Haynes-1999-The Death of God Movement and The Holocaust - Radical-Theology-Shoah

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The Death of God
Movement and the
Holocaust
Recent Titles in
Christianity and the Holocaust—Core Issues
The Stones Will Cry Out: Pastoral Reflections on the Shoa (With Liturgical Resources)
Douglas K. Huneke
Christianity, Tragedy, and Holocaust Literature

Michael R. Steele
From the Unthinkable to the Unavoidable: American Christian and Jewish Scholars
Encounter the Holocaust
Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, editors
Holocaust Education and the Church-Related College: Restoring Ruptured Traditions

Stephen R. Haynes
Holocaust Scholars Write to the Vatican

Harry James Cargas, editor
Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity During the Holocaust

Victoria J. Barnett
The Death of God
Movement and the
Holocaust
Radical Theology
Encounters the Shoah
Edited by
Stephen R. Haynes
and John K. Roth
Contributions to the Study of Religion, Number 55

Christianity and the Holocaust—Core Issues
Carol Rittner, Series Editor
GREENWOOD PRESS
Westport, Connecticut • London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Pubiication Data
The death of God movement and the Holocaust : radical theology

encounters the Shoah / edited by Stephen R. Haynes and John K. Roth.
p. cm.—(Contributions to the study of religion, ISSN
0196-7053 ; no. 55. Christianity and the Holocaust—coreissues)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-313-30365-7 (alk. paper)
1. Death of God theology. 2. Holocaust (Christian theology)
3. Holocaust (Jewish theology) I. Haynes, Stephen R. II. Roth,
John K. III. Series: Contributions to the study of religion ; no.
55. IV. Series: Contributions to the study of religion.
Christianity and the Holocaust—core issues.
BT83.5.D43 1999
231.7'6—dc21 98-47820
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
Copyright © 1999 by Stephen R. Haynes and John K. Roth
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be

reproduced, by any process or technique, without the
express written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-47820

ISBN: 0-313-30365-7
ISSN: 0196-7053
First published in 1999
Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881

An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
www.greenwood.com
Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this book complies with the

Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984).
1098765432 1
To the Memory
of
Paul M. van Buren

1924-1998
A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver.

—Proverbs 25:11
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Contents
Series Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: The Holocaust and the Death of God— xiii

Encounter or Reencounter?
Stephen R. Haynes and John K. Roth
Part One: The Death of God Movement Is Born
1. Toward a Hidden God 3

Time, April 8, 1966
Part Two: The Death of God and the Holocaust—Reconsidering the

Encounter
Practitioners
2. The Holocaust and the Theology of the Death of God 17

Thomas J. J. Altizer
3. Genocide and the Death of God 25

William Hamilton
4. From the Secular to the Scriptural Gospel 35

Paul M. van Buren
5. Radical Theology and the Holocaust 43

Richard L. Rubenstein
Vlll Contents
Respondents
6. After the Holocaust: The Death of God and the Profaning of Texts 57
Edith Wyschogrod
7. The Holocaust and the Death of God: 63

A Response to Altizer, Hamilton, and Rubenstein
Thomas A. I dinopul os
8. The Holocaust, Genocide, and Radical Theology: 69

An Assessment of the Death of God Movement
John K. Roth
Part Three: The Death of God and the Holocaust—Analyzing the

Encounter
9. The Death of God Movement and 79

Twentieth-Century Protestant Theology
John J. Carey
10. The Death of God: An African-American Perspective 91

Hubert G. Locke
11. The Death of History and the Life of Akeda: Voices from the War 99
Gershon Greenberg
12. Christians and Pharisees: Jewish Responses to Radical Theology 111

Timothy A. Bennett and Rochelle L. Millen
Epilogue 131
John K. Roth and Stephen R. Haynes
Bibliography 135
Index 143
About the Editors and Contributors 149

Series Foreword
The Holocaust did not end when the Allies liberated the Jewish survivors from
Nazi Germany’s killing centers and concentration camps in 1945. The
consequences of that catastrophic event still shadow the world’s moral, political,
and religious life.
The Christianity and the Holocaust—Core Issues series explores Christian
complicity, indifference, resistance, rescue, and other responses to the Holocaust.
Concentrating on core issues such as the Christian roots of antisemitism, the
roles played by Christian individuals and groups during the Holocaust, and the
institutional reactions of Christians after Auschwitz, the series has a historical
focus but addresses current concerns as well.
While many of the series’ authors are well-known, established Holocaust
scholars, the series also features young writers who will become leaders in the
next generation of Holocaust scholarship. As all of the authors study the
Holocaust’s history, they also assess its impact on Christianity and its
implications for the future of the Christian tradition.
The Death of God Movement and the Holocaust explores how Nazi
Germany’s destruction of the European Jews affected important currents in
Christian and Jewish theology. Specifically, in the mid-1960s, four diverse
religious thinkers from the United States—Thomas Altizer, William Hamilton,
Richard Rubenstein, and Paul van Buren—intensified Friedrich Nietzsche’s
nineteenth-century claim that “God is dead.” Although they represented different
traditions, utilized varied methods of analysis, and focused on culture in
distinctive ways, the four young Americans were all influenced—some more,
others less—by the Holocaust, the twentieth century’s watershed event.
Their headline-grabbing work—Time's cover story featured it on April 8,
1966—caused a stir in Christian and Jewish circles alike. Thirty years later, a
symposium at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR)
revisited the death of God movement by asking the four radical theologians to
reflect on the ways in which awareness of the Holocaust affected their thinking
not only in the 1960s but also into the late 1990s.
X Series Foreword
Along with responses to their presentations by other noted scholars. The

Death of God Movement and the Holocaust contains the significant essays that
Altizer, Hamilton, Rubenstein, and van Buren prepared for the AAR symposium
in New Orleans. Stephen R Haynes and John K. Roth have edited and
introduced a volume that reprints Time's 1966 cover story on the death of God
movement, documents the development of “radical theology” and its encounters
with the Holocaust, identifies the lasting contributions and controversies that
comprise the legacy of the death of God movement, and shows how those
themes and issues agitate Christian and Jewish life on the eve of the twenty-first
century.
Carol Rittner and John K. Roth

Acknowledgments
The editors would like to thank those who aided them in bringing this book
into being, including Time Life Syndication for permission to reprint “Toward
a Hidden God” from Time (April 8, 1966).
At Claremont McKenna College we received skilled assistance from
Micheal Malsed, who provided formatting and computer expertise, and
especially from Elizabeth Wydra, whose editorial eye and bibliographical
searching significantly improved the book. At Rhodes College we were ably
assisted by Laura Hardin, who tracked down the Time article reprinted here, and
Greg Sims, who scanned and formatted the entire manuscript.
We would also like to thank the book’s contributors. They made our work
easier by their expressions of enthusiasm for the project and by the timely and
expert completion of their contributions. We also wish to thank the American
Academy of Religion for its sponsorship and support of the AAR’s Religion,
Holocaust, and Genocide Group, and all those who participated in the “The
Death of God and the Holocaust” symposium at the 1996 AAR Annual Meeting
in New Orleans.
We are also indebted to Elisabetta Linton and Betty Pessagno at
Greenwood Publishing, whose enthusiasm for our project and patience as it
came into being are very much appreciated. Finally, we must thank our families,
who support us and our work in so many ways.
Paul van Buren, to whom this book is dedicated, died while it was in
production. The editors express their appreciation for Dr. van Buren’s
willingness to contribute to this volume, as well as for his legacy of theological
courage.
And then came the Holocaust.
Paul M. van Buren, A Theology

of the Jewish-Christian Reality
Introduction: The Holocaust and
the Death of God—Encounter or
Reencounter?
Stephen R. Haynes and John K. Roth
BEGINNINGS
The remote origin of this book is a conversation that took place in the corridor
of a Washington, D.C. hotel during November 1993. The occasion was the
annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and Society of
Biblical Literature. One of the editors (Haynes) was leaving an AAR session on
post-Holocaust theology when he was accosted by a colleague he had met at
another conference the previous spring.
Knowing of his research interest in the theology of erstwhile radical
theologian Paul van Buren, Haynes’s friend reminded him of the approaching
thirty-year anniversary of the emergence of the so-called death of God movement
in a celebrated Time cover story. The significance of this anniversary—and what
exactly he might do about it—escaped him for the time being. But like all good
ideas it was to reassert itself at a more opportune time.
THE FORUM
About the same time, this same editor was making plans to submit to the
Program Committee of the American Academy of Religion a proposal for a new
program unit that would focus on the intersection of religion and Holocaust
studies. The proposal was approved at the end of 1993 and the Religion,
Holocaust, and Genocide Consultation met for the first time at the AAR’s
annual meeting the following year. The consultation was welcomed by members
of the Academy as a forum for the discussion of Holocaust and genocide issues
and their religious dimensions, and it was elevated to “group” status in 1996.
As Haynes and group co-chair Rochelle Millen of Wittenberg University
discussed the sort of sessions they would plan for the 1996 annual meeting, the
idea that had been broached in that hotel corridor in 1993 resurfaced. Haynes and
Millen believed, though they were not sure, that the death of God movement
XIV Introduction
had emerged in 1966. As a student of contemporary Protestant theology, Haynes

recalled that the “movement,” such as it was, received its public beginning with
a Time cover that provocatively asked “Is God Dead?” Haynes decided to
research the idea. With little trouble, one of his students was able to track down
that back issue of Time^ which was dated April 1966.
Reading the article (which is reprinted in this volume), Haynes discovered
some very tentative references to the Holocaust and other contemporary historical
tragedies. In fact, twentieth-century experiences of genocide were among the
challenges to faith highlighted in the article. But these were mentioned only
obliquely, and were lumped together in a manner that did not foster clarity rf
thought. The article included a photograph captioned “death at Hiroshima” and
opined that in the 1960s belief in God was suffering from the fact that “after
Dachau’s mass sadism and Hiroshima’s instant death, there are all too many
real possibilities of hell on earth.”
Two things stood out in this passing reference to the link between
genocide and the theology of the death of God. The first was its imprecision:
Today the conflating of Nazis and nuclear bombs is generally avoided in
sophisticated discussions of genocide. In fact, at this moment in our history
there is considerable interest in the Nazi Holocaust even though the specter of
nuclear conflagration has largely vanished. The second notable aspect of the
article’s reference to the Holocaust was its primitive understanding of the Nazi
Final Solution. Specifically, the use of “Dachau” as a metonym for German
crimes against humanity reflects a very early stage in the comprehension cf
Hitler’s war against the Jews. Slowly over the past three decades “Auschwitz”
has emerged as the metonym of choice, naming as it does the most notorious
Nazi death camp and the endpoint of a long evolution in methods of murder.
Furthermore, the Time article encouraged the idea that all Nazi compounds were
“concentration camps,” and thus obscured the fact that Dachau was not a
Vernichtungslager whose very purpose was the efficient annihilation of human
beings.
These observations on the way the death of God movement had been
communicated to the American public by a leading news magazine assisted
Haynes in honing the idea that would lead to the creation of this volume. He
decided to devote a session of the Religion, Holocaust, and Genocide Group at
the 1996 AAR Annual Meeting to commemorating the thirty year anniversary of
the death of God movement, with special attention to whether and how the
Holocaust had affected the views of radical theologians during the 1960s. The
Time article’s reference to “Dachau’s mass sadism” confirmed that the reality of
the Final Solution and its death camps had not been fully assessed by 1966.
Could the same be assumed about the death of God theologians of which the
article spoke? Or were these theologians before their time, as it were, in
possessing an instinctual sense of the Holocaust’s meaning for theological
reflection? And who could answer these questions?
The idea seemed relevant and important, but two formidable questions
remained: What form would the session take, and would it fit the parameters of
the AAR’s Religion, Holocaust, and Genocide program unit? Haynes
approached the first question with the assumption that the best way to
understand the so-called death of God movement was to allow those who had
Introduction XV
been part of it (or whom the media had claimed were part of it) to speak with
their own voices. But where were these men? Were they still alive? Were they
still active professionally? Would they agree to participate in a conference
session at the request of someone they had never met?
The question of the proposed session’s relevance to the work of the
Religion, Holocaust and Genocide Group could not be overlooked, and in feet
had to be tackled first. Despite the attractiveness of the theme, as co-chair the
Haynes felt obliged to retain the group’s focus on episodes of genocide and their
religious meanings. Another writing project led him in the direction of a
solution to this apparent dilemma. In the process of conducting research on the
history of Holocaust education in American colleges and universities, he was
struck by the fact that full consciousness of the Holocaust as a watershed in
Western history did not begin to emerge until the late 1970s. Many scholars
have tried to explain this gap between event and understanding, but all agree it
is a large one that stretches across the decade of the 1960s. Perhaps, then, the
question that would bring the death of God theology into the purview of
Holocaust and genocide studies was this; What effect, if any, did knowledge of
the Shoah and consideration of its meaning have on the death of God
theologians who were so prominent in the second half of the 1960s?
Haynes thought this question important to ask, and was fairly certain no
one had asked it. In fact, the Time article’s vague references to “Dachau and
Hiroshima” suggested the real possibility that for the death of Goders themselves
the Holocaust had become submerged in the unconscious sea of “man’s
inhumanity to man” to which their theologies were in some part a reaction. But
what role had knowledge of the Holocaust—and what it revealed about human
behavior in the modem world, and about the Christian and Jewish
traditions—played in their thought in the 1960s; and what role should or could
this knowledge have played in retrospect? These seemed like provocative and
appropriate questions, but who would answer them?
A few years before this time Haynes had written his dissertation on
understandings of “Israel” (the Jewish people) in the work of prominent
Protestant theologians, including Paul van Buren. At the time. Professor van
Buren had been gracious enough to host the fledgling scholar at his Boston
home and submit to questions related to his theology. Haynes knew that van
Buren had never regarded himself as a “death of God theologian” and that he had
come to repudiate the book—The Secular Meaning of the Gospel
(1963)—which had earned him that moniker. But Haynes believed van Buren
could help him honestly assess whether his idea for a session on the death of
God and the Holocaust was worth pursuing.
As it turned out. Professor van Buren was out of the country and Haynes
had to turn elsewhere. (Happily, while he was not able to participate in the AAR
session. Professor van Buren made an important contribution to this volume,
which is dedicated to his memory). Having recently enjoyed personal contact
with another of the original death of God theologians, Richard L. Rubenstein,
Haynes contacted him. Though extremely busy as president of the University of
Bridgeport, Rubenstein voiced support for the idea of revisiting the movement
with particular reference to the Holocaust, and consented to sit on a panel of
death of God thinkers at the 1996 AAR annual meeting in New Orleans.
XVI Introduction
Rubenstein suggested that Haynes contact William Hamilton and Thomas

J. J. Altizer, two principals of the original movement, as well as Harvey Cox,
who some had associated with the death of God theology. While Cox turned
down an invitation to participate in the session, both Hamilton and Altizer
agreed, and it appeared that a thirty year retrospective on the death of God
movement was to become a reality.
PUBLICATION
At this point, Haynes made a fortuitous contact. John Roth was spending
the 1995-1996 academic year in Norway on a Fulbright Fellowship, and during
that time was in touch with Haynes concerning a book to be included in the
series Roth was co-editing with Carol Rittner, R.S.M. Aware of Roth’s
expertise in both philosophy and Holocaust studies, Haynes apprised him of the
planned session and asked him to serve as a respondent. Roth agreed to do so,
and was enthusiastic about the project. In fact, he wrote from Norway that the
proceedings ought to be published if at all possible.
Haynes was not yet confident there would be anything to publish, but after
further discussion and planning with Roth and success in securing panelists and
respondents, Roth approached Greenwood Publishing with the idea of a volume
based on the AAR session. Greenwood was enthusiastic as well, and offered a
contract for a book that would include pieces by as many of the original death-of-
Goders as could participate in the session in New Orleans, responses by John
Roth, Edith Wyschogrod, and Thomas Idinopulos, and other articles to be
commissioned by the editors.
THE SESSION
The two-and-a-half-hour AAR session in New Orleans turned out to be

everything its organizers had anticipated. It was advertised with the title
“Holocaust, Genocide, and Radical Theology: Assessing the ‘Death of God
Movement’ Thirty Years Later.” The published description announced that: “In
this session, three principals in the ‘death of God movement’ will reassess it by
responding to the following question: How did your awareness of genocide (in
the Holocaust or elsewhere) affect your theological reflection in the 1960s?
Looking back, what effect might it or should it have had? To what extent
should radical theologians today take seriously the phenomenon of genocide?”
An estimated two hundred persons attended the session. The crowd
included many who had been active in or careful observers of the death of God
circle thirty years earlier. Significantly, in fact, many senior members of the
Academy arrived and chose their seats thirty minutes before the session was to
begin. For them and many others, this retrospective on the death of God
movement was not to be missed.
Ironically, attendance on the panel itself was less than perfect. In a letter
that accompanied the paper he wrote for the session. Professor Altizer mentioned
that lack of institutional travel funds might preclude him from traveling to New
Orleans. The editors hoped the prospect of a reunion vîth his theological fellow
travelers from the 1960s would overcome any logistical obstacles to Altizer’s
Introduction xvii
participation. But a few hours before the session was to commence, it was
learned that Professor Altizer was not coming to New Orleans, and that was that.
Altizer made it clear, however, that he had no objection to his paper being
read in his absence. As session convenor, that task fell to Haynes. At the last
minute Professor Hamilton expressed discomfort at the idea of discussing the
work of a scholar who was not present. But he overcame his qualms and the
session was underway. It was exceedingly strange for Haynes to stand in front cf
several hundred persons reading aloud thoughts so unlike his own; yet he made
every effort to do Professor Altizer justice. Hamilton and Rubenstein read their
own contributions, each taking about twenty minutes to do so. The three
respondents followed, and the sessino’s remaining forty-five minutes were
devoted to questions and discussions. While there is no transcript of that
discussion, several of the issues that emerged are visited in the critical articles
contained in this volume.
As will be clear from the articles in the first two parts of the book, the
AAR session was spirited, provocative, and—we believe—^historic. It was the
first time that the principals of the death of God movement had been together in
a public forum in nearly thirty years; it was without doubt the first time that
they had been asked to think systematically about the Holocaust and its
relationship to their theologies; and it was very likely the last time that group
would assemble for any purpose.
CONCLUSION
As John Carey maintains in his contribution to this volume, during the
1960s the discipline of theology underwent revolutionary change as the
certainties on which it was built were called into question. During the same
period knowledge of and curiosity about the Holocaust began to grow
exponentially in the American mind. The connection between these two trends,
a connection that has not been previously explored, is the subject of this study.
Another unique aspect of this volume is that it allows the former death cf
God theologians to speak in their own words, long after their voices have ceased
to be heard at the center of the theological arena. The book is certainly not the
last word on the death of God movement or even on its connection with the
Holocaust and genocide. Rather, as the record of a historic gathering, it is
intended to be an impetus to conversation among those interested in the
relationship of theology and humanity’s survival. Its editors hope that, in
drawing attention in a new way to the link between theological reflection and
contemporary experience, it might illuminate areas of human encounter with the
world—and with the transcendent—^that remain a mystery.
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Part One
The Death of God Movement Is Born

■'» I i
Toward a Hidden God
Time, April 8, 1966
Is God dead? It is a question that tantalizes both believers, who perhaps secretly
fear that he is, and atheists, who possibly suspect that the answer is no.
Is God dead? The three words represent a summons to reflect on the
meaning of existence. No longer is the question the taunting jest of skeptics for
whom unbelief is the test of wisdom and for whom Nietzsche is the prophet who
gave the right answer a century ago. Even within Christianity, now confidently
renewing itself in spirit as well as form, a small band of radical theologians has
seriously argued that the churches must accept the fact of God’s death, and get
along without him.
How does the issue differ from the age-old assertion that God does not and
never did exist? Nietzsche’s thesis was that striving, self-centered man had
killed God, and that settled that. The current death-of-God group* believes that
God is indeed absolutely dead, but proposes to carry on and write a theology
without theos, without God. Less radical Christian thinkers hold that at the very
least God in the image of man, God sitting in heaven, is dead, and—in the
central task of religion today—^they seek to imagine and define a God who can
touch men’s emotions and engage men’s minds.
If nothing else, the Christian atheists are waking the churches to the brutal
reality that the basic premise of faith—^the existence of a personal God, who
created the world and sustains it with his love—is now subject to profound
attack. “What is in question is God himself,” warns German Theologian Heinz
Zahmt, “and the churches are fighting a hard defensive battle, fighting for every
inch.” “The basic theological problem today,” says one thinker who has helped
define it, Langdon Gilkey of the University of Chicago Divinity School, “is the
reality of God.”
* Reprinted from “Toward a Hidden God,” Time, April 8, 1966. Copyright 1966 Time
Inc. Used by permission.
4 The Death of God Movement Is Bom
A TIME OF NO RELIGION
Some Christians, of course, have long held that Nietzsche was not just a
voice crying in the wilderness. Even before Nietzsche, Soren Kierkegaard
warned that “the day when Christianity and the world become friends,
Christianity is done away with.” During World War II, the anti-Nazi Lutheran
martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote prophetically to a friend from his Berlin
prison cell: “We are proceeding toward a time of no religion at all.”
For many, that time has arrived. Nearly one of every two men on earth
lives in thralldom to a brand of totalitarianism that condemns religion as the
opiate of the masses—which has stirred some to heroic defense of their faith but
has also driven millions from any sense of God’s existence. Millions more in
Africa, Asia and South America seem destined to be bom without expectation of
being summoned to knowledge of the one God.
Princeton Theologian Paul Ramsey observes that “ours is the first attempt
in recorded history to build a culture upon the premise that God is dead.” In the
traditional citadels of Christendom, grey Gothic cathedrals stand empty, mute
witnesses to a rejected faith. From the scrofulous hobos of Samuel Beckett to
Antonioni’s tired-blooded aristocrats, the anti-heroes of modern art endlessly
suggest that waiting for God is futile, since life is without meaning.
For some, this thought is a source of existential anguish: the Jew who lost
his faith in a providential God at Auschwitz, the Simone de Beauvoir who
writes: “It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a
creator loaded with all the contradictions of the world.” But for others, the God
issue—including whether or not he is dead—has been put aside as irrelevant.
“Personally, I’ve never been confronted with the question of God,” says one
such politely indifferent atheist. Dr. Claude Levi-Strauss, professor of social
anthropology at the College de France. “I find it’s perfectly possible to spend
my life knowing that we will never explain the universe.” Jesuit Theologian
John Courtney Murray points to another variety of unbelief: the atheism of
distraction, people who are just “too damn busy” to worry about God at all.
JOHANNINE SPIRIT
Yet, along with the new atheism has come a new reformation. The open-
window spirit of Pope John XXIII and Vatican II have revitalized the Roman
Catholic Church. Less spectacularly but not less decisively, Protestantism has
been stirred by a flurry of experimentation in liturgy, church structure, ministry.
In this new Christianity, the watchword is witness: Protestant faith now means
not intellectual acceptance of an ancient confession, but open
commitment—perhaps best symbolized in the U.S. by the civil rights
movement—to eradicating the evil and inequality that beset the world.
The institutional strength of the churches is nowhere more apparent than in
the U.S., a country where public faith in God seems to be as secure as it was in
medieval France. According to a survey by Pollster Lou Harris last year, 97% of
the American people say they believe in God. Although clergymen agree that
Toward a Hidden God 5
the postwar religious revival is over, a big majority of believers continue to

display their faith by joining churches. In 1964, reports the National Council of
Churches, denominational allegiance rose about 2%, compared with a
population gain of less than 1.5%. More than 120 million Americans now claim
a religious affiliation; and a recent Gallup survey indicated that 44% of them
report that they attend church services weekly.
For uncounted millions, faith remains as rock-solid as Gibraltar. Evangelist
Billy Graham is one of them. “I know that God exists because of my personal
experience,” he says. "I know that I know him. I’ve talked with him and walked
with him. He cares about me and acts in my everyday life.” Still another is
Roman Catholic Playwright William Alfred, whose off-Broadway hit, Hogan’s
Goat, melodramatically plots a turn-of-the-century Irish immigrant’s struggle to
achieve the American dream. “People who tell me there is no God,” he says,
“are like a six-year-old boy saying that there is no such thing as passionate
love—^they just haven’t experienced it.”
PRACTICAL ATHEISTS
Plenty of clergymen, nonetheless, have qualms about the quality and
character of contemporary belief. Lutheran Church Historian Martin Marty
argues that all too many pews are filled on Sunday with practical
atheists—disguised nonbelievers who behave during the rest of the week as if
God did not exist. Jesuit Murray qualifies his conviction that the U.S. is
basically a God-fearing nation by adding: “The great American proposition is
‘religion is good for the kids, though I’m not religious myself’” Pollster Harris
bears him out: of the 97% who said they believed in God, only 27% declared
themselves deeply religious.
Christianity and Judaism have always had more than their share of men of
little faith or none. “The fool says in his heart, ‘there is no God,”’ wrote the
Psalmist, implying that there were plenty of such fools to be found in ancient
Judea. But it is not faintness of spirit that the churches worry about now: it is
doubt and bewilderment assailing committed believers.
Particularly among the young, there is an acute feeling that the churches on
Sunday are preaching the existence of a God who is nowhere visible in their
daily lives. “I love God,” cries one anguished teenager, “but I hate the church.”
Theologian Gilkey says that belief is the area in the modem Protestant church
where one finds blankness, silence, people not knowing what to say or merely
repeating what their preachers say. “Part of the Christian mood today,” suggests
Christian Atheist William Hamilton, “is that faith has become not a possession
but a hope.”
ANONYMOUS CHRISTIANITY
In search of meaning, some believers have desperately turned to
psychiatry, Zen or drugs. Thousands of others have quietly abandoned all but
token allegiance to the churches, surrendering themselves to a life of
“anonymous Christianity” dedicated to civil rights or the Peace Corps. Speaking

for a generation of young Roman Catholics for whom the dogmas of the church
have lost much of their power, Philosopher Michael Novak of Stanford writes:
“I do not understand God, nor the way in which he works. If, occasionally, I
raise my heart in prayer, it is to no God I can see, or hear or feel. It is to a God in
as cold and obscure a polar night as any nonbeliever has known.”
Even clergymen seem to be uncertain. “I’m confused as to what God is,”
says no less a person than Francis B. Sayre, the Episcopal dean of Washington’s
National Cathedral, “but so is the rest of America.” Says Marty’s colleague at
the Chicago Divinity School, the Rev. Nathan Scott, who is also rector of St.
Paul’s Episcopal Church in Hyde Park: “I look out at the faces of my people,
and I’m not sure what meaning these words, gestures and rituals have for them.”
HYDROGEN AND CARBON

To those who do formulate a God, he seems to be everything from a
celestial gas to a kind of invisible honorary president “out there” in space, well
beyond range of the astronauts. A young Washington scientist suggests that
“God, if anything, is hydrogen and carbon. Then again, he might be
thermonuclear fission, since that’s what makes life on this planet possible.” To a
streetwalker in Tel Aviv, “God will get me out of this filth one day. He is a God
of mercy, dressed all in white and sitting on a golden throne.” A Dutch
charwoman says: “God is a ghost floating in space.” Screenwriter Edward
Anhalt (Becket) says that “God is an infantile fantasy, which was necessary
when men did not understand what lightning was. God is a cop-out.” A Greek
janitor thinks that God is “like a fiery flame, so white that it can blind you.”
“God is all that I cannot understand, says a Roman seminarian. A Boston
scientist describes God as “the totality of harmony in the universe.” Playwright
Alfred muses: “It is the voice which says, ‘It’s not good enough’—that’s what
God is.”
Even though they know better, plenty of Christians find it hard to do away
with ideas of God as a white-bearded father figure. William McCleary of
Philadelphia, a Roman Catholic civil servant, sees God “a lot like he was
explained to us as children. As an older man, who is just and who can get angry
at us. I know this isn’t the true picture, but it’s the only one I’ve got.”
INVISIBLE SUPERMEN
Why has God become so hard to believe in, so easy to dismiss as a
nonbeing? The search for an answer begins in the complex—and still
unfinished—history of man’s effort to comprehend the idea that he might have a
personal creator.
No one knows when the idea of a single god became part of mankind’s
spiritual heritage. It does seem certain that the earliest humans were religious.
Believing the cosmos to be governed by some divine power, they worshiped
every manifestation of it: trees, animals, earth and sky. To the more
sophisticated societies of the ancient world, cosmological mystery was proof

that there were many gods. Ancient Babylonia, for example, worshiped at least
700 deities. Yet even those who ranked highest in the divine hierarchies were
hardly more than invisible supermen. The Zeus of ancient Greece, although
supreme on Olympus, was himself subject to the whims of fate—and besides
that was so afflicted by fits of lust that he was as much the butt of dirty jokes as
an object of worship.
Much closer to the deity of modem monotheism was the Egyptian sun god
Aten, which the Pharaoh Amenophis IV forced on his polytheistic people as “the
only god, beside whom there is no other.” But the Pharaoh’s heresy died out
after his death, and the message to the world that there was but one true God
came from Egypt’s tiny neighbor, Israel. It was not a sudden revelation. Some
scholars believe that Yahweh was originally a tribal deity—a god whom the
Hebrews worshiped and considered superior to the pagan gods adored by other
nations. It is even questionable to some whether Moses understood Yahweh to
be mankind’s only God, the supreme lord of all creation. Even after the
emergence of Israel’s faith, there is plenty of Biblical evidence that the Hebrews
were tempted to abandon it: the prophets constantly excoriate the chosen people
for whoring after strange gods.
The God of Israel was so utterly beyond human comprehension that devout
Jews neither uttered nor wrote his sacred name. At the same time, Judaism has
a unique sense of God’s personal presence. Scripture records that he walked in
the Garden of Eden with Adam, spoke familiarly on Mount Sinai with Moses,
expressed an almost human anger and joy. Christianity added an even more
mystifying dimension to the belief that the infinitely distant was infinitely near:
the doctrine that God came down to earth in the person of a Jewish carpenter
named Jesus, who died at Jerusalem around 26 A.D.
It was not an easy faith to define or defend, and the early church,
struggling to rid itself of heresy, turned to an intellectual weapon already forged
and near at hand: the metaphysical language of Greece. The alliance of Biblical
faith and Hellenic reason culminated in the Middle Ages. Although they
acknowledged that God was ultimately unknowable, the medieval scholastics
devoted page after learned page of their summas to discussions of the divine
attributes—his omnipotence, immutability, perfection, eternity. Although
infinitely above men, God was seen as the apex of a great pyramid of being that
extended downward to the tiniest stone, the ultimate ruler of an ordered cosmos
cooperatively governed by Christian church and Christian state.
UNDERMINING FAITH
Christians are sometimes inclined to look back nostalgically at the
medieval world as the great age of faith. In his book. The Death of God, Gabriel
Vahanian of Syracuse University suggests that actually it was the beginning of
the divine demise. Christianity, by imposing its faith on the art, politics and even
economics of a culture, unconsciously made God part of that culture—and when
the world changed, belief in this God was undermined. Now “God has
disappeared because of the image of him that the church used for many, many
ages,” says Dominican Theologian Edward Schillebeeckx.
At its worst, the image that the church gave of God was that of a wonder
worker who explained the world’s mysteries and seemed to have somewhat
more interest in punishing men than rewarding them. Life was a vale of tears,
said the church; men were urged to shun the pleasure of life if they would serve
God, and to avoid any false step or suffer everlasting punishment in hell. It did
little to establish the credibility of this “God” that medieval theologians
categorized his qualities as confidently as they spelled out different kinds of sin,
and that churchmen spoke about him as if they had just finished having lunch
with him.
THE SECULAR REBELLION

The rebellion against this God of faith is best summed up by the word
secularization. In The Secular City, Harvey Cox of the Harvard Divinity School
defines the term as “the loosing of the world from religious and quasi-religious
understanding of itself, the dispelling of all closed world views, the breaking of
all supernatural myths and sacred symbols.” Slowly but surely, it dawned on
men that they did not need God to explain, govern or justify certain areas of life.
The development of capitalism, for example, freed economics from church
control and made it subject only to marketplace supply and demand. Political
theorists of the Enlightenment proved that law and government were not
institutions handed down from on high, but things that men had created
themselves. The 18th century deists argued that man as a rational animal was
capable of developing an ethical system that made as much sense as one based
on revelation. Casting a cold eye on the complacency of Christianity before such
evils as slavery, poverty and the factory system, such 19th century atheists as
Karl Marx and Pierre Joseph Proudhon declared that the churches and their God
would have to go if every man was to be free to shape and improve his destiny.
But the most important agent in the secularizing process was science. The
Copernican revolution was a shattering blow to faith in a Bible that assumed the
sun went round the earth and could be stopped in its tracks by divine
intervention, as Joshua claimed. And while many of the pioneers of modern
science—Newton and Descartes, for example—were devout men, they
assiduously explained much of nature that previously seemed godly mysteries.
Others saw no need for such reverential lip service. When he was asked by
Napoleon why there was no mention of God in his new book about the stars, the
French astronomer Laplace coolly answered: “I had no need of the hypothesis.”
Neither did Charles Darwin, in uncovering the evidence of evolution.
PRESTIGE OF SCIENCE
Faith in God survived scientific attack only when the churches came to
realize that the religious language of the Bible is what Theologian Krister
Stendahl calls “poetry-plus, rather than science-minus.” Nowadays, not even
fundamentalists are upset by the latest cosmological theories of astronomers.

Quasars, everyone agrees, neither prove nor disprove divine creation; by
pushing back the boundaries of knowledge 8 billion light years without finding a
definite answer, they do, in a way, admit its possibility. Nonetheless, science
still presents a challenge to faith— in a new and perhaps more dangerous way.
Anglican Theologian David Jenkins points out that the prestige of science
is so great that its standards have seeped into other areas of life; in effect,
knowledge has become that which can be known by scientific study—and what
cannot be known that way somehow seems uninteresting, unreal. In previous
ages, the man of ideas, the priest or the philosopher was regarded as the font of
wisdom. Now, says Jenkins, the sage is more likely to be an authority “trained in
scientific methods of observing phenomena, who bases what he says on a corpus
of knowledge built up by observation and experiment and constantly verified by
further processes of practice and observation.” The prestige of science has been
helped along by the analytic tradition of philosophy, which tends to limit
“meaningful” ideas and statements to those that can be verified. It is no wonder,
then, that even devout believers are empirical in outlook, and find themselves
more at home with visible facts than unseen abstractions.
Socialization has immunized man against the wonder and mystery of
existence, argues Oxford Theologian Ian Ramsey. “We are now sheltered from
all the great crises of life. Birth is a kind of discontinuity between the prenatal
and post-natal clinics, while death just takes somebody out of the community,
possibly to the tune of prerecorded hymns at the funeral parlor.” John Courtney
Murray suggests that man has lost touch with the transcendent dimension in the
transition from a rural agricultural society to an urbanized, technological world.
The effect has been to veil man from what he calls natural symbols—the
seasonal pattern of growth—that in the past reminded men of their own
fmiteness. The question is, says Murray, “whether or not a contemporary
industrial civilization can construct symbols that can help us understand God.”
TEACH-IN FOR GOD

Secularization, science, urbanization—all have made it comparatively easy
for the modem man to ask where God is, and hard for the man of faith to give a
convincing answer, even to himself It is precisely to this problem—how do men
talk of God in the context of a culture that rejects the transcendent, the
beyond?—that theologians today are turning. In part, this reflects popular
demand and pastoral need. “God is the question that interests laymen the most,”
says David Edwards, editor of the Anglican SCM Press. Last month the
University of Colorado sponsored a teach-in on God, featuring William
Hamilton and Dr. George Forell of the University of Iowa’s School of Religion;
more than 1,700 people showed up for the seven-hour session—a greater turnout
than a recent similar talkfest on Viet Nam. At the University of California at
Santa Barbara, students and faculty jammed two lecture halls to hear Harvey
Cox talk on “The ‘Death of God’ and the Future of Theology.”
“If you want to have a well-attended lecture,” says Rabbi Abraham

Heschel, a visiting professor at Manhattan’s Union Theological Seminary,
“discuss God and faith.” Ministers have found that currently there is no easier
way to boost Sunday attendance than to post “Is God Dead?” as the topic of
their next sermon.
The new theological approach to the problem of God is not that of the ages
when solid faith could be assumed. No serious theologian today would attempt
to describe the qualities of God as the medieval scholastic did with such
assurance. Gone, too, is any attempt to prove God by reason alone. For one
thing, every proof seems to have a plausible refutation; for another, only a
committed Thomist is likely to be spiritually moved by the realization that there
is a self-existent Prime Mover. “Faith in God is more than an intellectual belief,”
says Dr. John Macquarrie of Union Theological Seminary. “It is a total attitude
of the self.”
FOUR OPTIONS
What unites the various contemporary approaches to the problem of God is
the conviction that the primary question has become not what God is, but how
men are justified in using the word. There is no unanimity about how to solve
this problem, although theologians seem to have four main options: stop talking
about God for a while, stick to what the Bible says, formulate a new image and
concept of God using contemporary thought categories, or simply point the way
to areas of human experience that indicate the presence of something beyond
man in life.
It is not only the Christian Atheists who think it pointless to talk about
God. Some contemporary ministers and theologians, who have no doubts that he
is alive, suggest that the church should stop using the word for awhile, since it is
freighted with unfortunate meanings. They take their clue from Bonhoeffer,
whose prison-cell attempt to work out a “nonreligious interpretation of Biblical
concepts” focused on Jesus as “the man for others.” By talking almost
exclusively about Christ, the argument goes, the church would be preaching a
spiritual hero whom even non-believers can admire. Yale’s Protestant Chaplain
William Sloane Coffin reports that “a girl said to me the other day, T don’t
know whether I’ll ever believe in God, but Jesus is my kind of guy.’”
In a sense, no Christian doctrine of God is possible without Jesus, since the
suffering redeemer of Calvary is the only certain glimpse of the divine that
churches have. But a Christ-centered theology that skirts the question of God
raises more questions than it answers. Does it not run the risk of slipping into a
variety of ethical humanism? And if Jesus is not clearly related in some way to
God, why is he a better focus of faith than Buddha, Socrates or even Albert
Camus? Rather than accept this alternative, a majority of Christians w'ould
presumably prefer to stay with the traditional language of revelation at any cost.
And it is not merely conservative evangelists who believe that the words and
ideas of Scripture have lost neither relevance nor meaning. Such a modem
novelist as John Updike begins his poem Seven Stanzas at Easter.
Make no mistake: if He rose at all

it was as His body;
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse,
the molecules reknit, the amino
acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
The century’s greatest Protestant theologian, Karl Barth of Switzerland,

has consistently warned his fellow churchmen that God is a “wholly other”
being, whom man can only know by God’s self-revelation in the person of
Christ, as witnessed by Scripture. Any search for God that starts with human
experience, Barth warns, is a vain quest that will discover only an idol, not the
true God at all.
HOLY BEING
The word of God, naked and unadorned, may be fine for the true believer,
but some theologians argue that Biblical terminology has ceased to be part of the
world’s vocabulary, and is in danger of becoming a special jargon as
incomprehensible to some as the equations of physicists. To bridge this
communications gap, they have tried to reinterpret the concept of God into
contemporary philosophical terms. Union Seminary’s John Macquarrie, for
example, proposes a description of God based on Martin Heidegger’s existential
philosophy, which is primarily concerned with explaining the nature of “being”
as such. To Heidegger, “being” is an incomparable, transcendental mystery,
something that confers existence on individual, particular beings. Macquarrie
calls Heidegger’s mystery “Holy Being,” since it represents what Christians
have traditionally considered God.
Other philosophical theologians, such as Schubert Ogden of Southern
Methodist University and John Cobb of the Southern California School of
Theology, have been working out a theism based on the process thinking of
Alfred North Whitehead. In their view, God is changing with the universe.
Instead of thinking of God as the immutable Prime Mover of the universe,
argues Ogden, it makes more sense to describe him as “the ultimate effect” and
as “the eminently relative One, whose openness to change continently on the
actions of others is literally boundless.” In brief, the world is creating God as
much as he is creating it.
Perhaps the most enthusiastic propagandists for a new image of God are
the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of Anglican theology. Bishop Robinson of
Woolwich, England, and Bishop James A. Pike of California. Both endorse the
late Paul Tillich’s concept of God as “the ground of being.” Pike, who thinks
that the church should have fewer but better dogmas, also suggests that the
church should abandon the Trinity, on the ground that it really seems to be
preaching three Gods instead of one. Christianity, in his view, should stop
attributing specific actions to persons of the Trinity—creation to the Father,
redemption to the Son, inspiration to the Holy Spirit—and just say that they
were all the work of God.
DISCERNMENT SITUATIONS
The contemporary world appears so biased against metaphysics that any
attempt to find philosophical equivalents for God may well be doomed to
failure. “God,” says Jerry Handspicker of the World Council of Churches, “has
suffered from too many attempts to define the indefinable.” Leaving unanswered
the question of what to say God is, some theologians are instead concentrating
on an exploration of the ultimate and unconditional in modern life. Their basic
point is that while modern men have rejected God as a solution to life, they
cannot evade a questioning anxiety about its meaning. The apparent eclipse of
God is merely a sign that the world is experiencing what Jesuit Theologian Karl
Rahner calls “the anonymous presence” of God, whose word comes to man not
on tablets of stone but in the inner murmurings of the heart.
Following Tillich, Langdon Gilkey argues that the area of life dealing with
the ultimate and with mystery points the way toward God. “When we ask. Why
am I?, What should I become and be?. What is the meaning of my life?—then
we are exploring or encountering that region of experience where language
about the ultimate becomes useful and intelligible.” That is not to say that God
is necessarily found in the depths of anxiety. “Rather we are in the region of our
experience where God may be known, and so where the meaningful usage of
this word can be found.” To Ian Ramsey of Oxford, this area of ultimate concern
offers what he calls “discernment situations”—events that can be the occasion
for insight, for awareness of something beyond man. It is during these insight
situations, Ramsey says, that the universe “comes alive, declares some
transcendence, and to which we respond by ourselves coming alive and finding
another dimension.”
A discernment situation could be falling in love, suffering cancer, reading a
book. But it need not be a private experience. The Rev. Stephen Rose, editor of
Chicago’s Renewal magazine, argues that “whenever the prophetic word breaks
in, either as judgment or as premise, that’s when the historical God acts.” One
such situation, he suggests, was Watts—an outburst of violence that served to
chide men for lack of brotherhood. Harvard’s Harvey Cox sees God’s hand in
history, but in a different way. The one area where empirical man is open to
transcendence, he argues, is the future: man can be defined as the creature who
hopes, who has taken responsibility for the world. Cox proposes a new theology
based on the premise that God is the source and ground of this hope—a God
“ahead” of man in history rather than “out there” in space.
German Theologian Gerhard Ebeling of Tubingen University finds an
arrow pointing the way to God in the problem in language. A word, he suggests,
is merely a means of conveying information; it is also a symbol of man’s power
over nature and of his basic impotence: one man cannot speak except to another,
and language itself possesses power that eludes his mastery of it. God, he
proposes, is the source of the mystery hidden in language, or, as he obscurely

puts it, “the basic situation of man as word-situation.”
“THE KINGDOM IS WITHIN YOU”

For those with a faith that can move mountains, all this tentative groping
for God in human experience may seem unnecessary. The man-centered
approach to God runs against Barth’s warning that a “God” found in human
depths may be an imagined idol—or a neurosis that could be dissolved on the
psychiatrist’s couch. Rudolf Bultmann answers that these human situations of
anxiety and discernment represent “transformations of God,” and are the only
way that secular man is likely to experience any sense of the eternal and
unconditional.
This theological approach is not without scriptural roots. A God who
writes straight with crooked lines in human history is highly Biblical in outlook.
The quest for God in the depths of experience echoes Jesus’ words to his
Apostles, “The kingdom of God is within you.” And the idea of God’s
anonymous presence suggests Matthew’s account of the Last Judgement, when
Jesus will separate the nations, telling those on his right: “I was hungry and you
gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink.” But when? they ask. "And
the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least
of these my brethren, you did it to me.’”
The theological conviction that God is acting anonymously in human
history is not likely to turn many atheists toward him. Secular man may be
anxious, but he is also convinced that an anxiety can be explained away. As
always, faith is something of an irrational leap in the dark, a gift of God. And
unlike earlier centuries, there is no way today for churches to threaten or compel
men to face that leap; after Dachau’s mass sadism and Hiroshima’s instant
death, there are all too many real possibilities of hell on earth.
The new approaches to the problem of God, then, will have their greatest
impact within the church community. They may help shore up the faith of many
believers and, possibly, weaken that of others. They may also lead to a more
realistic, and somewhat more abstract, conception of God. “God will be seen as
the order in which life takes on meaning, as being, as the source of creativity,”
suggests Langdon Gilkey. “The old-fashioned personal God who merely judges,
gives grace and speaks to us in prayer, is, after all, a pretty feeble God.” Gilkey
does not deny the impotence of God, nor undervalue personal language about
God as a means of prayer and worship. But he argues that Christianity must go
on escaping from its too strictly anthropomorphic past and still needs to learn
that talk of God is largely symbolic.
NO MORE INFALLIBILITIES
The new quest for God, which respects no church boundaries, should also
contribute to ecumenism. “These changes make many of the old disputes seem
pointless, or at least secondary,” says Jesuit Theologian Avery Dulles. The
churches, moreover, will also have to accept the empiricism of the modern
outlook and become more secular themselves, recognizing that God is not the
property of the Church, and is acting in history as he wills, in encounters for
which man is forever unprepared.
To some, this suggests that the church might well need to take a position of
reverent agnosticism regarding some doctrines that it had previously proclaimed
with excessive conviction. Many of the theologians attempting to work out a
new doctrine of God admit that they are uncertain as to the impact of their
ultimate findings on other Christian truths; but they agree that such God-related
issues as personal salvation in the afterlife and immortality will need
considerable re-study. But Christian history allows the possibility of
development in doctrine, and even an admission of ignorance in the face of the
divine mystery is part of the tradition. St. Thomas Aquinas declared that “we
cannot know what God is, but rather what he is not.”
Gabriel Vahanian suggests that there may well be no true faith without a
measure of doubt, and thus contemporary Christian worry about God could be a
necessary and healthy antidote to centuries in which faith was too confident and
sure. Perhaps today, the Christians can do no better than echo the prayer of the
worried father who pleaded with Christ to heal his spirit-possessed son: “I
believe; help my unbelief”
NOTES
1. Principally Thomas J. J. Altizer of Emory University, William Hamilton of
Colgate Rochester Divinity School, and Paul van Buren of Temple University. Satirizing
the basic premise of their new non-theology, the Methodist student magazine Motive
recently ran an obituary of God in newspaper style:
“ATLANTA, Ga., Nov. 9—God, creator of the universe, principal deity of the
world’s Jews, ultimate reality of Christians, and most eminent of all divinities, died late
yesterday during major surgery undertaken to correct a massive diminishing influence.
“Reaction from the world’s great and from the man in the street was uniformly
incredulous . . . From Independence, Mo., former President Harry S. Truman, who
received the news in his Kansas City barbershop, said, T’m always sorry to hear
somebody is dead. It’s a damn shame.’”
2. Almost impossible to translate, the name Yahweh means roughly “I am who I
am” or “He causes to be.”
3. Probably the most famous proofs for God’s existence are the five ways of St.
Thomas Aquinas, all drawn from the nature of the universe, that he sets out in his Summa
Theologiae. Aquinas’ first proof, for example, is that certain things in the world are seen
to be in a state of motion or change. But something cannot be changed or moved except
by another, and yet there cannot be an infinite series of movers. Therefore, there must be
a first, or prime mover that is not moved or changed by anything else—and this is God.
Part Two
The Death of God and the Holocaust:

Reconsidering the Encounter
Practitioners
A death of God theology first openly appears in America, and while the deepest
thinking about the death of God and the deepest imaginative enactments of the
death of God have occurred in Europe, it is only in America that theology itself
has affirmed the death of God. But this theology was the first Christian theology
that was not only a response to the Holocaust but grounded itself in the ultimacy
of a Holocaust that had ended every trace of a just or beneficent providence.
—Thomas J. J. Altizer
2
The Holocaust and the Theology

of the Death of God
Thomas J. J. Altizer
Just as the American theology of the death of God was deeply a product of the
turbulence of the 1960s, it was likewise the expression of a uniquely American
sense of guilt, a guilt deriving from a reversal of America’s “manifest destiny,”
a destiny that is an American consequence of a Christian faith in an absolutely
providential God who is both the ultimate and the finally actual source of every
historical event. But now America becomes manifest as Amerika, and hence as
the source not of a deep historical liberation but rather of a new historical
enslavement of humanity as a whole. Above all it is the victim of the Holocaust
who not only most deeply symbolizes but most deeply enacts a radically new
and apocalyptic destruction, one that can be understood as the consummation of
a uniquely Western historical destiny, and a destiny that had now embodied
America itself as the very center of a new world. Perhaps it is the American
Christian who most openly makes manifest this destiny, for, just as Christianity
above all other religious traditions knows an absolutely providential God, it was
American Christianity that from its very beginnings in New England Puritanism
had known itself as the vanguard of an apocalyptic and universal liberation. So it
is that the American Christian now faces a new responsibility for what would
appear to be a reverse or inverted providence, a providence wherein a kingdom
of light passes into a kingdom of darkness, or the Kingdom of Christ becomes
manifest as the Kingdom of Satan.
This American theologian became a death of God theologian in The
Dialectic of the Sacred (the original title of his second book), a book seeking an
opening to a coincidentia oppositorum of the radical sacred and the radical
profane; and one arena that is here all too inadequately explored is the
coincidence of profane space and sacred space; as is most purely embodied for
us in Franz Kafka’s world. If it is Kafka who most prophetically not only
foresees but already enacts the Holocaust, this occurs in the calling forth of an
absolutely demonic world, and an absolutely demonic and all too realistic
18 The Death of God and the Holocaust
historical world, a world that is our world indeed, and yet a demonic world that
is paradise itself. So Kafka could declare: “Expulsion from Paradise is in its
main aspect eternal: that is to say, although expulsion from Paradise is final, and
life in the world unavoidable, the eternity of the process (or, expressed in
temporal terms, the eternal repetition of the process) nevertheless makes it
possible not only that we might remain in Paradise permanently, but that we
may in fact be there permanently, no matter whether we know it here or not.”^
Now it is Martin Buber who has responded most profoundly theologically to
Kafka, and in accordance with his understanding of the “eclipse” of God in our
time, Buber can say of Kafka: “God is hiding Himself from the time in which he
[Kafka] lives, and so from him, its most exposed son; but in the fact of God’s
being only hidden, which he knows, he is safe.”
Buber makes this judgment in Two Types of Faith, wherein he calls forth a
uniquely Jewish type of faith, an Emunah that is in eternal covenant with God
and that is present in every child of Israel, and even so present today. But this
book is also, and even more deeply Buber’s first full and perhaps only
theological response to the Holocaust, and in his most radical theological
judgment he can declare: “That He hides Himself does not diminish the
immediacy; in the immediacy He remains the Savior, and the contradiction of
existence becomes for us a theophany.”^ Buber had his greatest theological
impact upon Christianity in the 1960s, and perhaps most so in America, an
America that was first coming into a public recognition of the “eclipse” of God,
and first entering a public response to the Holocaust. These are not unrelated
events; indeed, they are inseparable events, and most inseparable to an
American Christianity that had known the absolute providence of God, one
embodied in its own “manifest destiny,” and one even now calling it to a new
world. Is the Holocaust a symbol of our new world? Is it, indeed, its very
inauguration? All too significantly the Holocaust occurred at the very time when
America first truly entered a universal historical destiny and role, and if this
marks the time when the end of European history as a universal history was
finally enacted, it marks the very advent of America as a universal historical
world.
Now it was not until the 1960s that American theology in its most vibrant
expressions left the world of the church and the seminary and entered the secular
world of modern culture and the modem university. Just as this was a truly new
culture in America, it was also a truly new academic world, one deeply shaped
by Jewish exiles from central Europe, exiles who themselves bore the imprint of
the Holocaust, and not least so in the incredible power of their research and
teaching, which directly or indirectly had an enormous impact upon the new
American theologian. While something parallel to this may well have occurred
in the impact of the Jewish mind upon medieval Christian theology, it now
occurs much more openly, or at least more openly within the theologian.
Certainly this theologian was deeply shaped by a uniquely modern Jewish
thinking, and just as my first theological partner was Arthur Cohen, my most
challenging theological critic was Richard Rubenstein, and the most gratifying
theological response to my work occurred when Jacob Neusner stated that “none
The Theology of the Death of God 19
can reasonably question that Altizer’s theological mind finds a place in the
sacred circle of the Torah.”"* Yet just as Marxism and Freudianism are our most
powerful modern mythologies, the Jewish experience of the Holocaust has been
our most ultimate modern or postmodern experience, and to speak apart from
that paradigm is now to speak apart from or against reality itself.
A death of God theology first openly appears in America, and while the
deepest thinking about the death of God and the deepest imaginative enactments
of the death of God have occurred in Europe, it is only in America that theology
itself has affirmed the death of God. But this theology was the first Christian
theology that was not only a response to the Holocaust but grounded itself in the
ultimacy of a Holocaust that had ended every trace of a just or beneficent
providence. While it is true that there are few references to the Holocaust in the
Christian death of God theological writing in the 1960s, there are also few
references here to any historical events, and whereas an earlier Christian
theological writing could know history as the arena of revelation and salvation
itself, now this becomes impossible, and impossible because history now first
appears to the modem theologian as an arena of darkness and horror, and of
ultimate and final horror and darkness. Although this may well not be due to the
Holocaust alone, it is the Holocaust alone that openly embodies such horror, and
we may presume that the Holocaust was a generating cause of the death of God
theologies, as it certainly was so for this theologian.
It is not insignificant that it was then Richard Rubenstein who called forth
the most passionate theological response, and perhaps most so in his reversal or
inversion of the doctrine of providence, which he passionately insisted was
inevitable as a consequence of the Holocaust. Subsequently many or most
theologians have simply bracketed or erased the doctrine of providence, but that
is clearly simply a failure of theological thinking, or only a rhetorical retreat
with no substantial theological meaning. The simple truth is that it is no longer
possible to affirm a providential God unless one affirms that God wills or effects
ultimate evil, and this is clearly a consequence of the Holocaust. Even Roman
Catholic dogma was significantly revised in response to the Holocaust, and the
New Catholic Catechism (1994) can go so far as to declare in italics that there is
not a single aspect of the Christian message that is not in part an answer to the
question of evil (#309), an answer most deeply occurring here in the statement
that God the Father has mysteriously revealed his almighty power in the
voluntary humiliation and resurrection of his Son, by which he conquered evil
(#272). If only in this perspective we could look upon Karl Barth’s
transformation of theology into Christology as an anticipation of the Holocaust,
and this was the Barth who most deeply influenced the death of God theology.
How very significant that Barth had such a deep effect upon Christian
death of God theology, one only equaled by the impact of the Bultmannian
movement; but these were the theologies that were most deeply affected by the
end of Christendom. Already in Blake and Hegel the end of Christendom is a
historical realization of the death of God, one releasing a third and final Age of
the Spirit, but that inauguration is the consequence of the final apocalyptic event
of the death of God. So it is that both Hegel and Blake could know and envision
history itself as an apocalyptic history, and if it is Blake’s Jerusalem that most

totally envisions an apocalyptic history, this is a history that is here an all-
consuming darkness and horror, and one that becomes historically actual in the
Holocaust.
Theologically, it would appear to be impossible to deny that the Holocaust
is an apocalyptic event, so that a theological acceptance of the Holocaust would
appear to demand an apocalyptic theology. But Christian theology has been an
apocalyptic theology only in its beginning in Paul and in its expressions in the
most radical or sectarian forms of Christianity. The great body of Christian
theology has not only been non-apocalyptic but anti-apocalyptic, and never
more so than in the twentieth century, despite the fact that our world is so clearly
an apocalyptic world, as above all manifest in the Holocaust itself. So it is that
the Holocaust was a cataclysmic event for Christian theology, not only
assaulting the doctrine of providence, but more deeply, assaulting the deepest
grounds of all established theology. This was a crisis far deeper than the crisis
known by the “crisis theology” following World War I; for it was a deep
negation of theology itself, and many of its most astute critics understood the
death of God theology as a consequence of the end of society and culture as a
whole, and if the death of God theology generated a public attention and furor
unknown in our theological past, this simply astounds our younger religious
scholars.
Who could imagine a theology today that actually accepts or even speaks
to our new historical world? But that was a real project of the death of God
theology, and one inseparable from an acceptance of the Holocaust as an
ultimate and therefore theological event, one demanding at the very least a
radical transformation of our understanding of God. Certainly the God of
Christendom died in the Holocaust, or became theologically unthinkable and
unimaginable, and unthinkable to genuine theology itself. And in America, if not
in Europe, this means that the God of every church dogmatics is now
unthinkable, and just as irreversibly unthinkable as is the metaphysical God. Not
only did this occur after the Holocaust, but it is a response to the Holocaust, and
even if only an implicit response, it is nevertheless a genuine response, and one
necessarily occurring if only to make possible the survival of theology. But is
theology, or genuine theology, now an actual possibility? This question may
well be the deepest theological consequence of the Holocaust.
“Never again!” That exclamation may well be our most immediate
response to the Holocaust, but we know that other, even if lesser, holocausts
have subsequently occurred, and many of our deeper thinkers and visionaries
know our future as a universal, even if a less violent or nonviolent, holocaust.
Virtually everyone now looks upon the death of God theology as a theological
failure, but there are few genuine minds who think that a less radical theology is
now necessary, and, if only in posing the necessity of a genuinely radical
theology, it would appear that the death of God theology was a resounding
success. But it would be so only if it was a genuine response to the Holocaust,
and a theological response to the Holocaust, one accepting the absence or death
of everything that we can know as God in the Holocaust. There is another
possibility, of course, and that is affirming that God, or the God whom we can
now actually know, is Satan! Already Melville’s Moby Dick initiated us into
this possibility, and Moby Dick is now established as our primal American epic,
an epic that not only is our first mythological novel but also inaugurated a
uniquely American imagination.
How fascinating that Barth primarily learned English so as to be able to
read this novel in the original, that William Hamilton’s theology would be
unthinkable apart from Melville, and that so many of our American students are
now initiated into theology by reading Moby Dick. Indeed, this epic can now be
understood as a prophetic precursor of the Holocaust, and most so in its very
unveiling of Moby Dick, a white whale that is Satan incarnate, and incarnate as
our deeper destiny. While it is true that our New Testament scholars and
theologians appear to be innocent of Satan or ultimate evil, this is certainly not
true of our deeper poets and seers, just as it is not true of our deepest thinkers.
But how can one accept the reality of the Holocaust and not accept the reality of
an ultimate evil? And how can the Christian accept the reality of an ultimate evil
and wholly divorce it from reality or God? Is Manicheanism an inevitable
consequence of Christianity, and is a Manichean Augustine the real founder of
Western Christendom? These questions leap beyond all bounds in a Christian
confrontation with the Holocaust, and if the Christian knows that God is the
ultimate origin of every event, then God is the ultimate origin of the Holocaust,
even if we follow Augustine and orthodox Western theology and speak of God’s
“permission of evil.”
To speak of God’s permission of the Holocaust is surely to speak
blasphemously, but is it possible to speak of God today and not speak
blasphemously? While Kafka seldom employs the word God, his uniquely,
totally realistic fiction is comprehensively grounded in everything that we can
know and name as God and above all in The Trial and The Castle, which are
virtual incarnations of the kingdom of Satan. And if this “fiction” is the clearest
prophetic precursor of the Holocaust, then what we can know as “God” is surely
a deep ground of the Holocaust, if not the deepest ground. Yet if the Holocaust
is a uniquely contemporary epiphany of Satan, then to refuse that epiphany is to
refuse the Holocaust itself. Thus, a Christian acceptance of the full reality of the
Holocaust would appear to entail a Christian naming of God as Satan, or an
acceptance of that God whom we can now actually and truly know as an
epiphany of Satan.
This is the very God that a uniquely Christian gospel can know as the God
who is dead, and even if the gospel is unheard today, or publicly unheard and
unspoken, nothing else is more ultimately necessary for our very survival today,
or for the survival of life itself For if we cannot know the death of God, we
cannot know an ultimate ending, and thus cannot know an ending of that
ultimate ground which is the ground of the Holocaust. Inevitably we do resist
and refuse the reality of the Holocaust, a resistance that most deeply occurs in
the very affirmation of God, or in a Christian affirmation of God today. Not only
is such an affirmation inevitably blasphemous in the perspective of the
Holocaust, but it is inevitably an affirmation and sanctioning of evil and of
ultimate evil. This is the eschatological and apocalyptic evil that has become
incarnate in our world, and if our deepest denial is a denial of that evil, this is a
denial of the Holocaust itself
Is a theology possible today that is not at bottom an erasure of the
Holocaust? Perhaps so, if a theology without God is a genuine possibility, or a
theology wholly and finally distant from everything that our history has known
and affirmed as God. The deep resurgence of Gnosticism in our world is not
divorced from this situation, and just as the original advent of Gnosticism was a
consequence of the ending of the ancient world, a new advent of Gnosticism
may well be a consequence of the ending of the modem world. But Christianity
itself was made possible by the ending of the ancient world, and if ancient
Gnosticism itself was an expression of Christianity, our new Gnosticism may
well be an expression of Christianity, and one even present in a newly orthodox
and ultimately sectarian Christianity. This is the only Christianity that is
manifestly or openly present today, and if it is a consequence of a postmodernity
inaugurated by the Holocaust itself, then the Holocaust may well be the
germinating origin of our world, but one before which we will be nameless if we
cannot name the Holocaust. And if we must name the Holocaust, then we must
name it theologically, and name it theologically by speaking of God and by
speaking of that dead and alien God who is the God of the Holocaust, or the
only God who can be named in the wake of the Holocaust.
Yet if this is the God who has actually and finally died in our world, so that
only an absolutely alien God could be renewed or called forth by that ultimate
event which is the Holocaust, then this is the God who is the consequence of
what the Christian most deeply knows as the absolute self-emptying of God in
the Crucifixion. That self-emptying can and has been known as an absolute
reversal of Godhead itself, as an absolute transcendence realizes itself as an
absolute immanence, and an original eternity and infinity become incarnate or
embodied in the full actuality of world itself. But this could only be a self-
emptying of an original infinity and eternity, with the consequence that an
original or primordial Godhead becomes alienated from itself, and thence can be
actual and real as such only as a self-alienated negativity. Such negativity itself
is a purely negative process of self-negation, and one continually recurring until
it wholly and finally negates itself, which is precisely the event that we have
known as the death of God. That death, and that apocalyptic death, is a
consequence of an absolute self-emptying of the Godhead, but with its
occurrence Godhead as such, or Godhead in itself, can now only be actual and
real as an absolutely alien and negative Godhead. Is the Holocaust an
embodiment of such a Godhead? And must the Christian give witness to that
Godhead in accepting the reality of the Holocaust? Is that, in fact, what the
Christian confession of God is in our world?
NOTES
1. Franz Kafka, Wedding Preparations and Other Posthumous Prose Writings^
trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (London: Martin Seeker & Warburg, 1954), 45.
2. Martin Buber, Two Types of Faith, trans. Norman P. Goldhawk (London:

Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1951), 168.
3. Ibid., 169.
4. Jacob Neusner, Preface to The Self-Embodiment of God, by Thomas J. J. Altizer
(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987), xiv.
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3
Genocide and the Death of God

William Hamilton
Before he became Jewish chaplain to the White House, Elie Wiesel remarked,
when Gerald Green’s mini-series on the Shoah began to appear on television,
that no one who had not been there had the right to write about that subject.
(Now I was not there; I was in the Navy.) This was both silly and charmingly
self-serving, since Wiesel’s principle managed to exclude nearly everyone but
himself.
I do not ordinarily welcome professional advice from novelists of the
second or third rank, but I’ll make an exception in this case and maintain silence
on the subject of radical theology and that genocide.
The Holocaust was a genocide committed by pagans, non-Christians, and
Christians against Jews (and others) on soil fertilized by Christianity. One effect
of Daniel Goldhagen’s study is surely to Christianize even more indelibly the
perpetrators. His “ordinary Germans” are ordinary Christian Germans. Wiesel
has noted that obvious fact: “All the killers were Christians. . . . The Nazi
system . . .had its roots deep in a tradition that prophesied it, prepared for it, and
brought it to maturity. That tradition was inseparable from the past of Christian,
civilized Europe.”^
Let me add a comment from yet another distinguished Townsend-Harris
graduate: “It will not, I believe, be possible for European culture to regain its
inward energies, its self-respect, so long as Christendom is not made answerable
to its own seminal role in the preparation of the Shoah . . .so long as it does not
hold itself to account for its cant and impotence when European history stood at
midnight.”^
Do we need to rehearse the old debate about the proper definition of
genocide? The term was apparently coined by Rafael Lemkin in his book Axis
Rule in Occupied Europe (1944). According to Lemkin, genocide entailed the
deliberate annihilation of a national, religious, or racial group by actions
directed against the group’s very survival. He called it “a composite of different
acts of persecution or destruction,” including attacks on institutions, culture,

language, religion, and economic security. Genocide might even include
nonlethal acts that undermine the freedom or dignity of the group. In 1946, in
part due to Lemkin’s lobbying efforts, the United Nations General Assembly
passed the following resolution.
Genocide is the denial of the right of existence to entire human groups, as homicide is the
denial of the right to live of individual human beings; such denial of the right of existence
shocks the conscience of mankind, results in great losses to humanity in the form of
cultural and other contributions represented by these groups, and is contrary to moral law
and to the spirit and aims of the United Nations. Many instances of such crimes of
genocide have occurred, when racial, religious, political and other groups have been
destroyed, entirely or in part. The punishment of the crime of genocide is a matter of
international concern. The General Assembly, therefore, affirms that genocide is a crime
under international law which the civilized world condemns, and for the commission of
which principals and accomplices—whether private individuals, public officials or
statesmen, and whether the crime is committed on religious, racial, political or any other
grounds—are punishable.^
I wish to call attention to two other genocides of special interest because

they were (and are) genocides in the name of God. David Stannard, in his
remarkable study American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New
World (1992), has convincingly shown that Columbus and his followers were
responsible for the killing in the name of God (or causing the death of) some 13
million natives within the first ten years after the initial landing at Hispaniola
(i.e., Haiti plus the Dominican Republic). America was born in a genocide.
Today we are impotent witnesses to another genocide, also being carried
out by practicing monotheists. In the former Yugoslavia (it is the “former Soviet
Union” now; how many more “former” nations is nationalism able to create?),
everybody has been killing everybody else, monotheists slaughtering
monotheists, but primarily orthodox Christians have been killing Muslims in
what may be a strange and belated retaliation for the Turkish victory at Kosovo
in 1389. In spite of the Serbs’ defeat, Kosovo became a defining and enduring
symbol of Serbian tenacity: how, in spite of defeat, victory can be achieved,
resurrection can follow all crucifixions.
There was a time when we could apply the “Casablanca” test in our moral
evaluations of the behavior of nations. Major Strasser was a Nazi and therefore
pure evil. Victor Laszlo was a resistance leader and therefore pure good. Rick
and Captain Renault proved their virtue when they disappeared into the fog to
join the Free French resistance.
Several months after Hitler’s 1941 invasion of Yugoslavia, the Serbs began
a revolt that finally led to a war of national liberation against the occupation.
The Serbs have always rightly believed that the Croats, Slovenes and
Macedonians systematically collaborated. Old good guys have become bad
guys, and vice versa.
Here are some brief historical-theological reflections on the road from
Kosovo yesterday to Sarajevo today. Nearly half of today’s Bosnian Muslims
trace their ancestry back to Muslims who converted to Islam. They were initially
Genocide and the Death of God 27
Bogomils, a neo-Manichaean Christian heresy that rejected monarchy and

sacraments, and was ruled by a class of ascetic elders. From the beginning they
were denounced both by Orthodoxy and (with special fury) by Rome, largely
because they refused to take sides in the Great Schism of the eleventh century.
After the Turks destroyed the Serbs at Kosovo in 1389, Ottoman troops
surrounded Bosnia. In an inspired diplomatic stroke, in 1415 the Turks offered
the Bogomils military protection and freedom to practice their religion, if they
would “count themselves” as Muslims and refrain from attacking Turkish
forces. Conversions from Bogomil Christianity to the more tolerant Islam
followed slowly and surely. Rebecca West’s remarkable account of this period
in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon must be re-read, remembering only to correct
for her pro-Serb, anti-Muslim inclinations. She writes: “Had it not been for the
intolerance of the Papacy we would not have had Turkey in Europe for 500
years. Fifty years later, the folly had been consummated. Bosnia was wholly
Turkish, and the Turks had passed on toward Hungary and Central Europe.”"^
Over the years, Bosnia’s ex-Bogomils, some blond and blue eyed, settled
in Istanbul and became part of the ruling elite. This partly explains Turkey’s
present concern for a people it has not ruled since 1875. That was when Bosnian
Christians joined with Serbs and Montenegrins in a battle against the Turks,
with Russian support. Austro-Hungary was awarded Bosnia in 1908 by imperial
decree, angering both the Serbs and their protector, Russia. This mess is what
exploded when Archduke Ferdinand was murdered in 1914 by a pro-Serb
Bosnian, marking the beginning of our twentieth century, which finds itself once
more looking toward Sarajevo here at its terrible close.
So today we seem to be rehearsing, in a new and possibly post-Christian
form, the bitter theological inheritance of Kosovo six hundred years ago. As
Paul Mojzes has remarked, the present Yugoslavian wars are “fought largely by
irreligious people who wear religion as a distinguishing badge but do not know
what the badge stands for.”^ Nonetheless, the Bosnian genocide is “religiously
motivated and religiously justified,”^ to the shame of all the participant
monotheisms, but especially the Christian ones.
This contemporary theological genocide imposes important theological
questions upon Christians. We will continue to need historical research, and the
familiar litany of theological murders must continue to be recited: Tokyo (gas
attacks), Oklahoma City (Christian Identity?), Hindu militants attacking Muslim
holy places, and New York City and Hebron and Belfast and Pensacola. We
must continue to ask who killed whom and why.
But we now need to push down to what Melville called “the little, lower
layer,” beyond historical investigation to the darker waters of theology. Just why
do monotheists kill? Why have monotheists become the champion killers at the
close of this century—that century of which Theodore Adorno said one cannot
be too much afraid?
It will not be easy for Americans to admit that monotheism has become a
great danger. It was only yesterday (I think it may have been 1975, with the
confluence of Watergate and our deserved defeat in Vietnam) that we managed
to relinquish the idea that we were the redeemer nation, chosen or almost
chosen, on God’s side and therefore invulnerable {pace Vietnam) and innocent
{pace Watergate). What is there about the claim to possess one God that makes
men and women dangerous? Perhaps the cry of Nietzsche suggests the
beginning of an answer: “If there were gods, how could I endure not to be a
god!” To claim to possess one of the gods of monotheism is more a moral than
an intellectual defect. Possession entails a claim to uniqueness, conferring
inferiority on all who do not similarly possess. Saying “yes” to your God not
only distinguishes you from those who say “no,” it requires you to say “no” to
the “no-sayers.” Those I negate I am bound to deny, to deny their right to deny
my affirmation, and, finally, to deny their right to be. To possess God is to
possess the most powerful instrument of self-approval our times have devised,
and this mirror can turn quickly into a sword of judgment. The Christian God
appears to be turning his advocates into self-righteous and dangerous sinners
and, ultimately, into killers.
Has monotheism truly become in our time an ideology of death, in spite of
Chartres and the St. Matthew Passion? Defunct, like those other dying “isms” of
the late twentieth century: fascism, communism, capitalism, socialism? If so,
then a primary function of radical theology—Christian, Jewish, Islamic (I’m
thinking, of course, of Salman Rushdie)—is to explore the ways to bear witness
o
to the danger of belief in a single god.
As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods;

They kill us for their sport.
(Shakespeare, King Lear, 4.1.36-37)
The bridge between monotheism and killing is a long, twisting, and largely
unexplored one. It cannot be negotiated in a day. Perhaps it can only be studied
in monographic bits and pieces. I propose to conclude my meditation on radical
theology and genocide by a brief exegetical (or, more exactly, homiletic)
exercise. I propose to look at Psalm 139, which can be described as the greatest
poem of faith in any language. This psalm may help us to begin to cross the
bridge.
1. Oh Yahweh, thou hast searched me, and known me.

2. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising,
Thou understandest my thought afar off
3. Thou winnowest my path and my lying down.
And art acquainted with all my ways.
4. For there is not a word in my tongue.
But, lo, O Yahweh, thou knowest it altogether.
5. Thou hast beset me behind and before.
And laid thine hand upon me.
6. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
It is high; I cannot attain it.
Now this is about God’s omniscience, to be sure. But the psalmist has no
interest in generalized or abstract knowledge. He is describing God’s knowledge
about him. The striking thing about these opening verses is that we cannot be
entirely clear about the psalmist’s attitude toward this “knowledge.” Does he
delight in it, or does it torment him? The British writer Graham Shaw is quite
sure about his answer to this question. “The Omniscience of God is experienced
at first as claustrophobic constraint. The soul is trapped in conditions curiously
prophetic of the modern floodlit concentration camp. It is indeed in the total
elimination of concealing darkness that the attitude of the psalmist is
transformed. In one of those reversals with which the technique of brainwashing
has made us so familiar, what he at first feared, he now affirms. The divine
omniscience ceases to be a threat and becomes the object of wonder and
praise.
Surely the psalmist is complaining here. He is being known too well. He is
beset behind and before, and the divine hand on the head must be a heavy one.
Otherwise, why would he try to escape?
7. Whither shall I go from thy Spirit?

Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
8. If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there;
If I make my bed in hell, behold thou!
9. If I take the wings of the morning.
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
10. Even there shall thy hand lead me.
And thy right hand shall hold me.
11. If I say. Surely the darkness shall cover me
And night shall encompass me about,
12. Even the darkness darkeneth not from thee,
But the night shineth as the day:
The darkness and the light are both alike to thee.
This analysis of escape is, of course, unforgettable. The psalmist tries to

flee to heaven, but God is there before him. (Why should that surprise him so?)
God is also in Sheol, the place of the departed spirits, and this is a surprise. In
early Hebrew thought Sheol was a location from which God was absent. Here he
is present in Sheol, which means this psalm is probably of a fairly late date, and
that the universal sovereignty of God has gone about as far as it can go.
Flight in space doesn’t work, nor does descent into darkness, whatever the
psalmist may mean by these alluring images. God is omnipresent; the psalmist
cannot get away, and he doesn’t much care for the situation.
13. Yea, it is thou that possessed my reins;

Thou didst weave me in my mother’s womb.
14.1 will praise thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Marvelous are thy works.
And that my soul knoweth right well.
15. My frame was not hid from thee
When I was made in secret.
And curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.
16. Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being imperfect;
And in thy book, all of these were written.
My days were being ordained,
When as yet there was none of them.

17. How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God!
How great is the sum of them!
18. If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand;
When I awake, I am still with thee.
In verses 13 through 18 we can detect a decisive change of attitude. In 13

through 16 we can watch the psalmist ask the question: “Why can’t I get away
from this albatross?” His answer draws on the riches of biblical theology: on
creation and eschatology. I cannot get away from you, he begins to see, because
you were there from the very beginning, before I was even conceived. And as
you were there in the beginning, so you will be there with me at the end, at the
time of judgment, when all of my living days will be examined in judgment’s
book.
And then, I think, in the decisive space between verse 16 and 17, the
psalmist decides to relinquish his complaints, to give up the search for an escape
route, and to praise what he began by denigrating. The splendid doubter, the
bold escaper, has become a pious man. And what happens when you become a
pious man? The roof falls in.
19. Surely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God!

Depart from me, therefore, ye bloody men!
20. For they speak against thee wickedly.
And thine enemies take thy name in vain.
21. Do I not hate them, O Yahweh, that hate thee?
And am I not grieved with those that rise up against thee?
22.1 hate them with perfect hatred;
I count them mine own enemies.
The evil of monotheism is brutally revealed. When you believe that you
possess God and deserve to, when you believe that God has an infinite number
of very kindly thoughts about you, then this is the kind of thing you may find
yourself saying. The wicked, the enemies, are those who take God’s name in
vain, or who have a different god, or none. God is asked to slay such dissenters,
and the psalmist proudly boasts about the splendid greatness of his hatred of the
haters of God. And in that hatred, he clearly believes he is doing God’s work.
Traditional exegetes have sometimes tried to escape from the problems that
verses 19 through 22 present. Perhaps they were a late scribal addition, or
perhaps they dropped into this place from another psalm. But we have no textual
grounds for excision. They belong and they need to be explained.
In the psalm’s final verses,
23. Search me, O God, and know my heart;

Try me, and know my doubts;
24. And see if there be any wicked way in me.
And lead me in the way everlasting!
we get a slight sense that the psalmist may be a little ashamed of his outburst
just before. “See if there be any wicked way”! Indeed. He seems almost to admit
it, and to be sorry. It makes a modestly hopeful conclusion to a breathtaking and
tormented poem.
We certainly don’t know much about the relation of monotheism to killing.
It is a relationship that radical theology is committed to explore. This great
psalm may serve as a plausible beginning.
Appendix: United Nations Convention

on the Prevention and Punishment
of the Crime of Genocide
THE TEXT OF THE CONVENTION

The Contracting Parties,
Having considered the declaration made by the General Assembly of the
United Nations in its resolution 96 (1) dated 11 December 1946 that genocide is
a crime under international law, contrary to the spirit and aims of the United
Nations and condemned by the civilized world;
Recognizing that at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great
losses on humanity; and
Being convinced that, in order to liberate mankind from such an odious
scourge, international co-operation is required:
Hereby agree as hereinafter provided:
ARTICLE I
The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of
peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake
to prevent and to punish.
ARTICLE II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed
with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious
group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(e) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its
physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
ARTICLE III
The following acts shall be punishable:
(a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiring to commit genocide;
(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
(d) Attempt to commit genocide;
(e) Complicity in genocide.
ARTICLE IV
Persons committing genocide or any of the acts enumerated in Article III shall
be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public
officials, or private individuals.
NOTES
1. Irving Abrahamson, ed., Against Silence: The Voice and Vision of Elie Wiesel,
Vol. 1 (Washington, D. C.: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1988), 33.
2. George Steiner, No Passion Spent: Essays 1978-1995 (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 1996), p xi.
3. In an appendix to this essay, I am attaching the text of the Genocide Convention
of the United Nations (1948), adopted unanimously and without abstention.
4. In Rebecca West, A Celebration (New York: Viking, 1977), 622.
5. Paul Mojzes, Yugoslavian Inferno (New York: Continuum, 1994), 170.
6. Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1996), 89. Two other passages from Sells’s striking study should confirm this:
The religious ideology of the violence was complex. It was at once part of a modem
surge in religious militancy after the cold war, a reappearance of a Serbian nineteenth-
century ideology that constmcts an age-old antagonism between Muslim and Christian in
which the Muslim is a race traitor, and a new manifestation in a history of assaults on
non-Christian populations in Europe grounded in manipulation of the Christ-killer charge
(90).
The violence in Bosnia was a religious genocide in several senses: the people destroyed
were chosen on the basis of their religious identity; those carrying out the killings acted
with the blessing and support of Christian church leaders; the violence was grounded in a
religious mythology that characterized the target people as race traitors and the
extermination of them as a sacred act; and the perpetrators of the violence were protected
by a policy designed by the policy makers of a Western world that is culturally
dominated by Christianity (144).
7. Thus Spake Zarathustra, Second Part, “Upon the Blessed Isles” (New York:
Modem Library, 1995).
8. Incidentally, I gratefully acknowledge the comradeship (unknown to him) of
Gore Vidal on this journey, he from the land of impudence, I from the land of piety.
9. Graham Shaw, God in Our Hands (London: SCM Press, 1987), 31.
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4
From the Secular to the

Scriptural Gospel
Paul M. van Buren
Thirty-six years have passed since I started to write what became The Secular
Meaning of the Gospel. At present I am trying to finish what I hope will be a
book entitled According to the Scriptures, a hypothetical reconstruction of the
origin of the pre-Pauline gospel of I Corinthians 15:3-4, and of that particular
reading of Israel’s tradition that came to be called the Old Testament and which
made that gospel possible. In the present essay, I shall try to say how the former
project appears to me today, and to give some account of how I got from there to
here.
In 1961 I had become something of a Logical Positivist, without really
understanding what that was. Reading, or rather misreading, Wittgenstein’s
Philosophical Investigations was the original stimulus that gave The Secular
Meaning such a positivistic slant, and it took about eight more years of reading
Wittgenstein and trying to explain him to graduate students before he succeeded
in convincing me that I had misunderstood him at a fundamental level.
Positivism, literalism, and historicism all appear to me now as interrelated
mistakes rather common in the thinking of many contemporary Americans, and
they are deep in us all, even in those aware of their inadequacies. Who can say
that they have put all that behind them? Doctrinal or biblical literalism is more
easily defined than overcome. These mistakes distort our reading of all texts, not
just religious ones, and I have come to find Wittgenstein’s Philosophical
Investigations a most helpful therapy, though William James also proved useful.
Together they taught me to see that no fact, no event, no idea, and no text are
available to us in any other way than through our and/or another’s interpretation.
What led me to take the Jewish people and their tradition so prominently
into my theological work, however, was not Wittgenstein, and it was also not the
Holocaust. Rather, it was the discovery of living Judaism and the living Jewish
people. What turned my theological work around was being confronted with the
living face of Israel, warts and all. That confrontation did not occur as the result
of a logical development, although surely Calvin and Barth had prepared the
way that opened before me. Rather, I was forced to confront Jews and Judaism
by the administrative chore of having to lead my department of religion in
finding candidates for two faculty positions in Judaica.
I have described this turnabout elsewhere {The Christian Century 98, June
17-24, 1981, 665-68), so I shall say only in summary that, having seen Israel
alive and well, or at least as well as the church, I recognized that the existence of
what I had seen with my own eyes (Positivism is not easily left behind!),
namely, living, continuing Israel, was denied by the whole theological tradition
in which I had been trained. Convinced, therefore, that the whole theological
tradition had been wrong about this utterly crucial matter of the identity and life
of Israel, I then set out to do what I could to reconstruct Christian theology as
best I could, building on the truth I thought I had discovered, rather than on the
lie of supersessionism. I have been at this ever since, with apparently minimal
impact on the church or its theology, but working with calm trust that in the
future my feeble and faulty steps will make the path easier for later theologians
and for a church that learns, someday, the blessing of repentance.
I realized that this reconstructive work could only be carried out credibly,
to myself as well as to others, by working from within, that is, as a member of
that community that uses the word “God.” So I reconnected with the community
and slowly learned anew to use their vocabulary. “God” has therefore become
for me a word that I can use, if never easily, although none of my positivistic
questions about its use were ever answered. What I have learned or relearned is
to appreciate and respect the biblical stories in which the term figures. Just how
those stories connect with “the real world” is therefore the new puzzle that has
replaced the old one about God in history. ''
As I look back on it now, I see The Secular Meaning as a false solution to a
real problem. The problem was how we should understand God and God’s
relationship to what we call history, to human life in this world. With a
positivistic misconception of God as a reputed factor in and of history, and not
being able to identify such a factor, I tried to reconstruct my Christian faith
without recourse to the term. It seemed to me at the time that the word “God”
ought not to be thought of as having ever had a reference. Others at the time
chose to argue for what they called “the death of God.”
The expression “the death of God” never seemed to me to be helpful. All it
seems to mean is that some idea of God has died. But God has never been only
an idea for any who have used the word at all seriously. If with the word “God”
we are referring to an idea, or even to a cultural ideal, then its passing can be
noted but not wept over. The issue raised by human suffering is not the
permanence of an idea, but the question whether there is some more
fundamental reality undergirding human existence, a question to which the
Holocaust offers only the most negative answer.
Over the course of time, I have come to find it more fruitful to give up the
questions that plagued me in 1961 and to ask instead about the concretely given,
the biblical stories. In Israel’s stories, God is not absent, but God is present in
From the Secular to the Scriptural Gospel 37
oddly indirect ways, such that Israel’s stories are not really about God. They are
about Israel. In the sense in which it can be said that the Greeks had stories
about the gods, Israel had no story about the God of Israel. It had stories about
Abraham, about Isaac, about Jacob and his children. They are the protagonists.
In following their stories, we learn about God—or we don’t. The God of Israel is
not one of the characters within the story. God is to be found, if at all, by
attending to the whole story. To put it another way, God is not to be found in the
surface story but in the deeper story, which does not force itself upon the reader
but which can be read within or behind the surface story.
The present volume has the Holocaust in its title, but I do not know how to
address that horror. An evil so vast yet so real is beyond me. I have been asked
if my interest in Bonhoeffer, who died a victim of Hitler’s government, formed
part of the background to my later concern to write post-Shoah theology. I see
little connection. Bonhoeffer interested me because of his “worldly” concerns
and his consequent emphasis on the Old Testament. I knew that he was aware
that he lived under a gangster government, but I did not know at the time
whether or to what extent he knew that his government was bent on carrying out
the murder of six million Jews. On the whole, Bonhoeffer was better on Jews
than Barth, but only to some extent. In any case, the Holocaust was not a factor
in my interest in Bonhoeffer. Indeed, I should point out that the Holocaust has
never been central to my thinking or work, and not just because it is so fearfully
unthinkable.
I have no right to say anything at all to Jews (apparently mostly liberal and
American) for whom the Shoah has become the center of their thinking, but
when I compare them with Jews (mostly Israeli and more or less orthodox) who
have deliberately refused to let the Shoah take the central place that they feel
should be reserved for the Torah, I have the uneasy feeling that the former are
not taking the best course for the future of their people. But how can a Christian
speak to this at all, seeing that it was our anti-Judaic theological tradition that
made the Shoah possible. Had we not taught the Western world over the course
of some nineteen hundred years to despise Jews and all things Jewish, modern
anti-Semitism and the Nazi murder of the Jews of Europe would have been less
possible. Who are we to say to any Jew, fix your sight on Sinai, not Auschwitz?
I will say this, however, to my fellow Christians. The Shoah is indeed to be
remembered, studied, spoken of, and commemorated in our worship, for it was
the fruit of our hatred and hostility. It should be on our conscience until the end
of time. But when we think of the Jewish people, it will help us to overcome our
old patterns of thought if we concentrate less on Jewish suffering and more on
Jewish life. We need to think not only of Sinai and all that it has meant and
means for Jewish life, but of the continuing life of this people.
They are the very reason why we cannot escape from God. The possibility
of saying anything positive about God after Auschwitz is frail, but because some
in the death camps did not abandon all trust in God, because Jews have
remained Jews and raised Jewish children in spite of the absurdity of
maintaining that God stood by or with his people in Auschwitz and the other
places of mass murder, we cannot escape from the question about God.
Jews have suffered before. It is not for the first time that the question
forces itself upon us: Has God no obligations arising from the covenant? If
Israel is in any way his people, is he then their God, or is that an empty saying?
But the question arises every time a relatively innocent person suffers crushing
humiliation or utter annihilation. Job’s stubborn complaint is perennially
relevant.
What then are we to say? Surely at least our expressions of assurance that
God is in control and exercises authority over this world need to be restrained
and severely qualified. If God is Israel’s God, then we must admit that we do not
know how God stands in relation to the covenant that we had thought was
binding on him as well as on Israel. That is not just Israel’s problem. That is the
church’s problem. In the face of the uncertainty, Israel can, if it will, go right on
obeying the mitzvot, the Commandments. What is the church to do when just
that which it took to be its core—its faith, its trust, its confidence in God—is
precisely what is now in question?
The first thing it can do is to keep close to Israel, not merely—or even
primarily—physically, but in thought, understanding, and concern, and in prayer
to the One who may pay no more attention to our prayers than he did to theirs in
1096 (the massacre of Mainz), in 1492 (the expulsion from Spain), or in the
early 1940s (Hitler’s “Final Solution”). Keeping close to Israel means having the
Jewish people today in mind when we consider any problem or development. In
response to the report of any news, it should be a Christian, not just a Jewish,
question: “Is it good for the Jews?” To leave Jews alone with that question,
rather than making it our own, is the clear sign that the church has forgotten
from where it came, to whom it belongs, and why Israel is in the world in the
first place.
Christians may also take comfort in some neglected words of Paul (I
Corinthians 12:7-11), where he notes the variety of the gifts of the Spirit, and
says that each member of the body (the church) has whatever gift he or she has
for the common good. To one is given wise words, Paul wrote, to another
knowledge, to another faith, to another healing, etc. Note that faith is just one
gift, so if I personally do not have faith, I am still part of the body and another
member will just have to do my believing, for as Paul put it, “If the foot should
say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make
it any less a part of the body” (I Corinthians 12:15). It may be my task to
reciprocate by doing my believing fellow member’s doubting for him. Only, as
Kierkegaard pointed out, the opposite of faith is not doubt; it is sin. It would be
better, then, to back away a bit from our Protestant concentration on faith and
join Israel in emphasizing more that we are called to be faithful to God even
when we are deeply doubtful that God has been faithful to Israel and therefore
must doubt all the more that God will be faithful to his church.
I shall here leave, mostly unanswered, the terrible questions with which the
Holocaust confronts us, and turn to the form in which I have chosen to
reconsider my old question about God and history, as it reemerges when we
begin with the given of the biblical stories from which the church first learned to
speak of Christ and God. Without arguing the case here, I shall begin with my
reconstruction of the origin of the gospel of I Corinthians 15:3b-5: “that Christ

died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was
raised on the third day according to the scriptures, and that he appeared to
Cephas, then to the twelve.” Taking the recurring “according to the scriptures”
as the key (and hence as the title of my study in preparation), it is first necessary
to realize that post-biblical Jewish interpretation of the scriptures appears, from
the evidence of the Qumran library, to have been counted itself as part and
parcel of the scriptures. But even with this enlarged conception of the scriptures,
it is difficult to imagine how those pre-Pauline formulators of this gospel could
have said it was “according to the scriptures,” unless we allow that the
developing exegetical tradition about the akeda, the Binding of Isaac, only
available in its fully developed form in documents written down over the course
of the first century, C.E., was already sufficiently available by the year 30 to
have given Peter and the others an image and a vocabulary to apply to the death
of Jesus and with which to produce their gospel. In this exegetical or midrashic
development, Isaac was emerging as the active figure, offering himself as a
sacrifice for the benefit of his descendants, for whom his blood was in fact shed
and his body reduced to ashes; then he was raised from the dead by the Lord of
death as well as life. (For the full development of the akeda and its later history,
see Jon Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son, and
especially Shalom Spiegel, The Last Trialf
Isaac, sacrificed, indeed self-sacrificed for the benefit of his heirs, and
raised by God—this tradition was a possible candidate for some Jews to have
used in order to interpret the death of one of their own. Indeed, 4 Maccabees
13:10-12 and 17:17-22 (ca. 18-55 C.E.) uses it in speaking of the Maccabean
martyrs; the Biblical Antiquities of Pseudo-Philo 32:2-4 and 40:2 (probably
originally written in Hebrew, in Palestine, around the time of Jesus) enlarges on
it; the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews draws upon its imagery and language
to speak of Jesus; and Paul (Romans 8:32) and the author of the Fourth Gospel
(John 3:16) clearly use it to interpret Jesus’ death. Another non-Christian Jewish
retelling of the akeda from the first century is to be found in the Jewish
Antiquities (1:222-237) of Flavius Josephus, near the end of the century.
Can we prove that the developed akeda was available to the formulators of
the gospel that Paul says (1 Corinthians 15:3a) he received? No, we cannot; but
what was later written down may have been in the air around the time of Jesus’
death. It would at least give us a human source for the gospel formulated before
Paul joined the movement. From this I suggest the hypothesis: God gave his
church its gospel through the developing post-biblical Jewish exegesis of the
akeda
The discovery of the gospel according to the scriptures was, of course, and
at the same time, the discovery of a way of reading Israel’s tradition in such a
way as to point to and interpret Jesus and his death. This two-sided discovery is
dramatically presented in Luke’s story of two disciples on their way to Emmaus
(Luke 24:13-35, especially verses 25-27 and 30-32). The second side of this
finding was the discovery of what soon came to be called the Old Testament.
The Old Testament, it must be stressed, is not simply the scriptures of
Israel or the Jewish Bible rearranged in another order, but those writings read
with a distinctive interpretation. It is therefore strictly redundant to speak of “the
christological interpretation of the Old Testament.” The Old Testament was
from the first the scriptures of Israel read or interpreted christologically. If this
smacks of typology or figurative reading, then it should, for that was how Jews
read their scriptures in the first century. I do not mean to say that all Jews read
their scriptures christologically—only a few Jews did that, and at least a few
others read them messianically—but all of them read them figuratively, as if the
ancient authors had written for the benefit of their later readers. And I would add
that this is still the way those scriptures are read by those Jews and those
Christians for whom they are still sacred. Both Jews and Christians, in marked
distinction from biblical scholars in the university, have always read those
writings as though they were relevant to the life of their respective present
communities. (Academic scholars do something similar, only the community for
whom they find these writings relevant is the academic community, and the
relevancy is for their further research, not their life.)
So, what is it for Jews or Christians to read Israel’s ancient stories and find
them “relevant,” as we say? It is at least to read them and to find the surface
stories not simply interesting as literary creations or as myths coming from and
throwing some light upon an ancient civilization, but as stories of our own
family, our own ancestors, whether we identify ourselves as their biological
descendants or as those who in some way have been grafted into the ancient
family of which these stories are told. In either way they become the reader’s
stories, our stories, and we tell them again because in so doing we discover
ourselves as their heirs anew.
The stories of Genesis and Exodus, for example, help us to define
ourselves as grounded in them and in the One who lurks in their background.
They can lead us—not force us—as Christians and also as Jews, to see our
present situation in continuity with them. When this happens, a connection
between the world of those stories and our present situation is not exactly
established but at least posed as a live possibility for a moment. In so far as this
happens, the old problem of God and history—transformed into the question of
continuity between old stories, behind which God seems to stand, and
ourselves—may reach a possible resolution in our time.
For Christians, this continuity or connection will require absolutely their
recognition of the prior Jewish claim to these stories, so that any claim on them
for ourselves has to be built on the legitimacy of their claim. Who knows? If
Christians could ever learn to read these stories in such a way as to make it clear
that they have a dual future, that they will be carried forward in history first of
all by the Jewish and then also by the Christian community, perhaps Jews will in
turn be able from their side to read them as having a dual future as well.
So much for the problems that occupy me at this time. As is evident, the
Holocaust is not the focus and not even in the foreground. Rather, my efforts
continue to center in rethinking the Christian church on the premise of the
continuing worth and importance of the Jewish people, the eternal validity of the
covenant of Sinai, and the continuing authenticity of Israel as God’s witness to
the world and to the Gentile church.

One might say that I have simply exchanged the impossible question of
God and history for the hardly less impossible one of Israel and history. Properly
understood, that could be true, but the exchange is more complex than that
formulation suggests. It should be clear that I am far from thinking that Israel
has become God, God forbid. Rather, I have come to see that questions about
the God of Israel are more likely to receive whatever answer is possible by our
coming to a better understanding of Israel, through pondering Israel’s stories and
the story that is the unfolding life of the Jewish people.
NOTE
1. Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The
Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1993); Spiegel, The Last Trial: On the Legends and Lore of the
Command to Abraham to Offer Isaac as a Sacrifice, trans. Judah Goldin (New York:
Behrman, 1967).
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Radical Theology
and the Holocaust
Richard L. Rubenstein
Although I have often explored the overall subject of genocide, in this essay I
propose to consider the subject of “Radical Theology and the Holocaust.”^ I
understand the Holocaust to mean the official, state-sponsored German assault
on the Jews that began in 1933, culminating in the extermination of the vast
majority of Europe’s Jews, and only terminated by Germany’s military defeat.
There were no internal forces within Germany or occupied Europe that could
have stopped the slaughter. Absent defeat, the Germans would have continued
their project until no Jew remained alive on this planet. Note that I do not refer
to “Nazis” but to Germans, for the National Socialist government commanded
the loyalty unto death of the overwhelming majority of the German people until
the bitter end.
I confine my discussion to the Holocaust because it presents theological
problems of a different order of significance than all other instances of modern
genocide. Alone among the demographic catastrophes of the twentieth century,
the theological interpretation of the Holocaust must confront what Stephen R.
Haynes has identified as the “witness-people myth,” the belief that whatever
happens to the Jewish people, for good or ill, is an expression of God’s
providential Justice and, as such, a sign “for God’s church.”^ The witness-people
myth in turn derives from the supersessionary claims of the Christian church
concerning the biblical idea of a covenant between God and Israel as his Chosen
People. If they are serious about their religious beliefs, neither Christian nor
Jewish thinkers can reject some version of the doctrine of Covenant and Election
or avoid the question of whether God was providentially involved in the
Holocaust.
Insofar as my thought can be characterized as radical, it is in the manner in
which I have confronted the question of God and the Holocaust. I have
categorically denied any purposeful divine involvement in the history of Israel,

and most especially in the Holocaust, and I have attempted to set forth a
theological perspective concordant with that view. I have consistently rejected
the idea that Israel is in any sense the Chosen People of God or that in any real
sense a covenant exists between God and Israel, save in the latter’s collective
religious imagination. These views were the basis of my reaction in Berlin in
1961 to Dean Heinrich Gruber’s assertion that it was God’s will to punish the
Jews at Auschwitz."^ The same conviction explains my response to Professor
Thomas J. J. Altizer’s contemporary assertion that “it is the . . . Holy of Holies
who is the murderer of His Chosen People and the Nazis . . . like Pharaoh are
only His chosen instrument.”^
Altizer’s radical interpretation of the Holocaust is at odds with those that
the majority of Christian thinkers are currently prepared to state publicly.
Nevertheless, his views are not only consistent with the larger compass of his
theology but also with the classical Christian interpretation of Jewish communal
misfortune. Altizer’s views cannot be dismissed as an aberration. I certainly take
them very seriously.
This is not the first time that my theological views have been diametrically
opposed to Altizer’s. My involvement in the movement of radical theology
began on the occasion of my initial public encounter with him in November
1965. At the time, I was invited to respond to a paper entitled “Theology and the
Contemporary Sensibility,” which he presented at the conference on America
and the Future of Theology at Emory University. In spite of the very great
differences between us, we were engaged in a somewhat common task of
theological exploration. Both he and William Hamilton were exploring the
meaning of the death of God in Christianity. I was attempting a somewhat
similar enterprise in Judaism. As a result, there were and still are certain
parallels between Altizer’s thought and mine.^ Both of us have been profoundly
influenced by dialectic mysticism and one of its most important philosophical
expressions, Hegelian philosophy. There is also a certain resemblance between
Altizer’s view of creation as a consequence of God’s kenotic self-emptying and
that of the Lurianic Kabbalism that I found theologically attractive. Rabbi Isaac
Luria was a seventeenth-century Jewish mystic, arguably the most important
Jewish mystic of all time. According to Luria, the Godhead or Divine Urgrund,
in the language of the Kabbalah the Ayn Sof, the original All-in-All, created the
world by an act of self-diminution and self-division known as tsimtsum. Since
the Ayn lacked all inner division, negation, and predication, it was no-thing.
In the Lurianic scheme, creation was thus truly a creation ex nihilo, a creation
by God out of his own no-thing-ness, so to speak. Thus, in both the Kabbalistic
view and Altizer’s theology, creation is an act of self-diminution of the Divine
Urgrund. That is a view I share.
Nevertheless, there is much in Altizer’s thought that I have never been able
to share. Although, like Altizer, I regard the transcendent God of biblical
monotheism as “dead,” so to speak, I obviously do not share his belief that
Christ is now present in the concrete actuality of our history. For me the “death”
of the biblical God of history, covenant, and election is a “cultural” rather than
Radical Theology and the Holocaust 45
an ontological event. That event makes possible a renewal of contact, so to

speak, with “God after the Death of God” whom I have spoken of as the Holy
Nothingness. When I wrote that “Omnipotent Nothingness is Lord of all
Creation,” I expressed both my religious feelings and my intellectual
convictions. Because of the gender-specific character of the term “Lord,” I
would today express the same meaning less succinctly as “Omnipotent
Nothingness is the Source, Ground, and Ultimate Substratum of all things.” In
any event, this formulation of mystical faith offers a way of synthesizing
mystical, dialectical, psychoanalytic, and archaic insights concerning God as the
ground, substantial reality, and final destiny of all things. It also has obvious
affinities with the Buddhist doctrine of Sunyata or emptiness, although Buddhist
thinkers would not use such poetic images as “Lord of all Creation” to express
their meanings. According to Masao Abe, “The ultimate reality for Buddhism is
neither Being nor God, but Sunyata. Sunyata literally means ‘emptiness’ or
‘voidness’ and can imply ‘absolute nothingness.’ This is because Sunyata is
entirely unobjectifiable, unconceptualizable, and unattainable by reason or will.
Accordingly, if Sunyata is conceived as somewhere outside of or beyond one’s
self-existence, it is not true Sunyata, for Sunyata thus conceived . . . turns into
something, which one represents and calls "Sunyata.^""
To the best of my knowledge, in the 1960s Altizer did not relate his idea of
Christ as present “in the concrete actuality of our history” to the Holocaust. Nor
at the time did either William Hamilton or Harvey Cox address themselves to
the Holocaust as a theological issue. Hamilton wrote that “a certain kind of God-
rejection with a certain kind of world-affirmation is the point where I join the
death-of-God movement.”^ Deeply sensitive both to the unfolding technological
civilization and to popular culture, Hamilton took the final scene of the Beatles’
motion picture A Hard Day’s Night—in this scene the Beatles sing, dance, and
then depart by means of a helicopter that rises above an overly complex
world—as a symbol of a new mood transcending the despair and alienation of
the world at that time. “The death of tragedy,” Hamilton asserted, “is due to the
death of the Christian God.”^
In the aftermath of the Holocaust, I was unable to detect the death of
tragedy. There was also in both Hamilton and Cox an optimism about
technological civilization, identified as “technopolis” by Cox, that I could not
possibly share.My encounter with Altizer came very soon after my first visit
to Auschwitz and the Warsaw Ghetto. Moreover, on October 23, 1965,
immediately after visiting the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, I learned of the death
of Paul Johannes Tillich the day before. Tillich’s lectures had an enormous
impact on me when I was a doctoral student at Harvard.*^ The day that Tillich
died was the very day I first visited Auschwitz. At the time, it had yet to become
a popular tourist attraction. Less than a month later, I was to respond to Altizer
in Atlanta. After Auschwitz and the Warsaw Ghetto, I could not come to Atlanta
in a mood of celebration. Then as now, I saw Auschwitz as an intrinsic
expression of what Harvey Cox called technopolis in The Sacred City. That
conviction prevented me from joining Cox in identifying the secular city with
the “self-realizing kingdom of God.”
In spite of the absence of any reference to Auschwitz in Altizer’s thought

in 1965, I suspect that Auschwitz was implicit in his thought even then. He is
too sophisticated a thinker not to have seen the connection between his own
version of Heilsgeschichte and Auschwitz. Could he have been holding his fire?
As a highly controversial, young radical theologian, he had enough on his plate
with his proclamation of the “good news” of the “death of God” without adding
a polarizing interpretation of the Holocaust shortly after Vatican II with its
attempt to restore a measure of healing to Jewish-Christian relations. By the
1990s, however, Altizer saw no reason to withhold his distinctive interpretation
of the Holocaust. Altizer made the connection fully explicit in the essay, “God
as Holy Nothingness,” which he contributed to the Festschrift presented to m*e
on the occasion of my seventieth birthday.’^ In that essay, Altizer credits me
with having grasped “the deep logic of Nazism” as “deicide,” namely, the primal
human wish to murder God in order to be free of all impediments to unrestrained
instinctual gratification.*^ He depicts the Germans as motivated by that wish in
the Holocaust. According to Altizer, deicide, the murder of God, is the deep
ground and logic of the Holocaust, a logic demanding that “the primal victim be
the Chosen People of God.”*"* Acknowledging that this may be “an insane
logic,” Altizer nevertheless observes that the logic has become “historically
actual in our time, which is truly the time of the death of God.”
In his interpretation of the Holocaust, Altizer argues that the theme of
Deicide is related to that of the Divine Infanticide. In Deicide the sons seek to
murder the Supreme Father; in Divine Infanticide, the Father murders the sons.
Altizer holds that both are intrinsic to the Holocaust. Regarding the Nazis as
motivated by a deicidal will to power at Auschwitz, Altizer also argues
dialectically that the universal human will to deicide is actually an image of the
Creator God’s will to self-annihilation and the restoration of the original divine
Urgrund. Thus, the same Godhead is also present as Divine Infanticide at
Auschwitz and in his relations with his human progeny. In this connection,
Altizer cites my argument in My Brother Paul that if, as both Paul and the rabbis
held, “the wages of sin are death,” then God, though he be righteous and just, is
the Divine Infanticide.*^ Altizer takes up this theme and makes it his own,
arguing that my conception of the Divine Infanticide is “a naming of that God
who is present in the Holocaust, that God who submitted his Chosen People to
the most horrible death in history, and did so precisely as an expression of His
love, for God slays those to whom He gives life.”*^ This is, of course, a view to
which I could not possibly give assent. Nevertheless, “insane” though his logic
may be, it does possess a certain consistency. If one accepts the view that there
was providential Divine involvement in the Holocaust, it is impossible to avoid
a conclusion similar to Altizer’s. That is why I have consistently rejected the
idea of such involvement throughout my entire career.
Altizer also finds an important place for the idea of tsimtsum in his
interpretation of the Holocaust. As noted, he holds that the Creator God, the
transcendent God of biblical monotheism, can best be understood as the result of
the self-diminution of the original Divine Urgrund. In true Gnostic fashion,
Altizer further argues that the diminished Godhead is “uniquely the God of
Israel” and the God of the Holocaust. He sees this correlation as the unstated but
nevertheless implicit expression of my thinking. Moreover, he claims that only
if the God of Israel is the God of the Holocaust can one “draw forth” a uniquely
Jewish identity whose “pure act” is manifest in the Holocaust as an act of
Infanticide. It is important to note the double sense in which Altizer uses the
term Infanticide. He means both the action of the Creator God in slaughtering
his allegedly Chosen People through the agency of Adolf Hitler and the National
Socialist state and the act by which the Creator God eliminated himself, so to
speak, in a reversal of the original tsimtsum, thereby making way for an end to
both history and the cosmos so that God may be all in all and, as such, the
Primordial Nothingness.
Altizer also connects the Creator God and the Holocaust to Israel’s original
rejection of ancient paganism. That fateful rejection resulted in Israel’s coming
to know the Creator God, the “God who is God and only God,” that is, the God
of both Scripture and the Holocaust, as distinct from the original Divine
Urgrund. According to Altizer, the God of Israel is present in the Holocaust as
an “ultimate and absolute iconoclasm.” Just as Israel came to know its God
through an initial radical iconoclasm that brought to an end the reign of ancient
paganism, a latter-day iconoclasm is inherent in the Holocaust, namely, the self-
annihilating iconoclasm of the Creator. In the Holocaust, the presence of the
self-annihilating Creator obliterates every memory of Divinity. As a result, “for
the first time the silence of God is both absolute and literal.” The godless void of
the Holocaust thus establishes the “possibility” of a new paganism that only the
Jewish people can know. That is because only the Jewish people, whom Altizer
characterizes as “the absolute Other,” and those non-Jews who were in some
way associated with their “otherness” have known the Holocaust. Moreover,
only in the deathly silence of the Holocaust could the new paganism have arisen.
With some justice, Altizer sees my thought as an expression of a new
Jewish paganism, although in recent years I have preferred to emphasize the
parallels between my thought and Mahayana Buddhism rather than nature
paganism. According to Altizer, I am supposed to have “heard the silence” as
the Divine Nothingness that is fully coincident with mysticism’s Primordial
Nothingness. Nevertheless, Altizer argues that the new Jewish paganism, of
which I may be one of the very few self-conscious exemplars, is uniquely
Jewish in that “it is grounded in the Creator alone,” in the sense that it arises out
of a Holocaust-motivated rejection of the biblical God of Covenant, which, as
noted, is simultaneously the self-annihilating movement of the same God.
Nevertheless, Altizer argues that the Infanticide of God in the Holocaust is
neither the Crucifixion of God nor deicide as Christianity has known it. In the
Holocaust, the biological sons and daughters are murdered. In the Crucifixion
the victim is the “eternally generated Son.” According to Altizer, God was
present as death in the Holocaust whereas Christianity has known that same
death as the Crucifixion of God, which, as we know, is followed by
Resurrection. Altizer further holds that post-exile Israel has known this death as
its own “eternally repeated death,” consummated both in the Holocaust and over
and over again in Israel’s history. Altizer contends that with the self-inflicted
death of Israel’s Creator God in the Holocaust, Israel’s history may be coming to
an end, making way for the new paganism, even as history itself comes to an
end.
When the editors of my Festschrift first received Altizer’s essay, they
questioned its suitability for inclusion in a volume celebrating my life’s work:
When I learned that I was to be honored with a Festschrift, I was asked whether
Altizer’s essay ought to be included. I encouraged the editors to publish it. In a
very important sense, the essay continues the dialogue between us that began at
Emory University in 1965. We did not agree about important issues then and
there was little likelihood that we would do so now, but I felt strongly that the
dialogue should continue.
There is much in Altizer’s interpretation of the Holocaust that most Jews
would find offensive. Moreover, in characterizing the Jew as the “absolute
Other,” Altizer comes close to Gnosticism, if he does not actively embrace it.
How could the Jew be the absolute Other if, as the historic Christian mainstream
has maintained, Christians are the “new Israel” and Christ the “end (telos) of the
Law” in the double sense of fulfillment and completion? Nevertheless, I have no
reason to believe that Altizer writes to offend. In interpreting the Holocaust, he
remains what he has been throughout his career, a serious and thoroughly radical
Christian theologian, arguably one of the most radical Christian theologians of
all time. As such, Altizer exhibits a characteristic common to all radical
theologians. They take religious belief with the utmost seriousness and they do
not pretend that the “scandal” of belief can be mitigated by liberal
reinterpretation. In that sense, I remain one of their number.
Given his religious and theological commitments, Altizer must interpret
the Holocaust in Christian terms. No matter how sophisticated his apocalyptic,
mystical theology may be, he cannot abandon the idea of Israel as the Chosen
People, a “witness people” whose continuing travail confirms the truth of
Christ’s church. Using the potent intellectual tools at his command, including
the history of religion, dialectic theology, and the Western philosophic tradition,
he argues for the providential character of the slaughter of perhaps six million
Jewish men, women, and children—yes, even the children, many of whom were
subject to the most unspeakable cruelties as the Germans killed them. True to
the classical theological tradition that regarded Nebuchadnezzar and Caesar as
unwitting agents of the Lord in their respective destructions of Jerusalem,
Altizer offers a comparable identification of Adolf Hitler. Here again, Altizer’s
fundamental purpose appears to be neither malice nor the wish to offend. Instead
he follows the logic of the Christian version of biblical religion to its ultimate
conclusion. Nor is Altizer lacking in Jewish counterparts. There are many
Orthodox Jewish messianists who regard the Holocaust as “the birth pangs of
the Messiah,” the terrible travail through which Israel must pass on the road to
final redemption. Our exploration of the subject of radical theology and the
Holocaust would be incomplete if we failed at least to make mention of Israel’s
radical messianists.
Let me clarity my meaning when I use the term providential. I do not refer
to a felicitous outcome in or beyond history for any individual or group of
individuals. I refer to outcomes that satisfy the conviction that the entire course
of history, no matter how blighted or horrible, up to and including the
dissolution of all finite entities in the Divine Urgrund, is as it should have been.
Perhaps no thinker has expressed this sense of the providential as well as Hegel,
whose thought on this issue is not unlike Altizer’s. Contemplating the course of
world history, with its record of crime, suffering, and slaughter, Hegel was able
to write in utter calm and philosophical detachment: “In order to justify the
course of history, we must try to understand the role of evil in the light of the
absolute sovereignty of reason. We are dealing here with the category of the
negative . . . and we cannot fail to notice how all that is finest and noblest in
history is immolated on his altar. Reason cannot stop to consider the injuries
sustained by single individuals, for particular ends are submerged in universal
ends.”^*
For Hegel, individual injury is overcome in the universal end. However,
Hegel never faced a situation of universal injury such as the Holocaust or the
threat of universal extinction in a nuclear holocaust. There is a profound
difference between a situation in which some persons suffer and perish unjustly
but the group survives and one in which an entire group or even all of humanity
perishes. If I read Altizer’s apocalyptic correctly, such a terminal universal
injury would not be inconsistent with the attainment of the New Jerusalem
which for Altizer is the Christian eschatological fulfillment.^^
There is, of course, no way that Altizer or his Jewish counterparts can be
refuted. They are engaged in the classical theological project of dissonance
reduction. As stated above, more than any other modem event, the Holocaust
can be ignored by neither Jewish nor Christian thinkers. By seeing that event as
in some sense the deserved fate of the people that rejected Christ, even as
Altizer does without resorting to the category of divine punishment, the
Holocaust can serve as a most powerful source of confirmation for Christianity.
And, in his providential interpretation of the Holocaust, Altizer is by no means
alone. By interpreting the event as an apocalyptic prelude to the eschatological
redemption of Israel, Orthodox Jewish messianists find confirmation for their
distinctive views. Since neither Altizer nor the Jewish messianists can abandon
their respective theologies, the horrors of the Holocaust must be shown to be
somehow congruent with their fundamental beliefs.
Such theological systems cannot be rendered intelligible across cultural
boundaries as can, for example, mathematics, the physical sciences, some of the
social sciences, and music. That is why their authors must claim a superordinate
source of legitimation for their views in some form of revelation. Put differently,
their views lack universality. What, for example, can Altizer’s statement that
“Christ is now present in the concrete actuality” of our history possibly mean to
a Muslim, a Hindu, or a Jew? Undoubtedly, a Buddhist, Muslim, or Hindu
thinker could find a meaning for the idea of Christ in their respective religious
systems, but it would not be one that knowledgeable Christians could accept.
Much as I respect Karl Barth as a theologian, I am at a loss to find in his
writings anything fundamental addressed to non-Christians, save perhaps the
implicit invitation to non-believers to abandon their darkness and enter the
magic circle of belief. I have a somewhat similar experience reading Altizer,

albeit without detecting a comparable invitation to join. Nor would I be
surprised were Christian thinkers to tell me that they fail to find any symmetry
between the world of everyday human activity and the claim of Jewish
messianists that the Holocaust can best be understood as the birth pangs of the
Messiah.
Unfortunately, theological ideas can and do have profound consequences
in the real world. During World War II, Altizer’s view of the Jew as the
“absolute Other” was widely shared by those who were convinced that European
civilization would never be whole as long as it was polluted by the presence of
emancipated Jews capable of influencing that civilization from within. Unlike
Altizer the thinker, many of the same people had the decision-making power
necessary to eliminate the absolute Other. They used that power as long as they
were able to do so. Let us not forget that within Christianity the absolute Other
of Christ is either the Devil or the Anti-Christ and that Hitler was by no means
alone in considering the Jews to be the “absolute Other” whose elimination was
unconditionally necessary to restore cultural and spiritual health not only to
Germany but to the European civilization that the Germans claimed they were
defending.
Let me make myself absolutely clear. I am not even remotely suggesting
that Altizer is in any way motivated by sympathy for the National Socialist
project. I simply want to point out that ideas have a life of their own that often
escapes their author’s intentions. I suspect that is why in the aftermath of the
Holocaust many thinkers refrain from interpreting Jews and Judaism in the
customary ways of their religious tradition. There is a certain kind of theological
integrity in Altizer’s interpretation of the Holocaust. Moreover, he makes it
abundantly clear in almost every sentence that he regards the pain endured by
the victims as terrible in the extreme. That recognition, however, does not and
cannot alter his Judgment that the catastrophe was both providential and
inevitable.
Over the years I have become less interested in theological dialogue and
more interested in the historical and sociological investigation of the Holocaust.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, my understanding of the Holocaust and the State
of Israel was initially regarded as a distinctively Jewish expression of death of
God theology. Indeed, I saw it as such myself. To this day, the question of the
meaning of the “death of God” remains a major issue in my work. It was
recently taken up anew in the revised and expanded second edition of After
Auschwitz. Nevertheless, my theological writings have come to be seen less as
an expression of death of God theology than as the initial expression of
contemporary Jewish Holocaust theology. My current theological writings
strongly emphasize the Holocaust theology aspect of my work.
Moreover, the question of God and the Holocaust has become less
important to me as I have come to view the Holocaust in its larger historical and
political context. In reality, even in the first edition of After Auschwitz I took
care to explain that the death of God was not an actual event that had happened
to God, so to speak, but rather to humanity. In utilizing the language of religion.
I was as interested in making potentially verifiable statements about the secular

culture of modernity as I was in sharing with my readers my views about
Divinity. I came to see the culture of modernity in the West as providing the
economic, political, and moral preconditions for the implementation of the
Holocaust. Consequently, my interests tended to move back and forth between
the study of the Holocaust and research into the kind of world in which state-
sponsored programs of population elimination and mass extermination could
take place. Since the writing of The Cunning of History (1975), sociology,
economics, and political theory have become at least as important as
psychoanalysis and theology as my interpretive tools for the understanding of
both religion and history.
In May 1993, as a result of visits to wartime Serbia and Croatia, an
important change occurred in my understanding of the Holocaust. What I
witnessed there was a triangular Holy War, not in the sense that an attempt was
being made to enforce religious belief, as was the case in the Inquisition, but
rather the attempt was to expel or exterminate those who do not share the
cultural identity that flows from a shared religious inheritance. That experience
gave me the clue I needed to deepen my understanding of the Holocaust. I came
to see the Holocaust as a Holy War whose fundamental objective was to
eliminate the Jews as a demographic and cultural presence from the domain of
European Christendom. I must confess that I did not see this clearly for a very
long time because of the strongly anti-Christian elements in National Socialist
ideology.
When I argue in the sense defined above that the Holocaust was a Christian
Holy War carried out by a National Socialist political leadership hostile to
Christianity, I do so in response to a fundamental question: What groups,
especially in Europe but to some extent in the Americas as well, considered the
elimination of Jews and Judaism by whatever means a long-term benefit? There
is a simple answer to that question: all those groups and institutions for whom
the religio-cultural monopoly of the Christian symbolic universe was an
indispensable requirement for a healthy, well-functioning society. This was a
widely held conviction before and during World War II. The pervasiveness of
this conviction may help to explain the widespread aid given by clerical leaders
with close ties to the Vatican, if not by officials of the Vatican itself, to many of
the more notorious perpetrators of the Holocaust in the latter’s post-war flight
from justice. One did not have to be a member of the National Socialist Party to
rest content with letting the Germans do the dirty work. This is not the occasion
for a further exploration of that highly complex issue. I would suggest, however,
that Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s well-publicized attempt to depict the Holocaust
as primarily a German enterprise casts too narrow a net.^^ Goldhagen does not
deal with the role of the majority of European Christian leaders—Protestant,
Catholic, and Orthodox alike—in the Holocaust. Nor does he deal with the
extent to which the political and corporate elites throughout Europe, as well as
in the United States, were more than content with the elimination of Europe’s
Jews.
These issues have now been dealt with by responsible scholars for half a
century, but no one has expressed more succinctly than Thomas Altizer the
ultimate motive for the Holocaust as a Christian Holy War. That motive was not
the Nazi will to deicide in the sense that both he and I describe it, but the widely
held perception that the Jews were the “absolute Other” whose presence in any
form could no longer be tolerated within European Christendom. Insofar as the
perception of absolute Jewish otherness was and is widespread, it is confined
solely to Christianity, for no other religion identifies Jews as deicides.
Moreover, Jews have no comparable sense of absolute Christian otherness
because they do not regard Christians as murderers of God.
NOTES
1. See Richard L. Rubenstein, The Cunning of History: Mass Death and the
American Future (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), second edition with introduction by
William Styron (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1978); Richard L. Rubenstein, The
Age of Triage: Fear and Hope in an Overcrowded World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983);
and Richard L. Rubenstein and John K. Roth, Approaches to Auschwitz: The Holocaust
and Its Legacy (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1987).
2. See Richard L. Rubenstein, “Religion and the Uniqueness of the Holocaust,” in
Is the Holocaust Unique?: Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, ed. Alan S.
Rosenbaum (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996).
3. See Stephen R. Haynes, Reluctant Witnesses: Jews and the Christian
Imagination (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1995), 8ff
4. See Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz, 2d ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1993), 3-13.
5. Thomas J. J. Altizer, “God as Holy Nothingness,” in V/hat Kind of God? Essays
in Honor of Richard L. Rubenstein, ed. Betty Rogers Rubenstein and Michael Berenbaum
(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995), 352.
6. Gott-ist-Tot-Theologie (Cologne and Zurich: Benziger Verlag, 1977).
7. Masao Abe, “Kenotic God and Dynamic Sunyata,” in The Emptying God: A
Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation, ed. John B. Cobb, Jr. and Christopher Ives
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990), 27.
8. William Hamilton, “The Death-of-God Theology” in William Robert Miller, ed..
The New Christianity: An Anthology of the Rise of Modern Religious Thought (New
York: Delacorte Press, 1967), 335.
9. William Hamilton, “The New Optimism—from Prufrock to Ringo,” in Radical
Theology and the Death of God, William Hamilton and Thomas J. J. Altizer
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 164-68.
10. See Richard L. Rubenstein, “Cox’s Vision of the Secular City,” in The Secular
City Debate, ed. Daniel Callahan (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 129-44.
11. See Richard L. Rubenstein, Power Struggle (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1974), 149-69.
12. Altizer, “God as Holy Nothingness,” 347-57.
13. See Rubenstein, After Auschwitz, 37.
14. Altizer, “God as Holy Nothingness,” 348.
15. Ibid., 348.
16. Richard L. Rubenstein, My Brother Paul (New York: Harper & Row, 1972),
15-16.
17. Altizer, “God as Holy Nothingness,” 351.
18. G. W. F. Hegel, “Introduction: Reason in History,” in Lectures on the
Philosophy of World History, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press 1975), 43.
19. See Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Descent into Hell: A Study of the Radical
Reversal of the Christian Consciousness (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1970).
20. I explore this issue in greater detail in “Holocaust and Holy War,” The Annals
of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 548 (November 1996): 23-44.
21. See Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans
and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).
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Respondents
Has monotheism truly become in our time an ideology of death, in spite of

Chartres and the St. Matthew Passion? Defunct, like those other dying “isms” of
the late twentieth century: fascism, communism, capitalism, socialism? If so,
then a primary function of radical theology—Christian, Jewish, Islamic...—is to
explore the ways to bear witness to the danger of belief in a single god.
—William Hamilton
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6
After the Holocaust:

The Death of God and
the Profaning of Texts
Edith Wyschogrod
“In my beginning is my end,” writes T. S. Eliot in “East Coker.” The poem

concludes, “In my end is my beginning.” Thomas J. J. Altizer concurs. The latter
statement is not the mere reversal of a dyad. Rather it is a declaration of the
permeability of beginning and end to one another: “Their respective and
contrary identities appear to be passing into one another, thereby dissolving and
erasing the integral and individual identities of both beginning and end.”* Such
is the character of our time that is not a time in any linear, previously understood
historical sense but, to use Hegel’s phrase, an upside-down world in which
providence itself suffers an inversion. Consciousness and interiority are over and
done with and, as Nietzsche reminds us, monstrous prodigies abound in an age
of cataclysm.
For Altizer the Holocaust helped to generate the death of God as a
perpetual crucifixion reenacted in history, a latter-day patripassianism: just as
the Father passes into the Son, so God passes wholly into the world so that the
death of God is a radical immanentization of the sacred. Apocalypse is
transmuted into Messianism, Messianism into Apocalypse in and through the
brokenness of Christ. In one of the most powerful passages of post-Barthian
Protestant theology Altizer writes: “This cosmos is the resurrected Christ, but a
resurrected Christ who is inseparable and indistinguishable from the crucified
Christ, for now the Christ of glory is the Christ of passion. So it is that the body
of Christ can only be a dark and broken body, but it is a body that is present in
all the immediacy of an unformed and primordial matter, as a totally fallen body
now reveals itself in the pure immediacy of the word.”^
No one can fail to recognize in this text the lamb with seven horns and
seven eyes, the sacrificial one described in Revelation: “Then I saw a Lamb with
the marks of sacrifice upon him” (Rev. 4:6), inexpungible marks that no one has
made more obvious than Altizer. Yet, I want to argue, these traces can never be
brought into plenary presence or full speech, as Altizer believes, but are tracks
or spoors of a past that can never be made present, that must “appear” as trace. It
is no accident that the book of Revelation speaks of marks, a transcendence
written, inscribed, in immanence, marks of brokenness that fissure the “pure
immediacy of the word” with difference.
I worry, however, about that dimension in Altizer’s writing that acclaims
the Dionysian Nietzsche, who transforms cyclical, eternal recurrence into an
eternity of pure presence with its attendant loss of memory and, with it, the loss
of guilt and pain. Does Altizer, who has given us perhaps our most profound
recent account of evil, mean to say with Zarathustra: I recreate “it was” into
“thus I willed if’ and “thus I shall will if’?^ Who is Altizer? Is he the Dionysian
who reflects a total inversion of a heteronomous will, an inversion, as it were, of
Abraham’s will, which became identical with God’s in the Bible? Or is Altizer
the post-Puritan riven with guilt, a guilt that derives from a reversal of manifest
destiny? Is he an Abrahamite who denounces the pandemic mass killings of our
time as Abraham protested the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah?
It is perhaps the latter Altizer who decries the waning of interest in
theology and the dimming down of affect in current responses to the Holocaust.
Yet I am somewhat more optimistic than he about the persistent need for
elements, integral to his death of God theology, that could provide responses to
recent cultural developments. Consider first what is by now a truism: the fact
that the world is undergoing an unprecedented change in the conception of being
and truth as they are understood by the information culture and are reflected in
the language of biological research. This new conception can be condensed in
the Pythagorean formula: the world is made of numbers. The body is
quintessentially its coded genetic structure; knowledge is transportable
information encoded as one and zero. To this neo-Pythagorean volatilization of
the body, the corporeal brokenness of the Lamb rather than theologies of
abstract transcendence could offer what Altizer might term a post-Christian
response.
With the radical critiques of the subject-object distinction by philosophers
of many persuasions, it could be argued that the notion of the “real” itself is
under attack, is “virtualized,” as some have put it. Does it then follow that the
phenomenality of the suffering body can be manifested only as virtuality? But if
there is nothing other than virtuality, we could not know this insofar as our
ontological categories would have been transformed. The term virtual is
meaningless without that with respect to which it is virtual. If so, virtuality
requires difference, the difference between it and something else that contests it,
a corporeal brokenness that speaks to the ultimacy of suffering, an endlessly
reenacted crucifixion that can be found in Altizer’s reading of the death of God.
Pure negation persists: the Holocaust does not come to an end. Altizer’s
theology is one in which the claim that the Holocaust holocausts is not a
pleonasm.
Among the lines I remember and honor most in the work of William
The Profaning of Texts 59
Hamilton are those found in his essay on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, written to

commemorate the occasion of the twentieth anniversary (April 9, 1965) of
Bonhoeffer’s murder. They read: “The Protestant continues to engage his
unbelieving brother, but he is likely to be engaging by working alongside him.
What distinguishes the Christian from his non-Christian comrade? If there is any
answer to that it may well be found by meditating on the third and most
powerful of Bonhoeffer’s ideas, written nine months before he was hanged:
‘Man is challenged to participate in the sufferings of God at the hands of a
godless world.’”"*
In the light of those reflections, I should like to consider three claims made
in Hamilton’s essay for this volume: first, that monotheism has become the
ideology of death in modernity; second, that Christianity understood
monolithically bears much of the responsibility for the Holocaust; and third, that
the narratives of the victims of genocide carry no privileged status. This refusal
of status is implicit in his critique of Elie Wiesel.
Hamilton’s sustained attack on monotheism is grounded in what might be
called the moral argument against traditional monotheisms, an inverted version,
as it were, of Kant’s rendition of the moral argument for the existence of God.
Kant adheres to the premise that it is necessary for happiness to be combined
with virtue, that both are joined in the concept of the summum bonum (highest
good). Practical (moral) reason demands not only that we attain a happiness
commensurate with our moral state but that the former be the cause of the latter.
Yet it is simply an empirical fact that virtue and happiness are not always found
together because, in the sensible world, their relation is merely contingent. A
constant connection between worthiness and happiness is possible only in a
supersensible world, a world that requires immortality as the condition for its
realization and the existence of God as its guarantor. Hamilton’s argument, like
that of Kant, presupposes freedom, except that for Hamilton the human conation
towards ill is bound up with suffering and eventuates in such heinous actions as
to preclude the existence of a moral God. Either God is the evil guarantor of
these actions and thus immoral, a contention that contradicts received notions of
God, or God does not exist at all.
I have no quarrel whatsoever with Hamilton’s empirical claim that the
world’s monotheisms may have contributed to its older and newer genocides.
Both the Native American and Yugoslav examples he cites are genocidal in
Lemkin’s sense (destructive of both persons and cultures), fueled by dominant
versions of monotheism and to be unequivocally excoriated. Nor can Hamilton
be faulted for the claim that the ground for the Holocaust was prepared by
Christian anti-Semitism. Goldhagen’s book, “which christianizes (the
perpetrators) even more indelibly,” is mentioned to lend support to the view that
Christianity prepared the ground for and was intrinsic to the implementation of
the Holocaust. (Note however that the term “ordinary Germans” that Hamilton
here associates with Goldhagen is not univocally understood. It is the key term
for Christopher Browning, whose work entitled Ordinary Men is criticized by
Goldhagen because Browning’s evidence is drawn from legal proceedings in
which the self-interest of the defendants plays a role. The subtleties of the case
need not be argued here.)

One has only to consider Hitler’s laudatory comments about Christianity in
Mein Kampf (1925) to discern a certain complicity between Christianity and
Nazi ideology. German unity could only suffer through the attack of Protestant
pan-Germanism upon Catholics, Hitler asserts, and he praises both Christian
faiths as building character and enforcing authority. He does not fail to add that
the interdenominational quarrel is a Jewish plot, “that the significance of this for
the future of the earth does not lie in whether the Protestants defeat the catholics
or the catholics the Protestants, but in whether the Aryan man is preserved for
the earth or dies out.”^ But before Christianity is perceived as the handmaiden of
Nazi ideology from the Nazi point of view, it must be noted that in the more
private context of the Tischrede, Hitler is far more critical and threatens to take
care of the churches after the war. Even in the most pro-church passages of Mein
Kampf WxiXQX does not forget his priorities: “Political parties have nothing to do
with religious problems as long as these are not alien to the nation, undermining
the morals and ethics of the race.”^ Later the category of Gottglaubig was
introduced into the Nazi lexicon to describe a new religious belief in German
national identity, a belief that was far removed from the doctrines of the
Catholic and Protestant churches.
Despite these considerations, I am troubled by Hamilton’s practical
account of the role attributed to Christians as if all could be lumped together.
Hamilton is dead right to see Christian opposition to Hitler as weak and all too
infrequent. But ranging from the low-risk protests of the Barmen Declaration, a
statement of the German Confessing Church that urged loyalty to God before the
state, to the far higher risk protests of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the White Rose
resistance movement, which included many Catholics, instances of Christian
anti-Nazism can be found. The convents that sheltered Jewish children in Italy,
Belgium and Hungary and the Protestants of Le Chambon who hid Jewish
families and who did so as believing Christians are compelling evidence of
Christian resistance. While extremely rare, these instances of opposition reveal
that the role of Christians in the Third Reich and the countries it conquered is
complex: most were willing instruments of National Socialism, a few were
silently dubious about the virulence of its anti-Semitism, and a very small
number constituted a source of resistance. These comments are in no way
intended to attenuate the critique of Christianity’s role in “the teaching of
contempt” but rather to show that Christian imperatives may function as
“floating signifiers” (a term used by post-structuralists to suggest ambiguity)
that can assume many guises.
Hamilton’s third claim about the status of victim testimony reflects a
certain opposition to ad hominem arguments, those in which the truth or falsity
of the argument’s conclusion depends upon the authority of the person who
testifies. This refusal of status is anathema to many philosophers and, it appears,
to Hamilton. But I am sympathetic to ad hominem arguments of a certain sort. I
want to contend that the question “Says who?” matters with respect to how we
regard an argument. It is precisely for this reason that I take Wiesel’s statements
about the Holocaust with utmost seriousness and find something quite disturbing
The Profaning of Texts 61
in Hamilton’s denial of Wiesel’s special relation to comments about the

Holocaust, a point to which I shall return.
I find disquieting what I believe to be Hamilton’s misunderstanding of
Wiesel’s theological position, a position that I identify as claiming that
narratives about the Holocaust are always written in the imperative and have not
merely illocutionary (performative) but perlocutionary (effective) force: “See
what has happened; such an event must not recur, not in Guatemala, not in El
Salvador, not in Rwanda, not in Bosnia.” I do not believe for a moment that, in
privileging survivor accounts, Wiesel intends to preclude historical study or that
he fails to realize that survivor stories may differ. Instead, he has in mind the
special character of Holocaust narratives.
To best explain what I mean, consider the rabbinic account of a category
called “defiling the hands.” In an article on this subject, Michael Broyde writes:
“Defiling the hands is a status of ritual purity (or impurity) . . .enacted by the
Talmudic sages not to promote ritual purity, but to protect holy works from
destruction or desecration. . . . People would store holy food in the ark with holy
scrolls saying both are holy. To prevent this conduct which led to rats, mice and
weasels eating the scrolls as well as the sacred food, the Sages enacted a series
of rabbinic decrees to deter this conduct. The touching of either conferred
uncleanness and precluded touching the other without purification.”
The most sacred among sacred texts are those which can be saved from a
fire on the Sabbath as determined by the presence of God’s name. For Wiesel,
survivor stories are in a sense such privileged texts, texts that defile the hands,
and must be protected from cannibalization. Whoever touches these
narratives—historians, filmmakers, archivists—must be aware of this
defilement. This point is conveyed in Wiesel’s comment: “Certain texts . . . must
be transmitted as secrets, as a whole, from mouth to ear, in whispers, like the
oral tradition which was never transmitted, written down. ... I think it was
Braque who said that literature is a world turned fire. . . . One doesn’t play with
fire.”^
It is Richard Rubenstein who has most forcefully confronted us with the
dilemma of the Holocaust without falling prey to the reductionism of social
science or to the classical Christian or certain Jewish accounts of Jewish
misfortune. Rubenstein’s succinct and by now classical statement stands: “I
have had to affirm the existence of a God who inflicts Auschwitz on his guilty
people or to insist that nothing the Jews did made them more deserving of
Auschwitz than any other people, that Auschwitz was in no sense a punishment,
and that a God who would or could inflict such punishment does not exist.”^
In his contribution to the present volume, Rubenstein offers the best
summary of Altizer—the gist of Altizer standing on one foot as it were—that I
have yet to read. I fully concur in Rubenstein’s gloss: for Altizer’s apocalyptic
theology, the obliteration of this people, Israel, “would not be inconsistent with
the attainment of the New Jerusalem which is for Altizer the Christian
eschatological fulfillment.”*^ I concur too in Rubenstein’s widening of the frame
of reference to include non-biblical religions so that they are not merely
recontextualized for their powerful arguments, such as their accounts of self or
the nihil, but are genuinely heard insofar as this is possible. With Rubenstein, I
have become increasingly interested in the historical investigation of what has
come to be called the genocidal universe, whose scope widens each day to
include the suffering in Bosnia and Zaire.
But I am interested in the Holocaust not for sociopolitical reasons alone.
For classical Christianity, the Crucifixion is followed by the Resurrection and its
reliving on Easter Sunday marks within Christianity the eternal return of these
events. But for Jews no one, no one at all, has risen. It is the texts of
history—the term “texts” here is to be widely construed—the historical record,
as it were, that is in one sense profoundly profane, but in another sense
continues to defile the hands.
NOTES
1. Thomas J. J. Altizer, History as Apocalypse (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1985), 11.
2. Ibid., 254.
3. Ibid., 230.
4. Thomas J.J. Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of
Goi/(New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 118.
5. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf trans. Ralph Mannheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1971), 562.
6. Ibid., 116.
7. Miehael Broyde, “Defilement of the Hands, Canonization of the Bible, and the
Special Status of Esther, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs,” Judaism 44, 1 (winter 1995):
66.
8. John K. Roth and Michael Berenbaum, Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical
Implications (New York: Paragon House, 1989), 367.
9. Ibid., 355.
10. The reference is to the story of the sage Hillel, who recites a version of the
golden rule as a condensation of the entire Torah.
The Holocaust and the Death of
God: A Response to Altizer,
Hamilton, and Rubenstein
Thomas A. Idinopulos
ON THE HOLOCAUST AND THEOLOGY

An event so destructive and so massive in human suffering cannot be evaded
theologically by Christians or by Jews. If God died at Auschwitz, there is equal
reason to think that the human spirit died there, too. I recall the arresting
statement of Eric Kahler, who observed that “the most frightening aspect of our
present world is not the horrors in themselves, the atrocities, the technological
exterminations, but the one fact at the very root of it all: the fading away of any
human criterion.”^
From a biblical perspective there is no greater crime than the crime against
the human criterion or human spirit, for it is a crime against God’s supreme
creation. The crime of the Nazis was a crime against the human spirit. It is this
crime against the spirit that Elie Wiesel has in mind when he says simply, “. . .
guilt was not invented at Auschwitz, it was disfigured there.”^
Saul Friedlander argues that the Nazis’ pathological anti-Semitism was a
primary factor in the Holocaust. True enough, but the Holocaust did not and
probably could not have happened without the cooperation of hundreds, even
thousands of normal, ordinary people.^ Even the Holocaust executives were
normal, depressingly normal; their brutality toward Jews shows little of the
pathology associated with the Jew-baiting hatred typified by Julius Streicher,
editor of Die Sturmer. Most of the perpetrators were like Adolf Eichmann, and
Eichmann was examined in Jerusalem by a battery of psychiatrists who certified
him as normal. “More normal, at any rate, than I am after having examined
him,” one is reported to have exclaimed."*
When it is not mad and perverted persons but normal, ordinary, and
otherwise decent ones who cause the greatest crimes, have we not reached the
stage of the spirit’s betrayal? “Evil in the Third Reich,” Hannah Arendt
observed, “had lost the quality by which we most recognize it—the quality of
temptation.”^ Is not the loss of temptation and guilt further evidence of the
spirit’s betrayal? For when the fundamental qualities lifting a human being
above the level of matter are obliterated, is not the divine-human link broken?
And when that link is broken, the human has become inhuman, reducing itself to
the level of technical functions and inert objects. Perhaps God died at
Auschwitz, but surely God’s human creation died there.
Raul Hilberg, the distinguished historian of the Holocaust, provides a vivid
example of the betrayal of the human spirit in speaking of German railroad
workers.
One does not think of the word Nazi when talking about railroads, it is a service
organization. Yet this organization, so set apart, so corporate in structure, was the very
heart of the destruction process. The Jewish people were transported from their homes to
a killing center. How did the transporters cope with their task? In the most ingenious
ways—by not varying their routine, by not restructuring their organization, by not
changing a thing. The documents which dispatched the special trains to their destinations
were not even stamped secret, because such a stamp would in itself be a recognition that
the task was not ordinary. For example, the SS, particularly the Reich Security Main
Office, had to order the trains and pay for their passengers, so much per track kilometer,
children under ten at half fare, children under four went free, one way—to Auschwitz,
Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen. The SS chafed under the cost and elaborate organization
which had to be set up to fund these transports. Jewish community funds were siphoned
off, deposited into special bank accounts and used by the SS to make the payments.
Finally, the railroad said all right, if you will send a minimum of 400 people, we will
charge you half-price fare. It was the railroads, not the camps that did the body counts to
calculate the fare! Not one railroad worker was ever tried. . . . The documents of the
German railroads are today in private hands, not in the federal archive. . . . But the issues
are greater than the fate of any single individual—if anyone in the German Railroad is
condemned, we have to begin to ask new questions about what we have so simply and
inaccurately called a monolithic totalitarian dictatorship.^
RESPONSE TO HAMILTON, ALTIZER, AND RUBENSTEIN

In considering the essays by Thomas J. J. Altizer, William Hamilton, and
Richard Rubenstein in this book, I thought back thirty years to a memorable
autumn week in 1966, when what was called the First National Conference on
Radical Theology and the Death of God convened at the University of Michigan
at Ann Arbor. Alas, this first conference turned out also to be last, I am not sure
why. I think it had something to do with the widespread perception of radical
theology as a fad that momentarily captured the attention of the media, and then
was easily dropped when the public became bored with it.
Such results are not surprising. If you capture public attention with the
arresting pronouncement that God is dead, then you had better deliver something
of philosophical or poetic or moral or theological substance to back that up.
Otherwise, the public, not to mention the university, will drop you faster than
you can say “death of God.”
An anecdote dramatizes my point. A week or so before the 1966 Ann
A Response to Altizer, Hamilton, and Rubenstein 65
Arbor conference, I turned on my home television one evening to find Thomas

Altizer on the Merv Griffin Show. After introducing him as a Christian theology
professor who was declaring God dead, Griffin sat Altizer down and asked him
when God had died and how. Altizer took a long look at Griffin and started
talking about the coincidentia oppositorum—^that God emptied himself in Jesus,
and that we could live full and free lives by giving up on the dead God in order
to embrace Jesus. Suddenly looking perplexed, Griffin interrupted Altizer and
asked him if Christians believe that Jesus is the Son of God. Now it was
Altizer’s turn to look perplexed, but after a pause, he answered yes. Griffin then
asked if Christians also believe that God is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
Another yes came from Altizer. “Well then. Professor Altizer,” beamed Griffin,
“if God is the Holy Trinity, then God cannot die because the Holy Trinity is
eternal.”
Before Altizer could reply, Griffin turned to his other guest on the show,
the famous one-liner comedian, the late Henny Youngman. “Henny,” Griffin
inquired, “what do you make of this business about God’s dying?” Without a
moment’s hesitation, Youngman shot back, “God is alive and well and living in
Israel.” The audience cracked up. Youngman saved the show. Griffin laughed
loudly and brought on a new guest.
Forgive my bluntness. In my opinion little of theological or philosophical
or poetic or moral substance was made out of the phrase “death of God” in those
early years. The reason, I think, is that the death of God was never developed as
an idea; it seemed to me that it functioned more as a rhetorical device. I saw that
device at work in William Hamilton’s early book. The New Essence of
Christianity. I saw it again in the essays that Altizer and Hamilton co-published
o
in Radical Theology and the Death of God. I also saw it in Altizer’s The Gospel
of Christian Atheism^ To some extent, the death of God as a rhetorical device
also appeared in Richard Rubenstein’s After Auschwitz.
Those who have read these books perhaps will agree that for none of the
authors did the death of God mean what Merv Griffin, Henny Youngman, and
most Americans assumed it meant: The death of the Creator, the death of the
God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the death of “Our Father in heaven,” as
prayed to in the Lord’s Prayer.
The death of God was not a theological or philosophical assertion about the
cosmos or reality. None of our authors identified himself with the robust, tough-
minded philosophical atheism represented by Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence
of Christianity, even if Hamilton had the chutzpah to trade on that title. Rather,
the radical theologians preferred Nietzsche, who also used the “death of God” as
a literary attention-getter to promote his conception of the new creative
humanity embodied in his Ubermensch. Similarly, Hamilton, Altizer, and
Rubenstein, to a degree, also used the death of God to focus the reader’s
attention on their own claims. For that reason the death of God meant different
things to them because their claims were different.
Following Bonhoeffer, Hamilton trumpeted a religionless, humanistic
Christianity for American youth, whom he thought ought to live secular lives,
free of guilt or shame or any feeling of sin and judgment. By a very selective use
of the New Testament he found in Jesus a model for this kind of secular living.
The word “relevant” was used a lot in those days by those, including Hamilton,
who thought that only a secularized Christianity was relevant and meaningful.
The ultimate judgment against Hamilton’s vision of relevant, religionless
Christianity was that within a few years theological students had turned to the
study of the history of religions and found personal spirituality far more
convincing than the death of God. So much for fads.
In those Ann Arbor days back in 1966, I found Altizer rhetorically
dazzling in stretching the “death of God” phrase to advocate a kind of non-
repressed, psycho-sexually free Christian faith, which he, too, found exemplified
in the person of Jesus. I recall that my wife was typing the critical response to
Altizer that I was to deliver at the Ann Arbor conference. In the middle of her
typing, she came to me with a mischievous smile on her face. “Tom Altizer
made a mistake,” she said. “What do you mean, mistake?” I replied. “It’s not
coincidentia oppositorum,'' she insisted. “What should it be?” I responded. “It’s
got to be coincidentia suppositorum,'' she replied. “Why?” I asked. “Because in
Altizer’s book God is always emptying himself”
Here it is important to note that in those early years neither Altizer nor
Hamiliton showed much interest in the Holocaust or genocide or anything that
was particularly tragic. In fact it is remarkable how optimistic their theologies
were then. And why not? If God or religion had died so that we could live fiilly
and more freely in Jesus, then we should celebrate the death of God and religion.
Richard Rubenstein, whose After Auschwitz was widely read in the 1960s
and beyond, did not share in such celebration. For good reason, I ordered his
book for hundreds of students for ten years in a large-enrollment course taught
at Miami University. The essays collected in After Auschwitz were well
conceived and well written. The argument that the God of Deuteronomy and the
Prophets, the providential Lord of history, was absent at Auschwitz is a
compelling proposition for anyone who knows the facts of Auschwitz and wants
to retain the integrity of religious faith, Jewish or Christian.
I, for one, could go along with Rubenstein on the death of God as a
meaningful expression when applied to the Holocaust or to any genocide or
human disaster past or present. No one of any sensitivity, whose eyes are open
to the reality of history, ought to believe that God is Providence and can control
history. Nor can one wake up from the nightmare of history to an eschatological
paradise. This earth and the history of this earth are all that we have, for better or
worse.
But after reading all of the essays in Rubenstein’s book, I began to feel that
he, not unlike Hamilton and Altizer, had also used the death of God as a
rhetorical device. I found that God was not really dead in Rubenstein’s book.
His actual phrase was, “We live in the time of the death of God,” where the
emphasis falls on the word time. For him the death of God is converted into a
cultural fact about the Nazi era and the Holocaust. And since the Nazi era, there
are new cultural facts. There is the State of Israel, and there is also a vibrant kind
of cultural Judaism that can be embraced through religious rituals such as the
Bar Mitzvah and services on Yom Kippur and other High Holidays. Thus, there
A Response to Altizer, Hamilton, and Rubenstein 67
is a movement from the negative proposition of the death of God at Auschwitz

to what appears to be the positive values of modern Israel and Jewish religious
ritual.
It is a movement in Rubenstein’s thinking that I never understood and still
do not understand. But when I think about it, I am reminded of an anecdote
concerning Raul Hilberg, whose words on the German railroad workers were
quoted earlier. I was in Hilberg’s presence one evening when a rabbi asked him
if he attended Hillel services at the University of Vermont, where Hilberg taught
at the time. Politely, Hilberg said no; he never went to Hillel services. The rabbi
asked why not. “Because I don’t believe in God,” Hilberg answered. That was
no excuse. The rabbi replied, “You don’t have to believe in God to go to Hillel
services, you know.”
Hearing that, Hilberg turned away, without a word.
NOTES
1. Eric Kahler, The Tower and the Abyss (New York: Viking Press, 1967); cited
from Lawrence L. Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1975), 74.
2. Saul Friedlander, “Some Aspects of the Historical Significance of the
Holocaust,” The Jerusalem Quarterly 1 (fall 1976): 36-59.
3. The participation of ordinary Germans in the Holocaust has been powerfully
underscored in Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary
Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).
4. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New
York: Viking, 1973), 184.
5. Ibid., 189.
6. Raul Hilberg, “The Holocaust: Three Views,” ADL Bulletin, November 1977.
7. William Hamilton, The New Essence of Christianity (New York: Association
Press, 1961).
8. Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966).
9. See Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism (Philadelphia:
Westminster Press, 1966).
10. See Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and
Contemporary Judaism (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966).
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8
The Holocaust, Genocide, and

Radical Theology: An Assessment
of the Death of God Movement
John K. Roth
How strange that the philosophy denying God came not from the
survivors. Those who came out with the so-called God is dead
theology, not one of them had been in Auschwitz. Those who had
never said it.
—Elie Wiesel, “Talking and Writing and Keeping Silent”*
As the twenty-first century approaches, the death of God movement—at least in

its most recent American form—is some thirty years old. My scholarly career,
which has focused on American philosophy and religion and on Holocaust
studies, parallels that movement, which has sometimes been called radical
theology. Concentrating on the American context out of which it grew, as well
as on the Holocaust’s impact—or lack thereof—on radical theology, this essay
opens with some personal reflections about the death of God movement. Such a
beginning is appropriate because radical theology has always involved self¬
interrogation. That self-interrogation has included tentative, changing, and
autobiographical qualities as well as passionate and firmly held convictions.
I did not become well acquainted with Richard L. Rubenstein, a leading
Jewish thinker and radical theologian, until 1976. He had influenced me,
however, well before our initial meeting and eventual collaboration on a number
of writing projects.‘ Rubenstein did so first through After Auschwitz: Radical
Theology and Contemporary Judaism^ a work first published in 1966 and
thoroughly updated and revised in 1993. Particularly in the United States, its
sustained impact has rightly been considerable in Jewish circles, but that book
has affected many gentile audiences, too.
Rubenstein’s book was among the first by any American to probe publicly
and systematically the significance of Auschwitz for post-Holocaust religious
life. Specifically, his analysis sparked debates that will continue well into the
future, because it challenged a belief that many Americans have long held dear.
After Auschwitz, Rubenstein contended, belief in a redeeming God—one who is
active in history and who will bring a fulfilling end to the vicissitudes of the
human condition—is no longer credible.
In the late 1960s, the stir caused by After Auschwitz linked Rubenstein to a
group of young American Protestant thinkers—Thomas Altizer, William
Hamilton, and Paul van Buren among them—who were dubbed “death of God
theologians.” The popular media, including Time, picked up the story, and the
movement ignited public discussion for some time. Although the spotlight
eventually moved on, the contributions of these thinkers—especially
Rubenstein’s—did not fade. Their outlooks posed questions and their
testimonies raised issues too fundamental for that. Yet neither the labeling nor
the clustering of these thinkers was entirely apt. None was atheistic in any
simple sense of the word. Nor were their perspectives, methods, and moods
identical. What they loosely shared was the feeling that talk about God did
not—indeed could not—mean what it apparently had meant in the past. In that
respect, the term “radical theology” described their work better than the more
sensationalistic phrase “death of God.” Creating breaks with the past and
intensifying discontinuities within traditions, they ventured to talk about
experiences that were widely shared even though most people lacked the words
or the encouragement to say so in public.
In 1972, when a lot of attention still focused explicitly on radical theology,
Frederick Sontag and I published a book called The American Religious
Experience. One of its themes was an exploration of how American thinkers
dealt with evil. In the drafting of this co-authored volume, I took responsibility
for a chapter on “The Death of God in American Theology.”^ So it was that I
immersed myself in the thought of Altizer, Hamilton, and van Buren, as well as
Rubenstein, during the winter of 1970-71 in particular. I found myself, as I still
do, attracted to these writers and yet critical of them, sometimes to the point of
disagreement. My mixed feelings have had much to do with the Holocaust, as I
will try to explain by saying a little more about each of these four thinkers in
turn.
To his credit, William Hamilton emphasized why secular consciousness
was increasingly unlikely to find credible the traditional God of Protestant neo¬
orthodoxy. In that context, he spoke about evil and suffering, but Hamilton also
celebrated an optimism that I found less than credible. The more I studied the
Holocaust, the more astonished I became by what he called his “worldly
optimism.” Hamilton described this outlook as one that “faces despair not with
the conviction that out of it God can bring hope, but with the conviction that the
human conditions that created it can be overcome, whether those conditions be
poverty, discrimination, or mental illness. It faces death not with the hope of
immortality, but with the human confidence that man may befriend death and
live with it as a possibility always alongside.”
In the same essay he asserted: “The sixties may well be the time for play,
celebration, delight, and for hope. . . . Pessimism—political, theological,
cultural—is coming to an end.” More than thirty years later, Hamilton’s
An Assessment of the Death of God Movement 71
contribution to this book seems much less optimistic, although one of his themes
remains too simple. I refer to his suggestion that if only we could suspend
monotheism, genocide might cease, a proposition that is insufficiently nuanced
to withstand close historical scrutiny.
In 1963, even before Rubenstein’s After Auschwitz or Altizer and
Hamilton’s Radical Theology and the Death of God had appeared, Paul van
Buren published The Secular Meaning of the Gospel, another important book.
Van Buren also emphasized the secularity of postwar consciousness, but he
concentrated less on cultural analysis than on the issues of verifiability and
falsifiability concerning religious language. While his outlook allowed for
meaningful talk about Jesus, van Buren doubted that the same could be said for
talk about God. Given the linguistic criteria that he held at the time, the problem
was that declarative propositions about God, strictly speaking, could not be
uttered meaningfully. A “secular meaning” of the Gospel, which underscored
the “contagious” freedom of Jesus, would have to be enough—at least for
Christians “in a world ‘come of age,’” as van Buren put it, and in which people
“no longer believe in a transcendent realm where their longings will be
fulfilled.”'’
Less exuberantly optimistic than the early Hamilton, van Buren disliked
his being linked with the other radical theologians; but it was not hard for most
people to see that the conclusion of his work in The Secular Meaning of the
Gospel implied a kind of death of God nonetheless. While I found that he was
right to insist that profound human longings may go unfulfilled, his “secular
meaning” of the Gospel was less than inspiring for me, and not least because the
freedom of van Buren’s essentially humanistic Jesus did not seem to be very
convincing, let alone contagious, as the Holocaust so grimly testified.
Although he joined other postwar Protestant thinkers in embracing the
work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a leader of Germany’s “Confessing Church” who
was killed for resisting Hitler, van Buren has argued—and he does so in this
volume—^that the Holocaust did not much influence his theological reflection in
the 1960s. To his credit, van Buren later revised his position substantially, and
those revisions did take the Holocaust very seriously indeed. Disenchanted by
the linguistic restrictions that governed The Secular Meaning of the Gospel, van
Buren has devoted most of his career to constructive theology' that seeks to build
bridges between Christian traditions and their essentially Jewish roots.
As for Altizer, when he burst onto the scene in the 1960s, there was
something breathtaking about his speculative boldness, through which he
developed a radical concept of incarnation. His Gospel of Christian Atheism
(1966) led to his Descent into Hell (1970), but I could identify neither with the
sense of release and the new birth of freedom that were supposed to come with
the former, nor with the outcomes—all things being made new—that the latter
promised. Altizer’s wildly speculative theology of history seemed too future-
oriented and too little grounded in the particularity of actual history. At the same
time, his theories struck me as too neatly dialectical, eschatological, and
apocalyptic, especially when the Holocaust was brought to bear upon them.
History, I suspected then and still do now, is more mixed and mixed up than
Altizer’s philosophy has admitted—then or now. In addition, I found that

memory counted for too little in Altizer’s thought. Putting the past behind us in
an orientation toward a culture in which all polarity and division disappear
seemed less appealing and convincing than Altizer interpreted all of this process
to be. These reactions, too, were intensified by my increasing immersion in
study of the Holocaust’s particularities, a study which was occupying more and
more of my time as the 1970s began.
It is worth noting at this point that Altizer’s contribution to this book
makes the claim that American death of God theology was “the first Christian
theology which was not only a response to the Holocaust but which grounded
itself in the ultimacy of a Holocaust which has ended every trace of a just or
beneficent providence.” I doubt that the Christian death of God theologies
grounded themselves in the Holocaust to the degree that Altizer claims. His
more credible statement in the same essay, I believe, is that “there are few
references to the Holocaust in the Christian death of God theological writing in
the 1960s,” a point that Altizer contextualizes by noting in addition that this
same writing contains “few references ... to any historical events.”
The Holocaust, as Altizer says in this book, may have been “a generating
cause of the death of God theologies,” as he claims it was for him, but there is
little evidence in the early texts of the principal Protestant participants in the
movement to confirm that judgment. Most of what they wrote at the time of the
movement’s first flourishing could have been written, and probably was written,
without explicit attention to the Holocaust in general or its details in particular.
By contrast with his Protestant brothers, Richard Rubenstein placed the
Holocaust at the very center of his contributions to radical theology in the 1960s.
More than that, as far as the death of God movement is concerned, his work is
what enlivened real soul-searching about that historic catastrophe. As a
Christian, I was influenced by the Protestant death of God theologians, but they
did not change my life. Rubenstein did. Two ways in which he did so are
crucial. Reference to them will lead to my overall comments about how to assess
radical theology thirty years later in relation to the Holocaust and genocide.
First, Rubenstein challenged me—and still does—with his analysis and
rejection of the God of history. Sometimes I think his analysis and rejection are
entirely correct. Sometimes I find myself saying and doing things—praying, for
instance—that make me realize something else, namely, that my mind is less
convinced than his. My reasons for saying so include the second point that I
want to make about Rubenstein’s influence on me. As far as I am personally
concerned, Rubenstein’s most important contribution has been to draw me and
others ever deeper into study of the Holocaust and genocide. One of the things
that such study reveals is a considerable variety of religious and theological
responses to these atrocities. Rather than giving me some single and definitely
convincing outcome, those varied responses leave me with questions about God
and humankind alike. Those questions—What, for example, should be said
about God or about human responsibility in a world so badly scarred by the
Holocaust and other genocides?—beckon me to explore and wonder about them
further.
As I explore and wonder about such questions, my overall appraisal of the

death of God movement’s links to consciousness of the Holocaust takes shape
along two basic lines of thought. First, the death of God movement helps to
show that gods die when the visions they support disintegrate. In the 1960s, the
four diverse thinkers usually associated with radical theology—Altizer,
Hamilton, van Buren, and Rubenstein—developed overlapping ways of
thinking, sometimes independently and sometimes in relation to one another,
that drove home that awareness. In doing so, they made a key contribution. At
the end of the day, however, that contribution consisted primarily of
observations about human consciousness, modes of interpretation, and specific
views about God and the nature of reality. All of these remain subject to revision
and reinterpretation. Hence, the death of God theologies settled very little but
opened up a multitude of good questions.
Nevertheless, I also conclude that this contribution—^with the very notable
exception of Rubenstein’s part in it—had relatively little to do explicitly with
the Holocaust or genocide. Quite apart from the Holocaust, what appeared in the
writings of Altizer, Hamilton, and van Buren at that time would probably have
emerged in the United States in some form or other anyway. By themselves,
moreover, most of the contributions of these writers—again, Rubenstein looms
as a large exception—would not have constituted a driving force for attention to
the Holocaust or genocide. The Protestant death of God theologians were too
little focused on the particularities of history for that outcome to take place.
In Christian circles, at least in postwar America, attention to the Holocaust
grew much more directly out of concern about Jewish-Christian relations—one
thinks of the pioneering work done by Franklin H. Littell and A. Roy
Eckardt—and that concern had relatively little to do with the death of God
movement as such. True, Littell emphasized Christianity’s credibility crisis after
Auschwitz and Eckardt urged fundamental revision of traditional Christian
teachings about Jesus and God alike, but neither of these thinkers is usually
associated with the death of God movement or radical theology. Rubenstein’s
impact on them can be detected, but they did not owe their Holocaust orientation
to him. In short, at the time when the death of God theologians were in the
spotlight during the 1960s, the theologians on the Protestant side of radical
theology—despite their leanings toward Hegel, Nietzsche, and even
Bonhoeffer—were too American, too removed from actual Holocaust history,
and too Christological to make solid, explicit responses to the Holocaust or to be
powerful catalysts for sustained encounters with the Holocaust’s devastating
details.
Second, the four radical theologians—each and all—accomplished one
other thing beyond question: Their questions, protests, criticisms, and
alternative visions helped to ensure that religious expressions, especially in the
United States, would be increasingly pluralistic. That result may have been an
unintended consequence of their work, but perhaps it was not. In either case, far
from curtailing talk about God and religion, far from settling issues about God’s
relationship to history, far from reducing the variety of religious practices, the
radical theologians were themselves both symptoms and products—even
heralds—of an increasing diversity of religious life in the United States, a

phenomenon that will continue its growth in the twenty-first century.
Echoing themes sounded by the death of God theologians more than thirty
years ago, the dominance of hedonist individualism in the United States suggests
that religion—despite Americans’ much-professed belief in God and widespread
participation in religious observances—has lost much of its influence on cultural
and economic life. Nevertheless, the persistence and diversification of religious
expression, at least in the United States, suggest that the radical theologians
were less than completely correct about secularization or the place of God in
human experience. As even the Holocaust helps to show, history defies
reductionist interpretations of all kinds. It remains a mixture of the secular and
the religious, of good and evil, and of the sacred and the profane as well. History
continues to be full of experience where, in one way or another and for good or
ill, God is present as well as absent or “dead.”
Gods die when the visions they support disintegrate. They do not die,
however, at the same time or in the same way for everyone. Even if the death of
God does take place, in one way or another, that passing does not mean so much
that a religious ending has been reached but that beginnings have been made
possible for new and different encounters with the source and ground of our
being within history itself
This essay began with Elie Wiesel’s pointed comment that the death of
God theologies did not come from those who had been in Auschwitz. For
various reasons—some of them better than others—at least some of the death of
God theologians are not very fond of Wiesel’s writing. How could they be, for
in spite of—even because of—his many questions about and quarrels with God,
Wiesel resisted the assertions and inclinations of the death of God movement. I
suspect that he did so for reasons related to Emil Fackenheim’s famous dictum
that Hitler must have no posthumous victories.
The logic of the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany and its
collaborators was hell-bent on the destruction of Jewish life and Judaism root
and branch. Its implications extended to the destruction of anything worthy of
the name “Christian” as well. Nazi success meant, even depended upon,
destruction of belief in a redemptive God of history. Hitler and his followers
came close to success on all of those counts.
Looking back, the death of God theologies were not as sensational as the
publicity they generated at the time made them out to be. Instead, they were to
be expected as signs of the times. Still looking back, this time with the
devastating detail of the Holocaust more clearly and directly in mind, I find
myself contemplating these not-really-so-radical theologies with one of Elie
Wiesel’s standards in mind. “The Holocaust,” he has said, “demands
interrogation and calls everything into question. Traditional ideas and acquired
values, philosophical systems and social theories—all must be revised in the
shadow of Birkenau.”^ Having done their part in support of that principle, the
death of God theologies, which are now in their own way traditional ideas,
remain subject to it as well. If they still help us to discern power—divine and
human—that can help to mend the world, then their contributions’ influence will
deserve to last.
NOTES
*See Elie Wiesel, “Talking and Writing and Keeping Silent,” in The German
Church Struggle and the Holocaust, ed. Franklin H. Littell and Hubert G. Locke (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 1974), 271. This essay is reprinted in Holocaust: Religious
and Theological Implications, ed. John K. Roth and Michael Berenbaum (New York:
Paragon House, 1989), 362-69. Wiesel’s comment was part of his response to Richard L.
Rubenstein at the first International Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the
Churches, which was held at Wayne State University in 1970. Rubenstein’s contribution
to that conference, which is also reprinted in Holocaust (349-61), was called “Some
Perspectives on Religious Faith after Auschwitz.” In this essay, Rubenstein argued, “If
the God of the Covenant exists, at Auschwitz my people stood under the most fearsome
curse that God has inflicted. ... I have elected to accept what Camus has rightly called
the courage of the absurd, the courage to live in a meaningless, purposeless Cosmos
rather than believe in a God who inflicts Auschwitz on his people.” Rubenstein’s most
recent views modify the idea that we live in “a meaningless, purposeless Cosmos,” but
his rejection of the God of history remains.
1. See, for example, Richard L. Rubenstein and John K. Roth, Approaches to
Auschwitz: The Holocaust and Its Legacy (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press,
1987), which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first book about the Holocaust co¬
authored by a Jew and a Christian.
2. See Frederick Sontag and John K. Roth, The American Religious Experience:
The Roots, Trends, and Future of American Theology (New York: Harper & Row, 1972),
201-35.
3. William Hamilton, “The New Optimism—from Prufrock to Ringo,” in Radical
Theology and the Death of God, ed. Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 169, 164.
4. Paul M. van Buren, The Secular Meaning of the Gospel: Based on an Analysis of
Its Language (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 1-2.
5. Elie Wiesel, foreword to Shadows of Auschwitz: Christian Responses to the
Holocaust by Harry James Cargas (New York: Crossroad, 1990), ix.
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Part Three
The Death of God and the Holocaust—

Analyzing the Encounter
ik
'I,
9
The Death of God Movement

and Twentieth-Century
Protestant Theology
John J. Carey
The scheduling of a symposium on “Radical Theology and the Holocaust” at the

1996 meeting of the American Academy of Religion in New Orleans was
felicitous in many ways. It brought back onto center stage several of the key
participants in the “radical theology” movement of 1963-67 and enabled many
of us to get reacquainted with the subsequent thoughts of those key participants.
Secondly, it reminded a younger generation that has come to theological
awareness since 1967 that there was an important and engaging movement in
twentieth-century Protestant theology that was known as the death of God
movement, or as radical theology. It is sobering for those of us who lived
through that time period and were much influenced by it to realize that today we
are teaching students who either know nothing about it or who regard the texts
of that movement as “ancient history.” Finally, it gives us a chance to revisit and
reappraise the significance of that movement, which in the flow of twentieth-
century Protestant theology was eventually outflanked on the left by the
emergence of black theology, feminist theology, and third world theologies.
Anyone interested in the history of Protestant thought in the twentieth- century
has a legitimate interest in revisiting that movement; we can now see more
clearly its cultural climate, and have a better perspective for assessing its
significance and legacy.
I have been asked in this essay to reflect on the death of God movement
and its place within twentieth-century Protestant theology. I undertake this task
with three caveats. First, I am assuming that it is not necessary (or even
possible) in a brief essay like this to reconstruct the many nuances of the various
theological issues advocated by the principal persons in this movement. Here I
will try to set the radical theology in its historical context and comment on what
legacy that movement has given us. The title of this chapter, which relates this
80 Analyzing the Encounter
movement to Protestant theology, is appropriate since radical theology made

virtually no impact upon Catholic theology.’
Second, in this article, I use the terms “radical theology” and “death of
God” theology as synonymous. I recognize that in the 1960s there were other
thinkers who were deemed radical (one thinks of J. A. T. Robinson, Harvey
Cox, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and even Paul Tillich), but leaders in this movement
eventually came to feel that the designation “radical theology” was less
pejorative than death of God theology, and regarded themselves as the “real”
radicals.
Third, although the names Gabriel Vahanian, Paul van Buren, and Richard
Rubenstein were associated with the early days and mood of this movement, I
am focusing in this essay primarily on the work of Thomas Altizer and William
Hamilton. I will comment briefly on the others, but it was Altizer and Hamilton
who were the major spokesmen for the movement. Vahanian eventually went
back to France, van Buren developed new interests while teaching on the
interfaith faculty at Temple, and Rubenstein (a colleague of mine for sixteen
years at Florida State University) began to work more in philosophy and the
social sciences.
THE CONTEXT OF RADICAL THEOLOGY

As virtually all students of twentieth-century Protestant theology realize,
there is an interesting and interconnected story to be told about Protestant
theology in the twentieth century. It is a story that describes the thought and
influence of numerous pivotal people; a story that deals with diverse cultures; a
story of wars, disillusionment, and destruction; a story of the search for meaning
amid spreading influences of technology, secularity, and popular culture. Some
of the main theological figures in this narrative up to 1965 are Adolf von
Harnack, Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Reinhold Niebuhr, H. Richard Niebuhr,
Henry Nelson Wieman, Rudolph Bultmann, William Temple, and Paul Tillich.
We need to recognize James Cone, John Cobb, Rosemary Radford Ruether,
Robert McAfee Brown, Gustavo Gutierrez, John Dominic Crossan, Elisabeth
Schussler-Fiorenza, Langdon Gilkey, George Lindbeck, and David Tracy as
members of a later generation, but of equal significance for religion between
1965 and 1995. In and through the historical epochs of the twentieth century,
these thinkers debated the interpretation and authority of the Bible; the
relationship of religion to modern culture, the significance of science and the
search for a metaphysic beyond theism, the expanding influence of secularism,
and the decline of mainline churches. The radical theologies joined the broad
debate on all of these topics. After 1965, new items on the agenda have included
ideology criticism, ecological issues, the influence of postmodernism, the
meaning and role of Jesus, gender and sexuality issues, and the plight of the
poor in the third and fourth worlds. These latter questions were so profound that,
as early as 1963, some interpreters were acknowledging “the shattering of the
theological spectrum.”
Twentieth-Century Protestant Theology 81
Throughout the twentieth century, many of these leading figures developed

“schools” of thought, so that we became accustomed to Barthians,
Buitmannians, Tillichians, Boston Personalists, process theologians, and
Niebuhrians. Although these schools disagreed as to the starting place for
Protestant theology, their founders have been influential for several generations
and their cumulative works form a sort of canon for the serious interpreter of
twentieth-century Protestantism. All of these major thinkers sought to interpret
Christianity so that it could be regarded as a viable faith option in the twentieth
century. This broad tapestry of theologians and issues is one component of the
context of the radical theology of the 1960s. We must eventually ask. Where did
the radical theologians participate in this broader theological agenda, and where
did they break new ground?
A second contextual component of radical theology was the debate in
America and Europe in the early 1960s about the legitimacy and necessity of
“God” language in Christianity. Bonhoeffer’s famous Letters and Papers from
Prison (1953) contained enigmatic references to the need to totally rethink the
foundations of Christianity and to develop something of a “religionless”
Christianity. Paul Tillich in his well-known volume The Courage to Be (the
Terry Lectures at Yale in 1952), called for an expanded concept of God which
would be beyond theism (Tillich actually referred to “the God above God”).
Anglican bishop John A. T. Robinson popularized and expanded on some of the
implications of Tillich and Bonhoeffer in his best-selling Honest to God (1963),
and his subsequent volume. Exploration into God (1967). Robinson asked, “If
God is not up there or out there, how can we speak about God today?” The
Jewish theologian Martin Buber published the Eclipse of God (1957), a work
that had much influence on Protestant theology. It testified to the absence of
God in contemporary culture. In 1965, Harvey Cox published his popular The
Secular City, which stunned the theological world by affirming the liberating
power of secularity and the responsibility of humans for their own plight and
problems. All of this is to remind us that the years 1950-65 were years when
God-talk became increasingly problematic, and many people wondered whether
it was possible to talk about God at all. This discussion was intense in Europe as
well as in North America. On this problem the radical theologians did break new
ground.
Other theological currents fit into this unrest as well. The critiques of
British linguistic philosophy about the very meaning of the word “God” and the
difficulty of verifying any type of religious assertion added to theological
uncertainty. The residual influence of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche still seemed
to foster much skepticism in the broader intellectual climate about traditional
Protestant faith statements, and this formed the basis for much academic and
philosophical anti-ecclesiasticism. Peter Berger’s well-known book. The Noise
of Solemn Assemblies (1961), raised a serious question about the authenticity of
the faith preserved in mainline churches. It seemed that the very foundations of
Christianity were being attacked from various sides, and the mainline churches
themselves (having benefited from the booming expansion of religion in
America in the 1950s) began to hunker down and defend their turf. It is in this
context that we need to look in more detail at radical theology from 1963
through 1967, when it tried to offer constructive alternatives for the disillusioned
and confused community of faith.^ The issue, I suppose, is to what extent they
succeeded and/or to what extent they made matters worse.
PERSONALITIES AND PERSPECTIVES

As the editors of this volume have pointed out in their introduction, the so-
called death of God movement was not a consistent or coordinated theological
movement at all. It was rather the work of several theologians working on
related problems and with different methodologies at the same time. Their
various ideas overlapped enough that an editorial religion writer from Time
linked these thinkers as “Death of God” thinkers in the famous Time cover story
of April 8, 1966. Thomas Altizer’s articles and essays began to appear in 1963,
and Hamilton’s writings began to appear in 1964 and 1965. Richard Rubenstein,
at that time Hillel chaplain at the University of Pittsburgh, was an early critic
and commentator but did not really enter the national scene until the appearance
of his book After Auschwitz in 1966. Paul van Buren, at that time at the
Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, entered the discussion
with his book The Secular Meaning of the Gospel in 1963. Van Buren was much
influenced by the British linguistic tradition, and his concerns about the
intelligibility of traditional God language represented a different type of critique
than those associated with Altizer, Hamilton, and Rubenstein.
What did these diverse scholars have in common? Langdon Gilkey in the
midst of the debate noted that one could discern five themes in the work of these
different writers: (1) the problematic character of God and of humanity’s
relationship to him; (2) the acceptance of the secular world as normative,
intellectually and ethically good; (3) the restriction of theological statements to
what one can actually form oneself and with that the rejection of certain
traditional ideas of tradition and authority; (4) the centrality of Jesus of Nazareth
as one who calls us into the world to serve him there; (5) uneasiness with
mythological, superhistorical, eschatological, or supernatural entities or
categories."^
Even if we allow that these five motifs were shared in some degree or other
by the prominent practitioners of the death of God theology, we also need to
note that other thinkers had shared many of those assumptions. (Hamilton, in
citing some of the forerunners of the death of God movement, lists Ludwig
Feuerbach, the early Schleiermacher, Karl Marx, William Blake, Heinrich
Heine, Fyodor Dostoevski, Leo Tolstoy, and Matthew Arnold.)^ Careful reading
of the texts produced by the major interpreters of radical theology reveals that
they did not mean the same thing when they used the expression “God is dead,”
and that they drew different consequences from such a statement.^ Rubenstein
was way ahead of his Jewish contemporaries at that time, since he was among
the first to explore the theological consequences of the Holocaust. His voice is
inevitably a sad and disillusioned one and was shaped profoundly by the
Holocaust. His pessimism alienated him from the Jewish community and was
always a counterpoint to Altizer’s enthusiasm for the death of God. Paul van
Buren did not continue as a contributor to this movement, although he did
continue to publish linguistic and analytical essays and has written extensively
on Judaism. All of this is to recognize that the radial theologians were not just
new on the scene, but were in fact in dialogue with other thinkers and issues of
the times.
Another observation about this movement was that it was created and
sustained by persons who purported to be Christians. Several people pointed out
at an early stage in the debate that figures outside the Christian church had
argued for many years that the concept of God was an illusion or a deception.
What seemed strange in the first phases of the death of God theology was that
people who were related to the church as theologians were championing this
cause and seemed to be in conflict with the traditions which had birthed them or
supported them. (Hamilton was a professor of Systematic Theology at Colgate-
Rochester Theological Seminary and van Buren was at the Episcopal Divinity
School in Cambridge). This might help us understand the anti-ecclesiastical
stress among the radical theologians; it is as though they wanted to preserve
some way of being religious in the world without accepting the traditional
stories of the established churches. Both Altizer and Hamilton seemed to feel
that most American churches had been molded by a folk religion which on the
whole ignored the intellectual stirrings of the latter part of the twentieth century.
Hence, there was a need for stripping down or letting go of the past as a
prerequisite before something new and vital could be bom.
We might also note that the radical theologians were not much influenced
by the major theological voices of the first half of the twentieth century: Karl
Barth, Emil Brunner, Reinhold Niebuhr, H. Richard Niebuhr, and Rudolph
Bultmann. Although they did cite the work of Tillich and Bonhoeffer, they
interpreted those theologies in a way that the majority of scholars at that time
would not support. Instead we heard more and more about Herman Melville,
Friedrich Nietzsche, William Blake, and Simone Weil. When I first read the
writings of the principal contributors to the death of God movement and heard
the leading proponents speak, it seemed that they had read entirely different
sources and were starting from different theological assumptions than I was. The
issue of authority was implicit here: To whom should we turn for guidance?
Dramatists, novelists, philosophers, and social scientists came to center stage.
There was a virtual total rejection of Anselm’s famous dictim, “I believe in
order to understand.” The “eyes of faith” were therefore rejected and replaced by
the question, “What can an intelligent person believe today?”
Although the editors of this volume have invited the major death of God
thinkers to respond to the Holocaust, it seems to me that only Richard
Rubenstein at that time brought a grasp of the Holocaust into the discussion.
There were too many other issues facing the radical theologians for them to get
seriously involved in the Holocaust. In fairness we must say that from 1963
through 1967 the Holocaust was not the major theological issue that it is today.
It did, of course, represent evil, but it was seen as more of a Jewish than a
Christian problem. In the fall of 1965, Emory University sponsored a
symposium on “The Death of God Theology” and held the proceedings at the
Glenn Memorial Methodist Church on the Emory campus. Altizer gave a major
address to an overflow audience; I still remember that he was wearing red socks
and a red tie, and obviously enjoying the role of radical prophet. Not many
people present understood the mystical and rather opaque presentation of
Altizer. It was clear, however, that in his view, our traditional assumptions about
God in Western theology and culture had to go. Richard Rubenstein was asked
to be a respondent to Altizer, and his presentation at that time catapulted him
into national prominence. He ended his remarks by saying, “As a Jew, I can
understand why people speak of the death of God. What I do not understand is
why there should be dancing at the funeral.” The power of that remark stunned
the overflow audience, and the crowd sat in complete silence for about a
minute.
It should be noted, however, that although all of the participants in this
movement enjoyed the publicity it garnered, the Christian representatives were
trying to articulate a new and viable form of Christian faith. For Altizer, if we
had the courage to let go of the old narratives of metaphysics and the concepts
of God which entered into the biblical heritage from the Hellenistic world, we
would eventually discover the presence and power of the true biblical God.
There was for him a new life of faith and courage awaiting the person who
would break out of the old categories. It is not accidental that Altizer’s thought
was so focused on eschatology and apocalypticism.
Hamilton, both in his 1966 book. The New Essence of Christianity, and in
his various articles, argued that we have enough biblical evidence in the parables
and sayings of Jesus to understand that even without the concept of God, Jesus
calls us into the world to serve. He argued that Jesus may be revealed in the
world, in the neighbor, in the struggle for justice, and in the struggle for beauty,
clarity, and order. “Jesus is in the world as masked, and the work of the
Christian is to strip off the masks of the world to find him and finding him, to
o
stay with him and to do his work.” It is in this sense, Hamilton argued, that in
the Christian life, ethics and love are public, outward, and visible. Christianity
for Hamilton became essentially an ethic, but remained a source of vision and
power for life. Someone once summarized Hamilton’s theology as “God is dead,
but Jesus lives!”
Looked at from the standpoint of European Protestant theology in the
twentieth century, we have to acknowledge that the death of God movement was
primarily an American phenomenon. There were thinkers of similar concerns on
the other side of the Atlantic (one thinks especially of John A. T. Robinson and
Roland Gregor Smith), but on the whole this movement had its roots in and
sought to respond to crises of belief in the American context. It is worth noting
that these theological voices were raised at a time when America was struggling
in the civil rights movement, and Martin Luther King was at the peak of his
influence. It was a time when the nation was drifting deeper and deeper into
involvement in Vietnam, when students were more and more critical of
American foreign policy and had less faith that our traditional institutions could
solve society’s problems. The days of radical theology were troubled days for
American society, and it is not surprising that the radicalism of social and
political thought was also expressed in the theological world.
THE DEMISE OF THE MOVEMENT

Before we go on to assess the significance of this movement, perhaps a few
words are in order as to why it died out. It burned brightly from 1964 to 1967,
but what caused it to recede so rapidly? The first thing to note is that it was
“outflanked” on the radical side of its message by the emergence of various
liberation theologies. James Cone’s well-known book Black Theology and Black
Power appeared in 1969; Gustavo Gutierrez’s Spanish edition of Theology of
Liberation appeared in 1971; Mary Daly’s Beyond God the Father appeared in
1973. All of these opened up new theological vistas and reminded scholars of
how much our Western theologies overlooked. After the emergence of liberation
theologies, radical theology was associated with the interests of white academic
males. These interpreters no longer found themselves on the cutting edge of
theology, even though they continued to publish and interpret their concerns.
Altizer published The Gospel of Christian Atheism in 1966, The Descent into
Hell in 1970 and The New Apocalypse: The Radical Vision of William Blake in
1967. Altizer’s creative work was acknowledged in a volume edited by John B.
Cobb, Jr., The Theology of Altizer: Critique and Response, published in 1970.
(Cobb opined that Altizer might well have been the most creative theologian in
America during the 1960s.)
Secondly, although every theologian in this movement had a nuanced
viewpoint and potentially a positive perspective, the popular concept of the
death of God was simply more than the Christian religious establishment could
bear. Thousands and thousands of ministers, hundreds of boards and agencies,
and many related institutions were tied into the God hypothesis for their life and
distinctiveness. Most church communities went on with business as usual, even
when intellectuals were probing the meaning of these new assertions. There was
a lot of puzzlement as to why these theologians sensed that their work was a
new interpretation of Christianity; many critics, such as Langdon Gilkey and
Dan Callahan, denied that there could be a Christian faith without God and
claimed that in fact the radical theologians were proposing a new religion.
Political pressure from denominations eventually pushed the principal
contributors to different institutions. Altizer became a professor of English at the
State University of New York at Stony Brook, Hamilton became a dean at
Portland State University, and Rubenstein went to Florida State University in
1970. It is interesting that Rubenstein, in response to the critiques of various
liberation theologies, became more and more politically conservative as his
career moved on. He eventually became an advisor and spokesperson for the
Unification Church.
There was certainly willingness in Protestant circles to acknowledge the
eclipse of God, the distance of God, the absence of God from our time and
culture. With that kind of language, the theological task becomes one of
discernment and sensing the signs of the times. To talk about the death of God,
however, was simply beyond what most Protestant communities could fathom.
Various graffiti began to appear as the movement went on; one that I recall is
“God is dead, (signed) Nietzsche. Nietzsche is dead, (signed) God.” Another
was “God is dead.—Thomas Altizer.” And a response was “Sorry about your
God, mine is alive and well.” The movement evoked mockery as well as
scholarly assessment; it triggered anger as well as curiosity.
A third memory that I have is that the movement seemed to be weakened
with the coming of the spring of 1967. These theological ideas seemed most
intense through the winter months, when life was bleak, cold, and depressing.
When spring came with warmth and flowers and renewal of nature, it seemed to
somehow negate the claims of the various death of God theologians. It was a
sign of renewal and hope, and conveyed to thousands that there was indeed a
transforming power that spoke through nature. The claim that “God is Dead” did
not seem so relevant anymore.
THE LEGACY OF THE MOVEMENT
We turn now to the legacy of this movement. What, if anything distinctive,

did it contribute to twentieth-century Protestant theology? Did it move
Protestant theology forward in any significant way, or should it be regarded as
an interesting but inconsequential flash upon the scene? Lonnie Kliever, in his
perceptive survey of contemporary theology entitled The Shattered Spectrum,
suggested that van Buren contributed to a positive sense of the secular; that
Altizer (along with John Cobb and Teilhard de Chardin) made important
contributions to process theology and theological method; and that Gabriel
Vahanian helped to clarify the “Theology of Hope,” which is generally
associated with Jurgen Moltmann.^ Kliever’s assessment helps to link the
radicals with the broader theological world. John Macquarrie, in his
comprehensive Twentieth-Century Religious Thought, regards the death of God
movement as but one of several “fads” which characterized in the 1960s.*^ He
says that the entire decade could be called the “decade of the dilettantes,” and he
evaluates the death of God thinkers as being on a par with the movements for
secular Christianity, Dionysian religion, and Black theology.’’ Macquarrie feels
that the death of God movement, particularly as represented by Altizer and
Hamilton, was a “passionate protest atheism” and as such made no significant
long-term contribution to Christian theology.
Martin Marty, writing about the American religious scene in 1969,
concluded that the whole movement was misfocused, especially Altizer’s theme
that Christians should rejoice at the demise of the Divine.’^ Marty observed:
“Theology? The prophecy of the ‘death of God,’ which had derived from anti-
ecclesiastical spokesmen in nineteenth century Europe, now derived almost
exclusively from theologians in the employ of the Church. Theologians who
began the 1960s by urging people to move out into the secular world,
furthermore, ended the decade by Joining some elements of the ‘tuned in, turned
on’ culture in the midst of anarchic and tragic realities. The life of a theological
movement was seemingly reduced from a millennium to a half year.” Marty
clearly did not expect that this movement would leave any legacy to future
decades. A span of thirty years has given us a better perspective, however. I
believe there are some important legacies from this movement, and I would like
to reflect on three contributions I believe it has made to the continuing work of
Protestant theology.
First, Thomas Altizer, who was probably the most creative (if opaque)
theologian of the group, introduced into our consciousness the methodology of
world religion study. Altizer, who trained at Chicago under Mircea Eliade, was
keenly interested in Buddhism and the role of myth, symbol, and ritual in
different religious traditions. His 1961 book, Oriental Mysticism and Biblical
Eschatology, probed the similarities of mysticism, ethics, and eschatology in
Buddhism and in Christianity. It has been said that Eliade had a wide following
among scholars of world religions, but that he was seldom read or discussed in
theological seminaries. (In four years at the Yale Divinity School in the 1950s I
never heard Eliade’s name!) Altizer’s interest in developing his “coincidence of
opposites” derived from his studies of Buddhism. It is true, as John B. Cobb, Jr.,
points out in his introduction to The Theology of Altizer, that there is
development in Altizer’s thought into at least three distinct periods: (I) the early
mythico-mystical orientalism of his book Oriental Mythicism and his early
articles (some of which are reprinted in the volume Radical Theology and the
Death of God); (2) his move to a historico-existentialist orientalism in Mircea
Eliade and the Dialectic of the Sacred’, and (3) his emerging interest in cosmic
metaphysics, as reflected in The Gospel of Christian Atheism (1966), The New
Apocalypse (1967), and The Descent into Hell (1970).^"^
Cobb reminds us that whoever assesses Altizer’s work needs to see it as a
whole—an observation, of course, that applies to any major theologian. Broadly
speaking, however, we can say that Altizer felt that the Christianity of our time
was soporific and no longer captured the awe and wonder of the biblical God.
Much of modern theology, he subsequently argued, is similar to Gnosticism.
Against this trend Altizer advocated a radical faith which acknowledges the
death of the Hellenistic deity and pursues a search for the true biblical
eschatological divinity.
Altizer was one of the first Christian theologians to incorporate into
American theology the methodology of the study of world religions and
comparative cultures. In a world which more and more talks about global
interests and realities, responsible Christianity can no longer afford to be
parochial. Theologians today do need a knowledge of other world religions, and
we need to know when we are saying the same things in different languages and
symbols. I recognize that this does not exhaust the whole of Altizer’s work, but
it underscores the importance of broad vision and comparative culture study as
we pursue theological work in the 1990s.
Second, Hamilton has left us a different legacy. Whereas Altizer sought to
recover the sacred, Hamilton simply acknowledged that there is no such thing as
the sacred anymore. His theological work attempted to show how people could
live thoughtful, caring, and responsible lives without relying upon the God
hypothesis. Traditional Christian conceptions of God as creator, redeemer, and
sustainer were, for Hamilton, irrevocably gone. Doctrines of providence,

judgment, and grace are unhelpful and unnecessary. Modem theologians, argued
Hamilton, live in the modern secular world just like anyone else, but they are
sad as they watch the verities of youth give way to the complexities and
ambiguities of maturity. I still think that Hamilton’s essay “Thursday’s Child,”
published originally in Theology Today, January 1964, and republished in
Radical Theology and the Death of God (1966), is one of the most poignant and
honest essays I have ever read by a theologian. In describing the life routines of
the modem secularized theologian, Hamilton wrote:
Does our theologian write books on systematic theology?. . . . The answer is a clear “no.”
First he gets his doctoral dissertation published. If it is any good, he can get quite a few
years of professional mileage from it, defending it, clarifying, writing articles on relevant
new material. From then on he speaks and writes as he is asked. Editors, ecclesiastics,
institutions and other scholars assign him subjects they think he would be interested in. In
this way, he can get a reputation for being skilled and interested in a field in which he has
no interest whatever. As the years pass by, the gulf between what he wants to do and
what he does grows wider.
Our modem theologian, says Hamilton, reads less and less, is alienated from the
Bible just as he is alienated from God and the church. The theologian today and
tomorrow is “a man without faith, without hope, and only the present, with only
love to guide him.”^^
Hamilton’s candor in addressing the dilemmas of living the faith in a
secularized age is still appropriate for our time. I would argue that Hamilton’s
legacy is in his honesty, a quality which cannot be measured in footnote
citations or in scholarly conferences. Few of us today would have the courage to
write an essay like “Thursday’s Child,” but most of us know what Hamilton was
talking about. He is the quintessential symbol of one who has left the traditional
faith behind and is trying to forge some meaning in a cruel and tragic world. In
many ways, he embodied a “new humanism” that is still important for segments
of liberal Christianity.
Furthermore, I think Hamilton continues to remind us that there are other
sources besides the Bible, tomes of systematic theology, and scholarly journals
to give us guidance in our human pilgrimage. The Christian theological world
too often closes in upon itself. Hamilton’s interest in literary figures—W. B.
Yeats, T. S. Elliot, Herman Melvile, Albert Camus, and Ignazio Silone—helped
him to glimpse what a new and authentic religious life might look like. He
believed we can benefit by reading outside the canon, which is parochial and
often irrelevant. In The New Essence of Christianity (1966) he emphasized the
values of tolerance, reserve, goodness, and resignation as guidelines for the
Christian life. All of these terms deserve an unpacking beyond what we can do
in this essay. All of them, however, are expressions of an honesty that sought to
“tell it like it is” without obfuscation or double talk. I suspect that in the 1990s
more people would identify with Hamilton than Altizer.
A third legacy of the radical theologies (although not unique to them) is
their anti-ecclesiasticism. None of them had much hope that the established
churches could be redeemed. All felt that Peter Berger’s devastating critique in
his Noise of Solemn Assemblies (1961) essentially laid bare the superficiality of
the churches. Hamilton argued persuasively on numerous occasions that in all
likelihood the communities of colleges and universities might become the core
of a new remnant, where vision and honesty might transform society. (The idea
seemed suggestive to me at the time, but after watching different academic
conflicts for thirty years, it now seems quixotic!)
Much of the radical theology’s quarrel with the churches stemmed from
the gap between academic life and church life. They saw, on the whole, the
established churches as resisting the new academic climate. They recognized
that the churches had a monopoly on publishing and interpreting the Christian
tradition. That same concern has been expressed in recent years by Robert Funk
and his colleagues in the Jesus Seminar. That creative group has established
their own press in an attempt to make their findings available to the general
public. So the spirit of skepticism and suspicion still remain in the 1990s. We
might put it this way: no young person who was influenced by the radical
theology would plan to be a minister. Denominations are conservative,
parochial, and bureaucratic. The strong implication was that whoever seeks to
live a religious life will live it individually, with courage and steadfastness, and
hopefully with some caring friends.
It is fair to say that the leading interpreters of the death of God theologies
did not perceive the issues of epistemology, language, and symbol as feminist
theology came to probe those themes. The movement did not grasp what
Gustavo Gutierrez and Frederick Herzog came to describe as “theology from the
underside of history,” nor how both the narratives and issues change if one starts
with the world of the dispossessed. It certainly did not take into account the
cluster of issues raised by James Cone and other black theologians. It was not a
movement for social change. These failures, by the way, were not unique to the
radical theologians; no one in the period seemed to discern these issues. The
radical theology did, however, move the American theological discussion in
very significant ways, and it left those of us who followed the movement
changed by the experience. It will be remembered as the last major reform
movement in Protestant theology that was articulated by white academic males.
It did not really have a constituency beyond Protestant academic circles, and it
did not give birth to a continuing school of thought. In the present climate of
postmodernism, Jesus study, and deconstruction, however, one can still find
affinities with the interests of radical theologians. They are, as we say, gone but
not forgotten.
NOTES
1. More details about the themes, issues, and methodology of the radical theologies
can be found in Jackson L. Ice and John J. Carey, eds. The Death of God Debate
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967). Altizer’s work is given careful scrutiny in John
B. Cobb, ed.. The Theology of Altizer (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1970). A
discussion of authors whose work influenced the radical theologies is found in Thomas J.
J. Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God (Indianapolis:
Bobbs Merrill, 1966), 193-196. Altizer provides a convenient set of readings from
historical and contemporary figures who had affinities with the radical theology; see his
Toward a New Christianity: Readings in the Death of God Theology (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967). The volume Radical Theology and the Death of God
reprints many of the articles Hamilton and Altizer had published in scholarly journals and
made these articles available to the general public.
2. See Roger Shinn, “The Shattering of the Theological Spectrum,” Christianity
and Crisis, September 30, 1963, 168-171.
3. To place radical theology in a broader perspective, see Donald Cutler, ed.. The
Religious Situation 1969 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969) and the companion volume The
Religious Situation, 1968 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968). The interesting series of New
Theology volumes edited by Martin Marty and Dean Peerman from 1964 through 1971
also shed much light on the broader theological climate; see especially New Theology
Nos. 1-3 (New York: Macmillan, 1964, 1965, 1966). Of special interest is Sydney
Ahlstron’s article, “The Radical Turn in Theology and Ethics: Why It Occurred in the
1960s,” in New Theology No. 8, ed. Marty and Peerman (New York: Macmillan, 1971),
19-39.
4. Cited by Hamilton in his essay “The Death of God Theologies Today,” in
Radical Theology and the Death of God, by Altizer and Hamilton, 46. Gilkey’s
reflections were given in a set of lectures at Crozier Theological Seminary in 1964 and
have only partially been published by the seminary.
5. These are cited in the bibliography in Radical Theology and the Death of God,
Altizer and Hamiltion, 193-202. See also Thomas J. J. Altizer’s Toward a New
Christianity: Readings in the Death of God Theology (New York: Harcourt, Brace &
World, 1967).
6. Hamilton acknowledges this in his essay “The Death of God Theologies Today.”
7. Rubenstein’s reply to Altizer is printed in The Theology of Altizer, ed. John
Cobb, 125-137. Rubenstein also adds to his original remarks and comments on the
evolution of this movement.
8. Hamilton, “The Death of God Theologies Today,” 49.
9. Lonnie Kliever, The Shattered Spectrum (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1981).
10. John Macquarrie, Twentieth-Century Religious Thought, 3d ed. (New York:
Scribners, 1981).
11. Ibid., 379-80. The growth and development of Black theology belies
Macquarrie’s assessment of it as a “fad.”
12. Martin Marty, “The American Situation in 1969,” in The Religious Situation
1969, ed. Donald Cutler, 25-43.
13. Ibid., 35.
14. John B. Cobb, introduction to The Theology of Altizer, 27.
15. William Hamilton, “Thursday’s Child,” in Radical Theology and the Death of
God, by Altizer and Hamilton, 89.
16. Ibid., 87.
17. William Hamilton, The New Essence of Christianity (New York: Association
Press, 1961), 119-59.
10
The Death of God:

An African-American Perspective
Hubert G. Locke
To examine, from an African-American perspective, the theological movement

that proclaimed thirty years ago the death of God is to encounter three ironies.
The first is to note that the proclamation of God’s death came in the midst of a
decade in which black Christians were giving powerful expression to the
opposite conviction. Just as a group of white theologians were concluding that
neither God nor the church had meaning or relevance for a secular world come
of age, black Christians were affirming their faith in a God of history who led
the Israelites out of Egyptian bondage and who, they believed, was leading
Black America out of enslavement in a racially oppressive society. As the
former announced “that there once was a God to whom adoration, praise and
trust were appropriate, possibly, even necessary, but that now there is no such
God,” the latter were celebrating the power and majesty of just such a God who
had heard the cries of the oppressed.' “When our most tireless efforts fail to stop
the surging sweep of oppression,” Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote in one of his
earliest reflections, “we need to know that in this universe is a God whose
matchless strength is a fit contrast to the sordid weakness of man ... [a God
'y
who] possesses love and mercy.”

During this period, both the black and the radical theologians were reading
the same theological sources and finding fundamentally different messages
therein. The writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who was
executed by the Nazis in 1945, became one of the major theological influences
of the post-World War II era; the radical theologians found Bonhoeffer to be one
'I
who advocated that “the modern world can do without God.” Black
theologians, however, gleaned from Bonhoeffer the message that the call of God
is a call to suffering and that Christ is present in history."' For black theologians,
Bonhoeffer is seen as an example of how to relate theology to life; similarly, for
radical theologians, Bonhoeffer “is communicating to many young Protestants

today because his are the only theological words. . . that can help us understand
the era into which we are moving.”^ But the world into which radical theology
was moving and that which the theologians of Black America saw were worlds
that were poles apart.
Perhaps nothing manifests the gulf between black and white
perspectives—tragically, including religious ones—than the fact that two
peoples sharing a common faith should have found themselves moving in
diametrically opposing directions concerning their respective understandings of
the source of that faith. White Christians, of course, also were engaged in the
civil rights struggle of the 1960s; to the extent that they were, the death of God
movement may have missed or misread a significant historical movement in the
life of white churches as well. But it is the civil rights struggle as essentially a
black religious crusade that heralded a message thoroughly at odds with the
pronouncements of the proponents of the decade’s radical theology.
It may be left to others to speculate as to how two such divergent views of
reality could emerge simultaneously. A generation earlier, the Swedish
economist Gunnar Myrdal had examined America’s racial situation and found
the nation to be fundamentally at odds with itself, torn between its high moral
ideals of justice and equality to which it gives expression in the Declaration of
Independence, the Constitution, and other political documents on one hand, and
the realities of its behavior toward its dark-skinned citizens on the other.^ It was
this moral dilemma upon which black Americans effectively seized, one which
enabled them to mount a massive challenge to the nation’s racial practices. The
challenge was based upon the spiritual principle of non violence, it was
organized by black pastors and lay people, it energized itself by holding
continual rallies in black churches, it drew its themes and inspiration from the
Scriptures and spirituals, and it disciplined its participants with a constant
reminder of the biblical admonitions against responding to evil with evil. It
would have been impossible to contemplate a mass response on the part of black
Americans to their racial plight other than one rooted in their religious faith, just
as it is highly improbable that the successful leader of the mass movement
launched in the 1950s and 1960s could have been other than a black clergyman.
If theology is an attempt to understand the meaning of God in the light of
events in one’s own time, then the civil rights struggle reflected a faith in
precisely a God whom the radical theologians proclaimed no longer existed.
Gayraud Wilmore terms Black Theology “an elucidation of what we have
understood God to be about in history, particularly in the history of our struggle
against racial oppression.”^ A God who works in history, however, is the God
whose existence radical theology denied: “history as the arena of revelation and
salvation . . . becomes impossible, and impossible because history now appears
to the modem theologian as an arena of darkness and horror. . . .” Given these
irreconcilable opposites, it is hardly surprising, in what to many was an
historical moment of supreme significance in the life of the black church, that its
theologians should pay scant attention to those who were announcing a
An African-American Perspective 93
Christianity which . . . has no God, has no faith in God, and affirms both the
death of God and the death of all forms of theism.”^
History as the arena of God’s activity, or the denial of that possibility, is
crucial for both Black Theology and the radical theologians. It is also the focal
point for the second irony. Both Black Theology and radical theology drew
largely on the historical experiences of the Jewish people to document their
claims. In the case of the civil rights struggle. Black Theology found in the
freeing of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery the prototype for the experience
that unfolded in the American South. For the radical theologians who at first
eschewed historical references altogether,” the destruction of European Jewry
during the era of the German Third Reich takes on a belated but gradually a
pivotal significance as an historical referent for their claims.”^^
Over the course of two millennia, the best and the worst moments in the
history of Christian thought have been shaped by Christian thinking about the
Jews, Judaism, and the Jewish experience. It is as though Christians, whose
religion rests on the life and death of a Jew, must be continually reminded that
their faith is measured by the character of its response to the world of Jewry. In
this respect, the preoccupation of Nazism with the Jews represented a perverse
political acknowledgement of what from a Christian perspective is a theological
truth: the Jewish people are a plumb line—as they have been throughout
Western history—for assessing the integrity of Christian faith and belief.
The two dominant modes of Christian response to the world of Jewry,
down through the ages, have been triumphalism and anti-Semitism. Both
responses frequently manifest themselves as opposite sides of the same
theological coin; for triumphalists, the superiority of the Christian message often
has been seen as a justification for the denigration of its Jewish roots and their
adherents. Neither Black Theology nor the radical theologians, when each has
confronted the Jewish people and their experience, has made these
unconscionable errors.
There remains, however, an added irony in the fact that both realms of
Christian thought confront the same reality—Jews and the Jewish
experience—and find therein such opposing messages. Admittedly, each focuses
on a different event and derives from it a different meaning; Black Theology
examines the Exodus and draws from it a message of hope; radical theology
looks at the Holocaust and discovers reason only for doubt and despair. In the
first experience (and its American sequel), the claim is advanced that both acts
of liberation are actions of God. In the second event, it is the absence of divine
action that is at issue, and that absence occasions the charge that the very notion
of divine activity is flawed, as is, in the final analysis, the idea of the Divine
itself.
From the standpoint of Black Theology, the radical theologians seem bent
on blaming God for what clearly is a depraved act of evil humans. It leads one to
conclude, in fact, that what is at work in these two opposing positions is not so
much a difference in theology as it is two different doctrines of humankind.
Western history, at one level, may be considered as the saga of an ever
increasing optimism about humankind and its potential for progress and
achievement. Certainly the period since the Enlightenment has been largely
written as one of a continual escalation in the realm of human accomplishment,
particularly in the spheres of science and technology.
The Holocaust shattered this optimistic outlook. The very idea of the
“progress of Western man” is mocked by the mass murder of some six million
Jews. That the depravity resulted from the initiation and implementation of
governmental policy in a nation which, for the first third of the twentieth
century, served as the epitome of Western progress only heightens the mockery.
But it is as if the radical theologians are unable to confront the death of this
grand illusion about Western humanity and its inevitable progress and, instead,
find it less disquieting to assert the final demise of the God which Western
tradition, for some time, was finding to be intellectually useless. Thus faith in
God becomes impossible; faith in humankind and its potential for achievement
continues unabated.
The discovery in the Holocaust event of the depth to which human
depravity could sink has not come as a shock to the black imagination. The
African-American experience has been largely that of a confrontation with
“Western man” at his worst. The Holocaust, therefore, appears to the African-
American mind as a uniquely horrific but not particularly surprising episode in
the long sweep of Western history. Thus, it may be postulated that the radical
theologians no longer believe in God because they cannot bring themselves to
give up faith in humanity while black Christianity and its divines maintain a
faith in God because they have long since given up on trusting in human beings.
The third irony may be not so much an expression of the ironic as it is a
certain academic arrogance or, if one wishes to be charitable, an intellectual
oversight. Langdon Gilkey describes radical theology as a “new wind in
theology,” which is important “because it does present to us in theological
language and symbols the mind of modern urban man.”^^ Altizer speaks of
America in the 1960s as a nation “which was first coming into a public
recognition of the eclipse of God” while Thomas Altizer and William Hamilton
consider radical theology as having “a distinctly American form [that] reflects
the situation of a Christian life in a seemingly neutral but almost totally secular
culture and society.”^^
There is, in these statements, an undoubted assertion of fact. While Jackson
Lee Ice and John J. Carey note that “the catchphrase ‘death of God’ or ‘God is
dead’. . . is an idea that has been outspokenly declared by philosophers, poets,
theologians, and novelists since the French Revolution,” the declarations of the
1960s were uniquely American in outlook. The movement was also an attempt
to respond to and offer an interpretation of the upheavals of a traumatic decade
in which an increasing sense of guilt and frustration over the United States’
escalating military entanglement in Vietnam gripped large segments of the
American populace. And for many, the decade did represent the advent, or at
least the recognition, of a distinctive secularity as dominant in the nation’s life, a
secularity which Harvey Cox in The Secular City, the best-selling theological
publication of the decade, suggested modern urban dwellers should welcome
and embrace.
There is, however, an element of hubris in these statements as well. If a

portion of the nation was “coming into public recognition of the eclipse of God,”
a different—and one suspects a much larger—portion was marveling at the
apparent presence of the God of justice in the unfolding civil rights revolution of
the decade. The radical theologians, who certainly were not oblivious to the
events of the civil rights revolution, seemed not to attach theological importance
to their occurrence. If the idea of the death of God, in Gilkey’s terms, presents
“in theological language and symbols the mind of modern urban man,” then
millions of urban black Americans who were responding during this period to an
entirely different theological language and symbols were missed in this analysis!
Were they missed or dismissed, overlooked or considered unimportant to
the main currents of American theological thought? This is one of the
frustrations of two centuries of black life in white America. One is never quite
certain whether the absence of black experiences in the assessments and
calculations of white scholars—and here it should be noted that this problem
extends far beyond the discipline of theology!—is an oversight or a calculated
consideration that finds those experiences quaint side notes to a larger, more
central and significant saga.
Harvey Cox, for example, published The Secular City, his widely
acclaimed theological “tract” (to use his modest language), in 1965. It echoes
many of the themes and raises most of the basic questions then being discussed
and debated in radical theology circles. The book’s success was such that Cox
published a revised edition in 1966. From reading this seminal theological
essay—possibly the most widely read theological publication of the
decade—one would not know that a major social revolution was under way in
the United States, that black religious ideals and leadership were at its core, or
that the issue of race had been tearing at the foundations of most major
American cities for the previous two years.
Eugene Borowitz, who, together with Richard Rubenstein, is one of the
handful of Jewish scholars who have responded to the Christian debate over the
death of God, wrote a rejoinder to Altizer in a collection of essays published at
the height of public attention to and debate over the radical theology movement.
Borowitz states, “Altizer may be right about the cultural situation . . . but what
shall a sensitive human being, much less a Jew, say of this boundless affirmation
of whatever history brings? . . . The past may have its problems, but, unless
there is some transcendent standard by which to guide modern man, how can
anyone who has heard of Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and the Union of South Africa
spurn its ideals for anything the future may bring?” Three decades later,
Borowitz’s question is apt to be asked with even greater urgency by anyone who
takes up the arguments of radical theology with an eye cast on the black
experience in America, especially given the sorrowful developments in that
experience since the death of God movement was launched. Given the
unfulfilled promises of the civil rights struggle—the facts that many of the hopes
and dreams of that era have not been realized and that deliberate efforts
continually erupt in the political arena to reverse the gains that were made—it
might be expected that cynicism or despair about the possibility of belief in a
providential God would strike a responsive chord in contemporary black

thought.
A break with a strong religious past and the rise of religious doubt would
first be seen in the life of the black church. However, C. Eric Lincoln and
Lawrence Mamiya conclude their recent study with the assertion, “At the
beginning of the last decade of the twentieth century, the black churches are, on
the whole, still healthy and vibrant institutions.”*^ Both their adherents and their
leaders have lived for generations with the question that troubles both Black and
radical theologians. Martin Luther King, Jr., phrased it simply: “Why does not
God break in and smash the schemes of evil men?”*^
The answer of the Jewish people to this question is one before which one
can only stand in respectful silence. No other people has had to confront the
question of Job—”If He slay me, shall I still trust Him?” But the current
religious mood and theological climate among African-Americans suggest that
they remain far removed from the perspectives of radical theology and its
answers to the dramas of our age.
NOTES
1. Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of
God (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), x.
2. Martin Luther King, Jr., as quoted in The Martin Luther King, Jr,. Companion,
ed. Coretta Scott King (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 55.
3. See William Hamilton, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” in Radical Theology and the
Death of God, by Altizer and Hamilton, 116-17.
4. See James S. Cone’s chapter on “The White Church and Black Power” in his
Black Theology and Black Power (New York: Seabury Press, 1969), 62-90.
5. Hamilton, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” 114.
6. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).
7. Gayraud S. Wilmore in Black Theology: A Documentary History, ed. G. S.
Wilmore and James S. Cone (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1979), 4.
8. See Thomas J. J. Altizer’s “The Holocaust and the Theology of the Death of
God,” in this volume, 21.
9. William Hamilton as quoted in The Death of God Debate, ed. Jackson Lee Ice
and John J, Carey (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967), 17.
10. See Altizer’s comments in “The Holocaust and the Theology of the Death of
God,” in this volume, 21. Altizer acknowledges that “there are few references to the
Holocaust in the Christian death of God theological writings in the 1960s.” In the same
essay, however, he also describes the destruction of European Jewry as “our most
ultimate modem or postmodern experience,” as “a generating cause of the death of God
theologies,” and speaks of Richard Rubenstein, the most prominent of the Jewish radical
theologians, as his “most challenging theological critic.” Much appears here to have been
gained in hindsight. Rubenstein’s essay in this volume gently observes that Altizer, who
asserts the Holocaust was a “generating cause” of his theology, did not make the
connection explicit until he wrote a Festschrjft essay in 1995, on the occasion of
Rubenstein’s seventieth birthday. Nor in the 1960s, notes Rubenstein in the same essay,
“did either William Hamilton or Harvey Cox address themselves to the Holocaust as a
theological issue” (47).
11. See Langdon Gilkey’s comments in The Death of God Debate, ed. Ice and
Carey, 22.
12. Altizer, “The Holocaust and the Theology of the Death of God, in this volume,
18. Altizer and Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God, xii-xiii.
13. See Ice and Carey, eds.. The Death of God Debate, 15.
14. Eugene Borowitz, “God-Is-Dead Theology” in The Meaning of the Death of
God, ed. Bernard Murchland (New York: Random House, 1967), 97-98.
15. C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African
American Experience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 382.
16. Martin Luther King, Jr., as quoted in The Martin Luther King, Jr., Companion,
ed. Coretta Scott King, 52.
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11
The Death of History

and the Life of Akeda:
Voices from the War
Gershon Greenberg
HISTORICAL DESTRUCTION AND DIVINE BEING

A main issue for death of God theology has been the impact of catastrophic
destruction on the belief in God’s being. Specifically, the view that the
Holocaust was the de facto end to God’s convenantal presence in history, to
Heilsgeschichte. This thrust God’s very being into question, even if it might still
be affirmed in and of itself, and outside any relationship to the world. Thus,
Richard Rubenstein felt “compelled to abandon belief in the providential God
who acts on history and elects Israel,” while not rejecting but indeed affirming
God as das Heilige Nichts, the Ground, Source, and Ultimate End of Being, the
“God after the Death of God” in and for history. Altizer speaks of the
impossibility of accepting the Holy of Holies as the murderer of his chosen
people or the Nazis, like Pharoah, as his chosen instrument.*
I believe that the issue of the Holocaust’s impact on God’s being should be
considered in the light of wartime Jewish religious thought:^ first, because the
historian of religious thought is mandated to search outlines of development;
second, because wartime religious thinkers offer a unique perspective. They
responded immediately and directly to the catastrophe. In this capacity they
were observers (subjects) and observed (objects) simultaneously. Those who
responded in writing (and they were overwhelmingly Orthodox) suffered and
were murdered in the ghettos and camps—for example, Kalonymous Kalman
*This essay is dedicated to the memory of Amos Funkenstein. In our last meeting, in Tel
Aviv, we discussed whether there were Orthodox thinkers during the war who responded
to the catastrophe in radical fashion. I am grateful to Richard Rubenstein for his support
of my work in this area over the last decade, and to my colleague Charley D. Hardwick
for helping me stmcture the essay.
Shpira (ghetto Warsaw), killed in Travniki, and Yehuda Leb Gerst (ghetto
Lodz), inmate in Auschwitz. Or they wrote from a position at the periphery of
the catastrophe—for example, Issakhar Teykhtahl and Aharon Rokeah in
Budapest, 1943/44. Others escaped the war or were living outside Europe while
their biological and religious (Yeshiva-world) families were being killed.
Third, wartime Jewish religious thought is illuminating because it was a
matter of life and death. Religious meaning was central to Orthodox life. The
ability to draw spiritual energy from past tradition into the present determined
whether there was consolation to be found amidst the tragedy, whether spiritual
(and hence psychological or even physical) survival was possible. Fourth, it is
illuminating because the theology which emerged during the war contains truth.
Since it coincided with the life process, it was existentially true—whether or not
it appeared to be theologically cogent decades later. For example, the two
thinkers considered here accepted the fact that history was destroyed and that
any divine role in history was irrelevant. But God’s being and his (metaphysical)
relationship to Israel remained unaffected. While theologians two decades later
were unable to accept the two (historical destruction and divine being) together,
these wartime thinkers did; and the reality of their spiritual lives, which
continued around these premises, gave them existential, if not objectively
coherent, truth.
These two thinkers, Simha Elberg of Shanghai, a respected journalist and
poet associated with the Halakha-zommxXtQd political organization Agudat
Israel, and Ya’akov Moshe Harlap, Rav Kook’s successor as head of the great
Merkaz Ha’rav yeshiva in Jerusalem and candidate for Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi,
maintained both truths together by connecting them with a third, that of Akeda
Among the wartime Orthodox Jewish religious thinkers, some objected outright
to any question about God’s role in history—for example, Hayim Israel
Tsimrman {Tamim Pa’alo, 1947). Others, such as Shlomo Zalman Shraggai,
spoke of the ongoing path of Heilsgeschichte through the Land of Israel
(Tahalikhe Ha'temura Veha’geula, 1958/59). Others, such as Yehezkel Sarna,
recast covenantal history into a purely metahistorical drama of premessianic
suffering, Teshnva (return to God), and redemption (Le’teshuva Ule’tekuma,
1944). Still others, notably Elhanan Wasserman, considered Heilsgeschichte the
reflection and function of Israel’s collective relationship to ontological Torah
(Ikveta De’meshiha, 1938). At least one, Yitshak Breuer, insisted that the
catastrophe forced Heilsgeschichte into the range of empirical history {Moriyah,
1944)."* Elberg and Harlap believed that historical reality had been utterly
destroyed by the Holocaust—leaving Heilsgeschichte off the map of religious
discourse.
But Elberg and Harlap did not project the destruction of history and
absence of convenantal history onto God’s being. While God’s convenantal
presence on the historical stage was now inconceivable—whether or not it was
ever a premise for our thinkers—His being vis-a-vis the individual Jew and
collective Israel remained intact. God’s existence was not threatened. The
mediator between the destruction of history and God’s being, the reality which
explained how the two could coexist, was the Akeda. By the medieval period.
Voices from the War 101
Akeda had become ingrained in Israel’s mind not as binding alone but as murder
as well—and Elberg and Harlap understood it in both ways, sublimated into
metaphysics and existentially focused respectively.^ The two thinkers channeled
Israel’s existence, not through the Land of Israel (as was typical for the religious
nationalist Mizrahi thinkers during the war) or through the ontological being of
Torah (Agudat Israel), but through the never-ending sacrifice of Isaac. By
translating Israel’s reality into an enactment of the mythic truth of Mt. Moriah,
our two thinkers found the path through which historical destruction and
affirmation of the divine could coexist. Internally, the reality of Akeda coalesced
historical death and eternal life. Structurally, it accounted for the coexistence
between shattered history and the continued presence of God.
SIMHA ELBERG
Elberg (71908-1995) was trained at Yeshiva Emek Halakha in Warsaw
under the Halakhist Natan Spigelglas (1882-71943) and briefly at the yeshiva of
Montreux under the Musar (moralist movement) and pro-Zionist educator
Eliezer Botschka (d. 1956). In the late thirties, Elberg studied ancient history at
the Sorbonne in Paris and worked as a journalist for the Orthodox Yiddish press.
He was in Warsaw when the Nazis invaded on September 1 1939. But he
escaped via Ostrova, Bialystok, Vilna, Slobodka, and Moscow. From
Vladivostok he continued with the Mir Yeshiva group to Japan, and then on to
Shanghai. There he remained, from September 1941 through late 1946, during
which time his parents, brothers, and sisters, as well as Spigelglas, were killed in
Treblinka. Elberg arrived in America in January 1947.^ His series of essays
about the Holocaust, Akedat Treblinka: Gedanken un Refleksen, was completed
in July 1946 in Shanghai. Whether or not ten thousand copies were sold, as
Elberg told me, the booklet was well received—“evoking great interest with its
rich content and moving themes.”^
The catastrophe, he wrote, was beyond comprehension by the human
intellect: “Everything which is manifest in creation, all phenomena {Yetsirot)
and events, have a particular name and definition. But there is no word powerful
enough, loaded with enough explosives, to depict what has happened to the six
million. The most powerful names, expressing definitions, only profane and
desecrate the current tragedy.”^ But Scripture did shed light on the catastrophe:
“It is not easy to provide an answer to the ancient, ever-renewed question about
why the righteous suffer. The problem is not about any single individual but
about the whole collective, the entire people. Not in any book of history, not in
any political system, is the path through the labyrinth of today’s unnatural
events to be found. [But] a deeper look into our ancient written sources will
throw light and some understanding about what has taken place in these days of
Tohy va’vohuT^ That is, the inability to comprehend the event in rational or
historical term corresponds to the objective or prehistorical chaos it meant: “We
were unwilling to learn from the world we had built, a holy community of six
million. So instead we must learn from the Tohu va’vohuT^^
What could revealed Scripture teach about the Holocaust7 Cain originated
murder in God’s creation, on an individual level. Hitler had a demonic power,

supernatural and beyond the human intellect, which originated murder in God’s
creation on a national level. His mass murder blemished creation with such
intensity that it became impossible for mankind to cleanse the sin and bring
about a correction (Tikkun); the demonic assault, that is, reached into the work
of God himself. But if the world could not be corrected, could anything be done?
Elberg did not consider the possibility that the destruction of God’s creation
compromised God’s being, or his relationship to the Jewish believer. His
answer, which had to presume divine reality, was in terms of a second creation:
The world of nature and its history had been obliterated, but the divine impetus
to create remained: “The world has tumbled down in the deep abyss {Tehom\
into the abyss (Apgund) of Holocaust (Umkum) and chaos {Tohu va’vohu). A
new creation (Yetsira) must take place, a new six days of genesis (Bereshit). But
this Bereshit-Yetsira can take place, only if the Torah becomes the light of the
nations, and the hour of ‘and the many nations shall walk by Your light’ [Isaiah
60:3] will strike.”"
In the midst of a new creation of the universe between time and eternity,
Elberg found the Akeda and Torah. The blemished word was unsalvageable,
leaving chaos, and human comprehension reflected it. The history of God’s
relationship with Israel had been set aside. Surviving destroyed history yet
retaining the experience of Mt. Moriah, the Akeda remained, metaphysically
real. Crystallizing Israel’s innermost and sacred relation, the Akeda remained
with God, suspended between eternity and time, poised for the new creation of
the universe. Mt. Moriah, Elberg wrote, remained with Israel through its exile
until it reached a climax with the Akeda of Treblinka. It was its own trans¬
temporal reality: “The Akedah of Isaac and the Akedah of Treblinka—the first
for the individual and the second for a nation, have both sanctified our history,
our existence. Treblinka is the permanent, forward projection (Fartsetsung) of
Mt. Moriah.”'^
As the ultimate Akeda, that of Treblinka was the holiest of all. Thus it
involved the Jews of Poland and Lithuania, Israel’s holiest individuals. Their
cries of sanctification of God’s name {Kiddush Ha’shem), their Shema (“Hear O
Israel”) which split the heavens, shows how they fulfilled their role—and how
the ''Akedat Yitshak nation passed the test.” The sobbing of millions of victims
broke forth from the red flames towards heaven, and never before had heaven
seen so many Kiddush Ha'shem Jews.
The Akeda crystallized life and death. Its life was spiritual and
metaphysical: “The human being and the Korban (sacrificial victim) human
being are two separate creations {Yetsirot), which cannot be measured by the
same standard. We, who only feel together with those of Treblinka {Treblinka
mitfiler): who have never found themselves struggling between death and life,
will never feel the metaphysical power, which transforms the human being into
a supernatural being.”The metaphysical power, the life within the death, came
from God: “The mother did not suffer the pains of Gehinnom when she herself
was the Korban who entered the gas chamber. In the role of innocent Korban,
she lived in another, heavenly realm, and this eased her pain. But she did go into
convulsions when she was judged to be the observer of the murder of her child.
The father suffered the pains of Job, not when he himself was burned alive. In
the shadow of danger a new power was bom in him, one which nourished him
until the final moment and gave him power to bear the pain. The father hurt
instead when he observed his child or the mother writhe in agony.”
There was life as well in the fact that the Holocaust ended exile and meant
the onset of sanctified existence: “Hitler is original. You ask: How is such a
human beast possible? One answer lies in the single word: exile. Hitler is the
deep translation of exile. We have neutralized {farflakht) the deep meaning of
exile with its tragic consequences. We have made too much peace with it. We
have become oblivious to the fact that we remain accused of sins of the
generations, and that at any moment the exile could make us account for our
guilt.” In this capacity, between time and eternity, holy and vital, the Akeda
was positioned with Torah to serve as a vessel for the new creation. For Elberg,
the death of the Jew in sanctification of God’s name was not a tragedy to be
forgotten but an act which belonged to a new universe—a universe which,
indeed, carried implications for redemption.
For Elberg, the inner act of Akeda, sacred and trans-temporal, was separate
from the outer perpetration of the murder of Jews on the part of Hitler. The one
belonged to the world which could be created anew by God, the other to the
blemished world which tumbled into the abyss. Thus, Elberg spoke God’s aegis
over Akeda within Israel. “Exactly as Isaac’s being led to the Akedah was
solely at God’s command, so also God’s will was in effect at the Akedah of
Treblinka.” But the Germans, the anti-sacred nation, lay outside God’s
universe:
The German pigs washed their mangy, polluted bodies with our souls. With how much
“filth” must Hitler have “dirtied” the German people forever. But soap produced from the
weak and little bodies of children does not clean away physical dirt. No. It “poisons” and
“sullies” the bodies. Hitler made wallets from the tender skin of women and the Germans
used them. Obviously, the entire German nation was too decadent to protest and stop the
bloody production. But the chemical stuff manufactured from Jewish bones and skin
contains more power than an atomic bomb. In each little piece of soap there are a
hundred Jews of sorrow. Someday the [holy] pieces will explode and rip apart the world.
1 ft
There is no protection against such metaphysical power.
The Jews of Poland and Lithuania were the holy emanation {Atsilut) of
God. The Khurbn (destruction) of Poland had the deeper meaning of “through
those near to Me I shall make Myself holy” (Leviticus 10:3); it meant that the
death of those close to God sanctified him. The German nation, however,
polluted and absorbed by the unsalvageable world, could never be
forgotten—not even if, as Martin Niemoller hoped, it repented: “No, and a
thousand times no. Pastor Niemoller. The pardon does not lie in our hands.
Hitler stuck his claws into our race (Shtam), into our parent and forefathers. No
one had the right to carry out experiments with holy, thousand-year-old bodies
in graves. Not I, not the Torah, will forgive the Germans for the desecrated
graves. No, Pastor Niemoller, you will not get our forgiveness at any price.”*^
Hitler and Abraham are paradigms of opposition. Hitler acted under his own
volition and against God. He deified his actions, considered the slaughter of
Jews a Mitsva, and built gas chambers in the name of his own god. Hitler
remained outside God’s world—part of the blemished world turned into chaos.
But Abraham followed God’s command. He expressed his volition in terms of a
merciful voice which alleviated his son’s pain (Genesis 22:6-8) and by the fact
that he wanted no Jew killed.^^
In sum, the destruction of the world of history, the blemishing of the
cosmos, did not compromise God or his relationship with Israel. The issue
Heilsgeschichte having been removed from the discourse, Elberg’s God
remained beyond the Tohu va ’vohu of the Holocaust. He was ready to create
again and fill the chaos with a world illuminated by Torah and reflecting the life
and holiness of the Akeda.
YA’AKOV MOSHE HARLAP

While Elberg believed that the holiest level of Akeda was evoked by the
Holocaust, and that Hitler terminated any further deception about exile, he found
no positive meaning in the Holocaust itself; Akeda holiness and the end to exile,
he would say, would have been possible without it. For Harlap, however, the
destruction of history and its conversion to Tohu va ’vohu is a constructive
constituent of the messianic transformation of the universe. In Elberg’s
Weltanschauung, the Holocaust occupies the realm of absolute evil which exists
apart from God. For Harlap, the evil of the Holocaust has a positive role in the
apocalyptic process which belongs to divine redemption.
Harlap (1883-1951), a third-generation Jerusalemite, was trained by the
Kabbalist Yehoshua Tsevi Michal Shapira (1840-1906). But his greatest
influence was Avraham Yitshak Ha’kohen Kook (1865-1935), the most
important religious figure in the twentieth-century history of the Land of Israel.
Kook was Harlap’s teacher and religious intimate, and he regarded Harlap as
one of the Seridim, those called by God to bear the thought of Israel’s collective
soul.^^
In a 1947 essay in Sinai, a periodical of Merkaz Ha’rav, Harlap epitomized
his apocalyptic comprehension of the Holocaust. He cited the Biur (explanation)
of Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalman, the Gaon of Vilna (“Ha’gra,” 1720-1797) to
Tikkunim Mi’zohar Hadash, and, evidently, also drew from Kol Ha’tor, the
compilation of Ha’gra’s messianic thinking attributed to his disciple Hillel ben
Binyamin Rivlin of Shklov (d. 1837). The text of Tikkunim Mi’zohar Hadash
2T describes two stages of apocalyptic activity: first, a period in which the
world returns to primordial chaos {Tohu va ’vohu) and is ruled by power, the era
of Israel’s exile and rule by God’s judgment and his “left hand” {T. Sota 47®);
second, thanks to Moses’ prayer, this is followed by an era when the world is
ruled by compassion and mercy—by God’s “right hand.” In the Biur, Ha’gra
identified the first era as that of Mashiah ben Yosef. In it, construction and
destruction coexisted—the destruction akin to the two thousand year era before
Torah or that preceding the Second Temple and Cyrus. From Kol Ha ’tor, Harlap
added that because Israel could not absorb the full messianic light all at once,
Mashiah ben Yosef had to enter the world in a dark vessel; darkness was
required for redemption to be fulfilled. Once this took place, Elijah would herald
the advent of Mashiah ben David. The ultimate messiah would remove the
dimension of shadow and enclose the world in light.^^
Harlap’s published and unpublished wartime writings detailed the
apocalyptic drama. In the first era, that of construction and destruction, the worst
possible evil would be paired with the purest good: in Talmudic terms, complete
evil {kulo hayav) with perfect piety {kulo zakai) {T. Sanhedrin 98®). The polluted
(Tuma) universe would expel Israel, while a fire of holiness would bum within
Israel. Collective Israel would coincide with the good. Harlap described Israel’s
character as at root holy—a holiness which was of itself and independent of any
recognition by any other nation. Its collective soul belonged to the realm shared
by Torah, which prevailed before creation. That soul was, in itself, devoid of
any concept of evil whatsoever, and if there was sin, it was attributable to
Israel’s point of contact with the nations of the world. Moreover, insofar as
Israel’s soul flowed from Torah and Torah was the instrument of creation, Israel
alone had the quality of metaphysical reality. All these positive attributes
prevailed within Israel during the first era of messianic redemption.
In radical contrast, the souls of the nations occupied the realm of evil, the
real of other-being (Sitra ahra). They were naturally blemished. While Israel
was rooted above in holiness and branched towards the pollution of the nations
below, the nations were rooted below in Tuma. In the era of Mashiah ben Yosef,
the nations descended deeper into darkness, i.e., chaos. Already anchored
outside the realm of metaphysical reality, now they severed their sole channel to
being, namely Israel. For Harlap, this evil was necessary for the staged
apocalyptic process, as a preliminary vessel of redemptive light; indeed there
had to be a purging of evil prior to salvation. But, perhaps to show how man was
responsible, or co-responsible, for the darkness, Harlap offered anthropological
explanations. Sensing that redemption was coming and knowing how this
spelled the end to their identifiable existence, the nations tried to sabotage
redemption by destroying its vessel, Israel. Harlap averred as well that the
nations were driven insane over the prospect of their imminent demise, and
reacted by destroying the perceived source of their miserable fate.^^
For Harlap, the Sitra ahra and the Holocaust it brought were indispensable
to the dynamics of redemption. The tension between the two sides {kulo hayav
and kulo zakai) brought about the explosion required to open the world to
receive the Mashiah ben David. Evil had to be fully expressed in order to be
purged from the universe. Darkness alone could provide entry of the messianic
light into the world. The realization of redemption, in sum, required joining the
light of Mashiah ben Yosef to the destruction of history.
The mythic Mashiah ben Yosef era had an existential complement.
Drawing from his teacher Rav Kook, Harlap spoke of “souls from the realm of
chaos” {Neshamot me ’olam ha ’tohu) who were zealous in their piety or became
martyrs {al Kiddush Ha ’shew) in the era of apocalypse. According to Rav
Kook’s description of 1912-13, these souls looked to finite reality to fulfill their
infinite yearnings for light. But the finite vessels could not convey the infinite,
and in reaction to the failure the souls fell apart in despair. But the souls did not
stop drawing from the holy of holies. At the end of days, they, and they alone,
could and would endure through destruction and evil, for they knew that the
dark mist must yield to light. Unsuited to the finite world to the point of their
own destruction, they were uniquely suited to the infinite.^"^
Harlap identified the Jews of the Holocaust era as Neshamot me ’olam
ha ’tohu. Among those who lived outside war-torn Europe, there were Jews who
pursued fulfillment of Mitsvot (Torah commandments) without limit and from a
stance within transcendental Torah. They fell apart psychologically upon their
inevitable failure. Each Jew murdered in the Holocaust was a new instance of
Akeda, bound and killed, loving God with the complete soul, even as the soul
was taken and death came {Berakhot 54®). Both sorts of Jews, those rooted in
Torah and those sacrificed in love for God, belonged to the root of the soul of
Mashiah ben Yosef, a crucible of construction and destruction. Each constructed
in terms of Mitsvot or love for God and thus belonged to the infinite. An
explosion took place in existential terms. There were pious individuals who
collapsed over the failure to live a total Torah life, whose souls awaited
redemption. There were victims whose bodies were shattered as the souls
ascended to God in love. Both participated in the mythic process of redemption,
enacting it individually below and in turn enhancing the process above. Of those
murdered, Harlap wrote: “The command to love God with all your heart, even if
[God] takes your soul [T. Berakhot 54®] needs to be carried out now, not only
individually. But also collectively—such that even if; God forbid, the soul of the
entire nation should be taken, the love for God would not be exhausted. This is
the substance of the Akeda of Isaac: The legacy of the self-sacrifice {Mesirat
nefesh) of Isaac is the Mesirat nefesh of the entire nation. In the era of the
messiah’s onset {Ikveta de'meshihd), the [Mesirat nefesh of Isaac] becomes
actualized in terms of the collective whole [of Israel].
In sum, for Harlap the destruction of history coexisted with the assertion of
God’s being. They belonged to the redemptive process, for which Tohu va’vohu
was indispensable. Whether as the vessel of the light, necessary catharsis, or as a
component of the explosive dynamic between the opposing forces of kulo hayav
and kulo zakai, evil and destruction enhanced divine redemption. The Akeda
crystallized the explosion on the existential level, opposing body and soul, finite
and infinite—and as such enacted and enhanced the cosmic process of the
Mashiah ben Yosef era.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
Elberg and Harlap differed on several levels. For Elberg the Holocaust was
contingent and originated with Hitler, while for Harlap it was an essential
component to the unfolding process of redemption. For Elberg there was nothing
positive in the Holocaust itself (even thought the Akeda within and the end to
exile took place in its context), while for Harlap the Holocaust in itself, the
intensification of Sitra ahra, was a negative reality with positive ramifications.
For Elberg the Akeda was a sacred metaphysical reality, one which transcended
history but expressed it. In it, physical suffering was transformed into spiritual
contentment, death and life coalesced. While reflected existentially, the Akeda
remained an absolute category. For Harlap, the Akeda was an existential reality,
one in which the body was shattered as the soul ascended in love for God. While
enhancing and enacting the tension of the Mashiah ben Yosef era, it was
primarily an existential category.^^
But they shared much. Both spoke of the destruction of history and the
world abandoned to pre-creative Tohu va’vohu. For both, Israel endured the
chaos because of its tie to Torah and its roots in the pre-creative realm—
although for Elberg the connection was of Akeda and Torah, and for Harlap, of
Israel’s collective soul and Torah. For both, God’s existence was not affected.
God’s being was a given, even if the world had to be re-created (Elberg) or
subjected to the most intense opposition between holiness and Tuma (Harlap).
Neither would conceive of attributing Nothingness to God in the face of the
Holocaust or redefining God as a plenum which spilled over into nature—as if
God had to be negated because of the disaster or affirmed in terms of nature.^^
Perhaps this is because neither invested their belief in Heilsgeschichte, but rather
in a relationship to God which transcended history and allowed life to be found
in sacrificial death.
NOTES
1. Richard Rubenstein, “Holocaust and Holy War, ” The Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science 548: The Holocaust: Remembering for the
Future (November 1996): 23-44. Richard Rubenstein, “Radical Theology and the
Holocaust,” in this volume, 45-55. See Steven T. Katz, “Richard Rubenstein, the God of
History and the Logic of Judaism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 46, 3,
Supplement (September 1978): 313-50; and Thomas J. J. Altizer, “God as Holy
Nothingness,” in What Kind of God? Essays in Honor of Richard L. Rubenstein, ed. Betty
Rogers Rubenstein and Michael Berenbaum (Lanham, MD: University Press of America,
1995), 347-56.
2. For an overall description of wartime Orthodox Jewish religious thought and the
Holocaust see Gershon Greenberg, “Wartime Orthodox Religious Thought and the
Holocaust,” in Yale University Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, ed. Walter Laqueur (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) and Gershon Greenberg, “Consoling Truth: Eliezer
Schweid’s Ben Hurban Lishua: A Review Essay,” Modern Judaism 17 (October 1997).
3. See Eliezer Schweid, “Ketsad Hishtakma Ha’emuna Ha’haredit Miza’azua
Ha’hurban,” in Ben Hurban Lishua: Teguvot shel Hagut Haredit Le ’shoa Bizemana (Tel
Aviv: Hakibuts Hameuhad, 1996), 216-35.
4. Breuer wrote: “The advent of the Second World War was the war of Nazism
against the nation of Israel. The beginning of the World War was in the year 1939. The
beginning of the 'Jewish War’ was in the year 1933. For when Nazism dominated over
Germany, war against the entire nation of Israel was proclaimed officially; not against the
Jews of Germany alone, but against all the Jews found in the world. Another advance
step in the movement of national emancipation: Germany would war against the nation of
Israel, making it known precisely by this, that the place of the nation of Israel is—in
history.” Yitshak Breuer, “Ha’milhama Ha’olamit (Ha’meshihit) Ha’sheniya” in Moriya
(Jerusalem: Hamerkaz Lema’an Sifrut Haredit, 1953/54), 233-42.
5. The notion of Isaac’s being murdered was hinted at in rabbinic literature. For
example: “And Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a bum offering
instead of his son [Genesis 22:13]. He prayed, 'Sovereign of the Universe! Regard it as
though I had sacrificed my son Isaac first and then this ram instead of him’” {Midrash
Bereshit Rabba 56:9).
As indicated by this report, from Mainz, 1096, the motif was ingrained in Israel’s
consciousness by the medieval period:
When the Jews discovered that the mobsters had broken through into the castle courtyard
and there was no way out except through apostasy, they resolved to delay no further:
'Their voice rang out because all hearts were at one: “Hear O Israel, the Lord. . . is
One.’” Ours is not to question the ways of the Holy One, blessed be He and blessed be
His name, for it is He who gave us His Torah, He who commanded that we die and be
slain for the unification of His Holy Name. . . . Let every one who has a knife inspect it
lest it be flawed. Let him come forth and cut our throats for the sanctification of Him who
alone lives eternally, and finally let him cut his own throat. . . . Whereupon all of them,
men and women, rose and slew each other. . . . The tender of heart put on courage and
themselves cut the throats of their lives and children, yea, babes. . . . Women bared their
necks to one another in order to be offered up (Li ’aked) for the unification of the Name.
So a man treated his own son and his own brother; so a brother his own sister; so a
woman to her son and daughter. . . . Here is one sacrificing and then himself being
sacrificed, and there another sacrificing and himself being sacrificed {ze oked vene 'ekad
ve ’ze oked vene ’ekad). . . . Ask ye now and see, was there ever such a holocaust {Akedah
me ’ruba) as this, since the days of Adam? When were there over a thousand and hundred
sacrificed {Akedah) in one day, each and every one of them like the Akedah of Isaac son
of Abraham? (“Shield and Buckler of Every Congregation,” 18-20, as cited in Shalom
Spiegel, The Last Trial: On the Legends and Lore of the Command to Abraham to Offer
Isaac as a Sacrifice, the Akedah, trans. Judah Goldin [New York: Behrman, 1979]).
6. Gershon Greenberg, “Myth and Catastrophe in Simha Elberg’s Religious

Thought,” Tradition 26, 1 (Fall 1991): 39-64.
7. Editor, “Ha’rav Dr. Simha Elberg,” Der Tog (New York) March 21 1947: 3.
8. Simha Elberg, “Gamisht gelemt,” in Akedat Treblinka: Gedanken un Reflelsen
(Shanghai: North China Press, 1946), 34-36.
9. Simha Elberg, “Farvart,” in Akedat Treblinka, 3-4.
10. Elberg, “Gamisht gelemt.”
11. Simha Elberg, “A1 Naharot Polin,” in Akedat Treblinka, 10-15. On the pre¬
creation status of Torah see, Zohar: Shemot 2:161 and Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalman,
chap. 5 in Biur to Sifra Ditseniuta (Jemsalem, 1985/86).
12. Simha Elberg, “Akedat Treblinka” in Akedat Treblinka, 8-9.
13. Elberg, “Akedat Treblinka.” See Joseph Gotfarstein, “Kiddush Hashem Over
the Ages and Its Uniqueness in the Holocaust Period,” in Jewish Resistance during the
Holocaust (Jemsalem: Yad Vashem, 1971), 453-82.
14. Elberg, “Akedat Treblinka.”
15. Ibid.
16. Simha Elberg, “Galut un Geula,” in Akedat Treblinka, 29-33.
17. Elberg, “Akedat Treblinka.”
18. Elberg, “Der Kamf mit toyte Yidn,” in Akedat Treblinka, 16-19.
19. See Martin Niemoller, Uber die deutsche Schuld, Not und Hoffnung (Zurich:
Evangelischer Verlag, 1946). Simha Elberg, “Das Gevisn fun Deytshland,” in Akedat
Treblinka, 20-24.
20. See Jon D. Levenson, “Isaac Unbound,” in The Death and Resurrection of the
Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 125-42.
21. See Simon Federbush, “Ha’rav Ya’akov Moshe Harlap zts’l,” in Hazon Torah
Ve ’tsiyon: Ma ’amarim Le 'toldot Ha ’tsiyonut Ha ’datit, ed. Shimon Federbush (Jerusalem:
Mosad ha-Rav Kuk, 1959-60), 287-303; Gershon Greenberg, “Holocaust Apocalypse:
Ya’akov Moshe Harlap’s Wartime Response,” Jewish Studies (Jerusalem) 37 (1999): 1-
10.
22. Ya’akov Moshhe Harlap, “Le’et Dodim,” Sinai 11, nos. 4-5/whole nos. 131-
132 (December 1947-January 1948): 126-138. Hillel ben Binyamin Rivlin Mi’shklov,
Kol Ha’tor (Erets Israel: 1993-94). Harlap cited Kol Ha’tor. “Ahyat Eliyahu,” in Mosde
Erets (Jerusalem: Va’adaMitsetsei Talmide Ha’gra Biyerushalayim, 1950-51), 7-12.
23. Ya’akov Moshhe Harlap, “Beni yakiri mahmadi,” Or Ha’mizrah 10, nos. 1-
2/whole nos. 36-37 (April 1962): 14-15; Harlap, Me Merom VI: Mima’ayene Ha’yeshua
(Jerusalem: Bet Zevul, 1981-82); Harlap, Me Merom IV: Hagada shel Pesah (Jerusalem:
Bet Zevul, 1954-55); Harlap, “Oz lanu be’elokim scXdC" Ha’yesod 12, nos. 289-290 (7
June 1943): 2; Harlap, “Halikhot Geulat Israel Ve’artso,” Ateret (August-September
1947): 10-13; Harlap “Beni Ha’yakar [27 October 1938],” Letter 158, Bet Zevul
Archives, Jerusalem; Harlap, “A1 Israel Emunato,” Ha ’yesod 9: 293 (18 April 1940), 2.
24. Rav Kook, “Zeronim,” in Ha ’tarbut Ha Hsraelit I (Jaffa: Moriya Shenboym-
Veys Printing, 1912-13), 9-27.
25. Ya’akov Moshe Harlap, “Vehine amar, 'Nahamu, nahamu ami’ [To Barukh
Yehiel Duvdevani in an Italian DP camp, 30 October 1946],” Letter 138, Bet Zevul-
Harlap Archives, Jerusalem; Harlap, Me Merom VI, 205-13.
26. Harlap did not appear to draw from the sacrificial character and implications for
Akeda on the part of Mashiah ben Yosef in Kol Ha 'tor.
27. See Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and
Contemporary Judaism Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 136-37.
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12
Christians and Pharisees:

Jewish Responses to
Radical Theology
Timothy A. Bennett and Roehelle L. Millen
Only an atheist can be a good Christian, only a Christian can be a

good atheist.
—Êmst Bloch
If the Christian continues to believe in the gracious and providential

love of God after Auschwitz, then not only is he once more denying
the humanity of the Jew, but he is also denying the pain of all
humanity, refusing the authentic or ultimate reality of a pain that
cannot be relieved or assuaged by a dehistorized or dehumanized
God.
—^Thomas J. J. Altizer
Do you hear the bell ringing? Down on your knees! They are
bringing the sacraments to a dying God.
—Heinrich Heine, 1834*
In an article published in 1970, Richard L. Rubenstein praised radical theology,

suggesting that it offered “the only basis for theological speculation in our
time.”^ Nevertheless, Rubenstein, the most outspoken Jewish advocate of death
of God theology, also felt compelled to qualify his praise and to draw significant
distinctions between Jewish and Christian ways of understanding the death of
God. Indeed, he wrote: “I feel strangely as if Dr. Altizer and I are Christian and
Pharisee in the first century all over again.” We shall turn our attention later to
an examination of Rubenstein’s remarks and caveats concerning radical
theology. Nonetheless, his comment stands as the title to this study of the Jewish
response to radical theology and suggests a basic ironic tenor underlying the
topic. As the third motto to this chapter indicates, though generally attributed to
Friedrich Nietzsche, the proclamation of God’s death, at least as cultural event

(to paraphrase Rubenstein), should more properly be attributed to that Jewish
German writer turned convert to Christianity while retaining his allegiance to
Spinozan pantheism, Heinrich Heine. Heine’s writing, of course, significantly
influenced Nietzsche’s. Theologians tend, however, to neglect this origin of
theothanatology and prefer to locate its beginnings in the thought of Friedrich
Nietzsche, son of a Christian clergyman. We refer to the relationship between
Heine’s and Nietzsche’s thought not so as to deny the Christocentric bias of
radical theology, but rather to indicate that there is a tension between Jewish and
Christian thought that is present even in the very origins of the concept of the
death of God. That tension is manifest in the history of the death of God
movement. In 1966, William Hamilton wrote hopefully that radical theology
might lead to the establishment “of some theological rules for a Christian, or at
least a Protestant, dialogue with the Jew—both secular and believing.”'* By 1970
both Rubenstein and Altizer continued to engage in dialogue, yet Rubenstein
referred to the eschatological basis of radical theology as “a sickness,” while
Altizer spoke of “a theological chasm” between Christian and Jew.^
This study does not attempt to present a comprehensive catalogue of how
Jewish thought responds to the challenge of radical theology. It does, however,
attempt to explore the tensions that characterize the Jewish response and to
understand what informs those tensions. We address the following issues: (1)
Why is there a Jewish response at all? (2) How does Jewish thought either
assimilate elements of radical theology or respond to them with the resources of
Jewish theological tradition, especially in light of the question of evil and
theodicy? and (3) To what extent does the radical Christian insistence on
eschatology create a barrier to dialogue with a distinctly Jewish radical
theology?
THE CHALLENGE TO JEWISH THEOLOGY

In his discussion of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s reflections on secularization and
Christianity in a world come of age, William Hamilton describes a “new era”
that must, he argues along with Bonhoeffer, radically transform religion and
render traditional doctrines and tenets of faith a nostalgic longing for historical
conditions that are irrevocably past: “It is the world of the radically accelerating
pace of secularization, of the increasing unimportance and powerlessness of
religion, of the end of special privilege for religious men and religious
institutions. It is the world of the new forms of technology, of the mass media,
of great danger and great experiment—what Kenneth Boulding calls the post-
civilized world.”^ Hamilton, along with other theologians associated with the
death of God movement, argues that the rapid and inexorable progress of
secularization removes the basis for traditional religious life. While one must
recall Eugene Borowitz’s admonition that Bonhoeffer clearly believes in God,
radical theology’s extrapolation of Bonhoeffer’s insight that modem humanity
can get along quite well without relying on God to mean that God’s death is not
merely a cultural but for all intents and purposes a metaphysical event, must
Jewish Responses to Radical Theology 113
shake the foundations of committed theism—whether Christian or Jewish/

Radical theology may proclaim God’s death, but it also, to use Altizer’s
terminology, argues that the incarnational reality of God’s kenosis alone
provides a basis for the understanding of redemption in the arena of history. In
this, radical theology remains radically Christocentric by insisting that
redemption is only possible at the cost of God’s dying into history and
humanity.^ Can Jewish thought ignore this claim which is in essence
supersessionist? Must Judaism not, for example, respond to Altizer’s
pronouncement: “As conceived [the death of God as historical event] only the
Christian can truly know the death of God because only the Christian is open to
the forward movement of history and the Word. Only a new Adam who is
liberated from the old creation of the past can celebrate the presence of the Word
in a new world that negates all previous forms of faith.”^ Unchallenged, such
assertions would render Jewish theism a vestigial faith ill equipped to meet the
demands of the modern era. Thus the Jewish response is concerned to
demonstrate that an authentically Jewish response to the secular age exists and is
distinct from the radical Christian stance.
Already in 1968, Arthur Lelyveld responded to radical theology’s
Christocentric bias. Averring that “Judaism cannot survive in a religionless or
post-humanistic era,” he argued that the movement’s influence requires Judaism
to speak a prophetic word to Christianity.^^ In essence, Lelyveld fears the moral
and ethical relativism that must, he argues, result from the death of God. If
Judaism lacks the resources to reply to the inexorable secularization of modem
life, then it must surrender to what Lelyveld regards as the inevitable
consequence of radical theology: nihilism.’^ Arguing that for the Jew, the issue
is not metaphysics but history, in 1967 Eugene Borowitz demonstrated
eloquently that the Shoah must inform the Jewish response to the proclamation
of God’s death:
Because of the evils which happened to our people, we cry out: there is no God! But if
there is no God, why should such evils not happen? In our time secularity has lost its
power to provide us with a powerful standard of right and wrong. Then why should
people not be killed? . . . And there we are, caught and locked in a paradox. If such
terrible things happen, how can we believe in God? But if we don’t believe in Him as the
standard which transcends our human, bestial, animal inclinations and requires us to be
more than we would like to be, then why do we protest so much? We protest because we
know we are more than what we see ourselves to be, that we must ever strive to be more
than what we are, that human history cannot be allowed to go on as it has. God requires
this of us, even that we quarrel with Him.*^
Both Lelyveld and Borowitz affirm the validity of Jewish tradition and
experience in the face of the crisis deriving from Auschwitz and the secularism
of the post-Holocaust age: only by affirming faith in God can humanity avoid
the despair of nihilism and uphold the belief in the sanctity and meaning of life.
A most compelling response to the question of the death of God is given by
Emil Fackenheim, whose struggle with these theological issues was in some
ways sparked by the Six Day War in 1967 and has continued to the present. In
1968 Fackenheim affirmed that “the Jew may not authentically think about
religion, or its modern crisis, or the goods and ills of the modem-secular world
as though Auschwitz had not happened.”'^ Or, in Irving Greenberg’s words, “No
statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible
in the presence of the burning children,”Thus Fackenheim’s response to “the
death of God” is framed by the question of theodicy as it must be formulated in
the post-Holocaust era.
Fackenheim begins by describing the impact of modern science upon
religion and religious belief. The legitimacy of religious belief would have to be
questioned, on this account, even if belief were still widespread. For according
to death of God philosophy, “modern science has demythologized the world of
fact, thus disposing of the need for a God-hypothesis.”^^ “God” cannot refer to
an objective being involved—or uninvolved—in the course of human history.
Rather, God is either a projection of the human spirit, a la Feuerbach, or a mere
expression of human emotion. Belief in God is thus reduced to a statement about
the believer rather than an affirmation about the world. Fackenheim understands
this view, expressed by Paul van Buren in The Secular Meaning of the Gospel
(1963), to be a complete capitulation to secularism.
The very conceptual bases upon which van Buren’s surrender to secularism
are founded, however, are, according to Fackenheim, misconstrued. That the
Hebrew Bible asserts the existence of God as a hypothesis necessary for the
explanation of fact is simply incorrect. The very first verse in Genesis, “In the
beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” states that God exists, not
that God’s existence is proven or provable in order to comprehend the world that
God brings into being. Fackenheim’s main philosophical objection to van Buren
is that he begs the central question from the outset. In Fackenheim’s words:
“Empiricism does not understand faith as faith understands itself. In its own
self-understanding, faith is a committed confrontation of the world, not a
detached observation; and in this confrontation ... it is receptive of a God who
speaks in and through the world.”
While van Buren’s account of the gospel abandons the God of Genesis for
an atheistic humanism, Thomas J. J. Altizer’s The Gospel of Christian Atheism
(1966) goes a step further, asserting and willing the death of the biblical God,
which results in a form of idolatry. Fackenheim inveighs against the Altizer
volume (as well as against Radical Theology and the Death of God, co-authored
with William Hamilton) as manifesting a “lack of intellectual discipline” and
“an inadequate grasp of Hegel” as well as of Nietzsche. “What responsible
secular philosopher of the age of Auschwitz and Hiroshima,” he queries, “would
utter the Nietzsche-style demand to abandon all those moral laws which the
Christian church has sanctioned?” That Camus and Sartre focus upon human
responsibility makes Altizer’s legitimation of moral abandonment by
proclaiming the death of God even more surprising.
It is fascinating that Fackenheim attributes the valorization of the death of
God to a deep anti-Jewish element in Christianity. How is this? Altizer affirms
that God’s death must be willed because God “is the transcendent enemy of the
fullness and the passion of man’s life in the world.”*^ Fackenheim interprets this
to be an identification of “the transcendent enemy” with the God of the Hebrew

Bible, patently Other and not incarnate, completely divine and not divinity made
flesh. Fackenheim’s response, in brief, is that the God of Genesis is neither
hostile to human freedom nor the cause of human repression; rather God creates
humankind out of love and with full freedom and responsibility.
Fackenheim, together with Lelyveld and Borowitz, declares the viability of
Jewish theology in the face of death of God theology. The mitzvoth, or
commandments, Fackenheim calls a sign of “grace,” an indication that God
thereby establishes and increases the possibilities for human freedom, not
lessens or contracts human opportunities. Here Fackenheim refers, it seems, to
Paul’s appeal to the Gentiles through rejection of the mitzvoth and Kant’s
Enlightenment critique of heteronomous law.
HESTER PANIM AND THE DIVINE-HUMAN RELATIONSHIP
Eugene Borowitz, Arthur Lelyveld, Norman Lamm, and Emil Fackenheim

represent a current that seeks to respond to the proclamation of the death of God
by reasserting the relevance of Jewish faith and Jewish law as meaningful
responses to secularism. To affirm Jewish law and thus the Jewish people as the
people of the covenant, as the recipients of revelation at Sinai, means
repudiating the death of God as metaphysical event. If God is dead, then the
covenant is no longer binding and the foundation of Jewish religious identity has
crumbled. However, even as normative Jewish thought affirms the covenant
with a living God, it stands before the terrible problem of history and theodicy
suggested by Borowitz: Where was God in Auschwitz? How can a living God
tolerate the existence of radical evil in the universe? Lamm, Lelyveld, and
Fackenheim place the observance of the mitzvoth in the context of faith in a deus
absconditus, thus preserving faith in a living but hidden God and assimilating
elements of death of God theology to Jewish categories.
This current in the Jewish response to radical theology does not, however,
naively assert the relevance of faith and halakhah without taking into account
the pervasive secularism that, at least in part, gave rise to death of God theology
in the first place. J. B. Soloveitchik in his complex study of the contemporary
faith experience affirms that “the untranslatability of the complete faith
experience is due not to the weakness, but to the greatness of the latter.” These
thinkers accept a version of the proclamation of the death of God. Like Richard
L. Rubenstein, whose own thinking is much more iconoclastic than theirs, they
admit that the concept of the death of God as a cultural event possesses at least a
degree of validity, but they reject Altizer’s basic tenet “that the death of God is
an historical event, that God has died in our cosmos, in our history, in our
Existenz^^^ Eugene Borowitz, for example, differentiates between sociological
theories of God’s death and metaphysical ones. In the former belong theologians
like Gabriel Vahanian, John Robinson, Paul van Buren, Harvey Cox, and
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose ideas, as we have seen, are seminal for both the
sociological and metaphysical schools of radical theology.^^ Essentially,
Borowitz’s summary of Vahanian’s position can serve to describe the grounds
on which the sociological or cultural event of God’s death proves acceptable:

“Modern man no longer believes in God, nor feels he needs to. The greatest
proof is that he has no desire even to disprove His existence. When atheism and
theism are equally boring then indeed God is dead.”
The death of God, when so construed, describes not a cosmic reality but
rather a diminished human capacity for experiencing the sacred (or, from the
point of view of some radical theologians, a liberation from the need to
experience the sacred). As a result, Horowitz (and Lelyveld as well) can affirm
the work of theologians like Cox and van Buren who interrogate the nature of
the language and metaphors used by cultures and individuals to describe the
experience of the sacred. At the risk of grossly oversimplifying this strand of
thought, one could argue that normative Judaism can cautiously accept the
sociological theory of God’s death and assimilate it to a kind of pastoral
concern. If God’s death is a cultural crisis, then normative Judaism must
understand the underlying trends of secularization and their effect on the modem
mentality if it is to be prepared to respond with metaphors, symbols, and forms
of prayer that address contemporary concerns and the contemporary inability to
believe. God is alive but we have forgotten how to seek him.
Norman Lamm’s response to radical theology perhaps best exemplifies this
sense of pastoral concern. According to Lamm, human beings should expect
periods of history when God seems to be distant. The modem era reflects, he
asserts, hester panim, the hiding of the face of God. Stating that during periods
when God’s face is hidden “. . . He will abandon us to the impersonal and
inexorable forces of nature and history,” Lamm reiterates the injunction from
Deuteronomy. There God states that hester panim is a divine punishment:
“And I will surely hide my face in that day on account of all the evil which they
have done, because they have turned to other gods (Deuteronomy 31:18, RSV).”
Lamm interprets the passage to mean that the modem secular and technological
era results in a diminution of belief This hiddenness can, however, be reversed.
According to Lamm, it is within the power of each human being to establish a
relationship with God that lifts the veil of hiddenness: “This is the answer of
Judaism: If we want God to be close to us, we must first get ourselves close to
Him. If we want God to be personal with us, we must get personal with Him.
That indeed is the overarching purpose of Judaism—its prayer, its law, its study
of Torah. God is not dead for us, unless we are first dead to Him. He is very
much alive to those who are alive to Him. As we will be to Him, so will He be
to us.”^^ Lamm’s argument, however, fails to come to terms with the question of
evil: Why should God have remained hidden during the Shoah?
Among Jewish theologians who respond to radical theology from the
traditional resources of normative Judaism, Lelyveld and Fackenheim argue
perhaps most eloquently that the death of God movement fails to frame its
understanding of God adequately when it insists on God’s death as a
metaphysical event. Observance of the mitzvoth is, Lelyveld argues, a spiritual
and social discipline that, by seeking God’s presence, makes God present in the
world:
This “sense of presence” is both a major characteristic and a primary motivation in

Judaism. The chief carrier of the concept and the term most frequently used to point to
the reality that it strives to apprehend is kadosh, usually and inadequately described as
“holy,” and the derivative concepts of kiddush hashem and kiddush hachaim: that is
making the divine presence manifest through human action and infusing life with
the divine presence. This is the primary vocation of man, according to Jewish
thought: to insure that presence in the world and in human relationships [emphasis
added].” Those who are looking for a “new language” and a “new style” adequate to the
this-worldly demands of our age would do well to take a close look at this idea of
28
kedushah.
For Lelyveld and Fackenheim, then, Judaism must formulate the question of
atheism differently. The Christian concern with individual salvation and belief
cannot occupy a central position in Jewish thought.
Lelyveld regards the Christian God as “the God who gives”; he sees the
Jewish God as “the God who demands.”^^ In this Lelyveld reasserts the need to
meet the demands of the mitzvoth as an act of redemption that requires human
action, whereas Christian theology, he contends, requires belief in Christ as the
Son given by the Father for the salvation of the world: “The central stress of
Christianity has been on the doctrine of John: ‘God so loved the world that he
gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have
eternal life. . . . not to condemn the world but that the world might be saved
through him.’ The central stress of Judaism has been: ‘Thou shalt be unto me a
kingdom of priests.’ ‘Choose life!’ and ‘Thus saith the Lord . . .’ The covenant
obligation that is central in Judaism calls upon the Jew to be God’s co-worker in
perfecting the world—not to be saved but to participate in the redemption of
mankind.”^® Thus, in the end, the Jew must choose loyalty to the covenant
because it alone provides the possibility of ultimate meaning. To deny God is to
deny the covenant and thus to condemn the world to nihilism and despair.
Auschwitz, as symbol of radical evil, poses the greatest problem for
theologians who respond to the death of God movement by affirming the
covenant. Lamm, for example, bases his rebuttal on the doctrine of hester panim
yet does not mention the Shoah. Borowitz, lecturing in June 1967, contends that
humanity must uphold belief in God if there is to be a transcendent standard by
which we may condemn the Holocaust. In that same lecture, however, he gives
voice to his belief in God by praising him for the Israeli victory in the Six Day
War: “Without having explanation, without proper words, without knowing the
technique of God’s work in history, we have nonetheless seen His hand these
past three days. We make no great claims to wisdom and try to make no
demands upon the Almighty, having found Him absent so often in recent
history, but it is necessary to say, even to our own surprise, we have seen God
make Himself manifest through the work of our brothers. We have seen the
covenant between God and Israel once strong and operative. Why? We do not
know. We do not know, but we know. How, we do not know; but now we know,
we know.” If the Israeli victory is a sign of the covenant, must believers not
ask with renewed fervor where God was during the Holocaust? The issue of
God’s absence or hiddenness during the Shoah will continue to trouble
responses to radical theology that rely on an affirmation of the covenant.
Emil Fackenheim’s formulation of the 614th commandment is arguably the

most compelling affirmation of the covenant in the post-Holocaust era.
Nevertheless, the 614th commandment itself suggests that the affirmation of the
covenant by thinkers such as Lamm, Lelyveld, and Borowitz fails to
acknowledge Auschwitz as a permanent rupture with all previous history.
Indeed, to support his vision of faithfulness to the mitzvoth and the election of
Israel as a nation of priests, Lelyveld must relativize the Holocaust: “But
Auschwitz is a new phenomenon only in a quantitative and technological sense.
One must say this with care, with reverence for life, with respect for those who
died—and with bitterness. But it is true.” Fackenheim’s 614th commandment
denies the very possibility of any such relativism: “It was forbidden to allow the
posthumous destruction of the Jewish faith in Man, God, and—this even for the
most secularist of Jews—that hope without which a Jew cannot live, the hope
which is the gift of Judaism to all humanity. To deny Hitler the posthumous
victory of destroying this faith was a moral-religious commandment. I no longer
hesitated to call it the 614th commandment: for post-Holocaust Judaism it would
be as binding as if it had been revealed to Moses at Mount Sinai. The long-
avoided but not accepted task, then, did not destroy my Jewish thought but
revolutionized it.”
In his study of religion and atrocity, Marc Ellis highlights the novum of
Fackenheim’s thought. In a sense, the 614th commandment supersedes the
revelation at Sinai. Judaism may not perish: but the loyalty to Judaism no longer
issues solely from allegiance to God’s command but also from the history of the
suffering of the victims of the Holocaust: “If the Jewish vocation begins with the
commanding voice of Sinai, it continues today with the commanding voice of
Auschwitz. Fackenheim understands this 614th commandment as issuing from
victims of Auschwitz themselves. If the origin of the Jewish community is found
in response to the voice of God, contemporary Jews must listen to their own
*2 A
voices, the tears and cries that arise from the dead.” The original 613 mitzvoth
remain valid but must now be considered in light of the 614th; they no longer
stand alone. The shadow of Auschwitz may obscure the face of God but does
not diminish the human obligation to God’s command. Fackenheim views
Auschwitz as a rupture with all previous Jewish history. Ellis thus affirms this
aspect of Fackenheim’s thought as calling for a theological response capable of
encompassing modern Jewish experience. While Fackenheim’s thought discerns
a possibility of upholding the covenant as the fundamental characteristic of
Jewish history and faith, Richard Rubenstein argues that post-Holocaust Jewish
thought must relinquish faith in the covenant as it has been traditionally
understood.
HOLY NOTHINGNESS THEOLOGY: TRAGEDY AS RESPONSE TO

RADICAL THEOLOGY
As stated in the introduction to this chapter, Richard L. Rubenstein is

undoubtedly the most outspoken Jewish voice sympathetic to death of God
theology. Other Jewish theologians maintain some sense of belief in a
transcendent God of history while referring to the hiddenness of God or, to use
Martin Buber’s term, the eclipse of God in the modern era. They refute the
premise of radical theology: God is not dead, they aver, but hidden; God is not
dead, but the human capacity for experiencing God has atrophied in a secular
era. Rubenstein also repudiates the death of God as a cosmic event. The point
warrants repetition: for Rubenstein the death of God is a cultural condition. In a
recent Festschrift honoring Rubenstein, the editors (Betty Rogers Rubenstein
and Michael Berenbaum) preface Thomas J. J. Altizer’s commentary on
Rubenstein’s theology with the following admonition: “This essay represents the
thinking of a radical Christian theologian and does not accurately reflect Richard
Rubenstein’s theology. . . . Rubenstein never wrote or spoke of the death of God
but only of the “time of the death of God.” He intended to speak of a condition
of man and not a condition of God. Rubenstein [sic] thought does not imply
deicide, as Altizer suggests, but was a comment on the absence of God in
contemporary culture. This distinction is an important divergence between
Altizer and Rubenstein.Though closely associated with death of God
theology, Rubenstein’s radicalism is distinctly Jewish and iconoclastic, but not
atheistic.
The story describing the origins of Rubenstein’s radicalism is familiar to
those who study his work. Visiting with Probst Heinrich Gruber of the
Evangelical Church of West and East Berlin in 1961, Rubenstein hears the
sympathetic German clergyman Gruber speak of Hitler in nearly biblical
terms—this despite Gruber’s opposition to Nazism. According to Gruber, Hitler,
like Nebuchadnezzar, was God’s instrument to chastise an unfaithful Israel. Of
that conversation, Rubenstein writes: “The interview pushed me to a theological
point of no return: If I truly believed in God as the omnipotent author of the
historical drama and in Israel as His Chosen People, I had no choice but to
accept Dean Gruber’s conclusion that Hitler unwittingly acted as God’s agent in
committing six million Jews to slaughter. I could not believe in such a God, nor
could I believe in Israel as the Chosen People of God after Auschwitz.” Faced
with what he regarded as the impossibility of reconciling the doctrine of Divine
Election with the suffering endured by the millions during the Shoah,
Rubenstein rejected the concept that the covenant establishes Israel as God’s
Elect?*
This strategy, however, necessitates a different vision of divine nature.
Rubenstein’s repudiation of the doctrine of election led him to question concepts
of a transcendent deity. Rubenstein criticizes doctrines that continue to attribute
to the Jewish people a crucial role in the history of redemption. Such theological
pandeterminism can lead either to relativizing Auschwitz (cf. Lelyveld’s
assertion that the Holocaust is only quantitatively different from other
persecutions and pogroms) or, as Rubenstein has shown, to the acceptance in
traditional thought of Auschwitz as warranted, if severe, punishment.
Liberated of the need to reconcile the Holocaust with the doctrine of election,
Rubenstein affirms that Judaism is a religion and culture like any other religion
and culture: “. . . Jews are a people like any other whose religion and culture
were shaped so as to make it possible for them to cope with their very distinctive
history and location among the peoples of the world. Put differently, I have
consistently rejected the idea that the existence of the Jewish people has any
superordinate significance whatsoever.”"^^ The God of History has essentially
died in Rubenstein’s theology.'^' Only in that regard may it be accurate to speak
of his theology in terms of the death of God. History is not in his thought a
drama of redemption, as it is in Christianity with its soteriological emphasis. The
deep structure underlying Rubenstein’s thought should rather be compared to
tragedy.
By abandoning the concept of history as a drama of redemption,
Rubenstein allows a God of nature to supersede the God of history. The tragic
metaphor underlying his theology expresses not the unfolding of humanity’s
salvation but rather a sense of what Nietzsche referred to as Greek pessimism.
Nietzsche bases his theory of tragedy on the silenische Weisheit. When Midas
forces the daemon Silenus to reveal what is best for humankind, Silenus replies:
“That which is best of all is for you absolutely unattainable: not to have been
A O
born, not to be, to be nothing. Second best for you is—to die soon.” The
Silenian Wisdom expresses the primordial unity of life in nature as a negation of
individual existence. Nature both gives rise to individual forms and entities yet
limits them. The pain of existence, Silenus’s words suggest, arises from the
human yearning away from death and the denial of life’s fmitude, bounded on
all sides by the infinite nothingness from which life and individuality themselves
originate.
Rubenstein echoes these motifs. He affirms the tragic sense of life as the
very basis of all religious life:
We concur in this vision [Rubenstein speaks here of Camus and of a first-century

apostate Jew, Elisha ben Abuyah, but he might well have spoken of Nietzsche in similar
language] of an absurd and ultimately tragic cosmos. We do so because we share with
Camus a greater feeling for human solidarity than the Prophetic-Deuteronomic view of
God and history can possibly allow. We part company only with Camus’s atheism. It is
precisely because human existence is tragic, ultimately hopeless, and without meaning
that we treasure our religious community. It is our community of ultimate concern. . . .
We have turned away from the God of History to share the tragic fatalities of the God of
Nature [emphasis in the original].
For Rubenstein, religious traditions alone can convey insight into the
nothingness underlying all existence. He writes: “Nothing so humbles and
teaches us our true station as do our [religious] traditions. Here we see all human
projects cast into their proper perspective. We intuit the insurmountable irony of
existence.”"^"^ Thus Rubenstein discerns a role for religion in the modern era—it
counters the technological and ideological hubris that blinds modern humanity,
but he argues for a radically different vision of the Jewish God.
In a sense, Rubenstein’s thought revives the synthesis of Greek and Jewish
elements that formed Kabbalah. Of course, Rubenstein acknowledges his debt to
Lurianic Kabbalah and employs its vocabulary of God’s tsimtsum to help
elucidate his own Holy Nothingness Theology:
According to Luria, the world came into being when God created it ex nihilo, out of
nothingness. This nothingness was not exterior to God. God created the world out of his
own nothingness through an act of self-diminution not unrelated to the idea of God’s
kenotic emptying of himself to which Dr. Altizer alludes. Whatever has been created out
of God’s nothingness is caught in a dialectic dilemma from which it can never escape.
Insofar as it is aware of its true origin in the divine nothingness—no-thing-ness would be
better than nothingness—it yearns to return to its source. Insofar as it desires to maintain
its separate identity, it is in alienation, separated from God’s nothingness. According to
Luria, all existence is in an unavoidable dialectic conflict between the tendency toward
self-maintenance and the yearning to return to the nothingness that is our true origin and
our real essence. Eventually, of course, God’s nothingness will be victorious [emphasis in
the original]
Furthermore, Rubenstein explains, the introduction of negation suggested in

Kabbalah accounts for evil: evil inheres in creation as a result of negation, but
creation is not evil."^^ As his valorization of Holy Nothingness indicates,
Rubenstein’s theology is the tragic wisdom of Qoheleth: “All go to one place;
all are from the dust and all turn to dust again” (Ecclesiastes 3:20, RSV). In this,
Rubenstein’s theology also parallels the Nietzschean teaching of eternal
recurrence, which Nietzsche referred to as a European form of Buddhism that
denied all teleology and was thus the most scientific form of belief—in other
words, the form of belief best adapted to the era of the death of God."^^
The deep structure of tragedy that shapes Rubenstein’s response to both
death of God theology and the Holocaust provides a framework for
understanding religion as a response to evil. Again, he views insight into the
tragic character of existence as liberation:
To say that God and nature are at one with each other, that they are alive and life
engendering, is to affirm the demonic side not alone in us but in divinity as well. . . . The
very character of life makes the divine source a ceaseless self-striving in which the
unending negativities and affirmations of existence follow one another and in which
individual forms of life are expressions of the self-construction and self-separation of
divinity. Life on life is thrust forward in divinity’s ceaseless project to enjoy its hour and
then to become the consumed substance of other life. Such a view of divinity makes
tragedy and destmction inescapable and ineradicable. Paradoxically, though it ascribes an
ontic quality to evil, it possesses far more compassion than the terrible view that makes of
evil a free act of will. In place of a moral philistinism that draws small comfort from the
knowledge that others are more guilty, it affirms, but also endows with proportion and
measure, both the loving and the demonic in man."^^
If the philosophical tenor of this statement is difficult, another reference

suggests more clearly the poignant irony of Rubenstein’s stance. In his critique
of Altizer, he cites the conclusion to Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel The Family
Moskat. Fearing the German occupation of Warsaw, one brother assures
another: “’I believe in perfect faith that the Messiah will come speedily in our
days.’ The other brother is astonished and says: ‘How can you say this?’ The
first replies: ‘Surely he will come. Death is the messiah.’ There is only one way
out of the ironies and ambiguities of the human condition: return to God’s
nothingness, the radical non-being of God and death.”"^^ The insistence on the
tragic nature of divine reality and on the divine nature of eternal recurrence must
lead to an impasse in the dialogue with Christian radical theology with its
eschatological emphasis.
Steven T. Katz is the most outspoken critic of what he calls Rubenstein’s
adoption of pagan naturalism. “In place of the Lord of History,” Rubenstein
writes, “punishing man for attempting to be what he was created to be, the
divinities of nature will celebrate with mankind.”^^ Nature will conquer and
incorporate history rather than history mastering nature. Future hope and distant
utopias will not determine the paths taken by individuals but rather a full-hearted
devotion to the here and now, to being in the present. Katz’s critique of this
notion is complex and we wish to emphasize only two of his points. First, nature
is morally neutral and it is odd to find it designated as a possible partner in
human relationships. Such a designation bespeaks idolatry. Second, Nazism
itself grew out of a mystical worship of the deities of nature, a devotion in which
human conscience, with its notions of good and evil, was to be forever
transvalued and transformed.^^ Should we not, Katz asks, be much more
cautious, perhaps even fearful of the dangers inherent in such romantic
idealizations of nature? In addition, despite Rubenstein’s stripped-down rabbinic
theology, it seems somewhat extraneous to state that a theology that is already
intensely focused on the here and now must be even more so centered. Such a
demand makes sense only if the aim is to remove entirely the anchor to ideals
which supersede the here and now. Indeed, as we have seen, this is the basis of
Rubenstein’s post-Holocaust theology. Katz’s incisive critique nonetheless
recognizes the provocative challenges Rubenstein forces us to confront.
ONLY CHRISTIANS MAKE GOOD ATHEISTS: THE PROBLEM OF

THE ESCHATON
William Hamilton’s hope, cited at the beginning of this chapter, that

radical theology might create the foundation for dialogue between Christian and
Jewish theologians has not been entirely fulfilled. As this survey indicates, much
of the Jewish response has attempted to refute the premise of death of God
theology while demonstrating that traditional Jewish theology provides adequate
answers to the crisis of secularization and alienation confronting modem culture.
To be sure, dispute and refutation represent important conversation between
Jewish and Christian traditions, and the radical theologians may learn much
from this type of response. Nonetheless, Eugene Borowitz’s assertion, “I do not
see much for Judaism to learn from the current Protestant discussions, though a
new style for communication of old truths would be useful,” suggests that the
dialogue has yet to overcome significant obstacles that inhere perhaps in
tensions between Judaism and Christianity that are either unresolved or cannot
be resolved.^^ The intensity of that tension is clearest in Rubenstein’s admonition
that “eschatology is a sickness.” Radical theology insists on the centrality of
eschatology and of the Christ as the Messiah: “While the Jew awaits a Messiah
of the future, the Christian knows that the Messiah-Son of Man has come in
Jesus Christ, that his coming was a real and decisive event, and that he will be
present with us even to the coming of the end of the world. Despite the fact that
we can no longer know him in the images of the Christian tradition, we know
that he is present in his Word, and that Word is a Word reconciling the world to
itself.””
Can there be a dialogue about the death of God? Whether that dialogue is
to take place with theologians whose ideas are more easily reconciled with
normative Judaism—represented here primarily by Lamm, Lelyveld, Borowitz,
and Fackenheim—or with the more radical, perhaps even heretical, theology of
Rubenstein, the Christian belief in the Messiah as the kenotic incarnation of a
dead God into history must represent a stumbling block.
If the deep structure of Rubenstein’s thought is tragic, then radical
theology denies the possibility of tragedy as the primary structure of the
universe and persists within the paradigm of Heilsgeschichte—history as the
unfolding of the story of redemption. It may be that one cannot avoid the
conclusion that radical theology can sacrifice God because it affirms the
Messiah. For radical theology as expressed by Altizer, the incarnation remains a
central historical and theological event that makes it impossible to believe in a
transcendent God; God has died into history. Instead the incarnation—as real
and ongoing event—is the promise and possibility of the ultimate transformation
and redemption of the world in the here and now. Thus the negation of the
transcendent God engenders a dialectic that results in the Hegelian Aufhebung of
the fall:
When the Incarnation is understood as a descent into the concrete, or as a movement from
a primordial and unfallen sacred to an actually fallen profane, then it cannot be conceived
as not affecting a supposedly eternal Godhead, or as being a static or unchanging
extension of the God who is the transcendence of Being. Nor for that matter can an
understanding of the Incarnation as a process of repetition allow the Incarnation to be
contained to a once and for all event of the past. A theology which remains bound to the
language and imagery of the New Testament must refuse the very thesis that the
Incarnation is a forward movement or process. An authentically kenotic movement of
“incarnation” must be a continual process of Spirit becoming flesh, of Eternity becoming
time, or of the sacred becoming profane.^"^
And thus Altizer concludes: “Consequently, a consistently Christian dialectical

understanding of the sacred must finally look forward to the resurrection of the
profane in a transfigured and thus finally sacred form.”^^ Hope in the final
redemption of history, in God’s death as the very basis for the final
transformation and reconciliation of sacred and profane, is foreign to
Rubenstein’s understanding of religious tradition as providing the framework for
coming to terms with the finality of nature’s cycle of death and new life, of
eternal recurrence.
Thus Rubenstein ironically refers to himself and Altizer as Pharisee and
Christian. In response to Altizer, he writes:
The Pharisees and early Christians saw the problem in terms of whether God had sent his
Anointed, thus beginning a new era of hope for mankind. One group said, “Yes, he has
come. The new aeon has begun.” The other said, “No, he has not. Things are no different
today than they were yesterday.” Today, both Dr. Altizer and I stand in the time of the
“death of God,” and we find that Christian and Jew are still arguing about the new being
and the new aeon. The Christian hopefully proclaims the new aeon, and the Jew sadly
says: “Would that it were so. Would that there were less evil. Would that there were less
human vice. Would that the complexities of the passions we are now free to express were
less tragic than they are. Unfortunately, the complex tragic nature of man continues
unchanged.”^^
The affirmation of the eschaton, of the end of the old and the beginning of the
new aeon, continues to scandalize the dialogue between Christians and Jews
who express sympathy for the insights of radical theology. We must ask, then,
whether this scandal does not in the final analysis derive from the different
destinies of Jew and Christian in the modem era, whether the stumbling block to
the dialogue lies in the divergent historical experience of Christian and Jew in
this century.
Whereas radical Christian theology may proclaim the new aeon, Jewish
theology must live in the rupture with all previous history that is Auschwitz.
Ellis points to the dilemma:
The hermeneutical dilemma of how to speak about God, or rather how to construct a
systematic theology about God—a foreign concept to Judaism—now moves to the center
[in the post-Holocaust era]. Living in God’s presence, one is faced with the question of
whether there is a human form of language adequate to conceptualize and understand
Auschwitz. In [George] Steiner’s words, one hears echoes of Rubenstein and Wiesel: “In
what conceivable language can a Jew speak to God after Auschwitz, in what conceivable
language can he speak about God?” The language of prayer is also suspect; can it be
anything but cynical, accusatory, or despairing? Speech about God is problematic, for
what forms can it take, what plausibility can it establish after Auschwitz?^
As Ellis’s comments suggest, a dialogue about God’s death or presence, if it is

to be authentic, must for Judaism also encompass a dialogue about Auschwitz.
To be sure, some Christian theologians have faced the challenges inherent in a
post-Holocaust theological conversation between Christians and Jews. Among
them are Clark M. Williamson and John T. Pawlikowski, both of whom
recognize and delineate the complexities of that issue. Pawlikowski, for
example, writes, “The challenge confronting theology after the Holocaust is to
discover a way whereby the new sense of human freedom that is continuing to
dawn might be affirmed but channeled into constructive rather than humanly
destructive purposes.” Williamson focuses on a different perspective. “The
church’s anti-Judaism,” he writes, “reflects and reinforces anti-Jewish practice. .
. . Post-Shoah theology takes as its task critical reflection on the historical anti-
Jewish praxis of the church, and to liberate the church’s witness and theology
from its inherited adversiis Judaeos ideology.”^^ Death of God theologians may
have much to learn from these beginnings.
Can a radically eschatological movement enter into dialogue about
Auschwitz without relinquishing the belief in the eschaton that makes its
proclamation of the death of God possible? Recently, Altizer offered the
following interpretation of Rubenstein’s Holy Nothingness Theology: “. . . for it
is the Jew alone who knows God and only God, that very unmediated encounter
with God, an encounter only possible for the Elect, is an encounter with death
itself, a naked and unmediated death which is the death of the Holocaust. But
that death was suffered only by the Elect, for even the Gentile who met it did so
because they were linked with Jews in being ultimately ‘other.’”^® Such
language verges on a reaffirmation of the doctrine of divine election that
Rubenstein explicitly rejects: radical theology can encompass the Shoah as a
necessary act in the drama of divine redemption. We have only to wait for the
final curtain to see that those who died in the camps and at the hands of the
death squads were not the victims of murder but God’s holy martyrs.
In the light of such statements, one can understand more clearly
Rubenstein’s admonition: “If you become post-Christian, choose pagan
hopelessness rather than the false illusion of apocalyptic hope.”^* Does the only
alternative exist in choosing between the tragic structure of Rubenstein’s
theology or the eschatology expressed by the radical theologians? Harold Bloom
argues that gnosis, with its concept of an alien, demonic God, is the only
credible theological response to the post-Holocaust era:
You don’t have to be Jewish to be oppressed by the enormity of the German slaughter of
European Jewry, but if you have lost your four grandparents and most of your uncles,
aunts and cousins in the Holocaust, then you will be a touch more sensitive to the
normative Judaic, Christian, and Muslim teachings that God is both all-powerful and
benign. That gives one a God who tolerated the Holocaust, and such a God is simply
intolerable, since he must either be crazy or irresponsible if his benign omnipotence was
compatible with the death camps. A cosmos this obscene, a nature that contains
schizophrenia is acceptable to the monotheistic orthodox as part of the “mystery of
faith.”^^
Altizer had called Gnosticism, with its demonization of history, the danger
inherent in radical theology: Altizer’s vision of the redemptive transformation of
history, of “the forward movement or process” of Incarnation, is, he may have
recognized, threatened by the “obscene, schizophrenic cosmos” which Bloom
sees manifest in the concrete historical reality of Auschwitz. Auschwitz may
preclude the eschaton. If a possibility exists that eschatological hope will not
inhibit dialogue between Jewish and Christian theologians, it must perhaps learn
from the philosophy of Ernst Bloch. Bloch draws upon Marxist, biblical, and
gnostic and kabbalistic sources to develop an eschatology that seeks to
understand religion as a protest against suffering and in this sense a desire to
negate the history of oppression and suffering that characterizes the human
tragedy. His heterodox marriage of theological and Marxian thought has much
to offer radical Christian theology.^"* Bloch’s thought reflects his Jewish heritage
and yet demonstrates affinities for the gnostic denunciation of history
According to Bloch, the eschaton cannot be rhapsodized as mystical union or
redemption of history. Instead, the promise of the eschaton calls us to bring
tools of historical, anthropological, and sociological analysis to bear on our
history and present so as to understand what inhibits, to use Bloch’s
terminology, our “Exodus from Egypt.” History must not, his thought suggests.
be rationalized as Heilsgeschichte but must be engaged by scientific and

scholarly analysis that unmasks structures of oppression that prevent the
fulfillment of human hopes for dignity and freedom expressed so eloquently in
religious symbols betrayed by concrete history. The call to involvement in this
aeon rather than the rhapsodic celebration of the arrival of the new aeon seems
to reflect emphases of Jewish thought and may provide an avenue for Jews and
Christians to consider together an eschatological approach that can come to
terms with the continued presence of evil in history without resorting to
theodicy.
George Steiner writes of the Holocaust: “With the botched attempt to kill
God and the very nearly successful attempt to kill those who had ‘invented’
Him, civilization entered, precisely as Nietzsche had foretold, ‘on night and
more night.Fackenheim’s description of Auschwitz as rupture echoes
Steiner’s images of despair: “. . . we are faced with the possibility that the
Holocaust may be a radical rupture in history—and that among things ruptured
may be not just this or that way of philosophical or theological thinking, but
thought [emphasis in the original].
In the end, it is precisely the understanding of and experience of history
that separates radical Christian and Jewish theologians. The rupture to thought
that we name Auschwitz undermines Jewish-Christian dialogue on radical
theology. It is premature, even twenty some years after the appearance of the
death of God movement, to expect authentic dialogue on the death of God. First,
Christians must establish what role Auschwitz and the Shoah will play in
Christian theology and determine whether Christian soteriology can account for
the Shoah and yet remain authentically Christian.
NOTES
* “//wr ein Atheist kann ein guter Christ sein, nur ein Christ kann ein guter Atheist
seinC Ernst Bloch, Atheismus im Christentum (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1968),
15. This and all subsequent translations of German in the text of the chapter are our own.
Thomas J. J. Altizer, “Response to Richard L. Rubenstein,” in. The Theology of Altizer:
Critique and Response, ed. John B. Cobb, Jr. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1970),
142. “Hort Ihr das Glockchen klingeln? Kniet nieder—Man bringt die Sakramente einem
sterbenden GotteC Heinrich Heine, Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in
Deutschland, Heinrich Heine Werke, Bd. IV (Frankfurt/TVI: Insel Verlag, 1968), 120.
1. Richard L. Rubenstein, “Thomas Altizer’s Apocalypse,” in John B. Cobb, Jr.,
ed.. The Theology of Altizer, 129.
2. Ibid., 128.
3. Cf Sander Gilman, “Heine: Nietzsche’s Other” and “Heine, Nietzsche, and the
Idea of the Jew: The Other and the Self,” in Inscribing the Other (Lincoln, NE and
London: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 99-143. Note as well that Altizer and
Hamilton do list Heine among the exemplars of “Literary expressions of radical religious
thought.” Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of
God (Indianapolis, New York, Kansas City: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 194.
4. William Hamilton, “American Theology, Radicalism, and the Death of God,” in
Radical Theology and the Death of God, by Altizer and Hamilton, 6.
5. Rubenstein, “Altizer’s Apocalypse,” 133; Altizer, “Response to Rubenstein,”
145.
6. William Hamilton, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” in Radical Theology and the Death of

7. Eugene Borowitz, Facing Up to It (n. p.: Reform Synagogues of Great Britain,
1967), 5. Cf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Widerstand und Ergebung, Briefe und Auzeichnungen
aus der Haft (Gutersloh: Kaiser Taschenbuiicher, 1997), 169-174. Hamilton refers
primarily to Bonhoeffer’s letter of June 8, 1944, which radical theology regards as a
legitimation of its own more extreme vision. A different approach is formulated by Emil
Fackenheim in “A Jew Looks at Christianity and Secularist Liberalism” and “On the
Self-Exposure of Faith to the Modern-Secular World,” in Quest for Past and Future:
Essays in Jewish Theology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968). These themes
are further developed in Fackenheim’s later writings.
8. For example, Altizer asserts: “‘God is dead’ are words that may only truly be
spoken by the Christian, not by the religious Christian who is bound to an eternal and
unmoving Word, but by the radical Christian who speaks in response to an Incarnate
Word that empties itself of Spirit so as to appear and exist as flesh.’” Thomas J. J.
Altizer, “The Sacred and the Profane,” in Radical Theology and the Death of God, by
Altizer and Hamilton, 154.
9. Thomas J. J. Altizer, “Word and History,” Radical Theology and the Death of
10. Arthur J. Lely veld. Atheism Is Dead: A Jewish Response to Radical Theolog}>
(Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1968), viii.
11. See, for example, Lelyveld, Atheism is Dead, 29.
12. Borowitz, Facing Up to It, 16.
13. Fackenheim, “On the Self-Exposure of Faith,” 281.
14. Irving Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity, and
Modernity after the Holocaust,” in Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era?, ed. Eva
Fleischner (New York: Ktav, 1974), 23.
15. Fackenheim, “On the Self-Exposure of Faith,” Quest, 291. Of course,
Fackenheim is referring to those concepts of Bonhoeffer’s which are foundational to
radical theology, especially as expressed by Altizer and Hamilton. Consult note 7 above.
16. Ibid., 293.
17. Ibid., 295-96. Fackenheim is the author of The Religious Dimension of Hegel’s
Thought and an expert in nineteenth-century German philosophy.
18. Fackenheim, 298.
19. Thomas J. J. Altizer, as quoted by Fackenheim in “On the Self-Exposure of
Faith,” 299.
20. See J. B. Soloveitchik, “The Lonely Man of Faith,” Tradition: A Journal of
Orthodox Thought, 17, 2 (summer 1965): 5-65.
21. Ibid., 62. Soloveitchik is here similar to William James in asserting that “only
peripheral elements of the act of faith can be projected on a cognitive pragmatic
background.”
22. Thomas J. J. Altizer, “America and the Future of Theology,” in Radical
Theology and the Death of God, by Altizer and Hamilton, 11.
23. See, for example, two essays by Eugene Borowitz: “Facing Up to It” and “God-
Is-Dead Theology,” in The Meaning of the Death of God: Protestant, Jewish and
Catholic Scholars Explore Atheistic Theology, ed. Bernard Murchland (New York:
Random House, 1967), 92-108.
24. Borowitz, “God-Is-Dead Theology,” 95.
25. Norman Lamm, “G-d Is Alive: A Jewish Reaction to a Recent Theological
Controversy,” Jew/5/z Life 33 (March/April 1966): 16-23. This article was revised and
reprinted in Radical Theology: Phase Two, Essays in a Continuing Discussion, ed. C.W.
Christian and Glenn R. Wittig (Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1967),
163-73. Page citations listed in the endnotes below will refer to this reprinted edition.
Modem discussions of hester panim upon which Lamm draws include Martin Buber’s
Eclipse of God (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957); and Joseph B. Soloveitchiks’s
essays “Kol Dodi Dofek,” “The World Is Not Forsaken” and “Destiny Not Causality.”
These essays can be found in the following volumes: Soloveitchik, Divrei Hegot
Veharakha (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem: World Zionist Organization, 1981), 9-55; Abraham
R. Besdin, ed.. Reflections of the Rav (Jerusalem, World Zionist Organization, 1979), 31-
40; Abraham R. Besdin, ed., Man of Faith in the Modem World: Reflections of the Rav,
vol. 2 (New York: Ktav, 1989), 70-73. Soloveitchik defines hester panim “as a temporary
and partial reversion of the world to its pre-yetzirah state,” when chaos prevailed and
God’s moral law, as we know it, was inoperative, 36.
26. Lamm, “G-d is Alive,” in Radical Theology, ed. Christian and Wittig, 166.
27. Ibid., 173.
28. Lelyveld, Atheism is Dead, 131.
29. Ibid., 158.
30. Ibid.
31. Borowitz, Facing Up to It, 17.
32. Lelyveld, Atheism is Dead, 172.
33. Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish
Thought (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), xix-xx. The
issue of the uniqueness vs. the universality of the Holocaust is significant in Holocaust
studies. See, for instance, Tehuda Bauer, The Holocaust in Historical Perspective
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978); Steven T. Katz, “The 'Unique’
Intentionality of the Holocausf ’ in Post-Holocaust Dialogues: Critical Studies in Modern
Jewish Thought (New York and London: New York University Press, 1983); and, also by
Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context, vol. 1 (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994).
34. Marc H. Ellis, Unholy Alliance: Religion and Atrocity in Our Time
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 22-23.
35. Editor’s note to Thomas J. J. Altizer, “God as Holy Nothingness,” in What
Kind of God? Essays in Honor of Richard L. Rubenstein, ed. Betty Rogers Rubenstein
and Michael Berenbaum (Lanham, New York, London: University Press of America,
1995), 34.
36. Richard L. Rubenstein, “The Dean and the Chosen People,” in After Auschwitz:
History, Theology and Contemporary Judaism, 2nd ed. (Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1992), 10.
37. Ibid., 3 ^
38. For an excellent discussion of this concept, see Daniel H. Frank, ed., A People
Apart: Chosenness and Ritual in Jewish Philosophical Thought (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1993), especially chapters 1-3. Also, see the classical commentaries
on Amos 3:2 and Exodus 19:6; as well as Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith:
Judaism as Corporeal Election (New York: Seabury Press, 1983); and Judith Plaskow,
“Chosenness, Hierarchy and Difference,” in Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a
Feminist Perspective (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990).
39. Cf, for example, Richard L. Rubenstein, “Covenant and Divinity, Part 1,” in
After Auschwitz, 161. There Rubenstein writes: “No example of mass murder other than
the Holocaust has raised so directly or so insistently the question of whether it was an
expression of Heilsgeschichte, that is, God’s providential involvement in history.”
40. Ibid., 172-73.
41. Cf, for example, Richard L. Rubenstein, “The Rebirth of Israel in
Contemporary Jewish Theology,” \r\ After Auschwitz, 201-09.
42. “Das Allerbeste ist fur dich ganzlich unerreichbar: nicht geboren zu sein, nicht
zu sein, nichts zu sein. Das Zweitbeste ist fiir dich—bald zu sterben.” Friedrich
Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragodie oder Griechentum und Pessimismus, Werke /, ed.
Karl Schlechta (Frankfurt/M, Berlin, Wien: Ullstein), 30.
43. Richard L. Rubenstein, “Person and Myth in the Judeo-Christian Encounter,” in
After Auschwitz, 19. Elisha ben Abuyah is discussed in Milton Steinberg, As a Driven
Leaf (New York: Behrman House, 1939); and J. B. Soloveitchik, Five Addresses
(Jerusalem: Tal Orot Institute, 1988), 193-99.
44. Rubenstein, “Person and Myth,” 27. Cf. Also, Soloveitchik, “The Lonely Man
of Faith.”
45. Rubenstein, “Altizer’s Apocalypse,” 129-30. One should also note that
Rubenstein’s theology also explores the rich parallels of the Lurianic paradigm to
psychoanalysis, especially to Freud’s insights concerning Eros and Thanatos. Perhaps an
ironic tribute to the doctrine of eternal recurrence, Rubenstein’s insistence that Holy
Nothingness Theology not be considered atheistic parallels Heinrich Heine’s insistence
that Spinoza’s pantheism, to which Heine was devoted, not be considered a denial of
God’s existence. Cf, for example, Heine, Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie
in Deutschland, 95.
46. Rubenstein, “Altizer’s Apocalypse,” 130.
47. “Es ist die wissenschaftlichste aller moglichen Hypothesen. Wir leugnen
SchluB-Ziele: hatte das Dasein eins, so rniiCte es erreicht sein.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Aus
dem Nachlafi der Achtzigerjahre, Werke IV, 445-853. Cf., as well, Rubenstein, “The
Rebirth of Israel,” in After Auschwitz, 208-09. There Rubenstein refers to the Greek
concept of eternal recurrence.
48. Rubenstein, “The Rebirth of Israel,” 208. Note as well that Altizer sees the
death of God and the centrality of the incarnation as necessary steps for making Christian
theology responsive to this-worldly social and political concerns. In contrast, the notions
of holiness within the world and tikkun olam, the obligation to repair the world, are
central to rabbinic thinking. See Thomas W. Ogletree, The Death of God Controversy
(Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1966), 104-8.
50. Richard L. Rubenstein, in the 1966 edition oi After Auschwitz, quoted by Katz,
Post-Holocaust Dialogues, 194.
51. Or, as George Steiner states, “The holocaust is a reflex ... of natural sensory
consciousness, of instinctual polytheistic and animist needs.” George Steiner, In
Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes toward the Definition of Culture (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1970), 41.
52. Borowitz, “God-Is-Dead Theology,” 106.
53. Altizer, “Word and History,” 132.
54. Altizer, “The Sacred and the Profane,” 152-53.
55. Ibid., 154.
56. Rubenstein, “Altizer’s Apocalypse,” 128-29.
57. Ellis, Unholy Alliance, 29.
58. John T. Pawlikowski, “Christian Theological Concerns after the Holocaust,” in
Visions of the Other: Jewish and Christian Theologians Assess the Dialogue, ed. Eugene
J. Fisher (New York: Paulist Press, 1994), 31. Cf Soloveitchik, “The Lonely Man of
Faith.”
59. Clark M. Williamson, A Guest in the House of Israel: Post-Holocaust Church
Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), 7.
60 Altizer, “God as Holy Nothingness,” 355.
62. Harold Bloom, Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and
Resurrection (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), 23-24.
63. See especially Bloch’s critique of the vulgarization of Marx’s (in)famous

statement that “[die Religion] ist das Opium des Volkes.” Bloch, Atheismus im
Christentum, 87-98. Bloch’s analysis of that statement provides as well a provocative
counterpoint to Fackenheim’s criticism of Marxian insights in To Mend the World. Cf.,
for example, 126-27 of that study.
64. Cf., for example, Bloch, Atheismus im Christentum, 321-24.
65. Of course, any future work in this direction must take into account
Fackenheim’s criticism of Bloch’s “post-Jewish” thought as offering an unauthentic basis
for post-Holocaust Jewish thought. See, for example, Fackenheim, To Mend the World,
194.
66. Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle, 46-47.
67. Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 193.
Epilogue
John K. Roth and Stephen R. Haynes
Some dismissed it as a 1960s fad, and the controversy swirling around radical
theology diminished, but not as quickly as it came. The death of God movement
made a more than ephemeral mark when it interrupted the American Dream.
Breaking into an American scene in which the optimism of Great Society hopes
collided with Vietnam nightmares and nagging domestic anxiety embodied in
the assassinations that took the brothers Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.,
radical theology raised uncomfortable questions, even when its voices waxed
eloquent about the future’s bright promise. Those questions had not been raised
in quite the same way before, and the level of discomfort they produced was
directly proportional to the Holocaust awareness that informed them.
In one way or another, even when they did not admit it openly, each of the
four major radical theologians—Altizer, Hamilton, Rubenstein, and van
Buren—also found that the death of God theme led them ever deeper into a
confrontation with the Holocaust. Many of their interpreters and critics have had
similar experiences. Links between the death of God movement and the
Holocaust, perhaps more apparent in retrospect than they were in the 1960s, do
much to account for the fact that the questions raised by radical theology have
not gone away and ought not to do so any time soon.
Disturbing questions—some prompted explicitly by the radical
theologians, others raised by their interpreters and critics—remain the most
important legacy of the death of God movement. Using a focus that is at once
retrospective and future oriented, each contribution to this book highlights some
of the questions. Thus, as a way of summing up what has gone before, and as a
way of pointing to the agenda that radical theology continues to set not only for
American religious thought but for theological and cultural reflection in every
time and place as the twentieth-first century arrives, here is a recapitulating
digest of twelve challenging issues—one taken in order from each of the book’s
132 Epilogue
major essays—that the death of God movement continues to raise. Implicitly, if

not explicitly, the Holocaust’s desolation resounds in them all.
1. From Time (April 8, 1966): Can a basic premise of much religious faith—’’the
existence of a personal God, who created the world and sustains it with his
love”—remain credible and persuasive?
2. From Thomas J. J. Altizer: “Is theology, or genuine theology, now an actual

possibility?”
3. From William Hamilton; What is the relation between monotheism and genocide?
4. From Paul M. van Buren: How will Christianity be affected if the Holocaust should be
on the Christian conseience “until the end of time”?
5. From Richard L. Rubenstein: After Auschwitz, how should the traditional religious
doctrines of Covenant and Election be interpreted?
6. From Edith Wyschogrod: In a post-Holocaust world, what texts should be called

“sacred,” and how should they be read, handled, and interpreted?
7. From Thomas A. Idinopulos: If God died at Auschwitz, did God’s human creation die
there, too?
8. From John K. Roth: If Elie Wiesel is right to say that everything must be revised “in
the shadow of Birkenau,” a principle that the death of God movement seems to
share, how might radical theology itself need to be reevaluated?
9. From John J. Carey; What are the implications of the death of God movement for
institutional religion?
10. From Hubert G. Locke. What, if anything, does radical theology offer to minority
groups—African Americans, for example—whose faith in a providential God has
helped them to cope with oppression and to achieve liberation from it?
11. From Gershon Greenberg: How might an even deeper confrontation with the
Holocaust, particularly through a careful reading of wartime Jewish religious
thought, affect the content and future of radical theology when it speaks about the
death of God or about our living in the time of the death of God?
12. From Timothy A. Bennett and Rochelle Millen: In post-Holocaust circumstances,

what could it mean—especially but not only for Jews and Christians—to speak of
the end of history’?
If the death of God movement’s most important legacy lives in questions

such as these, then that legacy’s vitality or demise depends on whether the
questions themselves continue to provoke the reflection they deserve. As this
book suggests, it is crucial for this question asking to persist because the quality
of human life depends on the quality of the questions we ask and on the ways in
which good questions govern our lives individually and collectively. The
Epilogue 133
questions raised by the death of God movement, especially insofar as those

questions are Holocaust-related, are good questions. They are about the
meanings, values, and purposes of our lives. They are about the things that
matter most. If the questioning legacy of radical theology remains alive and
well, human life in years to come may at least be less at risk than it has been in
the Holocaust-scarred world of the twentieth century.
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Index
Abe, Masao, 45 Bar Mitzvah, 65
Abraham, 36, 58 Barmen Declaration, 60
Adorno, Theodore, 27 Barth, Karl, 11, 13, 19, 35, 37, 49, 57,
After Auschwitz iûhQnsitin), 50, 65, 80, 83
66, 69, 70, 71, 82 Beauvoir, Simone de, 4
Akeda, 39, 100-106 Beckett, Samuel, 4
Alfred, William, 5 Bennett, Timothy A., 132
Altizer, Thomas J. J., 14n.l, 44-51, 57, Berenbaum, Michael, 119
61, 64-66, 67, 70-73, 80, 82-87, Bergen-Belsen, 64
94-95, 99, 111-14, 119, 121,123, Berger, Peter, 81
125, 131 Berlin, 44
America and the Future of Theology Beyond God the Father (Daly), 85
(Emory University Conference, Birkenau, 75, 132
1965), 44, 48, 83 Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (West),
American Academy of Religion, 79 27
American Dream, 131 Black theology, 86, 92, 93
American Holocaust (Stannard), 26 Black Theology and Black Power
Anhalt, Edward, 6 (Cone), 85
Anselm, 83 Blake, William, 19, 82, 83
Aquinas, Thomas, 14 Bloch, Ernst, 111, 125
Archduke Ferdinand, 27 Bogomils, 27
Arendt, Hannah, 63 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 4, 10, 37, 58, 59,
Arnold, Matthew, 82 71,73, 80,81,83,91, 112, 115
Aten, 7 Borowitz, Eugene, 95, 112, 113, 115-
Augustine, 21 18, 122
Auschwitz, 37, 44, 45, 46, 61, 63, 64, Bosnia, 27
69, 95, 99, 113-15, 117-19, 123 Botschka, Eliezer, 101
Axis Rule in Occupied Europe Boulding, Kenneth, 112
(Lemkin), 25 Breuer, Yitshak, 100
Ayn Sof 44 Brown, Robert McAfee, 80
Browning, Christopher, 59
144 Index
Broyde, Michael, 61 Dionysius, 58

Brunner, Emil, 80, 83
Buber, Martin, 18, 81, 119 Ebeling, Gerhard, 12
Buddha, 10 Eckardt, Roy A., 73
Buddhism, 45, 47 Eclipse of God, The (Buber), 81
Bultmann, Rudolf, 13, 19, 80, 83 Edwards, David, 9
Eichmann, Adolf, 63
Callahan, Dan, 85 Elberg, Simha, 100-107
Calvin, John, 35 Election, 43, 44
Camus, Albert, 10, 87, 114 Eliade, Mircea, 87
Carey, John J., 94, 132 Elijah, 105
Castle, The (Kafka), 21 Eliot, T. S., 57, 87
Chardin, Teilhard de, 86 Ellis, MarcH., 118, 123
Chartres, 28 Emmaus, 39
Christian Century, The, 36 Enlightenment, 8, 93
Civil rights movement, 4 Eschaton, 124, 125
Cobb, John, Jr., 11, 80, 85, 86, 87 Exodus, 40
Coffin, William Sloane, 10 Exodus (from Egypt), 93, 125
Coincidentia oppositorum, 17, 65, 66 Exploration unto God (Robinson), 81
Columbus, Christopher, 26
Cone, James, 80, 85, 88 Fackenheim, Emil, 74, 113-18, 126
Confessing Church, 71 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 65, 82, 114
Courage to Be, The (Tillich), 81 First Corinthians, 35, 38, 39
Covenant, 38, 40, 43 First National Conference on Radical
Cox, Harvey, 8, 12, 45, 80, 81, 94, 95, Theology and the Death of God
115, 116 (University of Michigan, 1966),
Crossan, Johhn Dominic, 80 64
Crucifixion, 22, 26, 47, 62 Forell, George, 9
Cunning of History, The (Rubenstein), Fourth Maccabees, 39
51 Freud, Sigmund, 19, 81
Friedlander, Saul, 63
Dachau, 13
Daly, Mary, 85 Genesis, 40, 114, 115
Darwin, Charles, 8 Genocide, 25, 26, 27, 28, 32-33, 43, 57,
Death of the Beloved Son, The 59, 66, 71-73
(Levenson), 39 Gerst, Yehuda, Leb, 99
Death of God, 10, 17, 19, 20-22, 36, Gilkey, Langdon, 3, 5, 12, 13, 80, 82,
44, 46, 50, 57-58, 64-66, 69, 72, 85, 93, 95
74, 79, 80, 82, 83-86, 88-89,91, Gnosticism, 22
92, 94, 96, 99, 111-126, 131-33 Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah, 25, 51, 59
Death of God, The (Vahanian), 7 Gospel of Christian Atheism, The
Deicide, 46, 47, 52 (Altizer), 65,71,85, 87, 114
Deism, 8 Graham, Billy, 5
Der Sturmer, 63 Great Schism, 27
Descartes, Rene, 8 Great Society, 131
Descent into Hell (Altizer), 71, 85, 87 Green, Gerald, 25
Deuteronomy, 65, 116 Greenberg, Gershon, 132
Dialectic of the Sacred (Altizer), 17 Greenberg, Irving, 114
Divine Infanticide, 46 Griffin, Merv, 65
Dostoevski, Fyodor, 82 Gruber, Heinrich, 44, 119
Dulles, Avery, 14 Gutierrez, Gustavo, 80, 85, 88
Index 145
Kant, Immanuel, 59, 115

Halakhah, 115 Katz, Steven T., 122
Hamilton, William, 5, 10, 45, 58-61, Kierkegaard, Soren, 4, 38
64, 65,70,71,73,82-85, 87, 112, King, Martin Luther, Jr., 84, 91, 96,
122, 131 131
Handspicker, Jerry, 12 Kliever, Lonnie, 86
Hard Day’s Night, A (Beatles film), 45 Kook, Avraham Yitshak Ha’kohen,
Harlap, Ya’akov Moshe, 100-107 100, 104, 105
Hamack, Adolf von, 80 Kosovo, 26, 27
Haynes, Stephen, 43
Hebrews (Epistle to), 39 Lamm, Norman, 115, 116, 117, 118
Hegel, 19, 44, 49, 57, 73, 114, 123 Last Trial, The (Spiegel), 39
Heidegger, Martin, 11 Le Chambon-sur Lignon, 60
Heilsgeschichte, 46, 99, 100, 104, 107, Lelyveld, Arthur, 113, 115, 116-19
123, 126 Lemkin, Rafael, 25, 59
Heine, Heinrich, 82, 111, 112 Letters and Papers from Prison
Herzog, Frederick, 88 (Bonhoeffer), 81
Heschel, Abraham Joshua, 10 Levenson, Jon, 39
Hester panim, 116, 117 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 4
Hilberg, Raul, 64, 67 Liberation theology, 85
Hillel, 67, 82 Lincoln, C. Eric, 96
Hiroshima, 95, 114 Lindbeck, George, 80
Hispaniola, 26 Littell, Franklin H., 73
Hitler, Adolf, 26, 37, 38, 47, 48, 50, 74, Locke, Hubert G., 132
103, 104, 118, 119 Lodz ghetto, 99
Holocaust, 18-22, 25, 35, 37, 38, 40, Logical Positivism, 35
43-52, 58-62, 63-64, 66-67, 69, Luke, 39
70, 71-74, 82-83, 93-94, 99-107, Luria, Isaac, 44
113, 117, 118, 119, 121, 124-26,
131-33 Macquarrie, John, 10, 11, 86
Holy War, 51 Mainz, 38
Honest to God (Robinson), 81 Mamiya, Lawrence, 96
Manicheanism, 21
Ice, Jackson L., 94 Manifest destiny, 17, 18
Idinopulos, Thomas, 132 Marty, Martin, 5, 86
Isaac, 36, 39 Marx, Karl, 8, 19, 81, 82
Israel, 50, 65, 67 Matthew, 13
McCleary, William, 6
Jacob, 36 Mein Kampf (Hitler), 59
James, William, 35 Melville, Herman, 21, 83, 87
Jenkins, David, 9 Messianism, 48-50, 57
Jerusalem (Blake), 19 Midrash, 39
Jesus, 8 Millen, Rochelle, 132
Job, 37, 96 Mitzvoth, 115-18
John XXIIl (Pope), 4 Moby Dick (Melville), 21
Josephus, 39 Mojzes, Paul, 27
Joshua, 8 Moltmann, Jurgen, 86
Monotheism, 30
Kabbalah, 44, 120, 125 Moses, 7, 118
Kafka, Franz, 17, 18, 21 Mt. Moriah, 101, 102
Kahler, Eric, 63 Murray, John Courtney, 4, 9
146 Index
My Brother Paul (Rubenstein), 46 Ramsey, Paul, 4

Myrdal, Gunnar, 92 Religionless Christianity, 65, 66, 81
Resurrection, 19, 26, 47, 62
Napoleon, 8 Revelation, 57, 58
National Council of Churches, 5 Robinson, John A. T., 11, 80, 81, 84,
Nebuchadnezzar, 48, 119 115
Neusner, Jacob, 18 Rokeah, Aharon, 100
New Apocalypse, The (Altizer), 85, 87 Rose, Stephen, 12
New Catholic Catechism, 19 Roth, John K., 132
New Essence of Christianity, The Rubenstein, Betty Rogers, 119
(Hamilton), 65, 84, 87 Rubenstein, Richard, 18, 19, 61, 64, 65,
Newton, Isaac, 8 67, 69, 70-73, 80, 82-85, 95, 99,
Niebuhr, H. Richard, 80, 83 111, 112, 119-123, 125, 131
Niebuhr, Reinhold, 80, 83 Ruether, Rosemary R., 80
Niemoller, Martin, 103 Rushdie, Salman, 28
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3, 4, 28, 57, 58,
65, 73,81,83,86, 111, 112, 114, Sarajevo, 26, 27
120, 121, 126 Sama, Yehezkel, 100
Noise of Solemn Assemblies, The Satan, 21
(Berger), 81, 87 Sayre, Francis B., 6
Novak, Michael, 6 Schillebeeckx, Edward, 8
Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 82
Ogden, Schubert, 11 Schussler-Fiorenza, Elisabeth, 80
Oklahoma City, 27 Scott, Nathan, 6
Ordinary Men (Browning), 59 Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), 4,
Oriental Mysticism and Biblical 46
Eschatology (Altizer), 87 Secular City, The (Cox), 8, 81, 94, 95
Secular Meaning of the Gospel, The
Paul (Saint), 38, 39 (van Buren), 35, 36, 71, 82, 114
Pawlikowski, John, 124 Seven Stanzas at Easter (Updike), 11
Peter (Cephas), 39 Shakespeare, 28
Philosophical Investigations (van Shanghai, 101
Buren), 35 Shapria, Yehoshua Tsevi Michal, 104
Pike, James A., 11 Shattered Spectrum, The (Kliever), 86
Postmodernism, 22, 80 Shaw, Graham, 29
Prophets, 65 Sheol, 29
Proudhon, Joseph, 8 Shoah, 25,37, 113, 116, 117, 119, 124,
Psalm 139, 28-30 125, 126
Pseudo-Philo, 39 Shpira, Kalonymous Kalman, 99
Puritanism, 17, 58 Shraggai, Shloino Zalman, 100
Pythagoras, 58 Silone, Ignazio, 87
Sinai, 115, 118
Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes), 121 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 121
Six Day War, 113
Radical Theology, 3, 25, 28, 31, 44, 46, Smith, Roland Gregor, 84
48, 65, 69, 70, 74, 79-89,91-96, Socrates, 10
111-126 Soloveitchik, J. B., 115
Radical Theology and the Death of God Sontag, Frederick, 70
(Hamilton and Altizer), 65 Spain, 38
Rahner, Karl, 12 Spiegel, Shalom, 39
Ramsey, Ian, 9, 12 Spinoza, Baruch, 112
Index 147
Stannard, David, 26
Steiner, George, 126 Vahanian, Gabriel, 7, 14, 80, 86, 115
Stendahl, Krister, 9 van Buren, Paul, 14n.l, 70, 71, 73, 80,
Streicher, Julius, 63 82, 83, 114, 115, 116, 131
Sunyata, 45 Vatican, 51
Vietnam, 10, 27, 28, 84, 94, 131
Talmud, 105
Temple, William, 80 Warsaw, 45, 99, 121
Teylditahl, Issakhar, 100 Wasserman, Elhanan, 100
Theodicy, 113, 114, 126 Watergate, 27
Theology of Altizer, The (Cobb), 85, Weil, Simone, 83
87 West, Rebecca, 27
Theology of Liberation (Gutierrez), 85 Whitehead, Albert North, 11
Theology Today, 87 Wieman, Henry Nelson, 80
“Thursday’s Child” (Hamilton), 87 Wiesel, Elie, 25, 59, 60, 63, 69, 74, 132
Tillich, Paul, 11, 12, 45, 80, 81, 83 Williamson, Clark M., 124
Time, 3, 70, 82, 132 Wilmore, Gayraud, 92
Tokyo, 27 Witness-people, 43, 48
Tolstoy, Leo, 82 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 35
Torah, 37, 100, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106 World Council of Churches, 12
Tracy, David, 80 World War I, 20
Treblinka, 64, 101, 102 Wyschogrod, Edith, 132
Trial, The (Kafka), 21
Triumphalism, 93 Yahweh, 7, 28
Tsimrman, Hayim Israel, 100 Yeats, W. B., 87
Twentieth-Century Religious Thought Yom Kippur, 65
(Macquarrie), 86 Youngman, Henny, 65
Two Types of Faith (Buber), 18 Yugoslavia, 26, 51
Ubermensch, 65 Zahmt, Heinz, 3

United Nations, 26, 32 Zalman, Eliyahu ben Shlomo, 104
Updike, John, 11 Zarathustra, 58
Urgrund, 44, 46, 47, 49 Zeus, 7
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About the Editors
and Contributors
Editors
STEPHEN R. HAYNES is Albert B. Curry Chair of Religious Studies at

Rhodes College. He has previously written or edited four books, including
Prospects for Post-Holocaust Theology (1991), Reluctant Witnesses: Jews and
the Christian Imagination (1995) and Holocaust Education and the Church-
Related College: Restoring Ruptured Traditions (1997). Haynes is co-chair of
the American Academy of Religion’s “Religion, Holocaust, and Genocide
Group,” has served on the Regional Advisory Council of Facing History and
Ourselves since 1993, and is a member of the Tennessee Holocaust
Commission. Haynes is also Director of “The Rhodes Consultation on the
Future of the Church-Related College,” a project funded by Lilly Endowment
Incorporated.
JOHN K. ROTH is the Russell K. Pitzer Professor of Philosophy at

Claremont McKenna College. He has published more than twenty-five books
and hundreds of articles, many of them focused on the Holocaust. In 1988 he
was named U.S. Professor of the Year by the Council for Advancement and
Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of
Teaching. Roth has served as a member of the United States Holocaust
Memorial Council, and he is the author of the text for the permanent exhibition
at Holocaust Museum Houston, which opened in that Texas city in 1996.
Contributors
THOMAS J. J. ALTIZER was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1927

and grew up in Charleston, West Virginia. After attending St. John’s College in
Annapolis, Maryland, and briefly serving in the U. S. Army, he studied at the
University of Chicago, receiving his Ph.D. (in the History of Religions) in 1955.
He has taught at Wabash College, Emory University, and the State University of
New York at Stony Brook, from which he retired in 1995. Altizer’s primary
project has been to seek a theology realizing a coincidentia oppositorum
between the sacred and the profane, or faith and a uniquely modern atheism.
150 About the Editors and Contributors
TIMOTHY A. BENNETT is Associate Professor of German at Wittenberg

University where he teaches courses in German language, literature, and culture.
He studied at the Johns Hopkins University, where he received his M.A. in 1980
and his Ph.D. in 1985, and at the Westfalische Wilhelms-Universitat Munster.
He is co-editor along with Rochelle L. Millen of New Perspectives on the
Holocaust: A Guide for Teachers and Scholars (1996). Currently he is working
on a project on Stefan Heym’s revision of the legend of the Wandering Jew.
JOHN J. CAREY is Wallace M. Alston Professor of Bible and Religion at

Agnes Scott College. He was educated at Yale University (B.D. and M.S.T.) and
Duke University (A.B. and Ph.D.). He taught at Florida State University for
twenty-six years, serving as chair of the Department of Religion, director of
Graduate Studies in Religion, and chair of the Program in Peace Studies. In
1986 he was appointed the third president of Warren Wilson College in
Asheville, North Carolina. Carey has authored or edited ten books and nearly 60
scholarly articles, and serves as a trustee of Presbyterian College.
GERSHON GREENBERG teaches in the Department of Philosophy and

Religion at American University. His current area of research is the history of
Jewish religious thought through the Holocaust. His published studies probe
Orthodox responses to the catastrophe from the schools of Hasidism, Musar,
Agudat Israel, and Mizrahi, as well as Jewish wartime responses to Christianity.
He has taught the history of modern Jewish religious thought in the Departments
of Jewish Thought and Philosophy at Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Hebrew Universities
and in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Oxford University.
WILLIAM HAMILTON was born in Evanston, Illinois. His educational

journeys took him to Oberlin College (with a detour in the U. S. Navy, 1942-
46), Princeton University, Union Theological Seminary, and the University of
St. Andrews. He taught at Hamilton College (no relation), Colgate Rochester
Divinity School, New College (Florida), and at Portland State University in
Oregon. Since 1986 he has been retired in Sarasota, Florida, where he continues
to write and lecture. His most recent book is A Quest for the Post-Historical
Jesus.
THOMAS A. IDINOPULOS is Professor of Religious Studies at Miami

University, Oxford, Ohio. He was educated at the University of Chicago and
Duke University. Among his publications are more than seventy articles on
religion, politics, and literature. His published books include The Erosion of
Faith: An Inquiry into the Origins of the Contemporary Crisis in Religious
Thought (1971). Idinopulos has been a guest speaker in Israel, Jordan, Germany,
Greece, Spain, Great Britain, and Canada, and has lectured at colleges and
universities throughout the United States. In 1986, he received the Associated
Church Press Excellence Award for his writing in Christian Century.
About the Editors and Contributors 151
HUBERT G. LOCKE is John and Marguerite Corbally Professor at the

University of Washington where he holds an appointment on the faculty of the
Graduate School of Public Affairs and the Program in Comparative Religion. He
has edited The German Church Struggle and the Holocaust (with Franklin H.
Littell), The Church Confronts the Nazis, and Exile in the Fatherland: The
Prison Letters of Martin Niemoller. He is also the author of three books,
including The Black Antisemitism Controversy: Views of Black Protestants. He
is associate editor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and serves on the
Education and Church Relations Committees of the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum.
ROCHELLE L. MILLEN is Associate Professor of Religion at Wittenberg

University, where she teaches courses on the Jewish Tradition, Women and
Religion, Judaism and Christianity in the First Century, and Germans and Jews.
She received an M.A. in Philosophy and Ph.D. in Religious Studies from
McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. The author of articles and
book chapters on Martin Buber, Nietzsche, the Holocaust, and women and
Jewish law, she is co-editor of New Perspectives on the Holocaust: A Guide for
Teachers and Scholars (1996). Currently she is working on a manuscript
relating to issues of women and Jewish law.
RICHARD L. RUBENSTEIN is president of the University of Bridgeport

and Professor Emeritus of Religion at Florida State University. His first book.
After Auschwitz (1966; revised 1992) initiated the contemporary debate on the
meaning of the Holocaust in religious thought, both Jewish and Christian. His
other books include The Cunning of History (1975), The Age of Triage (1983),
and Approaches to Auschwitz (1986), co-authored with John K. Roth. In 1994 a
Festschrift in his honor was published under the title What Kind of God?
PAUL M. VAN BUREN was Professor Emeritus of Temple University,

and Honorarprofessor fur Systematische Theologie at the University of
Heidelberg. Until his death in 1998 he lived and wrote on Little Deer Isle in
Maine with his wife, Anne, an art historian. He was educated at Harvard and the
University of Basel. His books include The Secular Meaning of the Gospel
(1963) and the three volumes of A Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality
(1980-1988, reprinted 1995). From 1980 he was a member of the World Council
of Churches’ Consultation on the Church and the Jewish People.
EDITH WYSCHOGROD is the J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Philosophy

and Religious Thought at Rice University. Her areas of specialization are
contemporary continental philosophy, ethics, and comparative philosophy. She
is the author of Emmanuel Levinas, the Problem of Ethical Metaphysics (1974);
Spirit in Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger and Man-Made Mass Death (1985); Saints
and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy (1990) and An Ethics of
Remembering: History, Heterology and the Nameless Other (1998). Her current
152 About the Editors and Contributors
interests include conceptions of the primitive in the philosophy of religion and

the impact of new information technologies upon our theories of knowledge.
Recent Titles in
Contributions to the Study of Religion
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Thomas K. Beecher; Minister to a Changing America, 1824-1900
Myra C. Glenn
From the Unthinkable to the Unavoidable; American Christian and Jewish Scholars
Encounter the Holocaust
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Holocaust Education and the Church-Related College: Restoring Ruptured Traditions
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BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY

Christianity, Tragedy, and Holocaust Literature

Holocaust Education and the Church-Related College: Restoring Ruptured Traditions

Holocaust Scholars Write to the Vatican

Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity During the Holocaust

Contributions to the Study of Religion, Number 55

The death of God movement and the Holocaust : radical theology

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.

Copyright © 1999 by Stephen R. Haynes and John K. Roth

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-47820

First published in 1999

Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881

Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the

Paul M. van Buren

A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver.

Introduction: The Holocaust and the Death of God— xiii

Part One: The Death of God Movement Is Born

1. Toward a Hidden God 3

Part Two: The Death of God and the Holocaust—Reconsidering the

2. The Holocaust and the Theology of the Death of God 17

3. Genocide and the Death of God 25

4. From the Secular to the Scriptural Gospel 35

5. Radical Theology and the Holocaust 43

7. The Holocaust and the Death of God: 63

8. The Holocaust, Genocide, and Radical Theology: 69

Part Three: The Death of God and the Holocaust—Analyzing the

9. The Death of God Movement and 79

10. The Death of God: An African-American Perspective 91

12. Christians and Pharisees: Jewish Responses to Radical Theology 111

About the Editors and Contributors 149

Along with responses to their presentations by other noted scholars. The

Carol Rittner and John K. Roth

Paul M. van Buren, A Theology

had emerged in 1966. As a student of contemporary Protestant theology, Haynes

Rubenstein suggested that Haynes contact William Hamilton and Thomas

The two-and-a-half-hour AAR session in New Orleans turned out to be

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The Death of God Movement Is Born

the postwar religious revival is over, a big majority of believers continue to

“anonymous Christianity” dedicated to civil rights or the Peace Corps. Speaking

HYDROGEN AND CARBON

sophisticated societies of the ancient world, cosmological mystery was proof

THE SECULAR REBELLION

fundamentalists are upset by the latest cosmological theories of astronomers.

TEACH-IN FOR GOD

“If you want to have a well-attended lecture,” says Rabbi Abraham

Make no mistake: if He rose at all

The century’s greatest Protestant theologian, Karl Barth of Switzerland,

proposes, is the source of the mystery hidden in language, or, as he obscurely

“THE KINGDOM IS WITHIN YOU”

The Death of God and the Holocaust:

The Holocaust and the Theology

history itself as an apocalyptic history, and if it is Blake’s Jerusalem that most

2. Martin Buber, Two Types of Faith, trans. Norman P. Goldhawk (London:

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Genocide and the Death of God

acts of persecution or destruction,” including attacks on institutions, culture,

I wish to call attention to two other genocides of special interest because

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