Death of God

The years I was at Lutheran Theological Seminary, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, I heard professors talking about the theology of Holy Saturday as the day when, speaking in Christianity’s later apprehensions, Logos the Creating Word was dead, entombed, and no one in charge, the universe orphaned, bereft and desolate. 

If one’s God is too small as J. B. Phillips wrote, it seems entirely right here from my seventh floor balcony on a gloomy Holy Saturday looking out across St. Andrew Bay as clouds move in and driving white rain pelts down, obliterating the city to the east of me. I love this, the thought of it, and the desolating liturgy of Holy Saturday; the idea that the stars will wink out and begin to fall, the firmament crumble and the water rush in, even though I know that beyond the gloom Saturn’s rings are still circling, Orion is still poised to strike with his sword, and somewhere the sun is still shining. What’s the theology? Well, at least in part it’s that creation came into being through Logos, the Creating Word; has its ongoing existence because the Word continues to speak -- or perhaps sung as C. S. Lewis has Aslan singing a world into being in one of the Narnia chronicles -- that we have our life and the world around us because the creating Word continues to be spoken; that if the Logos ever goes silent, not only will we not be, we will never have been. Maybe that’s a function of the voices singing round the throne, a Speaking from heaven lest the Logos again fall into the hands of men. Someone else may hear different, but in my knowing, nothing is sung there but Anglican Chant.

A hard rain, moved in off the Gulf as I watched, but not blowing, at least not my way, and I sat out here through the whole measure of it. It’s all good here; so far, God was only dead for that one day of the holy triduum. 

TW+