"The Death of God – What was it all About"
Psalm 14 also refers to James 2:14-26
Ascension Sunday + May 20, 2012
Reverend Dr. David C. Brown
Pilgrim Congregational United Church of Christ
400 Glenwood Drive, Chattanooga, TN 37404
The April 8, 1965 cover of “Time” magazine had a stark question in large red letters on a dark background, “Is God Dead?” It created an instant national furor. Magazine covers are not meant to inform but to motivate people to buy the magazine. That recent cover of “Time” depicting a mother breast-feeding her four-year-old is a good example of this sort of shock advertising. “What is this all about?” we ask ourselves and buy a copy to find out what’s inside. If that is what those long-ago editors of “Time” intended, the result exceeded their wildest expectations. That issue garnered record sales. Yet today, what “Time” labeled “radical theology” is largely forgotten.
This past February, the man responsible for creating the “God is dead” furor died, remembered only for this moment in the history of theology, a moment that never became a movement. That man was my theology professor at Colgate Rochester Divinity School when I was a student from 1960 to 1964. His name was Dr. William “Bill” Hamilton. At the time he was my teacher, “Bill” Hamilton was a very conventional theology teacher. We studied classical and modern theologians and, to the best of my recollection, he never shared any of his convictions that God might, indeed, be dead.
Like the rest of the world, I only learned about what he believed through an article he wrote for “Playboy” magazine (of all places!), a book he co-authored with another theologian Thomas J. J. Altizer, “Radical Theology and the Death of God,” and, of course, the now famous or infamous, if you prefer, article in “Time,” all of them published in 1966. At that time, I was in the second year of my first pastorate at Wesley Methodist Church in Niagara Falls, New York. When the “Time” article appeared, it is not an exaggeration to say that I was besieged by questions not only from my rather conventional parishioners but also by reporters from the city newspaper. I was not alone in facing hard questioning. All across the country clergy were asked whether they agreed that God was dead. No one did, of course, and the responses ranged from the thoughtful to the trivial. When asked, Billy Graham announced, “God is not dead; I spoke to him this morning.” My own response at the time was hardly more thoughtful. Now, more than forty years later, inspired by Bill Hamilton’s recent death, I will attempt a more helpful answer to the question, “The Death of God – What was it all About?”
To begin, we need to learn more about the life of Bill Hamilton, himself. It began on a quiet Sunday afternoon in 1938 when something went terribly wrong near young Bill’s home. As a foolish stunt, three of his teenage friends had been building pipe bombs to explode and surprise their neighbors. There was an explosion, and one of Bill’s friends, an Episcopalian, was dead. Another, a Roman Catholic, lay on the grass fatally injured. A third friend, the son of an atheist, emerged without a scratch. How, 14 Year-old Bill wondered, could a just God allow such a tragedy? Indeed, why do any innocent people suffer? Does God have any power to intervene in human lives to protect us from hurt and harm?
These questions haunted Bill at his friends’ funerals, at Oberlin College, and in his years in the Navy in World War II. While he had been raised in what he described as a “bland, very liberal” Baptist home, as soon as he was able, he stopped attending church. However, he didn’t stop reading theology. As he said later, “I may have been the only guy on my ship with a copy of “The Nature and Destiny of Man” in my duffel.” The book’s author, Reinhold Niebuhr, was one of the leading U.S. theologians of that day.
After the war, Bill went to Union Theological Seminary in New in New York City because Niebuhr who taught there had invited him to attend. It didn’t matter that Bill wasn’t sure he was a Christian. Niebuhr thought that Union, a bastion of liberal Protestantism, would be a good place to figure that out. The two became lifelong friends.
After graduating in 1949, Bill got married and earned his doctorate in theology from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He returned to the United States and taught theology at Colgate University in upstate New York. A few years later he joined the faculty of my seminary, Colgate Rochester Divinity School.
All through these years, Bill reflected on his fractured faith. How was it possible to reconcile a faith in God as an all-knowing and all-powerful solver of problems in the face of terrible human suffering, especially in the wake of the Holocaust? For Bill there were only two possibilities. Either God had no power to avert human suffering and was a helpless onlooker of human misery or God was behind everything, including the death camps – and therefore God is a monster.
It was from this very personal reflection on the place of God in human tragedy that he would eventually conclude that “God is dead.” But he didn’t mean quite what he said. While he no longer believed in the traditional image of God, he didn’t consider himself an atheist. And he never let go of his belief that Jesus was the supreme example of how human beings should treat one another. In his words: “The death of God is a metaphor. We needed to redefine Christianity as a possibility without the presence of God.” In that difficult to understand way, Bill considered himself a Christian until the day he died, though he never attended church.
Apart from the rage of conservative Christians, a few of whom sent him death threats, “Mainstream” Protestant theologians dismissed Hamilton’s ideas as a fad whose shock value was vastly greater than its insight. In hindsight they were probably correct. No one studies his books or articles anymore except as an historical curiosity. The death of God was simply one more example of how people in the 1960’s expressed everything in terms of their own experience. “Everything that is important, or even exists, is what I feel, what I think, and what I believe.” The notion that there could be a reality beyond our own experience was simply nonsense. By the way, that is the fundamental flaw, as I see it, in all the current interest in atheism. For today’s atheists, human beings are the measure of all things. If we cannot see something, touch it, measure it and manipulate it, it simply doesn’t exist. For these people God is simply a mistaken figment of human imagination. It’s time for us all to grow up and leave this childishness behind.
Bill would have strongly disagreed with this. If I understood him correctly when I studied under him, and later when I read his writings he believed the way we Christians have traditionally understood God as a rewarder of good and punisher of evil doesn’t deal realistically with the world as we know it. And the notion that God is like a divine bellhop, ready, willing and able to give us whatever we want if we just pray enough, go to church often enough, and give money enough, is blasphemy. Some Christians today who seem so sure they know everything about God are simply foolish. God is infinitely more than any human being can possibly understand. How words are always inadequate to describe God.
Having said that, the kind of God you and I believe in makes all the difference in the world. Today nearly every American says that she or he believes in God. To which I want to ask, as did the ancient prophets of Israel, “What does your God expect of you?”
There is a wonderful and challenging passage in the New Testament Letter of James (James 2:14-26) which I will paraphrase: ”What good is it, brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith in God but do nothing to help your poverty-stricken brothers and sisters? Yes, I know, you say you believe in God, but so do the demons, the powers of evil in this world. The wicked evil shudder at the thought that you might translate your abstract belief in God into concrete efforts to relieve human misery. But if you aren’t willing to make sacrifices to help people in need, what difference does it make if you say you believe in God? Faith that is not demonstrated by acts of love is worthless, just so many words.”
Friends, that is what I believe and, in his own way, I think that is what Bill believed. It is we who are responsible for overcoming human tragedy. I seem to recall Bill saying in class something from Luther to the effect that those who say they don’t believe in God are sometimes closer to God than those who say they believe. In that special sense, I believe that Jesus might have said of Bill as he said of another good man seeking God, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” (Mark 12:34)
There is a poem not much read anymore that I believe is a good note on which to end this message as my belated tribute to Bill Hamilton.
ABOU BEN ADHEM
“Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw – within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich and like a lily in bloom –
An angel, writing in a book of gold.
Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the presence in the room he said,
‘What writest thou?’ – The vision raised its head,
And, with a look made of all sweet accord,
Answered, ‘The names of those who love the Lord.’
‘And is mine one?’ said Abou. ‘Nay, not so,
Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerily still, and said, ‘I pray thee, then,
Write me as one who loves his fellow men.’
The angel wrote and vanished. The next night
It came again with a great wakening light,
And showed the names whom love of God had blessed,
And lo! Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest.”
- James Henry Leigh Hunt
I believe Bill Hamilton’s name is in that book, and I hope you and I, whatever our understanding of God, want our names there, too. The God who can inspire such love is never dead.
Amen