The Death of God
The idea that God has disappeared both practically and theoretically from
human life.
In one sense, the idea of the death of God is intensely biblical and
orthodox. In the passion narratives we hear how God, in the form of Jesus,
died on the cross. The body laid in the tomb is God’s corpse.
Orthodox
theology has always insisted upon the indivisibility of God, which makes it
difficult to argue that only Jesus died on the cross. The death of Jesus is the
death of God – although, of course, the story continues to tell of God’s
resurrection.
The death of God on the cross is one of the most extraordinary and
radical features of Christian theology. In the crucifixion,
God apparently
sacrifices his own life. But if God is eternal, how can he die? If God is
unchanging, how can he change from ‘living’ to ‘dead’? And if God is
omniscient, would he not know about his resurrection in advance, thereby
making his ‘death’ a charade? Here we see trinitarian doctrine collapsing, as it
often does, into a tangle of paradoxes. As the hymn puts it:
’Tis mystery all!
The Immortal dies –
Who can explore his strange design?
The idea of ‘the death of God’ started to gain a new relevance when the
nineteenth-century philosopher Hegel put the
concept at the centre of his
theology. He argued that the death of God was ‘the negation of negation’: a
necessary and decisive step in the history of the world. Hegel believed that
God had to die as an historical figure in order to become real as an eternal
idea of perfect human society. The death of God as a human being opens up
the age of God as Spirit. In other words, God’s death permits him to become
more universal: incarnate in the whole of human society and not merely in
one individual.
The death of God reaches its best-known expression in the writings of
Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Gay Science). He tells
the parable of the madman who proclaims in the town square that God is dead
and that all our reference points have vanished. The townspeople say he is
crazy and the madman departs, saying he has come before his time.
‘The death of God’ is Nietzsche’s shorthand for the disappearance of all
foundational ideas: truth, goodness, reality, beauty, progress, facts, and so on.
Nietzsche’s hero is the pre-Socratic
philosopher Heraclitus, who argued that
the world has no stable truths, but is in endless change. Nietzsche blames
Plato and Christianity for covering up Heraclitus’ wisdom with the illusion
that the world is founded on theological realities. Slowly, since Plato,
humanity has begun to glimpse that we create our own ideas of truth and that
God is just another human invention. Nietzsche
believed that a few people
(called ‘over-people’) had the strength to face this truth, but that most of us
would follow the herd and cling to our illusions.
Depending on who you speak to, Nietzsche is either a brilliant prophet
who could foresee the anti-foundationalism which would be characteristic of
modernity, or a philosopher who failed to acknowledge that all his own
thinking depended upon ‘a hidden theology’ of foundational concepts. In
recent years, for example, the Radical Orthodoxy
school of theology has
argued that the death of God is a humanist ‘myth’ that depends upon
concealed metaphysical presuppositions – in particular, the existence of the
self. Either way, for good or ill, Nietzsche is probably
the most influential
philosopher of modern times.
In the 1960s, some radical Christians argued that it is possible to have a
version of Christianity that holds the death of God as a Christian truth.
Drawing on Blake and Hegel, Thomas Altizer’s The Gospel of Christian
Atheism (1967) argued that God ‘annihilated’ himself on the cross in order to
empty himself fully into the world. Few would go as far as Altizer, but most
theologians now accept the death of God as a cultural phenomenon that
theology must address.
THINKERS
Thomas Altizer (1927– ) was the leading thinker in ‘death of God
theology’. He argued that theology cannot find its future ‘unless it passes
through and freely wills its own death and dissolution.
Theology is now
impelled to employ the very language that proclaims the “death of God”’
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