Gabriel Vahanian dies at 85; key figure in 'God Is Dead' movement

L.A. Times ^ | 9/16/12 | Elaine Woo

[Borges]

Despite a provocative title, Gabriel Vahanian's book "The Death of God" caused no public stir when it was published in 1961.

By the middle of the decade, however, a massive upheaval was underway in American society and Vahanian, a little-known Syracuse University professor of religion, found himself at the center of a furious national debate.

The French-born academic entered the spotlight in 1965 when Time magazine's Easter week cover posed the question that Vahanian and other radical theologians had raised: "Is God Dead?" The arguments pro and con were still churning more than a year later, when the magazine noted that the easiest way to boost Sunday church attendance was to announce a sermon on the divine demise.

Vahanian, a key thinker in what became known as the "death of God" movement, died of natural causes Aug. 30 at his home in Strasbourg, France, said his son-in-law, Jeffrey W. Robbins. He was 85.

Time had named him one of the four best-known theologians of the movement, which, according to the magazine, argued it was "no longer possible to think about or believe in a transcendent God who acts in human history" and that Christianity "will have to survive, if at all, without him."

In Vahanian's view, America in the early '60s was a "post-Christian world," driven away from faith by the Holocaust and other World War II horrors.

[Tolkien]

We were put here to glorify God, period.

[Borges]

He was right in the sense of describing a cultural condition that became very explicit a few years later. He seems to have been a believer.