Death of God

Discussion

The Death of God in Postmodern Theology

Erik Haines:

1.

"The death-of-God question in postmodern theory and contemporary continental philosophy of religion stretches back more than sixty years. Gabriel Vahanian’s The Death of God: The Culture of Our Post-Christian Era (1961) named the cultural-historical fact: modern secular life had lost contact with the sacred. Thomas Altizer and William Hamilton’s Radical Theology and the Death of God (1966) carried the question into an explicitly theological register, with Altizer drawing on Blake, Hegel, and Nietzsche to articulate a Christian-atheist gospel in which God’s death is itself a central salvific event. Richard Rubenstein’s After Auschwitz (1966) carried it into the Jewish tradition through the catastrophe of the Shoah (Holocaust).

The academic postmodern theology that took up the question in the 1980s extended this Continental-philosophical reception into a deconstructive register. Mark C. Taylor’s 1984 work, Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology, established a critical foundation for examining the death of God through the lens of Derridean deconstruction. This academic trajectory was institutionalized in 1989 with the launch of the Religion and Postmodernism series at the University of Chicago Press. John D. Caputo’s deconstructive philosophy of religion — culminating in The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (2006) and The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (2013) — developed a strand into what he calls a weak theology which challenges traditional classical theism by asserting that God’s true power lies in powerlessness and the call to love and justice. Peter Rollins’s Pyrotheology — articulated through the Belfast-based Ikon Collective from the mid-2000s and in books such as How (Not) to Speak of God (2006) and The Fidelity of Betrayal (2008) — translated the Caputo-Derridean and Žižek-Lacanian currents into practical religious-communal form, building a/theistic communal practice grounded in death-of-God thinking. The connection between Pyrotheology and scholarly postmodern theology is overt: Rollins explicitly cites Caputo, Žižek, and Jean-Luc Marion as major influences.

Slavoj Žižek’s intervention into this conversation is structurally distinct from the deconstructive-postmodern lineage. Where Taylor and Caputo work through Derrida, the apophatic-mystical tradition, and negative-theology, Žižek works through Hegel and Lacan. And where Caputo’s weak theology renders God’s “weakness” as a poetic-deconstructive event without a real ontological substrate, Žižek’s materialist-Hegelian reading renders God’s death as the speculative-dialectical truth of Christianity itself, with the Pauline community and the Mystical Body of Christ recast as a form of communism on the horizon. His sustained engagement with Pauline Christianity — across The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (2003), The Monstrosity of Christ (2009, with John Milbank), Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (2012), and most recently Christian Atheism: How to Be a Real Materialist (2024) — has been the most ambitious contemporary attempt to read Christianity through Hegelian-Lacanian categories. By prioritizing Pauline Christianity, Žižek has managed to revitalize the philosophy of religion for a new generation of aspiring scholars and philosophers. For several decades, the academic study of religion and philosophy of religion was dominated by either structural language theory or Derridean deconstructive methods. These frameworks frequently diluted the core theological essence of Christianity into abstract textual analysis, thereby masking any concrete contemplative and divine reality.

Cadell Last has situated the Žižekian intervention as a cornerstone of the philosophical and theological project at the Philosophy Portal. This was clearly demonstrated during the Philosophy Portal course on Christian Atheism, which organized its study around a historical lineage of Kant and Hegel to Žižek and Rollins. The program further synthesized these viewpoints by featuring guest contributions from Slavoj Žižek himself, Peter Rollins, and Barry Taylor."

2.

"The death-of-God theology that emerged in the years after the Second World War is much wider and theologically more complicated than its most recent Žižekian uptake suggests. Anyone who came of age intellectually in the wake of the catastrophes of the twentieth century — the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the colonial violences whose unraveling defined the postwar order — had to reckon with what theological language could still mean after Auschwitz. The first generation of self-identified death-of-God theologians — Thomas J. J. Altizer, Gabriel Vahanian, William Hamilton, Paul van Buren — formulated the question sharply enough that Time magazine could put it on its cover in April 1966.

But the question itself was older, and the responses to it more varied, than the Time cover and its New York correspondents knew. The Nouvelle Théologie of Henri de Lubac, Jean Daniélou, Yves Congar, and Marie-Dominique Chenu had been engaging secularization for decades by then — the death-of-God event in the strict sense Bonhoeffer named when he wrote of a world come of age — and engaging it with the full theological content of the Christian tradition intact. That wider Catholic landscape I return to in Section III. Here I want to focus on the volume’s specific postmodern theological register.

The second part of the Rosy Cross anthology, implicitly engaging with this expansive tradition, is rooted in a particular postmodern theological framework that surfaced in the early twenty-first century. That said the landscape of continental philosophy of religion was significantly transformed during this period by Slavoj Žižek’s foundational works: The Puppet and the Dwarf (2003), The Monstrosity of Christ (2009, co-authored with John Milbank), and Less Than Nothing (2012). Collaborative environments like Belfast’s Wake Festival further catalyzed this intellectual evolution by merging Hegelian and Lacanian viewpoints. More recently, Cadell Last’s Philosophy Portal has become an essential center for synthesizing and propelling this dialogue through its seminars and community engagement. In its final form, the Rosy Cross collection integrates three major currents of this postmodern theological field into a cohesive volume.

The first strand is Žižek’s Hegelian-Lacanian position, and it is the volume’s animating centre. Cadell’s chapter The Necessity of Christian Atheism articulates this strand most fully: Christianity is the religion in which the gap between humanity and God is transposed into God himself; Christ on the Cross is the moment when the God-of-the-beyond dies, opening the community of believers — what Žižek calls the Holy Spirit — onto a freedom abandoned to itself, sustained by nothing but the love of its members for each other. Cadell formulates this as a double axiom: Christianity is the truth of religion, and atheism is the truth of Christianity. The axiom is meant to be read, he tells us, as a non-orientable surface, a Klein bottle in which the two propositions never resolve into one another but generate the dialectic of Christian Atheism as a project. The strand draws its philosophical authority from Hegel and Lacan, its political horizon from a left tradition that runs from Marx through the Frankfurt School into the present, and its appropriation of theological language from a reading of Pauline Christianity that takes the kenosis of the Cross as the structural-philosophical core of what Christianity is for.

The Žižekian intervention in continental philosophy of religion is substantial work, and it is worth being precise about what it does. It refuses the postmodern dissolution of theological content into deconstructive negation. It insists, on Hegel’s own ground, that the Cross is the structural event in which the divine itself enters the abyss of finitude. It holds Pauline Christianity — the kenotic Christ, the Cross as scandal, the ekklesia as the body of the resurrected Lord — at the centre of contemporary continental philosophical attention. And it has opened a conversation between Hegelian-Lacanian categories and the deepest currents of Christian theological reflection at a scale no other contemporary continental project has reached. Cadell’s chapter in this volume — his work with the Klein-bottle structure, his patient working-through of the Žižekian materials, his sustained commitment to taking the Christian-atheist project further than its progenitors have themselves taken it — is a real extension of this project.

The second strand is the Protestant and deconstructive technology of Pyrotheology, which has its own ground and lineage. Peter Rollins is the central figure here. His How (Not) to Speak of God, The Idolatry of God, and Insurrection come out of the Belfast emerging-church movement — the early-2000s Protestant evangelical attempt to engage post-modernity from inside congregational practice. Rollins’s later collaboration with Žižek — visible in The Divine Magician and in the Wake Festival programming — layered Žižekian categories onto a pre-existing Protestant deconstructive theology that drew on Bonhoeffer, Tillich, and Caputo’s-reading of the death-of-God theologians. In the volume, Rollins’s Introduction to and Speculations on Pyrotheology presents Pyrotheology as a technology for the death of God in the life of the subject, deploying parable, liturgy, performance, and art. The strand is distinct from the Žižekian commitment. Pyrotheology has Protestant roots and operates as a practice of deconstructive faith from inside congregational structures. It is theology, but theology of a particular post-evangelical and Protestant-deconstructive kind.

The third strand is the academic postmodern theology in the lineage of Mark C. Taylor. Barry Taylor’s chapter History-Heart of Radical Theology and the Theological Unconscious names this lineage explicitly. Mark C. Taylor — author of After God and Erring, one of the principal figures who brought Derrida’s religious turn into dialogue with theology — is the architect of what within academic circles is called postmodern theology, and Barry Taylor declares himself, plainly, a Taylorian. “Postmodern theology and radical theology,” he writes, “are sometimes bedfellows, and not even strange bedfellows; they sleep side by side in the same cot.” He goes further: “For my take, to do theology is not always to be thinking about God. In fact, I seldom think about God.” Religion’s function, he tells us, is destabilising rather than stabilising. The disappearance of God is God’s “final revelation.” The question: “do you believe in God? “ is, he says, “the most uninteresting question there is about the notion of God.”

The three strands have distinct genealogies. Žižek’s Christian Atheism operates inside the Hegelian-Lacanian-post-Marxist matrix and reads the Cross as the structural event of the divine’s own self-emptying into finitude. Rollins’s Pyrotheology emerges from Belfast’s post-Troubles emergent-church milieu and treats Christianity as a deconstructive technique for collapsing the certainty-structures of belief. Mark C. Taylor’s academic postmodern theology, working out of the Yale-Chicago lineage that has shaped a generation of religious studies departments, has translated Derridean deconstruction into a theology-after-the-death-of-God in which the religious is dissolved into pure textual operation, with no divine reality left to be received as actual content. The volume’s force comes from gathering these three into a single conversation about what Christianity becomes after the death of God. They share, across their differences, a theological lack — and what it is, and why it matters, is the diagnostic this section sets down."

(https://www.erikhaines.org/p/on-the-coming-age-of-the-rose-facticity)