On the Meaning of “God”: Transcendence without Mythology

Many have observed that modern man, more than the man of any other age, lives in a world from which God is absent, a genuinely secular world. Our forefathers had a sense of God's continuous providential guidance of history as a whole and of their individual destinies in particular; they found their lives meaningful because they were lived within the context of God's purposes, each man having his own unique place and task. But such meaning as most men of our time find is the this-worldly humanly-created meaning emergent from ordinary social intercourse and/or cultural activity. For some this loss of a transcendent source and purpose has reduced human life to meaning-lessness and absurdity, a pointless and empty burden simply to be endured (Beckett); others react with bitterness and revulsion (Sartre); still others seem to find sufficient satisfaction in their daily round of activities, punctuated occasionally by aesthetic experience or unusual excitement, not to miss or lament the dimensions of depth and transcendence and mystery in which previous generations found their lives ensconced. But in any case the radical “eclipse of God” (Buber) or even the final irretrievable “death of God” (Nietzsche) appears to be the most momentous theological fact of our age. Given this cultural context, it is little wonder that linguistic analysts find it dubious whether the word “God” has any genuinely specifiable meaning, and theological writers, in a desperate attempt to rescue the Christian faith from what appears to be its certain demise, seek wholly “secular” interpretations which go so far as to dispense with the word and idea of “God” entirely.