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movements in Christianity have been black theology, feminist theology, and the theology of the East-West dialogue, which raised the vexing problem of Christian uniqueness. Death of God theology is, or should be, a presence in each of these important developments, for it raises the problem of the limits of redefinition of the idea of God. We cannot, the radicals insist, simply redefine the idea of God so that it suits our correct ideological needs, whether of color, gender, or political involvement. Historical Christianity is, probably, incurably sexist and anti-Semitic, and the theology of the death of God may help, at least slightly, in assuaging the damage done by these grievous illnesses.

      A number of recent theological explorations continued the work of the death of God theologians. Altizer, always the intense and powerful Hegelian dialectician, continued to write from within the Christian tradition, insisting that Christianity is today only possible in the form of the negation of God. Altizer persistently explored the relations between death of God theology and deconstructionist literary criticism. Hamilton, less methodologically committed, worked obliquely on the idea of the death of God through literature and cultural history. Distinguishing between two kinds of death of God experience (which he calls the murderer and the detective), Hamilton devised an interpretation of Herman Melville as a significant artist of the experience of God’s death in Melville and the Sea and Reading Moby Dick and Other Essays.

      Newer voices include those of Don Cupitt and Graham Shaw (see his God in Our Hands) in England, Charles Davis in Canada (see the admirable What Is Living, What Is Dead in Christianity Today), and Jens Glebe-Möller in Copenhagen (see his two essays on Christian atheism, A Political Dogmatic and Jesus and Theology). They have begun to plot the relationships among the political, liberationist, and radical theologies. Death of God theology today is neither victorious nor ubiquitous. But within Christianity it continues to explore that possible space between what used to be called belief and unbelief.

       WILLIAM HAMILTON

      Bibliography

      Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism.

      Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God.

      William Hamilton, The New Essence of Christianity.

      Paul Van Buren, The Secular Meaning of the Gospel.

      Cross-Reference: Black Theology, Culture, Deconstructionism, Feminist Theology, Liberation Theology–Latin American, Political Theology, Silence.

      DESTINY (See FREEDOM.)

      DETERMINISM (See FREEDOM.)

      DIALECTICAL THEOLOGY (See NEOORTHODOXY, PARADOX.)

      DECONSTRUCTIONISM

      “Deconstructionism” (with the “-ism” added) is a term that is rarely used as such in technical philosophical and theological literature, but it has come to refer in more popular parlance to a variety of critical and interpretative methods that deny there is any obvious order of metaphysical truth to which literary, religious, and philosophical texts refer. The term ultimately derives from the works of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and secondarily from the German thinker Martin Heidegger.

      In religious thought the so-called deconstructionists have been identified with a group of philosophical theologians, who have each in his own way introduced Derridean and Heideggerian styles of expression into traditional Christian, or post-Christian, discourse. The leading deconstructionist theologian has been Mark C. Taylor (Erring, Deconstructing Theology, and Altarity). Other figures include Carl A. Raschke (The Alchemy of the Word and Theological Thinking), Charles Winquist (Epiphanes of Darkness), and Robert Scharlemann (The Being of God: Theology and the Experience of Truth).

      Taylor’s work has been influenced heavily by the ideas of Thomas J. J. Altizer, who sparked the movement known as “death of God” theology in the mid-1960s. In fact, deconstructionism in theology has been called a “hermeneutic of the death of God,” or “the death of God put into writing.” Such an interpretation, however, belies the richer and more intricate strands of development in late-twentieth-century religious thinking to which earlier philosophical and literary “strategies” of deconstruction have given rise.

      For example, although Taylor in Erring maps out what he dubs an “a/theology,” centering on the loss of selfhood and the final and complete “incarnation” of God’s presence in written texts, Raschke in Theological Thinking argues that the “method” of deconstruction can actually revive for formal theologians the long-abandoned Barthian emphasis on divine transcendence. Interestingly, Taylor himself has recently veered in this direction. At the same time, Winquist employed the Derridean view of language itself, which withstands some comparison to Freudian psychoanalysis, to lay the groundwork for a new pastoral interpretation of the deep unconscious, as well as for a concrete mode of social praxis. Scharlemann has adapted the rhetorical rhythms of the deconstructionist literature to rehabilitate in many important respects the older agendas of the theologian Paul Tillich—in particular, Tillich’s preoccupation with the negativity of human existence, or what Scharlemann calls “the being of God when God is not being God.”

      The impact of deconstructionism on theology in the present era has sometimes been compared to the role of existentialism during an earlier period. In one way the parallel is accurate. Within a relatively brief time, deconstructionism in the late–twentieth century, like existentialism between the two world wars, greatly transformed the grammar and concerns of theological writers. Like existentialism, it has left its imprint mainly on the curricula of colleges and seminaries while remaining an object of confusion and distrust in local parishes. Finally, deconstructionism has played to many of the same “postmodern” impulses that existentialism did in an earlier generation. It has served as a consistent and metaphorically fertile fund of disclaimers against orthodox theism. It has also rekindled a creative fervor within the theological idiom and redefined a kind of autonomy for the field that seemed to have vanished in the early 1970s, when the trend was toward reducing theology to other forms of intellectual inquiry or cultural expression (e.g., “political theology,” “feminist theology,” and “theology of play”).

      Yet the various deconstructionist theologies, or varieties of “theological thinking,” have to date proved themselves incapable, as was not the case with existentialism, of making a direct impact on the culture at large. There are, for example, no well-known “deconstructionist” poets or novelists. There are no deconstructionist coffeehouses. The simple explanation may be that deconstructionism per se, as first indicated in such philosophical texts as Heidegger’s What Is Called Thinking?, Derrida’s Of Grammatology, and Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge, has remained above all a view of language rather than a philosophy of existence.

      The popularity of deconstructionism can be understood on the one hand as a long-overdue revolt in philosophical theology against the sovereignty of logical positivism and linguistic analysis, which left little room for a sense of the mysterious. The deconstructionist slogans “thinking the unthought” and “saying the unsaid”—phrases borrowed from Heidegger—can be construed as the postmodern equivalent of the Barthian encounter with God as “wholly other.” In addition, deconstructionism has permitted theological writers a freedom to assimilate other disciplines such as linguistics, literary criticism, philosophical pragmatism, and to a certain extent even scientific theory, in a manner that was denied to them just a decade before. But the gains have been almost entirely academic.

      What, then, are some of the general themes marking the deconstructionist program in the theological arena? Although these themes are not necessarily common to all deconstructionist authors, they can be summarized as follows:

      1. The End of Theology. Just as Heidegger announced “the end of philosophy” as a continuing metaphysical tradition of argument, so deconstructionists proclaim the “end of theology” as a coherent process of inquiry

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