Death of God theology

Christian theologians announcing the death of God

Death of God theology — in English death of God theology, which its authors also called "radical theology" (radical theology) — is a movement that appeared in the early 1960s and sought to turn the phrase "God is dead" from the cry of an atheist philosopher into the starting point of a Christian theology. William Hamilton and Thomas J. J. Altizer themselves presented it, in January 1966, as "a contemporary development within Protestantism," to which a few Jewish, Catholic, and non-religious voices were already responding, and as "an attempt to place an atheistic point of view among the Christian possibilities"^[2]. They add that this theology has "a distinctively American form"^[3].

The novelty was not atheism, as old as the world: it was the place from which it spoke. The Death of God theologians taught in theology faculties and seminaries, called themselves Christians, and addressed the Churches. Hamilton claimed it in 1965: they profess "to be theologians, to be Christians, to speak from a community and to a community," and refuse to let their position be seen as "a complicated form of atheism wearing a new hat"^[4]. The 1966 preface speaks of a "pastoral response" intended to support "those who have chosen to live as Christian atheists"^[5].

The sharpest formula is Hamilton's. It says exactly what separates this theology from the experience of the mystics, who often felt God far from them without ever doubting that he was there:

"We are not speaking of the absence of the experience of God, but of the experience of the absence of God." — William Hamilton, "The Death of God Theologies Today," 1965^[6]

Ten senses for a single formula

The expression was so ambiguous that its own promoters had to break it down. In the preface to Radical Theology and the Death of God, dated 1 January 1966, Hamilton and Altizer list ten possible senses, "moving slowly from conventional atheism to theological orthodoxy": there never was a God; there was a God, but there no longer is one; the idea and the word "God" must be entirely recast; liturgical and theological language must be revised; the Christian narrative no longer saves; certain concepts of God must be destroyed; men now experience God only as hidden, absent, silent; false gods must die so that the true one may be born; God must die in the world to be born in us; our language about God always remains imperfect^[7].

Of these ten senses, they claim only one as their own, the second:

"There was once a God to whom worship, praise, and trust were appropriate, possible, and even necessary, but there is now no longer any such God. This is the position of Death of God theology, or radical theology. It is an atheistic position, but with a difference." — Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, preface to Radical Theology and the Death of God, 1966^[8]

The list explains why the debate was so confused. The last senses have always belonged to Christian language: the God who hides himself (Is 45:15), the idols that must be abandoned, the birth of Christ in the soul, and the awareness that "our human words always fall short of the mystery of God" — while truly reaching it^[9]. The second, by contrast, denies that God still exists. A single slogan thus covered both Christian truths and their negation, and it is this ambiguity that gave it its power to spread.

To find one's way, the authors can be reduced to three families. For some, the death of God is a fact of culture: modern civilization lives as if God did not exist (Gabriel Vahanian, William Hamilton). For another, it is a fact of language: the word "God" is said to have no more verifiable meaning for modern man (Paul van Buren). For the most radical, it is a real event: God is said to have emptied himself in Christ and in the world, never to return (Thomas Altizer)^[10]. The Second Vatican Council, which was completing its work in autumn 1965, at the very moment the press was discovering the movement, already described these attitudes among the forms of contemporary atheism: some expressly deny God, while others "treat the question of God in such a way that the question seems meaningless"^[11].

What Death of God theology is not

Four confusions must be set aside from the outset.

• It is not ordinary atheism. The classical atheist says there never was a God; radical theology says there was one and that he died, and it claims to keep Jesus, the Gospel, and the Church^[12].
• It is not Nietzsche. When the German philosopher has his "madman" cry out that God is dead, in 1882, he speaks as an adversary of Christianity; the theologians of the 1960s wanted to turn the same phrase into Christian good news. The article Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) sets out the philosopher's thought.
• It is not the silence of God known to believers. "Truly you are a God who hides himself" (Is 45:15): the psalmists, the prophets, and the saints knew God's felt absence, even to the nights of faith. A God who hides himself is not a dead God, and Saint Paul VI recalled this in 1968: "God is hidden," but he "makes himself heard and sought by other means"^[13].
• It is not the Christian confession "God died on the cross." The faith has said since the apostles that the Son of God died in his flesh, and that he rose again; it never says that divinity ceased to be. This decisive point is developed below, in the section on what the faith truly says about the death of God.

The formula was not born in the twentieth century, nor even with Nietzsche. It comes from Christian piety, which sang of the death of the Son of God on the cross; philosophy then detached it from the cross, Romantic literature made it a nightmare, Nietzsche an atheist cry, and the theologians of the 1960s a program. Hamilton and Altizer themselves acknowledged it: the German chorale "God himself is dead" is perhaps, they wrote, "the historical source of our modern usage" of the expression^[14].

"God himself lies dead": a Lutheran hymn of 1641

In 1641, the Lutheran pastor Johann Rist published at Lunebourg the first collection of his Himlische Lieder ("Heavenly Songs"). It contains a "sorrowful funeral hymn" for Good Friday and Holy Saturday, O Traurigkeit, o Herzeleid ("O sorrow, O heart's pain"), whose first stanza mourns "the only child of God the Father" carried to the tomb^[15]. The second stanza says:

"O great distress! God himself lies dead. He died on the cross, and thereby, through love, won for us the kingdom of heaven." — Johann Rist, O Traurigkeit, o Herzeleid, second stanza, 1641^[16]

The line seemed so bold that in the nineteenth century several evangelical hymnals corrected it to "the Lord lies dead," then to "the Son of God lies dead," the version sung today^[17]. The correction was not necessary, however, for the Catholic faith: the hymn says exactly what the Council of Ephesus and the Second Council of Constantinople say, namely that the one who died on the cross is God, and that he died "through love." Luther himself had defended this way of speaking, in 1539, against those who wanted to reserve it for the man Jesus:

"If it is not God, but only a man, who died for us, we are lost. […] God, in his nature, cannot die, but, since God and man were united in a single person, it is rightly said: God died, when the man died who was one, or a single person, with God." — Martin Luther, Des conciles et de l'Église, 1539^[18]

Until then, the formula therefore belongs to the language of faith: it designates the death of the Son in the flesh, it is sung before the cross, and it leads to the kingdom. The next step was to tear it away from the cross.

Hegel and the "speculative Good Friday" (1802-1827)

The philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is the first to make the phrase a diagnosis of his time. In 1802, on the last page of his essay Foi et savoir, he speaks of "the infinite pain" on which "the religion of modern times" rests, and which he sums up with the hymn's formula: "the feeling: God himself is dead." Philosophy must, in his view, take up this pain as a mere "moment" of the Idea and thereby restore "the speculative Good Friday, which was otherwise historical"^[19].

The shift is decisive. The Good Friday of the Gospel is an event of history, followed by a Sunday; Hegel's "speculative" Good Friday is a stage of thought through which God himself is said to pass in order to become fully God. In his 1827 lectures on the philosophy of religion, Hegel explicitly quotes Rist's hymn and draws from it a reading that is no longer that of the Church:

""God himself is dead," says this Lutheran hymn; this consciousness expresses that the human, the finite, the fragile, weakness, the negative are themselves a divine moment, that they are in God himself." — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Leçons sur la philosophie de la religion, 1827^[20]

For the faith, the Son takes on human weakness without divinity becoming weak; for Hegel, negation and death become moments of God's own life, which realizes itself in the world and in history. The First Vatican Council would target precisely this idea in 1870, rejecting the opinion that "the divine essence becomes all things by manifesting or evolving itself"^[21]. It is in this Hegelian lineage that Thomas Altizer would place his theology, a century and a half later.

The dream of the dead Christ: Jean Paul (1796) and Nerval (1844)

Before being a theory, the death of God was a nightmare. In 1796, the German writer Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter) inserted into his novel Siebenkäs a "Speech of the dead Christ, from the top of the edifice of the world, to say that there is no God." In a dream, the dead ask Christ whether there is no God, and he answers: "There is none"; to the dead children who ask him whether they have no father, he answers weeping: "We are all orphans, I and you, we are without a father"^[22]. But the story ends with the dreamer waking, his soul "weeping with joy at being able to worship God anew," and Jean Paul admits in a note that he would himself reread these pages to heal himself, if his heart ever came to lose the sense of God^[23]. It is a nightmare written to awaken faith.

Germaine de Staël gave a translation of it in De l'Allemagne — printed in 1810 but seized by the imperial police, published in London in 1813 then in Paris in 1814 — under the title "Un songe"^[24]. She stopped her translation at the collapse of the world, without the believing awakening of the dreamer: Romantic France thus received the nightmare without its conclusion^[25]. In 1844, Gérard de Nerval drew from it the epigraph of his poem "Le Christ aux Oliviers," which he attributes to Jean Paul but which he himself condenses into a formula promised a long posterity:

"God is dead! heaven is empty… Weep! children, you have no father anymore!" — Gérard de Nerval, "Le Christ aux Oliviers," epigraph, 1844^[26]

Nietzsche and the madman's announcement (1882)

With Friedrich Nietzsche, the formula definitively changes meaning: it no longer designates the death of the Crucified One, but the death of faith itself. As early as § 108 of The Gay Science (1882), he warns that the event will leave a lasting shadow behind it:

"After the death of Buddha people still showed his shadow for centuries in a cave — an enormous and terrifying shadow. God is dead: but, given the way men are made, there may still be for thousands of years caves in which his shadow is shown."^[27]

The most famous passage, § 125, stages a "madman" who, lantern in hand in broad daylight, announces in the marketplace: "Where has God gone? […] We have killed him — you and I!"; "God is dead! God remains dead! And it is we who have killed him!"; and he asks what churches are now for, "if they are not the tombs and monuments of God"^[28]. The madman adds that he "comes too early": the enormous event is still on its way, men have not measured its consequences.

In § 343, which in 1887 opens Book V added to the second edition, Nietzsche names the event without parable: "the fact 'that God is dead,' that faith in the Christian God has been shaken"^[29]. "God is dead" therefore does not mean for him that God does not exist, but that faith in the Christian God has become unbelievable — and that Europe continues to live in the shadow of a God it no longer believes in. (French texts: trans. Henri Albert, 1901^[30].)

Bonhoeffer, Bultmann, Tillich: the materials for a theology without God

In the twentieth century, three Protestant theologians unwittingly supply the materials that the American theorists of the death of God would use. In 1941, in the middle of the war, the Lutheran exegete Rudolf Bultmann launched in his lecture New Testament and Mythology the program of "demythologization": the New Testament is said to speak the outdated language of myth, and faith must retranslate its content into a call to decision, without holding to the historical reality of the narratives^[31].

Paul Tillich, exiled in the United States since 1933 and become one of the most famous Protestants in America — cover of Time magazine on 16 March 1959^[32] — teaches that the "God of theism," a being among others, must be surpassed toward the "God above God," the ground of being itself^[33]. In October 1965, Time quotes him in support of the new movement: "I say yes to this movement insofar as it points to something that is above symbolic language about God"^[34].

Finally Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from his cell in Tegel prison, sketched during the summer of 1944 a "religionless Christianity": the world is said to have come of age, the "stopgap" God of the limits of knowledge pushed ever further back, and he wrote to his friend Eberhard Bethge, on 16 July 1944: "before God and with God we live without God"^[35]. Altizer, Hamilton — who devoted a chapter of Radical Theology and the Death of God (1966) to him — and Rubenstein would claim him as their own^[36]; but Bonhoeffer prayed every day in prison and confesses the risen Christ to the end: a forced appropriation, as the reply to objection 4 below shows.

Between 1961 and 1966, four Protestant theologians in the United States announced, each on his own, the death of God — then the major press turned it into a national event. The movement is distinct from post-conciliar Catholic neo-modernism: a Presbyterian, two Episcopalians, a Methodist teaching at Syracuse, Philadelphia, Rochester, and Atlanta, plus a rabbi. Time, which brought them together in October 1965, saw in it "a uniquely American phenomenon"^[37]; in December 1969, the same magazine wondered whether God was not in the process of "coming back to life"^[38].

1961: a Frenchman from Syracuse announces the "post-Christian" era

The first of the four is a Frenchman. Gabriel Vahanian was born on 24 January 1927 in Marseille, into an Armenian family, studied at Valence then in Paris, left for the United States in 1948, earned a master's degree there in 1950 then a doctorate at Princeton in 1958, and taught twenty-six years at Syracuse; he died in Strasbourg on 30 August 2012, at 85^[39].

His book The Death of God: The Culture of Our Post-Christian Era, published in New York by George Braziller in 1961, reuses articles from The Nation — including "This Post-Christian Era" of 12 December 1959 — with a preface by Paul Ramsey and a Nietzsche epigraph^[40]. The thesis is not that God does not exist: Western civilization, become "post-Christian" while remaining religious, has made God a cultural accessory, and this well-integrated American religiosity is itself his tomb. French translation as early as 1962 by Bernard Willerval, at Buchet-Chastel^[41]. In 1965, Time presented him, at 38, as "more conservative than the others"^[42].

1963: an Episcopalian priest declares the word "God" meaningless

The second is an Episcopalian priest trained by Karl Barth (doctorate 1957), who joined Temple University in Philadelphia in 1964, where he would teach until 1986^[43]. Paul van Buren, 41 in 1965, published in 1963 The Secular Meaning of the Gospel — subtitled Based on an Analysis of Its Language — in New York with Macmillan and in London with SCM Press^[44].

His thesis applies to theology the verification criterion of analytical philosophy: a sentence verifiable by no experience says nothing, and the word "God" is in that case — including, as Time notes, "the very prospect of his reappearance"^[45]. The Gospel must be retranslated into secular language, centered on the man Jesus of Nazareth. The Second Vatican Council would describe two years later, without naming anyone, this attitude: some "treat the question of God in such a way that the question seems meaningless"^[46].

William Hamilton: the "experience of the absence of God"

The third, William Hamilton, was born in 1924 in Evanston, Illinois, studied at Oberlin then at Union Theological Seminary in the time of Niebuhr and Tillich, earned his doctorate at St Andrews under Donald Baillie, and became holder of the chair of historical theology at Colgate Rochester Divinity School^[47].

In 1961, like Vahanian, he published The New Essence of Christianity with Association Press — Time retained from it: "If Jesus could wonder whether he was abandoned by God, will we be blamed for wondering?"^[48]. In spring 1965, his article "The Death of God Theologies Today," in The Christian Scholar, gave the movement its sharpest formula:

"We are not speaking of the absence of the experience of God, but of the experience of the absence of God." — William Hamilton, "The Death of God Theologies Today," 1965^[49]

Hamilton called himself a Christian and wanted to stay in the Church: "in the time of the death of God, we have a place to be, he said. It is not before an altar; it is in the world, in the city, with the neighbor in need as with the enemy"^[50]. The price was immediate: in 1967, Colgate Rochester withdrew his chair and barred him from the introductory course; "I got the message," he would write: "death of God for me; death of Christian character for them"^[51]. He left for New College in Sarasota, then joined Portland State University in 1970, where he ended his career; he died in Portland on 28 February 2012, at 87^[52]. Ten years later, he would date the affair lucidly: October 1965, an article by Edward B. Fiske in the New York Times followed in less than a week by Time — "enough to turn a few articles and reviews, plus a long personal correspondence between Tom Altizer and me, into a media event"^[53].

Thomas Altizer: kenosis to the end

The fourth is the most radical and the most famous. Thomas Jonathan Jackson Altizer was born on 28 May 1927 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, studied at the University of Chicago (bachelor's 1948, master of theology 1951, doctorate 1955), failed the psychiatric examination prerequisite for Episcopalian ordination, then converted, in his own words, "to the death of God"^[54]. He taught at Wabash College, then at Emory University in Atlanta from 1956 to 1968^[55].

His shock phrase appeared as early as 1963 in his book on Mircea Eliade (Westminster Press, Philadelphia), before opening his essay "Theology and the Death of God," page 95 of the 1966 collection:

"God died in our time, in our history, in our existence." — Thomas J. J. Altizer, Mircea Eliade and the Dialectic of the Sacred, 1963, reprinted in Radical Theology and the Death of God, 1966^[56]

For Altizer, the death of God is neither a metaphor nor a problem of language: it is a historical event to be welcomed, even willed — the Incarnation itself having to be understood, says the joint preface of 1ᵉʳ janvier 1966, "as effecting the death of God"^[57]. Where Friedrich Nietzsche announced it as an adversary of Christianity, Altizer makes it Christian good news: that is the subject of The Gospel of Christian Atheism, published in 1966 by Westminster Press^[58].

On the Merv Griffin Show, "the response was violent": on the way out, "a crowd awaited me, demanding my death"^[59]. At Emory, indignant letters, threats over donations, a critical statement from the Methodist bishops — but President Sanford Atwood defended his tenure in the name of academic freedom, his post belonging to the undergraduate college and not to the Candler school of theology^[60]. Altizer left Emory in 1968 for English at Stony Brook; he died on 28 novembre 2018 in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, at 91^[61].

A rabbi among the theologians: Richard Rubenstein

The fifth name is not Christian. Rabbi Richard Rubenstein published in 1966, with Bobbs-Merrill of Indianapolis, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism: after the murder of six million Jews, one can no longer believe in the God of the Covenant or in the God who acts in history — for one would have to see his will in the Shoah^[62]. Hamilton would count him among his own, "Jewish and religious"^[63]. His question is that of innocent evil, not of secularization; the article The Church and the Shoah treats it in its own right.

The neighbors: Robinson, Cox, Sölle

Around the core gravitate three neighbors, cited without being counted among the four. In England, the Anglican Bishop of Woolwich John Robinson published on 19 mars 1963 with SCM Press a 143-page paperback, Honest to God, which popularized Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich and caused a national scandal^[64]. In the United States, the Baptist Harvey Cox published in 1965 La Cité séculière (The Secular City), in praise of an adult world with no reference to God — Saint Paul VI would discuss this book in 1971, Casterman edition 1968, page 50^[65]. In Germany, the Lutheran Dorothee Sölle published in 1965 Stellvertretung, "a chapter of theology after the death of God," toward a political theology of suffering^[66].

The uproar: three Time covers

On 22 octobre 1965, the religion section of Time headlined "The "God Is Dead" Movement," opened with Altizer's phrase and lined up the four portraits — Altizer, van Buren of Temple, Hamilton of Colgate Rochester, Vahanian of Syracuse — with this definition: "They say that it is no longer possible to think of a transcendent God who acts in human history, nor to believe in him, and that Christianity will have to survive, if it survives, without him"^[67]. The end gave the floor to Harvey Cox, 36, to the Methodist Daniel Day Williams — "There is no God, and Jesus is his only son" — and to Paul Tillich: "I say yes to this movement insofar as it points to something above symbolic language about God"^[68]. A few days earlier, Edward B. "Ted" Fiske had opened fire in the New York Times^[69].

On 8 avril 1966, in the middle of Holy Week, Time struck harder: a black cover with blood-red letters, "Is God Dead?," with no image at all — a first — for an eight-page report, "Toward a Hidden God," prepared over more than a year by John Elson with some thirty correspondents and about three hundred interviews^[70]. The report reduced the group "chiefly to Altizer, Hamilton and Van Buren," cited a Harris poll (97% of Americans said they believed in God, 27% described themselves as deeply religious) and Paul Ramsey's remark — "the first attempt in history to build a culture on the postulate that God is dead"^[71]. Best-selling newsstand issue in more than twenty years, 3 421 readers' letters, a record at that date^[72].

On 26 décembre 1969, the same magazine took stock: "Is God Coming Back to Life?" — God had perhaps only been "eclipsed during a period of dizzying social change," and Gallup measured Sunday practice falling from 49% (1958) to 43% (1968)^[73]. The movement seemed extinct: in 1989, Lloyd Steffen would observe that "the death of God is dead"^[74].

The four authors did not say the same thing under the same slogan — which is precisely why the slogan circulated so well. As seen above: for some, the death of God is a fact of culture; for another, a fact of language; for the most radical, a real event. Each thesis is presented here fairly, in its own words — that is the steelman rule: present the opponent in his best light before discussing him — then one sentence states what faith retains as true in it. The full doctrinal judgment comes next, in the section on heresy, and the final table sums up the five positions at a glance.

Gabriel Vahanian: the death of God as a fact of culture

Vahanian's thesis is the most sober of the four, and the only one its author never presented as an atheism: the "death of God" is a fact of culture, not a statement about God. From page 6, he warns that this death is not "a recent historical or cultural misfortune" that a revival would repair, but "a fundamental possibility confronting every man," born of the religious inclination itself — and that this post-Christian era is "the product of Christianity"^[87]. The West has entered a "post-Christian" era — the expression is his — while remaining religious with a religiosity that is neither pagan nor Christian: it "worships under the name of God a dotard," he writes, quoting Kierkegaard, and cultural Christianity "bequeathed to us the idea of the death of God," become "the foundation of our civilization"^[88]. God dies as soon as he becomes an accessory of culture or a human ideal, adds the last page: the finite cannot contain the infinite^[89].

"Our age is post-Christian; but it is still religious." — Gabriel Vahanian, The Death of God, afterword, 1961^[90]

What the Church retains as true in it, in one sentence: the observation is largely correct — a society can live as if God did not exist — but a fact of culture is not a fact about God, and the Council itself recognizes that believers, through their failings, "veil the authentic face of God" instead of revealing it^[91].

Paul van Buren: the death of God as a fact of language

Van Buren's thesis is the most technical: it concerns neither God nor culture, but words. Applying to theology the criterion of analytic philosophy — a statement has meaning only if it can be verified or refuted by experience — he argues that sentences about a transcendent God acting in history say nothing at all, and that the word "God" is therefore dead with the death of empty words^[92]. What remains is the Gospel, to be retranslated into secular language: no longer "God has spoken," but the story of Jesus of Nazareth and of the freedom he communicates. Irony of history: the author of this manifesto is a priest trained by Karl Barth, the theologian of the Word of God — having passed through the Episcopal seminary at Austin before Temple — who turns against theology the demand for rigor learned in a good school. He is the only one of the four whose position almost exactly overlaps meaning no. 2 claimed by the joint preface of 1966 — "there was a God, there is none anymore" — except that in his case nonexistence follows meaninglessness: God is no more because the word "God" no longer means anything. Time summed up in 1965: he "gloomily concludes that all talk about God — including the very prospect of his reappearance — is philosophically meaningless"^[93].

Intellectual honesty requires adding that van Buren himself later reread his book severely: in 1980, he ranked The Secular Meaning of the Gospel among works that take "our uncritical cultural two-dimensionality as the norm," alongside Harvey Cox's La Cité séculière^[94].

What the Church retains as true in it, in one sentence: the demand is legitimate — speaking of God must never be pious chatter — but the Church speaks of God by analogy and from his visible works, for "since the creation of the world, the invisible perfections of God are seen by the mind through his works" (Rm 1, 20).

William Hamilton: the death of God as experience

Hamilton's thesis is the most pastoral of the four: neither a theory of culture nor a theory of language, but the testimony of an experience. Men today do not merely lack the experience of God; they positively experience his absence — "we do not know, we do not worship, we do not possess, we do not believe in God," he wrote in 1965, "and we do not take all this as a mere statement about our fragile psyches, but as a statement about the nature of the world"^[95]. And this absence is public: "the death of God is a public event of our history," he added — it is not confessed in the secrecy of a soul, it is announced to a community in order to convince it^[96]. The Christian nevertheless stays at his post: "in the time of the death of God, we have a place to be — not before an altar, but in the world, in the city, with the neighbor in need as with the enemy"^[97]. And this atheism claims to be provisional: "we wait, we try out new words, we pray that God will return"^[98]. Hamilton moreover refuses to have his position reduced to "a complicated form of atheism wearing a new hat," as seen above: he means to be a theologian, speaking from one community to another.

What the Church retains as true in it, in one sentence: staying beside men instead of fleeing the world is a Christian duty, and a God who hides — "truly, you are a God who hides himself" (Is 45, 15) — is not a dead God.

Thomas Altizer — and, separately, Richard Rubenstein

Altizer's thesis is the only fully metaphysical one: the death of God is a real event, come about in history, and it must be welcomed. God emptied himself in Christ and then into the world — kenosis with no return — and "only the Christian can celebrate an Incarnation in which God really became flesh," for "radical theology must finally understand the Incarnation itself as effecting the death of God"^[99]. Hamilton, who nevertheless shares his book, marks the distance: his colleague Altizer, he says, "likes to say that the death of God is a historical event, that it happened in our time, and that we should welcome it, even will it, and not turn away from it"^[100] — welcoming and willing, where Hamilton, for his part, waits and prays. The Christian must even lend a hand: say No to God in the name of the Word that comes without God, and "bury the decaying God who continues to haunt our memory of past things"^[101]. Such is the program of his Gospel of Christian Atheism, published in 1966 by Westminster Press, which Time already announced in 1965 as an analysis of the death of God "as an essentially redemptive act"^[102].

What the Church retains as true in it, in one sentence: kenosis is real — the Son "emptied himself" (Ph 2, 7) — but it is a lowering that adds humanity without removing divinity, and the hymn to the Philippians ends with the exaltation of Christ (Ph 2, 9-11), not with his dissolution.

Richard Rubenstein, for his part, belongs in a paragraph apart, for his question is not the same: in After Auschwitz (1966), the rabbi argues that the Shoah shattered the God of the Covenant and of history, since one can no longer confess a God who chooses Israel and guides history after the murder of six million Jews^[103]. No kenosis to welcome, no language to reform, no culture to describe: the crux is election and providence — if God led history, the Shoah would be his will. What the Church retains as true in it, in one sentence: before innocent evil, silence and tears come before explanations — and faith answers not with a theory, but with the crucified God who enters into suffering instead of watching it from afar.

Heresy, apostasy, or simple atheism?

The Church's law gives precise words. Heresy is called "the obstinate denial, after the reception of baptism, of a truth which must be believed with divine and Catholic faith"; apostasy, "the total rejection of the Christian faith"^[104]. The theology of the death of God stands on the border between the two. By its content, it denies the first article of the Creed, "I believe in God," and thus goes further than most ancient heresies, which disputed how God is Trinity or how Christ is God and man. By its form, it presents itself as a Christian theology, keeps the name of Jesus and speaks to the Churches; that is why it ranks among modern heresies rather than among atheist philosophies.

Saint Paul VI named this contradiction in 1971, before the Secretariat for Non-Believers. He rejected the secular version of Christianity which empties Christ's message of all its Godward scope and ends up promoting, "without caring about the contradiction in terms, a "Christian atheism"," adding: "A certain theology of the death of God has not escaped, alas, this strange absurdity"^[105].

The judgment concerns doctrines, not persons. The movement's authors were Protestants and, for one of them, a rabbi; none fell under the jurisdiction of the Catholic Church, and no proceedings targeted their persons. Paul VI himself admitted in 1970 that some had launched the formula "perhaps without bad intention," to target false or inadequate ideas of God, or from a misplaced humility before his mystery — before recalling that "it is possible to know God," by reason and by faith^[106].

The denial of the living and immutable God

The first dogma affected is the simplest. The First Vatican Council, in 1870, defined that the Church "believes and professes that there is one true and living God," "eternal," "absolutely simple and immutable," "distinct from the world in reality and by essence"^[107]. It anathematizes anyone who refuses to admit "that there is one true God, creator and Lord of visible and invisible things," and anyone who maintains "that the divine essence becomes all things in manifesting or evolving itself"^[108]. The first sentence targets atheism; the second targets in advance Hegel's God, who becomes himself only by passing into the world, and of whom Altizer's theology is the direct heir.

Altizer explicitly assumes it. In the joint preface of 1966, he writes with Hamilton that "only the Christian can celebrate an Incarnation in which God really became flesh," and that radical theology must finally understand "the Incarnation itself as effecting the death of God"^[109]. For faith, the Word became flesh without ceasing to be God; for Altizer, God becomes flesh only by ceasing to be God.

It is not a matter of opposing one authority to another. A God who could die would not be God, but a being among others, subject to time like us. Scripture says it in simple words: "I, the Lord, have not changed" (Ml 3, 6); "You are the same; your years have no end" (Ps 101 [102], 28); God is he who "alone possesses immortality" (1 Tm 6, 16). Paul VI drew the conclusion in 1968:

"No contradiction is more violent, nor more sacrilegious, than that which bursts forth between these two terms: God and death, if they are considered in their objective meaning, Being and nothingness, life and its negation, the absolute and the absurd." — Saint Paul VI, general audience of 13 novembre 1968^[110]

An old patripassianism in new clothes

The idea that the Father himself supposedly suffered and died is not new. Around the year 200, Christians in Asia Minor and Rome, Noetus and Praxeas, maintained that the Father and the Son are one and the same person. Tertullian summed up their doctrine around 213: Praxeas "says that the Father himself came down into the Virgin, that he was born of her, that he suffered," and he concluded that he had "crucified the Father"^[111]. The Church rejected this modalism, or patripassianism, as early as the 3rd century, and anathematized it with Sabellius at the Council of Constantinople in 381^[112].

Altizer does not say that the Son of God died in his flesh, which is what faith says. He says that God, as such, "died in our time, in our history, in our existence," and he draws a program from it: "It is the Christian who must kill God, or rather it is the Christian who must bury the decaying God who continues to haunt our memory of past things"^[113][114].

The theology of the death of God takes up this pattern and pushes it to the limit: it is no longer only the Father who would suffer in the Son, it is divinity itself which would disappear into the cross. The Church's faith says something else: it is the Son, and he alone, who became man and who died; he died in his flesh, without divinity, common to the Father, the Son and the Spirit, having ceased to be. The articles Modalism and Sabellianism trace this ancient crisis.

A kenosis with no return: the doctrine set aside by Pius XII in 1951

The favorite text of the theologians of the death of God is the hymn of the letter to the Philippians: Christ "emptied himself" (Ph 2, 7) — in Greek ekénôsen, whence the word kenosis, which designates the lowering of the Son in the Incarnation. Modern Protestant theologians — Thomasius, Gess, Godet, among others — had drawn from it the idea that the Word, in becoming man, supposedly limited his own omniscience and omnipresence, or even underwent a true " Depotentiation"^[115]. For the fifteenth centenary of the Council of Chalcedon, Pius XII set aside this reading without смягчение:

"Against the profession of faith of Chalcedon there also rises, widely spread outside the enclosure of the Catholic religion, an opinion which a passage of the Apostle Paul's letter to the Philippians, understood in a rash and false way, gave birth to — it is called the kenotic doctrine — and according to which it is imagined that divinity was removed from the Word in Christ: a detestable invention which, as condemnable as the Docetism opposed to it, reduces the whole mystery of the Incarnation and Redemption to empty and bloodless phantoms." — Pius XII, encyclical Sempiternus Rex Christus, 8 septembre 1951^[116]

Pius XII opposed to this thesis the formula of Saint Leo the Great: in the complete nature of a true man "was born a true God, wholly in what is his, wholly in what is ours"^[117]. Kenosis is a gift that adds humanity without subtracting divinity; and the hymn to the Philippians ends with the exaltation of him who had lowered himself (Ph 2, 9-11). Altizer's theology goes further than the kenotic Christologies targeted by Pius XII: in his case, it is no longer the Word stripping himself of a few attributes, it is God entire emptying himself into the world, and definitively. The comparison is editorial, since the 1951 encyclical predates the movement; but the condemned principle is the same, carried to its extreme.

A Christianity Without Resurrection

The last consequence is the most visible for an ordinary believer. If God is dead, no one raised Jesus from the tomb. Yet the preaching of the apostles is entirely the proclamation that "God raised him up, freeing him from the pains of death, because it was impossible for death to hold him in its power" (Acts 2:24). The Catechism recalls that the Resurrection is "a real event," and that it is the common work of the three divine Persons: it took place "by the power of the Father," and the Son "brings about his own Resurrection by virtue of his divine power"^[118]. Without it, says Saint Paul, "your faith is in vain, you are still in your sins" (1 Cor 15:17).

The theology of the death of God still keeps Jesus, however, as a model of love of neighbor and as a figure of freedom. But a Jesus who remained dead cannot be a living Lord; he can only be a memory. Paul VI saw this clearly: this secularized Christianity ends up "emptying the message of Christ of all its theocentric scope"^[119] — that is, of what turns it toward God.

The Catholic Church did not respond to the theology of the death of God with a nominal condemnation: its authors were not Catholic, and the movement died out before any particular act was needed. It responded in three complementary ways: a conciliar teaching on modern atheism, an institution for dialogue, and the repeated words of Saint Paul VI, who named the slogan, judged it, and exposed its root.

Before the Storm: Ecclesiam suam (1964)

On 6 August 1964, in his first encyclical, Paul VI devoted an entire passage to "the denial of God," which he presented as an obstacle to the Church's dialogue with the world. There he described the conviction of many men that they would free humanity "from false and outdated ideas" about God, and he offered this diagnosis:

"This phenomenon is the gravest of our time. [...] It is not a liberation, but a dramatic attempt to extinguish the light of the living God." — Saint Paul VI, encyclical Ecclesiam suam, 6 August 1964, no. 104^[120]

The encyclical does not stop at condemnation. The pope wants to "grasp, in the modern atheist, at the innermost level of his thought, the motives for his trouble and his denial," and he acknowledges that these motives are born "sometimes from the very demand concerning the presentation of the divine world: one would want it loftier and purer" than certain imperfect forms of language and worship^[121]. The whole Catholic response of the following years is already contained in this double movement: firmness on the truth, attention to the reasons of the one who doubts.

The Council Confronts Atheism: Gaudium et spes (1965)

On 7 December 1965, on the eve of the closing of the Second Vatican Council, the constitution Gaudium et spes devoted three articles to atheism. The text first affirms the gravity of the phenomenon: many of our contemporaries reject "the intimate and vital bond which unites man to God," "to such an extent that atheism ranks among the gravest facts of this time and must be subjected to a most careful examination"^[122]. It then distinguishes its forms: express denial, agnosticism, the question of God judged "meaningless," man exalted to the point of enervating faith, protest "in revolt against evil in the world"^[123].

The council also made an examination of conscience that few of the Church's adversaries expected:

"In this genesis of atheism, believers may have no small share, insofar as, by neglect in the education of their faith, by misleading presentations of doctrine, and also by failures in their religious, moral, and social life, it can be said of them that they veil the authentic face of God and of religion rather than reveal it." — Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et spes, no. 19, § 3^[124]

The council's response rests on three affirmations. The Church "cannot cease to reprove with pain and with the greatest firmness" atheistic doctrines; at the same time she seeks to grasp "the hidden causes of the denial of God"^[125]. She holds that "the recognition of God is in no way opposed to the dignity of man, since this dignity finds in God himself what founds it and what brings it to completion"^[126]. And she points to the remedy: doctrine presented as it should be, and above all the life of believers, for "what contributes most to revealing the presence of God is the fraternal love of the faithful"^[127].

The Secretariat for Non-Believers (1965)

Paul VI had wanted an institution for this dialogue. L'Osservatore Romano of 9 April 1965 announced the creation of a Secretariat for Non-Believers, entrusted to Cardinal Franz König, Archbishop of Vienna, appointed to its presidency on 6 April; the cardinal defined its task as the study of the various atheisms, "with a view to dialogue"^[128]. The pope saw in it the sign of the Church's interest in all men, "even those who are farthest from her"^[129]. The Secretariat published on 28 August 1968 a document on dialogue with non-believers, which begins with the words Humanae personae dignitatem^[130]. The death-of-God movement thus faced, from its very entry into the news, a Church that had given itself the means to study unbelief instead of merely deploring it.

Saint Paul VI and the "Unfortunate Slogan" (1968-1975)

From 1968 on, Paul VI returned constantly to the formula. On 25 April 1968, he rejected the idea that scientific and technical conquests required "the death of God," "as someone put it in an unfortunate expression": such progress called on the contrary for "a higher, more penetrating, more adoring sense of God"^[131]. On 13 November following, he gave its fullest analysis. He noted that God was said to be dead "in a certain eccentric and restless sector of modern thought," referred to the article the Jesuit René Marlé had just devoted to the question in the review Études, and reduced the slogan to its truth:

"But we know that this unfortunate 'slogan' applies, in the language of culture, to its subjective content, that is, to the thought of man, who no longer knows how to give meaning, value, to the ineffable name of God. God would be dead in the mentality of man. It is not the sun that has gone out, it is the eye of man that has grown dark." — Saint Paul VI, general audience of 13 November 1968^[132]

The pope affirms there that the Church does not hesitate to say, "yesterday as today, that for her God is not dead," and that she continues to proclaim with Peter "Christ, the Son of the living God"^[133]. A week later, he added the formula that would become the thread of all his interventions: "What is called the "death of God" resolves itself into the death of man"^[134].

On 12 September 1970, before a Thomist congress, he aimed directly at the theologians: "it is not with impunity that theologians — they bear only the name! — can endlessly hold forth on the death of God," for man, believing himself exalted by the denial of the Creator, does not perceive that "the spiral of his denials was irresistibly dragging him from the death of God to the death of man"^[135]. On 18 March 1971, before the Secretariat for Non-Believers, he called the "Christian atheism" of "a certain theology of the death of God" a "strange absurdity"^[136]. On 17 July 1974, he cited William Hamilton by name, alongside Marx, Feuerbach, and Comte, among those for whom "God is dead" for modern man^[137].

The pope never speaks as a prosecutor, however. He acknowledges that some used the formula "perhaps without bad intention"^[138]; he recalls that God is "hidden" and must be sought "with passion"^[139]; and he sees, in those who went to the very end of the experience of the "death of God," a new need for prayer, "as in one who is about to drown"^[140].

The Creed of the People of God (1968)

On 30 June 1968, to close the Year of Faith, Paul VI pronounced a solemn profession of faith on the parvis of Saint Peter's. He said he wanted to offer "to the living God the homage of a profession of faith," at a time when he saw Catholics seized "by a sort of passion for change and novelty"^[141]. The text does not name the theology of the death of God, but it answers it point by point by saying who God is: he is "He who is," as he revealed to Moses, and he is "Love," as Saint John teaches, "so that these two names, Being and Love, ineffably express the same divine reality"^[142]. A God who is Being itself cannot cease to be; a God who is Love does not withdraw from the world he loves.

Catholic Theologians Face the Slogan

Catholic thinkers had prepared the ground well before the American movement. Father Henri de Lubac had published as early as 1944 Le Drame de l'humanisme athée, from which Paul VI would borrow the formula in Populorum progressio in 1967: "Certainly man can organize the earth without God, but "without God he can in the end only organize it against man. Exclusive humanism is an inhuman humanism""^[143]. In 1968, de Lubac commented on the pages of Gaudium et spes on atheism in Athéisme et sens de l'homme, which Paul VI quoted on 13 November of the same year^[144]. The Italian philosopher Cornelio Fabro, a specialist in modern atheism, had traced its genealogy in a monumental work^[145]. Jacques Maritain had devoted an essay to La Signification de l'athéisme contemporain, whose practical conclusion Paul VI would take up in 1971^[146].

Besides Henri de Lubac, whose Le Drame de l'humanisme athée (1944) supplied Paul VI with his formula — "without God, man can in the end only organize the earth against man"^[147] —, two verified Catholic thinkers deserve their place in facing the slogan.

The Italian philosopher Cornelio Fabro had traced, already in Introduzione all'ateismo moderno (Rome, Studium, 1964), the complete genealogy of modern atheism^[148]: his contribution is to show that the "death of God" of the 1960s is not a novelty, but the culmination of a process begun with Descartes and Feuerbach, whose metaphysical presuppositions he dismantles one by one.

Jacques Maritain, in La Signification de l'athéisme contemporain (Paris, Desclée de Brouwer)^[149], shifted the debate from observation to witness: faced with atheism, the decisive argument is not one more demonstration, but a life that would not be livable if God did not exist — the formula Paul VI would take up in 1971 before the Secretariat for Non-Believers.

De Lubac himself extended his Drame in 1968 with Athéisme et sens de l'homme, a commentary on the pages of Gaudium et spes on atheism which Paul VI quoted as early as 13 November of the same year^[150]: the theologian and the pope advanced together, one illuminating the council, the other proclaiming it.

John Paul II: "An Absurdity, in Concept and in Terms" (1986)

Twenty years after the movement, Saint John Paul II took up Paul VI's diagnosis in his encyclical on the Holy Spirit. There he sees the culmination of a very ancient suspicion, which presents God as man's rival: "the refusal of God has gone so far as to declare his "death." This is an absurdity, in concept and in terms!" And he concludes, relying on the council — "the creature without the Creator vanishes":

"The ideology of the "death of God" shows easily by its effects that it is, on the theoretical as on the practical level, the ideology of the "death of man."" — Saint John Paul II, encyclical Dominum et vivificantem, 18 May 1986, no. 38^[151]

Twelve years later, the encyclical Fides et ratio names the philosophical root without naming persons: "certain representatives of idealism have sought in various ways to transform faith and its content, including the mystery of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, into dialectical structures rationally conceivable"^[152]. That is exactly Hegel's operation on Good Friday, which Altizer inherited.

Benedict XVI: Our Age Become "a Holy Saturday" (2010)

On 2 May 2010, before the Holy Shroud exposed at Turin, Benedict XVI meditated on Holy Saturday, "the day when God is hidden." He quoted Nietzsche's madman's cry, "God is dead! And we killed him!", and made this remark: "This famous expression is, if we look closely, taken almost literally by the Christian tradition; we repeat it often in the Via Crucis, perhaps without fully realizing what we say"^[153]. From it he drew the spiritual portrait of a century:

"After the two world wars, the lagers and the gulags, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, our age has become to an ever greater extent a Holy Saturday: the darkness of this day questions all those who ask about life, and in a particular way it questions us believers." — Benedict XVI, meditation before the Holy Shroud, Turin, 2 May 2010^[154]

But the pope does not leave the last word to darkness. On Holy Saturday, God, in Jesus Christ, shared "not only our death, but also the fact that we remain in death" — "the most radical solidarity" —, and "precisely from there, from the darkness of the death of the Son of God, appeared the light of a new hope: the light of the Resurrection"^[155]. The Italian original of the meditation moreover quotes the ancient homily with the very words of the slogan, restored to their Christian meaning: "God died in the flesh and went down to shake the kingdom of hell"^[156].

The slogan of the 1960s looks like an attack on Christianity; it is in reality a Christian phrase turned from its meaning. When a Christian says "God died on the cross," he does not say that God ceased to exist: he says that the one who died on the cross is God. The simplest image is that of Mary's title: calling her "Mother of God" does not mean that she engendered the Godhead, but that she brought into the world, according to the flesh, someone who is God. In the same way, the eternal Son truly suffered and truly breathed his last in the human nature he had taken, without his Godhead, which can neither suffer nor die, being extinguished for all that^[157].

The whole difference from the theology of the death of God lies in these two words: "in the flesh." The Church says that the Son of God died; she never says that the Godhead died. And she does not stop at the tomb: the same sentence that announces death announces resurrection.

"You Killed the Prince of Life": The Language of the Apostles

The first to speak thus is Saint Peter. A few weeks after Pentecost, under Solomon's portico, he said to the crowd of Jerusalem: "You killed the Prince of life, whom God raised from the dead; we are witnesses to this" (Acts 3:15). The sentence brings together the two terms that the theology of the death of God separates: the one who was killed is the author of life, and he did not remain in death.

Saint Paul uses the same language. The rulers of this world, he writes to the Corinthians, did not know the wisdom of God, "for, had they known it, they would never have crucified the Lord of glory" (1 Cor 2:8); and he asks the elders of Ephesus to watch over "the Church of God, which he acquired with his own blood" (Acts 20:28). The blood shed at Calvary is called the blood of God, because it is the blood of the Son. These three verses would be precisely those which a pope would invoke, five centuries later, to justify the formula "God suffered in the flesh"^[158].

The text the death-of-God theologians quoted most, the hymn of the Letter to the Philippians, does not stop at the tomb either. Christ, "being in the condition of God," "emptied himself, taking the condition of a servant," "obedient unto death, even death on a cross" — and the hymn continues at once: "Therefore God exalted him" (Phil 2:6-9). To read the first half without the second is to hold a Good Friday without Easter.

The Church Fathers Were Not Afraid of the Word

The Church Fathers were not afraid of the word. At the beginning of the second century, on the road to his martyrdom, Ignatius of Antioch begged the Romans to let him be "the imitator of the passion of my God" (Rom. 6:3^[159]), and he called Jesus Christ "our God" (Eph. 1:1^[160]): the one who was going to die under the teeth of the beasts is God, and that is why his death saves.

Half a century later, Melito of Sardis, in his homily on Easter, pushed boldness as far as oxymoron: "God was put to death" (On Pascha, § 96^[161]). The formula is deliberate: it says that the Crucified is not an ordinary man abandoned by God, but God himself delivered to death in the flesh. NOTE OF CAUTION: the same passage carries a violent indictment of the Jews ("by an Israelite hand"), which fed the accusation of "deicide"; the Church rejects this accusation: "what was committed during his Passion cannot be imputed indistinctly either to all the Jews living then, or to the Jews of our time" (Second Vatican Council, Nostra aetate, no. 4^[162]).

Gregory of Nazianzus, in his second homily on Easter (Oration 45, §§ 28-29), contemplates the same paradox: the immortal Lord freely tastes death to destroy death therein and to drag Adam out of it^[163]. And Tertullian, refuting the Docetists who denied the reality of Christ's flesh, turns the scandal into an argument:

"The Son of God died: it is believable precisely because it is absurd; buried, he rose again: it is certain because it is impossible." — Tertullian, On the Flesh of Christ, 5^[164]

All say the same thing, in the strongest words: one may say that God died, because the one who died on the cross is God — but one never says that the Godhead died. That is exactly the boundary that the theology of the death of God would cross eighteen centuries later.

Saint John Damascene, in the eighth century, summed up this tradition in a formula that Saint Thomas Aquinas would take up: God "assumed the properties of the flesh, for it is said that God can suffer, and that the God of glory was crucified"^[165]. The Fathers speak thus because they know what the sentence protects: if the one who dies on the cross were not God, the cross would save no one.

Ephesus and Constantinople: "One of the Trinity Suffered in the Flesh"

The Church ended up fixing this language in terms of faith, against those who wanted to soften it. At the Council of Ephesus, in 431, the twelfth anathema of Saint Cyril of Alexandria against Nestorius, who refused to attribute the Passion to the Word himself, was received:

"If anyone does not confess that the Word of God suffered in the flesh, was crucified in the flesh, tasted death in the flesh, and was the firstborn from the dead, inasmuch as he is life and life-giving as God, let him be anathema." — Council of Ephesus, twelfth anathema of Saint Cyril of Alexandria, 431^[166]

A century later, the dispute flared up again at Constantinople. Emperor Justinian let the pope know that controversies had arisen on three questions, two of which touch our subject directly: can Christ be called "one of the Trinity"? Did Christ God, "impassible according to the Godhead," "suffer in the flesh"? In March 534, Pope John II answered yes to both, and proved it by the Scriptures and the Fathers — the Acts of the Apostles, the First Letter to the Corinthians, Cyril's anathema, Saint Leo's Tome^[167]. In 553, the Second Council of Constantinople made it a canon:

"If anyone does not confess that the one who was crucified in the flesh, our Lord Jesus Christ, is true God, Lord of glory, and one of the Holy Trinity, let such a man be anathema." — Second Council of Constantinople, Canon 10, 553^[168]

The Catechism of the Catholic Church cites this canon and draws the general rule from it: "Everything in Christ's humanity must therefore be attributed to his divine person as its proper subject," "not only miracles but also sufferings and even death"^[169]. Theology calls this rule the communication of idioms, that is, the exchange of properties: one may say of God what belongs to the man Jesus, and of the man Jesus what belongs to God, because it is a single person. Pope Vigilius gave the reason in 552: the Son of God "suffered for us, was crucified in the flesh, died in the flesh, and rose on the third day," so that "the impassible divine nature remained and the truth of our flesh was maintained"^[170].

Saint Thomas Aquinas: What Dies and What Does Not Die

Saint Thomas Aquinas poses the question bluntly in the Summa Theologiae: can one attribute to God what belongs to man, such as "dying" and "suffering"? The objection is that of every shocked reader: attributing deficiencies to God seems blasphemy^[171]. His answer distinguishes the subject and the manner: one attributes to the Son of God what belongs to human nature, but "according to his human nature"^[172]. Hence the sentence that draws the exact boundary with the theology of the death of God:

"Likewise, in the mystery of the Incarnation, we say that the Son of God suffered, but we do not say that the divine nature suffered." — Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, IIIa, q. 16, a. 5, ad 1^[173]

Thomas adds that Christ died "not as God, but as man"^[174]. His death was nevertheless a true death: "That Christ was truly dead is an article of faith," to the point that one cannot simply say that he "was man" during the three days, but only that he was then "a dead man," his soul being separated from his body^[175]. And during those three days, the Godhead was separated from neither one nor the other: the body laid in the tomb and the soul descended to the realm of the dead remained united to the person of the Word^[176][177]. That is why the Creed can say of the Son of God that he "was buried" and that he "descended into hell."

The Catechism teaches the same thing in its own terms: the Son of God "tasted death," that is, knew "the state of separation between his soul and his body," and "the divine person of the Son of God" "continued to assume his soul and his body separated from each other by death"^[178][179]. A real death, then; a disappearance of God, never.

"God Died in the Flesh": The Great Silence of Holy Saturday

Each year, on the morning of Holy Saturday, the Church has read in the Office of Readings a very ancient homily whose first line literally contains the words of the slogan: "What is happening? Today, great silence on earth; great silence and then solitude because the King sleeps. The earth trembled and grew still, because God fell asleep in the flesh and awakened those who have slept since the beginning. God died in the flesh and the realm of the dead began to tremble"^[180].

This dead God does not disappear: he goes down to seek man even in death. The homily, which the Catechism quotes about the descent into hell, makes him say to Adam:

"I am your God, and for your sake I became your Son. Arise, you who slept, for I did not create you to dwell here bound in hell. Rise from the dead; I am the Life of the dead." — Ancient homily for Holy Saturday, quoted by the Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 635^[181]

The Catechism calls this day the mystery of Holy Saturday, when Christ laid in the tomb "manifests God's great Sabbath rest" after the accomplishment of salvation^[182]. It spells out what the article of the Creed confesses: "Jesus really died, and [...] by his death for us, he conquered death and the devil"^[183]. The article Holy Saturday presents this homily and the liturgy of that day in detail.

"The Master of life died; living, he reigns"

On Easter Sunday, the sequence Victimae paschali laudes, attributed to Wipo, chaplain to Emperor Conrad II in the 11th century, sings the outcome of this "duel":

"Death and life met in a wondrous duel. The Master of life died; living, he reigns." — Easter sequence Victimae paschali laudes, French liturgical translation^[184]

The risen Christ says it himself to Saint John in Revelation: "I am the First and the Last, the Living One: I was dead, and behold I am alive for ever and ever; I hold the keys of death and of the abode of the dead" (Rev 1:17-18). Saint Paul draws the consequence: "raised from the dead, Christ dies no more; death no longer has power over him" (Rom 6:9).

That is the heart of the answer. In the faith of the Church, God dies out of love, in the flesh, for a time, and he comes forth living to give life; it is death that dies. In the theology of the death of God, the divinity sinks into the world and does not return: there remains only a moral example, an admirable man and an empty heaven. The first announcement is good news, the second an endless mourning. As Saint Paul said to those who doubted the resurrection, "if Christ has not been raised, our proclamation is without content, and your faith too is without content" (1 Cor 15:14).

The theologians of the death of God were neither fools nor cynics. Several were men of prayer, and their questions are those of many of our contemporaries. They deserve to be heard in their strongest form, and to receive a precise answer.

Objection 1 — "It is only an observation: God has disappeared from modern life"

The objection. Gabriel Vahanian claimed to prove nothing about God; he was describing a civilization. Our age, he wrote in 1961, is "post-Christian," yet it remains religious, with a religiosity that is no longer Christian, and it is Christianity itself which bequeathed to it "the idea of the death of God," now become "the foundation of our civilization"^[185]. Churches empty out; the economy, science and politics function with no reference to God: to note his death would only be honest.

The answer. A fact of culture is not a fact about God. Vahanian himself admitted it on the last page of his book: the death of God might be "only a cultural phenomenon," as if only "our religious and cultural notion of God" had died^[186]. Paul VI gave the exact formula for this distinction: "It is not the sun that has gone out, it is man's eye that has grown dark"^[187]. The Church does not deny the observation; she even takes her share of it, since the Council recognizes that believers "veil the authentic face of God" by their failings^[188]. But from the eclipse of God in a society, one cannot conclude that he does not exist, any more than one concludes from the night that the sun has ceased to exist.

Objection 2 — "After Auschwitz, one can no longer believe in the God of history"

The objection. This is the gravest, and it comes from a rabbi. Richard Rubenstein, in After Auschwitz (1966), argues that one can no longer believe in the God of the Covenant, master of history, who chose Israel, after the murder of six million Jews: if God acts in history, one would have to see a divine will in the Shoah, which is unthinkable^[189].

Rabbi Richard L. Rubenstein, in After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), argues that after the murder of six million Jews, one can no longer believe in the God of the Covenant as tradition presents him: a personal God, master of history, who elected Israel and acts in its favor^[190]. If God truly governed the course of events, one would have to attribute what happened at Auschwitz to his will; yet that thought is unbearable. Rubenstein concludes that the God of history, the transcendent God who intervenes and who chooses, is dead for contemporary Jewish consciousness — not out of indifference, but out of fidelity to the victims: he refuses to make their extermination a divine act.

It is the only "theology of the death of God" born of a real wound rather than a theory: Rubenstein writes as a rabbi confronted with the six million dead, not as a professor speculating about religious language. That is why the objection he raises is the gravest of all those this article meets, and the one before which any facile answer is indecent. Hamilton himself, taking stock ten years later, counted Rubenstein among his own: radical theology was at its beginnings Christian and religious, then "Jewish and religious (Rubenstein)" (Original text: "later Jewish and religious (Rubenstein)", Ignispedia translation) — the rabbi thus belongs to the movement, but through the door of suffering, not through that of speculation.

The answer. It cannot be a facile explanation, and the Church does not give one. Benedict XVI, visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau on May 28, 2006, began by taking up the question itself: "Why, Lord, did you remain silent? Why could you tolerate all this?"; and he refused to pretend to understand: "We cannot peer into the mystery of God — we see only fragments, and it would be a mistake to want to judge God and history"^[191]. He then pointed out that the death of God was the program of the executioners, not the conclusion of their victims:

"At bottom, these violent criminals, through the annihilation of this people, intended to kill that God who called Abraham and who, speaking on Sinai, established the criteria for guiding humanity, which remain eternally valid. If this people, by the mere fact of existing, bears witness to that God who spoke to man and took charge of him, then that God had finally to die and his power belong to man alone." — Benedict XVI, address at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, May 28, 2006^[192]

The Christian answer is not a theory: it is a cross. In the same address, Benedict XVI recalls the faith of Christians, "who affirms that God himself descended into the hell of suffering and suffers with us"^[193]. In Spe salvi, he adds that "God reveals his own Face in the figure of the sufferer who shares the condition of man forsaken by God," and that this figure grounds a hope: "Yes, the resurrection of the flesh exists. There is justice"^[194]. For the protest against God in the name of justice turns back on itself: "A world without God is a world without hope," and no one then answers "for the suffering of the centuries"^[195]. The article The Church and the Shoah presents the history of those years.

Objection 3 — "Saint Paul himself says that Christ emptied himself"

The objection. The New Testament affirms that Christ, who had "the condition of God," "emptied himself" (Phil 2:6-7). If God emptied himself in Jesus, and Jesus died on the cross, is it not God himself who died? Altizer would only be taking Saint Paul seriously.

The answer. The hymn must be read to the end. The subject of the abasement is the one who has "the condition of God"; he takes "the condition of a servant," that is, he adds humanity, and the hymn ends with his exaltation: "That is why God exalted him: he endowed him with the Name that is above every name" (Phil 2:9). The Church explicitly rejected the reading that would make this verse the withdrawal of divinity: Pius XII called it in 1951 a "detestable invention," as condemnable as Docetism, and opposed to it Saint Leo: Christ is "true God, wholly in what is his own, wholly in what is ours"^[196]. Kenosis is not the suicide of God, it is the humility of his love: he gives himself without losing himself, and that is why he can give us life.

Objection 4 — "Bonhoeffer called for a Christianity without religion"

The objection. The godfather of the theologians of the death of God is no marginal figure, but a martyr of Nazism. From his cell in Tegel prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes to his friend Eberhard Bethge, on April 30, 1944, the question that haunts him: "what keeps preoccupying me is the question of what Christianity really is, or rather who Christ really is, for us today"^[197]. On June 8, he describes a world come of age, which has learned to do without the "working hypothesis" called "God" in everything and to push God ever further out of life^[198]. On July 16, he sketches a "non-religious interpretation of biblical concepts" and launches the famous phrase: before God and with God, we live without God^[199]. Hamilton devotes an entire chapter of Radical Theology and the Death of God (1966) to him^[200]: if Bonhoeffer himself called for a "Christianity without religion," who will dare say the radicals betray him?

The answer. Bonhoeffer never called for a Christianity without God, but without the bourgeois "religion" of the 19th century — its dated cultural forms, its "stopgap" God of the limits of science. The same man who writes these letters prays every day in his cell, meditates on Scripture and celebrates worship until the eve of his execution at Flossenbürg, on April 9, 1945^[201]. Above all, he never separates the suffering Christ from the risen Christ: his "Christianity without religion" remains fastened to the one who is "there only for others," and his final theology remains christological from end to end^[202]. The appropriation is thus forced: where Bonhoeffer keeps the risen Christ as center, the radicals keep only the phrase. The article Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) sets out his life, his prison letters and this controversy.

Objection 5 — "The word God no longer means anything to modern man"

The objection. Paul van Buren describes neither a culture nor an experience, but analyzes language: applying to theology the criterion of analytic philosophy — a statement has meaning only if it can be verified or refuted by experience —, he argues that sentences about a transcendent God acting in history say nothing at all, and that the word "God" is thus dead with the death of empty words^[203]. Time summed up in 1965: he "gloomily concludes that all talk about God — including the very prospect of his reappearance — is philosophically meaningless"^[204]. What remains is a Gospel to be retranslated into purely secular language, centered on the man Jesus.

The answer. The principle on which this critique rested — only what can be verified by experience has meaning — cannot itself be verified by any experience: it refutes itself in being stated. The Catholic tradition, for its part, never claimed that our words enclose God. The Catechism asks us to "purify our language ceaselessly of what is limited, imaged, imperfect in it," for "our human words always fall short of the mystery of God"; but it immediately adds that this language, though expressed "in human fashion," "really reaches God himself"^[205]. The Fourth Lateran Council had formulated the principle in 1215: between Creator and creature, no resemblance can be noted without noting an even greater dissimilarity^[206]. Our words are thus neither empty nor adequate: they are true, and always surpassed. Paul VI recalled it in 1970 in face of the slogan: "it is possible to know God," by two great ways, "reason and faith"^[207].

Objection 6 — "Secularization is irreversible"

The objection. In 1965, Harvey Cox celebrated in La Cité séculière the advent of an adult world, organized without God; sociologists announced that modernization would push religion back everywhere, inevitably. Paul VI himself acknowledged in 1971 that this process "may seem irreversible"^[208]. The theology of the death of God would only have drawn the conclusions of history.

The verdict of history. The sociological prediction failed, and those very ones who had carried it acknowledged so. As early as its issue of December 26, 1969, Time wondered whether God was not "coming back to life" and whether he had ever really been "dead" — perhaps only "eclipsed during a period of dizzying social change"^[209]. Thirty years later, the sociologist Peter Berger, one of the fathers of secularization theory, reversed his judgment: "the presupposition that we live in a secularized world is false; today's world is as furiously religious as ever"^[210]. The death-of-God movement itself already seemed extinct in 1989: "all indications show that the death of God is dead"^[211].

The answer. Paul VI distinguished two realities that the slogan confused. Secularization, that is, the legitimate autonomy of earthly realities, which the Council recognizes, is not secularism, an "ideological system" claiming "absolute autonomy of man over his own destiny" and creating "a climate of absence of God"^[212]. The first is a fact of history; the second is a choice, and it is in no way inevitable.

A correct diagnosis, a false conclusion

The theologians of the death of God accurately described a real experience: that of men and women who live, work and suffer without ever meeting God again, neither in their thought nor in their heart. The Church does not dispute this experience. Paul VI described it himself: "It is not divine reality that has diminished, it is the human mentality which, today, is less apt to receive its radiance and its voice"^[213]. Benedict XVI spoke of the hidden God as part of contemporary spirituality, "existentially, almost unconsciously, like a void in the heart that has grown ever wider"^[214].

The fault of the theology of the death of God is thus not to have seen this void; it is to have made it a revelation. It mistook the eclipse for extinction, and the silence of God in a culture for his nonexistence. Above all, it renounced what was its own mission: a theologian is not tasked with noting that men no longer pray, but with telling them of the one they have forgotten.

From the death of God to the death of man

Paul VI's saying was verified faster than any prediction of the sociologists: "What is called the 'death of God' resolves into the death of man"^[215]. Once God is declared dead, man remains the sole author of his values; then he becomes an object among objects. Paul VI described in 1974 those who had gone to the end of this experience: they ended with "an impersonal man, reduced to a number," in a great feeling of fatalism and solitude^[216]. John Paul II took up the same observation in 1998 about nihilism, which is "the negation of the humanity of man and of his very identity," and which leads either to "a destructive will to power" or to "the despair of solitude"^[217].

The reason for this slide is simple. If man has a dignity depending neither on his strength nor on his usefulness, it is because he receives it from another. The Council said it in one sentence: the dignity of man "finds in God himself what founds it and what completes it," and "when the divine support and the hope of eternal life are lacking, the dignity of man suffers a very grave wound"^[218]. To announce the death of God was, unwittingly, to announce the fragility of man.

Saint Thérèse at the table of sinners (1896-1897)

From Easter 1896, Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus goes through a trial of faith lasting until her death, which she recounts in Manuscript C of her autobiographical writings. She describes an inner darkness where the voice of unbelief is heard: heaven seems closed to her, and she sees herself seated at the table of sinners, sharing the bitter bread of those who do not believe. She writes that she walks in this night not for herself, but for her sisters and for sinners: she accepts remaining in the darkness so that others may come out of it, offering her own temptation against faith for the salvation of unbelievers.

The contrast with the theologians of the death of God is total, and it lies in three differences. First, Thérèse endures the night; she does not erect it into doctrine. What Hamilton and Altizer publish as a thesis about God — "God is dead" — she lives as a trial of her own faith, without ever making it an affirmation about the being of God. Next, she stays: she remains in the Carmel, at prayer, the sacraments and obedience, even though she no longer feels any fruit from them. Where radical theology concluded from the felt absence of God to his nonexistence, the Carmelite concludes from the same absence to a purer fidelity — believing not because one feels, but because one loves. Finally, she intercedes: her night becomes prayer for the "poor sinners" whose table she shares, where the American movement made contemporary unbelief a theological program.

Thérèse is thus the living refutation of the passage from trial to doctrine: the same night which, systematized, yields the "death of God," sanctifies the one who passes through it while clinging to the hidden God.

The hope of the Living One

The theology of the death of God lasted a few years; the faith it claimed to supersede continues to say, every Sunday, "I believe in God." It says so not because it ignores the night, but because it knows Easter morning. The God it proclaims "is not the God of the dead, but of the living" (Mt 22:32); he entered death to conquer it from within, and "the last enemy to be destroyed is death" (1 Cor 15:26). The slogan of the 1960s said that God was dead; the Gospel says it is death that will die: "Death has been swallowed up in victory. O Death, where is your victory?" (1 Cor 15:54-55).

History, for faith, thus moves not toward an empty heaven, but toward the day when God will dwell with men: "He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more [...]. Behold, I make all things new" (Rev 21:4-5). The Christian does not ask God to dissolve into the world; he asks each day, in the prayer Christ taught him, that his kingdom come and his will be done "on earth as it is in heaven" (Mt 6:10). It is the exact inverse of the theology of the death of God: not a world from which God would have withdrawn forever, but a world in which he will come to reign.

The most convincing witness remains the one Jacques Maritain called for and Paul VI took up before the Secretariat for Non-Believers: "To believe in God must mean living in such a way that life could not be lived if God did not exist"^[219].

The "theology of the death of God" is neither the first nor the only modern error about God. The following table places it among its neighbors: some prepare its ground, others share its vocabulary without sharing its thesis.

• The Church and the Shoah — the history of the years in which Rubenstein's objection was born.
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer — the witness whose prison letters were appropriated by the radicals.
• Henri de Lubac — the theologian of the Drame de l'humanisme athée, Paul VI's source.
• Cornelio Fabro — the philosopher who dismantled the genealogy of modern atheism.
• The problem of atheism and zetetics — the Catholic answer to contemporary atheism.

Short bibliography

• Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1966.
• Gabriel Vahanian, The Death of God: The Culture of Our Post-Christian Era, New York, George Braziller, 1961 (French trans.: La Mort de Dieu, Buchet-Chastel, 1962).
• Paul van Buren, The Secular Meaning of the Gospel, 1963.
• Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1966.
• Saint Paul VI, Credo du peuple de Dieu, solemn profession of faith, June 30, 1968.
• Second Vatican Council, constitution Gaudium et spes, nos. 19-21, December 7, 1965.
• Henri de Lubac, Le Drame de l'humanisme athée, 1944.