Local Issue; 20; God is Dead

When I say that God is dead, I mean that the transcendent Lord, the sovereign God, who is revealed in the Old Testament, in the Bible, if you will, the God who is confessed in the Christian tradition. That this God is no longer present, is no longer manifest, is no longer real. And furthermore, I intend to say not that this God is simply missing, not that this God is in eclipse, but rather that this God is dead. This is Thomas J.J. Altizer, associate professor of religion at Emory University at Latta Georgia.

He calls himself a Christian atheist. He preaches a radical theology. National educational television presents, local issue, God is dead. Now, if God is dead, Christ was the vileest imposter ever to wriggle His carcass across the stage of human history, because He postulated all of His teachings upon the existence of God and the eternality of God. And as a Christian, I feel that I can't contribute to this sort of thing because I don't have a dime to spend for Satan's work. And the reason most people take up the death is because of God's stuff in the New Theologies, because of stuff that come with just insipid, stupid and dead, and the only alternative they've seen before is just pure atheism, just scientific code in human stuff. There's a lot of terror involved in this idea. And this is why I think it arouses so much controversy.

I'm not sure that we face the terror within us of saying God is dead. The issue is theological, but it is not confined to an ivory tower. People in the community are shocked, outraged, demanding answers from ministers, satisfaction from university presidents. Thomas Altizer was discovered by the New York Times and Time Magazine. He had been writing books and articles for the professional journals for ten years, but when these publications scattered his cry, God is dead across the nation, the southeastern end of the Bible belt reverberated. Denounce in the pulpit, alumni and churchmen demanded that Emory University throw out the heretic. Overnight Altizer, the Christian atheist, was a regional and national anti-hero. Few listened beyond the three words, God is dead, but there was more. The question is often asked, if God is dead, when did He die?

And the fundamental Christian answer is that God died in Jesus Christ. God died when He became incarnate in Christ, when the word became flesh. This was a death that was consummated in the passion of Christ in the crucifixion itself. We're all familiar with those words of Jesus on the cross. Oh, my God, my God, why has thou forsaken me? Which have been problematic words for Christians for centuries, but now I think we can more fully understand these words, that Christ himself was giving witness to the death of God in him. They're also sacred words to us in Paul. Many of you might remember Paul's words on his epistle to the Philippians, who I like to read, beginning at 2.5, have this mind among yourselves, which you have in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped,

but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men, and being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Now we understand these words to mean that God himself emptied himself of his original transcendence, power, sovereignty, mystery in Jesus Christ, that this was an actual and a real event, an event that was consummated on the cross itself. Thomas Altizer teaches in the Department of Religion, School of Arts and Sciences, not in Emory's Theology School. Bill practicing theologians in clergymen in Europe and America read his work. He is heard in high sanctuaries. The most reverend Paul J. Hallenon, Archbishop of the Archdiocese of Atlanta, has heard that God is dead.

Dr. Altizer speaks with a voice tuned to the student generation, that interesting group today that considers the enemy to be everybody over 30. He talks like an evangelist, a Paul and this maid at the heartlessness of the world, and he asks fresh questions about a man's most tireless search that is to find his own meaning. His present importance lies, I believe, in these three virtues. He is young, he is fervent, and he is searching, and we should be grateful for this. At this stage in his career, his importance as a theologian is still to be won. Certainly, Dr. Altizer is speaking of a vital thing, has God meaning. He has the questions and bold enough to emerge as a birth or a tillic of the 1970s, but right now he is more of an event than a theologian.

As far as the world in which God is not real, therefore the Christ, and we are called to know, a new form of Christ as we do like, is a Christ who exists in his real and his manifest in his present, apart from any sign, apart from any reality, of God. Traditional Christianity believes that after the crucifixion, Jesus Christ was resurrected from the dead and ascended in heaven, that I repudiate the doctrine of the ascension. I believe that the movement of the incarnation is a continual and total movement into flesh, so that after the crucifixion Christ does not return to heaven, he does not ascend to heaven. On the contrary, he descends ever more deeply into the flesh, into the world, into life. Christianity has had many strange alice, both unwitting and unwilling, and the death of God theologians may turn out to be such strange bedfellows. Dr. Altazer's questions may force church-going Americans to inventory their own souls. It happened with Galileo in his honest work in science, Marx in his human petty, fried

in his ex-plorations of the unconscious and subconscious. In each case, the churches had to rethink their position. I think that the so-called radical theology or the so-called death of God theologian, is it theology that witnesses to, as I said before, a newer form of Christ, a fuller, more total, more universal manifestation of Christ, and that what this kind of theology makes possible is a Christian living in the world, so that we can live fully in the world, we can live totally in the world, and we don't have to be bound up to nostalgic memories in the past. We don't have to exist in fear of some kind of distant, invisible, oppressive God. That will not die all at once, nor by sections, but sections of Christians may let him die in the hardness of their hearts or in the cold indifference of their churches. Dr. Altazer may have come to the aid of Christianity just in time.

What about the Jews? After all, the God under discussion belonged to them first. At the temple of Atlanta, Rabbi Jacob M. Rothschild addressed the question. I'm not at all sure that I understand what the God-is-dead theologians are saying, but it seems to me that the basic theological problems with which they struggle are not present in Judaism. It's not that Jews are not confronted with a constant challenge to re-evaluate traditional God ideas in the light of modern ideas and surgeons. We are, and we constantly do seek to make our God-concept vital and meaningful in this age, just as in every age. But the phrase Christian or Jewish atheism is incomprehensible in Judaism. Emory University is supported in part by the Methodist Church.

So, for some layman and alumni, the thought of a professor proclaiming the death of God is shocking, appalling, impossible. Now, the today in class, the problem will be to talk about the reality of God in the context of the death of God, to give some meaning to the reality of his death as a liberating redemption event. This is the man who made Thomas Altizer and the phrase God-is-dead a local issue. He is Robert Schumat, a Columbus, Georgia eye surgeon, and a 1948 Emory alumnus. Dr. Schumat, responding to the Time Magazine story on Radical Theology, bought an ad in the Atlanta Papers, which read, write the office of President of Emory, and tell them why you, like me, are not donating to the $25 million building fund. Response to the ad is led to a public reappraisal of academic freedom.

Well, I think that the University, if they really want to raise this money, they are missing a trick by not going to some beer companies or some whiskey or companies and saying, look, we've got this course in atheism at the university. We're going to provide you with some future customers. Wouldn't you like to contribute to this so that we can promote this sort of thing? I'm sure it'll show up in your balance sheet as our time goes by. You know, the thing that rather disturbs me is that the God is dead brigade will teach in universities and seminaries that were built by the money of God-fearing people. Why don't they raise their own money and build their own universities? For those of us who operate apart from the church, there is complete theological freedom. So much so indeed that I don't know of any other university in which there is as much

freedom for the theologian as there is at Emory. So consequently, it's not very strange as many people think it is that Emory has supported me, I'm very much concerned in the story about the theory that the author of the author is teaching at Emory University. And I've questioned the field like he should be five. As far as I'm concerned, the author of the author is atheists. I haven't read in his books or in his articles because I don't read that kind of stuff. The reason I asked some of the trustees of Emory University last week at the North Georgia conference why he hadn't been five. And they told me, according to his tenure there, that in the regulation of the rules of the universe, the system all over the country, that you could not fire man just for his thinking and his belief that he had been called in and asked for his resignation, but he's not a gentleman enough to resign if he'd been asked to resign. So just what steps we can take to get him out of that, I don't know, but we met as

a hundred percent, I think, in trying to get rid of Dr. Oldtizen. I feel that no man should have a position that he can't be fired from under any circumstances. He's a dangerous man, I think, because I know of influence. He has on the bow as if that right, just at that age, when they can be led the right way of they can be led the wrong way. And I heard an elderly lady say the other day that a relative of us had left Emory and he's left there with a lot of wrong thinking because he had heard such things as that. I think the Methodist people is going to have to put so much pressure on the trustees of Emory University that they will have to find a way to get rid of Dr. Oldtizen. I feel like if they don't, a lot of the churches are going to hold their support from the Emory University. We would have to bring charges in order to dismiss a professor. And there are no grounds for bringing charges in Professor Altizer's case.

As I said, also to AAUP, he has not shown incompetence. He has not neglected his duty, nor is he guilty of gross moral derpitude. On the contrary, he is rated by both students and faculty as an excellent teacher, with special qualities of stimulating and exciting the mind. His scholarly books and other publications are rated highly by his peers, and his private life has not offended the community in any overt way. Consequently, there was no difficulty in formulating our administrative position of defending his right to express his ideas, even though such ideas were controversial and in the sensitive area of religion. Other church-related institutions of higher education, though not so large as Emory, do academic freedom somewhat differently. Officials at Emanuel College in Franklin Springs, Georgia, express a position that many Methodists would like to see practiced at Emory.

But we do feel that when it comes to academic freedom along the line of teaching things contrary, absolutely contrary to our philosophy, that then there is a little question as to what we shall do next. We do have a point of view as a Pentecostal homeless college, which we have some basic agreement, but allows considerable latitude within this. But we would be less than honest if we say we actually in actively encourage deviation from, well, we consider biblical, Christian faith, although we've never had in the history of our school one that we've had to dismiss from the school on account of their teaching in the school. But we did have one that seemed to get out of line just a little, and then he decided to withdraw on his own account.

It was, of course, a teaching in the guard to atheism and those things, which is absolutely against our adopting our belief here at the college. Even though the faculty does not teach radical theology, Emanuel College students have heard of Christian atheism, Professor John Swales teaches Bible history. What do you tell them about Alzheimer's theories? Well, we haven't discussed it too much because I haven't felt that the subject is too important. Students at Emory do think it's important. There's no Christianity left in the church, I don't think. There's God necessary anyway. I mean, what do you have, but people going through the motions? I know that's awfully pessimistic, and I'll say, go nuts. I agree, the technological culture may kill us. We don't have any place to stand. We can't even see what we're standing on. We have no point of view, no point of discrimination, which to look at other things.

But I think that Alzheimer's is really giving us an alive option here, and what he's seeing. Well, what is this good news? I think I sort of, in my readings, have failed to understand. He talks about repudiating our past that there's the dichotomy between the sacred and the profane, and that we can't look nostalgicly back to the past, that this is wrong because this is a forward movement, and he sort of has this eschatological end, and he talks about a new epiphany of Christ. What is this new epiphany? What is this? What is this? This Christ is accomplished. What is this gospel? It's good news that we can, what is he brought, man? It wasn't the greedy that Alzheimer's things didn't think we got. Well, you know, we think that man is called to be mature, and that there are epiphanies all along the road. You've got to be an epiphany in May 27, 1966, for me, to this to be meaningful. Not the event of, you know, something that happened in the reign of Pope. What is it for you to say that the present moment can't be meaningful outside of radical

Christianity? I mean, can you say that? Can you affirm that? Well, you think they're going to be epiphany is all right in everyday life. Everyday life is going to be just like it is, just everyday life. Why do you say that? Look how that's the way it is. Well, well, when was your last epiphany? You know, this is a fine, fine is like this, just don't happen. You just don't wake up or rapture in the morning. Well, it could be, this could say more about us, and it does about the epiphanies. It may and cannot be sensitive enough. He could be looking for the wrong thing, and it may be that our religious experience is what's getting in the way of religious experience. Publicity following his recent work has affected the personal life of Dr. Altizer and his wife. It's been, my favorite phrase is exhilarating and exhausting. You know, it's terribly exciting, and I'm very happy about it, but I think that both of this has been sort of under the gun, it's at work.

I think that the most troublesome thing is that such a very large number of people have written, or called, or come to see me, and in many cases, they're serious people, and their intentions are serious. And frankly, the mail has been so overwhelming that it hasn't been possible to answer these letters. I don't have Secretaryal Service, and I answer all letters by hand, and I've only been able to answer, I suppose, maybe one or two percent of the mail that I've received. There of course have been a number of requests to speak, I've been forced to turn down over 90 percent of those, because I don't believe in being away from my classes for more than a week each term, but it has been exhausting. But I think the thing that most excites me is that, finally, theology has become a matter of public interest, that there seems to be a tremendous, common public mass interest in real theological talk.

I had no idea whatsoever, I don't think any of us had any expectation to be this kind of public interest. We expected it to last for about six weeks at a maximum, didn't we? At a maximum, although, of course, we didn't anticipate even that publicity, and once it occurred, we thought it would be very short-lived, as it's not been. Of course, this hasn't been new work for me, would you say, Gail? This is just amazed me, really, because he's been saying it for seven or eight years. And, outside the cloistered halls of the university, you know, nobody cares, really. Today they care. In virtually every hamlet, the small town minister is confronted by the words of altizer and church members who demand answers. I think that God is very much alive, and really, altizer is the one that's dead. The Bible said in the end time that many false prophets would come on the scene, and therefore we must realize that, because we believe that this is in somewhat a poor honor of the

any Christ is coming in the end time that the Bible tells us about, and then the Bible tells us to mark such fellows as that and board them, and, of course, to have nothing to do with them and warn our people against them, and that's what I'm doing. A more colorful medium with the fundamentalist message is the old-fashioned revival. It has a long history and is as American as the 4th of July, but today there is nothing dated about its operation. John Haggai preaches old-fashioned religion, but he employs the latest techniques and operates with an uptown sophisticated crew. He promised to preach on the God is dead theology, then threats of rain cut his crowd to 3,000. When the rain did come, most of the crowd moved into the field house, where services continued as usual. In John chapter 8, the Lord Jesus Christ said, You shall know the truth, and the truth shall

make you free. Now the reason that I have used that text is because members of the God is dead brigade say that God is dead, but that Christ Jesus lives. Now they do not believe that he rose bodily from the grave, so it's hard for me to understand how they can say he lives, he is dead. If he did not rise from that grave, the 3rd day Jesus Christ is dead. Now the truth of the matter is that this is a violation of the 3rd commandment pure and simple. It is blaspheming. God is alive. Now there are those who say, I believe that Jesus Christ was a good man, but I don't believe that he was God. Well, either Jesus Christ was what he said he was, God very God, or not only was he not a good man, he was a miserable charlatan.

Can you believe a man who lies when he speaks? Let me ask you a question, if a person lied to you nine times out of every dozen times he spoke, would you believe him? And so these who say that Jesus is a great ethical teacher, and then he began a great humanitarian movement, are absolutely contradicting the facts because if they say he did not rise from the dead. God is not dead. It's a little ridiculous for the courts to say that the undertaker is dead. God is not dead. Now the reason that a man denies the existence of God is not because of intellectual difficulties, but because of moral difficulties. Now by moral, I'm not referring to sensuous difficulty, but I mean it is to his own interest that there be no God to call him into account. This is but another facet of the revolt against all authority we are seeing in America and in the world today.

God is. Within the Protestant churches, particularly those located in the modern urban centers, younger ministers seem to appreciate the work of altizer, though they seldom subscribe totally to any radical theological point of view. Any acceptance of a doctrine like altizers will meet resistance. In my opinion, Tom Altizer and the other radical theologians are exceedingly important to the life of the church in our time. They are saying some things which you and I as Christians ought to pay heed to in a very real way. Some altizer, of course, is a dialectical theologian. This means that his language is not always easily understandable as far as laymen and many ministers are concerned. There's been much misunderstanding at this point. Tom will say in one sentence, God is alive. In the next sentence, he will say his famous God is dead statement. We've got to come to grips with what he means by this. I think that the two most important things as far as contributions that Tom can make to

the life of the church today is when he is saying to us that Jesus Christ has come into the world in which we live, that he is no longer to be understood as having returned to the right hand of God, but that he is alive, working, moving, acting in our common ordinary days. This means that when you and I as Christians come to the point where we run into barriers and problems in life, we no longer stop and look upward and pray to a God out there somewhere, but that we must plunge on into these barriers and complexities, expecting in faith to meet Jesus Christ in them. There is also here a note of tremendous optimism. This note of optimism is something that many of us do not realize has been lacking in theology of the modern era. What it definitely has, we pass through a dark period, now come these who are saying to us something quite different.

Radical theology is discussed in the liberal church as well as the fundamentalist. At Atlanta's new Unitarian Universalist Church, conversation is served after service along with the coffee. And this may have the effect of maybe a dialogue within the liberal church as well in terms of our relationship to the real question of significance of God in the liberal church. If I may explain many of us come to the point of defining what we mean by God, and to me as a liberal, God is universal law, is in my well-saved gravity's day, and I mean it is just shake me at all. It is the mysterious thing that makes people and things good. There is a shaking effect that it would to the Orthodox church, right, but we at least have to come to grips as well in our own concept because God, the concept that has to be meaningful or the absence of God, has to be meaningful.

And this is precisely what I'm attempting to say, namely, that the Christian now can only exist in faith, can only exist in Christ in so far as he confesses that God has did. In so far as he confesses that the transcendent Lord of the Christian tradition is no longer real, is no longer manifest, is no longer present, only by that way that the Christian today have a way to the Christ who is totally present here and now in our body, in our life, in our reflection. There is no conclusion to this piece. The exchange continues from all sides. Thomas Altizer has opened a Pandora's box, and no one can close it up again. For better or worse, depending upon your point of view, phrases like God is dead, Christian atheism, and radical theology have become a part of our language, culture, and public concern. Communication between the world of theology and the world of the secular has begun, and

as each probes for better understanding of the other, these worlds are bound to change. This is just amazed me, really, because he's been saying it for seven or eight years, and outside the cloistered halls of the university, you know, nobody, nobody cared, really. This is NET, the National Educational Television Network. Thank you.