God's Not Dead (Like A Lion)

The title track of Australian Christian pop rock band Newsboys' sixteenth studio album reunites their lead singer Michael Tait with his former DC Talk bandmate Kevin Max. The song finds the two pals singing of their belief that God is alive in contradiction of a century's worth of philosophers who thought otherwise. "God's not dead, let's worship Him," said Tait. "We serve a living God!"

The phrase "God is Dead" was first used by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in The Gay Science and repeated in his famous work Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche wasn't talking about God dying in a literal sense, but as someone who no longer believed in such a cosmic order, he believed the Christian God was no longer a viable source of any absolute moral principles. 80 years later, on April 8, 1966, Time's cover article covered a western theological movement that had arisen, known as the "death of God." Their argument was that modern secular thought and culture had lost all sense of the sacred, so for the contemporary mind "God is dead". A transformed post-Christian culture was therefore needed to create a renewed experience of deity.

The song was written and originally recorded by American Contemporary Christian singer-songwriter Daniel Bashta as "Like A Lion." Newsboys keyboardist Jeff Frankenstein recalled to NewReleaseToday: "I'm not sure officially how everyone in the band first heard the song, but last summer we were at a festival and our manager was talking about songs we could record for our upcoming worship album. He handed me an unlabeled CD which had 16 songs on it. There were no song titles or artist names listed. I spent the day listening through the album, and I had never heard Daniel Bashta's song 'Like A Lion' before. It stood out to me as fresh and unique and I loved his voice. I just loved the song. We all felt like we could record a cool version of the song by our band. It all started tying together the concept of what we wanted to say on this album. The campaign of what we wanted to bring out in the next season of the band was this bold statement in this day and age."