Theologian who heralded the death of God ponders his own
Pastor Dale Morgan
Theologian who heralded the death of God ponders his own*
By Nancy Haught, Religion News Service
PORTLAND, Ore. — It was a quiet Sunday afternoon in 1938 when something
went terribly wrong near young Bill Hamilton's house. His teenage
friends had been building pipe bombs. One, an Episcopalian, was dead.
Another, a Catholic, lay on the grass fatally injured. And the third,
the son of an atheist, emerged without a scratch.
How, Hamilton wondered, could a just God allow this? Why do the innocent
suffer? Does God intervene in human lives?
"Theodicy came to dwell in my 14-year-old head that Sunday," he says.
The questions haunted Hamilton at his friends' funerals, at school, in
the Navy, at seminary and in his years as a theology professor in
upstate New York. By 1966, he had an answer, and it landed him in Time
and Playboy magazines: God was dead.
Now, some 40 years later, a new atheism is surging. Best-sellers bash
religion, Christianity in particular. Published excerpts from Mother
Teresa's private journal reveal her doubts. The Golden Compass, drawn
from a trilogy of novels in which a key character wants to kill God, is
a blockbuster movie.
For Hamilton, 83, who lives here with his wife, it's too late. God's
already gone. His own health is fragile; his hands shake and he moves
slowly. It's hard to imagine that this gentle man once shook the world
of theology.
Hamilton grew up a "bland, very liberal" Baptist, in a middle-class
Chicago suburb. "As soon as I was able," he says, "I left it." He
graduated from Oberlin College and joined the Navy in World War II. "I
may have been the only guy on my ship with a copy of The Nature and
Destiny of Man in my duffel," he says. Its author, Reinhold Niebuhr, was
the leading U.S. theologian of the day.
After the war, Hamilton went to Union Theological Seminary in New York
City because Niebuhr invited him. It didn't matter that Hamilton wasn't
sure he was a Christian. Niebuhr thought Union, a bastion of liberal
Protestantism, would be a good place to figure that out. The two became
lifelong friends.
Hamilton graduated in 1949, got married and earned his doctorate in
theology from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. The family
returned to the U.S., where Hamilton taught theology at Colgate
University in upstate New York.
Hamilton spent those years reflecting on his fractured faith. The image
of God as an all-knowing, all-powerful solver of problems couldn't be
reconciled with human suffering, especially in the wake of the Holocaust.
Hamilton wrote out his two choices: "God is not behind such radical
evil, therefore he cannot be what we have traditionally meant by God" or
"God is behind everything, including the death camps — and therefore he
is a killer."
Hamilton didn't see an active God anymore. But the theologian was not an
atheist. And he didn't want to let go of Jesus, as the example of how
humans should treat one another.
"The death of God is a metaphor," he says. "We needed to redefine
Christianity as a possibility without the presence of God."
He stopped going to church, but because he wanted his children to know
the Bible and understand how Jesus lived, he taught them Sunday school
at home. "All of us appreciate the teachings of Jesus Christ, what an
extraordinary figure he was," says his son, Ross.
Hamilton redefined Christianity without God, other theologians
speculated: God died long ago, perhaps at the birth of Jesus; or science
and technology killed the deity. Hamilton, Thomas J.J. Altizer at Emory
University and Paul Van Buren at Temple published a few articles in
theological journals. Newspapers picked up the story in 1965. On April
8, 1966, Time's cover declared that God was dead, and christened the
movement "radical theology."
By the time Hamilton's essay appeared in Playboy four months later,
alongside topless photos of Jane Fonda, he was frustrated with the
public perception of his work. Some didn't understand his argument or
care about its subtleties. The response was hostile. "Institutions were
upset, trustees perplexed, colleagues bewildered," he says.
Hamilton doesn't like to talk about what happened. "There were death
threats," his wife, Mary Jean, says. "There were letters to the editor,"
remembers his son, Don, who watched his father walk past faculty friends
and no one spoke. There were unofficial calls for Hamilton's
resignation. He kept his job, but the divinity school yanked his endowed
chair in 1967.
Critics dismissed the death of God movement as a blip, a passing fad.
But Hamilton helped pave the way for other radical theologians:
feminists, who dropped patriarchal descriptions of God; and
liberationists, who saw God in poverty and suffering.
Hamilton left Colgate to teach religion at New College in Sarasota,
Fla., where an avant-garde and freewheeling atmosphere attracted bright
students. But after a few years, he and his wife decided it wasn't where
they wanted to raise their five children.
They moved to Oregon in 1970, where Hamilton taught at Portland State
University for 14 years. His classes covered topics from literary
criticism to death and dying, even a little religion.
Hamilton still rises every day at 6 a.m. to write. He writes by hand,
and progress is slow. He hopes, however, to get his novel off to a
publisher soon. He still reads avidly — Shakespeare, politics, some
theology and the new atheists. It's their attitude that annoys him most.
"These are blanket indictments of religion in general, or Christianity
in particular," he says. "There is a self-righteousness, a glibness in
their writing. They are too sure of themselves. They've backed
themselves into a fundamentalist mode."
He remains a Christian who doesn't go to church. And faced with his own
mortality, he doesn't think much about God anymore, except when asked.
"The death of God enabled me to understand the world. Looking back, I
wouldn't have gone any other direction. I faced all my worries and
questions about death long ago."
Nancy Haught writes for The Oregonian in Portland, Ore.