Karen Armstrong - A History of God--The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam

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statements to which Ayer referred work very well for the objective facts of science but are not suitable for less clear-cut
human experiences. Like poetry or music, religion is not amenable to this kind of discourse and verification. More recently
linguistic philosophers such as Antony Flew have argued that it is more rational to find a natural explanation than a religious
one. The old 'proofs' do network: the argument from design falls down because we would need to get outside the system to
see whether natural phenomena are motivated by their own laws or by Something outside. The argument that we are
'contingent' or 'defective' beings proves nothing, since there could always be an explanation that is ultimate but not
supernatural. Flew is less of an optimist than Feuerbach, Marx or the Existentialists. There is no agonising, no heroic
defiance but simply a matter-of-fact commitment to reason and science as the only way forward.
We have seen, however, that not all religious people have looked to 'God' to provide them with an explanation for the
universe. Many have seen the proofs as a red herring. Science has been felt to be threatening only by those Western
Christians who got into the habit of reading the scriptures literally and interpreting doctrines as though they were matters of
objective fact. Scientists and philosophers who find no room for God in their systems are usually referring to the idea of
God as First Cause, a notion eventually abandoned by Jews, Muslims and Greek Orthodox Christians during the Middle
Ages. The more subjective 'God' that they were looking for could not be proven as though it were an objective fact that
was the same for everybody. It could not be located within a physical system of the universe, any more than the Buddhist
nirvana.
More dramatic than the linguistic philosophers were the radical theologians of the 19605 who enthusiastically followed
Nietzsche and proclaimed the death of God. In The Gospel of Christian Atheism (1966), Thomas J. Altizer claimed that the
'good news' of God's death had freed us from slavery to a tyrannical transcendent deity: 'Only by accepting and even willing
the death of God in our experience can we be liberated from a transcendent beyond, an alien beyond which has been
emptied and darkened by God's self-alienation in Christ.' {4} Altizer spoke in mystical terms of the dark night of the soul
and the un of abandonment. The death of God represented the silence that necessary before God could become meaningful
again. All our old conceptions of divinity had to die, before theology could be reborn. We were waiting for a language and a
style in which God could once more become a possibility. Altizer's theology was a passionate dialectic which attacked the
dark God-less world in the hope that it would give up its secret. Paul Van Buren was more precise and logical. In The
Secular Meaning of the Gospel (1963), he claimed that it was no longer possible to speak of God acting in the world.
Science and technology had made the old mythology invalid. Simple faith in the Old Man in the Sky was clearly impossible
but so was the more sophisticated belief of the theologians. We must do without God and hold on to Jesus of Nazareth. The
Gospel was 'the good news of a free man who has set other men free'. Jesus of Nazareth was the liberator, 'the man who
defines what it means to be a man'. {5}
In Radical Theology and the Death of God (1966), William Hamilton noted that this kind of theology had its roots in the
United States, which had always had a Utopian bent and had no great theological tradition of its own. The imagery of the
death of God represented the anomie and barbarism of the technical age which made it impossible to believe in the biblical
God in the old way. Hamilton himself saw this theological mood as a way of being Protestant in the twentieth century.
Luther had left his cloister and gone out into the world. In the same way, he and the other Christian radicals were avowedly
secular men. They had walked away from the sacred place where God used to be to find the man Jesus in their neighbour
out in the world of technology, power, sex, money and the city. Modern secular man did not need God. There was no
God-shaped hole within Hamilton: he would find his own solution in the world.
There is something rather poignant about this buoyant sixties' optimism. Certainly, the radicals were right that the old ways
of speaking about God had become impossible for many people but in the 19903 it is sadly difficult to feel that liberation
and a new dawn are at hand. Even at the time, the Death of God theologians were criticised, since their perspective was
that of the affluent, middle-class, white American. Black theologians such as James H. Cone asked how white people felt
they had the right to affirm freedom through the death of God when they had actually enslaved people in God's name. The
Jewish theologian Richard Rubenstein found it impossible to understand how they could feel so positive about Godless
humanity so soon after the Nazi Holocaust. He himself was convinced that the deity conceived as a God of History had died
for ever in Auschwitz. Yet Rubenstein did not feel that Jews could jettison religion. After the near-extinction of European
Jewry, they must not cut themselves off from their past. The nice, moral God of liberal Judaism was no good, however. It
was too antiseptic; it ignored the tragedy of life and assumed that the world would improve. Rubenstein himself preferred
the God of the Jewish mystics. He was moved by Isaac Luria's doctrine of tsimtsum, God's voluntary act of
self-estrangement which brought the created world into being. All mystics had seen God as a Nothingness from which we
came and to which we will return. Rubenstein agreed with Sartre that life is empty; he saw the God of the mystics as an
imaginative way of entering this human experience of nothingness. {6}