‘God is dead’ proponent joins his subject
The idea that God was dead had been around for centuries, most prominently with Nietzsche in the late 1800s. But after the Second World War and the Holocaust, it re-emerged in North America as radical theologian Thomas Altizer and others questioned whether a benevolent God could exist.
The subject burst out of the ivory tower on April 8,1966, when a stark Time magazine cover, all black with bold red letters, pointedly asked: “Is God Dead?”
The article, highly nuanced on the theme, focused mostly on how science and secularism were supplanting religion. But in the United States, where 97 per cent of adults said they believed in God, it touched off a ferocious backlash against the magazine and led to the vilification particularly of Altizer, who was more visible than the others, spoke to the press and had a certain theatrical flair.
“God is dead,” he asserts with finality in a documentary produced for National Educational Television after the Time article came out. “This God is no longer present, is no longer manifest, is no longer real.”
He even went on the Merv Griffin Show, a popular television talk program, though the event, held before a live audience in a Broadway theatre, was a debacle. He was given two minutes to speak. “The response was a violent one,” he wrote later, “forcing the director to close the curtains and order the band to play forcefully, and after this event a crowd greeted me at the stage door, demanding my death.”
Altizer died Nov. 28 in Stroudsburg, Pa. He was 91. His daughter, Katharine Altizer, said the cause was complications of a stroke.
Atlizer’s theology was esoteric and not easily understood, leaving most people, including many clergy, to react viscerally to its basic premise. Confusing matters was that the few theologians in his intellectual circle — including William Ham- ilton, Paul M. Van Buren and Rabbi Richard Rubenstein — did not agree among themselves on how God had died, why he had died or what his death meant. They were essentially writing God out of the picture, but they did not consider themselves atheists; Altizer called himself a Christian atheist, further muddying the waters.
“He was one of the country’s most hated, misunderstood, radical and prophetic voices of the past century,” said Jordan Miller, who taught religion at Stonehill College in Massachusetts, wrote articles with Altizer and considered him a mentor.
The “God Is Dead” cultural moment, such as it was, was short-lived. A year after the Time article, Altizer lamented that he was no longer “the bad boy of theology” but felt more “like the invisible man.”
But he had inflamed evangelicals, and his lasting effect may be that he helped give rise to the religious right.
“I suggest that both evangelical and mainline Protestantism’s development from the late 1960s were a reaction against his theology,” said Christopher Rodkey, pastor at St. Paul’s United Church of Christ in Dallastown, Pa., and who also considered Altizer a mentor.
Altizer maintained that his views had been misunderstood and the anger directed toward him misplaced.
But, he wrote in his memoir, “while I offended many permanently, and lost every hope of a foundation grant or a major academic appointment, I have never regretted the offence that I gave.”