If we affirm the death of God fervently enough, a new revelation of the sacred will appear. Altizer is convinced, however, that the judgment of the death of God is now overwhelmingly evident.
Thomas Altizer and the Future of Theology, by Theodore
This vision of a new way of identity Altizer sees as inherent in the true meaning of the incarnation. Secularization is therefore good as it undermines man’s confidence in the ultimacy of the religious intuition as the clue to the divine.
Dialectic or Duality? by William A. Beardslee
It is obvious that in comparison to the openness of the present, there is a sense in which the past is dead. The past will bud forth into the future as part of the complex fabric of the successive presents.
Response by Thomas J.J
Altizer
Altizer and Catholic Theology
Catholic Theology and the Death of God: A Response by Eric C. Meyer
I Altizer’s probe of the possibility of a Catholic death-of-God theology is a real venture in creative ecumenical thinking. The most important concern in Altizer’s thought is the significance of the problem of atheism. THEOLOGY CAN HAVE NO POSSIBLE GROUND IN THE LIFE OF THE CHURCH, (2) THAT IT IGNORES OR SIMPLY NEGATES THE.
Here we can raise three questions: (1) Can Altizer’s death-of-God theology have a possible ground in the life of the Church. Altizer has not shown that the life of the Church can be fully absorbed into the cosmos as he proposes. Therefore, he has not been able to demonstrate convincingly that it is really possible in this regard for his brand of death-of-God radical theology to be grounded in the life of the Church.
Therefore, although everyone experiences the absence of the transcendent God, it is only the Christian who can really know and name this absence as the death of God.
Man and God Evolving
Altizer and Teilhard by James W
Heisig
Response by Thomas J.J. Altizer
But as a consequence of the Incarnation, the real opposition between God and the world is negated and transcended. How is it possible even to speak of the evolution of God from a Catholic point of view. The great claim of the doctrine of analogy has always been that it makes possible a genuine knowledge of God.
It seems clear to me that no such knowledge is possible so long as the reality of the world is essentially different from the reality of God. Or, in more explicit theological language, the death of God is the actualization of the movement of Spirit into flesh. Blake and others (perhaps Rilke and Joyce) reached a vision of the cosmic Christ; but an.
Once the theologian could speak of the church as a truly human communal and social body, and perhaps the Catholic.
Altizer and Jewish Theology
Thomas Altizer’s Apocalypse by Richard L. Rubenstein
I also welcome the "death of God" theologians because I believe they start with the real spiritual problems of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, although I can accept the proclamation of the death of God, I cannot accept the apocalyptic enthusiasm that comes out of it. There is one twentieth-century prophet of the death of God who is strikingly absent from Professor Altizer’s thought, and from the list that he has given us.
The sons murdered the father because he had access to the women of the primal horde. It is an anthropological insight that cannot be negated even in the time of the death of God. The myth that the death of the father is a prelude to liberation is one of the oldest of all human dreams.
In his latest work, Altizer faces the question of the content of the New Jerusalem.
Response by Thomas J.J
Finally, the Christian must say Yes or No to the question of the actual advent of the New Jerusalem: for if the. If anything, the fullest expressions of the modern imagination are even more apocalyptic in form, movement, imagery,. Only the dualistic form of the modern Western consciousness, which is grounded in an absolute distinction between the subject and the object of consciousness, instills us with the seemingly irrevocable sense that the world or reality stands wholly outside of consciousness itself.
Then a reversal of consciousness inevitably makes manifest and real a reversal of the world or of reality as such, and the world or reality as it was previously manifest to consciousness. Nevertheless, if the Christian recognizes the good faith of the Jew in preserving the divine name in a Godless world, he must acknowledge his own bad faith in attempting to exercise the same vocation. For not only does the Christian not know the God of the Jew, but as a Christian he is inescapably a son of that Christ who proclaimed and made.
Once faith is grounded in the dawning of the Kingdom of God, there can be no true openness to a God or Lord standing outside of the world and time, and hence no openness to the reality of God in a Godless world.
Altizer and Some Modern Alternatives
Thomas Altizer and the Dialectic of Regression by Daniel C. Noel
Brown and the Nietzsche of "Eternal Recurrence" as indices to a properly dialectical coincidentia oppositorum of the sacred and profane. The prospects are favorable, at points in Mircea Eliade and the Dialectic of the Sacred, for an avoidance of Brown’s regressive direction. The metaphysical process is known to the psychology of the unconscious as the individuation process.
I think, too, that the dogmatic interpretation which you give of the Incarnation is very narrow. In the sporadic syntheses of the latter, there always lurked the danger that rescue would be ineffectual or too late. Altizer, Review of Owen Barfield, Worlds Apart: A Dialogue of the 1960’s (Wesleyan University Press, 1963), in The Journal of Bible and Religion, Vol.
A relevant presentation of the relations between Barfield and the later Heidegger is the essay by John J.
Process Theology and the Death of God by Nicholas Gier
Altizer insists that his affirmation of the death of God be interpreted in this manner. The Whiteheadian conception of the primordial nature of God also combines these notions of independence and intimacy. The CN of God is the cumulative actual being of the cosmos at any given moment, as apprehended by God in his PN.
Simply put, the process view virtually turns on the concept of the retention of all past forms of experience. The concept of God and individuals as autonomous and self-contained is a unique product of the Western consciousness. Speaking solely in terms of the human dimension is also inadequate for the process theologians.
I am quite aware of the differences between Whitehead and Hartshorne concerning a process doctrine of God.
Thomas J.J. Altizer Response
Here, we find no awareness of the Fall (except as a means of affirming total personal responsibility), no doctrine of sin as opposed to evil, no past or future eschaton, no atonement (except as a moral example), and no Incarnation (except as a "renewal" of the sense of the present immediacy of God). Does not such a total affirmation of the past foreclose the possibility of a truly new or revolutionary future. What can it mean to speak of the richness of the past in the context of our revolutionary situation.
For apart from what process theology affirms as the absolute presence of God there would be no ground for the ultimate reality and responsibility of the individual. It is instructive at this point to contrast Whitehead’s metaphysical understanding of the primordial nature of God with Hegel’s dialectical understanding of Spirit. It is not accidental that it is this very section of the Science of Logic (Vol.. I) that Hegel identifies the law of contradiction as the.
Nor need the Christian Hegelian necessarily feel threatened in the presence of the logical power of the Christian Whiteheadian.
Altizer and the History of Religions
Zen and the Death of God by Winston L. King
Of course the death of the traditional Christian God calls for the death of traditional. II In Zen, as in death-of-God, we encounter a radical critique of the parent tradition. Again, and fundamental to all Zen thinking, is the evil of the subject-object dichotomy.
Naturally, Zen also has much to say about the evil dualism of the transcendent and the immanent. III Zen immanental terms are not precisely death-of-God incarnational terms, but they seem to be within shouting distance of the latter. All the God that is, is incarnate in the concrete realities of the here and now.
Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism (The Westminster Press, 1966), all of the basic Altizer themes are to be found.
Altizer and the History of Religions
Thomas J.J. Altizer Response
If nothing else, King’s Christian apprehension of the dialectical way of Zen offers a demonstration of a form of Buddhist dialectical life and power that is apparently not present in Christianity. Here, I can only take up the question of the relation between Zen and Christian affirmation. Initially, I was delighted with King’s judgment that the "history" which a Christian atheism claims to be the total consequence of the.
It is not accidental or insignificant that ethical ways disappear or are invisible as such in both the total ways of the Orient and in the most radical expressions of modern Western thinking and vision. On the other hand, Nietzsche’s symbol of Yes- saying calls upon its hearer to become God, or to freely accept the total responsibility of God, a responsibility that Christianity had identified with the total sovereignty of the Creator. From the perspective of the old man or the old creation, this new power is terrifying, for it demands not only a total immersion in the here and now, but also a total.
Nothing whatsoever stands outside of this responsibility, for total Yes-saying demands not only an acceptance but also an affirmation of the All.
Notes for a Dialogue by Mircea Eliade
In all my "scholarly" studies I attempted to illustrate a rigorous and relevant hermeneutics of the sacred. This is surely not a rejection of history, but an anticipation of the creative acts of the future. Altizer’s most serious criticism concerns my understanding of the dialectic of the sacred as a hierophany.
It is, then, through the experience of the sacred that the ideas of reality, truth, and significance first dawned, to be later elaborated and systematized by metaphysical speculations. Recollection and reenactment of the primordial event help "primitive" men to distinguish and hold to the Real. In short, the hierophany is an ontophany -- the experience of the sacred gives reality, shape, and meaning to the world.
Altizer asks himself: "Can Eliade remain content with the idea that the goal of man’s choice of the sacred is simply to arrive at a precosmic state.
