In his 1996 novel, In the Beauty of the Lilies, John Updike has a fictional Reformed Presbyterian minister feel his faith abandon him like an exhale, leaving his “habitual mental contortions decisively relaxed.” For this minister, the experience was one of relief, “an immense strain of justification” lifted “at a blow.” Unbelief, in this sense, is not so much a choice of the will but the relaxation of the will, with the mind clicking into an atheist-materialist position that feels reassuringly natural.
Many Christians today feel the “immense strain of justification” when measuring our theological beliefs against our everyday experience. We might be convinced God exists, but this mental stance conflicts with our surface experience of the world as a secular place where God’s existence is not obvious. It’s not obvious, at least, in the same way the coffee in your hand and the national election are obvious. Instead, belief demands mental exertion.
How come we often find atheism plausible—as an account that strikes us as somehow aligned to reality at a basic, intuitive level—even if we think it is incorrect? In Bulwarks of Unbelief: Atheism and Divine Absence in a Secular Age, Joseph Minich equips believers to grapple intelligently with the godless feel of the world around them.
Interpreting divine absence
In the book, Minich aims to bolster “persons motivated to maintain orthodox religious faith in our current context” by helping them “recognize the unique role that their will must take in the maintenance of their religion.” As he argues, this work of maintenance requires inhabiting our secular age theologically.
Minich makes his case in a refreshing way. In recent years, there has been a steady stream of books on secularism, modernity, and disenchantment, but the bulk of these adopt a “history of ideas” approach, attributing these developments to Marxism or feminism or Hegelianism or Puritanism or late-stage capitalism, to name a few. Minich counters that these accounts, while relatively valuable, don’t tell the whole story. Ideas are not the only driving force of history.
As Minich argues, the root cause of our divine-absence discourse is phenomenological rather than ideological. In other words, it derives more from how we perceive the world than our theories about it. Supplementing the work of Charles Taylor, author of the oft-cited study A Secular Age, Minich agrees that our tacit experience of modern life has altered our view of reality.
The triumph of the Industrial Revolution played a pivotal role in this shift, ensuring that machines and modern technology would fundamentally shape our perception of reality. Over time, the Industrial Revolution gave rise to what Minich calls the “bulwarks of unbelief”: the background features of modern “technoculture” that (both consciously and subconsciously) render belief in God implausible (though not impossible) and atheism plausible (though not inevitable).
Minich’s entry point into this problem is how modern people interpret divine absence. As a phenomenon, this is nothing new. Ancient and medieval peoples experienced it (just read the Psalms, particularly Psalm 88), but they interpreted it differently. God’s perceived absence could mean, perhaps, that he stood in judgment over a person or people for their sin. Or it could mean that, like a trainer, he was leaving us to be tested. At any rate, God’s absence called for interpretation.
Something happened in the hundred years spanning 1860 and 1960, Minich argues. In that period, the possible meanings of God’s absence shrunk down to one: God’s nonexistence.
In this regard, the ancients had the more logical approach. Minich asks, Why do modern people immediately and intuitively interpret God’s absence to mean he does not exist, when so many other explanations are available? Put another way, why is our first impulse to equate invisibility with unreality?
Part of the answer, Minich argues provocatively, is that our experience of what reality is has changed. As he sees it, modern technoculture mediates—and even distorts—our tacit sense of what is real. In consequence, God’s existence begins to seem (but only seem) less plausible than it really is.
Since the Industrial Revolution, our engagement with the world has been increasingly filtered through technology. What is more, as our tools have grown in refinement, we rely on them not only to engage the world but also to exert a level of control over the world.
In Minich’s observation, technoculture makes the world “entirely subject to” our own “agency or ends” (emphasis added). In turn, this dynamic informs our sense of what is real and cultivates a default posture toward the world:
To put it bluntly, the [technocultural] world is a world for me. I do not find myself in a big, mysterious world suffused with agencies to which I am subject and around which I must learn to co-navigate with my immediate community. I find myself in a world almost entirely tool-i-fied, a world of my own (agentless!) subjectivity before an increasingly silent cosmos.
In technoculture, then, the idea of a supreme agent, God, fails to comport with our everyday experience. It does not even seem relevant. “In my judgment,” writes Minich, “the modern technological order tacitly communicates to us, day in and day out, that reality (the sort that actually concerns us), belongs to the order of the manipulable.”
Within this order, we can govern our lives with rational, efficient control, as when we adjust the thermostat, block a Facebook profile, or select a movie from the heap of options. But everything outside this “manipulable” realm hardly registers as “real” to modern sensibilities. No wonder that minds formed in such an environment will naturally equate divine absence with divine nonexistence.
Comings and goings
I have attempted to outline Minich’s argument, but this task is difficult. His book progresses in centrifugal rather than linear fashion, building like an upward spiral in a series of excursions. Here, we read about Karl Marx’s theory of labor. There, about the signification of the city in ancient cosmogony. Now, we consider Jacques Ellul’s concept of technique, and now, Martin Luther’s anthropology of hearing.
Shifts in style exacerbate the mental whiplash. On one topic, Minich waxes lofty and lyrical. On the next, his prose turns mind-numbingly technical. The central idea of the book, that modern technoculture obscures (and even distorts) our experience of reality, is reinforced with each spin of the narrative wheel, but the number and interdisciplinary variety of his arguments can be dizzying.
This makes it difficult to hold Minich’s work together or consider it in comprehensive ways. The saving grace is his appeal to the reader’s lived experience in technoculture. Some of his observations will resonate while others will fall flat, but you may find yourself nodding in recognition more often than not.
Minich clarifies that he has not refuted atheism in some unanswerable way. At most, he has deflated it by showing how nonrational pressures make “atheist claims plausible” to modern minds.
But simply by raising the point that divine absence requires interpretation, Minich has accomplished something powerful. Beyond recommending some mental exercises to help us reattune ourselves to a reality that bolsters faith, Minich advances a particular theology of divine absence, which develops over the course of the book.
He reminds us that God often makes himself scarce. History is full of divine comings and goings: smoking mountains one day, then centuries without so much as a prophet. Even before the Fall, God’s presence was not constant; he appears to have walked with Adam in the cool of the day and then withdrawn. We relate to God through his absence, it seems, as much as through his presence.
In what would strike some readers as a twist, Minich reveals that he likes technology. The solution to the current crisis of divine absence, he thinks, is not reversing the clock and returning to a time when our engagement with nature and creation was more direct. Instead, he pushes us to inhabit our current moment theologically.
This involves a recognition, he writes, that “we are contingent creatures who develop. We mature. And we mature and change and are perfected by means of shifting circumstances and the trials that they bring.” Minich favors the analogy of child-rearing. For children to mature, parents must allow moments of controlled abandonment, permitting them to explore their world freely or be left alone with tasks. Understanding divine absence as one of God’s “parenting methods” helps us interpret this age of divine absence as a possible aid to spiritual maturity.
While I appreciate what Minich is getting at, the child-rearing analogy presents problems, as it could be taken to insinuate that Christian sanctification succeeds by maturing us beyond our need for God. Minich anticipates this reading and warns against it, but he must work against his own imagery.
Perhaps a more congenial image comes from the Song of Solomon, especially as we follow the ancient Christian habit of presenting it as a romantic allegory of the church’s union with Christ, its bridegroom. In this poem, the bride searches the garden for an absent lover. She catches a glimpse of him through the lattice. He again vanishes, which only inflames her longing.
Here, Scripture depicts the lover of our souls as both absent and present. As he deliberately, even playfully, eludes us, he induces an agony of love. By his absence, he teaches us how to long, and so to receive his presence (when we have it) as a gift, not a given.
In this way, trust in God sustains us in his absence, assuring us that the withdrawal of presence need not represent a withdrawal of love. God is absent, but as we say in the Nicene Creed, “He will come again.”
Blake Adams is a writer, editor, and trained historian.
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