By Their Groups notes

Back when I was a boy, I was walking along the street in Johnstown, Pennsylvania when I noticed a bright yellow slip of paper on the sidewalk. Being a curious kid, I picked it up. The fact that I remember the event all these years later is due to the surprising inscription on that piece of paper. It said, “God isn’t dead. He hasn’t even been sick.” No doubt, the cards had been printed up by some fundamentalist religious individual or group. I reflect now that whoever authored it was convinced not only that God existed and wasn’t dead, but that God was a “He.”

Even back then, the theological movement that had inspired the card was something of an historical relic. It’s been said that the “Death of God” movement of the 1960’s and ’70s was the theological equivalent of the Nehru jacket, here today and gone tomorrow. But the threat it posed in the popular religious consciousness lingered on.

I want to thank Ralph Nazareth for giving me the idea to preach today’s sermon on the past and future of the “Death of God.” Ralph has lovingly been referred to as the guru of our PoemAlley program. Ralph has maintained an interest in the movement’s ideas for many years. He even wrote a profile of the best-known figure in Death of God theology, Thomas J.J. Altizer, in 1977. Ralph encapsulates the movement in that article very well, I think. He writes, quote,

No single new development in theology can claim to have received as much publicity from the mass media or to have drawn as much fire from the public as the one initiated by the death of God school. The central message of the proponents of the death of God was scandalous, offensive, and deeply disturbing to the traditional believers as well as to the religious bystanders, who were being challenged to confront the disappearance of a transcendent theistic source from which one could derive meaning, direction, and value,” unquote.

When Ralph first told me about his interest in Death of God theology to my attention, I must confess I felt like someone hearing a totally foreign language. I don’t remember the phrase “Death of God” ever being uttered in my seminary education. I had a vague idea that it was a movement of the 1960’s, but I couldn’t have told you much about it.

“Scandalous, offensive, and deeply disturbing,” were the words Ralph used to describe the impact of the Death of God movement on its contemporaries. What about now? Does it continue to scandalize, offend, and disturb? Does it still linger in our consciousness as that cover of Time magazine, in 1966, that asked “Is God Dead? in red letters on a black background?

Or maybe you remember Elton John’s 1971 song, “Levon,” which contains the line,

“He was born a pauper to a pawn on a Christmas Day

When the New York Times said God is dead

And the war's begun

The phrase, the “Death of God” remains shocking. As Ralph Nazareth put it, (quote) “the traditional believers as well as to the religious bystanders … were being challenged to confront the disappearance of a transcendent theistic source from which one could derive meaning, direction, and value.” How many of us talk about God wanting this or that, doing this or that, as a matter of custom, without really thinking through what we mean by the word God….

When we try to figure that out God, as a word or as a (supposed?) reality, and we come to conclusions outside the standard answers, there can be a lot of controversy. Death of God theologian Thomas J.J. Altizer, in the heyday of the movement’s public exposure, went on the Merv Griffin TV talk show and was met with many in the crowd shouting, “Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!”

Altizer and his fellow Death of God thinkers were almost universally misunderstood, at least in the popular culture, which lead to much hostility, confusion, and criticism.

They were often seen as a wholly negative and anti-Christian. In fact, there was much they affirmed in what they saw as the next phase of Protestant Christianity, a Christianity, which while it affirmed and (even willed) the death of God, found immense value in the example of Jesus and pointed the way to each Christian taking up the role of Christ in the world, without the help of a transcendent God.

So, what was (or is) Death of God theology?

It’s been said that just as Neo-orthodox theologians like Karl Barth looked for inspiration the Reformation of the 16^th century, the radical theologians, including the Death of God school, look to the 19^th century and thinkers like Hegel, Nietzsche, and Blake, living in a time of great technological and scientific change. You’ll recall our first reading this morning, from Nietzsche where he describes a madman carrying a lantern like Diogenes, proclaiming the Death of God. He also had his title character in Thus Spake Zarathustra pronounce, “God is dead.”

In William Blake also Death of God theologian Altizer saw a new Christianity beyond God the Father. In Altizer’s own words, in his 1967 book The New Apocalypse,

Christ assumes the dark satanic body of the natural world to put off death eternally, that world dies in his death, and, most paradoxically of all, the God whose wrath nails Christ’s Body to the cross is the God who Himself must perish in Christ’s death. (p. 81)

Twentieth century German philosopher, Martin Heidegger said, “God is dead. And this means everything except ‘There is no God.’ ”

The Death of God is not standard atheism, or as one of its chief proponents, William Hamilton, colorfully put it, the death of God theologians, “do not grant that their view is really a complicated sort of atheism dressed in a new spring bonnet.” They were responding to a world everywhere modernizing and changing. They drew inspiration from another German, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who became a type of disembodied force in Protestant circles in the decades following his death in a Nazi concentration camp. Bonhoeffer said we lived in “a world come of age” in which the old religious models and practices were no longer adequate.

Still another German, Paul Tillich, was a theologian who put the field on a new footing as he redefined God as “the ground of being.” Altizer and Hamilton dedicated their book, Radical Theology and the Death of God to Tillich, though late in his life he criticized their ideas. Tillich is referred to as the founder of radical theology. But the death of God radicals thought that Tillich hadn’t gone nearly far enough in revolutionary theology in ways consistent with Hegel’s dialectal theory, in which all trends in thought and history follow pattern or thesis and antithesis leading to synthesis. In Hegel’s view opposites eventually coincide and negate each other. In such a way, thought the most extreme of the radicals, the opposites of holy and profane or sacred and secular were losing their meaning in the modern world. To ancient humans, only the sacred cycle of life was real. But to modern humans, some of them contended, it is the particularity of concrete moments in the profane or “non-religious” world are real. To Altizer, God actually died with Christ on the cross. What at first might seem a stunning loss for Christianity, Altizer saw as the potential for Christianity’s greatest strength. God died, in his view, in any transcendent and supernatural way of existence and was incarnated forever in all the world. Thus God became All-in-All. That was way too much to try to explain in two minutes on a TV talk show, or in the eighth grade English of Time magazine.

Thus, the death of God movement may have generated more controversy than lasting direct influence. All the same, perhaps the movement could, with much caution, be likened to other products of the 20^th century academy dangerous to life as we know it, the atomic bomb, and LSD, which each escaped the ivy covered walls to take on lives of their own in the world. Death of God movement put on the table of theology what had been suggested by the politics of the French Revolution, the philosophy of Hegel and Nietzsche, and the biology of Darwin. Humanity was not the same creature that had developed the religions of the ancient world. In Bonhoeffer’s language, the world had “come of age”—ready or not.

The same Germany in which so many prominent philosophers and theologians were questioning traditional views of God, was host to an episode where an eager national state stepped in to assume God’s role. I speak of course of the Nazi period in which the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer was taken along with millions of others, while the faith of countless others was consumed in the flames of war and genocide.

Many of us remember the times we have performed a Purimspiel, here at the Society. A Purimspiel is a typically light-hearted play performed by Jews to commemorate God’s deliverance from their would be destruction as depicted in the biblical book of Esther. In 1979, Elie Wiesel, the author and Holocaust survivor, wrote a much more serious Purimspiel. It’s called, The Trial of God. Though set in the 17^th century, it’s loosely based on an actual incident in which the 15 year-old Wiesel witnessed of three rabbis holding a trial for God in Auschwitz.

Especially after the Holocaust, God as all-powerful, all beneficent protector was a hard opinion to maintain. At the same time, the idea of the absence of God can be enormously threatening. It would seem today’s humanity is caught between the twin temptations of retreat into unthinking orthodoxy or nihilist despair. Is God to be clung to, rejected, ignored, or transformed. Will God tell us? Or must we decide for ourselves. The death of God movement, though most do not hear its call, demands we consider, in a very immediate way, the ways we may rely on God as a friend (or enemy), scapegoat, savior or placebo.

Karen Armstrong, the former nun who gained fame with her book A History of God once said that new ideas of God often appear at first to be atheism, then to be a deeper understanding of reality. Who will be the God of the 21^st century, alive or dead? God or Goddess? Existing or non-existing? Knowable or unknowable? Imminent or transcendent? Or will such categories be inadequate or irrelevant?

As I was preparing the sermon, a song came on the radio which featured a voiceover from a movie called The Second Coming. In the movie, the cinematic Jesus says,

"You are becoming gods. There is a new master of creation—and it's you. You've unraveled DNA. You're five years away from building your own people, and at the same time you're cultivating bacteria strong enough to kill every living thing. Do you think you're ready for that much power? . . . If you want the position of God then take the responsibility. . . .

[Jesus goes on] I was born the son of God, and the son of God came once before and gave you a testament and you ignored it. This time, there will be a third testament, a new foundation for the way you live your lives, and the third testament will be written by you."

We are groping and grasping for meaning, purpose, happiness, wholeness. What kind of God do we need? What kind of God can we find?

I once had a older UU, Jewish by background, tell me that after the Holocaust God and he had parted ways after the Holocaust. Some time after as we talked about what was happening in his life, I asked him if he’d like me to say a prayer. As we held hands and bowed our heads, tears welled in his eyes. He told me he would give God another try. No doubt he would discover this God of the second try different from the first. Perhaps better.

I will close with the recent words of Rebecca Parker, president of the Star King School for the Ministry, the UU seminary in Berkeley, California, that shows a continuing relevance of the death of God for radical Christians such as her. Parker is responding to President Bill Sinkford’s call for UU’s to return to what he calls a “language of reverence.” Parker writes,

Over the course of the past 200 years, in the name of justice and liberation, religious liberals have hastened the death of God. We have presided at the funeral of God the King, God the Father, God the Unmoved Mover, God the Old White Man in the Sky, the Able-Bodied God, the Straight God, the All-Knowing God, the Leave-It-All-to-Me-I’ll-Take-Care-of-It God, and more. In place of God, we have emphasized human responsibility. We know it is in our hands to create justice, equity, compassion and peace. As Marx said, faith in God too often becomes a way for people to abnegate our responsibility, deny our power and become passive in the face of a sacrosanct status quo. The way the name of God has been so easily on the lips of those who bless acts of war is only the most recent example of people leaning on God to rationalize human actions that are far from holy.

Your call for a renewed religious language is heard by some among us as a threat to this hard-won sobriety in the face of religious language that sanctions injustice and obscures human responsibility.

But I hear something else in your call. It is not a call to return to old ways that we have learned are inadequate. Your call is something new -- something that could only happen in the wake of the death of God.

Those who have moved through the death of God find themselves entering a new space -- a space in which the divine can be experienced in a fresh way. The baggage of oppressive images has been left behind. In the ensuing openness, a sense of sacred presence emerges and invites articulation. People come again to the realization that in the face of overwhelming threats to our lives and the life of all we love there is a source of sustenance, resistance and hope that moves within us and beyond us.