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Iconoclasm in Paperback
By E. David Willis

FOR those who missed the message the first time around (1961), Gabriel Vahanian's The Death of God is now available in paperback (Braziller, New York, 1966, $1.95). The volume is remarkably timely because it is about the only book having to do

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with the death of God which seems to make much sense, and because Vahanian's original argument has unfortunately been little heeded by those (Altizer, Hamilton, and perhaps van Buren) who in the last five years have taken up the title (but not the thought) of this work and whose writings have been forged into a "death of God movement" by religious journalism.

What makes Vahanian's thought worthy of attention is not his lively style nor even his sensitivity to the cultural critiques provided by literary figures. It is rather his willingness to go no further than his Christian existentialism will honestly permit him, his determination not to capitulate too readily to easy solutions for the sake either of tidy thought, theological security, or ecclesiastical complacency. He appears equally convinced that biblical thought, and not radical immanentism, addresses man's predicament, and that it is quite possible that biblical thought cannot survive in the modem world. "The radical immanentism of our, cultural religiosity may be only provisional. In the light of Biblical thought, this immanentism can show that God dies as soon as he becomes a cultural accessory or a human ideal; that the finite cannot comprehend the infinite (finitum non est capax infiniti). From this point of view the death of God may be only a cultural phenomenon as though only our religio-cultural notion of God were dead. But this makes even more serious the question whether the transcendental view of man and his culture, as set forth in the Bible, has any chance of surviving the modern presupposition that God is dead.

"The dilemma of radical immanentism is that it offers no resolution to man's predicament because, although it attempts to define man in terms of his relatedness to others, it can only project man as a god or a wolf to his fellow man. In Biblical thought, too, man is defined by his relatedness to others-'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as [as though he were] thyself.' But man, a finite being, neither defines nor comprehends-he is defined and comprehended by God the Infinite, the Wholly Other" (Death of God, p. 231).

Such a theological perspective sharply distinguishes Vahanian from the death of God duo, Altizer and Hamilton. Vahanian shares with them a literary flair and a place on the anti-institutional bandwagon, and like them he correctly recognizes the profound changes which have resulted in modern man's disenchantment with God talk. But while they respond to this disenchantment by offering a

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radical reduction of the divine to the human dimension, Vahanian contends that it is precisely such immanentism which constitutes the present idolatrous religiosity which is modern man's crisis. For them the death of God means that there is no God or that the God that was once is no more. For Vahanian the death of God is a cultural phenomenon-as the full title of the volume indicates, The Death of God: The Culture of Our Post-Christian Era. That is, western culture is no longer responsive to traditional conceptualizations about the divine, and Christianity itself has been mainly responsible for this kind of death because it has contributed to the domestication of God. On the one hand, there is religiosity which is "the cunning by which secularism triumphs over faith in God and, instead, sets up faith-faith in anything" (ibid., p. 50). On the other hand, there is the Christian faith which "centers on the immediacy of God's transcendent presence in the world of things and beings. An understanding of this immediacy today requires other modes of thought in order to convey what the traditional concepts adequately expressed in a previous era. The faith does not hinge on these concepts, but on their content" (ibid., p. 52).

Vahanian's case would be even stronger if he were not so confusing in his use of three crucial terms, "God," "Christian," and "institution." God (God') means the idolatrous projection of religious men who equate the living God (God-) with their cultural aspirations. The death of God is the cultural process by which secularism (the "technological," "synthesistic", "mass" religiosity) substitutes God 2 for God'. There is no guarantee, moreover, that there can be a conversion of culture so that men can once again know, worship, and obey God- as would be the case if secularity ("involvement in the world for the sake of God's, glory") were to triumph over secularism.

The word "Christian" usually refers to the self-defeating and gradual assimilation of God- into Western culture to produce his "death." It is in this sense that Vahanian uses "Christian" -when he says that "the death of God is, after all, not a divine failure but the failure of Christian man, like other human failures in history" (Wait Without Idols, Braziller, New York, 1964, p. 234). On the other hand, "Christian" refers to that act of faith in the God" who is the subject of the kerygma. Vahanian speaks in this latter sense when he says that "our present crisis stems from the fact that we

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have changed the biblical iconoclasm of the Christian tradition into the idolatrous post-Christian religiosity of our cultural institutions, be they social, political, economic, or ecclesiastical" (ibid., p. 234).

"Institution" is seldom, if ever, used in anything but a pejorative way as almost equivalent with idolization. It is that which materializes, overwhelms, atrophies, and invalidates the human experience (ibid., p. 230); "organized religion with its variegated paraphernalia by trying to show how pertinent faith is, blunts it and mummifies it" (ibid., p. 230).

Inevitably, one cannot accurately capture a systematic statement from such richly rhetorical and prophetic literature as Vahanian's; but his insistence on the divine transcendence is clear enough. What is rather unclear is just who this God is, and especially how he can be God for us. According to Vahanian, the only gracious experience we have of this God is his absence. The living God is emphatically not encountered in any present institutional or cultural dimensions of human life; what is met there is only the idolatrous presence of the dead God. This leaves the individual Christian faithful in his refusal to bow the knee to any God who is present institutionally or culturally; in short, Christian fidelity is to wait without idols, It is ironic that the congenital existentialist disdain for institutions and love of paradox run the risk of becoming only a more private form of the mass religiosity which is deplored. In reducing ecclesiology to over-worked negations, there is the danger of ignoring the mediation in the church of the Word which keeps the prophet truly prophetic and not merely religiously dissident. At this crucial point-the provision for exposure to the proclamation of the kerygma within the church-Vahanian has precious little to say, certainly much less than Bultmann, Barth, and Tillich with whose theologies his thought otherwise bears a felicitous resemblance. Ultimately, Vahanian's basically healthy iconoclasm presupposes the Christian message which is communicated within and against the church, and this in turn presupposes, if this communication is to be for us men and not for angels, institutional and cultural expressions.