Editorial April 16, 1966 Issue

The Living God

Helen Wood Bauman

The Christian world's turbulent discussion of the declaration by certain religionists that "God is dead" can scarcely be quieted by human reason. Whatever God is, personal opinions cannot change it.

Perhaps all that is happening in today's theological agitation is that that the traditional concept of God has outlived credence by thoughtful people. Perhaps a day of reckoning has come for the false teaching of centuries of Christian faith that Jesus was God, that divinity became humanity. Now we must, according to those who promote the "God is dead" concept, go on without God, giving our allegiance to Jesus alone, since God died on the cross. Christian Science cries out against these illogical beliefs.

The Saviour must have known that divinity was animating him as he exercised the power of Spirit over mortality and matter, through which mortality acts to perpetuate its own doom. But Jesus did not teach that he was God. He designated himself many times as the Son of God and often as the Son of man. When his opponents quarrelsomely accused him of "blasphemy ... because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God," as they said, he made his position amply clear. "I said, I am the Son of God"^{John 10:33, 36;} were his words. It was error, not Truth, which made men believe that he was teaching that he was God. He was denying this fallacy.