The 1966 Time Cover, and What Vahanian Actually Argued

Time magazine's cover for April 8, 1966 carried three words in red type on a plain black background, "Is God Dead?", the first time the magazine had run a cover with no image at all, and it remains the single most recognized artifact of this movement, far better known than any of the books that prompted it. The cover story reported on a genuine and often bitter dispute among a handful of American Protestant theologians, but its stark either or framing flattened a set of positions that disagreed sharply with each other into a single yes or no question about God's existence.

Gabriel Vahanian, whose 1961 book The Death of God: The Culture of Our Post Christian Era had supplied the phrase five years earlier, is a useful corrective to the cover's framing precisely because his own argument was not the metaphysical claim the headline implies. Vahanian held that traditional Christian belief in a transcendent, sovereign God had lost its cultural plausibility in a secularized, technological modern West, so that "God is dead" functioned for him as a diagnosis of contemporary religious culture's indifference rather than an assertion that God, understood correctly, does not exist; he continued to argue for a recovered, less domesticated sense of divine transcendence rather than for atheism. That the phrase he coined became the banner over Altizer's far more radical claim that God had ceased to exist by pouring into the world is itself a measure of how far a single arresting sentence can travel from the argument that first stated it.