Dead end? More from Michael Saunders on ‘death of God’ theology
‘A vulnerable faith can help to build bridges between theist and nontheist Friends.’
Following my ‘Back from the death’ article (8 July), some Friends seem to have missed what I hoped was a positive vision. In one letter, a Friend even derided the phrase ‘death of God’ as a ‘weird oxymoron’. But isn’t this ‘weird oxymoron’ already suggested by Christian language about the cross? ‘We preach Christ crucified’, as Corinthians has it. This does conjure a strange vision: one of a God who became incarnate in the vulnerable body of a Jewish peasant – of a God who was executed. To render this weird oxymoron more palatable, to smooth out its rough edges, is to shy away from the radicality of the Christian proclamation. This proclamation declares ‘that God was indeed fundamentally present in the fate of the crucified Messiah,’ as the Methodist theologian Theodore Jennings puts it, which should encourage acts of loving solidarity with those who are themselves suffering from violent oppression. If I say that there is an atheism – a moment without God – at the heart of Christianity, it is because I take seriously this proclamation. It is worth sitting, I think, with these words from the German philosopher Ernst Bloch: ‘Only an atheist can be a good Christian; only a Christian can be a good atheist.’
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