Deceased--Gabriel Vahanian

Gabriel Vahanian
January 24th, 1927 to August 30th, 2012

"Gabriel Vahanian dies at 85; key figure in 'God Is Dead' movement"

The French-born theologian's 1961 book 'The Death of God: The Culture of Our Post-Christian Era' helped define a philosophical movement.

by

Elaine Woo

September 16th, 2012

Los Angeles Times

Despite a provocative title, Gabriel Vahanian's book "The Death of God" caused no public stir when it was published in 1961.

By the middle of the decade, however, a massive upheaval was underway in American society and Vahanian, a little-known Syracuse University professor of religion, found himself at the center of a furious national debate.

The French-born academic entered the spotlight in 1965 when Time magazine's Easter week cover posed the question that Vahanian and other radical theologians had raised: "Is God Dead?" The arguments pro and con were still churning more than a year later, when the magazine noted that the easiest way to boost Sunday church attendance was to announce a sermon on the divine demise.

Vahanian, a key thinker in what became known as the "death of God" movement, died of natural causes Aug. 30 at his home in Strasbourg, France, said his son-in-law, Jeffrey W. Robbins. He was 85.

Time had named him one of the four best-known theologians of the movement, which, according to the magazine, argued it was "no longer possible to think about or believe in a transcendent God who acts in human history" and that Christianity "will have to survive, if at all, without him."

In Vahanian's view, America in the early '60s was a "post-Christian world," driven away from faith by the Holocaust and other World War II horrors.

"Now man has declared God not responsible and not relevant to human self-knowledge," he wrote. "The existence of God, no longer questioned, has become useless to man's predicament and its resolution."

That message found a receptive audience as the '60s unfolded in one convulsion after another — the assassination of a president and struggles over the war in Vietnam, civil rights and free speech.

"It was a period of transformation, and his book was one of the expressions of '60s radicalism," theologian Thomas J.J. Altizer, another prominent death-of-God theologian, said of Vahanian during an interview last week. "He was articulating it theologically, and he had a better understanding than any of us of the actual death of God at that point in history."

Postulating the death of God brought death threats to the group, which also included Paul van Buren and William Hamilton. Hamilton, who died in March, lost his teaching position at Colgate Rochester Divinity School in New York even though he was tenured.

Vahanian often joined his like-minded colleagues in public forums, but he was not in lock step with them theologically. A French Protestant who admired John Calvin and worshiped with a Presbyterian congregation, Vahanian approached the question of God's relevance from the vantage point of a lifelong churchgoer.

"He was an iconoclastic thinker through and through," said Robbins, who teaches religion and philosophy at Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania along with his wife, Noelle Vahanian, one of Gabriel's two children.

Unlike others in the God-is-dead camp, Vahanian approached the issue as a cultural critic, looking for ways to talk about God in an increasingly secular world.

"He was doing a cultural analysis, whereas the others were doing a more traditional philosophical, theological critique," said James B. Wiggins, a longtime friend and colleague in the religion department at Syracuse. "Finding ways to give expression to the theological in terms that were intelligible to an ever more secular culture was the project in which he was engaged throughout his career."

Vahanian was born Jan. 24, 1927, in Marseille, France. His parents, Mesrop and Perouse Vahanian, were Armenian refugees who had fled to France after World War I to escape persecution in Armenian areas of Turkey.

He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Grenoble in 1945, followed by studies at the Protestant Theological Faculty of Paris.

In 1958 he earned a doctorate at Princeton Theological Seminary and joined the Syracuse faculty. He led efforts to establish its graduate program in religion, which, Wiggins noted, was unusual for a secular university with no theology school. He also became a key figure in the study of religion and literature.

Vahanian remained at Syracuse for 26 years, leaving for France in 1984 to accept an appointment at Protestant Theological Faculty in Strasbourg.

He married Barbara Swanger in 1962. Besides his wife and daughter, he is survived by a son, Paul-Michel, and two grandchildren.

Although the public spotlight on his ideas receded, Vahanian "remained a death-of-God theologian in a profound sense," Altizer said. "He understood better than any of us the way God is dead in our culture" and especially how atheism was important to faith.

"The Christian era has bequeathed us the 'death of God,' but not without teaching us a lesson," Vahanian wrote in his 1964 book "Wait Without Idols." "God is not necessary, but he is inevitable. He is wholly other and wholly present. Faith in him, the conversion of our human reality, both culturally and existentially, is the demand he still makes upon us."

"Gabriel Vahanian, Professor, Dies at 85; Was Linked to ‘Death of God’ Movement"

by

Paul Vitello

September 8th, 2012

The New York Times

Gabriel Vahanian, a theologian whose 1961 social critique, “The Death of God: The Culture of Our Post-Christian Era,” gave a name to a seemingly atheistic but widely misunderstood theological movement, died on Aug. 30 at his home in Strasbourg, France. He was 85.

His daughter, Noelle Vahanian, confirmed his death.

Mr. Vahanian, a churchgoing Presbyterian throughout his life, was a professor at Syracuse University when a small literary publisher released “The Death of God,” a scholarly work that took church leaders to task for what he considered the trivialization of Christian teaching in the secular age. It was not an endorsement of Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1880s-era announcement of God’s death. And it received little attention outside university religion departments and periodicals like The Journal of Bible and Religion. (The Journal’s review called it a dense read, but worthwhile. “Books like this must be written and read if Christian solutions are to be found,” it said.)

But in 1966, Mr. Vahanian reached a wider audience when Time magazine named his book as the forerunner of several works written around that time by scholars belonging to what the theology world called the Death of God movement. All were grappling with some of religion’s big questions in the post-World War II era, Time said: Would the center hold if people stopped believing? How might religious values survive in a postfaith world?

Mr. Vahanian knew and corresponded with some of the others in the movement, including Harvey Cox of Harvard, Thomas J.J. Altizer of Emory University and William Hamilton, who would be forced out of his faculty post at an upstate New York seminary after the furor over the Time article and later teach at Portland State University in Oregon. He died in March.

None were atheists. Some were uncomfortable with the name of their movement, since they considered themselves more like a rescue team than an attack squad. They saw their work as a continuation of inquiries begun by some of the great theologians of the early and middle 20th century, including Paul Tillich, Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Mr. Vahanian, though, distanced himself from the group and its Nietzschean aura, however ill deserved.

“He had a totally different theological sensibility from most of them,” said Jeffrey Robbins, Mr. Vahanian’s son-in-law, who is chairman of the department of religion and philosophy at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pa. “He was an iconoclast, and a radical. But he described himself as a lifelong, practicing, disgruntled Protestant Christian.”

Mr. Cox, a professor emeritus at Harvard Divinity School and the author of the best-selling 1965 book “The Secular City” — considered one of the basic texts of the Death of God movement — described Mr. Vahanian as a “visionary” with a traditionalist streak.

“He didn’t like the idea of pronouncements about what no one could possibly know,” Mr. Cox said in a phone interview on Wednesday. “He had too much respect for religious tradition.”

In his book, Mr. Vahanian criticized efforts to modernize Christianity, implicitly rebuking the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, author of the 1950s self-help best-seller “The Power of Positive Thinking.” Mr. Vahanian condemned “positive thinking” and other doctrines that reduced Christianity to what he called “a tool for success.”
Faith had higher purposes, he said. It was for dealing with suffering; plumbing the conscience; confronting doubts about God.

“God is not necessary, but he is inevitable,” Mr. Vahanian wrote in 1964 in “Wait Without Idols,” displaying the gnomic style that sometimes tried reviewers’ patience (and eschewing capital letters when referring to the deity). “He is wholly other and wholly present. Faith in him, the conversion of our human reality, both culturally and existentially, is the demand he still makes upon us.”

Gabriel Antoine Vahanian was born on Jan. 24, 1927, in Marseille, France, one of four children of Mestrop and Perouse Vahanian. His parents settled there in the early 1920s after fleeing the ethnic cleansing campaigns that swept Armenian areas of Turkey after World War I. After completing his studies at the Protestant Theological Faculty of Paris in 1949, he received his Ph.D. at the Princeton Theological Seminary.

In 1958 he became a professor of religion at Syracuse University, where he taught for 26 years and helped to found the university’s graduate studies program in religion. He moved in 1984 to Université des Sciences Humaines de Strasbourg, for a post considered France’s most prominent theological professorship of Protestantism.

Besides his daughter, who, like her husband, Mr. Robbins, is a professor of religion and philosophy at Lebanon Valley College, Mr. Vahanian is survived by his wife, Barbara; a son, Jean-Michel; and two grandchildren.

Though he had differences with the “Death of God” theologians, Mr. Vahanian shared “the deep sensitivity and religious passion that animated the movement,” Mr. Robbins said.

In “Wait Without Idols,” Mr. Vahanian identified the origin of the problem facing “Death of God” theologians as he saw it:

“It is easier to understand oneself without God than with God. The dilemma of Christianity is that it taught man how to be responsible for his actions in this world, and for this world itself. Now man has declared God not responsible and not relevant to human self-knowledge. The existence of God, no longer questioned, has become useless to man’s predicament and its resolution.”
“This, then, is the irony of the cultural tradition of Christianity: it has bequeathed us the idea of the death of God.” 

"In Memoriam Gabriel Vahanian (January 24, 1927-August 23, 2012)"

by

James B. Wiggins, Eliphalet Remington Professor of Religion, Emeritus

The Religion Department at Syracuse University

Professor Gabriel Vahanian, friend, colleague, creative thinker and theologian, devoted father, relatively mild curmudgeon, determined marcher to the beat of his own drummer—I offer some of my recollections of the characteristics and accomplishments of this remarkable man.

Born to Armenian parents in France, he received his primary and secondary education in schools in France and his baccalaureate from the Lycee of Valence.  He received a fellowship to come to the United States in 1948.  He took his Master’s Degree in Theology from the Princeton Theological Seminary in 1950 and his Ph.D. from that institution in 1958.  He joined the faculty in the Department of Bible and Religion in the College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University in 1958, where he taught until 1984. Then he returned to France as a professor at the Universite de Strasbourg where he taught until his retirement as Professor Emeritus of cultural theology from the Protestant Theological Faculty of the Universite Marc Bloch.  He continued his active scholarly life and published widely in France and the USA.

It was my great privilege to meet “Gaby” as he was widely and affectionately known to friends and family in May 1963 when I was interviewed for a position in the Department of Religion.  In preparation for that trip to Syracuse, I read his book The Death of God: The Culture of our Post-Christian Era. With its publication in 1961, his work burst into local and national notoriety.

It was widely publicized in the context of a theological movement that became know as “The Death of God” and connected him loosely and not very appropriately to three other American Protestant theologians.  The attention given to the group and each of the thinkers associated with it caused a cultural furor in 1962.  So it was with great interest and some trepidation that I anticipated meeting him.

During his first years at SU, he had already established himself as a leader in the Department who effectively agitated to have its name changed from the Department of Bible and Religion to the Department of Religion, which it has remained ever since.  Gaby and I became friends and colleagues during the next twenty-one years as he played a major role in the department and in the emergence of the field of the academic study of religion through a number of associations.  When the American Academy of Religion adopted that name in 1964in place of the National Association of Biblical Instructors, he was elected as a member of the original Board of Directors.  He remained an active, contributing member and participant as the AAR became the major scholarly and professional organization for the study of religion in the United States.

That involvement stimulated him to creatively imagine what the study of religion at the graduate level should and could be.  He was recruited to join the faculty of the Theology School a Drew University in 1966.  In a great example of his skill and imagination, he instead turned the tables and persuaded the Dean of the Graduate School at Drew, Stanley Hopper, and an assistant professor in the college at Drew, David Miller, to join the faculty at Syracuse.  After that coup, Vahanian enlisted those two important contributors and the rest of the faculty in establishing a brand new Ph.D. program in Religion—one of a very few at that time in a secular university with no school of theology.  In an unprecedented short time, he shepparded the outline and proposal for the new program through the department faculty and then through the vetting process in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Curriculum Committee of the University Senate.  In the fall of 1968 the first students matriculated in the new program and four years later, the first two Ph.D.’s in religion were conferred by Syracuse University.  None of that would have happened without Gabriel Vahanian.  

The distinctiveness of this new program drew widespread attention from other professionals in the field  and students from all across the USA and abroad.  Notable new faculty members were also recruited in the decade of the 1970’s as the college recognized the growing accomplishments of the department.  Among them, for example, Huston Smith and Michael Novak were noteworthy additions.  During the decade of the 1970’s there were also numerous distinguished visiting professors in the department, a practice that had begun early on with the visit of the noted theologian Rudolf Bultmann. The presence of Gabriel Vahanian was a significant factor in attracting such colleagues.

Professor Vahanian was also a very popular undergraduate teacher.  His courses were always over-subscribed, and although students often commented how difficult those courses were, they were intellectually challenging and stimulating.  So, popular but never easy, his courses were a mainstay of the curriculum of the Department of Religion.

In recognition of his many accomplishments both within the university and nationally and internationally, Gabriel Vahanian was named by Syracuse University to the Eliphalet Remington Professor Chair and subsequently to the Jeanette Kittredge Watson professorship. In 2000, the Gabriel Vahanian Endowed Graduate Support Fund was established in the Department of Religion and continues to accept donations in his memory to support the educational and research expenses of current graduate students in this program in which Gaby invested so much of his life.

Even while on the faculty at Syracuse University, Professor Vahanian maintained ties with his native France.  He spent summers at a home near Marseilles. When he was on leaves from SU, he usually resided in France and maintained his connections with colleagues there, especially at the Universite de Strasbourg.  Thus, it was not entirely surprising, though very disappointing to us, when he informed the Department in 1983 that he had been invited to and accepted an appointment to the Protestant Theological Faculty in Strasbourg.  He taught there until he retired.  During his early years there, he also remained an adjunct professor at Syracuse University.

Professor Vahanian was a prolific author.  His bibliography covers a wide range of subjects, all related to his profound interest in the relationship between religion and contemporary culture.  Although his book, The Death of God (1961), is the one that many will be most familiar with, he was a major figure in developing the subfield of religion and literature in his early book Wait Without Idols (1964). That interest in the relation between religion and culture continued throughout his career to In Praise of the Secular (2008.)  He was deeply influenced in a formative way by the theological tradition of the Reformed church from John Calvin through Karl Barth.  The theology of Paul Tillich, interpreted in his distinctive way, was also a lifelong interest and influence on Vahanian as shown in his book, Tillich and the New Religious Paradigm (2004).

Bridging traditions between Europe and the United States as a distinguished faculty member and thinker in a secular department of religion at Syracuse University from 1958 until 1983 and then as a theologian in the Theological Faculty of a major university in France for more than a decade, few figures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries exerted so wide an influence on the study of religion and showed the importance and relevance of theology to the larger secular culture as did Gabriel Vahanian.

He is survived by his wife and their son and daughter.  His daughter, Noelle, and her husband, Jeffrey W. Robbins, both hold Ph.D. degrees (1999 and 2001) from Syracuse’s Department of Religion . They teach and publish in the fields of the theology, philosophy and the academic study of religion today.  Together with professors across the United States and some in Europe who implicitly and often explicitly in citing the work of Professor Vahanian in their own work, they demonstrate the continuing influence of the thought of this remarkable man.

A memorial service for Professor Vahanian was held on Friday, September 7, 2012 in the Église Réformée Saint Paul in Strasbourg, France.

Gabriel Vahanian will long be remembered as a challenging, generous, thoughtful, sometimes enigmatic and always cherished friend and colleague.  He will be profoundly missed.

Gabriel Vahanian [Wikipedia]


Deceased--William Hamilton 

Deceased--William Hamilton

William Hamilton
March 9th, 1924 to February 29th, 2012

One of several theologians [Gabriel Vahanian, Paul Van Buren, William Hamilton, John A.T. Robinson, Thomas J. J. Altizer, John D. Caputo, and rabbi Richard L. Rubenstein] echoing Nietzsche's "God is dead" statements...a popular theological amendment to the Existential movement of the 1960s. Frankly, it still makes sense.

"William Hamilton dies at 87; theologian questioned God's existence"

William Hamilton wrote the book 'Radical Theology and the Death of God.' It and an ensuing Time article called 'Is God Dead?' became part of a national questioning of establishment values.

March 3rd, 2012

Los Angeles Times

Theologian William Hamilton, a member of the Death of God movement of the 1960s that reached its peak with a Time magazine cover story, has died. He was 87.

Hamilton died Tuesday at his home in Portland, Ore., of complications from congestive heart failure, his family said.

Hamilton told the Oregonian newspaper in 2007 that he had questioned the existence of God since he was a teenager, when two friends — an Episcopalian and a Catholic — died from the explosion of a pipe bomb they were building, while a third — an atheist — escaped without a scratch.

The image of God as all-knowing and all-powerful couldn't be reconciled with human suffering, especially after the Holocaust, Hamilton said.

"I wrote out my two choices: 'God is not behind such radical evil, therefore he cannot be what we have traditionally meant by God' or 'God is behind everything, including the death camps — and therefore he is a killer.'"

He discovered that he no longer believed in an active God.

"The death of God is a metaphor," Hamilton said. "We needed to redefine Christianity as a possibility without the presence of God."

The idea was not a new one, said fellow radical theologian Thomas J. J. Altizer. Poet William Blake and German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had long ago raised the question.

Hamilton "was what we call a radical Christian, or if you like, an atheistic Christian," said Altizer, who was co-author with Hamilton of the 1966 book, "Radical Theology and the Death of God."

The book and the ensuing 1966 Time magazine article "Is God Dead?" became part of a national questioning of establishment values. They also made Hamilton a pariah at Colgate Rochester Divinity School, a liberal Baptist theological school in Rochester, N.Y.

Despite holding an endowed chair and full tenure, Hamilton was no longer allowed to teach and left for a new job at New College in Sarasota, Fla., said Ronald Carson, a student of Hamilton's at the time and now an emeritus professor of humanities at the University of Texas.

"He rose to the occasion of the notoriety and made, I think, wonderful educational use of it, trying to clarify what this means, encouraging other people to try to think it through," Carson said.

He explained the concept as "not about the beyond. It's about living a good life. Bill would say, 'Pay attention to the Christian story. Reread the Sermon on the Mount.'"

Hamilton left New College in 1970 and became dean of arts and letters at Portland State University, teaching a wide range of subjects until he retired in 1986.

He continued writing, producing books on William Shakespeare and Herman Melville. His most recent work, a collection of essays on religious themes titled "Sine Nomine," was published last fall.

Born March 9, 1924, in Evanston, Ill., Hamilton was raised a Baptist and went to Oberlin College before joining the Navy during World War II. After the war he enrolled at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

Hamilton married ballet dancer Mary Jean Golden, and together they went to Scotland, where Hamilton earned his doctorate in theology at the University of St. Andrews.

Besides his wife, Hamilton is survived by five children, eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

"God is Dead theologian William Hamilton dead at 87"

February 29th, 2012

The Wall Street Journal

Theologian William Hamilton, a member of the Death of God movement of the 1960s that reached its peak with a Time Magazine cover story, has died in Portland, Ore. He was 87.

Hamilton died Tuesday from complications from congestive heart failure at the downtown apartment he shared with his wife, his family said.

Hamilton told The Oregonian newspaper in 2007 that he had questioned the existence of God since he was a teenager, when two friends — an Episcopalian and a Catholic — died from the explosion of a pipe bomb they were building, while a third — an atheist — escaped without a scratch.

It caused him to question why the innocent suffer, and whether God intervened in people's lives, he said.

"The death of God is a metaphor," Hamilton said. "We needed to redefine Christianity as a possibility without the presence of God."

The idea was not a new one, said fellow radical theologian Thomas J.J. Altizer. Poet William Blake and German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had long ago raised the question.

"We didn't just come out of nowhere," said Altizer, who was co-author with Hamilton of the 1966 book, "Radical Theology and the Death of God."

Hamilton "was what we call a radical Christian, or if you like, an atheistic Christian," Altizer said from his home in Mount Pocono, Pa. "He dedicated a good part of his life to renewing, making actual and right now, the way of Jesus."

Hamilton's talent was putting these difficult ideas in a way that could be understood by the general public, Altizer said.

Before their book, Hamilton brought his ideas to a national audience on the Sunday morning CBS television show, "Look up and Live," at one point airing excerpts from the Ingmar Bergman movie, "Winter Light," which was about a pastor who decides God has died.

The book and the ensuing 1966 Time magazine article "Is God Dead?" became part of a national questioning of establishment values that included the Civil Rights Movement and protest against the Vietnam War.

They also made Hamilton a pariah at Colgate Rochester Divinity School, a liberal Baptist theological school in Rochester, N.Y.

His son, Donald Hamilton, recalled how fellow faculty living on their leafy dead end street "hated my father."

Their family recited The Lord's Prayer before bedtime and attended a Presbyterian church until his father's notoriety made him no longer welcome at services, at which point he led his family in Bible studies at home.

Despite holding an endowed chair and full tenure, and being sent by the school to represent them at the funeral of four black girls killed in a church fire, William Hamilton was no longer allowed to teach and left for a new job at New College in Sarasota, Fla., said Ronald Carter, a student of Hamilton's at the time and now an emeritus professor of humanities at the University of Texas.

"He rose to the occasion of the notoriety and made, I think, wonderful educational use of it, trying to clarify what this means, encouraging other people to try to think it through," said Carter.

He explained the concept as "not about the beyond. It's about living a good life. Bill would say, 'Pay attention to the Christian story. Reread the Sermon on the Mount.'"

Hamilton left New College in 1970 and became dean of arts and letters at Portland State University, teaching a wide range of subjects until he retired in 1986.

He continued writing, producing books on William Shakespeare and Herman Melville. His most recent work, a collection of essays on religious themes titled "Sine Nomine" was published last fall.

Born March 9, 1924, in Evanston, Ill, Hamilton was raised a Baptist and went to Oberlin College before joining the Navy during World War II. He was commissioned an ensign trained to identify enemy aircraft for the planned invasion of Japan, his family said.

In his sea bag was a copy of a book by one of the most influential theologians of the era, Reinhold Niebuhr, who became Hamilton's friend and teacher after the war, when Hamilton enrolled at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

Hamilton married ballet dancer Mary Jean Golden, and together they went to Scotland, where Hamilton earned his doctorate in theology at the University of St. Andrews.

Back in the United States, he taught at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., before going to Colgate Rochester.

Besides his wife, Hamilton is survived by five children, eight grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.

"The Dangerous God: A Profile of William Hamilton"

by

Lloyd Steffen

"In some ways I had the worst possible preparation for becoming a theologian. I grew up in a very bland, very liberal, Yale-Divinity-School-pastor. Baptist, suburban, middle-class parish that bored me silly as soon as I was able to read and write. And I left it."

These remarks by radical theologian William Hamilton tell only part of the story. Hamilton went on to receive the best kind of preparation for becoming a theologian. After graduating from Oberlin College and studying at Union Theological Seminary in the glory days of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, Hamilton was ordained and went on to earn his doctorate at St. Andrew’s in Scotland under Donald M. Baillie. Appointed to the faculty of Colgate Rochester Divinity School where he would soon assume the school’s chair of historical theology, Hamilton established himself by frequently contributing to theological journals and writing Reader’s Guides to the Gospels and short books on theological anthropology, including the well-received New Essence of Christianity. He gained even wider recognition when he hosted a nationally broadcast CBS television series devoted to explaining religion and theology.

In the early 1960s Hamilton was a jewel in the crown of up-and-coming American theologians; the most promising part of a traditional academic theological career was ahead of him. Then, as the philosopher Karl Jaspers liked to say, "something serious happened." With the 1966 publication of Radical Theology and the Death of God, a book he wrote with Thomas Altizer, Hamilton joined several other young theologians in shaking the foundations of the American theological establishment. The wider society looked on in amazement, granting Hamilton more notoriety than theologians have any reason to expect. Before the storm he helped to create passed, Hamilton was featured in a Time magazine cover story, had his chair of theology "removed," and reported receiving death threats.

What brought about this radical change? Hamilton would explain it with characteristic directness: "God died." The radical theologians -- Hamilton, Altizer, Paul van Buren and, from another angle, Richard Rubenstein -- were a small but energetic group. All eventually settled in secular universities to teach, and, for the past 25 years, all have continued to make significant scholarly contributions.

But changes in vision, direction or setting have occurred: van Buren became a leader in Christian-Jewish dialogue, Altizer has been working in a department of English to deconstruct God-talk, and Rubenstein has continued a psycho-sociological inquiry into religion. As for Hamilton, he has been preoccupied for two decades with the work of Herman Melville, and he commands the Melville literature today as he once did that of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth.

In 1965 Hamilton was an acknowledged leader of what became known as the "death of God" theology. Altizer once said of Hamilton that he was the "first theologian to break through the barriers of Protestant neo-orthodoxy and formulate a theological acceptance of the death of God," which he accomplished by "entering into an open dialogue with modern culture." Hamilton, Altizer said, had become "the most articulate leader of the death-of-God movement in America."

Altizer’s assessment still holds. Hamilton is still thinking and writing about the death of God, still trying to come to terms with its implications, still working to articulate the project of radical theology. But the movement itself appears to be extinct. The death of God is no longer a topic of conversation in the seminaries or at cocktail parties. All indications are that the death of God has died.

Some say that the radical theology movement died like so many fads of the ‘60s; it was a "theology of the month" that made a flash and disappeared. There is some truth in this, as Hamilton himself is willing to concede. The death of God was a media event and, as Hamilton has written, "Any event the media create they can uncreate." But in another sense death-of-God theology has not disappeared at all; it has simply been transformed. It has entered, or is in the process of entering, mainstream theology.

Explicitly, the death-of-God theology is instrumental in various postmodern or "deconstruction" theological projects, Altizer and Mark C. Taylor being perhaps the best-known examples. Implicitly, the death of God idea has appeared in such repositionings as Gordon Kaufman’s presidential address before the American Academy of Religion. Analyzing the peril of nuclear holocaust, Kaufman found himself dispensing with any notion of divine Providence. He argued that God certainly would not will nuclear destruction, yet we cannot trust God to intervene in history to prevent it: therefore human beings as autonomous and free agents will determine their ultimate destiny. This is a radical rethinking of God’s nature, one that Christians who believe in the meaningfulness and providential course of human history would be hard pressed to accept without affirming in some sense that God, the God of Providence, had died.

But perhaps nowhere is death-of-God thinking more evident today than in aspects of feminist theology. The God who is dead to many women (and men) who still want to identify themselves as Christians is the God who has been imprisoned by culturally bound and contingent patriarchal symbols. Recognizing that their critique has rendered images of God no longer absolute, feminists have discovered that the religious power structure is reluctant to admit that patriarchal symbols for God are culturally influenced (as if God really were male) or contingent (as if use of a feminine symbol to point to a nonrepresentable God is more inadequate or idolatrous than use of a male symbol) To read Mary Daly or Naomi Goldenberg, to consider Rosemary Ruether’s demasculinizing of the Gospel stories or to ponder the renewed attention to "goddess" theology and the development of a lesbian theology is to see the basic language of theological discourse upset and transformed. Hamilton has always contended that the death of God was a language event -- "A lot of my friends kept their seminary jobs by using that way out" -- and a phrase that comes easily to mind when considering the radical changes brought to theology by feminist thinking is this: "God is dead" -- although now one hears above a whisper, "Long live the Goddess."

Remarks Hamilton: "Feminist theologians are coming to the point where they are going to have to deal seriously with the masculine God. Radical theology and feminist theology are going to have to join hands. And that attempt to find a Goddess behind the God is going to fail because they will find that She can castrate just as well as He did, although with different instruments." Hamilton, recognizing that there are feminists who will have to "give up the task of trying to preserve Judaism and Christianity by altering God’s gender or by discovering female images for God in Hosea and Joel," will have to look elsewhere to "find religious shape for our identity." Hamilton believes feminist theology will have to face "the possibility that the idea of God is an absolutely invaluable piece of first-century ideology that we can do without."

Whatever one thinks of Hamilton’s theo-thana-tology, it is clear that few contemporary theologians have been as passionately preoccupied with the God question as Hamilton. He has shifted his emphasis in that preoccupation over the years, particularly with respect to explicating the experience of the death of God. In one approach, which Hamilton has called the "detective" experience, a body is found. The body, of course, is God’s -- God is found dead in the culture, and the theologian must determine how to do "God-talk" in a godless world. In the ‘60s, the revisionists said "secularize" or "reformulate": the radicals said "do without"

In the "detective" scenario, a radical theologian would seek to discover how the body -- the dead God -- got there, who killed it, and what kind of evidence will establish the death given the obvious lack of a corpus delicti. Hamilton worked in the detective mode in his 1974 book On Taking God Out of the Dictionary (McGraw-Hill) a book that went unadvertised, mostly unread and was distinguished for having won an art award for the dust-jacket design. The book is significant, however, not only because it suggests the important role Melville was to play in Hamilton’s theological development, but because the book served as a "reality check" in which Hamilton sought evidence in the culture for what he had been saying. In making the case that the death of God was permanent, the book initiated a wide-ranging and innovative -- some would say undisciplined -- conversation about the nature of post-Christian existence. Hamilton used a self-interview, one-act plays. short stories, a meditation on Norman Mailer and various other devices to think through the question that the death of God was posing to modem men and women. It is no accident that the book is replete with quotations -- few from theologians, since Hamilton was seeking confirmation from the culture for a theological understanding that the theological community had rejected.

Hamilton was ironic and playful in this book. "One of the metaphorical meanings of ‘death of God’ is the end of all absolutes in the spiritual life, so not even the death of God can be treated as an absolute," he wrote. But his deep concern for retaining ethical coherence in a postmodern world was also evident, as was his traditional allegiance to Jesus: "In his baptism, his teaching, his healings, his passion, death and resurrection -- in all of it, there is a demand laid on us, or an offer tendered, and it is the task of the Christian to embody that offer in his world, being as candid as he can about the difference between Jesus’ beliefs and his." For Hamilton, the death of God, rather than rendering Jesus superfluous, makes him all the more indispensable -- for Jesus is a comrade who provides a place to stand.

My sense of movement from faith to unfaith was never at all decisive or clear, and rye never had any difficulty in continuing myself as a Christian whatever other people have said. I think it is because I have always defined ideology as a commitment to comrades. Do you know [Ignazio] Silone’s marvelous piece called "Choice of Companions"? He talks about what we do when communism has died and one cannot be a Catholic in Italy -- what did the refugees do at night? They lit campfires and sat around it and told stories. The most important thing about a person is who are the comrades he or she chooses. So that is the way I define my Christian existence -- and my friends.

For Hamilton, the nature of Jesus’ self-understanding remains beyond our historical reach. It is not the historical Jesus but the Christ of the kerygma whom Hamilton affirms, the Jesus "bringing the Kingdom, the new age, here and now into the midst of ordinary lives" who shows us a "way to be human," who establishes a bond of comradeship, who draws us out of our private lives into the world, who provides us with a place to stand. "What he was is hidden; what he proclaimed, offered, defined, is not." Hamilton has repudiated God, not Jesus -- not the Christ of the kerygma.

In the detective mode, God is found dead, "dead in the souls of one’s contemporaries," as Camus said. But lately Hamilton has moved out of the detective approach and into the "killer" mode: "Now I am more interested in the murderer," he says. Here God is not dead at all, "but very much alive, murderous and needing to be killed. And ‘illustrated’ by your own choice of imams, generals, politicians, TV shills." In the killer mode, a body is not found, a death is required. As Hamilton has written in his latest book, Reading Moby Dick and Other Essays (Peter Lang, 1989) :

Today, the death of God experience in its second coming is less like Angela Lansbury finding an unexpected corpse on Sunday night in her kitchen and more like the murderer who put the corpse there in the first . . . . In its present form, the death of God experience suggests that the God of the great Western monotheistic faiths -- at least in the First and Second Worlds -- is too male, too dangerous, too violent to be allowed to live. Death of God today is not finding a body and figuring out who and why. It is the capture, understanding, and abolition of a dangerous 20th-century ideology.

"Obviously, because of what is going on in Christianity and Islam," Hamilton has concluded, "people with Gods are dangerous. And one of the things you can do to help your brothers and sisters is to take Gods away from people so their weapons won’t be quite so sharp as they are with monotheism."

I asked Hamilton, "Is that the danger of Ahab? Is that the reason for your interest in Melville?"

I got into Melville because I needed to have somebody to look at very carefully who tried and failed to escape from a powerful religious tradition. He just simply could not get rid of it. And bland Nathaniel [Hawthorne] sitting there in his little farmhouse couldn’t figure out why his young friend, 15 years his junior, got so hung up on all these Puritan things. He didn’t understand how Melville got so hot. I’ve always been closer -- in belief or in disbelief -- to the passion of Melville than to that serene [Hawthorne].

Hamilton has found in Melville a difficult but kindred spirit. Melville navigated the waters of death and disbelief in a way that Hamilton believes provides reliable guidance to those who would today seek to understand and explicate our religious situation. Melville has been to Hamilton not only a scholarly preoccupation but also a source of inspiration. The title On Taking God Out of the Dictionary came from a Melville letter – "Take God out of the dictionary, and you would have him in the street." Hamilton used this quote to consider the cultural-linguistic developments in death-of-God thinking, arguing that the word "God" no longer serves to cover the territory it once did. "God" is an instance of archaic usage, and the problem with "God" is lexigraphical.

Hamilton’s command of Melville has led to other developments as well. In 1985 he published Melville and the Gods (Scholars Press) , a scholarly but elegant study that focuses on what Hamilton calls Melville’s pilgrimage through "deconversion." With the death of God providing hermeneutical access, Hamilton explores Melville’s religious quest in a manner befitting traditional "religion and literature" studies. But he drops his most explicit theological reflection in the "killer mode" in a footnote at the end of the "Ahab" chapter: "Perhaps we should say that God became man so that man now no longer needs to become God or even to believe in him. Man may now cease striving for what he is not, making a monster of himself, so he can attend to becoming what he is." Hamilton’s Melville leaves behind the Christian God, for, as Ahab demonstrates in Moby Dick, that God is evil, perhaps mad, and a death-dealer that ought not to be worshiped.

Hamilton argues that Melville finally resolved his theological crisis in an 1888 poem, "Pebbles." "The hurt of which [Melville] is here healed is not only the general hurt of life, but it is also the hurt of faith that God himself inflicted. When God dies, or is finally killed, other gods sometimes mercifully appear if you need them." Melville found healing and resolution in the sea -- the pitiless and inhuman sea, which does not flatter or deceive and that, for all its connections to death, is life. Hamilton ties his religious quest to Melville’s own torturous journey: "When God died, I went to sea with Ishmael, and have gladly remained there."

Hamiton said he had one more Melville book in him, and Reading Moby Dick and Other Essays contains a rollicking guide to Moby Dick in which Melville’s treatment of the "dangerous God" motif is highlighted. Hamilton’s pursuit of death-of-God themes also appears in essays on "Shakespearean Death," "The Conversions of Michelangelo," and a sermon delivered on the text "To Cast Fire Upon the Earth." The essay "God as Monica’s Breast" is worth the price of the volume, and the "Consenting to Die" essay, which discusses suicide and death as something to do" rather than just wait for, breaks into a fictional discussion between a doctor and a cancer patient. This book, his eighth, contains some of Hamilton’s best -- his wittiest and most personal -- writing, and the originality of Hamilton’s work is all the more pronounced because the world hardly has room for one more look at Moby Dick. Hamilton, arguably one of our most innovative and courageous theological minds, demonstrates again, as he did when writing about Dostoevsky or Camus, that he also is one of our most insightful theological interpreters of modern literature.

Having retired from his positions as dean and university professor at Portland State University, Hamilton has settled in Sarasota, Florida. He keeps current on political matters. A former civil rights activist and outspoken opponent of U. S. involvement in Vietnam, he has been greatly disturbed by the success of the Reagan revolution and the values, especially that of privatism, that it has fostered. "I do not think socialism has a future in this country at all, although I suppose instinctively my economics are socialist, as my ethics are conservative and my politics are liberal. My theology is radical -- and I’m just trying to keep those balls up in the air, but they don’t fit."

Hamilton identifies himself as a Protestant who "has always believed relief of the human condition is what we must be doing. You cannot really define the meaning of human life other than to find some particular point at which the relief of the sorrows of the human condition is your business." He makes no apology for this doctrinally empty ethicality: "I’ve never lived or been trained in a tradition that has defined Christian existence in terms of doctrine anyway. Doing Christian thought and action is still the most interesting thing to me."

At one point he remarked:

It seems to me that to find yourself in the midst of the Jewish, Christian or Islamic worlds is to say in a number of different ways -- the religion-politics mix of Islam is one way, the prophetic tradition is another way, the New Testament tradition is another -- that there is one nonnegotiable absolute, an it’s not a principle, it’s not a moral value: it’s an answer to the problem of where you look, where you belong, where you pt your body in this world. Not at the altar, and not in the private realms, but out there in the world at the service of human beings. That’s where you are. That’s what Christianity drive you to; and that for me is the element and the comment of the Western religious traditions which I use to attack the temptations to privatism in myself, in my kids, and in my students.

Hamilton continually challenges other Christians t come to grips with their experience of a godless world, world in which God is either absent altogether or present ii the worst way: in the selfish impulses and evil acts of small minds, so that God comes to represent in fanaticism and hatred death itself. Doing away with God may, Hamilton says, make us more bereft, but it may also make us "more human, more tentative, more able to live easily with both adversaries and friends."

I sometimes wish, especially when I hear colleagues slight Hamilton or his contributions, that they would look more seriously at the Hamilton who has embodied in his passion, his restlessness, his intellectual daring and his care for others something authentic to the heart of the Christian message. When I think of Bill Hamilton I am reminded of Dostoevsky’s comment that if it turned out Jesus were a fraud and wound up in hell, he would rather be in hell with Jesus than in heaven with all the saints. It may turn out that Hamilton will wind up in hell just as many of his critics expect him to; but if so, I hope his critics are prepared for a most surprising development -- that he will be there engaged in animated conversation, with Jesus.

[Lloyd Steffen is chaplain at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. This article appeared in the Christian Century, September 27, 1989, p. 844.]

God Is Dead [Wikipedia]