| Thomas Altizer is spokesman for the “death of God” theological movement in America. This dissertation focuses on his concept of God.; Altizer's mature concept of God entails three moments in the life of God. The first is Primordial Godhead, or Godhead as the eternal, undifferentiated identity. This is, Altizer argues, the Godhead traditional Christianity knows, a Godhead totally passive and transcendent. The Primordial Godhead sublates itself, simultaneously giving birth internally to God and externally to the world. This inaugurates the second moment, which is God-in-existence (my term). At the crucifixion, this God dies and becomes the Apocalyptic Godhead—the third moment—and precipitates nihilistic apocalypse in the world. This is the Godhead modern apocalyptic writing knows, a Godhead totally immanent in the here-and-now.; My critical analysis of Altizer's Death-of-God theology concentrates on his theological method.; I argue that Altizer's worldview is late-modern. His agenda is to redefine theology to make it relevant again to an atheistic-nihilistic society. His approach is to construct an authentic Christian theology by rereading traditional Christian theology through five lenses: philosophy (Hegel and Nietzsche), Christian epic (Dante, Milton, Blake, and Joyce), Jewish and Christian mysticism (Eckhart, Luria, and Böhme), comparative religion (Buddhism), and Historical Criticism (Weiss, Schweitzer, Bultmann).; I propose a fourfold key for understanding his theology. Its controlling theme is divine immanence, its controlling approach is comparative-apophatic, its intended product is a Godless theology, and its intended goal is relevance to late-modern society, above all the academy.; My major critique of his theology—which he claims to be authentic Christian theology—is that it is neither authentic nor Christian. I contend that authentic Christian theology is what the Fathers taught—the “original idea” of the doctrine—as revised in subsequent centuries according to a carefully defined criterion, viz., that any warranted change in doctrine must be an organic growth of the original idea. I further argue that any reformulation of Christian theology which fails to meet this criterion is a doctrinal corruption, and the reformulation is thereby non-Christian. This is precisely the case with Altizer. His radical, apocalyptic, theology is most creative, original, and relevant, but it is not Christian. |
