Gabriel Vahanian, theologian, social criticism, 1961, "The Death of God: The culture of our post-Christian," gave a name to a movement apparently atheist but widely misunderstood theological, died August 30 at home Strasbourg, France.
His daughter Noelle Vahanian, confirmed his death.
Mr. Vahanian, a Presbyterian church attendance for all his life, he taught at Syracuse University, when a small literary publisher published "The Death of God," a scientific leaders who took the church to task for what is considered the trivialization of the Christian doctrine in secular era.
It has not been approved by Friedrich Nietzsche 1880-was the announcement of the death of God has received little attention outside of university departments of religion and newspapers like the Journal of Bible and Religion. (Guest reviews The Journal has established a dense read, but worth it. "Books like this should be written and read if the solutions are Christians," he said.)
But in 1966, Mr. Vahanian has reached a wider audience when Time magazine named the book as the forerunner of numerous works written in this period by scholars who belong to the world to call for the death of theology movement God. All have been struggling with some of the great questions of religion in world war II, said the center would have if people stopped believing? What religious values ??survive in a world postfaith?
Mr. Vahanian knew and corresponded with some of the others in the movement, including Harvey Cox of Harvard University, Thomas JJ Altizer at Emory University and William Hamilton, who was forced to leave his post to a faculty State of New York, after the Time article Rage seminar and later taught at Portland State University in Oregon. He died in March.
They were not atheists. Some felt uncomfortable with the name of their movement, as it is considered more of a rescue team in an attack team. They see their work as a continuation of research initiated by some of the greatest theologians of the twentieth century and the media, such as Paul Tillich, Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Mr. Vahanian, but distanced himself from the group and its aura Nietzsche, however, does not deserve.
"I had a completely different theological sensibilities of most of them," said Jeffrey Robbins, Mr. Vahanian son-in-law, who is chairman of the department of religion and philosophy at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pa. "It was an iconoclast and radical. But he is described as a permanent practice, disgusted Protestant Christian. "
Mr. Cox, professor emeritus of Harvard Divinity School and author of the bestselling 1965 book "The Secular City" - considered one of the fundamental texts of the death of God movement - Mr. Vahanian described as a "visionary" with a traditionalist vein.
"I do not like the idea about the claim that he could not know," Cox said in a telephone interview Wednesday. "He had too much respect for religious tradition."
In his book, Mr. Vahanian criticized efforts to modernize Christianity implicitly criticizes the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, author of the 1950 self-help best-seller "The Power of Positive Thinking." Mr. Vahanian condemned the "positive thinking" and other doctrines that have reduced Christianity to what he described as "a tool for success."
Faith had higher goals, he said. And 'face was suffering, hydraulics awareness, addressing questions about God.
"God is not necessary, but inevitable," Vahanian, wrote in 1964 in "Wait Without Idols," sometimes displays a genomic test the patience of auditors (and leaving aside capital letters when referring to the deity). "It's totally different and totally present." S faith in him, the transformation of our human, cultural and existentially, is the question that is still upon us. '
Antoine Gabriel Vahanian was born January 24, 1927 in Marseille, France, one in four children Mestrop Vahanian Perouse. His parents settled there in the 1920's after fleeing ethnic cleansing campaign that has spread to areas Armenians in Turkey after World War I.
After completing his studies at the Faculty of Protestant Theology Paris in 1949, he received his Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary.
In 1958 he became professor of religion at Syracuse University, where he taught for 26 years and helped found the university's degree in religion.
He moved in 1984 to the University of Human Sciences in Strasbourg, a place considered most important theological chair of Protestantism in France.
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