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.