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The Death of God and the Death of Persons
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
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‘God is dead’ can mean many things. It can mean that the way God has been thought of is no longer adequate, or that there is no God and never has been, or that human consciousness of God has receded.1 Our concern in what follows begins with ‘the death of God’ in this last sense, in the specific sense of the death of an awareness of God or of an affective consciousness of God. Or rather, this is where half of our concern begins. The other half begins with a phenomenon which is the mirror image of the death of God:the death of persons. By ‘the death of persons’ I mean something analogous to the sense specified for ‘the death of God.’ I mean the death or at least the decline of a consciousness of the inherent worth of persons, of the worth persons have as persons. In Kantian terms the death of persons is the loss of a consciousness of persons as ends in themselves. The death of God and the death of persons are parallel, and, furthermore, they are connected. The connection is not difficult to see, particularly if we remind ourselves of what Nietzsche said about the death of God.
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page 263 note 1 Thomas J.J. Altizer and William Hamilton, two ‘radical’ or ‘death of God’ theologians, in the preface to their book Radical Theology and the Death of God outline some ten ways ‘the death of God’ can be understood. Radical Theology and the Death of God (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1966), pp. x–xi.Google Scholar
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page 266 note 3 In The Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals Kant formulated various principles of the moral law. The categorical imperative and the practical imperative are two.
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page 282 note 1 Why then, it might be asked, do we not always find a well developed God-consciousness with a well developed person-consciousness? And why is it that historically as human beings have become more aware of the worth of persons there has been a dying of the sense of God's presence? To the first question there may be no general answer. It is a fact, however, that though a person should discover that he is deceiving himself regarding one matter, he may still fail to discover that he is deceiving himself regarding a related matter – even though the cause of the self-deception is the same in the two cases, for instance his vanity.
The second question raises a more serious issue for the thesis that what prevents one discovery prevents the other. For, it would seem, even though one discovery might not lead to the other, still making one should not lead to a strengthened denial of the other. But is the presupposition of the question correct? Have we become more aware of the worth of persons in the age of the death of God? Or have we simply become more consistent in the application of social justice as a matter of principle?