“Almost invariably the radical Christian has set himself against theology, believing that theology is inevitably bound to the authority of the Church, and thus is incapable either of speaking the original language of faith or of expressing a contemporary Christian vision. Quite simply the radical Christian has judged theology as such to be closed to either original thinking or imaginative vision, and the so-called renaissance of theology in the twentieth century has done little to dissipate the force of this judgment. Nevertheless, the fact remains that so long as the radical vision remains unassimilated by theological discourse it will both continue to remain foreign to the community of faith and appear to be confined to a peculiarly speculative or imaginative realm. The task of theology today is to appropriate a contemporary Christian vision in such a manner as to make it thinkable as faith. So far from continuing to find its ground in the finality of Biblical revelation, theology must seek contemporary expressions of the Word of faith, opening itself to the address of a Word that has become fully actual in the present, an incarnate Word that has ceased to be meaningful and real in its original or initial expression. Above all, theology must abandon a religious form, wholly and consistently repudiating the religious quest for the primordial sacred, and with it the religious negation and reversal of the profane; for to the extent that theology even now remains bound to a primordial or transcendent Word it will remain closed to the present and human actuality of history. Consequently, theology must follow the radical Christian in passing through the death of God, in dying to every echo and memory of the reality of the primordial God, not as a means of simply capitulating to its own dissolution, but rather as a way to the rebirth of itself.”

Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism

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