The death-of-God stir has passed like an overnight storm, and certain signs suggest that it may soon be forgotten. For one thing, book sales of God-is-dead writings are falling off, and publishers are looking for some new religious development. Those who are informed that God is dead apparently do not wish to linger long beside the corpse.
In Canada and the United States, Editor Carl F. H. Henry of CHRISTIANITY TODAY has addressed campus and ministerial meetings on “The Resurrection of Theism After the Death of God.” Articles in theological journals and recently published paperbacks indicate that a new probing of the reality and nature of God may very well emerge as the central religious concern of the decade 1965–1975.
The pulpit, as we know, often lags behind frontier theological concerns. At the fiftieth anniversary service for the General Commission on Chaplains and Armed Forces recently held in Washington Cathedral, Bishop Dwight E. Loder, Methodist Bishop of Detroit, devoted much of his preaching time to the death-of-God dialogue. But listeners perked up their ears when he stated that “the real tragedy of our times is not that some are saying ‘God is dead,’ but that there is so little evidence among Christians that God is alive.”
Perhaps the last large-scale interest in the death-of-God flurry occurred recently on the University of Chicago campus. There more than 2,000 persons—mostly from off-campus—heard Thomas J. J. Altizer and John Warwick Montgomery state the secular and the evangelical view in prepared papers and then answer questions from the floor. As a kind of final rite for the death-of-God theology, CHRISTIANITY TODAY publishes the following excerpts from this long Chicago discussion.—ED.
Montgomery: You seem to feel that a blind leap of faith involves two alternatives—either the traditional Christian position or the completely kenotic and hidden Christ who is manifest in some sense in the present situation. I’m sure you realize that this is not simply a matter of two alternatives. A blind leap can be made in an infinite number of directions. Now at a university such as this, there are many uncommitted students who are searching for a way out of the difficulties of our time. What they want to know is: Why should the leap be made in the direction you suggest, particularly since you give no criteria whatever for the notion of a word somehow hidden in the present situation. Why a leap in that direction, rather that a leap in the direction of Meher Baba’s Sufism, in the direction of the Marxist ideology, in the direction of traditional Christianity, or any number of other options that could be mentioned?
Altizer: Let me clarify a point here. I certainly do not intend to suggest that my own way is the only way. Far from it. That would be a horrible situation.
Montgomery: Why is it a possibility at all in the present situation?
Altizer: I think it’s a possibility insofar as it attempts to understand Christ as being present in such a way in our world as to fulfill his original movement into flesh.
Montgomery: May I interrupt you at this point? Why can you speak in any sense about a Christ when you have cut yourself off from a historical Jesus? You have already pointed out in many connections that the Christ as he appears now has no necessary connection at any point with the Christ of history. Under those circumstances, how do you have any right to use the six-letter word Christ? With what reference are you employing this word?
Altizer: There’s a misunderstanding on your part here, I think. What I assert is that the person of Jesus of Nazareth has disappeared from history. His Word is in part present to us, and we can in part truly know his Word.
Montgomery: On what basis do you make that statement?
Altizer: Simply on the basis that it is possible critically, I believe, to ascertain something of the meaning of the original message of Jesus. I think that we cannot possibly recover the full meaning of it, but I think it is possible to recover essential dimensions of it. For example, it seems to me to be quite clear that he was an apocalyptic preacher, that he proclaimed an apocalyptic word. This can be known, and indeed, I think, has to be an essential ground of any contemporary Christian theological quest.
Montgomery: Why is his apocalyptic emphasis not an imposition on his teachings by the early Church as you would regard other aspects of his teaching?
Altizer: There’s a very good reason for this, using here the basic embodying principle, that in his word which can be ascertained as being most offensive to the early Church, to the Church which canonized the New Testament, and which nevertheless remains in the New Testament, we can have good reason for regarding it as being authentic. There are lots of technical problems here, of course, but I simply accept what it seems to me to be the general result of modern New Testament scholarship which identifies the original message of Jesus as being apocalyptic.
Montgomery: There was probably nothing more offensive in the teachings of Jesus than his affirmation to be God incarnate, to be God in the flesh.
Altizer: I don’t think there’s any possibility that Jesus taught that he was God in flesh.
Montgomery: But the point is that you just said the more offensive the teaching, the more likelihood it was the original teaching.
Altizer: Offensive to the Hellenistic church. That was the ground of thinking of the Hellenistic church.
Montgomery: Is that right? What about his resurrection from the dead? There was nothing that irritated the Hellenistic world more.
Altizer: The Hellenistic church. It was the Church that canonized the New Testament, not the Hellenistic world.
Montgomery: You don’t feel it bothered the Hellenistic church in the slightest that Jesus’ claims were the fulfillment of the Jewish Messianic claims of God incarnate?
Altizer: First of all, there never were any Jewish Messianic claims that there would be an incarnation of God. That’s not Messianic. The Messiah in Jewish tradition was a human figure, not a divine figure.
Montgomery: You don’t feel it was the least bit disturbing to the Hellenistic church that Jesus claimed to be God incarnate, that he died for the sins of the world?
Altizer: These are the theological foundations of the Hellenistic church. Of course they’re primary.
Montgomery: All right. How do you distinguish the Hellenistic church from the Jewish church?
Altizer: One of the major distinctions is that the original primitive Church was an apocalyptic Jewish sect.
Montgomery: But you see, you’re begging the question. How do we determine what was the original and primitive proclamation?
Altizer: You didn’t ask that question.
Montgomery: I’m asking it now, because obviously it’s integral to your argument.
Altizer: Let me just put it this way. Do you doubt that Jesus was an apocalyptic teacher?
Montgomery: Not in the slightest.
Altizer: Well, then, 1 don’t see the thrust of your question.
Montgomery: The point is that you are selecting from his teachings this particular aspect of them, this apocalypticism, and you’re arguing that it is primary because that would have been offensive to a particular group within the early Church. Now, as a matter of fact, practically everything Jesus said was offensive to somebody in the early Church, and this is no criterion at all for selectivity. The thing is that you are arriving at the New Testament with certain presuppositions as to what can be removed here and absentized. Apocalypticism happens to be one of these things.
Altizer: We have to remember this that there is no possibility of reconciling everything in the New Testament. There’s too much that is self-contradictory. So no one could say that he accepts the full authority of the New Testament. No one could say that he accepts everything that the New Testament says about Jesus or about Christ without embracing some real kind of schizophrenic madness.
Montgomery: All right, let me give you an example of schizophrenic madness. At DePauw University you made the statement that the ascent into heaven is heretical but that the descent into hell is a magnificent presentation of the early, basic Christian proclamation. Now, unless I’m mistaken, textual scholars have had far more difficulty with the descent into hell in terms of its Petrine statement (1 Pet. 3:18 ff.) than they have ever had with the ascent into heaven. The ascent into heaven is presented, for example, at the end of Matthew and at the beginning of the Book of Acts. Now on what New Testament basis can you possibly say that the descent into hell is orthodox while the ascent into heaven is heretical? This shows perfectly well that you’re operating with extrinsic criteria. You’re using the Bible as nothing but an opportunity for proof-texting, the worst kind of “fundamentalistic” proof-texting.
Altizer: I offer no proof-text for the descent into hell. As a matter of fact, that’s a strange thing to accuse me of. I’m not aware that I’ve ever used a proof-text.
Montgomery: What I’m trying to find out is why you feel that the ascent into heaven is heterodox, while the descent into hell is orthodox.
Altizer: I think that we have a primary problem in ascertaining the basic, fundamental, primary meaning of the Christian faith. I do so on the basis of the understanding of the incarnation: on the basis and understanding that God in Christ has become flesh, that God has become manifest in time and in space, that this is a final and complete movement of God into the world. Now to believe in the ascension is to believe that God has annulled and reversed this process, to continue to cling to a pre-incarnate form of the Word, therein refusing the reality of the incarnation. Therefore, I regard it as a false form of faith, or a bad form of faith. Whereas to believe in the descent into hell is to believe that Christ himself continues after the crucifixion to move into the depths of life and body and world. And that seems to me to be perfectly consistent with the fundamental understanding of the incarnation.
Montgomery: Yes, but what ground do you have for saying anything about the incarnation? You already said that the notion of Christ presenting himself as God in flesh was not in the least offensive to the Hellenistic community, which you feel created this situation, the New Testament situation. Under those circumstances, you’ve cut yourself off from making any statements about the incarnation. All you’re able to talk about apparently is Jesus’ apocalypticism, which was terribly offensive to the Hellenistic church. You see, you’re importing an understanding of incarnation into the situation from outside.
Altizer: We understand the incarnation primarily not on the basis of deductions from the New Testament but rather on the basis of an encounter with and understanding of the Word which is present in our midst in our flesh.
Montgomery: There’s an article by Kai Nielsen that was reprinted in New Theology No. 1 entitled “Can Faith Validate God Talk?” The essence of this article is that anybody who speaks about an encounter with something has a responsibility to make sure that he is encountering something other than his own innards. Why is this an encounter with a Word? It seems to me it is an encounter with Altizer.
Altizer: The decisive question here is. Can such an encounter be spoken of in such a way as to embody life and light?
Montgomery: All right, why is it life and light?
Altizer: Call it what you will, redemption or …
Montgomery: But the question is not how it appears to you or how it appears to me, but how we can settle a question like this. This is obviously of tremendous importance, because people are looking for some kind of religious answers in the situation that you’ve described as a very, very difficult one. Now you go around talking about your encounters with a fully kenotic Word. Why should anybody listen?
Altizer: There’s no reason why they should listen to me, of course. But they do have a primary obligation to listen to anything that can bring meaning to life. Now one thing they can’t do—they can’t find any objective, rational, scientific means of validating a Word of life. That is hopeless and demonic, I believe.
Montgomery: In that case, why are you bothering to write?
Altizer: Let’s not identify all writing with objective rational analysis. If we were to do that, there would be no theology whatsoever.
Montgomery: All right. Then you’re thinking in terms of theology as a kind of poetic expression of your own approach to the universe. Is that right? This is autobiography essentially.
Altizer: It’s autobiography in the sense that it is an attempt to witness to a reality dawning in humanity at this time.
Questions From The Floor
1. Question to Altizer: What is the manifestation today of the energy that entered the world by virtue of God’s death in Christ?
Altizer: Now this is the fundamental question with which we’re dealing, of course. In a very real sense, this is a question which cannot be answered objectively. This is a question which each man is called to answer for himself. Each man has to ask himself wherein he truly finds a release of energy, wherein he truly finds love and joy. Now I do think that what we do have, I would not say objectively but symbolically is a fundamental pattern within the tradition of the Christian faith. And for me, as I said before, the pattern is the incarnation. Insofar as I believe that the incarnation is a continuous forward movement in history, I believe that we can look to the world, the flesh, the body energy as being most fundamentally the source of life for us; that living in the time in which we do, namely, in the time of the death of God, everything which appears in our transcendent horizon, or everything which is associated with mystery or the beyond, can only be a source of death, can only be a source of alienation and repression. We are called instead to a movement of Christ in the world, actually and immediately present to us, who releases us here and now, not in some afterworld, for a fullness of life which we can only know insofar as interiorly and actually we become open to energy wherever it will appear, wherever it may appear. We have no clear guidelines to such a source of light. I would only say that we have a symbolic guideline insofar as we can know that God is no longer manifest as God, that the Word is no longer manifest in the form of pure or transcendent spirit, but instead is released in the world as a source of life and energy here and now immediately and actually to us.
Montgomery: If I stick my finger in a light socket I get plenty of energy. The question is, How do I know when it is divine, spiritual energy, and when this is simply a device for self-shocking? It seems to me you’ve simply got to answer this question. You can’t allow the thing to float off into the realm of mystical incarnational teaching when you don’t even have a basis for that. When you say that you can get some kind of symbolic indication, you ought to know that unless you have an identifiable reference, there is no sense in even talking about symbolism. If A is the symbol of B, and B is the symbol of C, and C is the symbol of A, you don’t know nothin’ but nothin’ about any of ’em.
Altizer: Yes, I think that’s the position of the orthodox Christian today.
Montgomery: It’s also the position of the orthodox Christianity of the first century that declared that on the basis of the de facto resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead you’ve got a basis for affirming that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. I’m still calling for a resurrection on your part, or a deferral to the one who did rise from the dead.
Altizer: I really don’t know how to reply to that, except that I can’t conceivably imagine how such a question could ever be asked by a Christian.
Montgomery: It seems to me Thomas asked it.
Altizer: Yes, I think he’s your model here.
Montgomery: And most good exegetes of the Gospel of John point out that it is at that point that the Gospel of John reaches its climax—in Thomas’s affirmation “my Lord and my God.” The Gospel of John begins with the incarnation that the Word became flesh, and finally we have that affirmation at the climactic point. Immediately following this we have the statement made that these things are written that you might have life through believing in the name of Christ. It seems to me that you’ve got to ask yourself whether you’re going to bring your theology into line with the primitive theology of the Christian faith, or whether you’re going to continue to create a religion on the basis of your own inner experience.
Altizer: Well, there’s no question about that. It’s the latter. But here I would say that my own inner experience is not simply my own, of course: it’s whatever participation may be open to me of the body of Christ which is present today.
Montgomery: This reminds me of Harvey Cox at the seventh annual meeting of the American Society of Christian Ethics in Evanston a year and a half ago. There Cox presented a paper on the secular city revisited. In the course of this he said, God is where the action is. There was somebody with some sense in the audience who said, “Wait a minute. How do you know when it’s God’s action and when it’s the Devil’s action?” Cox gave a long answer, and the essence of this was: participating in the confessing community. Very similar to what you’ve just said. To this the questioner said, “Carl McIntire’s church or your church?” Carl McIntire, for the benefit of some of the people here, is a right-wing reactionary if there ever was one, politically and in every other way. And his general approach was about as different from that of Professor Cox as you could imagine. This just shows how frequently theologians today beg the question. If you talk about participation in the community, then the question obviously is, “What community?” because many communities declare that they are the body of Christ. Edgar Sheffield Brightman said that in a universe in which both Christian Science and Catholicism are true, you’ve got a madhouse. Questions of this kind have got to be settled. You can’t leave them in vague terms like this. You’re just playing with words.
Altizer: I’m afraid there aren’t any easy answers, Mr. Montgomery.
Montgomery: You don’t present any answers. I’ll accept any old answer.
Altizer: I’d be unchristian if I presented an answer that would satisfy you.
Montgomery: That’s interesting, because that’s about the criticism that the early Christians received. They went around and they actually proclaimed something, that God had come into the world in Jesus, that he had died for people’s sins and risen again for their justification. And Paul cites the people who saw the resurrected Christ. There were 500 still alive, he said, the implication being that if you don’t believe it, go and ask one of them. The early Christians were so blamed definite that they turned the world upside down. And theologians, I’m afraid, such as yourself, are so indefinite that they’re leaving the world in just as much of a mess as they find it.
2. Question to Montgomery: How do we have the knowledge of persons? In what sense can we know a historical figure who has died in space and time, such as Jesus or Caesar?
Montgomery: This is a very good question. The answer is we come to know a historical figure personally as we come to know that historical figure objectively. Not the other way around. Anybody who tries to set personal knowledge over against objective knowledge is doomed to solipsism. This is evident within the New Testament itself. For example, when John the Baptist was finding difficulty in retaining his commitment to Christ, being in the hoosegow, he sent his disciples to Jesus and said, “Are you the one who was supposed to come or shall we look for another?” Jesus said, “Go back and tell John the things which you have heard and seen, that the dead are raised, that the blind receive their sight, that the Gospel is preached,” etc. The point is that in order for John’s personal commitment to remain as it ought to be, it was necessary for that personal commitment to be grounded referentially. The great mistake of historiographers, such as Dilthey, is that they attempt to impart some kind of knowledge by participation which does not take seriously the objectivity of the historical facts. If you want to find out about Jesus personally, the way to do it is to go to the primary historical records. Don’t go to Altizer’s books. Don’t go to Montgomery’s books. Go to the books that were written by people who had personal and direct contact with Christ. That’s the way to find out what the Christian faith is all about, and to find out what that magnificent personal encounter with Christ can mean.
Altizer: Fantastic!
Montgomery: According to the primary documents—which I think have got to take a little precedence over your judgments of them nineteen centuries later—in the beginning of the Book of Acts we have the assertion that Jesus ascended into heaven and said, “In the same manner in which you see me go into heaven so I will come again from heaven.” The writer of the Book of Acts is certainly the writer of the Gospel according to St. Luke, the third Gospel, and therefore we are in the midst of the primary documents of the Christian faith. Now what’s the trouble with the document at that point?
Altizer: There are innumerable problems here, of course, which I don’t quite see how we can discuss. Frankly, this is a strange kind of discussion for me. I’m just not accustomed to people who take such things as being the teachings of Jesus. This is all new to me.
Montgomery: I can only conclude that nineteen and a half centuries of church history are totally new to you, which is a strange thing for a theologian to say. What I’m presenting is not Montgomeryism. This happens to be the teaching of the ecumenical creeds maintained by all orthodox Christians—Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant. The position maintained by the Reformers, reiterated by Wesley, and on to the present. You’re the one presenting the most bizarre and aberrational form of religion imaginable—and you have the gall to cloak it with the name of the Christian faith.
