A
angellous_evangellous
Guest
Thomas J. J. Altizer 1927-
by
Nathan J. Barnes
The History of Protestant Theology in America
CHHI 90213
Dr. James O. Duke
March 22, 2006
Life
Thomas J. J. Altizer was born in Cambridge, MA in 1927. He was raised in the Episcopal tradition. He received his MA in religion from the University of Chicago in 1951, and a Ph.D. in 1955. He gained widespread attention in the 1966 with the publication of The Gospel of Christian Atheism[1] and his essays in Radical Theology and the Death of God.[2] The most interesting aspect of Altizers career, of course, is his role in the so-called God is dead movement that began with these publications. He left the faculty of Emory during the outrage that his early works caused and accepted a position as professor of English at Stony Brook University in New York in 1968, where he serves today as Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature. It is a mistake to believe that he ran away from the struggle in the 1960s, unable to defend himself as a church theologian. His theological expressions as one outside of the church are consistent with his method: completely rejects traditional Christian theology and uses Buddhism as his primary interpretative tool.[3] Although Altizer was in the theological limelight in the 1960s, most of his significant theologizing has occurred within the last fifteen years. He is not ordained, and his theologizing is not representative of any Christian denomination or heritage.
I could not find a biography on Altizer nor a webpage authored by him or his students. Primary sources are therefore selected works by Altizer. In this paper I will review very briefly the background of Christian Atheism and trace elements of Altizers thought from the early works above through more contemporary works: History as Apocalypse (1985), Genesis and Apocalypse: A Theological Voyage Toward Authentic Christianity (1990), The genesis of God: A Theological Genealogy (1993), The Contemporary Jesus (1997), Godhead and the Nothing (2000), The New Apocalypse (2000), The New Gospel of Christian Atheism (2002).
Influences
One can hardly read Altizer without encountering the influence of the Buddha, Paul Tillich, and Fred Nietzsche.[4] All of these influences affected Altizer very early in his theologizing. He read Tillich extensively for his masters thesis,[5] and was influenced by Buddhism and other elements of Eastern thought while working on his doctoral dissertation.[6] In these early works he came to a conclusion that he never abandoned, Christian theology can be reborn only by way of an immersion in Buddhism.[7] I suspect that Altizer chose Buddhism because it encountered absolute nihilism before it swallowed the West, and it solved the problem of despair by total self-annihilation and absorption into the Nothingness.[8] Long before Nietzsche and other thinkers exposed the nothingness in Christianity and Western culture, Buddhists had surrendered completely to it with incredible success.[9]
Altizer posits that the entire Christian conception of God is useless for today, based upon a through review of the contemporary[10] view of God in literature, philosophy, poetry, and art. His source for theological reflection is not the Bible nor Christian tradition, but the entire human reflection upon the divine - except for anything that is the product of church tradition.[11] With the growing popularity of the scientific method and the question of how to interpret scientific results from Kant onwards, the role of metaphysics dwindled in the humanities. Theism in the theologians, artists, poets, historians, and philosophers adopted skepticism and gradually began to divorce their thinking of God from history and nature, and then to question both Gods ability to speak to humanity and for humanity to reach out to God.[12] Altizer applies the nihilism of Nietzsche and others to Christian theology, being part of the tradition that senses a great divide between humanity and the divine. This nihilism requires a completely new theological language.[13]
The Gospel of Christian Atheism
Altizer believes that God is dead, but claims that he is very much Christian, which makes him unique in the God-is-dead movement. In his early works, Altizer identified himself with this movement whose important contributors at the time were William Hamilton, The New Essence of Christianity (1961); Gabriel Vahanian, The Death of God (1961); and Harvey Cox, The Secular City (1965).
The God-is-dead movement is the theological reflection on the alienation of humankind from the divine due to important movements in philosophy, history, poetry, art, and works of literature.[14] The primary influences of many God-is-dead thinkers are Descartes (1596-1650), Kant (1724-1804), Blake (1757-1827), Hegel (1770-1831), Kierkegaard (1813-1855), Nietzsche (1844-1900), and Freud (1856-1939). Together, these thinkers forced the West to reconsider the relationship between humanity and the divine by reflecting hard on the nature of reality and how reality is perceived. Virtue, morality, and theology flow from what we know and how we know it, and with the advent and popularity of existentialism, theologizing slipped away from interaction with the natural and historical.[15] Altizer seeks to find a meaningful Christian experience in a philosophical worldview that is defined by a nihilistic rejection of all traditional Christian theological reflections.
Therefore, the God-is-dead movement is an expression of the nihilism that follows a frustrating absence of the divine in Western culture.[16] The thesis of the Gospel of Christian Atheism makes the response of Altizer to the separation of God and humanity in modernity and post-modernity explicitly clear: It is the thesis of this book that the Christian, and the Christian alone, can speak of God in our time; but the message the Christian is now called to proclaim is the gospel, the good news or glad tidings, of the death of God.[17] It is beyond doubt that Altizers declaration of the death of God solves a whole host of atheistic protests and other criticisms of Christianity.[18] By boldly declaring that God is dead, and has been dead since the time of Christ, one is completely absolved from explaining all of the paradoxes of the existence of God.[19] One does not need to explain how God acts and has acted in history; there is no need to explain the paradox of the presence of evil and why an all-powerful or loving God would allow evil and injustice to endure;[20] and the relationship between science/philosophy[21] and religion/theology.[22]
Altizer believes that the Christian faith is tied too much to a useless ecclesiastical tradition.[23] He thinks that the first great heresy of the Church is the teaching that the Church is the Body of Christ.[24] Therefore, Altizers method will be a deconstruction of Christian theology.[25] His mission is to identify doctrines or theologies that are the product of the Church - that is ecclesiastical tradition - and produce a theology that is pure from its influence. Altizers theologizing is a bold departure from Christian tradition, as he identifies heresies within the canon itself in regard to both Christ and the nature of the Church. From his point of view, the recognition of Jesus as the Son of God in Scripture negates the power of the Incarnation.[26]
The death of God notion is therefore inextricably tied to Altizers Christology.[27] As he shapes his concept of the Incarnation, he says, One of my favorite words is the Greek word kenosis which in some sense has to do with an emptying process, or a self-emptying process.[28] God completely poured out all divinity and transcendence and died on the cross in Jesus Christ. The Church as the Body of Christ and the worship of a transcendent Lord is an unacceptable reversal of the Incarnation - the self-emptying of God into Christ. Altizer refers to the Incarnation as Gods self-annihilation or self-negation.[29] Buddhism therefore becomes a useful tool in surrendering to the nothingness of God and participating in a personal self-annihilation. In a type of now-and-not-yet eschatology made famous by Albert Switzer, Altizer believes that the redemptive act of Gods death will be progressively realized from the death of Christ until the Apocalypse.[30]
Reflections
I agree with Altizer that theologizing must be meaningful to the world. However, I have protests to all of Altizers methods. To my mind, his methods are inconsistent from beginning to end. First, his deconstructive method is unreliable and biased. At some point in his method, he is dependent upon the testimony of the Church, the canon of Scripture, and arbitrarily removes from that testimony proof texts which he uses to sustain his argument. In doing so, he takes partial testimony from an organization which he considers to be heretical. So he is taking texts that were preserved from an institution which he considers to be heretical and uses them partially to construct his theology. An example of this is his apparent affinity for the Christ-hymn in Philippians. It does say that Christ emptied himself to become a servant, but it also says that Christ is glorified - and both are the testimony of the same Church. There is no evidence whatsoever that the hymn had ever been redacted - that the glorification of Christ was added to a doctrine of Incarnation. If so, then Altizers usage of the text would be justifiable.
Secondly, Altizer seems to be looking for God in all the wrong places. He concludes that speaking of God is dead, but that is because he radicalizes Tillich and accepts Nietzsches review of Christianity. Even the self-imposed title of the movement as radical Christianity reveals that God is dead only to a minority of nihilistic intellectuals. Altizer and others claim that theism and Christianity is dead at a time when the Martin Luther King and Billy Graham and other theologians were influential leaders in American Protestantism. With the post-modern spirituality in America that largely embraces theistic language, it seems that the secular method of Altizer is now failing its own test. Despite my protests, I appreciate Altizers work. I too have affinity for Buddhism, and indeed it would be useful in redeeming Christianity if Nietzsche were as popular in American intellectual and spiritual thinking as it is in the mind of Altizer.
WORKS CITED
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Cost of Discipleship. Translated by R. H. Fuller. New York: Macmillan, 1949.
. Letters and Papers from Prison. Edited by Erberhard Bethage. Translated by Reginald Fuller. New York: Macmillian, 1953.
Adolfs, Robert. "Is God Dead?." In The Meaning of the Death of God, ed. Bernard Murchland, 70-91. New York: Random House, 1967.
Altizer, Thomas. The Altizer-Montgomery Dialogue. Chicago: InterVarsity, 1967.
. The Gospel of Christian Atheism. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1966.
. "A Critical Analysis of C. G. Jungs Understanding of Religion." PhD diss., University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, 1955.
. Godhead and the Nothing. New York: State U. of NY, 2003.
. History as Apocalypse. Albany: State U. of New York, 1985.
. "Nature and Grace in the Theology of St. Augustine." MA thesis, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, 1951.
. The New Gospel of Christian Atheism. Auora: Davies, 2002.
. Radical Theology and the Death of God. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966.
Borowitz, Eugene. "God-is-Dead Theology." In The Meaning of the Death of God, ed. Bernard Murchland, 92-107. New York: Random House, 1967.
Fisher, David. "Review: History as Apocalypse." Journal of Religion 66, no. 4 (1986): 448-9.
Penner, Hans. "Review: Mircea Eliade and the Dialectic of the Sacred." Journal of Religion 44, no. 3 (1964): 253-55.
Taylor, Mark. "Altizer's Oiriginality." Journal of the American Academy of Religion 52, no. 3 (): 569-84.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spake Zarathustra. Translated by Thomas Wayne. New York: Algora, 2003.
. Beyond Good and Evil. Edited by Rolf-Peter Hortsmann and Judith Norman. Translated by Judith Norman. New York: Cambridge University, 2002.
. Antichrist. Translated by Thomas Wayne. New York: Algora, 2004.
Olson, Alan. "Genesis and Apocalpyse: A Theological Voyage toward Authentic Christianity." Journal of the American Academy of Religion 61, no. 1 (1993): 123-5.
[1] Thomas Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1966). This work will be cited as Gospel. Due to the excessive amount of works cited by this author, I will reference his works only by source title in this paper.
[2] Thomas Altizer, Radical Theology and the Death of God (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966).
[3] "... theology must never again be enclosed within the classrooms and the churches," Gospel, 12. It seems to me, then that to participate in the church as an ordained minister/scholar would be antithetical to his mission: to redefine Christianity without loyalty to the Church.
[4] Thomas Altizer, Godhead and the Nothing (New York: State U. of NY, 2003), ix. I confess that I did not rely enough on Mark Taylor, but nevertheless he has an excellent article on Altizer. Mark Taylor, "Altizer's Oiriginality," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 52, no. 3 (1984): 569-84. A full review of any one of these influences in the works of Altizer is quite beyond the scope of this paper.
[5] Thomas Altizer, "Nature and Grace in the Theology of St. Augustine" (MA thesis, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL), 1951.
[6] Thomas Altizer, "A Critical Analysis of C. G. Jungs Understanding of Religion" (PhD diss., University of Chicago, Chicago, IL), 1955.
[7] Thomas Altizer, History as Apocalypse (Albany: State U. of New York, 1985), 2. So much so that he refers to God as the Nothing or Nihil, Nothing, ix.
[8] Gospel, 37; Genesis and Apocalypse (Louisville: John Knox, 1990), 98. The review by Alan Olson is helpful, "Genesis and Apocalpyse: A Theological Voyage toward Authentic Christianity," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 61, no. 1 (1993): 123-5. See also Hans Penner, "Review: Mircea Eliade and the Dialectic of the Sacred," Journal of Religion 44, no. 3 (1964): 253-55.
[9] See especially Genesis and Apocalypse, 89.
[10] From Kant onwards.
[11] From Altizer's point of view, church tradition is invalid both due to its age and its heretical Christology. Cf. Gospel, 27, Perhaps the deepest obstacle to the realization of this new vocation of theology is the priestly conviction that that canon of Scripture is closed, revelation is finished and complete, the Word of God has already been fully and finally spoken. The God-is-dead theologians pay careful attention to the unbelieving world. They see that people are living quite happily without God and have outgrown Him spiritually and intellectually, Eugene Borowitz, "God-is-Dead Theology," in The Meaning of the Death of God, ed. Bernard Murchland (New York: Random House, 1967), 82.
[12] See the influence of Spinoza in Godhead and the Nothing, 81.
[13] Godhead and the Nothing, 20.
[14] Robert Adolfs, "Is God Dead?," in The Meaning of the Death of God, ed. Bernard Murchland (New York: Random House, 1967), 82.
[15] Some theologians fought against this movement, like Charles Hodge and other American theologians, but the trend nevertheless continued.
[16] I do not intend to posit Nietzsche as single-handedly ushering in the modern age; but he is hailed as an important thinker that ushered the West into modernity, and his tremendous impact on the God-is-dead movement is widely celebrated. Although I imagine that Altizer read all of his works, I can certainly detect influence from Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883); and Beyond Good and Evil (1886); and Antichrist (1888). Cf. Thus Spake Zarathustra 25 to Gospel, 132-147. Cf. Antichrist, 1-11 and Godhead and the Nothing, ix-xiii. Cf. Beyond Good and Evil 47-9 and Godhead and the Nothing, 47-63. English translations of Nietzsche are widely available: Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. by Thomas Wayne (New York: Algora, 2003); Beyond Good and Evil, trans. by Judith Norman (New York: Cambridge University, 2002); Antichrist, trans. by Thomas Wayne (New York: Algora, 2004).
[17] Gospel,15. Altizer does note that orthodox Christianity implicitly affirms that God died in Christ, because it affirms that Christ is God. However, I cannot detect any emphasis at all on the resurrection of Christ as the resurrection of God. That is, for Altizer, God emptied Himself into Christ and died on the Cross, and remains forever dead. The resurrection of God in Christ is a resurrection into emptiness, Genesis and Apocalypse, 90.
[18] A critical weakness in my opinion is that Altizer never produces a convincing argument that God was ever alive in the first place.
[19] Assuming of course, we forgive Altizer for not defending the existence of God in the first place. It is interesting that one who is famous for declaring that God is dead cannot produce a convincing argument that God was ever alive in the first place. Altizer seems to assume that God was once meaningful to people, and now is not. Such an assumption without defense is worrisome.
[20] This is an especially important question after the Holocaust.
[21] Philosophy impacts the perception of oneself and all other information. Descartes (1596-1650), Kant (1724-1804), Blake (1757-1827), Hegel (1770-1831), Kierkegaard (1813-1855), Nietzsche (1844-1900), and Freud (1856-1939) are especially important here, Godhead and the Nothing, 19-21. It is especially useful then that Buddhism fits perfectly into a nihilistic framework, and offers personal and spiritual freedom within nihilism, Godhead and the Nothing, 79, 100.
[22] I believe that Altizer specifically states that his death of God theology solves these problems in Gospel.
[23] Gospel, 11, 132. One of the aims, therefore, of Altizer, is the establishment of a religionless Christianity - a term that I can trace to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. by Erberhard Bethage, trans. by Reginald Fuller (New York: Macmillian, 1953), 161-66. I have no doubt that Altizer has reflected on Bonhoeffers interpretation of Luthers leaving the cloister to become a part of the world in Cost of Discipleship, trans. by R. H. Fuller (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 39ff.
[24] Gospel, 132.
[25] David Fisher, "Review: History as Apocalypse," Journal of Religion 66, no. 4 (1986): 448-9.
[26] Gospel, 133.
[27] Thomas Altizer, The New Gospel of Christian Atheism (Auora: Davies, 2002), 46.
[28] Thomas Altizer, The Altizer-Montgomery Dialogue (Chicago: InterVarsity, 1967), 9. This work is a transcript of a public discussion in which Thomas Altizer and John Montgomery discussed the God-is-Dead movement at the University of Chicago in 1967. This work will be cited as Dialogue. It is no coincidence, in my opinion, that kenosis has parallel in Buddhism, shunyata. Shunyata is in the Heart Sutra chanted by Mahayana Buddhists.
[29] Gospel, 102-31; Dialogue, 10, 15. Cf. Taylor, Altizers Originality, 576.
[30] Dialogue, 14, 16.
by
Nathan J. Barnes
The History of Protestant Theology in America
CHHI 90213
Dr. James O. Duke
March 22, 2006
Life
Thomas J. J. Altizer was born in Cambridge, MA in 1927. He was raised in the Episcopal tradition. He received his MA in religion from the University of Chicago in 1951, and a Ph.D. in 1955. He gained widespread attention in the 1966 with the publication of The Gospel of Christian Atheism[1] and his essays in Radical Theology and the Death of God.[2] The most interesting aspect of Altizers career, of course, is his role in the so-called God is dead movement that began with these publications. He left the faculty of Emory during the outrage that his early works caused and accepted a position as professor of English at Stony Brook University in New York in 1968, where he serves today as Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature. It is a mistake to believe that he ran away from the struggle in the 1960s, unable to defend himself as a church theologian. His theological expressions as one outside of the church are consistent with his method: completely rejects traditional Christian theology and uses Buddhism as his primary interpretative tool.[3] Although Altizer was in the theological limelight in the 1960s, most of his significant theologizing has occurred within the last fifteen years. He is not ordained, and his theologizing is not representative of any Christian denomination or heritage.
I could not find a biography on Altizer nor a webpage authored by him or his students. Primary sources are therefore selected works by Altizer. In this paper I will review very briefly the background of Christian Atheism and trace elements of Altizers thought from the early works above through more contemporary works: History as Apocalypse (1985), Genesis and Apocalypse: A Theological Voyage Toward Authentic Christianity (1990), The genesis of God: A Theological Genealogy (1993), The Contemporary Jesus (1997), Godhead and the Nothing (2000), The New Apocalypse (2000), The New Gospel of Christian Atheism (2002).
Influences
One can hardly read Altizer without encountering the influence of the Buddha, Paul Tillich, and Fred Nietzsche.[4] All of these influences affected Altizer very early in his theologizing. He read Tillich extensively for his masters thesis,[5] and was influenced by Buddhism and other elements of Eastern thought while working on his doctoral dissertation.[6] In these early works he came to a conclusion that he never abandoned, Christian theology can be reborn only by way of an immersion in Buddhism.[7] I suspect that Altizer chose Buddhism because it encountered absolute nihilism before it swallowed the West, and it solved the problem of despair by total self-annihilation and absorption into the Nothingness.[8] Long before Nietzsche and other thinkers exposed the nothingness in Christianity and Western culture, Buddhists had surrendered completely to it with incredible success.[9]
Altizer posits that the entire Christian conception of God is useless for today, based upon a through review of the contemporary[10] view of God in literature, philosophy, poetry, and art. His source for theological reflection is not the Bible nor Christian tradition, but the entire human reflection upon the divine - except for anything that is the product of church tradition.[11] With the growing popularity of the scientific method and the question of how to interpret scientific results from Kant onwards, the role of metaphysics dwindled in the humanities. Theism in the theologians, artists, poets, historians, and philosophers adopted skepticism and gradually began to divorce their thinking of God from history and nature, and then to question both Gods ability to speak to humanity and for humanity to reach out to God.[12] Altizer applies the nihilism of Nietzsche and others to Christian theology, being part of the tradition that senses a great divide between humanity and the divine. This nihilism requires a completely new theological language.[13]
The Gospel of Christian Atheism
Altizer believes that God is dead, but claims that he is very much Christian, which makes him unique in the God-is-dead movement. In his early works, Altizer identified himself with this movement whose important contributors at the time were William Hamilton, The New Essence of Christianity (1961); Gabriel Vahanian, The Death of God (1961); and Harvey Cox, The Secular City (1965).
The God-is-dead movement is the theological reflection on the alienation of humankind from the divine due to important movements in philosophy, history, poetry, art, and works of literature.[14] The primary influences of many God-is-dead thinkers are Descartes (1596-1650), Kant (1724-1804), Blake (1757-1827), Hegel (1770-1831), Kierkegaard (1813-1855), Nietzsche (1844-1900), and Freud (1856-1939). Together, these thinkers forced the West to reconsider the relationship between humanity and the divine by reflecting hard on the nature of reality and how reality is perceived. Virtue, morality, and theology flow from what we know and how we know it, and with the advent and popularity of existentialism, theologizing slipped away from interaction with the natural and historical.[15] Altizer seeks to find a meaningful Christian experience in a philosophical worldview that is defined by a nihilistic rejection of all traditional Christian theological reflections.
Therefore, the God-is-dead movement is an expression of the nihilism that follows a frustrating absence of the divine in Western culture.[16] The thesis of the Gospel of Christian Atheism makes the response of Altizer to the separation of God and humanity in modernity and post-modernity explicitly clear: It is the thesis of this book that the Christian, and the Christian alone, can speak of God in our time; but the message the Christian is now called to proclaim is the gospel, the good news or glad tidings, of the death of God.[17] It is beyond doubt that Altizers declaration of the death of God solves a whole host of atheistic protests and other criticisms of Christianity.[18] By boldly declaring that God is dead, and has been dead since the time of Christ, one is completely absolved from explaining all of the paradoxes of the existence of God.[19] One does not need to explain how God acts and has acted in history; there is no need to explain the paradox of the presence of evil and why an all-powerful or loving God would allow evil and injustice to endure;[20] and the relationship between science/philosophy[21] and religion/theology.[22]
Altizer believes that the Christian faith is tied too much to a useless ecclesiastical tradition.[23] He thinks that the first great heresy of the Church is the teaching that the Church is the Body of Christ.[24] Therefore, Altizers method will be a deconstruction of Christian theology.[25] His mission is to identify doctrines or theologies that are the product of the Church - that is ecclesiastical tradition - and produce a theology that is pure from its influence. Altizers theologizing is a bold departure from Christian tradition, as he identifies heresies within the canon itself in regard to both Christ and the nature of the Church. From his point of view, the recognition of Jesus as the Son of God in Scripture negates the power of the Incarnation.[26]
The death of God notion is therefore inextricably tied to Altizers Christology.[27] As he shapes his concept of the Incarnation, he says, One of my favorite words is the Greek word kenosis which in some sense has to do with an emptying process, or a self-emptying process.[28] God completely poured out all divinity and transcendence and died on the cross in Jesus Christ. The Church as the Body of Christ and the worship of a transcendent Lord is an unacceptable reversal of the Incarnation - the self-emptying of God into Christ. Altizer refers to the Incarnation as Gods self-annihilation or self-negation.[29] Buddhism therefore becomes a useful tool in surrendering to the nothingness of God and participating in a personal self-annihilation. In a type of now-and-not-yet eschatology made famous by Albert Switzer, Altizer believes that the redemptive act of Gods death will be progressively realized from the death of Christ until the Apocalypse.[30]
Reflections
I agree with Altizer that theologizing must be meaningful to the world. However, I have protests to all of Altizers methods. To my mind, his methods are inconsistent from beginning to end. First, his deconstructive method is unreliable and biased. At some point in his method, he is dependent upon the testimony of the Church, the canon of Scripture, and arbitrarily removes from that testimony proof texts which he uses to sustain his argument. In doing so, he takes partial testimony from an organization which he considers to be heretical. So he is taking texts that were preserved from an institution which he considers to be heretical and uses them partially to construct his theology. An example of this is his apparent affinity for the Christ-hymn in Philippians. It does say that Christ emptied himself to become a servant, but it also says that Christ is glorified - and both are the testimony of the same Church. There is no evidence whatsoever that the hymn had ever been redacted - that the glorification of Christ was added to a doctrine of Incarnation. If so, then Altizers usage of the text would be justifiable.
Secondly, Altizer seems to be looking for God in all the wrong places. He concludes that speaking of God is dead, but that is because he radicalizes Tillich and accepts Nietzsches review of Christianity. Even the self-imposed title of the movement as radical Christianity reveals that God is dead only to a minority of nihilistic intellectuals. Altizer and others claim that theism and Christianity is dead at a time when the Martin Luther King and Billy Graham and other theologians were influential leaders in American Protestantism. With the post-modern spirituality in America that largely embraces theistic language, it seems that the secular method of Altizer is now failing its own test. Despite my protests, I appreciate Altizers work. I too have affinity for Buddhism, and indeed it would be useful in redeeming Christianity if Nietzsche were as popular in American intellectual and spiritual thinking as it is in the mind of Altizer.
WORKS CITED
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Cost of Discipleship. Translated by R. H. Fuller. New York: Macmillan, 1949.
. Letters and Papers from Prison. Edited by Erberhard Bethage. Translated by Reginald Fuller. New York: Macmillian, 1953.
Adolfs, Robert. "Is God Dead?." In The Meaning of the Death of God, ed. Bernard Murchland, 70-91. New York: Random House, 1967.
Altizer, Thomas. The Altizer-Montgomery Dialogue. Chicago: InterVarsity, 1967.
. The Gospel of Christian Atheism. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1966.
. "A Critical Analysis of C. G. Jungs Understanding of Religion." PhD diss., University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, 1955.
. Godhead and the Nothing. New York: State U. of NY, 2003.
. History as Apocalypse. Albany: State U. of New York, 1985.
. "Nature and Grace in the Theology of St. Augustine." MA thesis, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, 1951.
. The New Gospel of Christian Atheism. Auora: Davies, 2002.
. Radical Theology and the Death of God. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966.
Borowitz, Eugene. "God-is-Dead Theology." In The Meaning of the Death of God, ed. Bernard Murchland, 92-107. New York: Random House, 1967.
Fisher, David. "Review: History as Apocalypse." Journal of Religion 66, no. 4 (1986): 448-9.
Penner, Hans. "Review: Mircea Eliade and the Dialectic of the Sacred." Journal of Religion 44, no. 3 (1964): 253-55.
Taylor, Mark. "Altizer's Oiriginality." Journal of the American Academy of Religion 52, no. 3 (): 569-84.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spake Zarathustra. Translated by Thomas Wayne. New York: Algora, 2003.
. Beyond Good and Evil. Edited by Rolf-Peter Hortsmann and Judith Norman. Translated by Judith Norman. New York: Cambridge University, 2002.
. Antichrist. Translated by Thomas Wayne. New York: Algora, 2004.
Olson, Alan. "Genesis and Apocalpyse: A Theological Voyage toward Authentic Christianity." Journal of the American Academy of Religion 61, no. 1 (1993): 123-5.
[1] Thomas Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1966). This work will be cited as Gospel. Due to the excessive amount of works cited by this author, I will reference his works only by source title in this paper.
[2] Thomas Altizer, Radical Theology and the Death of God (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966).
[3] "... theology must never again be enclosed within the classrooms and the churches," Gospel, 12. It seems to me, then that to participate in the church as an ordained minister/scholar would be antithetical to his mission: to redefine Christianity without loyalty to the Church.
[4] Thomas Altizer, Godhead and the Nothing (New York: State U. of NY, 2003), ix. I confess that I did not rely enough on Mark Taylor, but nevertheless he has an excellent article on Altizer. Mark Taylor, "Altizer's Oiriginality," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 52, no. 3 (1984): 569-84. A full review of any one of these influences in the works of Altizer is quite beyond the scope of this paper.
[5] Thomas Altizer, "Nature and Grace in the Theology of St. Augustine" (MA thesis, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL), 1951.
[6] Thomas Altizer, "A Critical Analysis of C. G. Jungs Understanding of Religion" (PhD diss., University of Chicago, Chicago, IL), 1955.
[7] Thomas Altizer, History as Apocalypse (Albany: State U. of New York, 1985), 2. So much so that he refers to God as the Nothing or Nihil, Nothing, ix.
[8] Gospel, 37; Genesis and Apocalypse (Louisville: John Knox, 1990), 98. The review by Alan Olson is helpful, "Genesis and Apocalpyse: A Theological Voyage toward Authentic Christianity," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 61, no. 1 (1993): 123-5. See also Hans Penner, "Review: Mircea Eliade and the Dialectic of the Sacred," Journal of Religion 44, no. 3 (1964): 253-55.
[9] See especially Genesis and Apocalypse, 89.
[10] From Kant onwards.
[11] From Altizer's point of view, church tradition is invalid both due to its age and its heretical Christology. Cf. Gospel, 27, Perhaps the deepest obstacle to the realization of this new vocation of theology is the priestly conviction that that canon of Scripture is closed, revelation is finished and complete, the Word of God has already been fully and finally spoken. The God-is-dead theologians pay careful attention to the unbelieving world. They see that people are living quite happily without God and have outgrown Him spiritually and intellectually, Eugene Borowitz, "God-is-Dead Theology," in The Meaning of the Death of God, ed. Bernard Murchland (New York: Random House, 1967), 82.
[12] See the influence of Spinoza in Godhead and the Nothing, 81.
[13] Godhead and the Nothing, 20.
[14] Robert Adolfs, "Is God Dead?," in The Meaning of the Death of God, ed. Bernard Murchland (New York: Random House, 1967), 82.
[15] Some theologians fought against this movement, like Charles Hodge and other American theologians, but the trend nevertheless continued.
[16] I do not intend to posit Nietzsche as single-handedly ushering in the modern age; but he is hailed as an important thinker that ushered the West into modernity, and his tremendous impact on the God-is-dead movement is widely celebrated. Although I imagine that Altizer read all of his works, I can certainly detect influence from Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883); and Beyond Good and Evil (1886); and Antichrist (1888). Cf. Thus Spake Zarathustra 25 to Gospel, 132-147. Cf. Antichrist, 1-11 and Godhead and the Nothing, ix-xiii. Cf. Beyond Good and Evil 47-9 and Godhead and the Nothing, 47-63. English translations of Nietzsche are widely available: Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. by Thomas Wayne (New York: Algora, 2003); Beyond Good and Evil, trans. by Judith Norman (New York: Cambridge University, 2002); Antichrist, trans. by Thomas Wayne (New York: Algora, 2004).
[17] Gospel,15. Altizer does note that orthodox Christianity implicitly affirms that God died in Christ, because it affirms that Christ is God. However, I cannot detect any emphasis at all on the resurrection of Christ as the resurrection of God. That is, for Altizer, God emptied Himself into Christ and died on the Cross, and remains forever dead. The resurrection of God in Christ is a resurrection into emptiness, Genesis and Apocalypse, 90.
[18] A critical weakness in my opinion is that Altizer never produces a convincing argument that God was ever alive in the first place.
[19] Assuming of course, we forgive Altizer for not defending the existence of God in the first place. It is interesting that one who is famous for declaring that God is dead cannot produce a convincing argument that God was ever alive in the first place. Altizer seems to assume that God was once meaningful to people, and now is not. Such an assumption without defense is worrisome.
[20] This is an especially important question after the Holocaust.
[21] Philosophy impacts the perception of oneself and all other information. Descartes (1596-1650), Kant (1724-1804), Blake (1757-1827), Hegel (1770-1831), Kierkegaard (1813-1855), Nietzsche (1844-1900), and Freud (1856-1939) are especially important here, Godhead and the Nothing, 19-21. It is especially useful then that Buddhism fits perfectly into a nihilistic framework, and offers personal and spiritual freedom within nihilism, Godhead and the Nothing, 79, 100.
[22] I believe that Altizer specifically states that his death of God theology solves these problems in Gospel.
[23] Gospel, 11, 132. One of the aims, therefore, of Altizer, is the establishment of a religionless Christianity - a term that I can trace to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. by Erberhard Bethage, trans. by Reginald Fuller (New York: Macmillian, 1953), 161-66. I have no doubt that Altizer has reflected on Bonhoeffers interpretation of Luthers leaving the cloister to become a part of the world in Cost of Discipleship, trans. by R. H. Fuller (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 39ff.
[24] Gospel, 132.
[25] David Fisher, "Review: History as Apocalypse," Journal of Religion 66, no. 4 (1986): 448-9.
[26] Gospel, 133.
[27] Thomas Altizer, The New Gospel of Christian Atheism (Auora: Davies, 2002), 46.
[28] Thomas Altizer, The Altizer-Montgomery Dialogue (Chicago: InterVarsity, 1967), 9. This work is a transcript of a public discussion in which Thomas Altizer and John Montgomery discussed the God-is-Dead movement at the University of Chicago in 1967. This work will be cited as Dialogue. It is no coincidence, in my opinion, that kenosis has parallel in Buddhism, shunyata. Shunyata is in the Heart Sutra chanted by Mahayana Buddhists.
[29] Gospel, 102-31; Dialogue, 10, 15. Cf. Taylor, Altizers Originality, 576.
[30] Dialogue, 14, 16.
