*The New Gospel Of Christian Atheism

The New Gospel Of Christian Atheism is the seminal book by Thomas J. J. Altizer, whose proclamation views the Death of God (really a self-extinction) as a process which began at the creation of the cosmos and came to an end through Jesus... in reality pouring out the full spirit of the Creator into the cosmos through the act known as kenosis. In developing his position, Altizer draws upon the dialectical thought of Hegel, the visionary writings of William Blake, the anthroposophical thoughts of Owen Barfield (founder of the Inklings and strong influence upon J. R. R. Tolkien, T. S. Eliot, and C. S. Lewis), aspects of Mircea Eliade’s views of the sacred and the profane, and the mirror-negative statements of Friedrich Nietzsche, concluding that the latter was indeed a true Christian. Altizer also examines the notion of evil, presenting it as the absence of will, but not separate from God. Orthodox Christianity–-considered nihilistic by Nietzsche–-named evil and separated it from good without thoroughly examining its nature. However, the immanence of the spirit (after Jesus) within the world embraces everything created. The immanence of the spirit is the answer to the nihilistic state that Christianity, according to Nietzsche, was leading the world into. Through the introduction of God in the material world (immanence), the emptying of meaning would cease. No longer would alleged followers of Christ be able to dismiss the present world for a transcendent world. Instead, they would need to embrace the present completely, and keep meaning in the here and now.

–Skadi meic Beorh

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‘The New Gospel of Christian Atheism sets forth an apocalyptic theology of history that understands the ending of Christendom as a consequence of the universalism of Christianity itself, so that the “death of God” in the modern world reflects the final phase of a radical incarnational movement: that is, the embodiment of the divine Spirit in the “flesh” of the world. In this movement of immanentization, it is God’s transcendence itself that is sacrificed, negated, emptied out into the very world that embodies and incarnates the divine will, such that now the center of faith lies at the center of the world.’

-from the back cover of The New Gospel of Christian Atheism