Beyond the Death of God”

SLD10.19.14 29th Ordinary Exodus 33: 17-33 Emory Presbyterian Church Jill Oglesby Evans

“Beyond the Death of God”

Exodus 33:17-33 The LORD said to Moses, ‘I will do the very thing that you have asked; for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name.’ Moses said, ‘Show me your glory, I pray.’ And God said, ‘I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you the name, “The LORD”; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But’, God said, ‘you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.’ And the LORD continued, ‘See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock; and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.’

So this is the second sermon in our ‘Beyond’ series, a brief cycle of sermons during which we intend to push a bit beyond what we think we know about God. The reason we’re doing this is to expose and expunge any possible false idols of complacency, certitude, or self-satisfaction that might be lurking in the shadows of our personal faith. We are daring to move into this foreign territory together because of our confidence in our identity as disciples of Jesus Christ, and also because we actually do know, when we remember, that God is more than we can know, or express, or even experience. And so together we embark on a sort of communal hero’s journey into the

Unknown, or at least, into the lesser known, unclear exactly what we’ll find but willing to be changed by what we discover.

Last week, the outset of our expedition took us ‘Beyond Theology.’ Not everyone quite understood last week’s sermon – and I confess, it did rather go on - so some of us, including myself, took a copy home to re-read what was said. There are more copies in the back of last week’s sermon if you still want one.

And I’m here to tell you, if you found last week’s sermon puzzling, well, grab yourself a copy of today’s sermon on your way out, too, ‘cause you’re likely to need it.

Because today our journey takes us into the unchartered territory…beyond the death of

God.

The death of God?

Why on earth would a discourse on the death of God crop up in a church? Isn’t that the stuff of nineteenth century, post World War II European existentialists, and the vocal disenchanted of the 1960’s? Yes, it was, and is, and yet I’m betting they still may have something to teach us.

You know, when German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche declared back in the

19th century that ‘God is dead!,’ it was a time when seismic shifts were taking place in the common consciousness of the West. Post-enlightenment humanity was taking a huge plunge into objectivity. The earth had ceased to be the center of the universe; man had lost his central role of the creature destined by God to dominate all other creatures, and Freud had recognized that faith in an all-powerful, omniscient God had its root in the helplessness of human existence and in humanity’s attempt to cope with our helplessness by means of belief in a helping father and mother represented by God in heaven. For many thinking people, the illusion of a fatherly God as a parental helper, that is, a theistic God, had to be let go.1

Due to the vast expansion of education and the rise of modern science during the era of Nietzsche, traditional beliefs within Christianity became almost nonexistent.

“Belief in God was no longer possible due to such nineteenth-century factors as the

1 The Gospel According to Zen, Beyond the Death of God, Robert Sohl and Audrey Carr, editors, A Mentor Book from New American Library, New York, 1970. “Today’s Spiritual Crisis,” Erich Fromm. p. 10. 2 dominance of the historical-critical method of reading Scripture, the rise of incredulity toward anything miraculous . . . and the idea that God is the creation of wish projection.

Still, the meaning of Nietzsche’s declaration about the death of God is often misunderstood. “Many have interpreted that Nietzsche meant a literal death or end of

God. Rather, his declaration points to the western world’s reliance on religion as a moral compass and source of meaning, which no longer served. Religion as a reliable source of meaning-making and moral guidance had died.

In an article entitled ‘The Madman,” Nietzsche describes a man who enters a town market or bazaar and cries out loudly, “I seek God! I seek God!” He encounters a group of mocking atheists who laugh at him until the Madman proclaims: “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 off 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?”

Writes Stephen Williams, Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God is not a rhetorical way of saying that ‘God does not exist’” but rather a declaration of the end of

“the end of theism, and the end of Christianity…. What Nietzsche words express is not a divine revelation so much as a fear that the decline of religion, the rise of atheism, and the absence of a higher moral authority would plunge the world into chaos. The western world had depended on the rule of God for thousands of years — religion gave order to society and meaning to life. Without it, wouldn’t society move into an age of nihilism?

Of believing nothing? Although Nietzsche himself may have been considered a nihilist by definition, he was critical of it and warned that accepting nihilism would be dangerous.2 For what would become of the western world without the transcendent father-savior through which the monotheistic religions expressed their longings?

Nietzsche’s 1882 notion that God is dead’ was then re-articulated and given new life in the 1960s. In large letters on the cover of the April 8, 1966 edition of Time magazine read the bold question, ‘Is God Dead?’ with the accompanying article addressing the growing atheism in America, as well as the growing popularity of Death of God theology. 3

I might speak now of Martin Heidegger’s insistence on the meaninglessness of previous Western metaphysics, if I understood Heidegger better. But I’d only be name- dropping. Best I can do is venture a single point Heidegger made that I fear applies to us today: that western religiosity has managed to reduce God, and then worship an image of our own making. Are we in the mainline protestant church guilty of this?

Reducing God to what we understand, and then worshipping an image of our own making? If so, then what are our options? Even if we were willing to let go of our reducible theistic God, what then?

Enter German theologian, Paul Tillich, who, though he preceded the formal Death of God movement, remains highly influential in the field. Drawing upon the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich Schelling, and Jacob Boehme, Tillich developed as a response to nihilism the notion of God as the "ground of all Being." Central to this

2 http://www.philosophy-index.com/nietzsche/god-is-dead/ 3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_is_dead

4 notion was Tillich's rejection of traditional theism and insistence upon a "God above the

God of theism."

Allow me to place Tillich in his context. Following the horrors of the holocaust and World War II, there emerged in Europe a crisis of spirit and mind that hovered over the religious life of thoughtful people, a profound disquietude provoked by modernity’s confrontation with death and meaninglessness.4

The mood in the United States, however, was quite different. Free from the physical ravages of war that Europe experienced, the postwar recovery in America was well underway, and with it the rise of a cultural optimism in a country which had both won the war and defeated the depression. Material prosperity was an ambition and a fact of life. America as the defender of the free world, reveling in a sense of self- satisfaction and security. Marked increase in church attendance and an epidemic of church building programs across the country. (Just look at the number of Presbyterian churches within a 5 mile radius of this one.)

But Tillich was not so persuaded of the depth or permanence of American’s latest revival of religion. In the midst of the religious boom of the 1950’s in an article entitled

“The Lost Dimension of Religion” he wrote, “if we define religion as the state of being grasped by an infinite concern, we must say that man in our time has lost such an infinite concern. And the resurgence of religion is nothing but a desperate and mostly futile attempt to regain what has been lost.”

4 The Courage to Be, Paul Tillich, Yale University Press, New Haven 1952, London 2000. Introduction.

To address this ‘lost dimension in religion,” Tillich writes his famous book, The

Courage to Be, whose final sentence speaks to the prevailing condition of existentialist doubt in his time. It says, The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when

God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt. (Ibid. xvii)

The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt. (Ibid. xvii)

Another way of putting that might be that our only hope is the hope that appears when the situation is beyond hope itself, or hopeless.

You see, religion for many moderns in Tillich’s time, as, perhaps in our own, had been reduced to a belief in the unbelievable. Darwin, Freud and Marx had created a world in which it was now possible, even desirable, to do without the divine hypotheses.

However, the result was not happiness or freedom but anxiety and bondage to fear. In the critical light of modernity, the certainties of the old pieties and theologies could no longer be sustained. But if there were neither a heaven for reward nor a hell for punishment, if God were created in the image of man and not the other way around, then where were meaning and value to be found? (xxii)

Tillich’s response was neither to accommodate to modern standards of credibility, nor to resist modernity and appeal to adamantly pre-modern fundamentalism. Rather he challenged the notion of a theistic God altogether. A definable God. A reducible God. God was not mere a part of the whole but rather the whole itself, argued Tillich. Not a being among other beings, even if regarded as the most important being, but being-itself. (p.184) Modernity, Tillich argued, had ‘unhorsed the god of theism.’ The god of theism which Nietzsche had said died. (p.185)

And so we could say that Tillich, too, argued for the death of God. Although not for the death of God as God is, but for the death of the god of theism, for the death of the theistic, containable, comfortable God of human projection. This god needed to die in order to make room for what Tillich called the ‘God above God.’ In other words, like

Nietzsche, Tillich was not doing away with the existence of God but with a particular conception of God that could no longer be supported by the honest intellectual inquiry of the modern world. After all, what happens to the God of a prescientific age when that prescientific age itself collapses? The popular anthropomorphic, personal and mechanistic concepts of God, the ‘God upstairs,” …was simply no longer credible.

But while for some the death of God might lead to the despair of atheism and meaninglessness, for Tillich it leads to a greater and deeper faith in a God beyond and above all that we doubt or know. ‘Absolute faith,’ Tillich called it; faith in the God above

God, a notion which takes radical doubt, doubt about God, into itself and transcends the theistic idea of God. (xiv) Tillich’s ‘Absolute faith’ is grounded in the God who remains after all other gods, including the theistic God around which so much of our liturgical language revolves, have proven themselves inadequate.

From the other side of doubt (and knowledge), emerges a God Above God, above the God of our understanding or conception, and it is from this God, Tillich teaches, that we take courage. It is in this God we place our trust. It is with this God we experience Tillich’s ‘absolute faith.’ (p.185) Indeed, it is toward this God that we aim in this ‘Beyond’ series – the God Above God, the God beyond any of our ideas, theologies, liturgies, projections or imagination, the God who is not a part of the whole,

7 but who IS the Whole. The God who is not merely a being, but the ground of being itself.

Okay, okay, I can already hear you, Tom: “I’m just a simple ‘ole hic. Just give me that ole’ time religion.” And to be sure, that ‘ole time religion’ is, for many of us, a source of comfort and beauty and tradition and, indeed, revelation. And we will return to it, but hopefully, after this Beyond discourse, with a renewed appreciation for the magnitude of the Unknowable Reality toward which it points.

Meanwhile, during these few short weeks of our ‘Beyond’ series, we dare to let go of the comfortable and the familiar, as an exercise in humility, recognizing both the limits of our language, and the limitless nature of the divine. As an act of surrender to the One who creates and loves us both into, and out of, being. And finally, as an act of courage, and ultimately, trust, as we push past the God we know to make room for the

God whom we do not know, the God beyond what we know, the God from whom, finally, and from no lesser gods, you and I take our courage to be.

Now, the notion of killing God, even if only the theistic God, has serious shock value, especially in the church. But is this really such foreign territory to us Christians?

Do we not, every year on Good Friday, kill the God we know in the person of Jesus

Christ? Does not the God Jesus knew die to Jesus, who, himself, before his death, doubted and despaired of his own abandonment? And when, in the Gospel of John,

God resurrects Jesus and Mary tries to hold on to him, does Jesus not say, ‘do not hold on to me, Mary. Let me go.’ Are we in the church not continually taught to let go of the

God we know?

God said to Moses, ‘See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock; and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.’ For no one shall see me and live.

The courage to be, says Tillich, is rooted, not in the God we know, but in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.

To the glory of that God. Amen.