Reflections on the Death of God

By David R. Reagan

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     Last year will long be remembered as the one in which a dynamic group of theologians dramatically proclaimed the death of God. This bold pronouncement sparked one of the most intense religious debates in the history of modern theology.

     Characteristically, the reaction of my brethren within the Church of Christ was one of hysteria. The Church's spokesmen quickly engaged in a shouting contest in defense of God, despite the fact that most of them did not have the foggiest conception of the essence of the controversy. Most would have been shocked to learn that the existence of God was completely irrelevant to the issue! Instead, the real debate centered around the nature of God.

     The emotionally immature and essentially anti-intellectual response of Church of Christ spokesmen culminated in a childish telegram that was sent to Thomas Altizer, one of the leading advocates of the "God is Dead" theology. The telegram was signed by literally hundreds of Church of Christ faithful who were in attendance at the regional conference of the Church held annually at Abilene Christian College. The telegram challenged Mr. Altizer to debate God's existence with one of the Church's professional anti-Communist spokesmen. Understandably, Mr. Altizer refused the invitation to participate in such an outlandish "academic" farce. His refusal was, of course, interpreted by the Abilene challengers as an unconditional victory for the one true church and sole defender of faith: the Church of Christ.

     Now I am not a theologian, and I certainly do not feel competent to analyze

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the complexities of the "God is Dead" theology. But the idea of God dying is a captivating one to me, for I am absolutely convinced that in a certain sense we are capable of killing God! What I am referring to, of course, is the personal relationship of every individual to Almighty God, and what I am saying is that since each individual has the power to destroy that relationship by shutting God out of his life, each individual has the capacity to kill God.

     But to understand the sense in which we can kill God does not explain the method of the murder. And so, we are left with a crucial question: How can we--we who believe in God and who profess to be followers of His Son--kill God? Or, to put it another way, how have many of us managed to become Christian atheists? Allow me to suggest a few possibilities.

     First of all, I would contend that many of us have killed God by locating Him in the past, by identifying Him with a series of miraculous events that took place over two thousand years ago. The consequence is that we often find ourselves praising a God who acted wonderfully to create the world, to liberate Israel, and to bring Jesus back from the dead, but who seems to have used up all his energy in those mighty acts and has been resting now for several centuries. God is past tense and God is magic, and both conceptions contribute to a form of Christian atheism. For example, when God is viewed primarily in historical terms, the effect is to substitute nostalgia for faith, for nostalgia is directed towards the past whereas faith is directed towards the present and the future. To be alive is to exist in the present, and thus a purely historical God might as well be dead for He has nothing to say about what is really important in our lives: our jobs, our material goods, our social clubs, and our golf game or hair-do. Similarly, when God is viewed primarily in terms of miracles, he becomes more or less irrelevant, for we live in an age which no longer counts on miracles or believes in magic. It seems to me that a considerable number of us have also killed God by limiting Him to the role of moral rule giver. In other words, we often look upon God as being nothing more than the Great Legislator whose only business is to lay down certain definite, iron-clad codes of "do's and don'ts." Such an image of God automatically makes Him irrelevant for much of adult life, because most of the situations in life are sufficiently ambiguous that no rules apply--or more than one does. It we are caught in the latter situation, then we have to have a rule establishing the priorities among the rules. And on and on it goes until suddenly we find ourselves more concerned about obeying the rules than about the person who was to be served by the rules and who needed us, rules or no rules.

     We have killed God too by identifying Him as the church--in either a physical or spiritual sense--by thinking that we can find God only in a building or in an assemblage of the saints. For if this is our concept, then when we leave the building or the assemblage, we leave God behind, and we emerge as shallow hypocrites. Now you are probably inclined to brush this example aside; but before you do so, let me remind you that although we may think that the identity of God with a building or a group of people is a childish notion, we nonetheless often act as if it were true.

     All too frequently religion and God are relegated to Sundays. In like manner, Christian ethics is something confined to theoretical speculation in Bible class. We are ever so careful to enunciate our "Amen" when we are amidst the brethren; but when we leave the worship service, we go about our daily lives as if we had never heard of love and ethics. And thus, the church buildings have become the tombs and sepulchres of God, for it is within them that we have attempted to bury God's reality.

     Now it should be noted that up to this point I have identified methods of killing God which are characteristic of all those who profess to be followers of Christ. To make the discussion more meaningful, let us sharpen our focus for a moment by

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turning our attention to three ways in which we within the Restoration Movement are particularly guilty of the death of God.

     First, I would point to the way in which we tend to view God as a Great Accountant whose major task is to keep an accurate record of our debits and credits in the "Book of Life." Salvation is something to be earned through perfect knowledge and perfect obedience. Both, of course, are impossible, although we are only willing to admit the fallibility of our obedience. But that admission is enough to wreck our spiritual lives. Failing to grasp the concept of salvation by grace through faith, we become engulfed in a feeling of sinfulness in which the debits always outnumber the credits. The result is a neurotic fear of death with unforgiven sins. We live in horror of the condemnation of a wrathful God whose books fail to balance, not realizing that God's reality is merciful and full of grace.

     Secondly, it seems to me that we within the Church of Christ have killed God by claiming Him as our private possession. What I have in mind is the way in which we have attempted to confine the church of God to the Church of Christ. We have done this primarily by locating God in one of the narrowest and most legalistic creeds that man has ever devised. Searching the scriptures diligently, we have succeeded in elevating our opinions on all sorts of trivia into sacred dogma. As a result, we have erected an artificial, "holier-than-thou" barrier between ourselves and all those who dare to differ with us in any way. In other words, we have constructed tests of fellowship unknown to God; and in the process, we have become literally engulfed in sectarianism. We have choked the concept of Christian brotherhood of its last breath of life. In our unmitigated self-righteousness, we have played God by refusing to love those who are the children of God but who refuse to accept our "infallible" interpretation of some minute scriptural point. And brethren, when we play God, we murder the only true and living God.

     Finally, I would argue that we of the Church of Christ are particularly guilty of God's death as a result of our fixation upon "patternism." I use this term in reference to our tendency to view the New Testament as if it were the Mosaic Code complete with detailed blueprints or patterns for church organization and worship procedure. Thus, we have concentrated our energies almost exclusively upon the legalistic restoration of the externals of First Century Christianity, and in doing so, we have built a facade that too often has been nothing more than "a sepulchre filled with dead men's bones." We have completely missed the boat by failing to recognize the far more important task of restoring the spirit of New Testament Christianity--the essence of which is caring for our fellow man. This failure has resulted in the death of God because the New Testament makes it clear that God will become alive only in direct proportion to the degree to which we become revolted and angered and sickened by the thousands of ways human beings express their utter indifference to one another. No, God's reality cannot be found in a superficial religion which is intent on nothing more than the perfection of outward forms.

     And so, in all of these senses--and many, many others--we have killed God. We have banished Him from the earth, placed Him harmlessly up in the sky, and praised Him for His mighty acts in the past. In short, we have not permitted God to be in the only place where God can be and still be God--in the midst of our lives, encountering us in all that we meet, limiting us, calling us. God hasn't died, it is rather that we will not permit Him to speak. Yet, God has spoken, for in the first century there came into history a Word about life, a Word that manifested itself in concern for those who were outcasts, immoral, and destitute. And then as now man did not want to hear that Word, and so he crucified it. But that word comes again and again and again, and it will continue to come. The question is not whether there is a Word, but whether we will listen to it.