The Death of God Movement and the Holocaust: Radical Theology Encounters the Shoah, edited by Stephen R. Haynes and John K. Roth. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. 152 pp. $55.00.

In this text on the "radical theology" movement of the 1960s, Stephen R. Haynes and John Roth bring together twelve articles to which they have added an introduction and epilogue of their own. One of the articles is the Time magazine essay of April 8, 1966, "Toward a Hidden God"; four are by the so-called "death of God" theologians Altizer, Hamilton, van Buren, and Rubenstein; and seven are from commentators on the movement. This makes for a very difficult book to review. I say "so-called" for two reasons: one is that these four were all saying markedly different things, and the other is that only Altizer seems to believe in some oddly metaphysical way in the self-emptying of God. He manages to believe far more in what God does (at least by way of getting rid of God) than some admittedly Christian theologians can manage to affirm.

The book is included in the "Christianity and the Holocaust" series because it seeks to answer the question of the effect that knowledge of the Shoah and its meaning had on the death of God movement. To those of us who are both post-Shoah theologians and who are quite old enough to remember the death of God movement, the question seems a little odd, far-fetched. Memory serves one fairly well on this point: the Holocaust was of decisive importance for Rubenstein's...