(9:54 AM) | Brad:

A Theological Memoir

Indeed, in June of 1955, while reading Heller’s essay on Nietzsche and Rilke for the seventh time in a library at the University of Chicago, I had what I have ever since regarded as a genuine religious conversion, one in which I deeply experienced the death of God, and experienced it as the act and grace of God Himself. Never can such an experience be forgotten, and while it truly paralleled my earlier experience of the epiphany of Satan, this time I experienced a pure grace, as though it was the very reversal of my experience of Satan, now I knew that “Satan” was dead, and had died for me. The identification of God as Satan was Blake’s most revolutionary vision, but at that time I had only begun an exploration of Blake, and had no explicit awareness of any such identification, so that I could not then name that God who is dead as Satan. But I could know God as the God who is truly dead, and at bottom I knew that this is a true theological understanding of God, and one demanding a transformation of theology itself, so that I was impelled to reverse my deepest theological roots, and that entailed a reversal of that Barthianism which I had so deeply absorbed. This occurred over many months when I returned to Indiana, spending most of my evenings intensively thinking about Barth while drinking bourbon and listening to Lotte Lenya’s original recording of "The Three Penny Opera." Somehow I was purged, or think that I was, for there are those who continue to identify me as a Barthian, and it is true that Barth is the only modern theologian whom I profoundly respect.

*****

I know that The Self-Embodiment of God is my best book, but I equally know that it is not truly my own; it certainly came as a gift, one wholly unexpected and gratuitous, and even if it also came out of a long and deep struggle, and only after the closing of many false paths, it is a book which in a deep sense wrote itself, and even if this is true of every genuine book, this book is not simply the product of this author; and it is unquestionably beyond every intention which I brought to its writing. I well remember the site of its writing, the dining room of my Victorian house in Port Jefferson on Long Island, where I wrote while standing because of problems with my lower back, and I shall also never forget that Ray Hart and Bob Funk were visiting me while I was completing its first chapter, and when they returned from a visit to Montauk Point, I proclaimed in shock that this chapter on genesis had finally proven the existence of God, and Bob immediately said: "Rush upstairs and take two baths!"

In the past year or so, I've become thoroughly enchanted by Altizer's work. Yes, he and his work are no longer talked about much. Yes, he may seem the quintessential impractical theologian. And, yes, the politico-ethical implications of his work are often hard to tease out. And yet, he is representative of that which keeps me from abandoning theology; or, more precisely, the sense that I, too, might be a theologian.

His memoir is remarkable stuff. In it, he does not simply retell the 'glory days' of 1960s theology -- heady times in which theological discussions, esp. 'The Death of God', made front-page news & were profiled on television programs. He discusses this, to be sure, and his prominent place in it. But his telling, in a manner similar to Augustine's Confessions transcends the retelling, and you very quickly find it to be a theological work in itself. A life lived theologically, if such a thing is possible.

It certainly can't be read in one sitting -- it is several chapters long, and the site is rather slow. But I think the patience of the open-minded will be rewarded.

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