Thomas Paine grasped that Christianity implied the suicide of God long before the God is Dead theologians of the 1960s came along

Somewhere in Texas, out of which nothing good comes

... A man is preached instead of a God; an execution is an object for gratitude; the preachers daub themselves with the blood, like a troop of assassins, and pretend to admire the brilliancy it gives them; they preach a humdrum sermon on the merits of the execution; then praise Jesus Christ for being executed, and condemn the Jews for doing it. ...   So many wild and blasphemous conceits have been formed of the Almighty. The Jews have made him the assassin of the human species, to make room for the religion of the Jews. The Christians have made him the murderer of himself, and the founder of a new religion to supersede and expel the Jewish religion. And to find pretence and admission for these things, they must have supposed his power or his wisdom imperfect, or his will changeable ...

-- Thomas Paine, Age of Reason

How do you cleanse the land of the blood of the innocent Jesus when it is God himself who defiled it?

 

So ye shall not pollute the land wherein ye are: for blood it defileth the land: and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it.

-- Numbers 35:33

 

New Testament "theology" is pretty clear that it is the Jewish god who is ultimately responsible for shedding Jesus' blood:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son ...

-- John 3:16

He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all ...

-- Romans 8:32 

God sent his Son to be our sin offering ...

-- I John 4:10

But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

-- Romans 5:8. 

The penalty for Jesus' murder is death according to the Law of Moses, but who could possibly kill God, the murderer, except God himself?

 

The Christian atheist Thomas J. J. Altizer, who died in 2018 at the age of 91, wrote in 1966 that the transcendent God of the Bible had truly died when he immanentized himself and entered human history through the Incarnation and was crucified. As a leading representative of The God Is Dead movement, the highly animated Altizer instantly became a pariah in America, which at the time literally wanted to kill him over it, as his obituary remembered:

 He even went on the “Merv Griffin Show,” a popular television talk program, though the event, held before a live audience in a Broadway theater, was a debacle. He was given two minutes to speak. “The response was a violent one,” he wrote later, “forcing the director to close the curtains and order the band to play forcefully, and after this event a crowd greeted me at the stage door, demanding my death.”

But logically one should really go a step farther than Altizer and say that the Jewish god actually committed suicide according to this God Is Dead "theology" because God did all this on purpose.

After all, Jesus allowed himself to be crucified according to the wide evidence of the gospels and the New Testament, which insists that Jesus went to the slaughter like a sheep and opened not his mouth (Acts 8:32). This is exactly what one should have expected of a truly Divine Man bent on death.

This problem again illustrates the limits of "theology", Aquinas' queen of the sciences.

Her rational talk about God goes only so far, which Tertullian recognized when he said that the resurrection is certain because it is impossible (certum est, quia impossibile).

There are more things than the resurrection which are impossible.

 

 

When God is dead to others, the good in you which comes from God is dead to them too

As an atheist himself says, here:

Social life is a theater. Behind the curtains, beasts reign. Fear is the primary check on the underlying self-assertion. Just as justice, at bottom, is usually no more than a desire to inflict pain, so the law and the state itself are possible only at gunpoint. The main reason people pay taxes, resist from harming one another (when they do), and obey the law is not that they are good moral agents, but that they are deterred by the prospect of painful consequences. ...

To a significant extent, civilization is nothing but a rationalist illusion. Conflict is the natural state of all animals, and man is the only cruel animal only because other animals are not thus advanced. Intrinsically competitive, the world is forever torn by incompatible interests. If we had knowledge of our collective motives and intentions, we’d see that human life is not meant to be peaceful and orderly. No wonder we all live in and by conflict, with ourselves, with family, with friends, with colleagues and co-workers, and on and on.

Peter Berger Misunderstands Interim Ethics

 

Peter Berger, writing in The American Interest, here:

The British writer Ferdinand Mount described the Sermon of the Mount as perhaps the greatest sermon ever, but that it was written for bachelors—that is, for individuals with no responsibility for the future. Probably Jesus’ message about the Kingdom of God was apocalyptic—a message about a radical shift in the nature of reality (which means that Paul was not far off). We know that many of his followers, and perhaps Jesus himself, expected that the apocalyptic event would happen in their own lifetime. Thus, as some scholars have put it, the moral teachings of Jesus (and possibly Paul’s as well) were an “interim ethic”—how to live in the short time before the coming of the Kingdom. If you expect the world to end next week, you won’t bother to change the oil, though you still want the windshield wipers to work. In that interpretation, the Sermon on the Mount was meant to describe the world after the coming of the Kingdom (though some of Jesus’ followers may want to anticipate this blessed condition in their present lives). Be this as it may, it is very doubtful indeed that Jesus intended these teachings to be a behavioral code for the next two millennia. In any case, any society larger than an Amish village would not survive for very long if it tried to live by such a code.

This is good as far as it goes, and God knows we don't read enough people talking about these issues, but it does seem to miss two things.

One, the Sermon on the Mount isn't just for bachelors. It's also for spinsters.

Apocalyptic ethics overthrow all human conventions because true repentance is impossible without them. There are no more husbands, fathers, wives, mothers and children per se in the kingdom of God, which is coming suddenly with the appearance of the Son of Man in the clouds of heaven. There is no time for funerals, for working at a job, for building bigger barns in your retirement to hold all your increase. "Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother" (Mark 3:34f.).

Two, the world after the coming of the kingdom is not really describable because it is transformed by divine action.

What is remarkable about it is how few, however, take seriously what this means in terms of justice in the teaching of Jesus. The assumption is usually that there are many human players left in a too-worldly kingdom of God populated by shiny happy people who have received the grace of God, whereas Jesus is at pains to describe God's coming judgment in which evil and evil-doers are swept away. The angels first come at the harvest not to rapture the few into the air to ever be with the Lord, but to gather the many tares and hurl them into the fire. As interim ethics, Jesus' teaching is survival ethics, and temporary because terrestrial, designed to help his hearers escape the wrath that is coming. Beyond that, the future is not really ours to see.

Perhaps more than anything else, it is the failure of this vision to materialize historically which has been lurking in the background in the mind of modernity and fueling the conviction that God is dead.