The Jewish American Novel

Chapter Three. The US-American Religious System and Radical or Death-of-God Theology

51 Chapter Three The US-American Religious System and Radical or Death-of-God Theology The discussion of the polysystem theory in my introduction has demonstrated that any semiotic subsystem correlates, on the one hand, with the larger (cultural) polysystem , and, on the other hand, with the other subsystems that make up the polysystem . Changes in one subsystem will therefore tend to affect the adjacent subsystems . However, when repertoric elements migrate from one system to another, the position and the function of these items in the source system are “irrelevant for the target system” (Even-Zohar, Polysystem 22, 94). These mechanisms are illustrated by the correlation of the political and the religious subsystems in the postwar US. The movement of the Holocaust issue from the periphery to the center of the political system (i.e., from an almost negligible to an important factor in political discourse) coincided with a dramatic shift in the (Jewish) US-American religious system, which suddenly witnessed the rise of radical (or death-of-God) theology. Discussions of the Holocaust in the political system centered on the responsibility of the human perpetrators—essentially the Nazis, but also the indifferent Allies (as was illustrated in the previous chapter). When the repertoreme migrated to the religious system, the increasing visibility of the Holocaust led instead to questions about the responsibility of God, and hence, about His absence or presence. This is not to say, however, that the death-of-God theology was a direct result of the rise in Holocaust awareness; Protestant theologians such as Thomas Altizer and William Hamilton were also proclaiming the death of God. But the fact that radical theology made its mark during the 1960s can partly be explained by the centripetal movement of the Holocaust in the political system. There is indeed a conspicuous temporal coincidence of decisive events in the political and theological systems. Note, for example, that some of the theologians who would gain renown as so-called “Holocaust theologians” incorporated the Holocaust into their theological framework only after 1963, i.e., after the repertoreme had entered the political system (see Fackenheim, “Self-Realization,” “Jewish”). For more than twenty years, Emil Fackenheim had been convinced that the Holocaust provided no problem for Jew- 52 Chapter Three ish theology, but “in the late sixties, he changed his mind” (Rubenstein, After 178). Perhaps the most conspicuous case is presented by Arthur A. Cohen’s The Natural and the Supernatural Jew, which still disregarded the theological implications of the Holocaust as late as 1962. Instead, it considered the Jew as endowed with a supernatural destiny in the Heilsgeschichte (salvation history) of a beneficent God. In The Tremendum, published in 1981 but based on lectures he delivered in 1974 and 1979, Cohen distances himself from this “easy book of 1962,” which he considers “defective in its perception of evil” (35). When Richard Rubenstein first incorporated the Holocaust into his thinking about the death of God, his succès de scandale, After Auschwitz (1966), created dramatic changes in the central repertoire of the US-American theological system (see John Roth 70). However, despite its popular success—the death-of-God movement even made the cover of Time magazine in 1966 and sparked a major controversy among Jewish theologians—radical theology soon lost its appeal, and, by the end of the 1960s, had again vanished from the theological system. John Carey points out that one of the reasons for the movement’s swift demise was purely institutional: “The popular concept of the death of God was simply more than the Christian religious establishment could bear. Thousands and thousands of ministers, hundreds of boards and agencies, and many related institutions were tied into the God hypothesis for their life and distinctiveness. . . . Political pressure from denominations eventually pushed the principal contributors to different institutions” (85). Today, many consider the death-of-God movement “a theological failure” (see, e.g., Altizer, “Holocaust ”), a “dreadful and ludicrous chapter” in theology (Berenbaum 46), or “a fad that momentarily captured the attention of the media” (Indinopulos 64), but it would be hard to deny that radical theology shaped the face of the 1960s in America. Although the movement was influential in academic institutional discourse, the Time cover story shows that popular media discourse also picked up on the movement. In fact, the ideas propounded by the radical theologians had penetrated society to such an extent that it became a subject for graffiti (“God is dead. (signed) Nietzsche. Nietzsche is dead...