Eclipse of God

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A period in which God or the divine is absent from the world, the idea that the world is now in a time of darkness or evil resulting from an abandonment by God. A variation of theothanatology, or the God is dead movement, the eclipse of God is normally, though not always, understood as a historical period which might end. In philosopher Martin Heidegger's formulation, it is the period of 'double lack,' in which the old gods have died and a new God has not yet come.

This view was also expressed by the German poet Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin, when he wrote 'Aber weh! es wandelt in Nacht, es wohnt, wie im Orkus, Ohne Goettliches unser Geschlecht.' ('But alas! our generation walks in night, dwells as in Hades, without the divine').

Some Jewish theologians, like Prof. Richard Rubenstein believe that this eclipse of God is the reason for the holocaust and support a secularization of Jewishness of the sort exemplified by Zionism and the founding of the secular state of Israel.

[edit] Martin Buber

Martin Buber wrote a book with the title Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation Between Religion and Philosophy. In it Buber considers the crisis of the critiques 20th century philosophers and philosophy in general for attempting to approach God as an object, or 'it', rather than as a subject, or 'thou'. He writes, 'Eclipse of the light of heaven, eclipse of God — such indeed is the character of the historic hour through which the world is passing.'

[edit] See also

• Theothanatology
• Holocaust theology
• God is dead