The Sacred Stranger: Searching for Meaning After the Death of God

Beyond Nietzsche, beyond despair—the return of transcendence.

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In his book Anatheism: Returning to God After God, Richard Kearney writes:

“The only Messiah still credible after the death camps would be one who wanted to come but could not because humans failed to invite the sacred stranger into existence.”

Anatheism literally means “a return to God after God”—from the Greek ana- (again) and theos (God). It describes a kind of post-atheistic return to faith or re-engagement with the sacred after going through atheism or profound doubt.

Nietzsche insightfully marked the 20th century as the century of the “death of God”— a death that naturally culminated in death camps. When God is dead, not only in our worldview but also in our experience, what is left to believe in? And yet, paradoxically, it is precisely when we are engulfed by doubt that we begin to desperately search for transcendence.

Anatheism is encountering the divine anew—after deep disbelief or disenchantment. But how can one believe in God after the experience of the “death of God”? Richard Kearney answers: in recognizing the divine in the stranger, the Other, the unexpected. True theophany happens only when we are ready to embrace a “sacred stranger.”

“God after God” is not the same as the God before. The God before made sense. The God after doesn’t. The God we meet after the death of God is always a total stranger—a sacred stranger. In other words, we never realize that we have encountered him until we have.

We never look for Him. All we do is desperately look for meaning and transcendence, while He is desperately looking for us. Anatheism is discovering the sacred after profound disillusionment. The deeper the disillusionment, the stronger the urge to rediscover the sacred.

The ultimate divine irony is this: disillusioned people often believe they are walking away from God in their search for meaning and transcendence, yet they end up bumping into Him in the most unexpected places. Silenced by doubt for too long, they open their mouths and begin speaking—and what comes out are stories of astonishing beauty and unbelievable transcendence.

Strictly speaking, anatheism is not our return to God; it’s a sudden and unexpected discovery that, while you thought you were distancing yourself from a “dead God,” you were, in fact, getting closer to the One-Who-is-Alive—in your experience of the sacred. With anatheism, we don’t walk toward God; we move away but, somehow, find Him present where we thought He was absent.

The word irony comes from the Greek “to play the fool.” God allows us to drink the cup of atheism to the dregs—to the point of killing God—only to find that we are searching for Him in every nook and cranny. After an age of death camps we can no longer believe in the Messiah as before—only in a Messiah who comes to us as a sacred stranger.

In his youth, Oscar Wilde flirted with irreverence and skepticism and believed in “art for art’s sake,” but in his later years, he wrote beautiful fairy tales for his children that captured the spirit of the Evangelium—without knowing it.

Many Soviet authors and film directors were atheists, and yet they created literature and films of Gospel-like transcendence without realizing it—thinking they were simply pursuing truth and beauty. What happens after we bury God? He resurrects right out of the ashes of our disbelief—in the body of a total stranger—someone we don’t recognize.

Who is this total stranger? We don’t know. All we know is that our hearts burn as he speaks. We don’t know his name or recognize his face, but his every word falls into our soul like quickening drops of living water. We recognize the sacred—God after God.

We are the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, walking the path of despair. Our hopes have collapsed—God died before our eyes. We no longer know how to live; we only know how to survive. And then we meet a stranger. He walks with us, speaks to us, and our hearts begin to melt. We don’t know who he is. We only know that we are communing with something sacred. And sacred is enough. We know—somehow—that something good is coming.

“The ana of anatheism makes sure that the God who has already come is always still to come.” Richard Kearney