The God they buried

A century and a half ago a philosopher famously announced that God was dead, and that we were the ones who had killed Him. He did not mean it as a boast so much as a diagnosis: Western culture had quietly stopped believing, and in doing so had hollowed out the faith that once held its whole world together, though it had not yet grasped what it had done. Whatever one makes of the claim, much of the modern world has gone on to live as if it were true. The air turned secular and disenchanted; faith was eased toward the margins, treated as a private hobby or a relic of a less knowing age. This is a vast and ambient disorientation, not a single shock but a slow change in the weather, until belief itself can feel quaint, like clinging to someone long buried. And yet the buried God keeps turning up. He proves remarkably difficult to keep in the ground. To the philosophers on the Areopagus, Paul said it plainly: God made us to seek Him, and He is not far from any one of us. Not far from the devout, and not far either from the secular age that filed His obituary and went on without Him.

You may be living out your faith inside a world, or a family, or a workplace where God is simply assumed to be gone, the question long since settled, your belief a leftover from a more credulous time. That ambient unbelief is its own kind of disorientation, quieter than a crisis but just as real, because it can make faith itself feel faintly embarrassing, like devotion to a corpse. But notice what the long view shows. The God so often declared dead keeps making Himself known, in conversions no one predicted, in hungers the secular age cannot satisfy, in the persistent ache for meaning it cannot explain away. The right response to a culture that has buried God is not scorn for the people who think He is gone; many are nearer to seeking than they know. The right response is to keep believing, and to remember Paul's astonishing claim. He is not far from you in the secular air, nor from the skeptic beside you. The obituary was premature. The God it announced as dead is closer to that whole disenchanted world than it has any idea.