Post-Holocaust theology - Rubenstein and the death of God

The Holocaust and classical theism

The Holocaust was the Nazi persecution and systematic murder of approximately six million Jews, carried out through human decisions, institutions and collaborators. Mass shootings, ghettos and death camps were among its methods. Families, communities, learning, religious institutions and cultural worlds were destroyed alongside individual lives. Treating the event only as an abstract problem of evil loses the scale and particularity of its human consequences.

Survival did not end suffering. Displaced people faced bereavement, destroyed homes and difficulty finding safety. Post-war antisemitism included the Kielce pogrom, on 4 July 1946, which killed at least forty-two Jews, many Holocaust survivors. This establishes continuing and renewed hostility in a particular setting; it does not prove that antisemitism increased uniformly everywhere or that all non-Jews held one view.

Classical theism typically affirms a powerful, knowing and good God. Jewish covenant adds a particular question about divine relationship with Israel and action in history. If God could prevent mass murder, knew it occurred and cared for the victims, why was it permitted? An appeal to guilt is especially unjustified: suffering does not establish that victims deserved it, as Job already shows.

The logical question asks whether the commitments are formally compatible; the evidential question asks whether this event makes a providentially protective account credible. Even a possible explanation may leave the second question severe. Ethical evaluation also asks what an explanation does to victims' dignity and to responsibility for perpetrators' actions.

Rubenstein and the death of God

Richard Rubenstein, in After Auschwitz (first published 1966), rejects the traditional confidence that an omnipotent covenant God directs history in the interests of a chosen people. If every historical event is attributed to that God's purpose, the death camps become part of divine intention. For Rubenstein, protecting the theology at that cost is unacceptable.

His death of God language describes the collapse of a culturally credible belief, not a biological event in which a divine body dies. In his revised account he explicitly treats it as a cultural event. The refutation concerns a particular providential God of history. It should not be reported as a laboratory demonstration that every conceivable ultimate reality is nonexistent.