Books by Gabriel Vahanian

In the aftermath of writing The Death of God, Vahanian had opportunity to advance his discussion. In his introduction to No Other God, he wrote, "Taken as nothing less if nothing more than a cultural phenomenon, the death of God signifies the transition from radical monotheism to radical immanentism and marks the birth of secularism as the vector of the new religiosity. It announces the the advent of a new, culturally Christian, paganism, even while theology is busy overlooking its indigence or covering it up with a glorified but amnesic vocabulary....But what I have denounced elsewhere as the charter of the incipient post-Christian idolatry is now proclaimed as the first article of an immanentist religiosity. So called 'Christian atheism' glories precisely in what I deplored when I first used the term 'death of God.' Meanwhile, Christian theology serves only to separate the Church from the world, instead of pointing to the fact that the Church is -- or should be -- what happens when the world hears the Word of God." Vahanian, recognizing that God is a word, and that God is not God without the world, ultimately helps readers understand the two poles of language that need to be kept in balance: wording the world and worlding the word. In this light, idolatry of every kind is threatened by new language, both symbolic and iconoclastic, which serves to usher in a new world.

""The death of God"" began, according to Vahanian, the moment Western man started to compromise with the Biblical concept of God transcendent, and to merge the identity of the Godhead with the identity of humankind. From this compromise evolved the belief in the possibility of heaven on earth, in human perfectibility, in the expectation that man, both individually and collectively, can control his termporal fate. Today, as a consequence, Western society not only exalts all possible material comforts, but requires as well easy, guaranteed, status-assuring religious affiliations. The present search for ""inner security"" is in direct opposition to the toleration of doubt that tests the strength of genuine religious faith. And Vahanian shows how our spiritual decline is reflected in much of the most important imaginative writing of today.

Ephemeral differences notwithstanding, both literature and the Bible are stirred by a common passion for words, all of which are on an equal footing in staging an at once intimate and ultimate passion of the word. Of language and its quest for truth of which each and every word of a dictionary is entrusted, so long as no word per se can lord it over all the other words. Keepers of the word, words cannot keep a secret, bound as they are both to reveal and conceal it at one and the same time. Except for a parrot, language has no mother tongue: it inherits only that which it can translate: the everlasting into the ephemeral, the temporal into the eternal, speaking into writing - into that which happens once and for all. Language is iconic and iconoclastic. It is propitious to God and would-be gods and, conversely, it is equally allergic to idols. Hence the title of this book, borrowed from a line of W.H. Auden's Christmas Oratorio. No sooner is God worshipped than God is turned into an idol.Biblical or not, religious or secular, literature is iconoclastic. ¿Promethean iconoclasm quarrels with God. Ironically less theistic, the paradox of Abrahamic iconoclasm lies in laying bare the duplicity, not so much of God, as of all human all too human conceptions of a God which, falling short of God, becomes an idol that can only be rebuked even by God if not by Abraham, the father of faith. No wonder, Western literature has dealt with the death of God rather than with the living God: its task has consisted in wording a world shaped and left to go adrift by Christian tradition itself gone irrelevant and locked up in a mother tongue no one speaks instead of time and again unleashing and worlding the Word.

Gabriel Vahanian's final work, Theopoetics of the Word weaves together Christian theology, continental philosophy and cultural studies to present a new theology of language and technology for the 21st century.