The Silence of God

I've been thinking about this a lot lately:

The experience of God's silence changes all such hopes and casts apologetics into a new framework. What it forces on modernity is a recognition that although Christendom may have died politically in almost every modern Western nation, it continues culturally. The silence of God is not to be equated with his absence by either Christians or their cultural despisers; if God were truly dead, one could not speak of or rage against his silence - there would be no silent one to designate. In the modern West, even anti-Christian rhetoric is forced to build its new edifices with or within the collapsed remnants of cathedrals. God is remembered in the remains of the Christian day, sometimes clearly enunciated in acts and institutions, sometimes barely recalled, always present in words, but silent to the times. The purpose of his body, the Church, remains evident in the post-1984 world, defended by some and rejected by others; its meaning, however, increasingly cannot be grasped.

from Peter Erb's Murder, Manners, Mystery: Reflections on Faith in Contemporary Detective Fiction