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This is a cross post from For All and None, my occasional blog for more off-beat topics:

Thomas JJ Altizer is, for me, the one truly fascinating theologian of the 20th Century, and remains today the one theologian whose vision and writings continue to captivate me, in spite of my complete unbelief.

Altizer found himself at the centre of a media scandal in the 1960s surrounding the loosely organised ‘death of God’ theology movement of which he was a central figure. The idea of a ‘death of God’ movement was never very accurate, in the sense that each of these theologians presented arguments and ‘systems’ radically at variance with each other. Altizer’s one time writing companion William Hamilton, for example, was essentially an atheist, and an atheist who wrote with some sadness, as he attempted to make sense of faith after the Holocaust. Richard Rubenstein was likewise most deeply a theologian of the Holocaust, and offered an attempt at reconfiguring the notion of ‘God’ in the light of the horrors of Auschwitz.

While Hamilton saw the death of God as the realisation of the absence of God, and Rubenstein parted with the God of traditional Judaism (‘Even the existentialist leap of faith cannot resurrect this dead God after Auschwitz’) in favour of a Tillich-influenced ‘Holy Nothingness’, Altizer proclaimed the death of God as an authentically Christian phenomenon, and as the heart of the gospel itself. For Altizer, the death of God was not a cause for despair, but was, rather, ‘good news’.

Altizer’s use of the words ‘death of God’, and indeed of ‘atheism’, have been, and continue to be, widely misunderstood. On a very superficial reading of Altizer, it may be seen that he is proclaiming atheism, and arguing that the ‘death of God’ is a cultural phenomenon. However, there is much more to his work than this, and Altizer’s ‘death of God’ is in fact far from atheistic.

Altizer’s vision is radical, poetic, and is ultimately grounded in a unique Christian mystical reading of the world, and of history. Altizer’s theology presents history itself as the ‘self-embodiment of God’ and, for him, in history, and in the world, we witness an ongoing creative process which actually is the self-emptying of Godhead. For Altizer, the whole of history constitutes the kenosis of the divine, the Word becoming flesh, and God becoming ‘all in all’.

When Altizer states that ‘God is dead’, he does not mean that there is no divine, but rather that the ‘God’ presented in orthodox faith – a Being existing apart from, and aloof from, material existence – is no more. For Altizer, creation is at the same time the ‘self-annihilation of God’ as Being and as transcendent, and the apocalyptic hope for a time in which God is radically imminent in the world has already been realised. This is Altizer’s ‘good news’ – that there is no God apart from life and history itself – that the divine is totally present.

Altizer is a man who draws on numerous ‘non-theological’ resources in his quest to spread the word, and does so in a way that may not be strictly ‘scholarly’ (in the sense of calm, detached, and ‘academic’), but is certainly creative and innovative. So, we find a lifelong engagement with the works of Nietzsche, as well as a deep interest in writers such as Hegel, Blake, Dante, and Milton, and a lengthy dialogue with Buddhism.

While this is fascinating enough as a manifestation of a uniquely heterodox theological vision, it is also Altizer’s impassioned, evangelical, and poetic presentation of his message which can captivate (or presumably repulse) the reader.

Unlike when I first encountered Altizer’s work as an undergraduate, there is now a large amount of relevant material available on the internet, and I present the following links as a starting point for those who might like to delve further into the radical theology of Thomas JJ Altizer.

Books by Altizer:

Radical Theology and the Death of God (1966) – Full text at Religion Online.

The Gospel of Christian Atheism (1966) – Full text at Religion Online.

The New Apocalypse: The Radical Christian Vision of William Blake (1967) – Excerpts at Google Books.

History as Apocalypse (1985) – Excerpts at Google Books.

Genesis and Apocalypse: A Theological Voyage Toward Authentic Christianity (1990) – Excerpts at Google Books.

The Genesis of God: A Theological Genealogy (1993) – Excerpts at Google Books.

The Contemporary Jesus (1997) – Excerpts at Google Books.

The New Gospel of Christian Atheism (2002) – Excerpts at Google Books.

Godhead and the Nothing (2003) – Excerpts at Google Books.

Living the Death of God: A Theological Memoir (2006) – Excerpts at Google Books.

Essays by Altizer:

‘Apocalypticism and Modern Thinking’ (1997) – Full text at Luther Seminary.

‘Absolute Nothingness and Taylor’s Imagology’ (2001) – Full text at the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory.

Video:

Altizer’s address to the American Academy of Religion, November 8, 2009 – Online at Vimeo.

Books on Altizer’s Work:

The Theology of Altizer: Critique and Response (1970) – Full text at Religion Online.

Thinking through the Death of God: A Critical Companion to Thomas J.J. Altizer (2004) – Excerpts at Google Books.

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Edit (28.02.10):

Glaringly absent from this post is any mention of the centrality of the Incarnation and Crucifixion in Altizer’s theology.

For example, in The Gospel of Christian Atheism, he writes:

First, we must recognize that the proclamation of the death of God is a Christian confession of faith. For to know that God is dead is to know the God who died in Jesus Christ, the God who passed through what Blake symbolically named as “Self-Annihilation” or Hegel dialectically conceived as the negation of negation. Only the Christian can truly speak of the death of God, because the Christian alone knows the God who negates himself in his own revelatory and redemptive acts. Just as a purely religious apprehension of deity must know a God who is transcendent and beyond, so likewise a purely rational and nondialectical conception of deity must know a God who is impassive and unmoving, or self-enclosed in his own Being. Neither the religious believer nor the nondialectical thinker can grasp the God whose actuality and movement derives from his own acts of self-negation. Thus it is only the radical, or the profane, or the nonreligious Christian who knows that God has ceased to be active and real in his preincarnate or primordial reality.

Nevertheless, it is essential that the radical Christian make clear what he means by his confession, eliminating so far as possible all that confusion and ambiguity arising from the language of the death of God, and clearly establishing both his Christian claim and his repudiation of all forms of religious Christianity. To confess the death of God is to speak of an actual and real event, not perhaps an event occurring in a single moment of time or history, but notwithstanding this reservation an event that has actually happened both in a cosmic and in a historical sense. There should be no confusion deriving from the mistaken assumption that such a confession refers to an eclipse of God or a withdrawal of God from either history or the creation. Rather, an authentic language speaking about the death of God must inevitably be speaking about the death of God himself. The radical Christian proclaims that God has actually died in Christ, that this death is both a historical and a cosmic event, and, as such, it is a final and irrevocable event, which cannot be reversed by a subsequent religious or cosmic movement. True, a religious reversal of the death of God has indeed occurred in history, is present in the religious expressions of Christianity, and is now receding into the mist of an archaic, if not soon to be forgotten, past. But such a religious reversal cannot annul the event of the death of God; it cannot recover the living God of the old covenant, nor can it reverse or bring to an end the progressive descent of Spirit into flesh. Religious Christians may know a resurrected Lord of the Ascension, just as they may be bound to an almighty and distant Creator and Judge. Yet such a flight from the finality of the Incarnation cannot dissolve the event of the Incarnation itself even if it must finally impel the Christian to seek the presence and the reality of Christ in a world that is totally estranged from Christianity’s established vision of the sacred.

Once again we must attempt to draw a distinction between the original or primal death of God in Christ and the actualization or historical realization of his death throughout the whole gamut of human experience. Remembering the radical Christian affirmation that God has fully and totally become incarnate in Christ, we must note that neither the Incarnation nor the Crucifixion can here be understood as isolated and once-and-for-all events; rather, they must be conceived as primary expressions of a forward-moving and eschatological process of redemption, a process embodying a progressive movement of Spirit into flesh. At no point in this process does the incarnate Word or Spirit assume a final and definitive form, just as God himself can never be wholly or simply identified with any given revelatory event or epiphany, if only because the divine process undergoes a continual metamorphosis, ever moving more deeply and more fully toward an eschatological consummation. While the Oriental mystic knows an incarnational process whereby the sacred totally annihilates or transfigures the profane, a process providing us with our clearest image of the primordial reality of the sacred, it is Christianity alone which witnesses to a concrete and actual descent of the sacred into the profane, a movement wherein the sacred progressively abandons or negates its particular and given expressions, thereby emptying them of their original power and actuality. Radical Christianity knows this divine or incarnational process as a forward-moving Totality. Neither a primordial God nor an original garden of innocence remains immune to this process of descent: here all things whatsoever are drawn into and transfigured by this cosmic or total process of metamorphosis. This movement from “Innocence” to “Experience” is potentially or partially present at every point of time and space, and in every epiphany of the divine process: thus we could even say that God dies in some sense wherever he is present or actual in the world, for God actualizes himself by negating his original or given expressions. Yet we truly know this divine process of negativity only by knowing God’s death in Christ.