Gabriel Vahanian was a man of faith whose critique, The Death of God: The Culture of Our Post-Christian Era, was considered a forerunner of a movement to save Christianity from obsolescence. A churchgoing Presbyterian throughout his life, he wasn’t endorsing Nietzsche’s “death of God” philosophy. Rather, he was challenging church leaders for what he thought was the trivialization of Christian teaching in the secular age.
His work asks us to consider who God actually is and to what degree subtle beliefs about God as having human motives and purposes may keep us from seeing the true Divinity. In his 1964 book, Wait Without Idols, he described the theological dilemma created by Christian culture that tried to define God in material terms: “It is easier to understand oneself without God than with God. The dilemma of Christianity is that it taught man how to be responsible for his actions in this world, and for this world itself. Now man has declared God not responsible and not relevant to human self-knowledge. The existence of God, no longer questioned, has become useless to man’s predicament and its resolution” (quoted in Paul Vitello’s, “Gabriel Vahanian, theologian in ‘death of God’ movement,” The New York Times, September 10, 2012).
Vahanian saw the rise of the Social Gospel and prosperity theology—which defined one’s holiness through the size of one’s bank account—as diminishing to Christianity. He believed that in order for faith to thrive, it needed to be understood as distinct from acts of human charity or material blessings. This implies that we can’t really find faith or evidence of God solely in material actions, however loving they may be.
