Word: vahanian
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...many cler gymen, the concept of a dead deity simply hearkened back to the secular atheism of Nietzsche. What was more at issue was not so much the existence but the concept of God, and even the theologians who founded the movement differed sharply in their views. Gabriel Vahanian of Syracuse University spoke of the death of God in the sense that the creator assumed by Western civilization no longer meant anything to the modern mind...
Undermining Faith. Christians are sometimes inclined to look back nostalgically at the medieval world as the great age of faith. In his book, The Death of God, Gabriel Vahanian of Syracuse University suggests that actually it was the beginning of the divine demise. Christianity, by imposing its faith on the art, politics and even economics of a culture, unconsciously made God part of that culture?and when the world changed, belief in this God was undermined. Now "God has disappeared because of the image of him that the church used for many, many ages," says Dominican Theologian Edward Schillebeeckx...
...Gabriel Vahanian suggests that there may well be no true faith without a measure of doubt, and thus contemporary Christian worry about God could be a necessary and healthy antidote to centuries in which faith was too con fident and sure. Perhaps today, the Christian can do no better than echo the prayer of the worried father who pleaded with Christ to heal his spirit-possessed son: "I believe; help my unbelief...
Only God Knows God. While Altizer, Van Buren and Hamilton proclaim the death of God with prophetic force, Syracuse's Associate Professor Gabriel Vahanian, 38, is urbanely content to explain why the funeral is necessary. More conservative than the others, Vahanian is a sociologist of religion and a cultural historian with a primary interest in analyzing man's perception of God. He argues that God, if there is one, is known to man only in terms of man's own culture, and thus is basically an idol: "Theologically speaking, any concept of God can only...
...Vahanian believes that the church's concept of God today is the product of the encounter between primitive Christianity and Greek philosophy, an idol that is no longer relevant to secular culture and has been either neutralized by overexposure or rejected entirely. Thus, he declares, God is dead, and will remain so until the church becomes secular enough in structure and thought to proclaim him anew in ways that will fulfill the cultural needs of the times. Since the spirit of the times is irretrievably secular-with all notions of transcendence and otherworldliness rejected-Vahanian in his current study...