Nietzche first coined the phrase God is dead almost a century before the Death of God theological movement reached full flower among the Protestant liberals. He was reacting in despair to the confusion and hopelessness that had been brought down by Kant, Ritschl, and Hume. Kant and Ritschl argued that one could not have a theoretical knowledge of God. They were attacking the Orthodox Theology of a transcendent God who was beyond the experience of fallen mortal man and could only be known by faith. As soon as the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason came on, this became not only permissible but a powerful argument among the philosophical, intellectual, and rational religionists. Hume and the empiricists who followed him went further and they limited all knowledge to that which could be perceived in the material world by the five senses. Since God was not verifiable empirically, the biblical view was labeled as mythology and unacceptable to the enlightened mind of modern man.
Though they had nothing to do with the start of the movement, Rudolph Bultmann, Paul Tillich, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer took up this line of reasoning. It was Bonhoeffer who came up with such phrases as the world and man coming of age, of religionless Christianity, of a world without God, of getting rid of the God of the gaps, and of getting along just as well as before.
Ever since Nietzche, the term God is dead had been used now and again but it was not until 1957, when Gabriel Vanhanian published a book called God Is Dead, that the notion began to form a systematized theology. Vanhanian did not believe that God was dead, but he believed that Christianity had suffered the irretrievable loss of God's influence and presence in contemporary society. He pleaded with the Church to accept this fact, to take what was left, and to make the best of it instead of trying to bring back orthodoxy. But Thomas J.J. Altizer laid hold of this theme and professed that he did believe that God had died. A gross man in his eastern mysticism, his thoughts and his rhetoric, he bellowed out the paradoxical declaration: God is dead, thank God!
For William Hamilton, the death of God meant that the reality of God no longer had any relevancy and there was no meaningfulness in terminology about God. Origins, religion, and all work of the Church must be carried out with nontheistic terms.
Paul van Buren, a name commonly associated with the God Is Dead movement, bitterly denied that he believed this doctrine or that he had anything to do with it. But this protest loses its force and integrity in his book the Secular Meaning of the Gospel. In this book van Buren attempts a redefinition of the Christian faith without a single reference to God anywhere. He, more than any other, gave intellectual, philosophical, and theological sophistication to this movement.
It must be acknowledged, in the interest of fairness, that in a later book, Discerning The Way, van Buren went a long way toward rectifying the impression. But the boar had already been in the vineyard and van Buren, a liberal theologian at best, did not have the moral and spiritual force to erase the images. It may be, however, that this view, which never had a strong and well defined theology, lost much of its force through van Buren's later writings.
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