by the atheists themselves — Minich simply paints a vision of life that is far more compelling. Here’s an example of what I mean taken from page 269:
“Perhaps…it rather takes courage to say that, in spite of evil…in spite of war, racism, genocide, rape, and so on, that God is still to be trusted and adored. Not, of course, as wishful thinking, not as calling evil “good”, but as receiving reality just as it is and as it must be—despite what the world often feels like. Perhaps, indeed, atheism is not bravery at all, but capitulation. Perhaps it is an intellectual, spiritual, and psychological failure to endure…”
Finally, lest it seem that Minich ends his book with a low blow, he calls the Christian to be a servant to ALL, and borrowing from Lewis, to treat everyone he or she encounters as immortal, as kings and queens.
First, this book is a great primer on Marxism, its tenets, and (some of) its key players. I would highly recommend it to anyone seeking to learn more about that school of thought.
Second, this book focuses in on our current technoculuture and how that culture has rendered it increasingly plausible to reject any notion of God, specifically the “exclusive”, Christian belief in / about God
Third, this book explores the theme of divine absence and its prevalence in arguments against God by modern atheists
Fourth, in my opinion, this books delivers a mammoth blow to any worldview built upon a foundation of unbelief. Unlike most modern rebuttals to atheism — you know, the ones that play by the rules, terms, and conditions set by the atheists themselves — Minich simply paints a vision of life that is far more compelling. Here’s an example of what I mean taken from page 269:
“Perhaps…it rather takes courage to say that, in spite of evil…in spite of war, racism, genocide, rape, and so on, that God is still to be trusted and adored. Not, of course, as wishful thinking, not as calling evil “good”, but as receiving reality just as it is and as it must be—despite what the world often feels like. Perhaps, indeed, atheism is not bravery at all, but capitulation. Perhaps it is an intellectual, spiritual, and psychological failure to endure…”
Finally, lest it seem that Minich ends his book with a low blow, he calls the Christian to be a servant to ALL, and borrowing from Lewis, to treat everyone he or she encounters as immortal, as kings and queens.
February 15, 2024
I appreciate Minich’s approach to this question, though I do not share his irenic temperament. The book is at its best when considering how modern technology affects persons and their beliefs. Much more could have been said on this point beyond Minich’s (deliberately narrow) focus on the plausibility of God’s existence or non-existence. For instance, much of the way modern technology constitutes us as persons in the world also conduces to political and social progressivism; or to the undermining of traditional marriage and childrearing; or to sexual libertinism; or to the destruction of traditional handicrafts and skills. Minich is aware of this: “just as I confront the world as a sort of passive material to be shaped by my will via the technologies that mediate its relation to me, so also…even persons proper tend to be reduced to passive material for manipulation. I can block on social media. I can turn off the television. I can hang up the phone. I can decide not to text back.” He is well read in the seminal thinkers who have analyzed modernity (Marx, Marcuse, Heidegger, Charles Taylor, Jacques Ellul, etc.). My biggest desideratum was for more phenomenological analysis of modern experiences. I found these the most rewarding and stimulating part of the book.
November 2, 2023
Minich takes Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age further down the field and adds his own emphasis. This is maybe the 5th or 6th book that I have read expanding on Taylor’s work. Maybe I should just read his book
Notes forth coming… (maybe)
Notes forth coming… (maybe)
July 14, 2023
I adored this analysis of atheism and modernity. I'm a huge fan of Charles Taylor, and appreciated Minich's engagement with (and supplement of) Taylor's theory. I was quite surprised by, and appreciative of, Minich's reading of Marx here. It's probably one of my favorite uses of Marx's more-philosophical argumentation. I also loved Minich's diagnosis of "technoculture" as well as his discussion of "order and chaos" in the ancient world, as compared to the post-enlightenment/modernity context.
I know some have critiqued Minich's conclusions, and I can see how the book leans much more heavily on analysis than forward, practical proposals, but I loved his use of Bonhoeffer and the general call for Protestantism to "grow up." We need to accept the world that is largely disenchanted, and still call to God within it. (Cue Andy Root's work, pulling on Barth and the "crisis" the church is in today, for a supplementary explanation that lends more to Minich's work).
Loved this so much. It's right in my sweet spot of history, cultural theory and philosophy. I will definitely be paying attention to Minich's work moving forward.
I know some have critiqued Minich's conclusions, and I can see how the book leans much more heavily on analysis than forward, practical proposals, but I loved his use of Bonhoeffer and the general call for Protestantism to "grow up." We need to accept the world that is largely disenchanted, and still call to God within it. (Cue Andy Root's work, pulling on Barth and the "crisis" the church is in today, for a supplementary explanation that lends more to Minich's work).
Loved this so much. It's right in my sweet spot of history, cultural theory and philosophy. I will definitely be paying attention to Minich's work moving forward.
May 23, 2024
There are several very good reviews for this book already, I do not need to add to the total number of words spilled. As has been sad, this book is very dense (not often I have to read with a dictionary) but very much worth the work to get through it.
I do suggest perusing some of the reviews, they will help clarify the main thrust of this work. But the topic is fascinating, how much the current mechanistic, manipulable, purposelessness the late modern age effects everyone, even how Bible believing Christian's view are conformed to the spirit of the age and our faith has become primarily propositional. Lots to think about here.
Highly recommend but know you are in for a serious challenge.
I do suggest perusing some of the reviews, they will help clarify the main thrust of this work. But the topic is fascinating, how much the current mechanistic, manipulable, purposelessness the late modern age effects everyone, even how Bible believing Christian's view are conformed to the spirit of the age and our faith has become primarily propositional. Lots to think about here.
Highly recommend but know you are in for a serious challenge.
April 30, 2024
If you do not subscribe to the Marxist theory of the alienation of labor you will find a significant portion of this book unpersuasive, as it is frequently referenced as a significant factor in our felt alienation with regards to God.
For a more positive perspective and historical recounting of the good resulting from technological advances and free-market capitalism, see Van Drunen's article, 'The Market Economy and Christian Ethics' in the Journal of Markets & Morality, Volume 17, Number 1 (Spring 2014): 11–45.
For a more positive perspective and historical recounting of the good resulting from technological advances and free-market capitalism, see Van Drunen's article, 'The Market Economy and Christian Ethics' in the Journal of Markets & Morality, Volume 17, Number 1 (Spring 2014): 11–45.
October 26, 2023
First, I have to admit that this is much harder to read than I thought it would be. I missed that it was on the academic side. That being said, it’s really excellent. Where does the felt absence of God come from? Why is it so pervasive? Such an interesting analysis that I think is really compelling. And the final chapter is dynamite. I really liked this.
November 5, 2024
This was slow and, in some places, difficult reading. Proves a helpful study in understanding the ways in which we understand our relationship to the world, especially with regard to technology. Minich provides a framework from which we can better pursue wisdom that accords with biblical anthropology.
June 14, 2024
Really really good!
Minich laws out a compelling argument that the experienced conditions of the modern world make unbelief more plausible than previous epochs of history.
We must therefore consider what God might be up to with his people in the age of “divine absence”!
Highly recommend!
Minich laws out a compelling argument that the experienced conditions of the modern world make unbelief more plausible than previous epochs of history.
We must therefore consider what God might be up to with his people in the age of “divine absence”!
Highly recommend!
July 19, 2023
I recommend this book. The bulk of the book, comprising chapters 2 and 3, are really well argued. I can easily imagine myself going back to it in the future.
Read
May 20, 2024A fantastic read. Highly recommend to anyone who ministers in an increasingly secular context (ie. anyone living in the West).
April 17, 2025
One of my new favorite books.
July 21, 2023
See my review at the Regent Bookstore blog.
December 16, 2023
I think the book is certainly worth reading. Maybe to my own fault, I was surprised by the technical and intellectual familiarity needed to fully engage. Some really insightful points and the overall orientation is one that I trust will stick with me. The finer points and conversation, though, is niche and difficult to follow at times. Thus, a good book that gets three stars. Not quite what I expected, but helpful, nonetheless.
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