The Death of God

Article in Stretton Focus, November 2014

Some of you reading this piece will remember the ‘Death of God Controversy’ of the 1960s. That whole decade was a melting pot of social and religious upheaval. Young people were looking for a freedom of expression denied to them by the social mores of the time. The poet Philip Larkin may have exaggerated a bit when he wrote “sexual intercourse began in 1963”, but he saw what was happening.
Religion itself could not escape the turmoil. There was a clash between the modern world view, and religious belief in a transcendent deity. That particular tension has always been there, but it was brought to a head by Time Magazine, which on its front cover, posed the question “Is God dead?”
The controversy of the 1960s has by now lost some of its momentum, but the underlying issue still needs to be grappled with in the light of continuing changes in our knowledge of the world. Our present understanding of the universe makes old religious ideas about God inadequate and obsolete.
These old concepts of God need to ‘die’, so that new ideas can be born. That very principle of death and rebirth is written into the fibre of an evolving Creation; and it includes the necessity for even religions to die.
Jesus himself is recorded as saying that every seed must be planted in the ground (that is, it has to ‘die’) if it is to produce new growth. This is a parable, not just of nature, but of the whole of life. Old religious ideas of God do need to die; but the seed, or kernel of religion (goodness, truth, beauty and love) should be replanted in the ‘soil’ of the modern age, so that it can bear fruit for us today.
Christianity itself is based on the concept of a dying-and-rising God, and should be leading the way into new ways of thinking about God.
God is dead – long live God.

Donald Horsfield

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