The New Gospel of Christian Atheism

by Thomas J. J. Altizer
Davies Group, 2002, 158 pages
Reviewed by T Nelson

Among the world religions, says Thomas J.J. Altizer, only Christ­ianity observes the death of its God. By the same token, in modernity nothing is more unique than the realization of the death of God. Thus, genuine atheism is possible only for Christians.

Christianity celebrates resurrection, on Easter, instead of mourning the crucifixion as it did in the past. According to Altizer, we ought to do both: it “cannot be a total event if it is not the death of God”. ^[1]

Now, you might ask, is this death death, or only “death” death? Or does he mean practical irrelevance, as Nietzsche meant? It seems that for Altizer God continues to exist, but his transcendence was converted to immanence by a process of self-negation.

In his 1966 book The Gospel of Christian Atheism, which made quite a splash in its day, Altizer proposed that God's death during the crucifixion was a voluntary act in which he poured out his transcendence or divinity into the world, sacrificing it or emptying it out as an act of immanentization to transform the world. Altizer calls such a transformation “apocalyptic” in that it signals a new beginning and the end of an old way of thought.

In 2002 Altizer rewrote his book for the benefit of those who missed his message about God being “dead” the first time around, or who didn't notice.

But the fact he says it so many times proves he doesn't really believe it. If your parent died, it would be the most terrible thing in your life; you could not bear to write a whole book about it, let alone repeat it multiple times on every page. Either he means it metaphorically, or he's saying it for the sake of notoriety. In The Call to Radical Theology (reviewed at right) he hints that it is Christianity's relationship to God, not God himself, that has changed. Maybe that is what has died.

But even that strikes me as false. I suspect that what believers want from God is something beyond the world—something transcendent. As science learns more about the natural world, their concept of God, rather than adapting, recedes to maintain that distance, so as to remind them that there is such a place.

Other theologians have explained Altizer's ideas as attempts to understand Christianity from a secular point of view. However, since he still accepts the presumed existence and divinity of God, perhaps one should say it is an attempt to explain the how and why of Christ's death and resurrection, which Christians celebrate as Easter.

None of that is really explained in the Bible (though I admit not to being an expert on this), nor does the Bible propose a mechanism to explain how the entire episode is supposed to have redeeming effects on humanity. These unexplained mysteries aren't as easily accepted as they were in earlier times. Nowadays we demand explanations: what exactly do transcendence and divinity actually mean? How could they be poured out like liquids or transformed through some alchemy into immanence?

Take divinity. Is divinity a property of a deity or merely a product of believers' relationship to him as worshipers? If the latter, perhaps it says more about us than about God when we say he loses it.

Perhaps in response to the generally hostile reaction of his original book, the writing here is rather cryptic. It doesn't answer these questions. Instead Altizer relies on quotes from Hegel, Nietzsche, and Blake. At one point, for example, he tries to relate Hegel's three categories of Being-In-Itself, Being-For-Itself, and Being-In-and-For-Itself to the Trinity in Christianity.

This sort of thing reminds me of R.D. Laing, a radical psychiatrist from the same era. The writing tends to make improbable, unexpected leaps of logic, on occasions citing fictional works like Finnegans Wake, Faust, and Moby Dick in support of his argu­ments. There is also, like R.D. Laing's writing, a certain amount of wandering, inscrutable prose:

Can we truly return from an absolute death, or can we only numb or disguise it, and if postmodernity is the advent of a truly new emptiness, and one now realizing a universalization of an actual emptiness, and a universalization of a new and absolute anonymity, are these universal embodiments of an absolute death, but now embodiments that are wholly exterior rather than interior, and embodiments bringing an end to interiority itself? ^[2]

Um, I would say ... yes?

For Altizer, the basis of Christianity is resurrection:

Resurrection is perhaps the most elusive of all Christian theological categories ... it is only in modernity that it has been possible to recognize the ultimate elusiveness or mystery of resurrection itself. ^[3]

But it's important for Christians to come to grips with the fact that if Christ was God, then despite his subsequent achievements, God did in fact die. In so doing, Altizer says, God caused a liberation from the body of thought that had become a prison for humanity from which mankind could only be liberated by the death of God. This is potentially a good thing:

Only the most ultimate and absolute negation can realize that apocalyptic totality, but this negation is a self-negation or a self-emptying, and only thereby can it make possible an absolutely new totality. ^[4] . . .

Is Zarathustra Nietzsche's name of the apocalyptic Jesus? Certainly not if we know Jesus as he has ever been known before, but if that Jesus has truly disappeared, this could make possible an absolutely new Jesus . . . who is the embodiment of a new humanity and a new world. ^[6]

Whether these ideas make any sense to Christians or not I can't say, but you have to admit they're radical. Atheists would say they're confirmation that any discussion of the properties of God and his motivations is pure, unadulterated speculation. Believers, if they're feeling optimistic, might see Altizer's work as a form of evangelization: anything that gets atheists to read about theology couldn't hurt. Everybody else, I suspect, will just put the book aside and get back to dying their Easter eggs ... I mean, dyeing them ....

1. The Call to Radical Theology, p. 149
2. The New Gospel of Christian Atheism, p. 39
3. ibid., p. 65
4. ibid., p. 60
5. ibid., p. 66
6. ibid., p. 69

apr 14, 2017; updated apr 16, 2017