The Death of God Revisited

I recently received the new (July 27) issue of The Christian Century. The cover story is about the end of the Roe era. The other topic highlighted on the cover is “Revisiting the Death of God Movement.” The essay inside is entitled “Is God Still Dead? The Legacy of 1960s Radical Theology,” written by Lloyd Steffen, chaplain at Lehigh University. The issue also contains an autobiographical piece entitled “When My Dad Killed God” by Don Hamilton, son of the Death of God theologian Bill Hamilton. Reading these articles was an exercise in nostalgia.

I remember when God died. The death of God changed my life. It made me into the Christian pastor I am today. When Time magazine published its iconic red and black 1966 cover with the words “Is God Dead?” I was a teenager struggling with my family’s Christian faith. At the time I was in a Methodist-related school taking a Philosophy of Religion class with our school chaplain. He brought the Time article to class, and we discussed what it meant to say that God was dead.

I entered Denison University (at the time a Baptist affiliated college) in 1968 planning to have a career in science. I took an introductory religion course to satisfy the liberal arts requirement. David O. Woodyard, Dean of the Chapel, was teaching the course. He had just published a book entitled Living Without God, Before God.  In the class he surveyed the works of radical theologians Thomas J. J. Altizer, William Hamilton, Gabriel Vahanian, and Paul van Buren. The course turned my life around. A year later I had switched my major to Religion.

It is no exaggeration to say that the Death of God Movement brought me to God. The chief concern in the 1960’s was how to do theology in a post-WWII, post-Holocaust era. In the Religion department we thought long and deep about the problems of evil and suffering. We debated Bonhoeffer’s “religionless Christianity.” We discussed Elie Wiesel and Viktor Frankl. We read Niebuhr and Barth, Brunner and Buber, Tillich and Heschel. I was hooked. After graduation I went to seminary.

How does the death of God lead a man to a life of professional Christian ministry? For me Death of God theology was the first taste of religion that took existential problems seriously. It offered no easy answers; it was willing to go wherever truth led. It was utterly honest at a time when institutional religion seemed shallow, judgmental and hypocritical. For example, Death of God theologian Bill Hamilton lost his job as a professor at Colgate Rochester Divinity School (a seminary related to my American Baptist denomination) because of his theological and intellectual honesty.

If you are not familiar with the radical theologians of the 1960’s, there is not room enough in this brief essay to fill you in. I will simply say that the Death of God is likely not what you think it is, or what most church people in the 1960’s thought it was. It is about the death of theism, both fundamentalist and liberal varieties. Neither camp has yet come to grips with the obituary a half century later. It was the death of the “god of the gaps,” the demise of a shrinking deity whose only job was to fill in the remaining gaps in the answers science offered about the nature and origin of the universe.

The death of God movement was about going beyond words and ideas, beyond institutional religion and spiritual fads. The death of God led me to the Christian mystics while still an undergraduate. After seminary graduation I was lured into the wilderness of evangelical Christianity for a few decades, but eventually I returned to my spiritual roots to deconstruct my religion and rediscover God beyond God, to use Meister Eckhart’s phrase. I have chronicled this theological journey in my books Thank God for Atheists and Experiencing God Directly.

There is a well-known Buddhist saying: “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!” This is not really a call to assassinate a spiritual leader. Similarly the death of God is not really about deicide. It is about dethroning idols and intellectually dismantling the religions built around them. One cannot see clearly until one’s idols are dead and buried. This iconoclastic quest led me to the Eternal Christ. That is what the Death of God did for me. 

Galactic Spirituality

The heavens leave me in awe. I am not talking about the celestial abode of a Hebraic male deity sitting on a celestial throne surrounded by angels. I am talking about the scientific images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope released this week by NASA.

The fact that this new telescope is one million miles away is itself amazing. The recent photos taken by this instrument bring me to my knees. Viewing these pictures of nebulae and galaxies has the same effect on me as any religious vision described by Isaiah or Ezekiel. Modern astronomy is a spiritual experience.

The first image unveiled by President Biden on July 11 was revelatory. The deep field image enlarges a portion of sky about the size of a grain of sand when held at arm’s length. Take a moment to demonstrate that for yourself and notice how small this field of view is.

Thousands of galaxies are visible within this tiny segment of the heavens. William Blake could “see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower.” We can see galaxies. Every tiny speck in the photo is a galaxy containing a hundred billion stars and countless worlds. If that many galaxies are visible in a field the size of a grain of sand, just imagine how many galaxies there are in the entire universe!

The feeling I get when pondering such wonders can only be described as religious awe. Witnessing stars being born in the in the Carina Nebula is akin to the magi witnessing the Star of Bethlehem. Seeing stars dying in the Southern Ring Nebula is like being present at the Cross. Watching Stephan’s Quintet of galaxies dancing in the heavens is Pentecostal. I feel honored to be part of a generation that can witness this miracle.

Astronomer Carl Sagan famously said that humans are the universe conscious of itself. That quote came to mind when I saw these newest photos. While viewing these images I was the universe conscious of itself. I was not observing distant objects out in space. I was looking in the mirror. These are me. These are us. The Webb pictures are selfies.

Sagan explained that the elements that make up our bodies were literally formed in stars. He called us “star stuff.” He said, “The cosmos is within us.” He sounds more like a mystic than an astronomer.  

Human consciousness emerged from these elements through the same evolutionary process that formed the heavenly bodies. It is the same process that undoubtedly formed intelligent life on other planets. Once again Sagan said, “The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.”

When I was younger I used to gaze into the heavens on clear night and feel small. The universe seemed so big, and I felt so small. My lifespan seemed no more than that of a mayfly compared to the 13.8 billion years of the universe. Now when I look into the starry heavens I feel big. I am billions of years old! I feel ageless.  

This human psyche that calls itself Marshall Davis is not ageless. It is a temporary phenomenon, an ephemeral fiction created by the brain, a brief whirlpool in the river of time, a blip in the cosmic drama. My essence – our essence – is as old as the universe. Older than the universe.

I look into the heavens, and I see God. No need to go in search of God in creeds and rituals. God is here now! Look and see. This is cosmic spirituality. Adherents of earthly religions can fight over political turf within nations and among nations, but the God of the cosmos has more galactic things in mind. If you have any doubt about that, just look through the Webb Telescope and watch galaxies collide.