An Understanding of the Death of God

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There are two common ways of thinking about the death of God. The first is what I will term the Altizerian understanding, so named after Thomas Altizer. It consists of the idea that God was an ontological reality. On this view, God could be conceived as a person, a being, a force, or whatever else. God, however, emptied himself and took on the form of man in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. He was then crucified and killed at Golgotha, the result of which was the literal death of God. The ontologically real God that we read about in the Hebrew scriptures expires upon the cross. Thus, God is dead.

The second way of thinking about the death of God will be termed the Vahanian understanding, so named after Gabriel Vahanian. On this view, God was never an ontologically real being. However one wants to think of God, be it as a Feuerbachian projection or a mere stopgap to deal with human ignorance, the God concept has fallen on hard times. In our increasingly post-Enlightenment, secular world, we are no longer finding ourselves reaching for God. We instead have placed our faith in our own human hands of modern philosophy, science, and art. Thus, the God concept is dead; it has become unnecessary. I believe it was William Hamilton who made the observation that children today when looking through a telescope don’t think of the beauty and majesty of their sovereign creator. Instead, they marvel at the capability of human technology and the possibility of human achievement in the exploration and understanding of our universe.

I can’t say I find either way of thinking about the death of God as especially compelling. On the Altizerian side, I see no reason to suppose an ontologically real God (i.e., a transcendent deity) ever existed. With Graham Oppy, I can say that such a deity is not an economical addition to my ontology. The explanatory power isn’t especially high, and the ontologically reduced atheistic explanations are equally compelling. On the Vahanian side, there hasn’t been much in the way of emphasizing why one should be a Christian. It seems to naturally result in a post-Christian and post-religion outcome. Obviously, as a Christian, this is an unacceptable outcome.

I propose that rather than understanding the death of God as literal (i.e., Altizer) or as strictly figurative (i.e., Vahanian), it should instead be understood as the proper revelation of the cross. Not because, as Altizer would put it, Jesus was literally God incarnate in the flesh. Rather, it’s because Jesus, who was nothing more than a human, was identified as God by his disciples despite his humanity and crucifixion. That is, God was no longer identified as the Father, the transcendent deity of power and privilege. Instead, God was identified as an impoverished, meek, humble Jewish carpenter who was rejected, beaten, and crucified. God was identified as a man who cried out about his abandonment by his heavenly Father on the cross. That’s the death of God. The God of the Hebrew scriptures, the transcendent deity, never existed (as Vanhanian would agree), but the realization of that in secularization is not what killed him. What killed him was the identifying of God elsewhere. Namely, in Jesus of Nazareth.

Throughout his life, Jesus continually pointed his disciples to the heavenly Father. Yet his disciples would go on not to identify God with the Father but to instead identify Jesus as God. Perhaps the most shocking instance of this can be found in the late first-century Epistle of Jude: “Although you are fully aware of this, I want to remind you that after Jesus had delivered his people out of the land of Egypt, he destroyed those who did not believe” (1:5). The author of Jude explicitly identifies Jesus as Jehovah, the one who delivered the Hebrew people out of Egyptian bondage. Now, some would go so far as to say that this establishes Jesus’ preexistence and status as a supernatural deity. As someone who doesn’t accept the historicity of the Exodus narrative, it establishes no such thing in my mind. It instead establishes that the followers of Jesus identified him as God, thus effectively killing any meaningful understanding of a transcendent deity of power.

There are implications to the death of God. Namely, there is the death of the metaphysical, the supernatural, the ultimate, foundations, certainty. In the words of Gianni Vattimo, there is a great and reverberant weakening effect as a result of the death of God. The certain metaphysical foundations that were established by an alleged intelligent, ordered universe that had its origins in the supreme, ultimate, transcendent God have been weakened by the elimination of said God. It’s not to say that we throw out our understanding of morality, virtue, ethics, or methods of inquiry now that the foundations are weak. Rather, we are now in a position where we must recognize that we got to where we are without an invisible guiding hand, as it were; teleology is dead. Thus, we can now proceed with the knowledge that such a hand is absent and, coming to think of it, unnecessary.

Another implication is the death of theology or the study of God. No longer does it make sense to think in terms of theology as traditionally conceived. That is, the study of a unique subject who is God. John Caputo’s term (though I don’t think he claims it as his own) theopoetics is arguably better. Strictly from an etymological perspective, the term means the creation or making of God. Because there is no given meaning or purpose in our universe (as a result of weakening), we must make meaning where none is found. We are, to put it as Max Stirner did, the creative nothing. We are nothing (both in the sense of having no higher purpose or identity and in the illusory nature of our egos), but we have the capacity to create. We have the capacity to engage with, influence, and manipulate the world around us. Our primary tool for doing this is language, and if we embrace the Nietzschean notion of our human history not as teleological but as a history of successive metaphors, then we can understand all of human history as fundamentally being driven by poetics, or creation, agitation, and manipulation of language.

Ultimately, I am suggesting an understanding of the death of God that is not literal or historical, nor is it strictly metaphorical. Rather, it draws directly from a commitment to the revelation of God found in the Greek scriptures. Namely, the revelation that God was among us, Immanuel, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. God is not invisible, unknowable, ineffable, or transcendent. God is instead identified in Jesus, a man whose end was met on the cross. Though I will not expound on the idea here, God is still among us in the form of the Church, the body of Christ. Just as God was recognized in the human body of Jesus, he is still recognized in the metaphorical body of Christ today.