In 1966, Time Magazine featured a bold cover asking “Is God Dead?” The article surveyed mid-century theologians trying to make God relevant to an increasingly secular society. Copernicus’ discoveries on the solar system, Newton’s thoughts on gravity, and Darwin’s theory of evolution, seemed to have eliminated the need for religion to explain the natural world. God took up less and less space in people’s daily lives. Even the devout Dietrich Bonhoeffer mused about a religionless Christianity. Time’s celebrated question recalled German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s often quoted statement “God is dead,” first proposed in 1882. Nietzsche wrote of a madman who jumped before the townsfolk gathered in the marketplace yelling, “Where is God?” The madman cried, “I’ll tell you! We have killed him – you and I! We are all his murderers!” The madman roundly affirmed, “God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him.” Nietzsche’s thesis was that self-absorbed and self-explained mankind had killed the need for God. After all, many aspects of the natural world and human nature which seemed previously to be supernatural mysteries were now able to be explained logically and rationally.
The decreased need for God to explain the natural world led to a diminished reliance upon God within mankind’s personal world. There is less need for healing prayer when a pharmacy can dispense cures. A farmer’s prayer for rain is superfluous when an irrigation system can be readily installed. Prayers for a loved one’s happiness in the next life are let slide when fond memories from the beloved earthly life are celebrated. Sunday as the Lord’s Day has disappeared from the calendar as organized religion has yielded to individual mindfulness. A changed world has led to a changed faith.
The crescendo of religious practices that characterized the Middle Ages – pilgrimages, passion plays, processions, patrons saints, relics, monasteries, nunneries, feast days, and the like – aided mankind in explaining the unexplainable. In modern times science and psychology have rightly explained many of the wonders of nature and much of the workings of the human soul. Religion no longer has to fill in the many omissions in humanity’s appreciation of the universe and human self-understanding. A God needed only to fill in the gaps (a phrase also dating back to Nietzsche) is no longer satisfactory. The twenty-first century religious world has to reveal to contemporary mankind that God is not simply an explanation for the universe but most importantly a loving being, a person, in fact three persons, who extend an invitation for eternal happiness to every man and woman.
Jesus famously distinguishes between this world and the next when he advises the Jewish leaders, “Then repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.” The secular world has a rightful legitimacy that mankind admirably discovers anew everyday. Just look at the cell phone in your pocket or at the radiation treatment that cured your cancer or at the pros and cons of the Green Revolution increasing crop yield. Science is doing a fine, if unfinished, job of explaining things.
However, in the first reading at Mass this Sunday, God declares in no uncertain terms, “I am the LORD and there is no other, there is no God besides me. It is I who arm you, though you know me not, so that toward the rising and the setting of the sun people may know that there is none besides me. I am the LORD, there is no other.” God indeed means business. God is not to be dismissed, not to be pushed to the side, not to be forgotten. God is not just there to answer mankind’s questions which daily grow fewer and fewer. God is there, or better, God is here to extend an invitation of personal love, of intimate friendship, of warm hospitality, if you will, toward every man and woman, toward every individual human being. God is not science or technology or medicine or even art. God is love and He wants to enter into a personal relationship with every individual, not only to make life easier and more understandable, but simply for the sake of enjoying eternal happiness together, beginning in this world and continuing into the next.
Jesus, the Son of God, did not die on the Cross to explain evolution or to hasten a cure for the plague or to expound on a Just War theory. Those are human challenges. Jesus died on the Cross to reveal that a personal relationship with God the Father — total openness to the Father’s Will no matter how challenging — is mankind’s most meaningful and most fulfilling and most honorable challenge.
