William Hamilton

摘要

Around Easter 1966, millions of Americans picked up a magazine with what would become one of the most notable covers in the history of the genre: Time's stark question "Is God Dead?" The main theologian profiled in the piece, William Hamilton, died Feb. 28 at 87. At the time of the article, Hamilton was a professor at Colgate Rochester Divinity School. He was no militant atheist. He was not contemptuous of faith or the faithful. Far from it, as a longtime churchgoer, he was all the more a threat to unreflec-tive Christianity. The issues with which he grappled were eternal and essential. He was questioning whether the Christian tradition of encouraging a temporal moral life required belief in a divine order. Could someone live by the ethical teachings of Jesus while rejecting the existence of a creator and redeemer God?