Post-theism

Post-theism is a variant of nontheism that proposes that the division of theism vs. atheism is obsolete, that God belongs to a stage of human development now past. Within nontheism, post-theism can be contrasted with antitheism. The term appears in Christian liberal theology and Postchristianity.

Frank Hugh Foster in a 1918 lecture announced that modern culture had arrived at a "post-theistic stage" in which humanity has taken possession of the powers of agency and creativity that had formerly been projected upon God.[1]

Denys Turner argues that Karl Marx did not choose atheism over theism, but rejected the binary "Feuerbachian" choice altogether, a position which by being post-theistic is at the same time necessarily post-atheistic.[2] For example, at one point Marx argued "there should be less trifling with the label 'atheism,'” as he insisted "religion in itself is without content, it owes its being not to heaven but to the earth, and with the abolition of distorted reality, of which it is the theory, it will collapse of itself."[3]

Related ideas include Friedrich Nietzsche's pronouncement that "God is dead" and the transtheism of Paul Tillich or Pema Chödrön.

Notable post-theists

See also

Notes and references

  1. ↑ Gary J. Dorrien , The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 1900-1950 (2003), ISBN 978-0-664-22355-7, p. 177f.
  2. ↑ D. Turner, "Religion: Illusions and liberation", in: Terrell Carver (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Marx (1991), ISBN 978-0-521-36694-6, p. 337.
  3. ↑ Karl Marx, Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge In Dresden (1842)
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