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On the Death of God

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On the Death of God David Wyatt Aiken On the Death of God A Post-mortem Reflection on a “Life” The intent of this paper is to tease out some of the more signifijicant philosophical and meth- odological ramifijications of the research presented in a recently published study, entitled “Philosophy, Archaeology and the Bible. Is Emperor Julian’s Contra Galilaeos a Plausible Critique of Christianity?” (Journal of Late Antique Religion and Culture 11 (2017), S. 1-37; E-ISSN: 1754-517X). In clear, the premise of this paper admits as plausible the argument ad- vanced by Emperor Julian in his treatise Contra Galilaeos, i.e., that the triune Supreme Being articulated and adopted by the Christian theologians is not the God of the Bible, but rather a transformation and adaptation of the God of the Greek philosophers, which was fijirst articu- lated by the pre-Socratic Xenophanes (c. 570 - c. 475 BC). There is also good reason to think that, as articulated by the Christian thinkers and as an “Entity” supposedly grounded in the biblical texts, the Christian God is simply a flawed philosophical “Idea”. Because the “profijile” of the God of the Christians is in such evident conflict with the “profijile” of the Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible, one must necessarily conclude that there is not One God of the entire Bible. Indeed, this deduction is not new on this telling, but was already a signifijicant element in some variations of early Christian Gnosticism, Neo-Platonism, and Manichaeism. The preponderance of evidence, archeological, textual, and contextual, strongly supports the claim that the God of the Christians is anhistorical – a Deity of Logic born out of the speculations of the earliest Hellenized Christian philosophers. The God of the Christian theologians corresponds to the highest ideals of western Neo- Platonic thought, and bears no comparison, either in actions or character, to the historico-geographical deities present in the Hebrew Bible. At this point, then, it is necessary to begin reconstructing “the rest of the story” for Christianity and the West. Dying Gods Generic dying god stories are typical of agrarian cultures. Similarly, announce- ments of the death of a God in the western world may also perhaps be seen to follow natural cycles. A fijirst important announcement occurredin the mid-fijirst century, at sea offf the western coast of Greece, with the proclamation that the Great God Pan was dead.1 Some believe this moment marked the beginning 1 Plutarch, Moralia V, 17, Cambridge, MA 1989. © Koninklij ke Brill NV, Leiden ZRGG 71, 3 (2019) Also available online - brill.com/zrgg 286 David Wyatt Aiken of the end of the pagan era. Then the announcement was heard a second time, in the late 19th century, when Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, returning into the world of men from a self-imposed exile, encounters a holy man in the wood worshipping, says the Heiliger, “the God who is my God” – a statement that leaves Zarathustra wondering at the fact that this holy man had not heard in his woods that God is dead. Nietzsche mitigates the matter-of-fact flatness of Zarathustra’s wonder by also composing an exalted, quasi-mystical dirge in the now-famous madman story from the Gay Science. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. 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 offf 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?2 Many have been the assertions of “god is dead”, and sundry the variations on the theme: from the “flight of the gods”, the “Entflohene Götter,” of Hölderlin,3 to the contemporary God is Dead movement in America. It seems, however, that there is always hidden within the very language of the assertion another proposition: namely, that the gods, and especially the God that surfaced in the theological traditions of the Christians, once existed. More philosophically oriented than the German romantics and their “gods”, the high priests of the Death of God movement offfer up the death of the Christian odG not by talking about “Him”, but rather, by talking about how humans seem to have transcended the need, interest, or even the possibility, of Him.4 In this latter- day incarnation of the Death of God tradition, it would seem that the issue is really not linked to (the) Deity, but rather to the human (lack of) interest story. One of the more provocative contemporary scholars to take up the standard in tracking this idea, and making a surprisingly favorable pro-Christian ar- gument, is Professor Georg Picht in his essay entitled The God of the Philo- 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (trans. W. Kaufmann), New York 1991, Bk. III, §108, p. 167; Bk. III, §125, p. 181-182; and Bk. V, §343, pp. 279-280. 3 See Friedrich Hölderlin, Germanien, in: Id., Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Dokumente in zeitli- cher Folge, Band X (hrsg. von D. E. Sattler), Bremer Ausgabe, München 2004, p. 239. 4 Hamilton and Altizer’s list of 10 possible interpretations for “god is dead” (Thomas J. J. Altizer/William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God, Indianapolis 1966, pp. x-xi), can be reduced to 3 general themes: 1) some variation of atheism (1, 2); 2) a language shortfall (3, 4, 10); 3) and, a narrative no longer consistent with men’s understanding or experience of the world (5, 6, 7, 8, 9)..
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