The Death of God Series - Pt. 1 - Kill Your Idols

Click here to read the introductory post for the series. 

A possible reading of Death of God -- Kill your Idols

As mentioned in the first post, the death of God is a repeated act, a ritual. In some ways, this continual killing, performing the death of God as a church, reminds us of our complicity, but not as fallen humans.

No, our complicity is through our participation in the most destructive aspects of an institutionalized, state-aligned religious organization, as obedient citizens and devout consumers. 

We realize through this complicity that our worship has been misguided, redirected away from this death scene. We've been too obsessed with national identity, denominational identity, and personal branding to have any attention directed towards the dead body of God. 

We jump too quickly towards resurrection instead of realizing that the killing requires us to remove the images we have created. The "ruler," "conqueror," or "king" figure is destroyed. Our images, prayers, and expectations need to be unraveled and reframed, but we tend to forget and drag along these conceptual corpses. We have let these bodies fester and rot. As Nietzsche says, "Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition?"

We need to leave these idols behind and walk towards the Unknown God that the Apostle Paul speaks of in Athens (Acts 17). 

We often don't realize it, but our images of God are already dead -- we don't believe in them even as we attempt to revive them. An all-powerful conqueror, a new ruler, a champion -- all of these images miss the vulnerability, the brokenness, and, as John Caputo says, the weakness of God. 

In the sermon on the mount, Jesus repeatedly says, "you have heard it said... but I say." He was constantly undoing, and destroying common ideas that were held by religious people at the time. These were ideas that formed their relationship with God, that shaped their image of God, and he destroyed it. It was an act of killing gods. It was a stripping away, a rewriting, an renewal of the god-concept. 

Each time we remember this moment, it allows us to enact this death, to mourn, and attempt to reconstruct an image of god. And we know, we will always fall short of constructing an image that matches the complexity, impossibility, and divinity of God -- so we do it again and again. 

This may seem hopeless. However, the alternative is to forget the death of God, to fail to realize our involvement and miss the (necessary) time of mourning. This forgetting is to abandon the suffering, to skip over instead of going through. The only way to the kingdom of God is through the death of God.