Thomas Altizer’s work is much more sophisticated and ambitious. If Hamilton explores his personal experience of the unhappy consciousness, Altizer launches himself into a theological reinterpretation of the doctrine of incarnation that is thoroughly dialectical. In the secular culture of the 1960s there was a widespread acknowledgement that God was absent: but only Christians knew that God was dead. The absence might be assumed to be the work of man: the death of God was the work of God himself. According to Altizer, Christians should not hold back, but should will the death of God. At the beginning and end of the period of the “death of God” theology, Altizer published on American novelist Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) in 1963 and on English poet William Blake (1757–1827) in 1967. He proposed an alternative reading to that of Eliade. It is God himself who, by the incarnation, has brought an end of the sacred in its primordial form. For Christians there is no going back. The sacred can be regained only by a dialectical negation of the profane, but it must be a sacred understood now in the light of the death of God.
Nor is it simply the pre-Christian God who has died. As early as World War I KARL BARTH (1886–1968) declared that such a God is dead. Altizer pursues his dialectic in a more Hegelian vein through the doctrine of kenosis, the self-emptying of God (Philippians 2:6–11). The kenotic movement of the Incarnation sees Spirit becoming flesh, eternity becoming time, and the sacred becoming profane. Christians must not look romantically or nostalgically to the beginning, but rather with hopeful anticipation to the end. The death of God marks the epiphany of the eschatological Christ. Altizer describes this as the gospel of Christian atheism. It was not received as good news in the churches, and unlike Hamilton he did not recommend radical Christians participate in the traditional religious life. However, by pursuing his profane destiny he still hoped to find a way “to return to the God who is all in all.”
The death of God theology was short-lived, but sufficiently lively that writers in other fields of radical theology felt it necessary to relate their own movement to it. Thus feminist theology welcomed the death of the divine patriarch, while liberation theology rejected the theme as distracting from the real issue, the death of men [sic!]. But these movements were calling for a new understanding of God the liberator and did not extend the theology of the death of God.
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