ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the so-called ‘death of God’, which arose in the nineteenth century, and the ‘death of the death of God’, which is of concern to philosophers today. As with science, philosophy has done a dramatic about-face in our time, and is no longer antagonistic to religious concerns. Up until the middle of the twentieth century, philosophy was opposed to religion, but then it turned in an unexpected direction, under the influence of Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida. God began to appear again in serious philosophy, but it was not the same image of God that had died a century earlier. A new image of God began to arise, and this was helped by the rediscovery of the ancient tradition of negative theology, a form of mystical theology. Hence, we can speak of ‘God after God’, a God who emerges after Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’, after the collapse of outworn beliefs and old forms of theology. It signals a radical departure from traditional ideas of the sacred and points to a religious renaissance that has hardly begun.
