Hi – this is Jan, your gentle radical. We’re about to start another journey into what radicality means. Welcome.

If this is your first time here: this podcast is an experiment in spiritual and political seriousness without the need to pretend we have clean answers. Gentle — because it refuses to brutalize reality with easy certainty. Radical — because it goes to the root, and asks what we really trust when the comforting stories collapse. Today we stay with a figure who still makes many people uneasy: Thomas J. J. Altizer — the “death of God” theologian. I’m not trying to convert you, and I’m not trying to destroy him. I want to understand a person who took his own inner experience seriously and insisted that theology, belief, and politics cannot be separated from that seriousness.

For me, radicality means belief that comes after self-reflection, and then openness: the willingness to be changed, corrected, unsettled. That’s how I’m trying to understand the cross: not as a quick solution, but as a gift that makes us capable of truth, and therefore capable of love.

Altizer uses the word “radical” in a precise way. In The Call to Radical Theology, he writes that radical theology is “a rethinking that is initially an unthinking” — a clearing of what’s already established so a new theological ground can appear.

"A genuinely radical theology is a theological thinking that truly rethinks the deepest ground of theology, a rethinking that is initially an unthinking of every established theological ground; only through such an unthinking can a clearing be established for theological thinking, and that is the very clearing that is the first goal of radical theology. Nor can this be accomplished by a simple dissolution of our given theological grounds, for those are the very grounds that must here be ultimately challenged, and challenged in terms of their most intrinsic claims."

So “radical” doesn’t mean edgy; it means: go down to the roots. And if the roots are rotten, don’t decorate them — dig. This is why Altizer can feel uncompromising: his work isn’t mainly about improving theology. It’s about surviving an experience — and then rebuilding a language honest enough to name it.

To understand why the tone is so existential, we have to talk about two epiphanies he treats as decisive. The first is what he calls an “epiphany of Satan,” from his seminary time in Chicago. He had to go to an examination:

“Shortly before this examination, I was in a turbulent condition. While crossing the Midway I would experience violent tremors in the ground, and I was visited by a deep depression, one that had occurred again and again throughout my life, but now with particular intensity. During this period I had perhaps the most ultimate experience of my life, and one that I believe profoundly affected my vocation as a theologian, and even my theological work itself. This occurred late at night, while I was in my room. I suddenly awoke and became truly possessed, and experienced an epiphany of Satan which I have never been able fully to deny, an experience in which I could actually feel Satan consuming me, absorbing me into his very being, as though this was the deepest possible initiation and bonding, and the deepest and yet most horrible union.“

This is not presented as a neat parable; it’s told as a terrifying initiation. You can pathologize it, romanticize it, or turn it into a horror movie — but Altizer doesn’t use it to pose as a rebel with a cool jacket. He uses it to face something much more disturbing: the possibility that evil is not only out there, but also within faith itself.

Later he writes, “Naming the enemy is a genuine theological challenge,” and then insists that “the enemy is most deeply within … and most deeply within faith itself”. That line turns radical theology into self-interrogation. It says: you don’t get to fight evil while keeping your own belief pure and innocent. You don’t get to denounce domination while refusing to examine the ways you crave domination — or crave submission. Altizer is not trying to escape darkness; he is trying to tell the truth about where he found God — or where God found him — and it was not in a sunny, “healthy-minded” place.

“If a coincidentia oppositorum between Christ and Satan is a deep center of the Christian epic, it only gradually evolves or become manifest, not being fully called forth until full modernity, and only full modernity has envisioned the totality of Hell, or an absolute abyss or total darkness, a vision of the ultimate and final depths of an absolutely alien abyss that can be discovered in every primal expression of the late modern imagination.“

And he names this temperament very directly:

“I can only finally think of theology as a vocation for the sick soul. I simply cannot imagine theological depth apart from a true opening to the deepest pathology. How could one truly know an absolute No-saying without being deeply affected by it? There is no innocent knowledge here, nor any actual understanding of innocence itself, for here innocence can only be an innocence lost. And it is most lost by our very knowledge of God! If only here we can truly know God, and most know God in actually knowing the final loss of our innocence, as every theologian knows this is precisely the point at which apologetics is most powerful, for we cannot know the actual depths of either guilt or darkness without knowing God. (…) If only in the depths of our guilt and darkness, God is very much alive today; no one knew this more deeply than Nietzsche, which is just why his proclamation of the death of God can only truly be heard with a Yes and Amen.“

Brutal — but clarifying. If you want depth, you will meet pathology. If you want truth, you will lose innocence. If you want a faith that isn’t propaganda, you will have to face the parts of yourself — and the parts of your tradition — that are dangerous. This is where gnōthi seauton comes in. Because if radicality means self-knowledge, then Altizer forces a question: do I want religion as comfort, or do I want religion as a way of telling the truth about what is happening inside me and around me?

For Altizer, the cross is not decoration. He asks: “Why is it not possible to understand the death of God as occurring in the Crucifixion itself?”. In other words: maybe the cross is not simply the place where God saves us by staying safely “above” our suffering. Maybe the cross is where God empties Godself — and does it all the way. That is kenosis. And if kenosis is real, then it’s not only a doctrine about God. It becomes a spiritual practice for humans: letting go of fantasies of control, letting go of guaranteed meaning, letting go of the need to be innocent — not to become passive, but to become capable of action that is not based on domination.

“in June of 1955, while reading Erich 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, and this was a conversion to the death of God. For then I truly experienced the death of God, and experienced it as a conversion, and thus 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 were the very reversal of my experience of Satan. (…) Then I was impelled to begin the process of reversing my deepest theological roots, and this initially occurred by way of a reversal of that Barthianism which I had so deeply absorbed. This took place over many months when I returned to Indiana, spending most of my evenings intensively thinking about Barth while drinking bourbon and listening to the original recording of The Threepenny Opera.“

Threepenny functions there as a deliberately “profane” counter-soundtrack while he unlearns a whole theological posture—the underworld satire and moral cynicism sitting next to Barth’s high seriousness, bourbon included, like a self-chosen pressure test for whether theology can survive contact with modernity’s dark, ironic register. That fits the way he frames his wider turn toward the “radical profane” and toward Nietzsche as decisive for his theological voyage. The phrase — “pure grace” — matters. It means Altiter isn’t presenting the death of God as a clever argument. He’s presenting it as something that happened to him — and as gift.

So what does “death of God” mean here? Not childish atheism. Not cheap cynicism. Altizer is speaking about the death of a specific God: the distant sovereign, the external authority, the God imagined as cosmic police, as the ultimate sanction behind every earthly sanction. He insists that that God dies — and that this death is not simply loss. It is an opening: new presence, new responsibility, and even a strange kind of joy. He writes of “apocalyptic joy,” a joy that can be evoked “in the heart of darkness”. So the death of God is not the end of religious life; it’s the end of a certain kind of religious power. And this is where theology becomes political, because when God is imagined as a distant sovereign, religion becomes an apparatus of authority. When that God dies, authority doesn’t disappear — but it loses its sacred alibi.

Altizer is explicit about this. “Authority is always the fundamental problem of our theological and our political life,” he writes in Living the Death of God. That sentence could be printed on an anarchist banner. But for Altizer it is theological before it is tactical: theology becomes dishonest whenever it becomes an apology for authority — whether church authority, state authority, academic authority, or the authority of “the way it has always been.” And he has a sharp sense of the radical edge of Christian history itself. In Satan and Apocalypse, when he writes about Milton and the English Revolution, he says Milton’s politics are “assaulting all absolute authority”. Again: not reforming authority — assaulting absolute authority.

Altizer argues that “moral discipline” and “moral judgment” often block grace because they trap us in a courtroom mindset: proving, policing, and verdicts replace openness to others. “Morality” then becomes a prison with “law” as its warden: the pure imperative encloses us in an iron cage until assurance vanishes and we can only say “No.” But predestination, paradoxically, can turn even terrible judgment into liberation by dismantling the whole regime of law and self-justification—so that the ultimate “No” is heard, finally, as an ultimate “Yes,” releasing us into pure action and engagement:

“In this perspective, it is moral discipline which most turns one away from grace, just as it is moral judgment which most disengages us from every actual opening to another, and 'morality' itself which is a true prison, and a prison in which the 'law' itself is our warden, as Kafka so deeply knew. Then the absolute authority of the pure imperative is an absolutely enclosing authority, one imprisoning us in its iron cage, then all deep assurance vanishes, and we can only say No. Yet predestination can know even the most terrible judgment as a liberating judgment, one liberating in its total disenactment of everything that we can know as law, but one assuring us that even the most ultimate horror of an absolute No is finally an absolute and total Yes, and in hearing that Yes we are released into pure action or pure engagement itself.”

For Altizer, predestination is the key that reconfigures ethics at the root: if the ultimate ground of life is not moral merit, legal obedience, or institutional authority, then the whole regime of “law” is exposed as a prison, and morality becomes the very thing that blocks grace and real openness to others. Predestination, in this sense, is absolute antinomianism—an assault on every claim that law can secure righteousness or certainty—so the “ethical” is not the cultivation of a moral will but the liberation of action from moral self-justification. That is why he can say that genuine ethical engagement (“pure action”) depends on an ultimate assurance that is independent of our moral character; only when the moral will is disengaged—when law is disenacted—can we act without the compulsions of judgment, innocence, and authority. Read this way, predestination is not passive fatalism but the enactment of an inner-worldly historical necessity (visible in modernity in thinkers like Hegel and Marx): it isolates the individual into absolute responsibility and thereby makes possible a total, this-worldly engagement. And this is also why Altizer links ethics back to Jesus: the offense of Jesus strikes most deeply at those who “know the Law,” because the ethics of the Kingdom collapses the distance between imperative and indicative—obedience becomes response to a present reality, not submission to an external command—so ethics becomes the radical practice of acting in the world after the authority of law has been broken.

“Every full philosophy of history is a theology of predestination, a predestination which is an absolute historical necessity, so that to understand that necessity is to understand predestination, and so likewise to enact that necessity is to enact predestination, so that not only are Hegel and Marx both philosophers of predestination, but here Marx is the purer philosopher of predestination, for he can know genuine understanding as being inseparable from praxis, and thus can know a true understanding of history as an enactment of history, and as an enactment of that absolute necessity which is absolute predestination.”

In the same move, Altizer ties ethics to apocalypse and kenosis: the “ethics of Jesus” is a Kingdom-ethics where imperative and indicative collapse into one another—“be perfect” is not a Kantian law imposed on you, but the demand/announcement of a new actuality breaking in, calling for enactment rather than mere obedience. This makes Altizer’s ethics inherently anti-sovereign: in his radical Christianity, the center is the Passion/Crucifixion as self-emptying, and everything that smells like absolute power, religious sovereignty, or ecclesial control is a betrayal of that center. Ethically, that translates into a stance of ongoing resistance to constituted authority—churchly, moral, political—because only a shattered “Law” can open the space for living, risky, worldly engagement.

I want to be careful: Altizer doesn’t hand you a party platform. But he gives you a spiritual posture: do not sacralize domination. And here’s the hard part — this is where the “do not go the easy path” becomes very concrete. It’s easy to contest authority when it’s somebody else’s authority. It’s harder when authority is inside you: your craving for certainty, your desire to be right, your need to control the narrative, your need to feel innocent. This is why kenosis matters. Because kenosis is not only anti-authoritarian politics; it’s anti-authoritarian spirituality. It is the refusal to make your ego into God.

So what does it mean to live this radically — in life, not just in concepts? I want to translate Altizer into a practice without domesticating him. First: radical theology begins with self-reflection, not self-obsession — honesty. Where is my belief coming from? What fear is it covering? What power is it serving? Second: radical theology refuses the easy path. Altizer will not let you hide behind healthy-minded optimism; he insists that depth requires opening to pathology — not to glorify suffering, but to stop lying about it. Third: radical theology is kenotic. It is willing to lose innocence, willing to lose the fantasy of control, willing to lose the external-savior model. In his memoir he says creation itself is “a purely kenotic act of absolute self-emptying”. If creation is kenosis, then spiritual life is not climbing upward. It’s learning how to empty — and to act anyway. And fourth: radical theology contests authority — especially absolute authority — in politics, in institutions, and in ourselves.

What I’m describing is not a fantasy of purity. It’s the willingness to ask, again and again: who benefits from this authority? What does it do to the vulnerable? What does it do to truth? What does it do to love? And then — to live accordingly, even when it costs you the comfort of belonging, the comfort of being praised, the comfort of being “safe.”

Let me end with the gentle radical question. Where, in your own life, have you experienced a small death of God — a moment when a story you relied on, a belief, an institution, a role, an image of yourself, collapsed — and there was suddenly nothing to lean on? And then: what, if anything, began to grow in that exposed place? I’m not asking you to agree with Altizer. But I do think he helps us take those moments seriously. Instead of rushing to replace what died, what would it mean to live that collapse as kenosis? What new forms of honesty, solidarity, and responsibility could begin there?

Thank you for listening. You can find notes and extras at yourgentleradical.space. Until next time: stay gentle, and stay radical.