Lesson Thirteen: The Death of God

The Death of God - Have Morals, Truth and Civility Fared Better?

Dr Thomas J.J. Altizer

October 24, 2012

Spent a little while this afternoon in my favorite bookstore, owned by a friend who is an agnostic theosophist. He is struggling to come to faith, any faith, I think. I found an old volume "the death of god" (not capital letters which was the vogue at the time) published in 1966, written by an old acquaintance of mine, Thomas J.J. Altizer the infamous professor of Bible and religion at Emory University where he taught from 1956 to 1968. I met him at Manuel's Tavern located at N. Highland and Ponce de Leon in Atlanta where he liked to hang out. 

When I met him he was just about to become famous. I was a teenager willing to listen to anyone's story. (Don't ask what a teenager was doing in a bar - that answer would take a book, I think I would entitle it "The Emancipated Minor." )  J.J. introduced me to modern American theology and single malt scotch. Trust me when I tell you that modern American theology only has context after about three shots of scotch. 

In his book he said, "Observing that the waters of European theology are at present somewhat stagnant, Karl Barth recently said that what we need in Europe and America is not a renewal of an older form of theology but a 'theology of freedom' that looks ahead and strives forward."' 

Here it is 46 years later in the autumn of 2012. Tell me J.J., how did that work out for us? I think you got your wish! One could write volumes about this failure, about the devolution of society and culture, about the exponential increase of every violence and evil, about the destruction of the family, the insanity of a culture that can believe a Human Being can Violate the Natural Law of Non-Contradiction and that a Man can be a WIFE and Mother; and that a Woman, can be a HUSBAND and Father. It is insanity incapable of understanding the "nature" the anatomy of the Human Being, created in the image of God, Male and Female.  I could tell J.J., about the explosion of the Occult, Satanism, Scientology, New Ageism, the present carnage of Political Islam/Jihadism, the worldwide Luciferian movement that is claiming as its own the philosophy of the Saints of the Middle Ages, supplanting Lucifer as the benevolent "knowledge creator" and Jehovah as an evil attack from the ream of darkness.  I could tell him about a host of other spiritualistic religious sicknesses, suicide cults and prosperity Gospel cults, trying to fill the void created by American theology and American religionism.  I could tell him his hope of theological freedom has borne fruit, how one in five children are on some kind of psychotropic drugs, under the care of Marxist psycho-political operators or their dupes, how one in four adults is on mind altering psychotropic drugs, and prescription drugs have become the new tobacco industry with far deadlier result and all the other expressions of the Culture of Death that "theological freedom" has produced.

Piedmont Park, Atlanta In the Hippy Days

Seeing J J's book was like meeting an old friend. At my young age, I was a closed book, really a blank screen, willing to let anyone feel comfortable projecting their image on me, absorbing like a sponge, not "belief" but information.  I had a basis to judge as true or false the thoughts I encountered because I had met Jesus Christ in such a special way at the age of thirteen, (a later lesson) that would never allow me to doubt HIS reality. It was a huge blessing because at the same time I had lost all faith in every religious form and doubted every theology. But somehow through the theological/philosophical forest, Jesus Christ was real, but everything else was suspect. 

If you are old enough to remember that era in Atlanta, I sometimes played piano at a hippy dive on 14th street; I have been trying to recall the name of that basement club but cannot pull it out. There I watched the street people, listened to anything anyone wanted to say. This was my "secret life" away from the religion and the community of my parents and extended family.  It was an education. I met  Stokley Carmichael the black power guru, and witnessed Jesus Christ to him and he mocked me, he thought I was a joke, but he liked me. I met the marxist, the peaceniks, the free love evangelists, the prostitutes, the runaways. It was an interesting, even revolutionary time to be alive. I also witnessed the racial tensions, the riots, the peace marches, it was the era between the assassinations of JFK and Dr King. 

Despite the turbulent times, the era held a common delusion I did not share.  In that era, were you to claim there was actual evil in the world you would cause gales of laughter, so caught in Social Darwinism was society.  It was locked in a humanistic belief in evolutionary human perfection. Much like today, just like the Biblical Literalists are ever expecting the rapture, so then and now the evolutionary Darwinists are expecting the sudden evolutionary step.  It was this sick delusion that had created this era. It was what I described in a previous lesson, "just love and be nice"; the age of peace has arrived, but on mind altering drugs and easy sex, while Vietnam was raging and civil unrest was the norm. Only a few years and the free love hippy generation turned into an MKUltra horror show, the CIA providing the drugs, the Mansion Family Massacres and one of the innocent looking Beach Boys almost losing his soul and his life under the influence of that demonic and charismatic evil that posses Charles Manson. It was the beginning of Doctor Jeffrey McDonald's decades of persecution. It was the era when the sicko-psychopath pedophile Dr Kinsey had hypnotized people into narcissistic idolatrous sexuality and the prophet of the sexual revolution Hugh Hefner was making his mark. Timothy Leary was dropping acid in public, (also a CIA asset) Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael were preaching race hatred, and Dr King was hounded by the FBI. The first picture I saw of J. Edgar Hover in drag was circulating, and in a real way the world had gone mad. We have not recovered, but millions are wiser.  

  

Seeing that book "the death of god" on the shelf was almost like stepping through a tunnel in time and would that it were possible to share the "before and after" reality of that 46 year experience, in a meaningful way and the lessons learned. Sadly each generation has to learn these lessons again and again, and in 2012 in the face of the new atheism, legal pot, once again the government supplying the drugs, who can guess what society will appear 46 years from now.

I stopped at my favorite tobacco shop and spent some time talking with my Hindu Indian friend. The book and the experience of those days still very much on my mind, he told me that he had read Altizer's Memoirs, Living the Death of God. I didn't know he had written it; I haven't read it yet, but am curious. When I left, having sampled and purchased 3 ounces of a pipe tobacco blend called "Cherry Bon Bon" awesome stuff, I passed a Greek Orthodox Church, which represents the poster-child of what the 60s post-modernists were rejecting. It reminded me of a lifetime of experience between those two worlds, and so many characters. My oldest brother and best friend, Bill (memory eternal) use to say to me, "The world used to have characters. There are too few characters, now." He was talking about the homogenizing culture of the 70s and 80s recovering in shock, and in a sick way from the 60s. "But" he would remind me, "your life has no shortage of characters." Yes, I collected characters, because characters tell stories, and teach lessons. Bill would not have wasted much time talking to J.J., that is why he saw too few characters.

 Altizer was not so radical, but then he was the opposite of "Orthodox." He taught that the immanence of the holy spirit was God emptying himself into matter and that the transcendent God thus "suicided," and that God's emptying himself, through the crucifixion, ceased to exist except as matter. No longer would followers be able to dismiss the present world as transient. They would have to embrace the present completely, and keep all meaning in the here and now. 

 Like I say, J.J. wasn't so radical as the headlines he generated, "God is Dead!" He wasn't saying God is dead, exactly. He was just another heretic mixing modern philosophy with ancient theology and a touch of New Age mysticism, claiming to have discovered something. Orthodoxy thoroughly accepts the immanence of God, his creative energies coursing BEING into existence nano-second by nano-second, what I call for convenience "The primary Grace of Being." There is not a monad of energy that fires this BEING without HIM.  And further the understanding and the EXPERIENCE of The Way, teaches us, by that experience, the Godhead did not have to suicide to be immanent and indeed did not suicide, since all things exist "of Him, in Him, through Him, by Him." Simply put, God can circumscribe Being, but Being cannot circumscribe God. Like most post-modern theologians, I think what Altizer struggled to reject was not God, but the Person Jesus Christ. He merely created a new form of Unitarianism, a Godless one.  Anyway, I digress, that Greek Orthodox Church had a sign on the marque out front that read, "We had better discover our only hope and help, or brace for the worst."  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said it clearly, "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened." 

"Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: 'Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.' Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.'” -- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, (Edward E. Ericson, Jr., “Solzhenitsyn – Voice from the Gulag,” Eternity, October 1985, pp. 23-4)

We should not fear those who do not believe, or those who believe wrongly, if we have met Jesus Christ truly. When sincere seekers are tied to Christ, even the works and words of heretical theologians, agnostics and atheists can be turned to blessing. "All things work together for the good of those that Love the Lord and are the called according to his purpose."

My dear brother, now reposed, at the time in the 60s was a bitter Marxist/Atheist. I think he took his little brother seriously for the first time when home on leave from the military, he spent time at Manuel's one evening, with J.J. and me. By that time J.J. had become famous, or infamous, all according to your view. Don was just impressed that I was "friends" with a man who had caused Time magazine and news papers across the country to publish at Easter time, a blazoned headline, "GOD IS DEAD." In the eyes of a Marxist Atheist that was "street credit" whether he understood the sophistication of J.J's theology or not. I don't think he did. 

I had no idea who or what my brother would become, who or what I would become. But that night J.J. quoted Don a line, from a footnote of his book, (he just happened to have with him) seeing me frustrated dealing with my atheist brother. He said, "Dostoevsky has a special meaning for the word atheist that does perhaps fit your brother Don. In a fragment from The Possessed that does not appear in the final draft, but which has been published recently under the title Stavrogin's Confession, the monk Tikhon says: 'Complete atheism is more respectable than worldly indifference . . . A complete atheist stands on the last rung but one before absolute faith (he may or may not step higher), but an indifferent man has no longer any faith at all, nothing but an ugly fear, and that only on rare occasions, if he is a sentimental man."

That image of my brother, on the last rung of the ladder, I realized to be more true than not, because he was curious and always wanted to engage in deep conversation. He loved examining everything. I kept my brother in conversation, discussing every idea under the sun, for nearly two decades, until life and friendship, love, which is the presence of God, the drawing of the Holy Spirit, created great faith in him. And this happened by MANY means. I lived to see him become one of the Vice Presidents of Delta Airlines, a man of such strong faith that he faced death with peace and resolve at a young age, just in his fifties struck down with a rare form of incurable leukemia.  

He had been in hospital for a week, some days touch and go, but it appeared by weeks end that he had so much improved that he sent the rest of the family home, (some who had gathered from hundreds of miles, were already many hours away) and when I arrived that Sunday afternoon, he told his wife and others to go to dinner, to take time and relax. He knew the week had been rough on them. When they left, he turned to me and said, "You know what I have to do and I didn’t want to do this without you." He looked strong and the doctors were talking about releasing him. What he was saying was incongruent. I could not make his visual image, match his words, yet, in my gut I knew the eternal meaning of what he was saying. Yet, knowing the answer I asked anyway, "Are you saying what I think you are saying?" He just nodded, yes. When I started to speak, to of course offer an alternative to "giving up the ghost" he said, "Butch, all the words have been spoken, just BE here with me."  You see I knew he had taken great care to build and complete the part he was to keep. So much so, I knew even though by then I was a priest, he was so much more complete than me. The sanctity I could see in him, shamed me that day, like another day, standing before Saint Sarah. I knew I had much struggle ahead and that it would not be easy. I could not help but envy him and even that envy shamed me. 

I sat by tears streaming feeling such peace, grief and anxiety all at the same time.  About twenty minutes later he said, "Something is happening, I'm going to call the nurse."  He went unconscious in a matter of minutes and reposed a few hours later peacefully having never regained consciousness.  The presence of the Holy Spirit was like a bright fog in his room. When the church talks about the air turning luminous in the presence of sanctity, it is not a metaphor. All I could hear was that prayer I had prayed thousands of times, "That the Lord may obtain for us pardon of our sins, a sound mind and a Christian and peaceful end to our lives, Grant this, O Lord."

Don was so non-assuming, when he was promoted to be one of the several vice presidents of Delta Airlines, he didn't tell me, I don't think he told anyone. I knew he had risen near the top, but I had no idea that near. Standing wake, a fellow introduced himself, that he was a friend of Don's and that he knew who I was, he said, "You're Butch, I recognize you from your pictures. You are a priest, prison chaplain, composer, piano tuner, recording and visual artist, Don bragged about you quite a bit." I asked him how he knew Don and he said Delta. So I asked him what he did. He said he was over system avionics. I asked, "Like the computers that fly the planes and all the instrumentation?" He nodded yes, I asked in surprise, “over the whole system?"  He said, "Worldwide." 
"Wow! That's impressive. Who do YOU report to?" 
He said, "Until Sunday, him" pointing at Don in the coffin, "VP of Operations."  I've told this story to other siblings and they look at me funny, he didn't tell them either. That, my friend, is a man who understood what was important.

 
So simple the faith and courage to face physical death without terror, what a blessing for a younger brother to witness, especially the death of a former atheist/marxist who came to unshakable faith SUDDENLY and seriously, stepping off that last rung, as J.J. had stated it, nearly 40 years before.  Dostoevsky was right, the step from Atheism to great and unshakable faith is but one rung in the ladder, even upon the very ladder of Jacob. (ref Genesis Chapter 28)

Those unwilling to doubt, unwilling to challenge, unwilling to question will never gain the unshakable faith of The Way. They are the first path clingers to the known, superstitious and sometimes bitter people whose driving force is fear, their religion is sickness and every doubt is a demonic shadow, a wicked plot with no healing properties. Such is not The Way.

The Way is not a road map, it is not a theory, it is the willingness to seek what is TRUTH. Even if you believe there is no God, FIND the TRUTH of it; prove it to yourself. That was how Don found the faith. He used the method that I quoted of Dr. Judy Wood, "When you have eliminated all possibilities, you have to accept the facts, no matter how implausible those facts may seem." AND he did not take this in a theory so he could impress his friends with arrogant atheism; rather he tested his non-God theory in LIFE, in the experience of his LIVING, by willingly having others who believe call on God for him. Most atheists, whose atheism is shallow, would find this frightening. In FEAR they would MOCK the idea of "testing" to see if God is real. It was for Don the witness of impossible situations resolved by prayer, he witnessed it over, and over again, in the experience of his life, destroying the possibility of coincidence. Making of coincidence a statistical impossibility. He would say to me, "You know I don't believe, but if you would pray about x, y, or z. I would appreciate it."  The reason he used this language was because he knew that if he gave me the language of the indifferent, you know, "Send so and so some kind thoughts."  I would say, "No, rather I'll pray for them." He was on The Way, experiencing The Way, for the first part of the hike, claiming all the while that The Way did not exist. 

Even after he started attending Church, for the sake of his children born to him when he was in his late thirties, it was as a social convenience and political advantage; he was still a skeptic. But changed when he witnessed a friend’s four-year-old girl's sight restored by prayer. (I wrote the story down somewhere when he told me about it, twenty plus years ago. I will try to find it and include it in a subsequent lesson) 

Those willing to actually seek the Truth will FIND HIM. Those following a theory, or experiencing through a mediator, dealing merely with mental abstractions, rationalizing and/or romanticizing will rarely find TRUTH. Our only hope is Truth, and TRUTH is a person who walked among us and taught us; Who suffered for us, Who conquered death, hell and the grave; Who comes to us in person and makes himself known to us. His name is Jesus Christ and it is highly doubtful in this culture of American Religionism that you have heard much that is true about Him.

One does not need to be a philosopher or great theologian to recognize the truth desperately needed for this time, "We had better discover our only hope and help, or brace for the worst." 

Here was my Icon corner before I knew what Icons were, 1963. It was here where I would pray on those days I sipped scotch with Thomas J.J. Altizer. I hope he has stepped over those millions of words and stepped from that last rung to unshakable faith.
"Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on us."

My Brothers, Donald and Bill, pray for me that God will grant me repentance before the end.

Archpriest Symeon Elias and Friends.