The Gospel of Christian Atheism

by Thomas J.J. Altizer

Genres: Philosophy, Theology, Religion, Christianity, Nonfiction, Spirituality, Atheism

157 pages, Paperback

First published March 20, 1966

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

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

For being such a dialectical thinker (and I'm all for dialectical thinking and taking Hegel seriously), Altizer ought to know better than to set up such false dualisms. He argues that that there are only two tenable positions for a Christian to take: either that of orthodox theology along with hell, damnation, wrath, total transcendence, etc., or that of his own radical theology which proclaims an intensely nihilistic death of God without one shred of transcendence left.

As a radical Christian myself, I neither interpret the "death of God" as a literal event in history nor as the total annihilation of transcendence. Nor do I believe that transcendence requires strict moral law or wrath. I subscribe to a panentheistic model in which God "kenotically" limited Godself at the beginning of cosmic history in order to actualize the existence of a freely existing universe. The Christ event is simply a historical revelation of this already true reality. But a transcendent ground remains without imposing upon our general freedom or imposing moral law and wrath. Rather, this transcendent ground, or logos/Word, is both immanent and transcendent as the all-encompassing reality of divine love energy.

It remains unclear to me whether this possibility and similar ones are either unthinkable to Altizer or simply ignored for the sake of argument.

[Benjamin Shay · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the worst book I've ever read. I came into reading it intrigued and at least somewhat inclined to be compelled by his thesis. However, by the time I was just a few pages into the book, it was apparent that I had begun reading obfuscatory jargon whose sole purpose seems to be to hide the fact that the book's arguments were not sharp. I could recognize the words on the page, could put them together into cogent sentences, and could even piece together paragraphs. But upon going from paragraph to paragraph and idea to idea, the concepts and lines of thought quickly fell apart.

[Douglas · Rating 1 out of 5]

Altizer’s book is a provocative but ultimately frustrating work. his attempt to merge Nietzschean death-of-God theology, the radical vision of William Blake, and dialectic of Georg Hegel with Christian symbolism collapses under its own contradictions. His prose is often dense to the point of opacity, masking speculative leaps as philosophical insight. While he claims to present a radical renewal of faith through atheism, the argument feels more rhetorical than substantive, relying on mystical paradoxes that erode any clear theological coherence. Altizer’s dismissal of traditional transcendence leaves little grounding for moral or spiritual meaning, reducing Christianity to a kind of existential poetics. The book’s ambition cannot be denied, but its self-referential style and lack of analytical rigor make it more a product of the 1960s theological avant-garde than a lasting contribution to Christian thought. Readers seeking intellectual clarity or grounded theology will find only confusion.

[Diocletian · Rating 2 out of 5]

I decided to read this to help me complete my reading challenge this year, as it had an interesting premise, was short, and, I figured, was probably an easy read. I was wrong. This book assumes a level of theological and philosophical knowledge which I sadly do not possess. So if this review seems a little unfair, that would be the reason. Now onto the review. The premise I was expecting was a Christianity without the traditional concept of God, and an exploration of what purpose holding Christian beliefs and morality would serve without the concept of God. However, my guess was fairly off. This book seems to be an attempt to reconcile existentialism and the Death of God philosophy expressed most famously by Nietzsche with Christianity. In attempting to do this, Altizer agrees with Nietzsche- except he takes it a step further. He thinks that God is literally dead. As in, he existed at one point, but then died. Altizer believes that God died at the Crucifixion, when he came in the form of Jesus and self-sacrificed himself, and his essence is now contained within the world. He gets to this point using a lot of complicated theological and philosophical language which, unfortunately, served only to confuse me even more than an already confusing premise. Maybe if I had been reading it earlier then 11:00 PM at night it would have made more sense, but who knows. It was still interesting, and should probably be re-read when I have improved my knowledge of complicated theological terminology.

[Mark · Rating 1 out of 5]

I remember hearing Slavoj Zizek speak about being a "Christian Atheist" years ago, by which he demonstrated that he understood Nietzsche, at least the stakes that Nietzsche raised theology to: namely, that if you're truly going to be an atheist, you must "transvaluate all values," that is, start from scratch, taking nothing Christian for granted, especially Slave Morality. Zizek's use of the label then is a frank admission of Christianity's enduring centrality and necessity to (post)modern ethics and philosophy.

Thus when I saw this book on the shelf in the library, my interest was piqued. I wanted to see a book-length treatment on the subject, but that's not what I found here. The preface, introduction, and first chapter all nicely developed and explained Altizer's idea of the topic, but by the second chapter he got his wheels stuck in mud and sat and spun. This would have worked much better as an essay in a journal, but the author wasn't content to leave it at that. Most of the second chapter onward simply quoted William Blake and Nietzsche, repeating his claims from earlier, and generally being exasperated that not everyone sees his perspective.

So what is his perspective? He thinks that "true" Christianity is a radical acceptance of the Death of God, by which he means that when Christ died, the transcendent God died with him. Thus he finds fault with mainstream Christianity's particular (limited to the Church) and historical (literal or otherwise) approach, instead of what seems self-evident to him, namely a universal (reciprocal relationship to the world) and spiritual (not overly concerned with historical fact) approach.

What this means pragmatically is that he's a modalist who refuses to understand the hypostatic union. The few times he mentions the trinity he hand-waves it away as philosophical mumbo-jumbo (it's frankly a little insulting how dismissive he is and how little he addresses his huge break with historic Christianity), which allows him to then interpret the incarnation as God going into one man, who in his death releases God into everyone, through his favorite word, "kenosis" or "self-emptying."

Because he adamantly refuses to understand the hypostatic union, namely the paradoxical assertion that Christ is fully Man and fully God simultaneously, he then is able to claim that the transcendent God (by which he absurdly means one even more distant and less historically grounded than the Jewish Yahweh) is distant, alien, and unrelatable. He then makes the argument that we can't worship a God who is distant and removed from our daily lives, and thus we must embrace the forward-facing (that is, future-facing) notion of Christian eschatology. This approach fails to understand all 2000 years of orthodox Christian thinking about the incarnation, and I'm baffled that he misrepresented it so badly.

I was frustrated with this not because I'm some partisan who disagreed with him: I love Nietzsche and I disagree with almost every word he wrote. But in contrast to Slavoj Zizek, arguably the best-known Christian Atheist alive today, Altizer had none of the ethos and wit that Zizek got from G. K. Chesterton and St. Augustine. Instead, Altizer decided to take a polemical tone, despite very serious flaws in his logic.

The primary flaw was his intentional misunderstanding of how reason and paradox operate. At one point (at many points, but in one place he linked this to Luther) he claimed that mainstream Christianity got to its mistaken conclusions through an over-reliance on abstract reason which separated it from experience and immediacy. He used Luther as an example of early dialectics with his law/gospel distinction, which I thought was genius, but he claimed Luther was still a slave to the "whore of Reason" in his continued belief in a transcendent God. This is obviously only a problem if one dispenses with the hypostatic union, which is what Altizer does. Altizer does this because he's overly married to reason and refuses to allow that paradox central to orthodox Christology (the hypostatic union), because... he's too married to reason and non-contradiction (which is what he accuses mainstream Christianity of). However, mainstream Christianity and Lutheranism in particular have never been overly married to reason, being comfortable with the ultimate paradox of intellectual history, namely the Trinity. Altizer thinks that God must go entirely into Christ and die utterly in him, simply because he latched onto Nietzsche's "God is Dead." As a result, he falls into the classic heresy of Modalism, whereby God is not seen as three persons in one being, but three persons each as possible "modes" that God can take on (Father in the OT, Jesus in the NT, and the Holy Spirit after the death of Christ). As Ecclesiastes says, there is nothing new under the sun.

There are two places I would agree with Altizer in a roundabout way. First off, yes, I think that often the mainstream Christian apologetics about God can distract us from the bigger picture, especially when we get lost in the trenches of debates with atheists and scientists. Ultimately, scripture rarely uses precise, let alone Greek philosophical terms to describe God, other than a few of the omni-s. In general, I would agree with the Muslims that apophatic theology is probably safest. The second point I'd agree on is that yes, the Church, especially the Lutheran Church, often is obsessed with salvation to the near-total denial of action in the world and the present moment; sermons so often focus exclusively on historical events in the texts and future events like judgement day and Heaven, to the exclusion and negation of the present. I'd love to hear more sermons about what the book of James focuses on, namely how to act now that we have the Gospel. Many churches have stayed at the same initial proclamation of the good news, which, though necessary, shouldn't be the end point, but rather the beginning: the springboard from which Christian love can uplift the world.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE MAJOR WORK OF ONE OF THE "DEATH OF GOD" THEOLOGIANS

Thomas Jonathan Jackson Altizer (born 1927) taught religion at Wabash College, then he taught English at Emory University from 1956 to 1968. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and has recently written a memoir, 'Living the Death of God: A Theological Memoir.'

He begins this 1966 book by saying, "Let me confess that this book was written with the conviction that it is an expression of a new and profoundly radical theological movement in America." (Of course, we now know that it was a very SHORT-LIVED "movement"; still, Postmodern theology and Emergent Church movement have some modern parallels to it.)

He asserts, "The 'atheism' of the radical Christian is in large measure a prophetic reaction to a distant and nonredemptive God who by virtue of his very sovereignty and transcendence stands wholly apart from the forward movement and the historical presence of the Incarnate Word." (pg. 62) He adds, "every man today who is open to experience knows that God is absent, but only the Christian knows that God is dead, that the death of God is a final and irrevocable event, and that God's death has actualized in our history a new and liberated humanity." (pg. 111)

The "real question" for Altizer, is this: "is faith speakable or livable in the actuality of our present?" (pg. 134) "If we can truly know that God is dead, and can fully actualize the death of God in our own experience, then we can be liberated from the threat of condemnation, and freed from the terror of a transcendent beyond." (pg. 145)

For students of historical 20th century theological movements, this book has some continuing interest.

[Nick Polk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love the theses and dialectical method in this book. I enjoyed the call to a radical Christianity and it challenged me as someone committed to process theology to really consider Altizer’s arguments. He can be a little redundant in some parts of the book, though

[Micah · Rating 4 out of 5]

at least his wager is more interesting than Pascal's

[Jared Perovic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Professor Thomas J.J. Altizer asserts a paradoxical unity of opposites in the title of his text. The Gospel of Christian Atheism (1966) establishes "the radical, or the profane, or the nonreligious Christian" (page 102). Professor Altizer agrees with atheism, without himself being entirely secular. The theist half of Christian atheism has an inner God who is nonreligious.

Professor Altizer accepts the atheist critique of religion in general, accusing religion of a reactionary nostalgia for lost tradition, or worse, guilty of idolizing the past. When religious discourse fixates on times and places, abstract principles transcend the profane particulars of human existence. The high-minded and faraway transcendence of religion risks diminishing the deity which is immanent within human experience. 

Contrary to the abstract and intangible transcendence of religion, Altizer condemns the religious enticement to raise God too high above human experience. Withstanding the critique from atheism, only what essence remains of spirit motivates a radical Christian position.

"The "atheism" of the radical Christian is in large measure a prophetic reaction to a distant and nonredemptive God who by virtue of his very sovereignty and transcendence stands wholly apart from the forward movement and the historical presence of the Incarnate Word." (Altizer, page 62)
Separate from the historical present, the divine "Word" seems entirely unrelatable in an empty and religious form. The faraway God of religious "transcendence," Altizer reduces to "distant and nonredemptive." Such a remote distance equates to God's absence, the distinctive feature of God in deist theology. 

Neither deist, nor strictly atheist, The Gospel of Christian Atheism contains an in-dwelling God. Without transcending experience, God participates within "the profane," what Altizer calls "the profane actuality of human experience." (108). Immanent within "human experience," the Word is universally inclusive enough to reverse the past.

[pjr8888 · Rating 4 out of 5]

fom St Patrick's Seminary Library, date due Feb 10, 1973

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

See The Death of God review...