Altizer and Rome

The death-of-god movement displays less and less vitality with each passing month. It would seem that this quasi-religious phenomenon, centering as it does on the motif of mortality, is itself experiencing death-throes.

An oblique indicator that the cry “God is dead” is losing its force is the appearance of an anthology of “Readings in the Death of God Theology” (Toward a New Christianity, edited by Thomas J. J. Altizer). This volume—though it conveniently omits bibliographic reference to The Altizer-Montgomery Dialogue (Inter-Varsity Press), which certainly marks at least one step in the decline of theothanatology—suggests that this “radical” movement has already reached the unenviable bourgeois stage of collected “readings.”

But an even more direct evidence that death-of-God is dying was provided last June 21, when Professor Altizer addressed a philosophy workshop at The Catholic University of America on “The Problem of God in Contemporary Thought.” Having found his position roundly rejected by virtually all strata of Protestant thought, Altizer emphatically stated that if there proves to be no possibility that Roman Catholic theology will move in the direction of his “totally christocentric” form of faith and the dialectical self-negation of God, then “I for one will be reluctantly forced to concede that an atheistic or death of God theology is a destructive aberration.” Quite a concession!

What has convinced Altizer that he should now put all his atheological eggs in a Roman Catholic basket? The answer is not hard to find, and it is an exceedingly instructive one for those Christians now celebrating the 450th anniversary of the Reformation.

Let us begin by recalling the essence of Altizer’s position: his affirmation of God’s death is a variant of archaic nineteenth century Hegelianism. He begins by rejecting the law of non-contradiction (on which all logical thinking is based) and substitutes for it Hegel’s so-called “dialectic logic” of perpetual thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, whereby religious truth undergoes self-negation and thus progressively rises to higher and higher levels, issuing out in a “God beyond God” and a “fully kenotic Word.” This totally hidden Christ (which must not be “identified with the original historical Jesus”) is encountered in the secular, profane present and even more fully in the apocalyptic “third age of the Spirit” growing in the crucible of today’s secularism. (See my The ‘Is God Dead?’ Controversy [Zondervan] and my chapter in Bernard Murchland’s The Meaning of the Death of God [Random House].)

At Catholic University Altizer effortlessly related these views to contemporary thinking in the Roman church. In contrast to historic Protestantism, which relies on the Bible as God’s sole and final revelation of truth, the modern Catholic thinker—whose greatest model is provided by the evolutionary theology of Teilhard de Chardin—conceives of a dynamic or evolving Christ. This Christ is progressively manifested in the growth of his Body, the Church—an organic development inseparable from the total body of humanity. “Once we are liberated from the root idea that the biblical and apostolic images of God have an absolute and eternal authority, then”—Altizer underscored the lesson for modern Catholics—“we can become open to the possibility that everything which orthodox Christianity has known as God is but a particular stage of God’s self-manifestation, and must in turn be transcended by the forward movement of God Himself”

Doubtless Altizer goes too far in his endeavor to create a one-to-one correlation between Rome’s world-view and process-thought Aristotelian logic, St. Thomas’s passion for objective, final truth, and the respect given through the centuries to the inerrant Scriptures and creedal verities are too much a part of Rome’s life to be brushed lightly aside. But Altizer is not mistaken when he points up the extent to which evolutionary, process thinking influences the contemporary Catholic mind.

Karl Adam, in his classic The Spirit of Catholicism, argued that true Catholic Christianity must not be seen in the “embryonic” state (its original biblical documents) but rather in its “progressive unfolding,” even as the oak must be seen not as an acorn but in its full maturity. Today many Catholics regard their church as a living organism that, as the extension of Christ’s incarnation, can creatively reshape its past: “reinterpreting” past pronouncements such as extra ecclesiam nullus salus (“outside the Church there is no salvation”) so as to give them totally new force. Once the Magisterium does reinterpret a past teaching, then all previous authoritative expressions of the teaching are held to carry this meaning: the past is rewritten in terms of the dynamic, living present. (See my paper “The Approach of New Shape Roman Catholicism to Scriptural Inerrancy,” forthcoming in The Evangelical Theological Bulletin and The Springfielder.)

To the Reformation Protestant, this procedure invariably suggests both the Marxist (dialectic, note well) rewriting of history and George Orwell’s 1984, where Winston, the citizen of a totalitarian world in which truth is continually “evolved” and “redefined,” comes to realize that his society has fallen into the epistemological hell of solipsism. The Protestant knows well—or ought to know well—that unless an objective Word from God stands over against the Church, judging it and proclaiming grace to it, the Church invariably deifies itself, thereby engaging in the worst kind of idolatry. When any corporate body lacking a clear external standard of truth grows in strength, it strives to become a standard to itself, a law to itself: a Leviathan, the “mortal god” described by Hobbes. Solovyov, in his Short Story of Antichrist (CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Jan. 29, 1965), well showed that where objective revelational truth ceases to provide a firm criterion of action, no church has the holiness to withstand the blandishments of antichristic power. (Cf. my essay, “Evangelical Unity and Contemporary Ecumenicity,” The Springfielder, Autumn, 1965, and The Gordon Review, Winter, 1966.)

From all sides today efforts are being made to unite Christendom ecumenically on the basis of vague dreams of evolving, process truth (a particularly unfortunate example being the writings of Charles J. Curtis, who employs Söderblom as a bridge to join Protestant with Catholic à la Whiteheadian process-thought). Altizer delineated the issue precisely when he asserted at Catholic University: “Any genuine evolutionary understanding of God is incompatible with the idea of an original deposit of faith which is absolute and given or unchanging.”

Here is the watershed: Was God in Christ, objectively reconciling the world unto himself? Did he “once in the end of the world [appear] to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself” (Heb. 9:26)? Has God spoken with absolute finality in the Holy Scriptures, which testify of Christ? If so, process-theology in all its forms must receive the kiss of death. For only the Christ of Scripture, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever, can offer Church and society a genuine Resurrection and Life.

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