William Hamilton, the retired theologian who declared in the 1960s that God was dead, died Tuesday (Feb. 28) in his downtown Portland apartment. He was 87.
Hamilton said he’d been haunted by questions about God since he was a teenager. Years later, when his conclusion was published in the April 8, 1966, edition of Time Magazine, he found himself at the center of a theological storm.
Time christened the new movement “radical theology,” and Hamilton, one of its key figures, received death threats and inspired angry letters to the editor. He lost his endowed chair as a professor of theology at what was then Colgate Rochester Divinity School in 1967.
Of course, what he meant was, “We must abandon our traditional view of God as omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent because the existence of radical evil makes that view untenable.” (Or, “I find it untenable and what I cannot understand cannot be true.”) In that, he spoke for millions who found that a tamer, not-omnipotent God they can keep in a box and take out or put back in whenever they want is precisely the kind of God that pleases them.
God is the dock, Lewis noted, and we are judging Him. The God of Revelation, who judges them, is thus rendered obsolete — “dead,” if you will. Bad things happen to good people because God is powerless to prevent them.
The idea that bad things don’t happen to good people because there are no good people — just sinners in need of redemption in a fallen world which is also groaning for its Savior — is much too hard to bear. We tell ourselves pleasing lies because the Truth requires too much from us. Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam.
He knows better now, doesn’t he?
I know it is an old saw, but appropriate:
“God is dead”… William Hamilton
“William Hamilton is really dead”… God
Times and institutions change. These days, for his views he would likely be given the hero’s welcome and a somehow more distinguished endowed position at what is now CRCDS.
“No service is planned.” What an epitaph.
Yeah, Katherine. I, too, was thinking his first reaction must have been something like “Oh $#!+” probably in conjunction with a well-known Anglo-Saxon intensifier beginning with F.