The Twilight of Atheism by Alister McGrath

Author:Alister McGrath
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2005-10-16T04:30:00+00:00

THE DEATH OF GOD THEOLOGY

The 1960s marked a period of transition, in which the settled assumptions of the Western past were called into question with unprecedented vigor. It was as if there was an unrelenting impatience with the ways of the past, a sense of sheer boredom with existing ideas and values, and a strong belief that a new beginning lay just around the corner. The cultural mood of the period is caught well by Tom Wolfe in his essay “The Great Relearning.” It was all about sweeping everything aside and starting all over again, “following a Promethean and unprecedented start from zero.” To its critics, it seemed madness, a surefire recipe for chaos and superficiality. But to those who caught the vision, it was nothing less than entrancing, promising a rosy future unfettered by the outdated constraints of their parents’ generation.

How could such a massive cultural upheaval leave Christianity unaffected? For the trendy young things of the 1960s, God was an outmoded idea that belonged to the past—or, even worse, to their parents’ generation. Reaction against God was the hallmark of a right-thinking and intelligent young person. In Europe there was a surge of interest in Marxism in the 1960s. The May 1968 student riots in Paris were hailed as the harbinger of a shake-up at least as great as that which had swept away the ancien régime in 1789. “The existing moral order is the enemy,” commented the editor of Libération, the left-leaning newspaper. The students were joined by nearly ten million workers—half the French workforce. For several weeks it looked as if France was facing a shutdown. Similar student protests at Columbia University in New York, together with widespread discontent with the Vietnam War, hinted at a global shift in values. In Northern Ireland, where I grew up, the vision of revolution also shimmered just over the horizon. The civil rights movement seemed poised to topple the old ways of living. A new dawn was just around the corner. Who could fail to be moved by such a powerful vision, especially when this one, unlike the pipe dreams of the past, seemed about to happen?

The 1960s marked a crisis point for Western Christianity. It suffered a severe crisis of confidence over these years, from which it has still not recovered. In the United Kingdom, the Church of England had been busy dealing with something that it regarded as being of ultimate importance: the revision of canon law, the internal legal codes of the church. While the bishops fiddled around with the arcane world of church legislation, their nation came close to losing its faith in God. John Robinson’s book Honest to God (1963) suggested that Christians ought to dispense with the idea of a God “out there,” and bring its ideas into line with some of the leading ideas of modern culture. This resonated with the cultural mood of the time. It made no small difference that Robinson was a bishop of the Church of England. Shortly

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