After Transcendence: The Death of God and the Future of Religion

Abstract

I am going to take it as my point of departure in this paper that, as Nietzsche so vividly put it, ‘God is dead’, and go on to reflect upon the question of what this might mean for the future of religion. Among the ‘shadows of God’ remaining to be vanquished, I suggest, is the shadow of the idea of God itself, which has fallen over the whole realm of religion in the Western world for so long that it takes some doing even to conceive of what religion might look like out from under it. If religion is to have a future, however, or at any rate a future other than simply a prolongation of its past, and a new lease on life after the ‘death of God’, having any interest and significance for those of us for whom (as Nietzsche put it in his gloss on this notion in Gay Science)2 ‘the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable’, this is an effort that must be made. And I further consider it to be an effort well worth making. For I believe the possibility of what I shall call ‘post-transcendence religion’ (‘PT-religion’ for short) to be of crucial importance in connection with the problem posed by the ‘advent of nihilism’ Nietzsche heralded, and with the task of overcoming it that was his greatest concern. And as I read him, I think he would agree. Indeed, I see him as one of the discoverers and explorers of this new religious continent, the devices of transcendence.

New struggles. — After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave — a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. — And we — we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.¹