But my point is that 'the death of God' is not something like the Battle of Waterloo or Magna Charta. It's not a historic event of that kind. For many people it hasn't happened yet. Others - to recur to an earlier question - are still in the phase of intense shock.

Sartre is one example of someone who does just this. Every text is, after all, a human document and whatever Kierkegaard thought about God was clearly a matter of human thought that can, in principle, be retrieved and interpreted by other human beings. A phenomenological approach to religion must, it seems to me, adopt the old adage: nothing human is alien to me.

Perhaps this is an area where every generation starts from scratch. Although the crisis of the First World War inaugurated an especially strong period of disillusion with regard to the optimism of the previous age, the pattern has repeated itself in many ways in more recent times, e.g., the loss of faith in politics as a means of advancing human well-being. And perhaps this also has to do with basic elements in growing up.

I think he [Heidegger] sets the question up in a useful way and, despite appearances, he's not 'against' technology. He just wants us to have a questioning and thoughtful relation to it. This must be relevant to any approach.

Perhaps - and this goes for the Kyoto School too - one of these insights is that nothingness and unknowing don't have to be equated with a destructive nihilism but with the experience of unity and participation - whilst resisting the tendency of objectifying metaphysics to claim that we can in some way 'know' that this experienced unity is really the truth of how things are, i.e., reveals being itself.

Now, as at the beginning of the 19th century, there is a certain discovery of Eckhart and related figures. There are questions as to how far our Eckhart accords with the real medieval teacher of that name, but there are certainly images in his work that help us work our way past several of the aporia with which we're confronted in our attempts to think about God.

However, in brief, I think the connecting of 'God' and 'Being' is one of these things for which there seems to be a natural impulse in human thinking but it can also lead to confusions. Religious believers mostly want to see God as the epitome of what is most really real and in some non-theistic contexts, people talk simply of 'Isness'.