Genesis and Apocalypse: A Theological Voyage Toward Authentic Christianity

Many contemporary reviews and articles on Thomas J. J. Altizer's Death-of-God theology read like obituaries; such reviewers have dismissed the radical theology movement as a short-lived, thus deceased and safely inert, product of the sixties. This work shows such pronouncements to be premature. Altizer's appeal, for me, lies in his masterful clarification of the kenotic, progressive, immanent nature of the Christian Word, a Word that announces that the God who alone is God has died in the event of Christ and that the death of this impassive, transcendent, wholly other God -- a God completely detached from the life of history and a complete nullification of everything human -- is in fact a redemptive act and event. Jesus is not God, says Altizer, but God is Jesus. For Altizer, the attempt to return to some putatively "original" expression of the Christian faith, such as we see in fundamentalism and Radical Orthodoxy, is in truth the attempt to reanimate a pre-Christian God and a pagan "Christ" and therefore to deny the Christ who is with us now as the New Adam and who incarnates as the agonizing process of history itself, of which "the historical Jesus," you, and I are but moments. Drawing on such writers as Blake, Nietzsche, Hegel, and Joyce, and provocatively linking them to the Judeo-Christian prophetic tradition, Altizer calls us to the contemporary Christ, the Christ who ever reveals himself in novel and illuminating ways in the whole of human experience by negating his past manifestations and our nostalgic fixations on them (perhaps what idolatry truly is).