The Contemporary Jesus

by Thomas J.J. Altizer

Thomas J. J. Altizer is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is the author of a number of books, including History as Apocalypse (published by SUNY Press), The Genesis of A Theological Genealogy, Radical Theology and the Death of God (with William Hamilton), The Self-Embodiment of God , and The Descent Into A Study of the Radical Reversal of the Christian Consciousness . There are hundreds of articles on his work in reference books, journals, magazines, and newspapers.

225 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1997

About the author

Thomas Jonathan Jackson Altizer was a radical theologian who is known for incorporating Friedrich Nietzsche's conception of the "death of God" and G. W. F. Hegel's dialectical philosophy into his systematic theology.

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Difficult book, as always with Altizer, but perhaps the most accessible I've yet read. This doesn't have the poetic, incantatory language of Genesis and Apocalypse: A Theological Voyage Toward Authentic Christianity, but it provides the ample rewards of Altizer engaging in a series of focussed reflections (Crossan's Jesus, Protestant Jesus, Catholic Jesus, Buddhist Jesus, etc). He's such a careful and illuminating reader that these reflections are powerful and fascinating even on their own, but it also becomes a mosaic that, by the end, quite clearly expresses his complex overarching project and his claims. (It also benefits, perhaps, by coming here so far along into his theological project. He can draw from, what, 30 years or more of work? And he just keeps going along after this, up until this present moment of July 2018.)

Highly recommended if you are at all curious about radical theology and/or so-called "death of God" theology.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book surveys different perspectives of Jesus, from the view points of literary figures such as Dante, Joyce, Blake and Nietzsche. The portraits of Jesus given here by Altizer are by definition universal or perennial philosophies. Altizer's achievement is to take the reader to the very heart of the human imagination with his unfolding of various portraits before painting a brand new picture as equally dazzling. Especially illuminating are the chapters on the Buddhist Jesus; this is not a mere conflation of similarities but a unification of the two figures in the human imagination.

This book is not so much for people wanting a theology that is relevant to contemporary times-Don Cupitt would be more recommended-but Altizer's book is very much more the mystic text and more purely religious.

The book begins with an examination of modern critical perspectives of Jesus, including those of John Crossan. These are of interest to the specialist but not essential. There are also two chapters that bookend the work which are purely personal theological treatises that are highly idiosyncratic and quite turgid. They are perhaps more illuminating to himself and his close readers.