On April 8, 1966, a five-thousand-word cover story appeared in Time magazine, sending the country into a panic over a group of theologians few had heard of then and nobody remembers now. Paul van Buren, Thomas Altizer, and William Hamilton are forgotten. The cover, however, remains memorable. The first in the magazine’s history not to feature a photograph or illustration, it shocked readers by asking, “Is God Dead?”
The author, John Elson, worked on the story for more than a year. It’s an exceptional piece of journalism. He introduced the nation to a school of thought that would come to be known as “Death of God theology.” Although its proponents differed on matters of substance and style, they shared an idea that was easily sensationalized: Christianity can and must dispense with belief in the divine. A “theology without theos,” as Elson put it, seemed ill timed—97 percent of Americans still professed belief in God. Reaction to the article was overwhelmingly hostile. The theologians fared no better. Attacked by the public and shunned by the academy, their careers never recovered.
Elson and his editors at Time, however, were prophetic in giving Death of God theology such attention. The United States today looks a lot like the society van Buren, Altizer, and Hamilton wished to midwife. Their ideas about the relationship between Christianity and secularization express, in exaggerated form to be sure, some of the most deeply felt religious intuitions of our culture. They also anticipated a crucial but under-examined phenomenon of our time: the institutional defeat and cultural victory of liberal Protestantism.
And so, fifty years on, to revisit the Death of God movement is not to witness the absurd apotheosis of sixties-era religion. It is to encounter a moment, at once traditional and radical, when liberal Protestantism sought a new dispensation to justify the moral supremacy over American life that it continues to enjoy to this day.
What does it mean to say that God is dead? The phrase unsettles, even menaces, and much of the antipathy directed at Death of God theology reflected a misunderstanding. The phrase was not a call to action. It announced a historical event. Something has happened in Western culture over the last three centuries, altering the conditions of human experience. Man has learned to understand the world and to order his life apart from God. God is dead in the way Latin is dead.
