The Death of God: A Belated Personal Postscript

(James W. Woefel, Christian Century, December 29, 1976, pp. 1175-1178)

1976? This was written in 1976? I am stunned. This is worth a read. No “woeful” jokes, please! (grin)

Here’s my favorite bit:

One of my cardinal beliefs of long standing which I see no reason to give up is a strong suspicion that the reality of both ourselves and the cosmic context in which we find ourselves is far richer than we know and doubtless contains dimensions of which we have only scratched the surface. Of course, this “more” to human and cosmic reality need not be transcendent in any sense other than “beyond”: beyond our present ordinary awareness and knowledge, perhaps in principle beyond purely scientific avenues of knowledge. Even in this sense transcendence may have all the depth and richness I at least could ask: mystery, ineffability, ecstasy, reunion and reconciliation, worlds upon worlds of various sorts and stages of existence, an ideal order of which our experiences of truth, beauty and goodness are fragmentary glimpses.

My problem is that I can no longer make sense out of certain images of transcendence, supremely the Christian image of the loving, personal Creator and Redeemer. Nor can I relate in any meaningful way at all my very general beliefs about transcendence to all the absurd and tragic things that go on in this little sphere of reality called earth. I simply cannot get the transcendent and the earthly together coherently — and so I content myself with what I know, with the earthly.

I am somewhat drawn to certain aspects of what I understand of the world orientation of Gautama the Buddha: the difficult art of learning to accept the quite specific limitations and possibilities of my life without making myself unhappy struggling to affirm beliefs I cannot honestly affirm. One of my favorite sources of consolation is the Buddha’s famous dialogue from the Pali canon on “Questions Tending Not to Edification.” I am trying — haltingly and amateurishly — to incorporate some of his wisdom, but for the present I am still more comfortable dealing with my life-situation in the more familiar terms of the Christian tradition. And at this stage in my pilgrimage, that has come to mean the myth of the God who in Christ dies to his deity and lives only as grand and miserable human beings within this beautiful ruined Eden called earth.

(Thank you, TJJ, for sending this article.)