We must recognize that the proclamation of the death of God is a Christian profession of faith. My own route to theology led through the discipline of religious history. Accordingly, a theology that speaks only a word from the past is not concerned with the true task of Christian theology.
How should we judge the signs of the Word or the Spirit in our own time. Let us assume that Christian theology is directed towards the goal of revealing the form of the Word which is present or emerging in the contemporary religious community. No radical Christian believes in the possibility of returning to either the word or the person of the original Jesus of Nazareth.
Of course, the great Christian revolutionaries of the nineteenth century went far beyond their spiritual.
The Gospel of Christian Atheism by Thomas J.J
Altizer
The Uniqueness of Chrisitanity
- Religion
- Word and History
- Fall and Death
It is, rather, in the purest forms of Oriental mysticism that the Christian theologian must seek the deepest challenge of the non-Christian religious world. It is the total repetition of this primordial Totality that reveals the sacred identity of the profane. Let us allow this understanding of Oriental mysticism to represent the true meaning of the negative or mystical movement of religion.
Finally, we must conceive of the Christian Word as directed toward the eschatological goal of the absolute overthrow of flesh and Spirit. Perhaps nothing else could so forcefully demonstrate the theological truth of the historical reality of the Christian Word. Nor does such a claim take into account the full, Christian meaning of the Fall.
Even the Christian faith in the possibility of a final revelation in history is an escape from the truth of the fall.
Jesus and the Incarnation
- The Name of Jesus
- Kenosis
- The Universal Humanity
No way lies for the living Jesus, proclaim these radical Christian prophets, apart from a total transcendence of the orthodox Christian tradition. If we put aside for the moment the problem of Christianity's betrayal of Jesus, we can discover in the Christian affirmation of the name of Jesus a clearly distinct and individual movement of faith. Wil -- this is the name of the deliverer and bringer of joy; so have I taught you, my friends.
It was' -- that is the name of the will's gnashing of teeth and most secret melancholy. Yet in what sense can we speak here of the Jesus who is near and not far. In the whole psychology of the "evangel" the concept of guilt and punishment is missing; also the concept of reward.
If the Christian name of Jesus is in some intimate and unique sense associated with the immediate actuality of the present, then the God of the Christian tradition is not simply a. Negativity is the power and the process of the self-realization or the self-mediation of the Hegelian Absolute, Subject or Spirit. But despite the fact that the Christian faith without exception testified to the reality of the.
To the Church's earliest theological formulations of the meaning of the Incarnation, Blake gives the opposite meaning. For he is not speaking of a transcendent and entirely different deity, but of God who has fully and definitively become flesh. The fundamental problem of the radical Christian vision of Christ is the concrete identity of the incarnate Word.
It is true that our history has gradually but decisively dispelled every sign and image of Christ that was once present in the Church. Jesus is the name of God's love, the love that dies eternally for man.
God and History
- The Christian Name of God
- God and Satan
The God of the biblical prophetic tradition is a God who speaks or reveals himself in history; here history is not the passive. First, we must recognize that Jesus Christ is the name of God fully and totally incarnated, and thus it is a divine name, a name that reveals the real movement of God himself. The name of Jesus Christ is simply meaningless apart from its Old Testament background, because it is the God of the Old Testament who is fully actualized and.
What might it mean to speak of the Christian God as a dialectical process rather than an existing Being. Otherwise, it is not possible to speak of the kenotic Christ, or of the self-annihilation of God, or of God who actually denied himself in Jesus Christ. Therefore, to speak of God as a dialectical process rather than an existing Being, is to speak of the God who emptied himself of God in Christ.
Nevertheless, the Christian must betray his faith if he refuses the forward movement of the divine process. Therefore, the Christian living in Christ must reject any image of the pre-incarnate God, except insofar as such images are transfigured by the self-sacrifice or self-denial of God himself. The Christian conception of God – God as god of the sick, God as spider, God as spirit – is one of the most corrupt conceptions of the divine ever to arise on earth.
In a sense, the kenotic movement of the Incarnation reaches its conclusion when God finally appears in human experience as the contradiction of life and the deification of nothingness. For to know the foreign and empty nothingness as the dead body of God is to be freed from every fearful and fearful sense of the mystery and power of chaos. When Jesus sees Satan fall from heaven, he knows that the time for the dawn of God's kingdom is near.
However, we must not imagine that such images merely testify to a Gnostic hatred of the world. The Christian God is the embodiment of absolute negation, because it is the only revelation of the sacred, which is a total reversal of a forward divine process.
The Self-Annihilation of God
- The Death of God
- Atonement
- The Forgiveness of Sin
If we imagine the fundamental meaning of the original Christian message in this way, we can also see that it is an early religious vision. All such religious claims not only attempt to solidify and freeze the life and movement of the divine process, but also Therefore, radical faith requires our modern condition as the revelation of the body of Christ, an.
What can the Christian fear from the power of darkness if he can call our darkness the fulfillment of the self-emptying of God in Christ. However, such an apocalyptic and dialectical understanding of the atonement calls for a new conception of atonement or. Yes, God dies in the Crucifixion: in it he fulfills the movement of the Incarnation by completely emptying himself of his primordial sacrality.
However, the removal of alienation and oppression must remain illusory if it is not an expression of the denial or self-annihilation of God. While Blake struggled to create a consistent dialectical vision of redemption as a universal process, Hegel's. Hegel is too Blakean in understanding the Crucifixion as the sacrifice of an abstract and alien God.
The resolution of this contradiction takes place only when each form of the Godhead by virtue of its inherent. Nevertheless, the Christian can designate an empty and life-negating Totality as the body of the Antichrist. The Christian who also knows Christ, who is the embodiment of God's self-denial, can know Satan or Antichrist, who is present to us as the actualization or historical realization of God's death.
In this way we can clearly see the continuing descent of the Word into flesh. Therefore, the Christian is finally called to accept the Antichrist, or the totality of God's dead body, as a final kenotic manifestation of Christ. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.
Yet this grace cannot be realized or fulfilled until it culminates in the cessation of the very memory of sin: yes.
A Wager
- The Living Christ
- Guilt and Resentment
- Yes-Saying
Even the memory of the original glory and majesty of God roots the Christian in the past. So it is the radical Christian proclamation of the death of God that frees the Christian from every alien and lifeless image of Christ. Now we must not confuse a Christian and eschatological passage through the actuality of history and experience with a mere submission to the brutal reality of the world;
Faith must always be able to speak of the Word that is really present, and to speak with the actuality of the world and experience that confronts it;. We must not deceive ourselves by thinking that the faith and worship of the Church must inevitably bear witness to a contemporary revelation of Christ. In the modern world, however, we find the strange phenomenon of the Christian freed from the fear of damnation, a Christian who is apparently incapable of experiencing terror.
As Augustine so wisely teaches, the deepest attraction of sin is the attraction of the forbidden. Consequently, repression and guilt are inseparable, or, at least, we become aware of our guilt only to the extent that we become aware of the power of repression within us. When the Christian bets that God is dead, he bets on the real and present presence of the fully incarnate Christ.
Thus a Christian wager on the death of God is a wager on the presence of the living Christ, a wager that Christ is now at least potentially present in a new and total form. His quest was not merely a movement towards madness, for he prophetically foresaw the darkness. Can we also reject every turning of the present, every escape from pain, every backward movement to eternity.
Dare we bet that Christ is fully present in the actuality of the present moment. Christian love is an incarnate love, a self-giving to the fullness of the world, an immersion in the actuality of time and the flesh.