Brethren, this according to the Religion News Service:
PORTLAND, Ore. (RNS) William Hamilton, the retired theologian who declared in the 1960s that God was dead, died Tuesday (Feb. 28) in his downtown Portland apartment. He was 87.
Hamilton said he'd been haunted by questions about God since he was a teenager. Years later, when his conclusion was published in the April 8, 1966, edition of Time Magazine, he found himself at the center of a theological storm.
Time christened the new movement "radical theology," and Hamilton, one of its key figures, received death threats and inspired angry letters to the editor. He lost his endowed chair as a professor of theology at what was then Colgate Rochester Divinity School in 1967.
"I wrote out my two choices: 'God is not behind such radical evil, therefore he cannot be what we have traditionally meant by God' or 'God is behind everything, including the death camps -and therefore he is a killer.'"
He discovered that he no longer believed in an active God.
"The death of God is a metaphor," he said. "We needed to redefine Christianity as a possibility without the presence of God."
While Hamilton may have paved the way for the most recent wave of strident atheism, he wasn't a fan of best-selling writers who attacked religion in general or Christianity in particular.
"There is a self-righteousness, a glibness in their writing," he said. "They are too sure of themselves. They've backed themselves into a fundamentalist mode."
Commentary. William Hamilton was an honest man who asked tough questions during a tumultuous era, an era where many children were learning to ask questions. Now, there are questions that open doors, and there are questions that close doors. I think Mr. Hamilton’s were the kind that closed doors. The sad thing is that too many have followed Mr. Hamilton to his dead end. On the up side, Mr. Hamilton saw through the hubris of the “bright” new atheists and did not identify with them.
William Hamilton: cleared all his doubts during his meeting with the living God at age 87.