30. Altizer's Christian Atheism

Altizer's Christian Atheism: System and Polemic

W. C R E I G H T O N P E D E N

The most important dialogue in American theology at present centers on the controversial theme of the death of God. The leading protagonists in this heated debate are Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton. The intense reception of their thoughts are due to the sensational headlines presented by the popular press. This journalistic theology has been more concerned with selling its copy than attempting to present accurately the ideas of either Altizer or Hamilton. Whereas Altizer is a serious, systematic theologian, Hamilton is more a literary, semi-ethical theologian. It is the contention of this writer that the important theological stimulation in the present discussion is being made by Altizer. It is based on this contention that we shall attempt to present Altizer's position in a systematic fashion, leaving the polemic to our concluding section.

System Altizer contends that Christendom, or the institutional religion of

Christianity, has perpetuated a concept of God as being utterly transcendent, omnipotent, omniscient, Creator and Judge. God is the original or primordial sacred that stands over against or is unaffected by the processes of time and history. Humanity exists in a broken state of sin and guilt, confronting "a wholly other God who demands a total submission to his numinous and judgmental power." (45)*

At on time man participated with God in this transcendent realm. The Bible records this transcendent realm for man as the state of Innocence in the Garden of Eden, with the myth of the Fall indicating man's expulsion from paradise and his consequent condemnation to death. "No religion has so stressed the importance and the centrality of the Fall as has Christianity, just as no religion has accepted the Fall as an ultimate and final event." (48) Paradoxically Christianity has presented the Fall as a necessary event, because without it there could be neither Incarnation nor full redemption.

1 All page numbers are to The Gospel of Christian Atheism by Thomas J. J. Altizer, Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1966.

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30 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT

A necessary result of the Fall is the Incarnation, or God coming to earth in the form of his son. In a sense God becomes Jesus Christ, but at the same time God remains in his transcendent realm as the Creator and Judge. The purpose of God sending his son Jesus is in order that Jesus may be crucified and, thus, atone for the Fall of man from the transcendent realm. In his death, Jesus pays Satan the price of man's sin, breaking the finality of death and ultimately making it possible for man to escape to heaven or to the transcendent realm.

The Resurrection of Jesus is to affirm that God did not really die, that God is triumphant over death. By not being confined to the tomb, "the orthodox image of Christ is an image of lordship and power." (133) Now being raised from the dead, Christ does not remain on earth. He ascends into Heaven where he fully participates in the power and majesty of the wholly other God. Man worships this God in Christ who for a short time became immanent to man, but who now is wholly transcendent to man. If man is to be redeemed, he must give up the things of this world which are false existence and seek a return to the existence of innocence in the transcendent world. Through Christ man is able to escape from being truly human and return to the state of existence before the Fall. The Church is the Body of Christ, as opposed to the body of humanity, which serves to enable man to escape his humanity and join the alien God in the non-human, transcendent realm. The essence of the Resurrection and Ascension is to affirm God's utter transcendence and that man's goal of redemption is to escape to this transcendent heaven.

It is this understanding of orthodox Christianity that Altizer alters or reject with his death of God Christian atheism. Before we indicate his alternation, we must indicate that Altizer agrees that God initially existed as the transcendent, wholly other Creator and Judge presented by the Old Testament. This means that for most of man's history, there existed a basic dualism which has been traditionally designated by the concepts of "supernaturalism" verses "naturalism." This supernatural or transcendent God is a static or unchanging Being whose relationship with man is depicted in the Fall, i.e. ejecting man from the Garden of Innocence because of his sin. According to Altizer, it is only the prophets in the Old Testament who indicate the possibility that God ultimately will move from being a static, transcendent Being to a redemptive process that is totally immanent in man.

We must take due note of the fact that it is the prophetic tradition, as recorded in the Old and New Testaments, and this tradition alone, which gives witness to the forward or progressive move-

ALTIZER'S CHRISTIAN ATHEISM 31

ment of revelation, a movement wherein the God of faith appears in new and even more dynamic epiphanies, as the prophetic oracle actualizes the name of God in such a manner as to reveal the integral relation between the divine process and the human reality of history. The God of the Biblical prophetic tradition is a God who speaks or reveals himself in history; here history is not the passive receptacle of the divine speech, but is rather the arena in which that speech itself becomes actual and real: for a part from history God would be silent, impassive, and alone. (85) The alteration in or the rejection of the orthodox position occurs in

Altizer contends that this static, transcendent God dies and becomes a forward-moving redemptive process totally immanent in the world. What he is contending is that the divine ceases to exist in the supernatural realm and now totally exists in the natural realm. This means that since the death of God there no longer exists the dualism between supernaturalism and naturalism, for the supernatural or transcendent ceases to exist.

This radical alteration occurs in Altizer's understanding of the Incarnation and Crucifixion. He rejects the conception of Jesus as the Son of God, contending that the transcendent God has become totally incarnate in Jesus Christ. The transcendent God becomes immanent in Jesus, or in other words, God becomes Jesus. In the forward-moving process of Incarnation, God negates His own transcendent Self and takes on a new form, an immanent, human-divine form. In this process of self-negation, God dies. Another way to express this would be to say that the transcendent God commits suicide in order to take upon himself a human form or to become a human God. Altizer expresses it by saying that "God has negated and transcended Himself in the Incarnation, and thereby He has fully and finally ceased to exist in His original and primordial form. To know that God is Jesus, is to know that God himself has become flesh: no longer does God exist as transcendent Spirit or sovereign Lord, now God is love." (67) It should be understood that the God who is dead was the sovereign, transcendent Creator and Judge of the Universe. At the same time that this God dies "He" becomes reborn or reincarnate in Jesus, making Jesus God. Although the God of the Old Testament dies, "He" becomes reincarnate in the form of Jesus. At this point it means that God is able to die supernaturally and because of this death to exist for the first time in a natural form.

This death-incarnation of the transcendent God becoming Christ cannot be fully grasped except by the epiphany of the Crucifixion, where, of course, God in His human form dies. Altizer is not saying that God dies twice, rather he is contending that the Incarnation and Crucifixion together


totally express the self-negation of the transcendent form of God as God becomes completely immanent in human flesh.

Yes, God dies in the Crucifixion: therein He fulfills the movement of the Incarnation by totally emptying Himself of His primordial sacrality. But His death is a self-negation or self-annihilation: consequently, by freely willing the dissolution of His transcendent "Selfhood," the Godhead reverses the life and movement of the transcendent realm, transforming transcendence into immanence, thereby abolishing the ground of every alien other. (133)

The death of God, or God becoming Jesus, is on the one hand a particular event and on the other hand a universal process. God actually becomes man in the particular Person of Jesus of Nazareth and actually dies in the particular event of this Incarnation and Crucifixion. In a true sense, it is an event that occurs once and for all time; meaning that the transcendent God of the supernatural realm is dead and never exists again. At the same time, the epiphany of the death of God is not limited to the event of Jesus of Nazareth, for Jesus is also a universal process. By this Altizer means that we can never know the Jesus of Nazareth. All we can know "is the Jesus who is fully manifest in a present and actual moment of time." (58) The Jesus we know is the epiphany of God that we personally know in our own present experience. In a sense Jesus becomes the universal form for a fulfilled humanity. Jesus becomes the totality of human experience, which is "the Jesus who is actually and fully incarnate in every human hand and face." (71 )2 Man knows Jesus as man experiences Jesus in his own life, or better still man becomes Jesus by experiencing the epiphany of God as Jesus in his whole life. "Jesus is the name of the love of God." (75) Man experiences fully the epiphany of this love as man totally becomes love.

Altizer's death of God theology is based on an eschatological or apocalyptic vision. This vision has to do with the Kingdom of God. For orthodox Christianity the Kingdom of God ultimately means those who are saved being with the transcendent God in the supernatural heaven. Since the transcendent God or supernatural realm no longer exists, the orthodox position is rejected and a new understanding must be postulated. This means that the orthodox understanding of some form of life after death with the transcendent God in heaven is rejected because neither this God nor transcendent realm exists. For Altizer, the Kingdom of God occurs

2 Altizer indicates that this point is based on the conclusions drawn by William Blake in There Is No Natural Religion.


with the creation of a new humanity, a new humanity where God and man become one. When all men experience the epiphany of love or God as Jesus in their own lives, then a new humanity will be established in which all men are divine. This process of God and man becoming one was inaugurated by the events of the Incarnation and the Crucifixion. Through a dialectical process in history, this self-negating process of God becoming man will be forward-moving until it culminates with man becoming divine. This dialectical process began in the death of God, as God initially took the form of flesh. When the divine has taken the form of the flesh of all humanity, the dialectical process is complete and the Kingdom of God occurs.

The radical Christian calls upon his hearer to open himself to the fullness of our history, not with the illusory belief that our history is identical with the history that Jesus lived, but rather with the conviction that the death of God which has dawned so fully in our history is a movement into the total body of humanity of God's original death in Christ. Once we grasp the radical Christian truth that a radically profane history is the inevitable consummation of an actual movement of sacred into the profane, then we can be liberated from every preincarnate form of Spirit, and accept our destiny as an occasion for the realization in the immediacy of experience of the self-emptying or self-annihilation of the transcendent and primordial God in the passion and death of Christ. (109)

Altizer contends that the force at work in history which has limited the fulfilment of the Kingdom of God has been institutional Christianity or religious Christianity. "The original heresy was the identification of the Church as the body of Christ." (132) The early Christians misunderstood the true significance of the Incarnation and Crucifixion, for they could not really accept the prophetic realization that God would truly kill Himself by taking the form of human flesh. They could not accept Jesus as God, for this would mean that they must find fulfilment in the present, human realm and not in some transcendent realm. What the Church did in the New Testament and later was to reject the self-negation of God by developing the accounts of the Resurrection and Ascension. The Resurrection affirms that the transcendent God did not become fully flesh and die. The Ascension affirms that God reigns supreme in His transcendent realm as Creator and Judge. These accounts together confirm for man that He does not belong to this human-world but, rather, should orient his life to the possibility of returning to the transcendent state of non-humanity before the Fall. What Altizer is doing is rejecting the Resurrection and


Ascension as being invalid theologically and historically because the validity of these events would make invalid the Incarnation and Crucifixion.

The radical Christian repudiates the Christian dogmas of the Resurrection of Christ and His Ascension into a celestial and transcendent realm because radical faith revolves about a participation in the Christ who is fully and totally present to us. Speaking in the traditional symbolic language of Christianity, we could say that radical faith transposes the traditional vision of the resurrection into a contemporary vision of the descent into Hell: the crucified Christ does not ascend to a heavenly realm but rather descends ever more fully into darkness and flesh. (120)

By centering on a transcendent God, institutional Christianity has oriented itself to the past and, thus, closed itself to the continuing revelations or epiphanies of God. The God who is worshiped is the alien, transcendent God of the past instead of the living Christ of the present. Not only has the Church perverted the significance of Jesus Christ and blocked the development of the Kingdom of God, but the God which the Church worships is not really God but is, in fact, Satan. If Satan is the evil force blocking the fulfilment of God's will, i.e. the Kingdom of God, then the worshiping Church becomes the agent in history blocking God's will. By being the agent of Satan, the God which the Christian religion worships is Satan, or the Antichrist.3

If one is to be truly Christian, Altizer contends that he must reject institutional Christianity and utterly embrace the profane or secular humanity. The Christian religion must be rejected because it orients man to Satan instead of the living Christ or, in other words, it orients man to the transcendent realm instead of to the fulfilling of his divine humanity in the present. God is the dialectical forward-moving process of becoming totally flesh, inaugurated in the Incarnation and Crucifixion. If man is to relate himself fully to the God who is Christ, the man must totally embrace the profane flesh. By embracing the profane or secular realm, the man is embracing the humanity which God is transforming into the divine humanity. When man embraces the secular, he embraces the becoming Kingdom of God. By totally immersing oneself in the profane, one becomes totally a part of the divine flesh of Christ. A "religionless Christianity" must be established that embraces the profane, which is the

3 Altizer indicates that he adopts the theme of God as Satan from William Blake's Milton and Jerusalem.


becoming Kingdom of God.4 The Christian religion must not only be rejected, it must be destroyed, because it worships Satan and keeps man for the redemption of God offered by God in His death.

There are several important implications of Altizer's position for those who desire to become part of the divine humanity. The theology of a "religionless Christianity" must undertake a different task than has been the task of the theologian in the Church. The new task of theology is to orient man to the contemporary revelations of God in the profane present. "Orthodox theology has been a backward quest for the transcendent realm whereas a truly Christian theology is a response to the movement of the Word in the present." (27) The deepest obstacle to the fulfilling of this new task for theology is the orthodox conviction that the cannon of Scripture is closed. By saying that the cannon is closed, orthodoxy contends that revelation is complete and finished, that the Word of God has already been finally and fully spoken The radical Christian contends that the canon of scripture is not closed, because God as Christ continues dialectically to reveal himself to man in every age. This continuing process of revelation is necessary if the Kingdom of God is to occur. Not only does the radical Christian contend that the canon of scripture is not closed, he also contends that the New Testament is not an adequate account of the revelation of God as Christ. The inclusion of the Resurrection and Ascension myths are the most striking examples of the perversion of the true revelation of the death of God proclaimed in the Incarnation and Crucifixion. Therefore, the true Christian cannot rely on the Bible as being either adequate or final testimony to the revelations of God. In taking this position, Altizer is agreeing with many other theologians that the Bible is of limited value to contemporary man because it is impossible to discover the historical Jesus or fully to understand the situations and languages of the Bible. "No radical Christian believes in the possibility of returning to either the Word or the Person of the original Jesus of Nazareth. Consequently, the radical Christian rejects both the literal and the historical interpretation of the Bible, demanding instead a pneumatic or spiritual understanding of the Word." (25)

Since the radical Christian cannot accept the Bible or orthodox theology as an adequate understanding of the revelations of God, it is Altizer's

4 In an earlier statement, Altizer uses Nietzsche's term the "Eternal Recurrence" to indicate this dialectical process from the death of God to the fulfillment of the Kingdom of God. cf. Altizer and Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God, "Theology and the Death of God", p. 98ff. Also cf. the final chapter of The Gospel of Christian Atheism.


contention that the contemporary man must develop a new theological language. "Faith must now find a trans-Christian language—i.e., a language substantially if not wholly different from its previous speech—if it is to exist and to live as faith. Not only must it abandon its own language, but it must likewise move beyond all that meaning which Christianity once shared with the universal community of belief." (31) For Altizer, this new language for faith is to be found in the dialectical philosophy and poetry of the nineteenth century, for it was within the proclamation using this language that contemporary man came to his fullest realization of the death of God and the dawning of the Kingdom of God. It is because of an increased understanding of the continuing epiphanies of God, made known in this dialectical language, that the radical Christian can in joy triumphantly proclaim the death of God. It is this joyous understanding that makes the radical Christian a Christian atheist.

Polemic

There are several problems with Altizer's contention that the transcendent God of the Old Testament dies and becomes the totally immanent God as Jesus. He contends that this is a historical event which we designate by the traditional theological term "the Incarnation." It appears that Altizer is making an empirical statement concerning the death of God. If this statement does describe an empirical event, then Altizer's contention is utterly meaningless to contemporary man. On the one hand, one must have trouble with the idea of a God who can die, or more properly commit suicide It is almost universally accepted that one characteristic attributed to divinity is that of being eternal. To contend that God is eternal and also dies is, at best, a paradox but more properly a meaningless statement from an empirical perspective. On the other hand, the contention that the transcendent God dies but lives as the immanent God as Jesus is empirically incomprehensible. Either God dies or He does not die. Either death is an empirical event or it does not occur. One cannot die and also be alive. If one examines Altizer's language, he does not really mean that God dies. Rather, what he means to say is that God essentially changes form. To be accurate, the death of God theology should be re-titled as the theology of the God who changes His form.

There is also a problem with the conception of a God who can repudiate His transcendent form and utterly adopt an immanent form. A traditional characteristic of God is that God does not essentially change. Altizer contends that, in this shift from utter transcendence to utter im-


manence, God does not essentially change, only the form changes. As an empirical statement, this is complete nonsense. When a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, there is an essential and radical difference. If a transcendent God utterly rejects His essential transcendent nature and assumes a nature of complete immanence, this God is essentially and radically different. At best, this God radically changes but it would be more meaningful to say that there are, or were, two different Gods. The different uses of the term "God" also indicate that Altizer is talking about two Gods. By using the word "God" for Jesus, he treats the term "God" as a proper name. At the same time, when the term "God" is used to refer to the transcendent God, Altizer does not use the term as a proper name. Linguistically, one cannot be intelligible and have it both ways. His use of the term "God" is further confirmation that he is talking about two radically different Gods.

Some crucial issues must be raised with his contention that God is Jesus. Such a contention can make no sense empirically and can only make sense as part of the "language-game" of faith. It is only in light of the Easter-conviction that possible intelligibility can be made of the statement; but of course Altizer rejects even a non-empirical understanding of Easter. We must also contend that if God is Jesus, then Jesus is not human. (A similar criticism could be made of traditional theology provided such theological contentions are claimed as being empirical statements.) The humanity of Jesus is essential to the integrity and testimony of the New Testament. Either the New Testament is telling us something about the character of Jesus that is reliable or it is an unfortunate religious fraud which we would do well to cease to perpetuate. The integrity of the New Testament concerning the humanity of Jesus can be evaluated in relation to the accounts of Jesus' compassion and obedience.

In the New Testament, Jesus is presented as a Man of great compassion. He is totally involved as a human in the affairs of humanity. The radical emphasis on love for one's brother clearly indicates that the key to an adequate understanding of Jesus is in His relation to other men. Now, if Jesus is not fully man but is fully God, then this New Testament view is totally wrong.

In the Gospels, radical stress is placed upon the obedience of Jesus in relation to God. Account after account is developed to demonstrate how Jesus is obedient to God's will. The obedience of Jesus is tied to the obedience of Israel in its Covenant relationship with God; this is why the Gospel proclaims a New Covenant or Testament. Jesus is called the Son of God which through out the Bible is used as a descriptive term for those


who are radically obedient to God. Now if Jesus is not in reality a man but is really God, then this picture of Jesus as obedient is really a charade or sham. It is illogical for God to be disobedient to His own self. A God that could be disobedient to His own self could not be God. Either Jesus is a man with a radical commitment to God, or the integrity of the New Testament is destroyed.

The Crucifixion is tied to Jesus as a man who shows radical compasión for humanity and radical obedience to God. Without this man of compassion and obedience, the Crucifixion makes no sense. Altizer proclaims that God as Jesus dies in the Crucifixion. He also proclaims this death of God as an empirical event. On the one hand, it makes no sense empirically to have a God who can die, especially a God who appears to have already died in the Incarnation, and live on in a non-empirical fashion. Altizer contends that Christ lives on in the hearts and hands of all humanity that are living in relation to the Kingdom of God. Either the death of God as Jesus is not empirically true or the living God in the present is not empirically true. If Altizer means that man has a conviction of becoming a new man in the present because of the God who died in the past, we can understand this as a statement of conviction and in this sense can talk about our living in relation in the present to the God who died in the past. What Altizer must cease doing is presenting empirical and non-empirical statements as if there is no essential difference between the quality and intent of these statements.

One final point concerning Altizer's Incarnation of God as Jesus. Jesus never claims to be God, according to the New Testament. It appears that Jesus was willing to be designated by the term "the Son of God" but no Jew would have ever equated this term with God. Furthermore, no New Testament writer, to my knowledge, ever calls Jesus God or God Jesus. In Hebrews, Jesus is equated with the High Priest, being the special representative of God but not God. In general, Jesus is called the Christ which means the anointed one of God. The Christ could never be God. The greatest blasphemy or heresy a Jew could commit would be the claim to be God. Since the New Testament is careful not to equate Jesus with God, Altizer's conception of the Incarnation not only questions the integrity of the Scriptures but, in fact, repudiates the basic Christological position of the New Testament. Let us grant that Altizer's position is related in some vague way to Jesus, but it is not related to the human Jesus of Nazareth whom His disciples, based on their conviction and commitment, proclaimed as the Christ.


Let us now turn to the crucial issue of the Resurrection. Altizer rejects the story of the Resurrection because he contends this account proclaims that Jesus as God has returned to His totally alien, transcendent realm. For Altizer, the Resurrection is a radical denial of the total immanence of God proclaimed in His death or Incarnation. Even with this rejection of the Resurrection, Altizer claims to be a Christian.

It is our contention that there were no Christians before Easter and, furthermore, that without a conviction and commitment concerning Easter one cannot be a Christian. Faith in the Resurrection is the key to an adequate understanding of the New Testament. All the Gospels were written in such a way as to demonstrate the significance of the Easter-conviction, granting that the fully-developed tradition has not been established in the earlier Gospel according to Mark. These Gospels make little sense without Easter, just as Easter makes little sense without the human Jesus being the Christ, or in other words being radically obedient to God. Also, the writings of Paul are unintelligible apart from the Easter-conviction, for the significance of Paul's commitment is centered in Easter: "If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain." (I Cor. 15:14) Without the Resurrection the integrity of the New Testament is abolished. Having dissipated this essential integrity, one cannot help but wonder how Altizer can have enough confidence in the Scriptures even to develop his theory of the God who changes forms.

The key to Altizer's misunderstanding and rejection of the Resurrection and Ascension is in his considering these as empirical accounts instead of interpretations based on religious conviction and commitment. We must contend that as empirical statements they are unintelligible to contemporary man but as statements of religious conviction are intelligible. Paul van Buren has indicated that the Resurrection makes sense if it is taken as a testing of what Jesus meant in the lives of His disciples.5 What is interesting is that Altizer gives a non-empirical account, which he does not adequately designate as non-empirical, of the living significance of God as Jesus in the present in such a way as to be making possible the Kingdom of God. This account of the living God in the present, as a non-empirical statement, is very similar to the non-empirical statement, based on religious conviction, concerning the Resurrection in the Gospels. If Altizer had developed an adequate distinction between empirical and non-empirical statements, it may well have been that he would not have

5 I am very indebted ot Paul M. van Buren for his stimulating book, The Secular Meaning of the Gospel.


found it necessary to draw his radical distinction between transcendence and immanence, enabling him to find integrity in the accounts of the Resurrection in the New Testament.

Altizer makes a similar mistake concerning the Ascension. He treats the Ascension as if it is an empirical statement. Empirically, the Ascension is unintelligible to modern man. If Jesus had floated off into space at the speed of light, the chances are great that we would be able to locate him with the high powered telescopes available today. At the same time, the account of the Ascension is intelligible to modern man, if it is taken as a non-empirical statement based on religious conviction concerning the significance of Jesus in the Uves of his disciples.

Altizer's eschatological or apocalyptic vision concerning the Kingdom of God is tied to his view of God as Jesus being totally immanent. He rejects the traditional view of the Kingdom of God occurring at the end of time with the Second Coming of Christ. Not only does he reject this poetic view, but he also rejects the position of realized eschatology developed by C. H. Dodd. Altizer's Kingdom of God is to occur among the living, as the essential distance between God and man is destroyed and they all become all in one. This position is non-transcendent or non-supernatural, for the Kingdom of God will develop and exist within nature. There is no heaven or future life. Only those who are living when the Kingdom of God develops will participate in this fulfilled existence.

One must admit that Altizer's position is interesting. Since there is not and cannot conceivably be any empirical evidence to verify the eschaton, one must assume that Altizer is not presenting an empirical prediction but, rather, speaks from the orientation or "blik" of his particular conviction. He does not explicitly state that his remarks on eschatology are non-empirical, but by designating the final chapter of The Gospel of Christian Atheism as "A Wager," one assumes this to be the case. The value of his eschatological view is that, by making it non-empirical and non-transcendent, it is conceivably more intelligible to contemporary man. The limitation in this aspect of his position is that he claims to be Christian, but it cannot be Christian since it is not related to the Easter-conviction.

In conclusion, we must say that Altizer's death of God theology attempts a definite contribution to contemporary theology. He realizes that the transcendent or supernatural God of orthodox or neo-orthodox theology is neither intelligible or révélant to the world view of contemporary man. We can no longer accept the statements of traditional theology as being empirically valid. From the perspective of our post-Newtonian, scientific world, such statements are empirically meaningless. But just as


there is no empirical ground to support the claims for a transcendent God, neither are there any empirical grounds to support the claims of a totally immanent God who in some way will bring about a new epiphany on earth. In a real sense, Altizer has presented us with a mythology and language that is no easier to understand as being relevant to life than is Biblical or traditional theology, so long as they are understood empirically. On the one hand, the value of Altizer's contribution is radically limited because of his failure to distinguish adequately between empirical and non-empirical theological statements. On the other hand, his contribution is limited because it is non-Christian, failing to relate his theology to the Easter-conviction. In any case, we should at least take seriously Altizer's warning: "No honest contemporary seeker can ever lose sight of the very real possibility that the willing of the death of God is the way to madness, de-humanization, and even to the most totalitarian form of society yet realized in history." (146)

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30. Altizer's Christian Atheism

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