Nietzsche proclaimed the ‘death of God’. This is not a truth claim, but the expression of an ambivalent experience. One can interpret it as the liberation from God through reason. One can also interpret the death of God as marking the end of human self-emancipation. Reason, as the ‘new God’, also became disputed as a consequence of the challenge of nihilism.

This collection of essays tries to answer the question how to speak about God after the death of God. Are there echoes of the old tradition of Neoplatonic and Christian negative theology in the specific embarrassment we experience today in speaking of God?

The God of metaphysics is no more. This can be experienced in very different ways. It can be an occasion to renew Christian thinking about God (Marion, (Kal), and Moyaert). God’s absence might also be experienced as a possibility to put the very notion of Being into question. This experience shows affinity with the old tradition of negative theology as we know it from the Christian past (Dionysus the Areopagite (Blans), Anselm (Marion), Aquinas (Wissink). Today it leads to a search for a new way of talking about God in contemporary thinkers such as Nietzsche (De Schutter), Bataille (Ten Kate) and Derrida (De Vries, Bulhof, Sneller). Furthermore people find the experience of the absence of God in Adorno (Steunebrink), Taubes (Terpstra and De Wit), and Bakhtin (Simons).

This well-written collection of articles is an excellent introduction into a new (postmodern) philosophical way of speaking about God. Its coherence is underlined and enhanced by the informative introduction and epilogue. All essays meet a high standard of scholarship. One thing I missed, however, is an article on the philosophical theology of the German philosopher Wilhelm Weischedel. He is a typical example of a philosopher who speaks about God in a post-metaphysical way; furthermore, he is influenced by the old tradition of negative theology. The theme of nihilism could also have been treated more extensively. The authors take it too easily for granted that the tradition of speaking about God as Being belongs to the past. Although they acknowledge the ‘death of God’, such philosophers as Tillich, Ricoeur and Weischedel still succeed in finding creative ways to connect God and being.