Of the questioning of God—Is he dead? Alive? Taking a sabbatical?—there shall be no end. If we grant the basic premise, how could there be? By “God,” we Christians indicate the being that defies comprehension and yet invites a relationship with us, the Absolute Mystery who commands our attention. We celebrate our loved ones without fully fathoming their depths. This tension between witness and unsearchability defines our relationship with God.

John T. Elson’s classic Time cover story, “Toward a Hidden God,” suggests as much. Reading it sixty years after its publication carried me back—not to 1966, when I was nine years old, but to 1976, when I was a student in an Intro to Philosophy course at the University of Innsbruck, struggling to get a handle on the assigned text, Was ist der Mensch? In that treatise, Emerich Coreth, SJ, the renowned colleague of Karl Rahner, set forth the foundations of a philosophical anthropology worthy of Transcendental Thomism. The treatise’s opening lines have stayed with me: “What is the human being? The human person is the one who can question and who must question!” 

And then Elson’s essay transported me forward in time to 1978, when the epistemic and ecclesial travails associated with “the death of God” were still invigorating theological discourse. I was a first-year divinity-school student at the University of Chicago interacting with intellectual giants like Martin Marty and Langdon Gilkey and reading other luminaries quoted in Elson’s tour of the horizon.

As I read on, nostalgia for those heady days gave way to feelings of regret at the passing of an era when God was happily up for grabs, with the options on offer ranging from Ground of All Being to the Man for Others to the Black Female deity of womanist renderings to the supremely interactive, constantly adapting divine chameleon of process theology. Those radical reimaginings of God were thrillingly destabilizing to a young Catholic who had assumed, naively, that most God-questions were already settled. In our own day they have been replaced by a narrow Christian nationalism and its enclave mentality intent on crowding out all challengers. The petty orthodoxies of the Christian right call to mind another classic from the expansive postwar era, J. B. Phillips’s Your God is Too Small (1952).

Perhaps Phillips was on to something when he complained about the narrowing and downsizing of the theological imagination among some Christian apologists. Attempting to account for the rise of agnosticism and even atheism within the Church itself in the 1960s—the trend to which the Death of God theologians were reacting—Elson blames the usual suspects: modern science and the secular worldview promoted by its cascading successes in solving certain biological, subatomic, and cosmic puzzles. This conventional narrative is not wrong, as far as it goes. But it needs balancing. Consider the thesis of historian James Turner’s spellbinding study, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America. “Though both science and social transformation loom large in the picture, neither caused unbelief,” Turner writes. 

Put briefly, unbelief was not something that “happened to” religion. On the contrary, religion caused unbelief. In trying to adapt their religious beliefs to socioeconomic change, to new moral challenges, to novel problems of knowledge, to the tightening standards of science, the defenders of God slowly strangled Him. If anyone is to be arraigned for deicide, it is not Charles Darwin but his adversary Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, not the godless Robert Ingersoll but the godly Beecher family.   

Conceding too much explanatory power to science or, worse, attempting to counter secular empiricism with religious empiricism has proven a trap for Christians since at least the time of Wilberforce and the Beechers. So, too, has a temptation that secular scientists have resisted more successfully—namely, to rest on one’s laurels, suspend self-criticism, interrupt the quest for new questions, and think the mysteries solved.

Martin Marty, my mentor and senior partner in studying fundamentalisms within and across religious communities around the world, reminded our team repeatedly of Spinoza’s dictum that we come “not to judge, not to weep, but to understand.” Yet even Marty, a most generous and disciplined scholar, could not always hide his distaste for a tendency he found dominant in the fundamentalist strain: the arrogance of a certainty that admits of no distance between the ineffable mystery and our feeble renderings of it, and the consequent refusal to question one’s own closely held “inerrancies.”

Marty’s frustration was deepened by the mounting evidence, available within and across these embattled and battling enclaves, that, contrary to their self-presentation as defenders of the one true faith from “the acids of modernity,” the fundamentalists—or “true believers,” as they called themselves—took full advantage of the complexities, ambiguities, and contradictions of the tradition. Like other moderns, they crafted from its many layers of meaning and interpretation their own distinctive religious logic. Despite their constantly ongoing process of reinventing the tradition by the selective retrieval and recasting of elements within it, they pronounced the process complete, the case for further questioning and questing closed. This seems a likely path to “the death of God.”

Other religious thinkers of the past sixty years have followed a similar process of retrieving, recasting, and reinventing the questions and provisional answers, but they have done so without pretending that they have closed the gap between witness and unsearchability once and for all.

And so, the chase continues. How could it be otherwise? In grappling with the God-question, churches will always be upending their own apple cart by striving, often under heavy pressure, to respond effectively to the current moment’s cultured despisers of theism. Ministers of the Gospel will duck for cover, feign and weave, sometimes with great insight, often less brilliantly, in order to keep the quest alive. Presumably, the Absolute Mystery demanding ever to be pursued would have it no other way. 

To read all the contributions to the symposium, click here.

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