“In spite of the death of God”: Gabriel Vahanian’s secular theology

What if secularity is a theological condition? What if secularity is the theological and societal experience of both biblical religion and the death of God? Beginning with The Death of God (1961), for half a century Gabriel Vahanian (1927–2012) developed a theory of secularity expressed as a distinctly theological saeculum: the shared world of human experience. Vahanian’s saeculum was positioned against what he identified as an “idolatrous concern about secular matters” (196) that resulted in “the idolization of religion” (196) expressed in technological religiosity representing “an unmistakable abdication of faith to reason—or unreason” (197). As outlined in No Other God (1966), Vahanian’s concern was with atheistic theologies that took the death of God and in his view denied it, “by sublimating it into a newfangled soeteriological concept” (4). Vahanian’s theological saeculum gives rise to a radical secular theology that begins in an iconoclasm of the self, includes an iconoclasm of the culture in which one finds oneself, and continually seeks a way to restate the biblical tradition into a post-Christian world. In his last book, Theopoetics of the Word (2014), Vahanian wrote, “You do theology not against the background of the death of God but in spite of it” (121). I have taken this as the epigraph for the discussion that follows. In this I write a radical secular theology via Vahanian’s Praise of the Secular, guided by my approach I term an annotative hermeneutics that arises from an engagement with the weak thought of the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo. The radical, secular theology that follows occurs against the background of the death of God, the death of God announced by Nietzsche and the death of God so thoughtfully, so faithfully, traversed by Vahanian. It is a secular theology of annotative hermeneutics that arises from Vahanian but is not Vahanian’s. Rather it is where Vahanian’s secular theology may lead us. This paper is published as part of a thematic collection dedicated to radical theologies.