God Is No More

'God Is No More' was the title of a book published in 1963 (What a year that was, with the publication also of John Robinson’s ‘Honest To God’!) The authors were Werner and Lotte Pelz who converted to Christianity from Judaism. Werner became an Anglican priest but I believe that they later returned to their Jewish roots. The book’s title is a quotation from William Blake:

If Thou humblest Thyself, Thou humblest Me.
Thou also dwellest in Eternity.
Thou art a Man: God is no more:
Thy own Humanity learn to adore,
For that is My spirit of life.

(I think one should take careful note of the words Blake chooses to begin with a capital letter)

In a foreword, the then Dean of Westminster, wrote:

“God is no more because he has become an idea – a mere word; and this has confined Him within neat and tidy systems. He is found at the end of an argument; His nature is formally stated; He is conventionalised, made familiar and respectable – and so he dies.”

Martin Buber,a Jewish philosopher, poet, and theologian, talked about ‘the eclipse of God’ as he grappled with the impact of Nazism and the holocaust on his people.
John Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, published his groundbreaking book ‘Honest To God' in 1963. He wrote, ‘Our image of God must go’ in favour, he argued, of the idea of God as ground of our being. He thought it might take a hundred years for this idea of God to find its way into mainstream Christianity.

Nazism, the war and the holocaust, put skids under a process which had been slowly gathering pace since the mid nineteenth century. The Victorian poet Matthew Arnold wrote in his melancholy poem, Dover Beach:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

But I suspect that the sea of faith to which Arnold refers depended on precisely the view of God which finally became untenable after Auschwitz; a God ‘out there’ who can be called upon to come in and help when the going gets tough.

What we have been exploring in our St. Johns Waterloo Lent course is based on the idea of God as ‘the ground of being’ which has continued as a more or less hidden underground stream in Christian history since at least the third century. The church (in western Christendom at least) has been like an beautiful ocean going cruise liner, well staffed by attentive stewards, and crew. The first class lounges have been marvellous places to be but somewhere in steerage, down in the bowels of the ship, there has always been a group of fellow travellers who possess some vital information about how the ship ought to be run. The irony is that these passengers might have drowned if they had not boarded the ship but their presence has been largely ignored ever since, in spite of the fact that they may be the only ones who know where the lifeboats are!

That’s why I am wary of using the word ‘God’. Is it time to abandon ship? Lots of people think so but it’s still a difficult call to make.