Judaism and The Death of God

There is a Theological Underground. It is very old. Some of the most hallowed thinkers of both Judaism and Christianity have been members in their time. I suspect that Moses Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart and Sören Kierkegaard were members. There is a simple qualification for membership: One must have ideas in advance of what the official religious establishment is able to accept. In the Middle Ages, membership—if discovered—could lead to ban, excommunication, burning at the stake or having one's tongue cut out. Today the penalties are more subtle; but in its own way, today's establishment can be as harsh as its predecessors.

Death-of-God theology is underground theology spectacularly risen to the surface. It has merited debate, books, radio and television coverage, newspaper reports, a Playboy article and a Time cover. As recently as three years ago, each of the major exponents of the new theological mood thought he was an intellectual loner, expounding ideas that aroused the intense disapproval of his religious establishment. It isn't easy to be a loner. Even theologians want acceptance, but not at the price of self-falsification. Then, quite suddenly, each of us realized that we weren't alone, that there was a group of theologians who were, each in his own way, expressing a very contemporary sensibility. As Professor William Hamilton, one of the movement's leading exponents, has written in Playboy: "Three or four of us seemed to be working along similar lines ... critics began to call us a movement, and we looked around and decided perhaps they were right."

I first learned of death-of-God theology from an article by Hamilton entitled "The Death of God Theologies Today" that appeared in the spring 1965 issue of The Christian Scholar. To my very great surprise, Hamilton associated my own theological writings with the death-of-God movement. My first reaction was acute embarrassment and skepticism. As Hamilton has said several times, the metaphor of the death of God is of Christian origin. Without the centrality of the crucifixion in Christian thought and experience, there would be no talk of death-of-God theology today. The ancient pagan religions had dying gods aplenty, but only in Christianity does the omnipotent Lord of heaven and earth assume mortality in the person of Jesus and suffer degrading and bitter death on the cross. And alone among the religions of the world, Christianity has as its symbol the instrument of execution by which God—in the person of Jesus—was executed.

I am a rabbi and a Jewish theologian. Judaism has no tradition of the death of God. The whole burden of Jewish tradition emphatically rejects even the remotest hint of the death of God. Furthermore, Jews have been called deicides so frequently and with such tragic results that the whole idea elicits a very special distaste from most of us. It was not surprising that I struggled to escape being designated a death-of-God theologian. Nevertheless, I quickly realized that Hamilton was correct in his assessment of my theological writings. I am convinced that the issues implicit in death-of-God theology are of as much, if not more, significance to contemporary Judaism as to Protestant Christianity. I am deeply grateful to Hamilton for enabling me to clarify my position as a Jewish theologian.

Hamilton writes that he understands "the death of God" largely in terms of the fact that "there was once a God to whom adoration, praise and trust were appropriate ... but that now there is no such God." I agree that we live in a world totally devoid of the presence of God. I believe in the futility of all current attempts, such as prayer and religious discipline, to make God meaningfully present to us. We are alone. We shall remain alone. Nevertheless, I do not believe that any man can assert that God is dead. How could we possibly know this? Such a statement exceeds human knowledge. The statement "God is dead" is, like all theological statements, significant only in terms of what it reveals about its maker. It imparts information concerning what he believes about God. It says much about the kind of man he is. It reveals nothing about God. I prefer to assert that we live in the time of the death of God rather than to declare, as Hamilton does, that God is dead.

The death of God is a cultural fact. We shall never know whether it is more than that. This suggestion implies that theology is important only insofar as it lends insight into the human condition. Though theology purports to make statements about God, its significance rests largely on what it reveals about the theologian and his culture.

All theologies are inherently subjective. The theologian is really closer to the poet and the creative artist than to the physical scientist. The value of artistic creation lies in the fact that a highly sensitive personality is able to communicate something important out of his own experience that other men recognize as clarifying and enriching their own insights. The theologian, no matter how ecclesiastically oriented he may seem to be, is in reality communicating an inner world he suspects other men share.

The term "God" is very much like the unstructured ink blot used in Rorschach tests. Its very lack of definite content invites men to pour out their fears, aspirations and yearnings concerning their origin, their destiny and their end. That is why Paul Tillich spoke of religion as "ultimate concern." When I say that the death of God is a cultural event, I mean that there is no longer any sense in which we can assert that God is effectively present in our lives. The thread linking heaven and earth, God and man, has been irrevocably broken. We now dwell in a silent, unfeeling cosmos in which we are condemned to live out our lives and return to the nothingness out of which we have arisen. Furthermore, I have absolutely no expectation of a return of the divine. The direction of our culture has been and will continue to be away from the sacred and toward the profane. A profane society knows neither God nor gods. For better or for worse, it has only its human resources to rely upon.

When did all this happen? For Jews, the death of God as a cultural event did not begin on the cross. Christian and Jewish radical theologians are as separated in their interpretation of Jesus as were earlier, more traditional Christian and Jewish theologians. During the past year, I participated in public dialog with Hamilton and with Professor Thomas J. J. Altizer, one of the most gifted of the Christian radical theologians, at the University of Chicago and at Emory University in Atlanta. We were in agreement that ours is the time of the death of God. Obviously, we could not agree on the significance of Jesus.

Nor did the death of God happen for Jews through the literature and philosophy of the 19th Century. Hamilton has stated that this literature was decisive for the Protestant radicals. Altizer concurs in this judgment. Hegel, Dostoievsky, Marx, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche have had an enormous effect on Jewish religious intellectuals, but we did not lose God through their writings. For every Jew, whether he admits it or not, God died at Auschwitz. After Auschwitz, it became impossible for Jews to believe in the traditional Jewish God as the all-powerful, all-wise, all-beneficent creator of heaven and earth.

According to traditional Jewish belief, whatever happens in human history does so because God in his infinite wisdom and justice causes it to happen. This conviction has been inseparable from Jewish religious sensibility from the time of the oldest books of the Bible to the present. I realized graphically and decisively that I could no longer accept the traditional belief during an interview in West Berlin in the summer of 1961. I shall never forget that encounter. On Sunday, August 13, the East Germans closed the border between East and West Berlin, creating the Berlin Wall crisis. I had been invited to Germany by the Bundespresseamt, the Press and Information Office of the West German Federal Republic, to survey cultural and religious trends in West Germany. Unexpectedly, I found myself in Berlin in the midst of one of the most explosive international crises of the postwar period. The Bundespresseamt arranged a series of interviews for me with German leaders. One of the interviews was with the Reverend Dr. Heinrich Grüber, Provost of the Evangelical (Lutheran) Church of East and West Berlin.

Dean Grüber's church was in East Berlin. He lived in the West Berlin suburb of Berlin-Dahlem. Our interview was scheduled for four p.m., Thursday, August 17. As I entered the dean's home, American Army tanks rumbled past the house. At the time, I had serious doubts that I would ever leave Berlin alive. The dean had a distinguished record of opposition to the Nazis during World War Two. He was imprisoned in Dachau for three years by Eichmann for his efforts on behalf of the condemned Jews of Nazi Germany. He was the only German to testify against Eichmann at the trial in Jerusalem. Since the end of the War, he has been one of the leaders of the movement for Christian-Jewish reconciliation in Germany. He was certainly no anti-Semite, yet he told me with the utmost conviction:

"It was God's will that Hitler exterminated the Jews."

Like all traditional Jewish and Christian believers, Dean Grüber had faith that whatever happened in history took place because an all-powerful Creator had ultimately caused it to happen. He was also convinced that God was behind the erection of the Berlin Wall, as a punishment for the sins of the German people. He certainly did not believe that the death camps were a good thing. Nevertheless, he couldn't help but believe that God was ultimately responsible for them. And he was not alone. Any traditionally religious Jew would have had to agree with the dean, in spite of the infinite pain such agreement would inevitably elicit. In moments of sad but extreme candor, some of my rabbinic colleagues have told me that they believed God was punishing His people through Hitler. I realized, as I listened to the dean, that there was no way I could believe in the all-powerful God of traditional Judaism and Christianity without accepting the notion that He was actively involved in the obscene horrors of World War Two. I could never accept the justice of God's involvement in Auschwitz. In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov tells his brother Alyosha that he can accept God but not His world. I can accept the world. It is an absurd, meaningless, gratuitous place, but it is my place. It is all I have or shall ever have. But I cannot, as a rabbi, accept the traditional belief in the all-powerful Author of mankind's history and destiny. To do so would be to affirm that my people got what they deserved at Auschwitz. If I must choose between God and my fellow man, I can get along very well without God. I could not survive spiritually or physically without human fellowship. After Auschwitz, God has become a stranger and an alien to Israel.

Hamilton writes of the death of God, "It is a joyous event; it is a liberating event ..." Here the gulf between Jewish and Christian radical theologians is perhaps greatest. I am saddened by the loss of God. But Hamilton echoes the optimism that characterizes many of today's brightest Protestant theologians. Thomas Altizer sees the death of God as a moment of great liberation. He is convinced that there is no room for both God and man. He believes that God literally died with Christ on the cross. In a brilliant interpretation of the theology of the crucifixion, Altizer maintains that God died so that man could be totally free. When God and man coexisted, men were slaves enchained to a heavenly master and lawgiver. According to Altizer, it was not God but man who was resurrected on Easter Sunday. Traditional Christian theology maintains that the sacrificial death of Christ liberates man from sin and death; Altizer maintains that the death of Christ was truly the death of God. It liberated man from God and made him truly free for the first time. Altizer joyously proclaims the gospel of Christian atheism. The death of God means the birth of a free, adult humanity. There is an apocalyptic dimension to Altizer's religious optimism.

The same optimism pervades Harvey Cox' brilliant theological interpretation of contemporary culture, The Secular City. Although Cox is not a death-of-God theologian, he can be classified as a theological radical. Cox divides human social organization into three levels: the tribe, the town and the urban metropolis. He sees the urban metropolis as the characteristic form of social organization of our time. Most critics of urban culture have stressed the alienation and depersonalization that characterizes existence in our overly rationalized, highly complex cities, but Cox takes an altogether different view of urban life. He sees it as characterized by anonymity and mobility. According to Cox, this means that the inhabitants of the secular city, his designation for the urban metropolis, are free to choose their friends, their moral standards and their life styles without undue concern for the censure or prejudice of neighbors and fellow townsmen. Cox identifies this freedom as equivalent to the freedom of the Gospel promised by Christ. He sees the restrictions and prejudices of the small town as akin to the restrictions of the law from which Jesus came to liberate men. Cox is so enthusiastic about the contemporary urban metropolis that he identifies it with the realization of the Kingdom of God. He acknowledges the human wreckage of the secular city, but he regards such phenomena as transitory. He calls upon us to embrace and celebrate the joys and promises of the freedom of the secular city. Few Protestant theologians have ever been as optimistic as Cox.

Contemporary Protestant radical theologians regard the loss of the sacred primarily as gain. I see it primarily as loss. Here again, the dialog between Jewish and Christian radical theologians finds us united on the fact of the death of God, but separated on its meaning. The reasons for this are very old. They are part and parcel of the deepest differences between Judaism and Christianity. Originally, Christianity was a movement of Jews who believed that the promised and long-awaited Messiah of Israel had come in the person of Jesus. (continued on page 74) Judaism (continued from page 70) Both the ancient Jews and the earliest Christians were convinced that the coming of the Messiah would be "good news," that it would make a decisive difference in the human condition. Some Jews believed that the coming of the Messiah would put an end to Israel's harsh lot under the Romans; others were convinced that the restrictions of the Torah would be modified; still others believed that the coming of the Messiah would usher in the resurrection of the dead. Death would be swallowed up in victory and God would wipe away all tears and sadness.

The earliest Christians were separated from their fellow Jews only by the conviction that the Messiah had come. All Jews had learned to await him. The Christians joyfully proclaimed his coming. Christianity's oldest claim was that the coming of the Christ represented a new and happier beginning, a radical change in man's tragic and broken condition. Christianity's fundamental message was one of hope that the tragic necessities of nature and history could be overcome. The response of those Jews who could not accept Jesus as the Messiah was that nothing new had happened, that the old world continued in its way as it had yesterday and would tomorrow. The Gospel offers the "good news" of a new beginning. Christian death-of-God theologians are faithful to that promise. They see the loss of God as a new beginning. Hamilton has written in Christianity and Crisis that he has no God but he does believe in the Messiah. I am left without hope in a world without God. Like my predecessors 2000 years ago, I see no new beginnings. The 20th Century has been one of the bloodiest and most violent of all centuries, especially for Jews. Though all of us enjoy the fruits of contemporary technology, technology creates as many human problems as it solves.

In contrast to the optimism of my Protestant colleagues, I am moved by what can best be described as the tragic vision. Hamilton has explicitly rejected the tragic dimension in the book he has written with Altizer, Radical Theology and the Death of God. Here the authors assert that the death of God involves the death of tragedy. They reject the despair and alienation of our time and call for a new mood of optimism concerning man and what he can accomplish. I cannot concur. If God is lost, human existence is without ultimate hope. All we have left is a tragic vision that asserts that all things human must perish, though what is lost is of irreplaceable value. The tragic sense is not unrelieved despair. It is a severely honest and undeceived vision of the human condition; it is an ennobling vision. Those who hold to it have never lost their conviction of the worth of what must inevitably perish.

There has been too little sense of the tragic in American culture. We have been too success oriented. We cannot let go of the myth that things are destined to get better and better. Things are not necessarily going to get worse and worse, but we do pay for whatever improvements we get. And the payment for life is ultimately its disappearance, in death. We are bracketed hopelessly between two oblivions. So be it. I would that it were otherwise, but I shall make the most of the only life I shall ever have. If any hope remains within me, it is that when my life is over, I shall honestly be able to say to myself, "I know it's finished, but I'd repeat it in exactly the same way for all eternity if I could." I hope for nothing save the capacity to accept my life as uniquely my own.

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called the desire to repeat one's life exactly as it had been "eternal recurrence." Almost a hundred years ago, he proclaimed the death of God. He was a prophet who knew his time had not come. Like Sören Kierkegaard and Herman Melville, Nietzsche is better understood in the 20th Century than in his own time. Perhaps no literary work has moved both Jewish and Christian radical theologians as deeply as the chapter in Nietzsche's The Gay Science entitled "The Madman." In it, Nietzsche's Madman proclaims the death of God and enters several churches to offer his Requiem aeternam deo. In a moment of prophetic insight, the Madman tells his listeners:

"I come too early....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. Lightning and thunder need time, the light of the stars needs time, deeds need time, even after they are done, to be seen and heard. This deed is as yet further from them than the furthest star, and yet they have done it themselves!"

All radical theologians are convinced that the time prophesied by Nietzsche's Madman has come upon us.

What does the death of God mean for the average man? That question agonized another 19th Century prophet, Fyodor Dostoievsky. In The Brothers Karamazov, he asks what, if anything, remains of morality if there is no God. Ivan Karamazov declares. "If God does not exist, then everything is permitted." If Ivan is correct, without God no crime—including parricide—is forbidden. Ultimately, the freedom Ivan intuits as the terrible fruit of the death of God drives him mad, as it did Nietzsche.

In an era of death camps, nuclear weapons and overpopulation, can we afford to say, "If God is dead, all things are permitted"? No theological movement in the 20th Century has aroused as much interest, anger and concern as has death-of-God theology. Even thieves need a set of objective norms to govern conduct. Death-of-God theology arouses the fear that there are no rules, there are no behavioral norms, that all that remains is for each individual to get away with what he can. People who react violently to death-of-God theology are not in reality defending God; they are defending themselves against the terrible fear that their entire moral universe will fall apart.

Of all the radical Christian theologians, none has proclaimed the gospel that everything is permissible as insistently as Thomas Altizer. This does not mean that Altizer favors crime or unbridled license. Altizer is faithful to a very ancient and honorable Christian tradition. He believes that before the death of the Christ, God was the supreme master of all men. The relationship between man and God was uneven. All power lay with God. As a result, man was little more than a servant of a very arbitrary master. God, however, proved to be more than a capricious tyrant. According to Altizer, He emptied Himself of His own being for the sake of mankind. Altizer maintains that man cannot be free as long as he is confronted by a living God. God therefore made the supreme sacrifice on the cross. With the death of God, man became totally free for the first time. Mankind is no longer confronted by a lawmaker or by a set of laws. Man and man alone must decide what is right and appropriate for his destiny. With good reason, Altizer is not sure that men will have the strength to accept this awesome freedom. He calls upon men to "will the death of God." That is his theological way of bidding men to accept the challenge of their freedom. Mankind's total freedom is God's greatest gift, offered to man at the cost of God's very existence. Christ came to give man freedom. For Altizer, that freedom is absolute.

As a Jewish theologian, I cannot concur. The deepest affirmation of Judaism is that men cannot do without a set of norms to govern and give structure to their lives. Judaism is the religion of the Torah. The Torah is basically a set of norms for the conduct of life. Altizer follows a very old tradition in seeing religious norms as an impediment to human freedom. I follow an even older tradition in seeing these guidelines as making realistic freedom possible. If we live in the time of the death of God, we need structure, order and tradition even more than we did before. I see such structure embodied in Biblical and rabbinic wisdom. Having lost God, Christian radical (continued on page 130) Judasim (continued from page 74) theologians remain faithful to the Christ and his mission; Jewish theologians remain faithful to the Torah and its tradition. Our loyalty is not slavish, but we are convinced there must be some order and structure if life is to be viable. Every parent knows that the most certain way to destroy a child is to permit him to do exactly as he pleases. Insightful norms do not impede realistic freedom; they make it possible.

Is it true that if God is dead, all things are permissible? As I read the Protestant death-of-God theologians, I find there is one prophet of the death of God they tend to ignore: Sigmund Freud. Freud was intensely interested in religion throughout his life. Early in his career, he offered—in Totem and Taboo—his theory of the origin of religion. According to Freud, religion began with the murder of God. Of course, Freud maintained that what we call God is actually a heavenly projection of a primordial father figure. In both Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism, Freud saw the origin of religion in an archaic, cannibalistic act of parricide at the beginning of human civilization. He postulated that originally men dwelt in small hordes, dominated by a tyrannical patriarch who had exclusive sexual access to the females of the horde. As each son became a potential sexual rival, the primal father murdered, castrated or exiled him. Driven by common sexual need, the exiled sons finally overwhelmed and murdered their father. Their objective was to displace him and gain sexual possession of his females.

According to Freud, their victory was to prove bitter and ironic. Once the sons murdered the father, they were too guilt-ridden to acknowledge their own deed. They did what men have done all too often. They denied their crime and tried to suppress conscious memory of the deed. Once dead, the father proved an infinitely greater source of terror than when alive. Because the sons attempted to suppress the memory, they conducted themselves as if the father were still alive. The dead father was speedily transformed by the sons into the omnipotent Father-God. The fear of God and the desire to obey His laws were rooted in the original violence against His person. God, according to Freud, is none other than the first victim of human parricide.

The sons murdered the primal father to possess his females. They soon learned that they could not have unlimited sexual access to the females, as had the father, without killing each other out of envy or rivalry. They quickly realized that some instrumentality had to be devised whereby sexual desire would not disrupt social structure. According to Freud, the sons instituted the law of exogamy at this point, to restrain themselves from doing to each other what they had done to their father. Having murdered the father to gain sexual freedom, the sons were forced to impose upon themselves the same prohibitions he had imposed upon them. They decreed, as had the father, that they would have to seek sexual partners outside of their immediate social group. They had been under the illusion that if only they could rid themselves of the father, they would find total sexual freedom. It didn't work. They sadly discovered that it is neither the father nor God, but reality itself, that imposes behavioral limitations upon us.

Freud's myth of religious origins has been subject to devastating scientific criticism. It is far less significant as an attempt to explain the origin of religion than for its capacity to lend insight into the necessity of law, discipline and structure for the social process. Every child imagines that it must keep clean, refrain from biting and soiling and maintain regular hours solely because parents insist. But sooner or later, he learns that life is impossible without self-imposed disciplines. I do not see the Torah as an arbitrary imposition that limits my freedom. I see it as a summation of the wisdom and experience of past generations. Very often I have learned through bitter experience what I could have learned with infinitely less pain had I paid serious attention to the book. Of course, I realize that we live in a time when people are more disposed to learn their lessons through trial and error than through tradition. As a college chaplain, I continually admonish parents, "Get off your child's back. The only way he'll learn is by finding out himself." We couldn't do it any other way in America, but we pay a high price in emotional distress and wrecked lives. I am not at all sure that other societies that make the rules of the game more explicit aren't better off than we are. Whether the rules are handed down or learned experimentally, we have taken Ivan Karamazov's speculation too seriously. It is simply not true that if God is dead, all things are permitted. The loss of God is not a happy event that liberates man; it is a sad event that makes the task of maintaining the slender thread of civilization and decency infinitely more difficult.

The great German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from a Nazi prison shortly before his martyrdom, was preoccupied with the problem of what to say of God in a time of no religion. I believe that our problem is what to say of religion in a time of no God. Neither Jewish nor Christian radical theologians are atheists. They have not withdrawn from a very deep commitment to and involvement in their religious communities. Contemporary radical theology will fail to have any significance unless it faces the question of what religious life can mean in the time of the death of God.

Every radical theologian has been asked, "If you believe as you do, why do you stay in business?" I believe the answer lies in the direction of a new paganism that uses the traditional language and liturgy of the established religious communities to its own purposes. Lest I be misunderstood, I do not mean by paganism anything as vulgar as the paganism of Cecil B. De Mille's extravaganzas. The idea of paganism unfortunately conjures up images of temple orgies and nude dancing girls. In reality, paganism was originally a religious movement predicated on man's deep understanding that he is a child of earth who is destined to live his brief span and return to earth. Paganism is the religion of nature. Judaism and Christianity are religions of history. If we can no longer believe in the God of history without praising Him for Auschwitz, we can believe in the old-new divinities of earth and nature. Paganism never proclaimed a belief in an omnipotent God who controlled all human events toward some meaningful historical goal, as did Judaism and Christianity. Paganism was a religion, but a nontheistic one. It celebrated the major events in the year's calendar, as well as the decisive events in the timetable of the individual's life from birth to death. I define religion as the way we share the decisive events and crises of life in accordance with the historic traditions and institutions of our inherited communities. Religion need have little or nothing to do with what a man believes about God. We turn to religion for those rituals that are appropriate for such decisive crises as birth, adolescence, marriage, the confession of guilt, the changing of the seasons and death. No one, for example, has to believe in an omnipotent God to be married in a church or synagogue. When this decisive turning point comes, most of us feel that it must be celebrated with more seriousness and dignity than a ceremony at city hall can offer. We turn to the church or synagogue for every important crisis of our life spans. When we do, nobody cares very much about what we believe. The religion most of us practice is paganism. We have become pagan in fact, though we remain divided into Protestant, Catholic and Jewish pagans and most of us continue to follow the inherited traditions into which we were born.

Sharing the crises of life is not the only reason most Americans become members of a church or synagogue in the time of the death of God. American society is too big and impersonal for anyone to feel a sense of community outside of small groups. The phenomenon Nat Hentoff has described as The Cold Society (Playboy, September 1966) is very relevant. All of us need a sense of community. Only the seriously disturbed find greater warmth in gadgets than in the fellowship of their peers. Since World War Two, there has been a spectacular increase both in the number of churches and in church membership. There has been little, if any, increase in religious belief. Another need has been met by the proliferation of religious institutions. It is the need for a significant community in which the individual is more than a number or an IBM card. The churches and synagogues do not always serve the need for community as well as they might, but they are among the few institutions in America making an honest effort.

I think I feel somewhat more at home in my religious community as a Jewish radical theologian than do some of my friends who are Christian radical theologians. Hamilton says he is searching for a new religious language and a new liturgy. I am not. I am perfectly content with the old language and the old liturgy. Of course, I am very liberal in the way I interpret it. As a matter of fact, in the time of the death of God, I suspect we need the old liturgies more than ever. Just as Altizer and Hamilton have a renewed appreciation of the Messiah in the time of the death of God, I have a renewed appreciation for the Torah and the traditions of Israel. If we have lost God, we need the discipline and guidance of our traditions more than ever.

Mysticism is also a very real option in the time of the death of God. Like paganism, mysticism has been the subject of much confusion in recent times. The mystic is not a hazy irrationalist yearning for an incommunicable revelation. Fundamentally, mystics are convinced that God is the source out of which we have come and with which we must ultimately be reunited. I suspect that mysticism was the vehicle through which paganism led an underground life in both Judaism and Christianity for the past 2000 years. The pagan sees all human existence as an expression of the earth's fruitfulness. Earth is the cannibal mother who gives birth to the fruit of her womb only so that she may ultimately consume it. For the mystic, God is the holy nothingness out of which we have come and to which we must return. The vocabularies of mysticism and paganism are somewhat different, but their basic perspective on the human condition is largely the same.

There are many indications of the renewed strength of mystical religion in our time. There may be some faddism involved in the interest in Zen Buddhism, for example, in the Western world since World War Two, but it is not all fad. Much of it has been a searching for new religious paths once it was understood that the God of traditional theism was dead and, as Paul Tillich said, deserved to die. In Judaism, there has been a revival of interest in Hasidism and Jewish mysticism, largely because of the writings of Martin Buber. Neither mysticism nor paganism requires a personal God: The God of both is the source out of which we have come and to which we must return. I believe that the time of the death of God will mean not only a renewal of paganism, it will also bring about a renewal of mysticism. My own deepest belief is that God is the holy nothingness, our source and our final home. Omnipotent nothingness is Lord of all creation. The old personal God of theism has been lost; the God of mystical religion will be renewed in the time of the death of God.

All radical theologians recognize that they are children of the same time, responding to similar issues and talking a very similar language. As Jews and Christians, we are separated by much that has always separated Jewish and Christian believers, but this separation is somehow dissolved in a deeper unity. As we study each other's works, as we converse about man and God, as we explore the meaning of our religious quest, we recognize at the deepest levels that we are contemporaries, sharing our time on earth together. I felt a cold chill when, in October 1965, I learned of the death of Paul Tillich. I was in Warsaw at the time. I had attended Tillich's lectures at Harvard and had been more deeply influenced by him than by any other American theologian, Jewish or Christian. I knew that day in Warsaw that the burden of exploring the theological meaning of contemporary American life would fall largely to those who had been Tillich's pupils. I was not the least surprised when I noted that Altizer and Hamilton had dedicated their book to Tillich's memory. As Altizer has said, Paul Tillich is the father of contemporary radical theology. Death-of-God theology is the inevitable dialectic result of the theology of Tillich. Having had a common teacher, contemporary radical theologians, both Jewish and Christian, address a common set of problems. We cannot, because of our ancestral inheritances, concur in similar affirmations, but we are very much together in this quest for religious meaning in our time.