Introduction
Does God lie at the center of Christian faith and proclamation? Is the Christian Word forever inseparable from its historic ground in the existence and the power of God? Must Christian witness inevitably speak of the glory and the sovereignty of God? These are questions which faith itself is now posing to the Christian and they are questions that must be met by the Christian who dares to accept the contemporary challenge of faith. 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 the glad tidings, of the death of God. Few Christians have thus far been able to embrace the death of God as a redemptive event, but an acceptance of his death looms ever larger in contemporary Christian thinking, and it is unquestionably true that the greatest modern Christian revolutionaries willed the death of God with all the passion of faith. Christian theology, however, has yet to learn the language of the death of God. Yet this should not persuade us that we are here meeting an anti-Christian rebellion which is foreign to the reality of faith: for theology is a thinking response to the witness of faith, and it appears only after and not before the epiphany or the movement of the Christian Word. Now the time has come for theology openly and fully to confront the death of God, and whether or not a new form of theology will arise in response to this crisis, theology in our time can only refuse to speak of the death of God by ceasing to speak.
For many years a conspiracy of silence removed theology from our contemporary human and historical situation. The modern theologian, while recognizing that God was no longer visible in the culture, the society, and the history of a dying Christendom, was nevertheless persuaded that he was present, and present in his eternal form, in an autonomous Word of faith. Inevitably the price that had to be paid for such a choice was an isolation of faith from the concrete and present reality of human existence. Many ironies beset this strategy of retreat, not the least of which is the claim that was advanced by innumerable theologians that the Christian faith is uniquely "historical" and "existential," insofar as it is directed to the deepest and most immediate center of man’s naked existence in the world. Needless to say, this center was identified as a broken existence of anxiety, guilt, and meaninglessness, and, even then, it was accepted only insofar as it compelled an "answer" from the Christian faith. Under the impact of an increasingly profane history, this "answer" simply evaporated or lost all human meaning, and theology was reduced once more to establishing faith as a haven from the emptiness and the ravages of an indifferent or hostile world. Meanwhile, theology ceased to speak in any meaningful way about the Word of faith. The language of the theologian became largely the polemical language of attack, assaulting other theologians for either the sacrifice of faith or the complete abandonment of all clarity and coherence, and even occasionally -- and this much more timidly! -- daring to attack the great outside world of unfaith or antifaith.
Today a new theologian is speaking in America, a theologian who is not so confident of the truth or certainty of faith, yet a theologian who is willing to discuss the meaning of faith. From the perspective of the theology of our century, the strangest thing about this new theologian is his conviction that faith should be meaningful and meaningful in the context of our world. Indeed, the very conviction that faith is eternally given or wholly autonomous is forcefully being challenged. Having come to the realization that Christian theology cannot survive apart from a dialogue with the world, it is increasingly being recognized that dialogue is a mutual encounter: faith cannot speak to the world unless it is prepared to be affected by that world with which it speaks. Moreover, the new theologian is confessing that the Word has ceased to be truly or decisively present in the established and traditional forms of faith. Certainly the older forms of faith have little meaning in our world, yet if we as Christians believe in an actually incarnate Word, then either the Word has perished or it has undergone a radical transformation. Refusing either to deny the Word or to affirm it in its traditional form, a modern and radical Christian is seeking a totally incarnate Word. When the Christian Word appears in this, its most radical form, then not only is it truly and actually present in the world, but it is present in such a way as to be real and active nowhere else. No longer can faith and the world exist in mutual isolation, neither can now be conceived as existing independently of the other; thus the radical Christian condemns all forms of faith that are disengaged with the world. A given and autonomous faith here reveals itself to be nonincarnate -- and is judged to be a retreat from the life, the movement, and the process of history -- with the result that faith must now abandon all claims to be isolated and autonomous, possessing a meaning or reality transcending the actuality of the world, and become instead wholly and inseparably embedded in the world. (Continues)
About the Author: Thomas J. J. Altizer received his Ph.D at the University of Chicago in 1955. He taught at Wabash College from 1954-1956, then moved to Emory University as professor of Bible and Religion until 1968. The "death of God" theology became a heated debate during his professorship at Emory. In 1968 he accepted a position at the State University of New York in 1968 as professor of English. Some of his primary works are: Radical Theology and the Death of God, ed. Altizer and William Hamilton (1966), The Gospel of Christian Atheism (1966), The Descent into Hell (1970), The Self-Embodiment of God (1977), Total Presence: The Language of Jesus and the Language of Today (1980), Genesis and Apocalypse: A Theological Voyage Toward Authentic Christianity (1990), and The Genesis of God: A Theological Genealogy (1993). Published by The Westminster Press, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Copyright © 1966 W.L. Jenkins. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock.