Editing God is dead (section)

==== Hegel ====
Contemporary historians believe that 19th-century [[German idealism|German idealist]] philosophers, especially those associated with [[Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel]], are responsible for removing the specifically Christian resonance of the phrase relating to the [[death of Jesus Christ]] and associating it with secular philosophical and [[Sociological theory|sociological theories]].<ref name=":0">{{Cite book |last=Josephson-Storm |first=Jason |url= |title=[[The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences]] |date=2017 |publisher=University of Chicago Press |isbn=978-0-226-40336-6 |location=Chicago |pages=67–9}}</ref>

Although the statement and its meaning are attributed to Nietzsche, Hegel had discussed the concept of the death of God in his ''[[Phenomenology of Spirit]]'', where he considers the death of God to "Not be seen as anything but an easily recognized part of the usual Christian cycle of redemption".<ref>{{cite journal |first1=Eric |last1=von der Luft |title=Sources of Nietzsche's "God is Dead!" and its Meaning for Heidegger |journal=Journal of the History of Ideas |date=Apr–Jun 1984 |issue=2 |pages=263–276}} See page 265.</ref> Later on Hegel writes about the great pain of knowing that God is dead:
{{quote|The pure concept, however, or infinity, as the abyss of nothingness in which all being sinks, must characterize the infinite pain, which previously was only in culture historically and as the feeling on which rests modern religion, the feeling that God Himself is dead, (the feeling which was uttered by [[Blaise Pascal|Pascal]], though only [[empirically]], in his saying: Nature is such that it marks everywhere, both in and outside of man, a lost God), purely as a phase, but also as no more than just a phase, of the highest idea."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Hegel |first1=Georg Wilhelm Friedrich |title=Philosophische Abhandlungen |date=1845 |page=153 }}</ref>}}

Hegel's student [[Richard Rothe]], in his 1837 theological text ''Die Anfänge der christlichen Kirche und ihrer Verfassung'', appears to be one of the first philosophers to associate the idea of a death of God with the sociological theory of [[secularization]].<ref name=":02">{{Cite book |last=Josephson-Storm |first=Jason |url= |title=[[The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences]] |date=2017 |publisher=University of Chicago Press |isbn=978-0-226-40336-6 |location=Chicago |pages=75–6}}</ref>