God Is Dead.

In October 1965 Time magazine stirred up a tempest among the general public with a cover story called "Christian Atheism: The 'God Is Dead' Movement." The story focused on recent developments in Christian theology in which academics discussed the need for society to recognize that it behaved as if God were no longer active in the world. They claimed that modern man functions without the need for some transcendent explanation of life, and theologians had difficulty in finding words to describe God. The argument went as follows: what could theology say about religion when God, as Friedrich Nietzsche said, is dead? The God of the Christian past no longer served a function.

Theological Stirrings.

The movement got its name from the title of Gabriel Vahanian's book The Death of God: The Culture of Our Post-Christian Era (1961), but the controversy was...