Bulwarks of Unbelief: Atheism and Divine Absence in a Secular Age, by Joseph Minich. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Academic, 2023, xii + 311 pages, $32.99.

Given the extent of our society’s moral decay, it is reasonable to have concerns about its future. While civilizational decline cannot prevent Christ from building his church (Matt. 16:18), it should motivate us to be like the men of Issachar, “who had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do” (1 Chron. 12:32). Joseph Minich’s recent book Bulwarks of Unbelief contains a number of insights that can help us understand our times and how to navigate them as faithful Christians.

How the Modern Technocultural Order Makes Atheism Much More Plausible Than It Has Been in Previous Eras

Minich contends that, in the modern age, the role technology plays in our engagement with the world creates an environment in which God’s existence is no longer felt to be obvious, regardless of what a person believes conceptually about the question of God. This stands in sharp contrast to ancient and medieval times, when the world was understood as a mysterious agent that acted upon man. In the modern era, the world is seen as material that can be manipulated by man, or as a machine whose malfunctions always have some kind of technical solution. It is generally assumed that any problem can be fixed with a pill, procedure, product, policy, or protocol. Anything that does not fit in with this conception is perceived to be nonexistent. In short, when our engagement with the world is so thoroughly mediated by technology, we tend to view reality as consisting only of that which we can control. This makes the notion of a transcendent God both implausible and inconsequential.

Echoing sociologist Peter Berger’s notion of “plausibility structures”[1] and philosopher Charles Taylor’s idea of the “social imaginary,”[2] Bulwarks of Unbelief contends that modernity has created an atmosphere “which does not require constant conscious reference to the divine” (57). As noted above, Minich sees modern technology, in connection with the loss of traditional networks of trust and our increasing insulation from the natural world, as playing a key role in this development. While man has employed technology throughout history, in the modern era technology plays a unique role in our engagement with the world. As Minich explains,

We experience the world as what is revealed and presented to us in our technologies. . . . Nature, for us, becomes an abstraction. For us, technology is what nature was to many generations of our ancestors. . . . It reveals to us a world full of convenience, a world in which unsavory items can be fixed by an enhanced technical apparatus, a world in which the heavier aspects of suffering and death are sanitized and rendered invisible. . . . Against this backdrop, then, what is the initial plausibility of any God (or transcendental reality) who is not suited to our convenience? (124–25, italics original)

Because our technological interface with reality extends even to our relationships, we are trained to view human beings (including ourselves) as manipulable material rather than personal agents. As a result, the world no longer seems to reveal a personal God. While 81% of Americans still say they believe in God,[3] many of them live as practical atheists, conducting their day-to-day lives without giving any thought to God. The postliberal, feminist writer Louise Perry has characterized this as a repaganizing of Western culture, noting that the distinguishing feature of pagans is that they “are oriented toward the immanent.”[4]

Minich develops his thesis by drawing upon a wide array of sources. He employs Jacques Ellul’s thoughts on how technique “strips us of our relationship with the natural world” (107), Martin Heidegger’s concept of how the enframing function of technology “shapes the way in which reality automatically appears to us” (113), and, perhaps most surprisingly, Karl Marx’s ideas pertaining to “modern labor in its relationship to our perception of reality” (115). On the last point, Minich explains that “the products that populate and mediate our experience do not have the marks of craft” but are mass produced by persons who tend to “lack investment and engagement in their making” (152, italics original). This shapes us to see reality as impersonal, because “a human’s self-conscious sense of agency and self-possession is fundamentally developed in response to the felt active personhood of others” (156, italics original). While our technocultural order compensates us with the conveniences offered by the many tools upon which we are made to depend, this has the effect of muting “those features of the world that reinforced God via the world’s own imposition” (177). Consider the similar observations of political philosopher Glenn Ellmers, who notes that we have lost

the conception of nature: the conviction that there is a fixed and intelligible order in the cosmos, outside our will, that supplies a permanent ground of morality and justice. In the absence of nature, history and science became the authoritative substitutes. History would supply man’s purpose by situating him within the course of historical progress. But this historicism teaches that we are not only situated but in fact isolated in our particular historic moment. Science, meanwhile, through its technical methodology, was intended to confirm man’s mastery over the raw materials of nature, including human nature. Only that which can be counted and measured is real, and the only real knowledge is the quantifiable. . . . Neither Science nor History, needless to say, has delivered on the promised results. As political scientist John Marini explains: “By recreating man as a historical being, his meaning is established in becoming. . . . That required a rejection of being and truth, or the eternal, as providing the necessary conditions, and limitations, on human understanding derived from philosophy and religion, and undermined the authority of nature, reason, and God. . . . [History] could not establish the meaning of man in terms of the end of History or its rationality. History is irrational and never ending.”[5]

To sum up, the rendering of reality as impersonal “stuff” at the mercy of the human will leaves man without a sense of ultimate purpose.

How Orthodox Protestantism Is Well-Suited for an Age Marked by the Felt Absence of God

Minich shows how orthodox Protestantism is especially suited to thrive in this historical moment. While he does not define what he means by “orthodox Protestantism,” the term is typically used to refer to the consensus found in the major Protestant confessions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At the heart of this consensus is the notion that Christian faith is shaped not by what can be seen but by what God says in his Word. Martin Luther explained this in his Heidelberg Disputation by distinguishing between the theologian of glory and the theologian of the cross. Fallen man is by nature a theologian of glory, relying on his reason to understand God. The only way to become a theologian of the cross is by submitting to what God says in his Word. Through this Word we learn that, in the economy of salvation, outward appearances often look contrary to true spiritual realities. It was the Protestant Reformation’s embrace of the theology of the cross that led to the recovery of the definition of the justified Christian as one who is simultaneously righteous and sinful.

The aspect of Luther’s thought that Minich explicitly employs in setting forth an orthodox Protestant response to modernity’s sense of divine absence is the theory of the two kingdoms. This is refracted through the famous statement from Luther’s treatise The Freedom of a Christian, “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all” (191). Thus, in Luther’s “spiritual kingdom” the believer is bound only to God, and in Luther’s “earthly kingdom” people are bound to the duties they owe to their neighbors. Because Christians dwell in both dimensions simultaneously, our involvement in the historical process connects the two realms and points to the ultimate meaning of history.

Christians must be strategic if we are going to preserve orthodoxy in the spiritual dimension while living in an earthly context that fosters unbelief. The first step in Minich’s proposed strategy is to engage frequently in four acts of remembrance that can help attune us to reality. First, we need to remember that God is not one being alongside other beings but is the transcendent source and ground of all creation and all the beings that inhabit it. Second, we need to remember that God originally made human beings with freedom “to participate and to be engaged in the unfolding of the historical process via their access to and ability to change the world of which they are stewards” (197). Third, we need to remember that, because man has misused the freedom that he was given at creation, human history is a project that, on its own, has no ultimate purpose. And fourth, we need to remember that God’s activity in creation, providence, and the preservation of our rebellious race “provide the grounds for the hope that divine activity can both resolve the problem of our exile and bring the human project to completion” (206).

The second step in Minich’s proposed strategy focuses on embodied practices that are vital for realigning “our distorted tacit sensibilities” with “our persuaded convictions concerning the nature of reality” (207). At the individual level, such practices include the following: engaging in activity that involves direct, embodied participation in the world; faithfully practicing the classical Christian disciplines of prayer, Scripture meditation, and worship in the church; living not merely for our own enjoyment but also for the benefit of others; and extending generous hospitality. One practice that I would add to Minich’s list is recognizing propaganda and the human impulse toward social conformity.[6] This is necessary because our society’s lack of a shared sense of transcendent purpose makes people especially susceptible to an activist, regime-aligned press and a government that eagerly engages in censorship. This added practice is all the more important in light of the fact that our primary media of communication are image-based, making it easy to shape people’s thoughts and attitudes through the sensory manipulation of emotion.

At the corporate level, one key “earthly kingdom” practice for Christians is to push back against our regime of social manipulation and its disdain for individual freedom and agency. Philosopher Matthew Crawford offers an astute description of this regime when he writes that “under the pretense of their own rationality and benevolence, some men seek to manipulate other men as beings incapable of reason.”[7] Retired entrepreneur and present-day book-reviewer Charles Haywood adds that, in the American managerial regime, “putatively private entities are the main actors, using narrative control and manipulation to control the population.”[8] According to Minich, mounting a challenge to this established order will require the cultivation of “a positive vision of finitude and of the limits of men with respect to other men” (222). In my opinion, chief among the things that such a vision should stress are the following: (1) our technocratic, managerial regime’s invocation of scientific objectivity as the preeminent factor in governance is specious, because moral and political judgments are always guided by scientifically unprovable presuppositions; and (2) ordinary people have the right and responsibility to evaluate expert claims and proposals on the basis of standards of truth and goodness that are intelligible to all people in the light of nature, which serves as the standard of authority for political society. In short, political power is neither absolute nor omnicompetent, and its exercise does not override individual agency. G. K. Chesterton addressed this just over one hundred years ago amid the controversy over eugenics, saying, “There cannot be such a thing as the health advisor of the community, because there cannot be such a thing as one who specializes in the universe.”[9] Elsewhere he quipped, “If the ordinary man may not discuss existence, why should he be asked to conduct it?”[10] C. S. Lewis made a similar point in The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength, in which he showed that when a society embraces the illusion of man’s mastery over reality, some men end up claiming mastery over other men. In Minich’s opinion, any success in pushing back against our manipulative regime and its agenda of dependency will make modern atheism “less and less plausible—because our attunement to reality (and the character of reality itself) will be perceived to have an irreducibly agentic and meaningful character” (224).

While modernity has created conditions that are conducive to unbelief, we should note how this presents orthodox Protestants with an opportunity to mature in faith. Instead of nostalgically longing for days gone by, we should remember that God is the one who has brought us to this historical moment and that he is working through it to further his plan. In Minich’s words,

Rather than seeing the present situation as a bad thing to be overcome by an approximation of the past, . . . it is worth seeing the present as an opportunity to shape a future that could not have been attained without going through this stage of human development in relation to our own religious faith. (179)

Minich adds that a similar point was made by Dietrich Bonhoeffer when he wrote these words while imprisoned by the Nazis:

The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world on the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which He is with us and helps us (236).

In other words, the theology of the cross is perfectly suited for our historical moment. In an age of unbelief, hope is not to be found in seeing God as present, but in hearing the Word by which he reveals himself to us. And this does not consign our faith to the private realm, because the Word upon which our faith rests is the same Word that “initiates and drives the history in which human beings are subsequently caught up. . . . The history to which human beings belong, then, is one that groans for the revelation/word that both is its origin and summons it to its end” (240).

Conclusion

The decline of our civilization is put into perspective when we remember that it has historical antecedents. In the fifth century, Augustine saw the fall of Rome as an opportunity to stress that, because the church is the earthly expression of God’s eternal kingdom, it exists beyond the rise and fall of empires. Today’s believers can do something similar as we reckon with the way our technocultural order leaves modern people without a sense of God or ultimate purpose. Because Christ has set us free from such bondage to vanity, we are well-positioned to hold forth a hopeful vision in this age of unbelief. We know that history is the unfolding of God’s plan to establish his eternal kingdom. This enables us to participate in the human historical project while resting  “contented within human limits in the expectation that the final hope of history is not dependent upon humanity’s hubristic seizure of it (which, in any case, inevitably destroys rather than redeems)” (219). Instead of being seduced by the idea that man can gain control over every aspect of life, Christians should carry out the duties we owe to God and to our fellow men while accepting the reality of human finitude, always remembering that the final hope of history does not rest upon man, but upon God.

Endnotes

[1] The term “plausibility structures” refers to the standards that a culture implicitly accepts and uses to judge all other proposed belief and action.

[2] The term “social imaginary” refers to the way most people in a given society imagine their social surroundings.

[3] “How Many Americans Believe in God?,” Lydia Saad and Zach Hrynowski, Gallup, June 24, 2022, https://news.gallup.com/poll/268205/americans-believe-god.aspx.

[4] Louise Perry, “We Are Repaganizing,” First Things (Oct. 2023): 35.

[5] Glenn Ellmers, The Narrow Passage: Plato, Foucault, and the Possibility of Political Philosophy (New York: Encounter, 2023), 48–9; italics original.

[6] The power of propaganda is famously illustrated in George Orwell’s novels Animal Farm and 1984. The impulse toward social conformity is a key theme in Terrence Malick’s historically-based film “A Hidden Life,” in which an Austrian farmer’s refusal to pledge loyalty to Hitler earns him and his family the disdain of almost everyone in his village.

[7] Matthew B. Crawford, “The Rise of Antihumanism,” First Things, no. 335 (Aug/Sept 2023): 50.

[8] Charles Haywood, “Lyons on the Managerial Regime,” The American Conservative (Sept. 11, 2023) https://www.theamericanconservative.com/haywood-lyons-managerial-regime/.

[9] G. K. Chesterton, “Eugenics and Other Evils,” in Collected Works, vol. IV (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1987), 332.

[10] Cited in Michael D. Aeschliman, The Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism (Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2019), 29.

Andrew S. Wilson is the pastor of Grace Presbyterian Church (OPC) in Laconia, New Hampshire. Ordained Servant Online, January, 2024.