Some may wonder why I call my blog “The End of God.” Well, we have come to the end of God, or better: we need to come to the end of God. If all we have is talk about God, belief—inert belief, that is—in God, analyzing of God, we may think we are in touch with God. But we aren’t. If it is true that we need to talk right about God—which I believe to be necessary—we can only come the end of God. Only God’s end will be the start of a new understanding of who God is and what God’s ends are. The end of God means three important things.
In the first place we cease our incessant talk about God. Who God is, where God is, why God made the world, why God allowed for evil, and doesn’t interfere, etc. Simply put: we stop talking about God. This is the end of God. The end of our God-talk, our constructs, our indubitable proofs of God, our letting God be in the space that we create for God with our language and our interpretations. The end of God is the end of gods in our image. The God of our imagination will have to cease. The God of Scripture has to begin. I am not saying that imagination has no place. Quite the contrary is the case. But while believing we have God at our disposal through our imaginative tools of modernist precision (historical exegesis, linear interpretation, and talk about ‘what the Bible teaches’), we have actually taken God’s freedom away and come to a human understand of what exactly God is allowed to think, say, or do. We have done so with the best of intentions, but God has been muffled. What we have claimed to be the defense of God against the bulwark of secularization and liberal thought has often only contributed to the end of God as much as the actions of those who would like to deny God’s existence. This end of God must be undone by the ending of this God of our construct and imagination. This is where it ends. But it is also where it begins.
When we consider who God is, we say that God is the one who has shown Godself in the person of Jesus. God has come to us in a human body, the body of the man Jesus Christ. All that we can know or say about God we learn from Jesus. The biblical narrative that preceded Jesus is one prelude to the incarnation and what has come after it, is its outworking all the way to its ultimate fulfillment. All God-talk about who, what, and where God is, becomes mute at the sight of Jesus. All ontological investigations into God and all epistemological endeavors to get at God halt in the light of Jesus presence. Jesus is all we need to know about God. We look at Jesus and see how he loves, heals, cares, provides. He gives his body for the other. He gives and loses his life. His human bodily life. This is the end of God in the body of Jesus. The end of God in Jesus Christ is our end. He died that we might live and give our lives for the other. God’s end is our end. How can we not go that path Jesus went? Our only speaking of God can be about how this God of Jesus can be made manifest through us.
The only theology that we may speak of, therefore, is one that speaks ethically. Only where God’s ends and ours meet is speech about God justified. This end is in this world. For God so loved the world that God gave God’s only Son. Jesus came in a human body into our creaturely existence in order to redeem, heal, reconcile, renew. “Embodiment is the end of God’s path.” This was one of Bonhoeffer’s favorite quotes. It summarized the journey of his own theology from the centrality of God’s presence in Jesus Christ to an affirmation of this world for which Christ has come. This world, our creaturely reality, lives in the hope that it will be renewed. In Christ God says Yes to the world, to our bodies, to our creaturely reality. Behold the face of Jesus. The face of one coming to renew the world and usher in the end of God.
