The 20th Century, particularly after the Holocaust, has been described as the era of the “Death of God.” This isn’t merely (or even necessarily) an acknowledgement that the 19th-century critique of religion, as undertaken by Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, et al. was correct or that it had, in fact, been completed. Nor does it merely mean that the God hypothesis is dead, or that we are now in a position in which God’s existence is a question (though it is). Religious people themselves (particularly Jews and some Protestant thinkers) acknowledged that the Holocaust called into question the sufficiency of religious notions. Faith in God had not led people to prevent the mass extermination of millions of their fellow humans but had, indeed, been used to justify it; millions of Christians acquiesced and actively participated.
Within theology, the “Death of God” is thought to be more like a moment or development and a description of a cultural milieu than it is a metaphysical claim about God. It’s not really meant to mean “God doesn’t exist,” but rather, “We have killed God in thought, our discrete deeds, and the way we live.” It would be more accurate to say that the 20th Century was a period when all the sophisticated metaphysical philosophico-theological arguments became trite and besides the point.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran minister, theologian, and anti-Nazis dissident who accepted the “death of God.” He lamented that, in and through the Holocaust, the world “came of age,” but he had hope that it finally had the occasion to realize (again) what had been revealed on the cross: God left us to ourselves, in our freedom. Attending this, we need to grapple with the fact that we have failed to live as such.
[W]e cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur [even if God were not given]. And this is just what we do recognize—before God! God himself compels us to recognize it. So our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15.34). The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us. Matt. 8.17 makes it quite clear that Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering. …. The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help. To that extent we may say that the development towards the world’s coming of age outlined above, which has done away with a false conception of God, opens up a way of seeing the God of the Bible, who wins power and space in the world by his weakness. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letter from 16 July 1944.)
In Bonhoeffer’s assessment, the temptation is to shirk away from the profound responsibility that attends the invitation to come to age, to resort back to a childish desire for a daddy figure to step in and take care of things for us. Against this, he argues, in effect, that we should grow the fuck up. The Big Other—the daddy figure of God—is a childish wish. God doesn’t want children. He wants disciples.
Richard Kearney suggests that the “argument” between theists and atheists is not really what concerns us, or at least what ought to concern us. He proposes what he calls an anatheist project: “returning to God after God—God again, after the loss of God.” (Richard Kearney, “God After God: An Anatheist Reimagining of the Sacred.”)
I want to extend this idea, stretch it.
It seems to me that there are obvious strategies whereby one could attempt to discern the call of God after the Death of God, or even after “the death of the Death of God”.
Consider the similitude between our position and those in Christ’s time. We, like they, find ourselves under systems of oppression that seek to lead us away from the kind of lives that were understood to be the kinds of lives God/love invites us to lead, even though prominent figures now (as then) express such ungodly ways of life using the language of religion. First-century Jews found themselves living under a regime that was allegedly headed by God in the Flesh (Caesar). It claimed unity and peace and love, but it purchased these by exacting terror on those within its domain. The peace of Rome was exemplified by the crucifixes that lined the highways, bearing the broken bodies of those who violated the law. The crucifix, prior to its transvaluation by the Christ-followers, was a symbol of the territorializing power of the pax Romana.
Marx wasn’t wrong that religious/transcendent language and thought often serve social-political and economic ends. Many of us, like many first-century Judeans, “identify with the forces of domination and participate in relations that maintain their power” (Lynice Pinkard, “Revolutionary Suicide,” 38). Others of us, like others of them, seek to simply wait things out, becoming quietistic and escapist. Think of the Saducces and Essenes, the former of which actively collaborated with the Roman oppressors, and the latter of which simply took flight from society and sought to wait things out until the end of time. Against the Essenes, Christ immersed himself in the world; against the Sadducees, he did not collaborate with Rome; against the Pharisees, he argued that the love of God was identical to the love of others.
How could the call to be loving, to love others, and to love love itself not be of continued relevance in our time, when our time is so similar to the time in which that call was made?
Is not the propitious moment—the moment when one can respond to the Other with love—always already at hand, always now?
It’s helpful to attend to the question of what messianic expectation amounts to, for ‘Christ’ = ‘Messiah’ = ‘Redeemer’. What needs redeemed is humanity. It always needs redeemed. Can we responsibly fail to ask what it is about our own situation and history that is unholy, i.e., unloving, divisive, perpetuating oppression, perpetuating injustice, life-denying, death-oriented?
The past that deserves redemption is the holy effort to live lovingly, to refashion the world into one in which the love of love reigns (i.e., as a topsy-turvy kingdom of love). That effort has always failed. How can we start anew, today? Every day?