Then Jesus gave a loud cry and died
Remember the now-infamous Time cover story "Is God dead?" It came from a movement that had exactly three adherents, in somewhat different forms, known as "Radical theology" or "Death of God Theology". William Hamilton, Thomas J. J. Altizer and Richard Rubenstein were three very different thinkers puzzling through our contemporary dilemmas using a variety of intellectual tools and wondering about the relevance of God-talk in an age poised on the brink of destruction. Hamilton - whose career and writings are so obscure he doesn't even have a wikipedia entry - taught at Colgate-Rochester Divinity School. Altizer taught briefly at Drew University School of Divinity. Rubenstein, at the time, was Jewish Chaplain and professor of religion at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland. Each in his own way sought to figure out, for a time no longer in need of God, what that meant.
While causing quite a stir among academics - everyone from Americans like John Cobb and Langdon Gilkey to Germans like Helmut Thielicke felt the need to respond to the claims of radical theology - it meant little to most Christians, because (a) for Hamilton and Altizer, writing as they did from a Christo-centric, radical Hegelianism, the death of God was a metaphysical fact with existential consequences, but their writing tended to be so dense as to defy easy summation; (b) for Rubenstein, God's death was a historical reality embodied by the horrors of Auschwitz, a historical reality that, for the Jewish people, necessitated religious solidarity in the face of a world no longer held in check by traditional religious demands of moral conduct.
Yet, we Christians, if we are to be consistent, do claim that God died. On Good Friday, when Jesus "gave a loud cry and . . . died", he didn't fake it. He wasn't holding one eye open to see if the Romans would leave him alone. He wasn't a spirit whose physical shell was expendable. He didn't speed his way to heaven in the arms of angels. Even employing the "two natures" theology (Jesus is fully human & fully divine) doesn't help, because of the perichoretic nature of the relationship (i.e., the two natures were fully entwined, inseparable); so we can't say that only the human part of Jesus was dead, but the divine part, the Second Person of the Trinity, was still alive.
The best depiction of Jesus' death is Michaelangelo's statue Pieta, in which a weeping Mary is holding the broken, battered body of her son on her lap, her eyes and hands turned to a now-empty heaven. The depiction of Jesus in that statue shows the ignominy of death. It robs us, all of us, of whatever we might call human dignity. There is nothing noble or uplifting here - only the horror of a mother holding the dead body of her adult child who has been broken and defeated by death (how many times in history has this particular scene been repeated? That is a subject for another day, methinks).
For now, we live in a world disenchanted. A world that, as the three gentlemen mentioned above said, is a world in which God is dead. Silence is the only option for now.
