The "death of God" and the postmodern way of thinking

Considered a madman by most of his contemporaries, though not at all taken as such by not a few modern intellectuals and academics when he bravely proclaimed through his parabolic poem Thus Spake Zarathustra that God is dead, Friedrich Nietzsche was a certified God-killer, indeed, of the highest order.

Nietzsche was the recognized prime architect and preacher of the "death of God" gospel, which lies at the very heart of contemporary Western culture now being largely shaped by the postmodern way of thinking.  The gospel in this scheme is no longer about salvation from the fires of hell.  Rather, the Nietzschean gospel announces a new message that, because God is dead, humans need not be constrained anymore by traditional moral principles His "misguided" followers have imposed upon humanity.  This, according to Nietzsche, is good news, the only real good news. 

Perhaps, Nietzsche simply played the role of Screwtape to disciple the likes of Wormwood whose task was to lure people of the modern world to make them think of doctrines not as primarily "true" or "false," but as "academic" or "practical," "outworn" or "contemporary," "conventional" or "ruthless."  Shortly after the awful death of this syphilis-stricken evangelist of the "death of God" gospel, the West began to take a new shape, as if determined to abandon its Judeo-Christian framework to have it replaced by an anti-theistic posture of the mind in its pursuit of a new socio-cultural arrangement without the moral restraints demanded by the reality of God's existence.

But who will replace God if He is already dead? The Enlightenment of the 18th century had the role of God taken by Reason (with the capital R) so as to bring its own utopian dream of an ideal modern world where everybody lives in harmony, in perfect peace and health, forever prosperous, not anymore lacking in every need except the need for God. This dream, however, started to dwindle on account of the bankruptcy of its premises and the emptiness of its promise of a nearly perfect world as it eventually showed itself impotent to deliver to the people of the modern its own ideals of peace, health and prosperity. 

For the highly sophisticated philosophical system and the technologically advanced gadgets of modernity, far from having supplied a sure answer to the woes of civilizations that include wars, human suffering and barbaric atrocities, among others, only contributed more threat to the survival of the modern world.  In fact, the 20th century, arguably the most "enlightened" of all centuries, proved to be the bloodiest in world history, in fulfillment of what Nietzsche himself predicted.

In spite of it all, the West appeared to be still decidedly unwilling to return to its Judeo-Christian roots and surrender the basic tenets of the "death of God" gospel.  In place of the Enlightenment ideals (which, together with the Judeo-Christian faith, championed the certainty and objectivity of truth), there came a new way of thinking called existentialism. Inspired by the writings of existentialist philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre and his disciple Albert Camus, a radically different presupposition became the dominant cultural mooring of the day: that existence precedes essence and that "truth" is just a human construct, inevitably subjective and inescapably relative to any individual. 

People then began to formulate their own reason for existence, to make up their own purpose for living and to invent their own meaning in life, relying upon their own intuition instead of searching for truth outside of themselves.  In the decades to follow, along with some other schools of thought then being disseminated in the Western world, existentialism would prove to be the immediate precursor of what has been known today as postmodernism.

References:

Carson, D. A. The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism.  Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1996.

Zacharias, Ravi.  Can Man Live Without God. Nashville, TN: W Publishing Group, 1994.