Gabriel Vahanian, Professor, Dies at 85; Was Linked to ‘Death of God’ Movement
Gabriel Vahanian was a figure in the “Death of God” movement in the 1960s.
By PAUL VITELLO Published: September 8, 2012
Gabriel Vahanian, a theologian whose 1961 social critique, “The Death of God: The Culture of Our Post-Christian Era [ http://books.google.com/books/about/The_death_of_God.html?id=KL7XAAAAMAAJ ],” gave a name to a seemingly atheistic but widely misunderstood theological movement, died on Aug. 30 at his home in Strasbourg, France. He was 85.
His daughter, Noelle Vahanian, confirmed his death.
Mr. Vahanian, a churchgoing Presbyterian throughout his life, was a professor at Syracuse University [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/syracuse_university/index.html ] when a small literary publisher released “The Death of God,” a scholarly work that took church leaders to task for what he considered the trivialization of Christian teaching in the secular age. It was not an endorsement of Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1880s-era announcement of God’s death. And it received little attention outside university religion departments and periodicals like The Journal of Bible and Religion. (The Journal’s review called it a dense read, but worthwhile. “Books like this must be written and read if Christian solutions are to be found,” it said.)
Mr. Vahanian, though, distanced himself from the group and its Nietzschean aura, however ill deserved.
“He had a totally different theological sensibility from most of them,” said Jeffrey Robbins, Mr. Vahanian’s son-in-law, who is chairman of the department of religion and philosophy at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pa. “He was an iconoclast, and a radical. But he described himself as a lifelong, practicing, disgruntled Protestant Christian.”
Mr. Cox, a professor emeritus at Harvard Divinity School and the author of the best-selling 1965 book “The Secular City [ http://www.amazon.com/The-Secular-City-Secularization-Urbanization/dp/0020311559 ]” — considered one of the basic texts of the Death of God movement — described Mr. Vahanian as a “visionary” with a traditionalist streak.
“He didn’t like the idea of pronouncements about what no one could possibly know,” Mr. Cox said in a phone interview on Wednesday. “He had too much respect for religious tradition.”
Faith had higher purposes, he said. It was for dealing with suffering; plumbing the conscience; confronting doubts about God.
“God is not necessary, but he is inevitable,” Mr. Vahanian wrote in 1964 in “Wait Without Idols [ http://books.google.com/books/about/Wait_without_idols.html?id=W7w_AAAAIAAJ ],” displaying the gnomic style that sometimes tried reviewers’ patience (and eschewing capital letters when referring to the deity). “He is wholly other and wholly present. Faith in him, the conversion of our human reality, both culturally and existentially, is the demand he still makes upon us.”
Gabriel Antoine Vahanian was born on Jan. 24, 1927, in Marseille, France, one of four children of Mesrop and Perouse Vahanian. His parents settled there in the early 1920s after fleeing the ethnic cleansing campaigns that swept Armenian areas of Turkey after World War I. After completing his studies at the Protestant Theological Faculty of Paris in 1949, he received his Ph.D. at the Princeton Theological Seminary.
In 1958 he became a professor of religion at Syracuse University, where he taught for 26 years and helped to found the university’s graduate studies program in religion. He moved in 1984 to Université des Sciences Humaines de Strasbourg, for a post considered France’s most prominent theological professorship of Protestantism.
Besides his daughter, who, like her husband, Mr. Robbins, is a professor of religion and philosophy at Lebanon Valley College, Mr. Vahanian is survived by his wife, Barbara; a son, Paul-Michel; and two grandchildren.
Though he had differences with the “Death of God” theologians, Mr. Vahanian shared “the deep sensitivity and religious passion that animated the movement,” Mr. Robbins said.
In “Wait Without Idols,” Mr. Vahanian identified the origin of the problem facing “Death of God” theologians as he saw it:
“It is easier to understand oneself without God than with God. The dilemma of Christianity is that it taught man how to be responsible for his actions in this world, and for this world itself. Now man has declared God not responsible and not relevant to human self-knowledge. The existence of God, no longer questioned, has become useless to man’s predicament and its resolution.”
“This, then, is the irony of the cultural tradition of Christianity: it has bequeathed us the idea of the death of God.”
Matthew Vines speaks on the theological debate regarding the Bible and the role of gay Christians in the church. Delivered at College Hill United Methodist Church in Wichita, Kansas on March 8, 2012. Transcript: http://www.matthewvines.com/transcript. Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/vinesmatthew.
SPEAKING OUT Matthew Vines, center, with Ross Murray of GLAAD, left, and the Rev. Shari K. Brink, at Marble Collegiate Church. Yana Paskova for The New York Times
IN HIS DEFENSE Matthew Vines speaking last month at a church in Manhattan. Yana Paskova for The New York Times
OFFERING A LESSON Mr. Vines, left, spoke with church member Jim Augustine before his lecture. Yana Paskova for The New York Times
By DOUGLAS QUENQUA Published: September 14, 2012
ONE year after Matthew Vines was forced to leave the Wichita, Kan., church he had attended since birth — not because he is gay, but because he tried to convince people there was nothing wrong with that — he was sitting facing a crowd of 235 Christians, most of them gay or lesbian, at the Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
Throughout the evening, various guests called him an inspiration and a messenger. One woman suggested he is an angel.
“Last year I felt like the only gay Christian,” Mr. Vines told the crowd last month, his hands noticeably shaking. “Now I feel like all Christians are gay. I suddenly have hundreds of Facebook friends who are gay Christians. So all right, we’re doing great!”
It was a rare moment of levity from a serious young man. At 22, Mr. Vines has emerged as an unlikely advocate (and lightning rod) for those straddling one of the most volatile fault lines in America’s culture war: homosexual Christians. As the country rushed to take sides over Chick-fil-A, J. C. Penney, the Boy Scouts and Michele Bachmann, Mr. Vines took a leave of absence from Harvard, where he was studying philosophy, to offer a lesson on the Bible [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/b/bible/index.html ] and same-sex relations.
“It is simply a fact that the Bible does not discuss or condemn loving, gay relationships,” said Mr. Vines, eating an omelet at Tom’s Restaurant in Brooklyn the day after his church appearance. “The point is that these texts have a meaning, and the traditional reading of them is wrong. It is incorrect — biblically, historically, linguistically.”
The medium for Mr. Vines’s message is a lecture that he delivered, videotaped and posted to YouTube [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezQjNJUSraY (above)] in March. In it, Mr. Vines tackles the traditional interpretations of all six Bible passages that refer to homosexual acts, arguing that they don’t actually condemn, or even address, the modern understanding of homosexuality.
It is a dense and scholarly presentation, drawing from history, theology, hermeneutics and ancient Greek. It is also suffused with emotion, particularly when Mr. Vines pleads with viewers to consider the plight of the modern gay Christian, who is effectively forced into celibacy.
“Falling in love is one of the worst things that could happen to a gay person,” Mr. Vines says early in the video, “because you will necessarily be heartbroken, you will have to run away, and that will happen every single time that you come to care about someone else too much.”
In the six months it has been on YouTube, “The Gay Debate: The Bible and Homosexuality” has been viewed 350,000 times and generated nearly 7,000 comments — not bad given its 67-minute run time and lack of music, humor or even a second camera angle. It has been translated into six different languages, including French, German and Spanish, with Japanese, Korean and Arabic versions in the works. Churches as far away as Australia and South Africa have held public screenings of the video, and Mr. Vines has been invited to speak at churches from Washington, D.C., to Washington state.
“I had basically become a closeted Christian,” said Jim Augustine, 32, a member of Marble Collegiate Church who was instrumental in bringing Mr. Vines there to speak in August. “When I came into sexuality, I came out of Christianity. Matthew gave me the intellectual tools to get past that cognitive dissonance.”
FOR the devoutly religious Mr. Vines — who is small-framed and pale with dark, narrow eyes — convincing people that there is no contradiction in being gay and Christian has deep, personal roots.
In late 2009, just weeks after accepting that he was, in fact, homosexual, Mr. Vines decided to take a semester off from college so he could come out to his family and friends in Wichita. Knowing that his father would have trouble reconciling his sexual orientation with Scripture, Mr. Vines decided to arm himself with all available scholarship on the Bible and homosexuality.
Some of the arguments were well known (Leviticus does not apply to Christians, for example); others less so, like the more plausible translations for the Greek term malakos, long interpreted as “effeminate” in the Corinthians passage listing those who won’t inherit the kingdom of God.
But key for Mr. Vines was the realization that every instance of homosexuality in the Bible represented excess lust, gang rape or “unnatural” acts committed by heterosexual men. Portrayals — much less condemnations — of naturally gay men, for whom opposite-sex relationships are not an option, simply never appear.
“That’s huge, that argument,” he said. “It’s key. It’s being made, but it needs to be made more, and more often.”
In 2011, Mr. Vines began using his knowledge to seek acceptance from his childhood church. One by one, he took parishioners to dinner and made his case. His father even helped him distribute his now eight-page paper to the church’s governing board.
“It was not well received,” Mr. Vines said. “So then I added six more pages to address some of their concerns and criticisms.” But it made no difference, and the Vineses eventually severed their relationship with the church they had attended for decades, a devastating move for the conservative Christian family.
Sad but not defeated, Mr. Vines resolved to take his message to a larger stage. He said he would turn his paper into “a resource that every gay Christian anywhere in the world who is struggling with this can access and can learn from.”
Within a few months, Mr. Vines had written a presentation, practiced it in front of his family, found a church that would let him speak and paid a local production company $500 to tape it. Once uploaded to YouTube, “The Gay Debate” quickly found an audience, admiring and otherwise.
Less admiringly, James White, director of the Alpha and Omega Ministries [ http://www.aomin.org/articles/bio.html ] in Phoenix, dedicated five hourlong podcasts to refuting, and sometimes belittling, Mr. Vines’s arguments. Matt Moore, a Christian blogger from Louisiana and self-described reformed homosexual, published a blistering 1,700-word rebuttal [ http://moorematt.com/2012/03/28/god-condones-homosexuality-response-to-matthew-vines/ ]. Several YouTube commenters compared Mr. Vines to Satan.
Such responses are not surprising, said Terry Todd, associate professor of American religious studies at Drew University in Madison, N.J. While Mr. Vines’s arguments are based in solid religious scholarship, they have been argued before, and rarely to much effect.
“I think Matt’s arguments are unlikely to change many minds, especially among the leadership in the conservative Christian communities to which they are addressed,” Mr. Todd, who otherwise praises Mr. Vines’s bravery, wrote in an e-mail. “These same arguments, largely taken from a generation of biblical scholarship from mainstream academics, have circulated for decades in those communities.”
It is a criticism Mr. Vines has heard before, and one he does not entirely refute. “I’m not making new arguments,” he said, “and I would hope not to be, because you want them to be well substantiated scholarly.”
Novel or not, Mr. Vines’s arguments have made a difference to many young gay Christians struggling with issues of sexual identity. James Gooch, 21, from Princeton, W.Va., had just given up trying to “pray away the gay,” as he put it, and was struggling with depression when he came upon Mr. Vines’s video on Facebook two months ago.
“I was just compelled to tears,” he said in an interview. “I found my faith all over again in that video.” Mr. Gooch showed it to his parents as well, and says “it’s made all the difference for our family.” He has since come out to the rest of his family and friends, largely to “positive feedback.”
Beth Buchanan, a lesbian Christian in Miami, Okla., recently showed the video to her mother. “My mom cried at the end,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Since then she has been comfortable talking about homosexuality.”
Some heterosexual Christians say it has changed their minds, as well. Betsy Burns Johnson, 51, of Ottawa wrote a note on her Facebook page in May saying she was no longer so sure the Bible condemned homosexuality.
“Does it make me nervous to take such a radical stand against such a long standing belief in favour of that of a 21 year old gay boy from Kansas? YOU BET IT DOES,” she wrote. But “lets face it, many Biblical stands we take on issues are based very much on how these scriptures have been interpreted over the centuries by people other than ourselves.”
As long as Mr. Vines keeps hearing reactions like these (he said he has received thousands of e-mails, Twitter messages and Facebook friend requests), it is hard for him to imagine returning to Harvard anytime soon. For now, his plan is to continue promoting the video, be it through talk shows (supporters have been tweeting his video to Ellen DeGeneres), DVD sales or church appearances. “We need to get these arguments into the hands of people who need them,” he said.
But he is not yet comfortable in the spotlight, either. At a reception after his appearance at Marble Collegiate Church, Mr. Vines looked overwhelmed as he stood shaking hands with a line of well-wishers that stretched out the door.
“One woman asked me how to convince her parents that being gay wasn’t a choice,” Mr. Vines said the next day. “I wish I had time to answer a question like that.” He admits he has given up trying to answer all his e-mail.
For a sensitive and soft-spoken young man who spends most of his free time with his parents and said he had never had a boyfriend, such admiration poses a challenge of its own.
“I find it extremely fulfilling, but it’s not like I’m having a fun time,” Mr. Vines said. “I don’t want this to be a decades-long undertaking.”
In what could be as much a sign of his youth as his determination, Mr. Vines doesn’t think it needs to be.
“The base line for this issue should be no one in the world anywhere should be homophobic at all,” he said. “Once we get there, we can move on to other things.”
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