Over Against the God of Death Stands the Death of God
A Radical Theological Preamble To Theology
Over against the God of Death stands the death of God. This is more than mere wordplay. There is no other way for god to function in culture. And, I might add, there is no other way for culture to function, period.
God in Culture
Either god is the almighty Lord who sovereignly rules over all of creation and guides everything to this god’s wonderful purpose. Or god is the weak god who suffers and agonizes with the weak in order to ultimately be snuffed out and killed.
Western Christianity has been prone to side with the powerful god. For obvious reasons. A powerful god, who is the ultimate foundation and origin of being, provides security. But a god who is the origin of being is at the same time the causal origin and with it the ultimate source of authority and thus power. The more such a god is centered in a culture, the more such a god can ultimately be tamed for purposes of wealth and power.
Roman Catholicism and medieval scholasticism, but also Calvinism and evangelicalism, have thrown themselves into the arms of the power-god. As they did so, they created –to the extent this was possible– a monolithic culture and social ethics that was universally applied wherever this god’s power reached. That reach coincided, not surprisingly, with the human power of the people who promoted this god.
Culture’s God
This god proved to be a god of death and destruction. Think of the crusades, the inquisition, the 17th-century religious wars, but let’s also not forget the later, increasingly post-religious, iterations of colonialism, slavery, imperialism, and capitalism.
Any god who is proclaimed as the highest god will eventually conform to the bloodthirsty aspiration of humanity. In the West, it is this vengeful distortion of the god Jesus Christ spoke of, that went incognito at the beginning of modernity only to emerge as the invisible hand behind the modern invention of capitalism.
There are good reasons to believe that our secularized Western societies are at heart a continuation of the Christian tradition of the god of death. Of course, there are good historical reasons to believe this. However, it seems that no culture can do without the religious dimension. Perhaps the separation of the secular and the religious, the natural and the supernatural, the worldly and the religious, that took place in modernity was entirely arbitrary.
Religion may be gone; the religious isn’t. We may no longer believe in deities that look down from a heavenly abode, but the deities are there nonetheless. They have performed their incarnation in our ideologies and our systems. They have become us and yet enslave us. Our culture is ruled by the god of death.
Death of God
There is also a minority report within Western Christianity in which god is portrayed as suffering and dying. This marginal story is most closely aligned with the message and life of Jesus of Nazareth. Interestingly, the aggrandizing claim of Jesus’s identification with the god of Israel created a problem for the imperial aspirations of Christianity in the 4th century. Why? Because Jesus is a suffering god; a god who dies. There goes your claim to understand the order of being or to have anchored your authority over others in the god.
The lesson we should have learned is that if you believe in a sovereign and almighty god you end up with a god of death. There really is no other way. But when you begin and remain with the death of god, there is no big other to be domesticated.
All that remains is the narrative of love poured out for the wellbeing of the world and its creatures. Of course, a dying god is no match for a god of death. To side with the latter means wealth and glory, to side with the former means to lose.
God of Death
The biggest problem for the West is not that god has died, a point so eloquently advanced by the death of god theologians in the 60s. No, the problem is that the gods are indeed alive but that we don’t know it or refuse to acknowledge it. With imagined objectivity derived from science, we have created a world in which religion is expunged and everyone is blind to the religious dimension of all human life.
Looking at poverty and climate change, we ought to have realized long ago that the god of death is alive and kicking and demanding the ultimate sacrifice, namely, that of the planet itself.
This is a radical theological preamble to theology: choose your god wisely. Choosing a dying god makes you a marginal theologian in many ways, but gives you an advance on theory and praxis. Beyond a theological preamble, this is at the same time a tragic assessment of the current state of our Western culture.