Variations On The "Death Of God" Theme In Recent Theology
...of God" is now well established in the theological vocabulary.
Widespread use in publication points to the popularity if not the precise definition of the term. Bishop J. A. T. Robinson's Honest to Godl has brought the theme into the busy pastor's study and even into the mass-media periodicals. As an expression, the "death of God" is very much alive. In a time of widespread "religiosity," the possibility of serious discussion of the theme is hampered by lack of precision in definition. One observes both panic in the face of "atheism" on the part of defenders of orthodoxy, and uncritical enthusiasm for the expression on the part of dilettanti. Forensic alarms from the former and superficial slogans from the latter serve only to obscure the truly serious issues in the new situation in theology. The variations on the theme of the "death of God" - absence, disappearance, silence, withdrawal, eclipse - indicate the particular character of the theological problem but also reveal the difficulty in defining exactly what the Nietzschean expression means in contem- porary theological vocabulary. This article will note briefly the historical situation which produced the expression, then indicate three basic variations on the theme in Sartre, Heidegger, and Buber, and finally illustrate how five young American theologians, Vahanian, Altizer, Hamilton, Van Buren, and Cobb, deal with the expression.
The striking - and problematic - shape of the term belongs, of course, to Nietzsche who gave extended expression to the phrase. Contemporary usage is certainly attributable to him, although Buber notes that the term had been employed by Hegel as early as 1802.
The content of the "death of God" expression, however, is the religious and philosophical heritage of three hundred years of Western thought from Copernicus to Nietzche. This period saw the great confessional...
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