The Death of God

"Have you ever heard of the madman who on a bright morning lighted a lantern and ran to the market place calling out unceasingly: 'I seek God! I seek God!'--As there were many people standing about who did not believe in God, he caused a great deal of amusement. Why! is he lost? said one. Has he strayed away like a child? said another. Or does he keep himself hidden? Is he afraid of us? Has he taken a sea-voyage? Has he emigrated?--the people cried out laughingly, all in a hubbub. The insane man jumped into their midst and transfixed them with his glances. 'Where is God gone?' he called out. 'I mean to tell you! We have killed him--you and I! We are all his murderers! ...

"'Do we not smell the divine putrefaction?--for even Gods putrefy! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers?... Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater event--and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history hitherto!'--Here the madman was silent and looked again at his hearers; they also were silent and looked at him in surprise. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, so that it broke in pieces and was extinguished. 'I come too early,' he then said, 'I am not yet at the right time. This prodigious event is still on its way, and is traveling--it has not yet reached men's ears ...' "

These wild and lovely words, written by Friedrich Nietzsche toward the close of the last century, have recently broken loose from the obscurity of lecture, textbook and monograph, into the incomprehending world of cocktail party, newsmagazine with intellectual pretensions and television. Why? What has happened? Is there really an event properly called "the death of God"? Or is the current chatter enveloping the phrase simply another of the many non-events afflicting our time?

No. The death of God has happened. To those of us with gods, and to those without. To the indifferent, the cynical and the fanatical. God is dead, whatever that means. To some, this is an event of terror, warranting tears and the writing of requiems. In the above passage, Nietzsche seems to reflect some of this cosmic horror. But to others, the event is one of great liberation and joy; an event not keeping one from something, but making something newly possible, in this case the Christian faith. In another connection, Nietzsche knew this joy as well.

"In fact, we ... feel ourselves irradiated as by a new dawn by the report that the 'old God is dead'; our hearts overflow with gratitude, astonishment, presentiment and expectation. At last the horizon seems open once more, granting even that it is not bright; our ships can at last, put out to sea in face of every danger; every hazard is again permitted to the discerner; the sea, our sea, again lies open before us; perhaps never before did such an 'open sea' exist."

I am a Christian theologian by profession; I have recently been involved in the death-of-God fuss, and I am, as well, committed to the death of God as a theological and human event.

It is hard to know just exactly why the furor started last fall. I had been defending the death of God, off and on for years, on C.B.S. television programs, coast to coast, as the saying goes. But this was in the decent obscurity of the Sunday-morning cultural ghetto, and no one really listens to the words people say on television anyhow. What matters is if you are sincere, like Hugh Downs. A book or two came out in 1963, and in 1964 and 1965 a few articles began to appear indicating a common interest in doing Christianity without God. Three or four of us seemed to be working similar lines, and critics--both fearful and interested--began to call us a movement, and we looked around and decided that perhaps they were right. This was the first decisive alteration in Protestant theology to take place since the communications explosion of the early Fifties, and no one was prepared for the rapidity of information passing when the snowball really started to pick up momentum. A handful of articles, commissioned by a bland weekly Protestant journal (which in turn is earnestly monitored by the religion editors of the weekly newsmagazines), provided perhaps the real (continued on page 84)Death of God(continued from page 79) trigger last fall. An excellent analysis by a young New York Times reporter was syndicated quite widely, and a rather ineffectual and tired piece in Time made the kind of mark that ineffectual and tired pieces in Time often do. A confused New Yorker series on the "new theology" added words without sense to the scene, and, at last, the religion-desk people in wire services, local chains and papers moved in and rewrote the rewritten work of others. By about Christmas, the non-events and the events were thoroughly mixed together, hostile reactions were being recorded to words never uttered, institutions were upset, trustees perplexed, colleagues bewildered and hostile, and in general the reaction to the news and publicity was becoming part of the news and publicity, which in turn engendered more reaction, and so on. For a while it looked as if the reaction had become the event, and otherwise sensible Christian critics decided to reject the death-of-God theology on the grounds that it was faddish and beginning to turn up at cocktail parties. As time went on, and cooler heads prevailed, it was apparently decided that mention at cocktail parties is evidence for neither the truth nor falsity of an idea.

One of the consequences of the mishmash character of the intellectual life of our day is that it makes clarity and precision difficult to obtain. "Death of God" is a difficult, complex, rather mysterious idea, and I'd like to set down some of the meanings that it seems to me to have today.

There is no question about it: "death of God" is a striking, rhetorical and offensive phrase. We death-of-God theologians do not call ourselves that in order to give offense. We mean "death." Traditional religious thought has spoken about the "disappearance" or "absence" or "eclipse" or "silence" of God. It means, by these words, that men do not permanently enjoy the experience of faith or the presence of God. The presence is, from time to time, withdrawn, and men cannot count on the timing or character of its return. This is a common enough religious affirmation in our time, but it is not what we death-of-God people are talking about. We are talking about a real loss, a real doing without, and--whatever we do expect of the future--we do not expect the return of the Christian God, open or disguised.

"Death of God" sounds not only offensive, it sounds arrogant. It seems to suggest not only that this experience has happened to us, but that it has, or ought to have, happened to everybody. "Death" seems to legislate for you as well as to illuminate for me. This is, however, not as great a problem as first appears. We death-of-God theologians, along with a good many others today, accept without reservation the relativistic intellectual and spiritual climate of our time. We may fight passionately for what we hold. But we have given up believing that there is something about Christians that makes our views inevitable or necessary or (by definition) better than alternatives. We merely represent one of the possible intellectual options today. We expect to be listened to, if we say anything honest and clear, and we expect to listen. Given this relativism, the arrogant sound to the declaration of God's death is partly overcome.

There is, incidentally, a practical advantage in the shocking character of the phrase "death of God." It is just not something that conventional religious people or bishops or officials can pick up and use in their own way, saying, "Why, we've been saying that all along." There are those who feature this kind of complacency, but it is tough to do it with "death of God." The phrase is, you might say, nonsoluble in holy water, even when uttered with extreme unction.

The affirmation of the death of God is Christian in two senses. It is, for the most part, made by Christian theologians. (Not entirely, however, and a dialog between Christians and Jews around this idea is coming into being that seems most promising and exciting.) And it is made by us in order to affirm the possibility of thinking and living as Christians. To say "death of God," then, is somehow to move toward and not away from Christianity. Thus it should be clear that we theologians are not trying to reduce the Christian faith to a bland and noncontroversial minimum so that it can be accepted by scientists, rationalists and freethinkers. We are not particularly anxious about relevance or communication. It is not because we long to slip something into the mind of "modern man" that we do what we do. It is because something has happened to us, and because we suspect that it may have happened to others, that we are talking about the death of God.

But let's move beyond introductory matters. Just what does the phrase "death of God" mean as we "radical" theologians use it? And how is this related to other possible and historical uses of the phrase? The best way to start this answer is to indicate that there are perhaps ten possible meanings for the phrase "death of God" in use today:

1. It might mean that there is no God and that there never has been. This position is traditional atheism of the old-fashioned kind, and it does seem hard to see how it could be combined, except very unstably, with Christianity or any of the Western religions.

2. It might mean that there once was a God to whom adoration, praise and trust were appropriate, possible and even necessary, but that there is now no such God. This is the position of the death-of-God or radical theology. It is an atheist position, but with a difference. If there was a God, and if there now isn't, it should be possible to indicate why this change took place, when it took place and who was responsible for it. I will be returning to questions like this.

3. It might mean that the idea of God and the word God itself both are in need of radical reformulation. Perhaps totally new words are needed; perhaps a decent silence about God should be observed; but ultimately, a new treatment of the idea and the word can be expected, however unexpected and surprising it may turn out to be.

4. It might mean that our traditional liturgical and theological language needs a thorough overhaul; the reality abides, but classical modes of thought and forms of language may well have had it.

5. It might mean that the Christian story is no longer a saving or a healing story. It may manage to stay on as merely illuminating or instructing or guiding, but it no longer performs its classical functions of salvation or redemption. In this new form, it might help us cope with the demons, but it cannot abolish them.

6. It might mean that certain concepts of God, often in the past confused with the classical Christian doctrine of God, must be destroyed: for example, God as problem solver, absolute power, necessary being, the object of ultimate concern.

7. It might mean that men do not today experience God except as hidden, absent, silent. We live, so to speak, in the time of the death of God, though that time will doubtless pass.

8. It might mean that the gods men make, in their thought and action (false gods or idols, in other words), must always die so that the true object of thought and action, the true God. might emerge, come to life, be born anew.

9. It might have a mystical meaning: God must die in the world so that he can be born in us. In many forms of mysticism the death of Jesus on the cross is the time of that worldly death. This is a medieval idea that influenced Martin Luther, and it is probably this complex of ideas that lies behind the German chorale God Himself Is Dead that may well be the historical source for our modern use of "death of God."

10. Finally, it might mean that our language about God is always inadequate and imperfect.

I want to go back to the second meaning of the phrase. If there was once a God and there is now not one, when did this change take place? There are a number of paths toward an answer. In one sense, God is always dying, giving (continued on page 137)Death of God(continued from page 84) himself to the world and to men, as in the fall of the primitive sky gods into animism. In a more decisive sense for Christians, the coming and the death of Jesus (the Incarnation, to use the technical term) stand for a kind of death of God. Here God, Christians have always said, takes on sin and suffering. Can it not also be said that God takes on mortality, that the coming of Jesus is the beginning of the death of God, and that because of this coming, men no longer need gods in the old religious sense? The New Testament perhaps comes closest to this in the saying, "He who abides in love abides in God."

But the "when" question has to be answered not only in terms of Jesus, but in terms of the 19th Century. If Jesus makes the death of God a possible experience for men, the 19th Century lives that reality and instructs us to do the same. A whole series of themes in the 19th Century deal, directly or indirectly, with the collapse of God into the world, and thus with the death of God. Goethe and the romantics spoke of the movement from transcendence to nature, and even Protestants were invited by some of their spokesmen at the beginning of the century to fling themselves on the bosom of nature in order to recapture a lost divinity. William Blake is singing mysteriously of the death of the transcendent God at the close of the 18th Century, and in the French Revolution itself we can perceive the close connection between regicide and deicide. Hegel, as early as 1807, speaks elliptically of God's death, and the left-wing Hegelians like Strauss and Feuerbach make it much clearer--the attributes of God must be transmuted into concrete human values. Karl Marx' own Marxism is in one sense an attempt to recover for the human community the values previously ascribed to God.

Ibsen and Strindberg knew the death of God, as did Victorian England. George Eliot found God and immortality impossible, duty alone irresistible, while the young Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach sang a song for a whole generation.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

And on our side of the Atlantic, Hawthorne rather quietly, and Melville with unforgettable force, laid the God of the Puritan tradition to rest. Perhaps the most unforgettable image of the dying God in our language is that of Ahab finally fixing his harpoon in Moby Dick's side, as the two of them sink together, both of them God, both of them evil.

Cryptically, but not entirely falsely, in Europe and America between the French Revolution and the start of World War One, the Christian God is dying. The coming and death of Jesus makes God's death possible; the 19th Century makes it real. And today, it is our turn to understand and to accept.

Thus, "When did it happen?" gets a three-part answer. In one sense with Jesus and the cross. In another sense in the Europe and America of the last century. In a final sense, today, just now. Just what is there about our time that has led us to see and to grasp this event?

• • •

Every man must answer for himself the question "What is the special quality of your experience of the death of God?" In one sense, I don't think one can or should try to persuade anyone else of the reality of the death of God. When I talk or write about it, I don't try to place a new thing into another's head, I try to remind him of what he already knows. If there is no answer, no recognition, I can be of no further use to him except as an example of the way he should not go. For me, the death of God is not a consequence of a simple experience like the discovery of, say, the scientific method that automatically rules out God. It is an emotional event, in the guts. It is made up of a number of things, modest in themselves, but overwhelming when taken together. It is for me partly the disappearance of the idea of God as a meeter of needs and a solver of problems. For much of its history, classical Christianity felt that while men, by their own hands, could solve many of the problems of life, there was always a dimension where man was powerless and which had to be ascribed to God. In this sense the longing for God was said to be common to all. Our hearts are restless, Saint Augustine said, until they come to rest in God. Today we must say some hearts are and some hearts aren't. Men may not need God, just as they may not need a single ultimate loyalty. Needs and problems are for the world to meet, and if it cannot meet them, nothing else can. This is one strand in the experience of the death of God for me.

Another has to do with the problem of suffering. If for you there is nothing special about the 20th Century's experience of suffering, then this line of argument will not persuade. There has always been unmerited suffering in the world, and it has always been a problem for the heart and the head to hold to the reality of suffering and to the goodness and power of God at the same time. It has always been hard, I am saying, and now it is impossible; for the terrible burden of suffering our time has witnessed can be ascribed to God only by turning him into a monster. The problem of Job, of Ivan Karamazov, of Albert Camus has fallen on our heads. It was Christians who did the work at Auschwitz, and their God became impossible after they had finished. Ernest Hemingway, whom we do not ordinarily think of as having been moved by these problems, has a touching scene on this point in For Whom the Bell Tolls: Anselmo is speaking to Jordan about his hopes when the war is over.

"But if I live later, I will try to live in such a way, doing no harm to any one, that it will be forgiven."

"By whom?"

"Who knows? Since we do not have God here any more, neither His Son nor the Holy Ghost, who forgives? I do not know."

"You have not God any more?"

"No. Man. Certainly not. If there were God, never would He have permitted what I have seen with my eyes. Let them have God."

"They claim Him."

"Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself."

"Then it is thyself who will forgive thee for killing."

"I believe so," Anselmo said.

Let me put this in another way. The death of God means two closely related things: that some of the human experiences to which men have traditionally given the name of God must be redescribed and renamed, and also that some of those experiences are no longer ours. For example, religious men have often pointed to experiences of dependence, awe, reverence, wonder, mystery, tragedy as signs of the incalculable and mysterious character of life, saying of these experiences taken together, "Something like this is what we mean by God." There are, of course, such things about us, and the only point I wish to make here is that one needn't give any of them the name of God. They are real facts of our life, we have human sciences and arts to clarify them, and they point to mystery and wonder, but not to God.

But a second thing is just as true. There are experiences that men have had in the past and which they have traditionally understood as pointing to God that are simply not available to us in the same way today. Take the experiences of dependence, especially in the presence of nature. Listen to a research biologist or a doctor or a physicist or a space scientist talk about his work. He is talking about mastery, control and power; not about a sense of his smallness before the universe. This is true of our kids as well. The other night I was out in the back yard with one of my children, who had to identify some constellations for his science homework. When I was young and used to stand under the starry sky, I recall being filled with all the things you were supposed to be filled with: awe, a sense of my own smallness, dependence. But my son is a full citizen of the modern world, and said to me, after he had located the required constellations, "Which are the ones we put up there, Dad?" He was more interested in what he could do up there than in what he could feel down here. He had become a technological man, and this means something religiously. Are there other traditional religious experiences that we're losing touch with? The death of God lives in this kind of world.

It is quite foolish to say that the death of-God theology wants to reduce life to the scientifically knowable or the immediately relevant. It has no special interest in relevance or in being acceptable to that nonexistent chimera, "modern man." In no sense does it wish to turn its back on the mysterious, the sacred, the holy or the transcendent. It simply will not call such things by the name of God. As a matter of fact, it might be very interesting to work out a way of talking about godless forms of the sacred --ideas and experiences of the sacred that need not include the experience of God. It is doubtless true that some roads to the sacred are ruled out for many of us in our rationalized and technological culture. There probably cannot be, for example, any way to the sacred via holy men, holy books or holy gestures in the usual sense. But even if our way to God is cut off, need it be the case for our experience of the sacred? Can the experience of sex become a way to the sacred for some? Not just sex as intercourse, but as total affirmation of one's sexuality in the midst of the human community. What would it mean to say that sex can become a new kind of sacred space? What would sacred mean in such a statement?

Perhaps death can also become a sacred event in our time of the death of God. Not, of course, our experience of our own death, but at least the experience of its coming, of mortality, and a facing up to death, our own and others, so as to befriend it and deprive it of its ability to hurt and surprise us. What meaning would "sacred" have if we tried to say that death may become a way to a godless form of the sacred today?

Some examples might make this point a bit less bewildering. In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln was offering what seems to me a moving example of death as a human, godless form of the sacred. He said, you'll recall, that they had met to dedicate a portion of the battlefield. Then he went on:

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate--we cannot consecrate--we cannot hallow--this ground.

You might have expected him to make the pious point here and to say that we mortals cannot consecrate anything because that is God's prerogative alone. But he didn't say that:

The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.

Not just the "right" side, but all those who fought, are the consecrators. Suffering and dying men, he suggests, have the power to make holy or sacred what was ordinary and profane before.

It would be easy to find a contemporary example of sex as a sacred event. Such a view is common rhetoric in our modern sentimental panegyrics to sex, both Christian and secular. So I would rather turn to another source, to Puritan New England, as a matter of fact. This is from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and Dimmesdale is speaking to Hester about their adulterous love.

"We arc not, Hester, the worst sinners in the world. There is one worse than even the polluted priest! That old man's revenge has been blacker than my sin. [He is referring to Chillingworth's diabolical attack on him.] He has violated, in cold blood, the sanctity of a human heart. Thou and I, Hester, never did so!"

"Never, never," whispered she. "What we did had a consecration of its own. We felt it so! We said so to each other! Hast thou forgotten it?"

Here is not only sex, but nonmarital sex, and in the heart of Puritanism, affirmed as a form of the sacred. Along such lines as these. I think, a conception of the sacred without God might be worked out.

I want to raise one final question about the idea of the death of God. If God is dead, as we say, what do we put in his place? What does the work in this godless Christian vision that God used to do in the classical tradition? Have we, it might be asked, taken the full measure of the terrible cry of Ivan Karamazov, If there is no God, then everything is permitted? Are people really strong enough to lose not only the fear of hell and the consolations of the next life, but also the reality of God?

There are two answers, or two forms of the same answer, to the question about the replacement of God. In one sense the answer must be "the human community" and in another sense it must be "Jesus." Let us distinguish between two kinds of meaning or function classically ascribed to God. If by God you mean the means by which forgiveness is mediated, or consolation in time of sorrow or despair, or judge of my arrogance and my idolatry--then we say that these functions, as central for us as they ever were in classical Christianity, must be taken over by the human community. We must learn to forgive each other with the radical unconditioned grace men used to ascribe to God. (Recall the touching words between Anselmo and Jordan quoted above.) We must learn to comfort each other, and we must learn to judge, check and rebuke one another in the communities within which we are wounded and in which we are healed. If these things cannot now be done by the human communities in the world, then these communities must be altered until they can perform these tasks and whatever others, once ascribed to God, that need to be done in this new context. In this sense the death of God leads to politics, to social change, and even to the foolishness of Utopias.

But it would be misleading to pass over to what we are calling the human community every task once given to God. There is another kind of meaning attached to the classical idea of God that needs another kind of surrogate. If by God you mean the focus of obedience, the object of trust and loyalty, the meaning I give to love, my center, my meaning--then these meanings are given not to men in general but to Jesus, the man, in his life, his way with others and his death. We death-of-God theologians thus stake out a claim to be able to make it as Christians not merely because we speak of the death of the Christian God, but because we see as the center of the Christian faith a relation of obedience and trust directed to Jesus. Something like this is placed on the lips of Uncle Nikolai by Boris Pasternak in Doctor Zhivago:

"As I was saying, one must be true to Christ. I'll explain. What you don't understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know whether God exists, or why, and yet believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, and that Christ's Gospel is its foundation. Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That's why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that's why they write symphonies. Now, you can't advance in this direction without a certain faith. You can't make such discoveries without spiritual equipment. And the basic elements of this equipment are in the Gospels. What are they? To begin with, love of one's neighbor, which is the Supreme form of vital energy. Once it fills the heart of man it has to overflow and spend itself. And then the two basic ideals of modern man --without them he is unthinkable-- the idea of free personality and the idea of life as sacrifice."

The human community in general-- not as it is, but as it might be altered to become--and that particular instance of the human community, Jesus of Nazareth, thus take over the work, the action, the deeds, once ascribed to the Christian God. Thus the death of God is the least abstract event one can imagine. It moves straight into politics, revolutionary change, and the tragedies and delights of this world.

At the start of this article, the question was posed whether the death of God might be a non-event, fashioned by nothing more substantial than the eager and empty publicity mills of our day. We radical theologians have found, I think, that it is something more. It is a real event; it is a joyous event; it is a liberating event, removing everything that might stand between man and the relief of suffering, man and the love of his neighbor. It is a real event making possible a Christian form of faith for many today. It is even making possible church and ministry in our world.