“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the nurderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves?” Friedrich Nietzsche.1 “This terrible ‘night’ created by the death of God has made incarnate the most awesome nothingness imaginable; now begins the deepestAngst that man has ever known.” Thomas J. J. Altizer.2 “Today, we cannot even understand the Nietzschean cry that ‘God is dead.’ ... The problem now is that theword God is dead.” Paul M. Van Buren.3 “God is absent, banished, expelled from the very heart of life. Society has closed up on that exclusion and the resulting emptiness, a desert without God, is a void from which it is dying.” Emmanuel Cardinal Suhurd.4 “We must conquer the last, the greatest of temptations—that of hope... We sing even though we know that no ear exists to hear us; we toil though there is no employer to pay us our wages when night falls. We are despairing, serene, free. This is true heroism.” Nikos Kazantzakis.5.
References
Nietzsche, Friedrich,Joyful Wisdom New York, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1960. Aphorism 125, pp. 167–169.
Altizer, Thomas J. J.,Mircea Eliade and the Dialectic of the Sacred. Philadelphia, Westminster, Press, 1964, p. 199.
Van Buren, Paul M.,The Secular Meaning of the Gospel. New York, Macmillan, 1963, p. 103.
Emmanuel Cardinal Suhurd, quoted from Brantl, George,The Religious Experience. New York, George Braziller, 1964, p. 1061.
Kazantzakis, Nikos, quoted from Wilson, Colin,The Strength to Dream. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1962, p. 249.
Nietzsche,op. cit.. Aphorism 343, p. 276.
Van Buren,op. cit.. pp. 103, 105, 129–130.
Jung, Carl G.,Psychology and Religion, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1938, pp. 103 ff.
Josey, Charles C., “The Contributions of Science to Modern Religion,”Journal of Religion, 1936,16, 463–475.
Blakney, Raymond B., translator,Meister Eckhart, A Modern Translation. New York, Harper, 1957, p. 129.
Niebuhr, H. Richard,Radical Monotheism and Western Culture. New York, Harper, 1960, p. 129.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Josey, C.C. On the death of God. J Relig Health 5, 280–290 (1966). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01578772
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01578772