NY Times of July 1, 1998 ran this obituary by Wolfgang Saxon for Paul Van Buren. The Rev. Dr. Paul Matthews van Buren, a leading exponent of the "death of God" school of theology, died on June 18 at Memorial Hospital in Blue Hill, Me. He was 74 and lived on nearby Little Dear Isle. The cause was cancer, his family said last week in an announcement of his death. Dr. van Buren was trained in the philosophical method of linguistic analysis, beginning with what he perceived as the problem of speaking meaningfully about a God for whom no sensory verification is possible. With "God talk" -- that is, talk of anything transcendent -- ruled out, he built a faith focused on ethical behavior around the historical Jesus of Nazareth. A professor at Temple University, he was one of the three principal American Christian theologians identified with the "death of God" movement of the 1960's, although he distanced himself from that term. "The so-called death-of-God movement is a journalistic invention," Dr. van Buren told an interviewer in 1974. "It missed the serious questions that needed to be discussed at the time, such as whether the Christian message can make sense in the world we're living in today." In his book "The Secular Meaning of the Gospel: Based on an Analysis of Its Language" (Macmillan, 1963), Dr. van Buren said, he was "trying to find an utterly nontranscendent way of interpreting the Gospel." "That way," he said, "sense could be made of it." Other theologians criticized both the methodology and thinking of the approach. One of the critics' central counterarguments was that if faith was stripped of all the mysticism surrounding the deity, there was little left of religion. Dr. van Buren, as an associate of the Shalom Hartman Institute of Judaic Studies in Jerusalem in the 1980's, worked to build bridges and new understanding between Christianity and Judaism. His last book, "According to the Scriptures," considered how the early Christians, as Jews, understood the death of Jesus through Jewish methods of biblical interpretation. It is to be published by Wm. B. Eerdmans. Dr. van Buren made his reputation as a nontraditional theologian with "The Secular Meaning of the Gospel." He also wrote "The Edges of Language: An Essay in the Logic of a Religion (Macmillan, 1972). His long engagement with Judaism and discussion with rabbinical scholars at the Hartman Institute was distilled in a trilogy, "A Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality" (Harper & Row, 1987-88). Paul van Buren was a native of Norfolk, Va. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in government from Harvard College in 1948 after having served in World War II in the Coast Guard. He received a bachelor's of sacred theology at Episcopal Theological School in 1951 and was ordained an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Massachusetts> His doctorate in theology came from the University of Basel in 1957. Dr. van Buren served as a co-director and curate in Detroit and began his academic career in 1957 as an assistant professor of systematic theology at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Tex. He joined the Temple faculty in 1964, served as chairman of the department of religion from 1974 to 1976 and took emeritus status in 1986. Dr. van Buren is survived by his wife of 50 years, Dr. Anne Hagopian van Buren; two daughters, Alice van Buren of Santa Fe, N.M., and Ariane van Buren of Manhattan; two sons, Philip, of Manhattan, Thomas, of Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.; a sister, Elsie van Buren of Peterborough, N.H.; a brother, Sheffield, of Harwichport, Mass., and five grandchildren.