Today is definitely the day to dust off Alan Lewis's wonderful Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Easter Saturday. As he meditates on Eberhard Jungel's theology, Lewis writes
[Jungel] in effect identifies Easter Saturday, the day of the burial of God, as theology's foundational, defining moment. For it is this occurrence, as recorded in the Christian narrative, which maximizes the dispute between faith and non-faith. While the flesh of God's Son lies immured in death, the sharpest controversy divides those who see only that God is gone and finished and those who know that in this palpable absence nonetheless God is yet more present, with life-giving resurrecting power. Even so, the God who is present in this absence, whose creative power is at work through the powerlessness of this defeat and death, is no more recognizable to the theist than to the atheist. Faith in God on the day when God is dead is faith of a very different order from the certainties expressed in metaphysics; and it is faith in another God then the distant, immutable, omnipotent deity of theism, that supreme stranger to suffering and death.
Not only, then, is Easter Saturday the day of mutual contradiction between those who believe in God and those who cannot; it is also the day of shared contradiction for those who believe in the absolute God and those who cannot, by the theology of the Crucified One: faith in the life and power of the God who is dead. To the extent that both of these conflicts are occurring now, with great intensity, at the end of the modern era, means that today is a cultural "Easter Saturday." And that is the context, where faith hears and opposes both partners in the disputation between theism and atheism, in which theology must work today, and to which the gospel is to be addressed.
We have much in common with atheists. We too proclaim the death of God. We too take a long hard look at the world and conclude there is no magical hope within the created order, nor any comfort in a power that remains outside it. There is no help from the god who is shut out of the tomb - the god who is defined in opposition to our suffering and death; some power imprisoned by his own majesty. Our only hope comes from the God who shuts Himself in the tomb.
Happy Saturday.
If God never lived, Nietzsche is only half right.