The Shape of Theological Humanism
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to grasp the absolute. Hegel understood the historical dimension of spirit; he did not grasp the temporality of his own thinking. From a different direction, Søren Kierkegaard exposed a weakness in Hegel’s system, asking: even if we could think the absolute, is God the absolute? Or is God different
from the absolute? Hegel failed to understand the infinite qualitative differ-ence between God and being (the absolute). These problems shattered Hegel’s idealist and speculative answer to the problem of how to think God beyond the collapse of Platonic-Aristotelian metaphysics. What was left but
nihilism? – the condition exposed by Nietzsche in which “the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking: ‘why’ finds no answer.”breaks down into “values,” posited as our own. As Nietzsche’s madman says, “God is dead, and we have killed him.” (^35) “Truth”
atic tyranny – were the end of most forms of theism as the right way to think of the divine. What kind of God could allow this world? The breakdown of metaphysical theology into nihilism leads to theologies which accept the The horrors of the twentieth century – gas chambers, rape camps, system-
loss, the death of God in critical thought. Theologians like Thomas J. J. Altizer and Mark C. Taylor affirm the death of God as the fulfillment and comple-tion of theology itself. The death of God is God’s own act which nonethe-less, according to Altizer, makes authentic faith possible in the form of faith
in a God who is wholly immanent in the profane, secular world.of the world has become the world; the visible has engulfed the invisible. The presence of God is known as divine absence.^36 The light
We have traced how the tension between religion and critical thought has divided theology. These tensions mirror in theism the flaws and tensions in God as Not God
humanism that drive towards overhumanization. The internal dynamics of biblical personalism have tended toward neo-tribalism, whereas the meta-physical theologies have tended toward nihilism in a/theologies. In order to avoid these extremes many attempts have been made to articulate a “post-
critical equivalent of the precritical hierophany.”third and paradoxical metaphor: God as not God.historical and rational critique; they appeal neither to biblical nor to meta-Theologies within this metaphorical cluster accept the results of both 3837 They cluster around a
physical proofs for the existence of God. However, the name “God” can still resound with precritical associations through the metaphors of heavenly deity and of light of the world. In order to do so, theologians point to a