The Apocalyptic Trinity

by Thomas J.J. Altizer

This book is a major step forward in radical theology via a sustained and creative challenge to conventional and orthodox thinking on the Trinity. Altizer presents a radical rethinking of the apocalyptic trinity and recovers the apocalyptic Jesus of Hegel, Blake, and Nietzsche.

214 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 11, 2012

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

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 2 out of 5]

By God, I have never read a prose more stiff, constipated, repetitive and migraine-inducing than what Altizer has to offer here. You are better off reading the first few chapters and skimming the rest of the book. With that being said, Altizer's informed ramblings do contain bits and pieces of truly brilliant heterodox Christian thinking. One of these provoking motifs is the counter- revolutionary triumph of orthodox Christianity (covering both the East and West) over the apocalyptic impulse of the originary message centring on the sacrifice of the Christ. This victory, which has already been achieved by the time of the Joachites, is most visible in the orthodox doctrine of Trinity, in a kind of perpetual Arianist temptation to conceive of the trinitarian Godhead as not being *actually* affected by the sacrifice of the Son. The unoriginate Father eternally generates the Son and the Spirit, and eternally sanctioning the eternal sacrifice of the Son. In this sense, nothing is ever new, not even the sacrifice of the Christ--the most novel event absolute novum in history of matter and spirit. But if what Altizer is suggesting is right, the sacrifice of the Godhead in its second power transfigures the Trinity itself, turning the latter from an economic Trinity to an open ended Apocalyptic Trinity, unleashing the process in which the triune Godhead as *actual* nothingness becomes all in all. In the end, the death of God, or the self-emptying nothingess of the Godhead (kenosis) is the excruciating labor through which Being and Nothing are finally synthesized as a unity of opposites.
Despite the overbearing stylistic flaws, Altizer's The Apocalyptic Trinity is a book that should be of interest any heterodox theist.