The Death of God... "God is Dead!"

“ God is dead. God remains dead. And we have
killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How
shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of
all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest
of all that the world has yet owned has bled to
death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to
clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement,
what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is
not the greatness of this deed too great for
us? Must we ourselves not become gods
simply to appear worthy of it? —Nietzsche,”

Death of God...

The cover of the April 8, 1966 edition of Time magazine asked the question "Is God Dead?" and the accompanying article addressed growing atheism in America at the time. At the time, a movement called "death of God" was arising in American theology. The death of God movement is sometimes technically referred to as
"theothanatology," derived from the Greek words theos (God) and thanatos (death). The main proponents of this theology included the Christian theologians Gabriel Vahanian, Paul Van Buren, William Hamilton, John A.T. Robinson, Thomas J. J. Altizer, John D. Caputo, and the rabbi Richard L. Rubenstein. In 1961, Vahanian's book The Death of God was published. Vahanian argued that modern secular culture had lost all sense of the sacred, lacking any sacramental meaning, no transcendental purpose or sense of providence. He concluded that for the modern mind "God is dead". In Vahanian's vision a
transformed post-Christian and post-modern culture was needed to create a renewed experience
of deity. Both Van Buren and Hamilton agreed that the
concept of transcendence had lost any meaningful place in modern thought. According to the norms of contemporary modern thought, God is dead. In responding to this collapse in transcendence Van
Buren and Hamilton offered secular people the
option of Jesus as the model human who acted in love. The encounter with the Christ of faith would
be open in a church-community. Altizer offered a radical theology of the death of
God that drew upon William Blake, Hegelian thought and Nietzschean ideas. He conceived of
theology as a form of poetry in which the immanence (presence) of God could be encountered in faith communities. However, he no longer accepted the possibility of affirming belief in
a transcendent God. Altizer concluded that God
had incarnated in Christ and imparted his immanent spirit which remained in the world even though Jesus was dead. Unlike Nietzsche, Altizer
believed that God truly died. He is considered to be
the leading exponent of the Death of God
movement. Rubenstein represented that radical edge of Jewish thought working through the impact of the Holocaust. In a technical sense he maintained, based on the Kabbalah, that God had "died" in creating the world. However, for modern Jewish
culture he argued that the death of God occurred in Auschwitz. Although the literal death of God did not occur at this point, this was the moment in time
in which humanity was awakened to the idea that a theistic God may not exist. In Rubenstein's work, it was no longer possible to believe in an orthodox/
traditional theistic God of the Abrahamic covenant; rather, God is a historical process.