God is dead theology

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The God-is-dead theology is named after a Nietzsche quote, which is first found in Aphorism 125 of the Happy Science , but was best known in connection with Nietzsche's late work Also Spoke Zarathustra . It is sometimes referred to as theothanatology , which is derived from the ancient Greek terms θεός theos "god" and θάνατος thanatos "death".

God is dead theology refers to a set of theories by various theologians and philosophers who seek to explain the rise of secularism and the abandonment of traditional belief in God by claiming that God either left humanity or even ceased to exist to exist.

The April 8, 1966 title of Time magazine and the leading article referred to a movement in American theology known in the 1960s as the "death of God".

Representative

The main exponents of this theology were the Christian theologians Gabriel Vahanian , Paul van Buren , William Hamilton and Thomas JJ Altizer, as well as Rabbi Richard Lowell Rubenstein .

In 1961 Vahanian's book The Death of God was published. Vahanian declared that modern secular culture has lost all sense of the sacred, has no sacramental meaning, no transcendent goal, no providence. He concluded that to the modern mind, God is dead. In Vahanian's vision, a transformed post-Christian and postmodern culture is needed to create a renewed experience of the divine.

Van Buren and Hamilton agreed that the concept of transcendence has lost all meaning in modern thought. According to its norms, God is dead. In response to this breakdown of transcendence, Van Buren and Hamilton offered secular people the choice of Jesus as the ideal person who acted in love. The encounter with the Christ of faith is opened in a church community.

Altizer proposed a radical theology of God's death based on William Blake , Hegelian thought, and Nietzsche's ideas. He understood theology as a form of poetry in which the immanence (presence) of God can be experienced in religious communities. However, he no longer recognized the possibility of believing in a transcendent God. Altizer concluded that God became man in Christ and passed on his immanent spirit , which remained in the world even after the death of Jesus, which contradicts New Testament statements such as 1 Petr 1,2  EU . Unlike Nietzsche, Altizer believed that God really died. He is seen as the leading proponent of God-is-dead theology.

Rabbi Richard Lowell Rubenstein tried to think through the shocking effects of the Holocaust in a radical way. On the basis of the Kabbalah , he maintained in the formal sense that God "died" when the world was created. However, he argued that the death of God occurred in Auschwitz for modern Jewish culture . Although it did not literally happen at this point, it was when humanity awoke to the idea that a theistic God did not exist. In Rubenstein's work, it was no longer possible in a God of Abraham to believe -Bunds who is the almighty creator of the historical drama, because then Hitler must be his unknowingly tool. He also gives up the doctrine of the election of the Jewish people; it has no decisive role in salvation history, the God of history has died. Nature gives rise to individual forms and negates them. This sense of the tragic or the irony of human existence counteracts technological and ideological hubris . Rubenstein is close to Nietzsche's idea of eternal return , of which he said: “It is the most scientific of all possible hypotheses. We deny final goals: if existence had one, it would have to be achieved. "

Here Rubenstein sees himself in contrast to Altizer, who sticks to Christian eschatology : The Messiah has come in Jesus, and “we know that he is present in his word, and this word reconciles the world with itself.” The “ Incarnation remains a central historical and theological event that makes it impossible to believe in a transcendent God; God died in history. Instead, the incarnation - as a real and ongoing event - is the promise and possibility of ultimate transformation and salvation of the world in the here and now. ”It is a continuous process of the sacred becoming profane and the resurrection of the profane in an ultimately sacred one Shape.

Representatives outside the USA were the Anglican Bishop John AT Robinson and the German theologian Dorothee Sölle . Among other things, they were influenced by Dietrich Bonhoeffer's question about a non-religious Christianity.

In Christian mysticism , too, there is a trend that comes to similar consequences as the God-is-dead theology, such as the negative theology of Meister Eckhart . His sentence is well known: he would "spurn the sight of the Trinity in order to cook soup for a mother".

Aftermath and criticism

The concern of the God-is-dead theology is still met with incomprehension and rejection in large parts of the Christian churches. In contrast, Stephen R. Haynes and John K. Roth see it as a new kind of connection between theological reflection and contemporary experience. In particular, they value reflecting on the Holocaust as an impetus for a conversation among those who are interested in the relationship between theology and human survival.

From the point of view of natural theology , it is impossible that God is not, and accordingly also not possible that he is dead in the sense of non-existence. ( Psalm 146.10  EU )

Hubert G. Locke criticizes the white, western-oriented perspective and points out that Harvey Cox in City Without God? ignores the experiences of the religiously influenced Afro-American civil rights movement . The death of God was proclaimed in theology in the same decade in which black Christians got their political motivation from belief in the God of Exodus . Black and radical theologians read Bonhoeffer in very different ways. While these emphasized the maturity of the world, which can do without God, those heard his call to suffer with Christ in history. Although the Holocaust had degenerated the Enlightenment idea of ​​progress into a parody, radical theologians had not given up the illusion of Western humanity, but rather found it less worrying to proclaim the ultimate downfall of a god whom Western tradition found intellectually useless.

Rabbis like Arthur Lelyveld, Norman Lamm , Emil Fackenheim or Eugene Borowitz consider a transcendent point of reference to be necessary, especially in view of " Auschwitz , Hiroshima and the South African Union " :

“And here we stand, trapped and locked in a paradox: When such terrible things happen, how can we believe in God? But if we do not believe in Him as the standard that transcends our human, bestial, animal inclinations and requires us to be more than we want to be, why do we protest so much? We rebel because we know that we are more than what we see ourselves as, that we must constantly strive to be more than we are, that human history cannot continue as it has before. God asks us to do this even when we argue with Him. "

See also

literature

  • Gabriel Vahanian : The Death of God . George Braziller, New York 1961
  • Dorothee Sölle : Substitute. A chapter on theology after the “death of God” . Stuttgart 1965, ext. New edition 1982
  • Dorothee Sölle: Believing in God atheistically. Contributions to theology . Olten and Freiburg, 1968
  • Thomas Jonathan Jackson Altizer : The Gospel of Christian Atheism . Westminster, Philadelphia 1966
  • Thomas JJ Altizer, William Hamilton: Radical Theology and the Death of God . Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis 1966
  • Bernard Murchland (Ed.): The Meaning of the Death of God . Random House, New York 1967
  • Richard Rubenstein : God After the Death of God . In: After Auschwitz: History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism . Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1992²; 293-306
  • John D. Caputo, Gianni Vattimo : After the Death of God . Columbia University Press, New York 2007

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Timothy A. Bennett, Rochelle L. Millen: Christians and Pharisees: Jewish responses to Radical Theology ; in: Stephen R. Haynes, John K. Roth: The Death of God Movement and the Holocaust ; Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999, p. 120
  2. ↑ Friedrich Nietzsche: From the estate of the eighties ; Works IV, pp. 445-853
  3. ^ Thomas JJ Altizer: Word and History ; in Thomas JJ Altizer, William Hamilton: Radical Theology and the Death of God ; Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis 1966, p. 132
  4. ↑ Timothy A. Bennett, Rochelle L. Millen: Christians and Pharisees: Jewish responses to Radical Theology ; in: Stephen R. Haynes, John K. Roth: The Death of God Movement and the Holocaust ; Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999, p. 123
  5. ↑ Klaus Berger: Against the "topless" theology . In: The daily mail . Quoted from kath.net , December 31, 2007
  6. ↑ Stephen R. Haynes, John K. Roth: The Death of God Movement and the Holocaust ; Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999, p. Xvii
  7. ^ The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (1965), Collier Books, 25th anniversary edition 1990. ISBN 0-02-031155-9 / German: Stadt ohne Gott? 6th ed. 21-26 Tsd., Kreuz-Verlag, Stuttgart / Berlin 1971. ISBN 3-7831-0024-0
  8. ^ Hubert G. Locke: The Death of God: An African-American Perspective ; in: Stephen R. Haynes, John K. Roth: The Death of God Movement and the Holocaust ; Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999, pp. 91-97
  9. ↑ Eugene Borowitz: God-is-Dead-Theology ; in: Bernard Murchland: The Meaning of the Death of God . Random House, New York 1967, pp. 97f.
  10. ↑ Eugene Borowitz: Facing Up to It , p. 16; quoted n. Timothy A. Bennett, Rochelle L. Millen: Christians and Pharisees: Jewish responses to Radical Theology ; in: Stephen R. Haynes, John K. Roth: The Death of God Movement and the Holocaust ; Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999, p. 113