Contemporary Theology I: Hegel to Death of God Theologies God Death of to I: Hegel Theology ST503 Contemporary - Transcript Rights Reserved

ContemporaryTheology I: 1 of 14 ST503 23 of 24 23 LESSON Divinity School. John S. Feinberg, Ph.D. Feinberg, John S. , and the Death of God Theology and , Experience: Professor of Biblical and Experience: Professor of Systematic Theology, Trinity Evangelical Systematic Theology, times when Scripture was written. And the real trick, according to according trick, real the And written. was Scripture when times to a van Buren is to continue to be a Christian and yet to hold on a religion which is stated in terms that are foreign for 20th belief, century men and women. And the trick is to figure that bring our religion into a contemporary frame of reference so out how to we can talk about things in ways that are intelligible to modern men and women and yet still remain Christian. that we need to learn remember that van Buren suggested You people like Antony Flew, things from people like Bonhoeffer, people like Bultmann, and specifically he elaborated Bultmann’s we have with You through your Son, Jesus Christ. Help us now as we Jesus Christ. through your Son, we have with You why are saying, May we understand what these thinkers study again. pray all of these We they mean. and what exactly they are saying it, Amen. in Christ’s precious name. we noted that he thinking, As we began to look at van Buren’s 20th century is a different world says we have to realize that the we’re living at a different time, We’re than the 1st century AD. understanding of the world, living at a different period in man’s at the and we just simply have a different mindset than people did and continue to explain his thinking and then to move on to on to move and then thinking explain his and continue to end of our discussion and see his another theologian toward the let’s any of that, But before we do form of Death of God Theology. bow again for a word of prayer. You does exist. we thank you so much that you are a God who Father, we know that Lord, about each one of us. do care You are personal. we and we are so thankful that exist, us; we know that You love You some of thought the at look we as Father, God. our as You claim can and whether are, are and what You who are not sure about who You that relationship thankful for the personal we are so at all, exist You At the end of my last lecture, I began to discuss Paul Van Buren’s Buren’s Van discuss Paul I began to of my last lecture, the end At of the Gospel The Secular Meaning time last it left I where up things pick to want I represents. it that

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Hegel to Death of God Theologies God of Death to Hegel Contemporary Theology I: Theology Contemporary Lesson 23 of 24 Death of God Theologies

thinking and reactions to it, and he told us that we need to adapt and adopt something from all of these thinkers. We need to focus on the emphasis of Karl Barth that says that Christianity has to focus on Christ. We have to, on the other hand, take seriously the concerns of people like Schubert Ogden, who say that we have to state our Christian beliefs in ways that modern men and women can understand. But beyond all of that, van Buren’s specific contribution is to say that we’re going to get an awful lot of help in this whole project if we take seriously the work of linguistic analysts and see what they would teach us about the very meaning of our religious language.

As I mentioned to you right at the end of my last lecture, the heart, so to speak, of

van Buren’s proposal is in his chapter four, where he takes up the issue of the analysis of theological language and he shares with us in that particular chapter how we should understand our religious and theological language.

He begins in this chapter by looking at the problem, specifically, of our religious way of thinking and talking. He tells us that many contemporary theologians think that the problem that confronts Christians as secular men and women lies in the nature of religion and the confusion of religion and Christian faith. But van Buren says he doesn’t think that’s the real problem. He thinks that the real problem lies in the character of the language of faith. The problem, then, is not so much one of a bad religion, as it is a problem of bad or at least he says “unworkable” language.

Well, on page 82 of this book, van Buren cites Gerhard Ebeling’s definition of religion as “the attempted enlargement of reality by means of God.” And what this means is that God is invoked to explain, to justify, or simply to fill in the picture of the world that we live in or to fill in our understanding of human affairs so that a religion is an attempt to appeal to God in such a way as to expand our understanding of reality. On the other hand, a religionless posture involves, and again I quote Ebeling’s definition, “Coming to terms with reality apart from God” or at least without use of the God hypothesis.

Now, van Buren, after giving this definition of religion, then notes that contemporary theologians from Karl Barth to Schubert Ogden, agree that Christianity really doesn’t conform to this definition of religion at all. They would say that religion is man’s use of God to

solve some human problem, whereas the gospel proclaims God’s unexpected use of man for God’s own purposes. So very definitely a difference in the way they understand Christianity as opposed to the way they understand religion in general. Van Buren, having presented all of this, steps back for a moment and says, you know, the problem with all of these definitions is that all of these theologians continue to speak about God, even though, as Ebeling put it: “A considerable proportion of our contemporaries haven’t the least idea of what we are even talking about when we speak of God.”

Van Buren then says that the solution proposed to this problem, the solution proposed by existentialist theologians, consists of eliminating all objectification of God in thought and word. Now by objectification he means thinking of God as a distinct being who has objective reality outside the mind. He says, though, that since Bultmann also objects to using the word god simply as a symbol for human experience. Well then, the word god appears to refer to nothing at all. On the one hand, you don’t want to objectify it; on the other hand, you don’t want a nonobjective use of the word god. A nonobjective use of the word of god takes that word as a symbol for something in human experience, maybe a sense of having encountered God, an experience of the numinous, but, of course, in that case, there might not really be something that’s out there. But, of course, even the nonobjective use of the word god allows for no verification whatsoever and therefore it is meaningless. How could I ever prove, for example, that I’m really having an experience of something or other?

Well, the moment we begin to use the word god in a qualified sense and van Buren says that a qualified sense would be equivalent to a non-objectified sense. He says that the moment that we begin to use the word god in a non-objective sense, then something happens which is like what happens in Flew’s parable. That is, we begin to kill our assertions by the death of a thousand qualifications and as it turns up, we wind up by making no assertion at all.

Well, of course, if there’s a problem of empirical verification of a non-objective use of god as I suggested a moment or so ago; there will surely be a similar problem with an objective use of it as well. In this case, as I say, the objective use of the term god would take it to stand for some being that has reality as an objective thing in the world apart from our mind. But since typically God has been taken to stand for an immaterial being, you can see what the problem is going to be for empirical verification of any sentence

that uses the term god in that way.

Well, van Buren summarizes the problem of talking of God for those empirically oriented—as modern secular man is—he summarizes the problem as follows, and here I quote him from page 84. He says, “The empiricist in us finds the heart of the difficulty not in what is said about God, but in the very talking about God at all. We do not know what God is and we cannot understand how the word “god” is being used. It seems to function as a name, yet theologians tell us that we cannot use it as we do other names to refer to something quite specific. If it is meant to refer to an existentialist encounter, a point of view, or the speaker self-understanding, surely a more appropriate expression could be found.” Let me interject at this point that these last sentences, to use the term to refer to an existentialist encounter point of view, etcetera would be a non-objective use of the term god. The former use of the word to refer to something specific would be an objective use of it.

Well, let me return to the quote form van Buren. He says, “If we want to use this term in the non-objective way, surely a more appropriate expression could be found. The problem is not solved, moreover, by substituting other words for the word “god.” One could supply the letter X. Flew used the word “gardener” in his parable, and the problem would remain, for the difficulty has to do with how X functions. The problem of the gospel in a secular age is a problem of the logic of its apparently meaningless language. And linguistic analysts will give us help in clarifying it.” Well, we’ll have to see whether they do. He believes that they do and having laid out the nature of the problem of the meaningfulness of religious language, van Buren then turns to a linguistic analysis of religious assertions. And he asks the question, “How specifically are religious assertions being used?” Our answer to this will tell us what they mean or if, in fact, they have any meaning at all.

Van Buren raises a series of proposals as to how religious assertions function and I’m going to sketch in the next few moments a couple of the more significant ones. He then tells us after he sketched these different proposals, his own understanding of how religious language functions.

Well, he turns very early in his sketch of other people’s handling of religious assertions to the work of R. M. Hare. That last name is spelled H-A-R-E. And Hare wrote a response to Flew’s parable and to Flew’s discussion of theology and theological language, and

in Hare’s response, Hare agreed that if religious and theological language is taken as asserting some empirical fact about the world, a fact that would be designated by a sentence like “God loves us.” If you take religious and theological language that way, then it is meaningless. But that doesn’t mean that religious and theological language is altogether meaningless, it just has a different kind of meaning than people have thought it to have.

Now in order to illustrate his point, Hare offers his own parable and it’s a parable about a student who has this insane fear that there are people who are trying to kill him. And no matter how much his friends present evidence to the contrary, this student is convinced beyond a shadow of doubt that there are people who are out to kill him. And Hare says that this student who has this insane view has what Hare refers to as a different blik, B-L-I-K, than you and I do or than anyone who’s sane does. Now when he talks about a blik, he’s using that term to refer to a fundamental attitude, a particular way of seeing the world, a mindset if you will. A blik is not something that one achieves by empirical investigation nor do you discard it by rational or empirical argumentation. A blik involves our basic presuppositions about the world, our basic conceptual grid, we might say, with which we interact in the world. Now Hare’s point is that the person who uses religious language uses it as an expression of a blik, an orientation, if you will, a commitment to see the world in a certain way and to live in accord with that blik.

So, Flew sees religious language as a collection of cosmological assertions. Assertions, that is, of facts about the universe. Now both Flew and Hare agree that this objectified, literal use of religious language and use of the word god in particular is meaningless. But neither of them adopts what van Buren calls a “qualified, literal use” of the terms either. Now “qualified, literal use” would be a non-objectified one. They think that that’s meaningless; the “they” being both Flew and Hare.The difference between Flew and Hare is that Flew thinks that religious language just attempts to assert facts. That is, it makes some kind of claims about the universe and if you apply the verification criterion to this language you find, that in fact, it’s meaningless. Hare, on the other hand, says that religious language is meaningful, it expresses a blik. As such, it does have meaning, but its meaning does not lie in any attempt to literally make assertions about God and His relationship to the world. Its meaningfulness lies in the fact that it expresses a particular commitment to see life, to see the world, in a particular way.

Well, that’s one example of how to analyze religious language. Another example that van Buren discusses is R. B. Brathwaite’s handling of religious language. And here, van Buren appeals to Brathwaite’s An Empiricist Analysis of Religious Belief. Brathwaite begins with the verification principle and he argues that religious and theological language, if you adopt the verification principle and use it, is meaningless. If you apply that principle to religious and theological language as though it was making assertions of fact, then given the verification principle, religious and theological language is meaningless. “It’s not the language of empirical observation, religious language isn’t.” says Brathwaite. “It’s not the language of a general theory, like a scientific theory that you could verify or falsify by empirical means, and it’s not like the language of mathematics and logic.”

Now according to Brathwaite, these three types of language: language of empirical observation, language of a general theory, and language of math and logic are the three kinds of language which are meaningful in light of the verification criterion. But having said this, Brathwaite is not ready to throw out religious language as meaningless altogether. In fact, he thinks that it is meaningful. It’s just that it’s meaningful because it has a particular use, and its use is what Brathwaite calls a conative, C-O-N-A-T-I- V-E. That is, it expresses the utterer’s intention to act in a certain way. Now for the Christian, Brathwaite says when he uses religious language, he is expressing his intention to follow in an agapeistic way of life. You can see that the term agapeistic comes from the Greek work agape. But Brathwaite says that’s not all that there is to it. There’s one more item that’s involved in this analysis of religious language.

He says that the use of religious language by someone includes not only a statement of one’s intent to act in a certain way, but it also involves an associating of that intention with certain stories. For the Christian, of course, it will be the Christian stories that are important, that he thinks of when he utters this language. For those of other religions, well, they have their own stories. Now these stories are not to be viewed as assertions that correspond to empirical fact, you shouldn’t see them that way, because they’re mythological, so obviously they can’t, in fact, refer to the external world. Instead, these stories have a certain psychological and causal relationship, if you will, to the intention to act a certain way. To associate one’s intention, for example, with these stories as being God’s will, helps us to carry through with the act that we say we intend to do.

Well, having discussed these different analyses of religious and theological language, and van Buren discusses more than just Brathwaite and Hare, but those are two of the distinctive ones he handles, van Buren then notes that not every theologian and philosopher sees things this way. There are some who think that the language, which is religious and theological language, is an expression of some knowledge or fact about the world. Now people who understand religious language this way understand it cognitively. Hare and Brathwaite and other people who understand religious languages’ meaning in a different way understand it non-cognitively. That’s the term that is used.

Well, now for a thoroughgoing empiricist, religious language cannot be understood cognitively. It can’t be understood as making some kind of assertion about the world. It can’t be seen as a knowledge claim in regard to the external world, because if that’s what you’re trying to do with it, then it’s going to fail to be meaningful by the verification criterion of meaning. As a result of that, van Buren opts for a non-cognitive understanding of theological language. On pages 98 through 100 we have his reasoning for adopting a non-cognitive understanding of religious and theological language. And even though this is a somewhat lengthy passage, I’d like to read it to you because I think you see here, not only what he’s going to do in terms of his way of understanding religious language, but also something of why he comes to this conclusion. He says, “We reject the cognitive approach to theological language, however, not primarily because it is logically puzzling, but because of certain theological commitments out of which this study has arisen. That approach builds its case on a natural sense of the divine, on natural religion, and a natural revelation. The history of theology seen from the perspective of modern charagmatic theology, suggests that this is a road leading into the wilderness.”

Modern charagmatic theologies would be theologies like Bultmann and others who follow him and attempt to get at the kernel of the gospel and aren’t so concerned with the form, the clothing, so to speak, in which the gospel is stated in Scripture. Well, van Buren then says, “Within the Protestant tradition, that road has been clearly charted and finally marked with a dead end sign by the work of Carl Barth and we see no reason to ignore the warning. Christian faith has troubles enough in the 20th Century without retracing the misleading path opened up for Protestantism by the rationalist orthodoxy of the 17th Century, followed to its unproductive end in the 19th Century.” That’s his assessment, of

course, of orthodox theology over the last few centuries.

“The cognitive approach,” he says, “to faith statements presented by some linguistic analysts leads into the old inner-contradiction of earlier forms of natural theology. It begins by speaking of a divine being of whom it cannot be said that this is the God of grace, the God who finds man wandering into idolatry with every conception he forms of the divine, the God who comes and makes Himself known to man, not through, but in spite of man’s natural conceptions of the divine. Either the God of which Christians have tried to speak is the God of grace and self-revelation, or He is the neutral ‘it’ of natural theology. The divine being of the cognitive approach is not easily assimilable to Pascale’s God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and wise men.

“To follow the cognitive approach to religious language would contradict our point of departure. It tends to mark off a certain area of experience as religious and it argues for a religious way of knowing in contrast to other secular ways of knowing. This approach leads Christians into the trap of the reductionist tendency of 19th Century theology, where they are tempted to fight a defensive action against all other knowledge in order to defend some small area of their own which they may call the proper sphere of theology concerning which they may cry, but surely cry in vain, that nonreligious knowledge should not try to tread on this holy ground.

“On the basis of these logical and theological objections, we judge the cognitive approach to theological language to be inadequate to the character of secular thought and to the heart of the Gospel. We cannot argue, of course, for some objective normative definition of verification or of the Gospel. When we call this approach inadequate, we are exposing our own categorical commitments, which we see in some modern charagmatic theology, some modern analytic philosophy, and indicated with the word ‘secular.’ We can only acknowledge that our commitments are such as to lead us to reject the search for religious preserve to be investigated by a special religious way of knowing. And we are committed to a Gospel which begins, not with an argument for undifferentiated theism, but with the impact of whatever it was that happened on Easter in the context of a particular history. With such commitments, we have no choice but to return to the consensus of such analysts as Hare and Brathwaite about the character of the language of faith and to assess its possibilities as a tool for determining what we have called the secular meaning of the Gospel.

“The first point of consensus is that simple literal theism is wrong and that qualified literal theism is meaningless. The second agreement lies in the implicit or explicit conviction that the language of faith does have a meaning and that this meaning can be explored and clarified by linguistic analysis. The third consensus is a concern to take Christianity seriously as a way of life, even though a straightforward use of the word ‘god’ must be abandoned.”

Well, I think you get a good idea of what he’s saying. We could go on further with this, but I would just encourage you to read through that section if you have opportunity and see more of his reasoning.

Well, in his final section in chapter 4, van Buren tells us the implications of all of this as he offers us an initial glimpse of his proposal for understanding the meaning of the Gospel. Van Buren says that this analysis of the language of faith shows us that, and I quote him here, “In the frank recognition that the lot of oblique language about God is no better and in some ways worse than that of simple literal theism, we come face to face with our real problem of understanding the Gospel today, the difficulty of finding any meaningful way to speak of God. We can no longer share the faith of the man who thought that his god lived in a tree and that his god would die if the tree were burned down or who conceded the weakness of a god who did not respond to calls for help from the dangers of nature or man. We should say, ‘He was mistaken,’ but his religious assertions were understandable. An assertion of qualified literal theism, on the other hand, is meaningless and the moral exasperation of Flew’s skeptical explorer is not to be dismissed lightly by those who claim to serve the true.” This quote comes from page 102.

Well then van Buren says that the question raised by a lot of this linguistic analysis is, “What is the real issue of Christian faith? Jesus or God? Christology or theology?” Van Buren’s answer is, “The linguistic analysts we have considered, especially here in Brathwaite, tend to choose the former, Jesus in contrast to Ogden. Flew raises the question of orthodoxy, but what is orthodoxy in this era when many sincere Christians do not know what to do with the word ‘god’ or can use it only in a way entirely different from the orthodox way of the early centuries of Christianity. Today we cannot even understand the Nietzschean cry that God is dead, for if it were so, how could we know? No, the problem now is that the word ‘god’ is dead.” This comes from page 103.

Well, I would suggest to you that clearly more than just the word “god” is dead if what van Buren is saying is taken out to its full implications. There’s also a certain concept of God, which is also dead, namely the traditional Judeo-Christian concept as revealed and in and through the language of Scripture is indeed dead. Now this doesn’t mean there is necessarily no such God, but only that we do not know what we’re talking about when we speak of this God. Since we don’t know, there may be no such God or there may be one about whom we can say and know nothing. If either of these is the case, then the traditional God is surely irrelevant to modern man, even to Christian man because you can’t talk about Him. You don’t know what you’re talking about Him. I think you can see that potentially, as well as to a large extent actually, this is even more radical than the conclusions that you would draw from the work of the earlier Wittgenstein and The Tractatus. In that case, we could at least say that the Judeo-Christian God may indeed exist just as we have understood Him to be, but we can’t talk about Him. This says we are so utterly unclear about what the word G-O-D means that if there is a God, we really have no clue as to what He’s like and as a result of that, we can’t talk about Him at all. But it’s more than just not being able to talk about Him; there may not be a God at all. At least not as we have traditionally understood Him.

Well van Buren then moves on to say that “A loose way of characterizing these analyses of the language of faith is to say that God statements have been translated into man statements. But these philosophers have also made it clear that man statements or statements about human existence are far from being all alike or on a single level. Man is involved in a multitude of language games and to take them all as the same game is to produce logical chaos. If we want to say that, although we are not sure what we mean when we speak of God, our concern is with Jesus of Nazareth and with our life in the world today, this concern could certainly be expressed in more than one way.” You’ll find that quote from van Buren on pages 103-104.

Well, van Buren later on says that the language game that he is playing in his book is seeking the secular meaning of the Gospel. And here’s what he says about this: he says, “The heart of the method of linguistic analysis lies in the use of the verification principle, that the meaning of a word is its use in its context. The meaning of a statement is to be found in and is identical with the function of that statement. If a statement has a function, so that it may in principle be verified or falsified, the statement is

meaningful, and unless or until a theological statement can be submitted in some way to verification, it cannot be said to have a meaning in our language game.” Pages 104-105 are where I’ve taken this quote from.

Well, of course, the key thing here is that it’s hard to see what function the word G-O-D has, but one thing seems pretty sure if you follow out the logic of van Buren. If it has a function at all, it’s not one which has anything to do with asserting empirical facts about the world, that is, it’s not to be objectified nor does it assert anything about some existential experience. That is, it’s not to be understood in a non-objectified sense. But if that’s so, if you’re not supposed to understand the word G-O-D either in an objectified sense or a non-objectified sense, then van Buren says that when believers use odd words like “God,” that is like the word G-O-D, they should clarify how they’re using it. He says on page 106, “If G-O-D is not a word which refers to something, they should be careful not to use it in a way that suggests that it does. If they’re talking about a blik rather than about how things are, they should say so.”

Well, as van Buren ends chapter 4, he notes that what he has said tells us the method for analyzing religious and theological language and for understanding it, but none of it tells us exactly what we should take to be the secular meaning of the Gospel. Let me put this a different way: we now know how to discover what the meaning of our language is through the methods of linguistic analysis, but we don’t yet know exactly what the Gospel is, we don’t know the content of it.

In the remainder of his book, van Buren offers his answer to this latter question, and as you might suspect from his comments about an emphasis on Christology and from his claims that the word G-O-D no longer has meaning, his understanding is going to focus on Christ; that is his understanding of the Gospel. Very little is said about God and when it is, it is usually translated into ideas about Christ or about our understanding of Christ. One should not be misled by this, however. The methodology of linguistic analysis shows that the language of Christ can’t be taken as straightforward literal, empirical assertion either. So if you thought we were going to be orthodox in van Buren’s Christology, you need to dissuade yourself of that idea very quickly. For example, the historical fact of Jesus of Nazareth is important for van Buren, but he says that our understanding of the Gospel involves not only that historical fact, but it involves Easter as well. But now again, don’t get

too excited or enthusiastic about this. Don’t think of Easter as referring to a literal resurrection.

Easter, according to van Buren, refers to the fact that people thought they saw Christ after He died and as a result of that, they saw Him in a new way; they viewed Him in a new way and this awakened in them the same kind of freedom that Jesus had. Now the kind of freedom that Jesus had, van Buren says, is a freedom from self and a freedom to be for others. Now there’s no doubt, van Buren says, that when the disciples said Christ appeared to them, there’s no doubt that they were making a sense content statement. That is, they really did have some sensation and van Buren believes it was a sensation of something or other, though not, of course, of a literally raised Christ. You and I are not empirically in a position to verify what the content of their private sensation was, but the fact that they acted in a new way shows that they really did have this sensation, and that as a result of this happening to them, their way of thinking changed.

So van Buren will tell us that Easter is crucial to the Gospel, not because it speaks of an empirically verifiable resurrection, but because it speaks of people coming to see Christ in a new way and acting accordingly. What is verifiable is that they must have experienced something because their behavior changed to fit this new understanding. What is not verifiable is that they actually saw Christ. No empirically-oriented, secular, modern 20th Century person can believe that they actually saw Jesus Christ raised from the dead.

Well, I think as you reflect on this theology, you can see that it is clearly a theology for which God is dead. Jesus Christ isn’t dead, that is, He’s still meaningful, but once we understand that when we talk about Jesus and when we talk about the Gospel we are not playing an empirical language game, just like history or science, then we recognize that the Jesus van Buren leaves for us is a far, far cry from the Jesus of the biblical narrative. And as I’ve suggested, it’s a Jesus and a Christianity which leaves out God. The term God has become so devoid of meaning in the 20th Century and we have so little idea of what this really stands for that indeed it really doesn’t make any sense to talk about God. We should confine our talk to Jesus, but, of course, Jesus as modern man can understand Him.

Well, we have then in Paul van Buren’s Secular Meaning of the Gospel an example of a Death of God Theology that relies heavily

upon linguistic analysis. I want to turn now to another example of a Death of God Theology. It’s represented by Thomas J. J. Altizer’s The Gospel of Christian Atheism. This book was published in 1966 by Westminster Press and all of my references to page numbers will refer to that edition.

Well, you remember that in van Buren’s case, he appeals very heavily to major thinkers like Bonhoeffer and Flew and Bultmann and, of course, the linguistic analysts, and just as he has thinkers in the background of what he is doing, so Altizer takes his cue from three major thinkers as well. But in Altizer’s case the key people are three 19th Century thinkers. Very important for Altizer are the philosophers Nietzsche and Hagel and then also the poet William Blake. Now what is it about these individuals that Altizer finds so helpful? Well, in particular it is their critique of traditional Christianity and specifically the God of traditional Christianity which they find so offensive. It’s that critique that Altizer believes points out the problem from the modern person who wants to be a Christian.

Well, as you begin looking at Altizer’s book, you come first of all to his introduction; and actually in the introduction, Altizer sounds the main themes that he’s going to develop in the book. And because of that, I think it’s instructive for us to begin with his introduction. Altizer begins the introduction and actually the whole book with the following comments, and I quote him: “Does God lie at the center of Christian faith and proclamation? Is the Christian word ‘forever’ inseparable from its historic ground in the existence and the power of God? Must Christian witness inevitably speak of the glory and the sovereignty of God? These are questions which faith itself is now posing to the Christian and they are questions that must be met by the Christian who dares to accept the contemporary challenge of faith. It is the thesis of this book that the Christian and the Christian alone can speak of God in our time. But the message the Christian is now called to proclaim is the Gospel, the good news or the glad tidings of the death of God.” That comes from page 15.

Well, that’s a rather shocking way to begin a book and reading that you might ask yourself now why in the world is it necessary at this point in history for us to speak about the death of God. Well, Altizer goes on. On page 16, he explains why this is necessary. Let me quote from him again. He says, “For many years a conspiracy of silence removed theology from our contemporary human and historical situation. The modern theologian, while recognizing

that God was no longer visible in the culture, the society, and the history of a dying Christendom was nevertheless persuaded that He was present and present in His eternal form in an autonomous Word of faith.” And Altizer here capitalizes the term Word. “Inevitably the price that had to be paid for such a choice was an isolation of faith from the concrete and present reality of human existence. Under the impact of an increasingly profane history, this answer simply evaporated or lost all human meaning and theology was reduced once more to establishing faith as a haven for the emptiness and the ravages of an indifferent or hostile world. Meanwhile, theology ceased to speak in any meaningful way about the Word of faith. The language of the theologian became largely the polemical language of attack, assaulting other theologians for either the sacrifice of faith or the complete abandonment of all clarity and coherence and even occasionally, and this much more timidly, daring to attack the great outside world of unfaith or anti-faith.”

Well, you can see from this that what Altizer is saying is that the reason that it’s necessary to speak about the death of God is that the traditional concept of God has become absolutely irrelevant to modern man, and because of that, Christianity, which incorporates that notion of God, is also irrelevant. On the other hand, if Christianity is going to have any relevance, any impact in the contemporary situation, it has to be stated in a form that modern man can appreciate and can adopt.

Well, what is the answer? What does Altizer think the direction should be that Christian theology should go? In my next lecture, I want to take that up immediately and see what he says about that and how he elaborates his theme of the importance of the death of God.

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