The Death of God movement is sometimes technically referred to as "theothanatology," deriving from the Greek theos (God) and thanatos (death).
Today, one of the most hotly debated trends in U.S. Protestant seminaries is a radical new brand of Christian thinking that takes as its starting point Nietzsche's 19th century rallying cry: "God is dead!"
The death-of-God theologians don’t argue merely that Christianity's traditional "image" of the Creator is obsolete. They say that it is no longer possible to think about or believe in a transcendent God who acts in human history, and that Christianity will have to survive, if at all, without him.
This new kind of Godless Christianity is a uniquely American phenomenon, although it acknowledges an intellectual debt to certain European thinkers, religious as well as secular. The death-of-God thinkers developed the idea that organized Christianity is a kind of idolatry that has obscured the real message of the Gospel behind irrelevant and outdated cultural forms.
They follow closely in the footsteps of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the anti-Nazi German martyr of World War II whose writings speak of the need for the church to develop a "nonreligious interpretation of Biblical concepts," and of a secular world that no longer finds God necessary as a hypothesis to explain the sun and stars or as an answer to man's anxiety.
In various ways, these theologians are trying to redefine other tenets of a Christianity without a Creator. Something of the variety and scope of the movement can be judged from the work of the four best-known advocates of a death-of-God theology: Altizer, Paul van Buren of Temple University, William Hamilton of Colgate Rochester Divinity School, and Gabriel Vahanian of Syracuse University.