We recently asked Joseph Minich a few questions about apologetics and his recent book Bulwarks of Unbelief: Atheism and Divine Absence in a Secular Age. We hope you benefit from this lightly edited interview with Minich as he wrestles with the implications of apologetics and unbelief in the modern world.
TGCC: You recently wrote a book on faith and unbelief. Why? What is it about?
I am fascinated by the experience of feeling some lingering doubt even after reading a bunch of apologetics books. Why is it that my mind can go on journey after journey of becoming more firmly persuaded of God’s existence or some other dimension of the Christian faith, but then I can rather quickly find myself wondering if I’ve just been weak-willed and ideological.
There is much to say about this, but what I focus on in Bulwarks of Unbelief is what cultural background noises help account for this experience.
Work through your own doubts and questions with complete honesty before God, and as God ministers to you in His grace, you will have something to offer others.
As many contemporary analyses of contemporary gender dynamics wind up having to frame these issues against a narrative and civilizational backdrop (the fallout of the Industrial Revolution, etc), I am attempting to understand what it is like to believe against the backdrop of the whole pattern of contemporary life.
TGCC: What is Apologetics? What is modern Apologetics?
Most basically, apologetics is simply the task of defending the faith against objections and challenges. It is as old as the faith itself.
We might speak of contemporary apologetics as a discourse of “defending the faith” that has formed against the backdrop of the aforementioned forces. This provides many opportunities, but it has arguably also been distorting in some respects. Chiefly, it can sometimes be the case that contemporary apologetics rhetoric starts in a skeptical headspace, problematizes the solidity of the common world and nature that we share with our unbelieving fellows, and then brings in Christian theory to fix the problems we’ve highlighted.
The Christian tradition moves in the reverse direction.
In fact, we do share a world and a nature, and it is these that the revelation of God illuminates. Behind the contemporary tendency is (in my judgment) an implicitly secularized cosmos that our minds re-enchant.
This is different than recognizing that it is we who are disenchanted, and no small part of Christian apologetics is ordered toward the training of the imagination.
TGCC: You recently noted that the apologetics of believers led to unbelief in the 18th and 19th centuries. What did you mean?
During the 18th and 19th centuries, you begin to see more open critiques of basic Christian doctrine and practice. The skeptics especially were rhetorically powerful. And of course, the church produced a great many responses to the Enlightenment philosophes and others.
However, most historians of modern unbelief argue that — counterintuitive as it might seem — the proliferation of books in defense of the Christian faith in the public sphere left many with the impression that the faith was vulnerable to critique, and therefore not as simply obvious as otherwise imagined.
In short, the felt need for apologetics was no less responsible for unbelief than any skeptical screed.
Even if I am not some great knower, presumably the “smart people” on the Christian team know how to deal with all of that. But to the extent that it seems to take massive mental contortion to defend the faith, and especially as I watch those obviously smarter than me get nervous or lose their faith, it is not shocking that some found this a destabilizing state of affairs.
TGCC: You criticize modern apologetics as tending toward viewing people as a “worldview-in-sneakers.” What does that mean?
I get this metaphor from a dear mentor. There is a tendency in much apologetics theory (and sometimes in practice) to treat our disorientation from the world and therefore our reorientation in intellectualist ways.
All human action gets reduced to an epiphenomenon of a person’s “worldview,” rather than their worldview being framed as one conscious part of a life that could never be reduced to a set of ideas.
Per the metaphor of Lewis’ best novel, we are all arriving at the possession of a full and consistent face.
In point of fact, a human often houses a bundle of contradictions and, per the metaphor of Lewis’ best novel, we are all arriving at the possession of a full and consistent face. Part of what we need to develop are rhetorical approaches to persons that both come from the fullness of our own humanity and appeal to whole persons (with a public world and common nature as our starting place).
TGCC: How should we do apologetics today, and what do you mean by a civilization of sages?
Work through your own doubts and questions with complete honesty before God, and as God ministers to you in His grace, you will have something to offer others.
For many, this will take the route of formal apologetics training under tutors. For others, this will take a more informal route.
The term “civilization of sages” comes in a context (in Miracles) in which Lewis is discussing the fact that modern life unhooks us from tradition and therefore the mediation of the wisdom of the sages to whole of the masses through a whole form of life.
In the disintegration of such mediating structures, the common man progressively finds himself in a position (from early into late modernity) where he must, as Lewis puts it, “find wisdom for himself or go without it.”
This sounds like a recipe for total disaster, and in some sense it is. But Lewis also wonders if God will redeem such a moment through the cultivation of a more mass-distributed sagedom.
