Theologian who heralded the death of God ponders his own
PORTLAND, Ore. — It was a quiet Sunday afternoon in 1938 when something went terribly wrong near young Bill Hamilton's house. His teenage friends had been building pipe bombs. One, an Episcopalian, was dead. Another, a Catholic, lay on the grass fatally injured. And the third, the son of an atheist, emerged without a scratch.
How, Hamilton wondered, could a just God allow this? Why do the innocent suffer? Does God intervene in human lives?
"Theodicy came to dwell in my 14-year-old head that Sunday," he says.
The questions haunted Hamilton at his friends' funerals, at school, in the Navy, at seminary and in his years as a theology professor in upstate New York. By 1966, he had an answer, and it landed him in Time and Playboy magazines: God was dead.
...
Dr. Bill Jones | 6/18/2008
