The Death of God Movement and the Holocaust: Radical Theology Encounters the Shoah (review)

Book Reviews 155 closed theoretical systems, and who are too clever by halfin their ability to dismiss facts their systems cannot explain. Jacques Kornberg Department of History University of Toronto The Death ofGod Movement and the Holocaust: Radical Theology Encounters the Shoah, edited by Stephen R. Haynes and John K. Roth. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. 152 pp. $55.00. In this text on the "radical theology" movement of the 1960s, Stephen R. Haynes and John Roth bring together twelve articles to which they have added an introduction and epilogue of their own. One ofthe articles is the Time magazine essay ofApril 8, 1966, "Toward a Hidden God"; four are by the so-called "death of God" theologians Altizer, Hamilton, van Buren, and Rubenstein; and seven are from commentators on the movement. This makes for a very difficult book to review. I say "so-called" for two reasons: one is that these four were all saying markedly different things, and the other is that only Altizer seems to believe in some oddly metaphysical way in the selfemptying of God. He manages to believe far more in what God does (at least by way ofgetting rid ofGod) than some admittedly Christian theologians can manage to affirm. The book is included in the "Christianity and the Holocaust" series because it seeks to answer the question of the effect that knowledge of the Shoah and its meaning had on the death ofGod movement. To those ofus who are both post-Shoah theologians and who are quite old enough to remember the death ofGod movement, the question seems a little odd, far-fetched. Memory serves one fairly well on this point: the Holocaust was ofdecisive importance for Rubenstein's death-of-God theology, as his book's title, After Auschwitz, made clear. The Holocaust barely entered the thought ofother death-of-God theologians at the time, as its absence from their writings testifies. Along the way, one encounters a variety of theological views of interest to postShoah thinkers. Altizer, for example, thinks that the only theology possible today "that is not at bottom an erasure of the Holocaust" would be a "theology without God" (p. 22). While all post-Holocaust theologians rethink their views of God, this comment would strike Fackenheimand Jonas as odd, not to mention Berkovitz. Hamilton, another death-of-God theologian, provides an article the brunt ofwhich is to ask this: "Just why do monotheists kill? Why have monotheists become the champion killers at the close of the century?" (p. 27). As a response to the Shoah, in all its complexity, this is a bizarre question. It does not distinguish killers from victims. It does not recognize the ways in which Nazism was not historic Christian anti-Judaism being reprised but a strange mix ofanti-Christian and anti-Jewishpaganism of"BIut, Boden, und Volk" and an extremely modem assumption as to the self-sufficiency of the finite unto itself. It 156 SHOFAR Winter 2001 Vol. 19, No.2 does not throw any light on other great killers ofour century, Stalin and Mao-Tse Tung, hardly noted for their commitment to monotheism. Rubenstein does not fmd (nor should he) the optimism of Hamilton and Harvey Cox about secularity and technology something that he can share. Auschwitz he sees as an expression of what Cox called "technopolis" (p. 45). Nor does he fmd that Altizer's assertion that "Christ is now present in the concrete actuality" of our history to be a statement of which a Jew (or Muslim or Hindu) could make any sense (p. 49). Ofthe radical theologians, it is Rubenstein who names the Shoah as "a Christian Holy War carried out by a National Socialist political leadership hostile to Christianity" (p. 51). In untangling that apparently paradoxical comment, one finds some of the complexities of the Shoah. Meanwhile, on the other death-of-God front, the work of Paul van Buren has proceeded in an entirely different direction. Van Buren decided that his contribution to the death-of-God movement, The Secular Meaning of the Gospel, was based on a misunderstanding of Wittgenstein (p. 35). He is right about this; van Buren was celebrating the early Wittgenstein at a time...