The Creative Death of God

Dear Colleagues,

The “death of God” motif blazes a transformative path through the modern history of ideas in radically differential keys—from Spinoza to Schelling and Hegel, Stirner and Mainländer, Bakunin and Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and Whitehead, to cite only a few brightly burning lights. New domains of thought were wrested into play as normative apprehensions of God’s essential nature were transformed, eclipsed, or displaced. The “death” metaphor applied to the monotheistic deity of Western traditions has surfaced in diverse, polyvalent, radical, often elusive registers, as has been delineated by critical observers such as Löwith, Blumenberg, J. Taubes and S. Taubes, Derrida, Baudrillard, Gauchet, and scores of others.

New values and jolting implications were consequential to the waves of serial godlessnesses: Luther’s abyssal hidden God, Spinoza’s purported “atheism,” Hegel’s unhappy consciousness, Stirner’s ecstatic egotism, Simone Weil’s absent God, and so on. Albert Camus remarked, “the history of metaphysical rebellion cannot be confused with that of atheism” (in J. Kripal, Superhumanisms, U. of Chicago Press, 2022, 76). Neither, certainly, can the “death of God” metaphor be confused with atheism, though all too often it has been.

Scholarly treatments tend to accent the negative valence of this “death,” emphasizing what is lost or rendered past rather than appreciating the novel potentialities—the ultimate adventure in ideas—opened up by epochal transformations of “God.” To achieve a more serious and sympathetic take, the
intent of this Special Issue is to plumb the creativity of the death of God motif as an “edge” driving modern thought that merits in-depth historical-critical assessment.

The proposal is to lay out as probingly as possible how the “death of God” has functioned as a creative catalyst for thought historically. Novel lines of thinking gained potency as traditional understandings of God ceded to innovative new atheisms, last gods, new gods, new idols, ideals, and superhumanities. Is modernity truly “post-theistic” or has it simply reinvented and reconstituted deity in sundry camouflaged and disseminated forms? Is the death of God a farewell or is it ironically a dimension of the persistent life of God, still claiming an apocalyptic and prophetic voice?

This Special Issue seeks probing historical-philosophical reflections on the constructive valence of the death of God, contextualized within a long-term historical-hermeneutic backdrop. Each contributor is invited to think freely, to work out an essay from the distinctive historical expertise she or he has
developed through a career-long trajectory. The desideratum is that a more creative heuristic will emerge from this journal Issue as a whole (as the 1975 Special Issue Daedalus 104.2, for example, spurred fuller cognizance of the “Axial revolution”). Constructive historical thinking has not, to date,
achieved this sort of hermeneutic probity and synoptic crystallization with respect to the death of God. It is a humanistic task inherently worthy of aspiration.

Dr. Lissa McCullough
Guest Editor

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• death of God
• godlessness
• post-theism
• atheism
• nihilism
• modern theology
• Stirner
• Mainländer
• Nietzsche
• Heidegger