Death of God movement co-founder

Theologian William Hamilton, a member of the Death of God movement of the 1960s that reached its peak with a

Time magazine cover story, has died in Portland, Ore. He was 87.

Hamilton died Tuesday from complications from congestive heart failure at the downtown apartment he shared with his wife, his family said.

Hamilton told The Oregonian newspaper in 2007 that he had questioned the existence of God since he was a teenager, when two Christian friends died from the explosion of a pipe bomb they were building, while a third — an atheist — escaped without a scratch.

It caused him to question why the innocent suffer, and whether God intervened in people’s lives, he said.

“The death of God is a metaphor,” Hamilton said. “We needed to redefine Christianity as a possibility without the presence of God.”

He co-authored the 1966 book, Radical Theology and the

Death of God , with Thomas J.J. Altizer. The book and the ensuing 1966 Time magazine article “Is God Dead?” made Hamilton a pariah at Colgate Rochester Divinity School, a liberal Baptist theological school in Rochester, N.Y.

Despite holding an endowed chair and full tenure, Hamilton was no longer allowed to teach and left for a new job at New College in Sarasota, Fla., said Ronald Carson, a student of Hamilton’s at the time and now an emeritus professor of humanities at the University of Texas.

Hamilton left New College in 1970 and became dean of arts and letters at Portland State University, teaching a wide range of subjects until he retired in 1986.

Born March 9, 1924, in Evanston, Ill., Hamilton is survived by his wife, five children, eight grandchildren, and four greatgrandchildren.