Is God Dead?

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In college, I read a book that profoundly affected my faith, contributing to a faith crisis that lasted for years. Entitled “Honest to God,” and written by Anglican Bishop John A.T. Robinson, it criticized traditional Christian theology and aroused a storm of controversy when published in 1963.

The book also inspired public interest in Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher who died in 1900. Nietzsche gained fame in his time for saying that “God is dead.” (That spawned the joke, “God is dead. Signed Nietzsche. Nietzsche is dead, signed God.”)

According to the online publication, “Thinking,” Nietzsche’s quote is “often misunderstood or taken out of context.” Nietzsche, it says, was referring to how the Enlightenment, the era in Europe in the 17^th and 18^th centuries when intellectuals were touting rationalism and empiricism and the separation of church and state, “had contributed to the erosion of religious beliefs, which had long served as a foundational belief system for much of the world.”

Robinson and Nietzsche

I thought of Bishop Robinson (not the other controversial Bishop Robinson who was the Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire) and Nietzsche when reading a recent column by David Brooks in the New York Times.

Brooks, too, wrote about the death of God, though he didn’t use that term. But he also decries the indifference toward religious values exhibited in today’s society.   

“The Bible,” Brooks wrote, “gave generations of Americans a bedrock set of moral values, the conviction that we live within an objective moral order, the faith that the arc of history bends toward justice. Religious fervor drove many of our social movements, like abolitionism.

“As late as 1958, according to a Gallup poll, only 18 percent of Americans said they would be willing to vote for an atheist for president. …By 2020, 60 percent of Americans said they would vote for an atheist for president.”

David Brooks
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Moral reasoning, he wrote, based on Judeo-Christian precepts like the Ten Commandments and the Golden rule, was reduced to the idea that “If it feels right, do it.”

How should Christianity address the current decline in religious interest? He suggests we learn from people like Reinhold Niebuhr, a theologian and ethicist who died in 1971. Niebuhr, according to Wikipedia, “wrote and spoke frequently about the intersection of religion, politics, and public policy.”

Niebuhr, wrote Brooks, believed that modern people are naïve about the benefits of rejecting religion, underestimating the human capacity for sin.

“He believed that you can’t use science to answer questions about life’s ultimate purpose and meaning. He dismissed the idea that with just a little more schooling, we would be able to educate people out of their racism and selfishness, or that secularism can address life’s deepest problems.”

Coherent Moral Order?

Niebuhr, he wrote, thought it was important to build a coherent moral order and believed there was a thing called the truth. He also believed that capitalism preys on the vulnerable.

I believe that Nietzsche, Brooks and Niebuhr, make valid points. But do I believe God is dead? Not by a long shot. History has seen many predictions about the demise of religion. How have they worked out?

My wife and I belong to a thriving, vibrant Catholic parish - one that adds an average of 25 new families a month. But whether the numbers rise or fall, we have confidence in Jesus’ message to his disciples in Matthew’s gospel: “I will be with you always, even unto the end of the world.”