Death of God theology refers to a range of ideas by various theologians and philosophers that try to account for the rise of secularity and abandonment of traditional beliefs in God. They posit that God has either ceased to exist or in some way accounted for such a belief.
Although philosophers since Friedrich Nietzsche have occasionally used the phrase "God is dead" to reflect increasing unbelief in God, the concept rose to prominence in the late 1950s and 1960s, before waning again.
The Phenomenology of Spirit (or The Phenomenology of Mind; German: Phänomenologie des Geistes) is the first published book by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel described the 1807 work, a ladder to the greater philosophical system of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, as an "exposition of the coming-to-be of knowledge". This development traced through the logical self-origination and dissolution of "the various shapes of spirit as stations on the way through which spirit becomes pure knowledge".
The text marks a development in German idealism. Focusing on topics in consciousness, metaphysics, ethics, and religion, it is where Hegel develops well-known concepts and methods such as speculative philosophy, the dialectic, the movement of immanent critique, absolute idealism, Sittlichkeit, and Aufhebung. It continues to influence Western philosophy, and "has been praised and blamed for the development of existentialism, communism, fascism, death of God theology, and historicist nihilism".