Lizzie Sanduleac’s Reviews > Bulwarks of Unbelief: Atheism and Divine Absence in a Secular Age > Status Update

Now what? Love your neighbor.
“When confronting others, we speak to kings.” 273

Ends on Lewis’s quote “there are no ordinary people” from The Weight of Glory.

God is “not interested in maximal clarity” because it doesn’t fix the problem of our corrupted will. 265

“It is good that God would ask us to… mature… through trust despite life’s suffering” which includes felt divine absence.

He permits “his people to hit the bottom, but not without shepherding them to the conclusion that God (by himself) is enough, sans all, to satisfy human longings.“ 268

Going forward, we need more dialogue about how “Christian claims illuminate common reality.” Persuasion, not louder assertion. 261

Succumbing to materialism often feels like submitting to reality, like “courageous love for truth” (263) but is really “capitulation”. (269)

“Inasmuch as we achieve some good but fail to discover the Christ, we have missed the point of history. We have missed life (John 17:3). It is not that these things are not good. It is that they are all relative.” 246

“Mission shows the power of Christ” and “the most ordinary participation” in it is “love of neighbor.” 248

Excellent connection to Scriptural truth and then careful application.

As a culture coming-of-age, we have the opportunity “to stand critically within one’s heritage” and freely choose what to do with it. 238

“God’s speech makes history,” not simply correcting a world that got out of hand. 238

“What passes through the historical flame of modernity are nevertheless the essential things of God and his word.” 241

“Christianity is the original universalism.” 244

236
Bonhoeffer on “coming back home”:
“the only way is that of Matt. 18:3, i.e. through repentance, through ultimate honesty. And we cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur ["as if God did not exist"]. And this is just what we do recognize— before God!”

234
“If modern Protestants fail to relate to humans as involved in the same… human project, they will perhaps… [miss] their own subtle idols (reducing the Christian faith to a functionally private modern identity) and also fail to come to grips with the Christian claim that Christ is the Desire (and the telos) of the nations (Hag 2:7).”

223
Can we regain “the feeling that one is a part of a local, national, and global (not to mention cosmic) economy— extended out… as concentric circles of home.”

228
On historical alienation
“The God-drained universe is a universe of futural disorientation.”

230
Bavinck says we need to be asking: “What might God be up to?”

“The person-person and even person-self relation is always prior to the person-techne relationship in order of being.”

Earthly Kingdom

For the community:
“Cultivation of a culture of persuasion” in which we individually and collectively refrain from manipulating others.

Essentially respecting freedom of the conscience.