The article, highly nuanced on the theme, focused mostly on how science and secularism were supplanting religion. But in a country where 97 percent of adults said they believed in God, it touched off a ferocious backlash against the magazine and led to the vilification particularly of Dr. Altizer, who was more visible than the others, spoke to the press and had a certain theatrical flair.

“God is dead,” he asserts with finality in a documentary produced for National Educational Television after the Time article came out. “This God is no longer present, is no longer manifest, is no longer real.”

He even went on the “Merv Griffin Show,” a popular television talk program, though the event, held before a live audience in a Broadway theater, was a debacle. He was given two minutes to speak. “The response was a violent one,” he wrote later, “forcing the director to close the curtains and order the band to play forcefully, and after this event a crowd greeted me at the stage door, demanding my death.”

His theology was esoteric and not easily understood, leaving most people, including many clergy, to react viscerally to its basic premise. Confusing matters was that the few theologians in his intellectual circle — including William Hamilton, Paul M. Van Buren and Rabbi Richard Rubenstein — did not agree among themselves on how God had died, why he had died or what his death meant. They were essentially writing God out of the picture, but they did not consider themselves atheists; Dr. Altizer called himself a Christian atheist, further muddying the waters.

“He was one of the country’s most hated, misunderstood, radical and prophetic voices of the past century,” said Jordan E. Miller, who taught religion at Stonehill College in Massachusetts, wrote articles with Dr. Altizer and considered him a mentor.