Nietzsche's philosophical legacy and Death of God Theology

The present article deals with the problem of crisis of Christian consciousness exemplified in 1960s by the emergence of the so-called Death of God Theology, a highly controversial project in American protestant thought. The leaders of this movement had their views influenced by the reflection on the destiny of Christianity in the work of the great philosophers and theologians of the second half of the 19th first half of the 20th century, such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. After witnessing in the wake of World War II the loss of credit suffered by both Catholic and Protestant Churches both of which, openly or tacitly, supported the fascist regimes, the exponents of Death of God Theology came up with the idea of a "Post-Christian Era". In heir attempt to provide answers to the religious and philosophical questions the postwar generation was putting, they offered a particular interpretation of Nietzsche's thesis that "God is dead". Universally recognizing Nietzsche's critique of Christianity as justifiable and accepting Bonhoeffer's concept of "non-religious Christianity", they raised the problem of the very possibility of speaking about God in a secular world. Like the representatives of many other trends in theology that emerged during the same period in the West, theologians of the Death of God school endeavoured to "rescue Christ from oblivion" by way of developing theories of "kenotic Christology", Thomas Altizer's "Christian atheism" being the most original contribution among these. As a radical anti-Trinitarian, Altizer understood the "death of God" in Christ as a leveling of the transcendental; following Nietzsche, he argued that Jesus Christ had found the "real life", whereas the Church "deified Nothing". Seeing as Nietzsche, speaking of the "death of God", meant "the end of Christianity", radical theologians strove to detect the presence of Christ in the midst of the secular world, i. e., outside the "religious forms", thus evidencing the unprecedented theological and ideological transformations.