Date: Thu, 9 Feb 1995 03:23:38 -0700 (MST)
From: LEO MEEKS  <lmeeks-AT-du.edu>
Subject: Re: Timetable of death of God




On Wed, 8 Feb 1995 WIDDER-AT-vax.lse.ac.uk wrote:

>(some deleted stuff) 
> The death of God marks the point when this certainty is lost.  At such a time,
> one can still believe in God and even salvation, but it becomes much more a 
> matter of faith.  Indeed, when the madman says that God is dead, he does not
> say God's existence has been disproven.  He is dead, rather, the moment his
> existence turns upon faith, the moment his existence turns on the possibility
> of human demonstration.
>(more stuuf deleted) 
> Later,
> 
> Nathan
> widder-AT-vax.lse.ac.uk
> 
Nathan,

There is a modernism in your post that is somewhat troublesome: you seem 
to suppose the modernist version of its own advent -- whether with Weber, 
Marx, Hegel, or whomever -- that is it seems that modernism is founded 
upon the fall or collapse of a pre-modern (to be read Christendom) world 
and what is before becomes increasingly untenable. The problem is that 
the death of God does not fit neatly into that frame of time without 
radically covering up the coming into being of the death of god. i would 
suggest that when Luther penned the Heidelburg Disputation of 1518 as an 
attack upon scholasticism for not understanding precisely the suffering 
and death of god as the central core to the christian literary practise. 
i underscore this point on Luther to suggest that the death of god is 
something other than what many of nietzsche's reader's -- heidegger among 
them -- have taken it to be. 

The question remains: what is the death of god and how is one to write it?

-leo

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