An excerpt from Radical Theology and the Death of God by Altizer and Hamilton.
It's important to state right from the get-go in this thread what is meant by the title of that book. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, the great philosopher (and an atheist I might add), proclaimed God to be dead back in Victorian times. This was not a pronouncement he wanted to make. In fact, he thought this event (the death of God) might be disastrous for modern civilization. The authors of Radical Theology and the Death of God were theologians writing in the mid 1960s who truly understood what Nietzsche was talking about and they embraced the death of God in modern society. It wasn't so much that Altizer and Hamilton thought that God was dead than it was that they saw that modern humankind no longer felt that it needed God in its life. God had become a choice in our society and many had deemed him unnecessary. The growing secular nature of Western civilization had decided that it could do without God. This attitude is even apparent in many people who still go to church. It's more of a "I can take it or leave it" kind of thing for many people who even still call themselves Christians.
The death of God is a social event and we are currently living through it. Altizer and Hamilton believe that God has just disappeared for the time being and they subscribe to an attitude of patient waiting for God's return. In the meantime, they think that Jesus is still a powerful figure in society and that it is still necessary to maintain religion and theology through this period of darkness. The following excerpt from their book has an Eastern flavor to it and appears to have been influenced by the great Catholic priest Thomas Merton.
For the record, I don't think that God has totally disappeared. He's just left center stage in Western culture, but still makes appearances in the psyches of modern individuals. That is what my experience tells me. And now for the relevant excerpt:
"First, Jesus may be concealed in the world, in the neighbor, in this struggle for justice, in that struggle for beauty, clarity, order. Jesus is in the world as masked, and the work of the Christian is to strip off the masks of the world to find him, and, finding him, to stay with him and to do his work. In this sense, the Christian life is not a longing and is not a waiting, it is a going out into the world. The self is discovered, but only incidentally, as one moves out into the world to tear off the masks. Life is a masked ball, a Halloween party, and the Christian life, ethics, love, is that disruptive task of tearing off the masks of the guests to discover the true princess.
In the parable of the last judgement (Matthew 25:34 ff.) the righteous did not know it was Jesus they were serving. The righteous today don't need to know it either, unless they are Christian, in which case they will say that what they are doing is not only service, work, justified for this and that structural reason; it is also an act of unmasking, a looking for, a finding and staying with Jesus.
In this first sense, the Christian life, ethics, love, is public, outward, visible. It is finding Jesus in your neighbor: "as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me" (Matthew 25:40).
There is another form of the presence of Jesus Christ in the world. Here, we no longer talk about unmasking Jesus who is out there in the world somewhere, we talk about becoming Jesus in and to the world. Here, the Christian life, ethics, love, is first a decision about the self, and then a movement beyond the self into the world.
The form, if not the content, of the parable of the Good Samaritan should be recalled. Jesus is asked a question: which one, among all the many claimants out there, is my neighbor? Jesus answers the question with one of his characteristic non-answers: "Don't look for the neighbor, be one." Or, to put the form of his answer on our problem: "Don't look for Jesus out there, in scripture, tradition, sacraments, Ingmar Bergman movies, in the world behind a mask- become Jesus." Become a Christ to your neighbor, as Luther put it.
In this form, the Christian life is not a looking outwards to the world and its claims, it is first a look within in order to become Jesus. "For me to live," cried Paul in one of his most daring utterances, "is Christ." Ethics and love are first a dangerous descent into the self. And in this form, the Christian life, ethics, love, are not so active or worldly. At this point the Christian is the passive man, and doubtless tempted into all of the easily noted dangers of confusing the self with Jesus.
The Christian life as the discernment of Jesus beneath the worldly masks can be called work or interpretation or criticism; while the Christian life as becoming Jesus looks a little different. At this point the Christian is the sucker, the fall guy, the jester, the fool for Christ, the one who stands before Pilate and is silent, the one who stands before power and power-structures and laughs.
Whichever of the paths one takes to find or define Jesus in the world, and perhaps some of us are called to choose both ways, and some only one, the worldliness of the Protestant can never, because of this, have an utterly humanistic form. I may be proposing a too simple marriage between Christology and ethics, a too narrowly ethical approach to Christological problems, but it should at least be noted that however acute the experience of the death of God may be for us, however much silence and loneliness are entailed during our time of waiting for the absent God, we are not particularly cast down or perplexed by this. A form of obedience remains to us in our time of deprivation. We dechristianize no one, we make no virtue of our defects, and we even dare to call men into the worldly arena where men are in need and where Jesus is to be found and served."
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