Christian atheism

Thomas Ogletree, Frederick Marquand Professor of Ethics and Religious Studies at Yale Divinity School, lists these four common beliefs:[1][2] Death of God theology, which had brief public prominence in the mid-1960s, refers to a range of views aiming to account for the rise of secularity and emphasizing that God has either ceased to exist or never did.

It is influenced by deconstructionists such as Jacques Derrida, the German idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Christian existentialists including Soren Kierkegaard and Paul Tillich, and philosopher Martin Heidegger.

[6] In the United Kingdom, Don Cupitt pioneered Christian non-realism, which rejects a "realistic ontology, the notion that there is something out there prior to and independent of our language and theories, and against which they can be checked.

We humans are nonetheless reduced to a position within the harmonious whole of evolution, whatever, but the difficult thing to accept is again that there is no Big Other, no point of reference which guarantees meaning.According to Žižek, the idea of Jesus' death on the cross addresses this tension by serving as an act of love and a "resolution of radical anxiety."

It uncovers how faith helps us resolutely confront our brokenness, joyfully embrace unknowing, and courageously face the difficulties of life.

[12]Theologians including Altizer and Colin Lyas, a philosophy lecturer at Lancaster University, have written about religion's place in a scientific, empirical culture.

Some follow the tradition of "Christian non-realism", most famously expounded in the United Kingdom by Don Cupitt in the 1980s, which holds that God is a symbol or metaphor and that religious language is not matched by a transcendent reality.

In 2010, a decision to allow Hendrikse to continue his ministry was made after a regional supervisory panel concluded that his statements "are not of sufficient weight to damage the foundations of the Church."

[19] In 2017, the WIN-Gallup International Association (WIN/GIA) poll found that Sweden, a majority Christian country, had second highest percentage (76%) of people who call themselves atheist or irreligious, after China.

[22] Catholic atheists accept the culture, traditions, rituals and norms of Catholicism, but deny the existence of God.

[16] In his book Mere Christianity, the apologist C. S. Lewis objected to Hamilton's version of Christian atheism and the claim that Jesus was merely a moral guide: I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God.'

You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher.

Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.Lewis's argument, now known as Lewis's trilemma, has been criticized for constituting a false dilemma, since it does not deal with other options such as Jesus being mistaken, misrepresented, or simply mythical.

Philosopher John Beversluis argues that Lewis "deprives his readers of numerous alternate interpretations of Jesus that carry with them no such odious implications".

[23] Bart Ehrman stated that it is a mere legend the historical Jesus called himself God; this would have been unknown to Lewis since he was never a professional Bible scholar.