Death of God Theology

Journalists in the mid 1960s gathered four American Protestant theologians under one label, death of god theology, and the label has stuck ever since, but the four did not agree with one another and some resisted the label outright. Thomas J. J. Altizer's position was the most metaphysically committed: God, in the Incarnation and above all the Crucifixion, poured himself wholly and irreversibly into the world, so that the transcendent God of classical theism no longer exists anywhere to be found, having become fully identical with a sacred, ever changing historical process. William Hamilton's position was narrower and more experiential: he did not claim to know whether God exists in himself, only that God had, as a matter of the modern believer's actual experience, stopped being a live possibility one could pray to or wait on, so that Christian ethics had to proceed as action in the world without that expectation.

Gabriel Vahanian, whose 1961 book gave the movement its name, is regularly misread as a member of this same camp, but his actual claim was different again and considerably more conservative: not that God had died in any sense, but that a secularized modern culture had made God irrelevant to it, a diagnosis of Western culture rather than a constructive theology of God's nonexistence, and Vahanian himself objected to being grouped with Altizer's far more radical claim. Paul van Buren pursued a fourth, largely separate project, restating Christian ethical language in the empiricist terms of contemporary secular language philosophy without asserting or denying anything about a transcendent God at all. Treating the four as a single school states the media reception of the 1960s accurately and states the theology inaccurately.

Time magazine's cover for April 8, 1966 carried three words in red type on a plain black background, "Is God Dead?", the first time the magazine had run a cover with no image at all, and it remains the single most recognized artifact of this movement, far better known than any of the books that prompted it. The cover story reported on a genuine and often bitter dispute among a handful of American Protestant theologians, but its stark either or framing flattened a set of positions that disagreed sharply with each other into a single yes or no question about God's existence.

Gabriel Vahanian, whose 1961 book The Death of God: The Culture of Our Post Christian Era had supplied the phrase five years earlier, is a useful corrective to the cover's framing precisely because his own argument was not the metaphysical claim the headline implies. Vahanian held that traditional Christian belief in a transcendent, sovereign God had lost its cultural plausibility in a secularized, technological modern West, so that "God is dead" functioned for him as a diagnosis of contemporary religious culture's indifference rather than an assertion that God, understood correctly, does not exist; he continued to argue for a recovered, less domesticated sense of divine transcendence rather than for atheism. That the phrase he coined became the banner over Altizer's far more radical claim that God had ceased to exist by pouring into the world is itself a measure of how far a single arresting sentence can travel from the argument that first stated it.