The Contemporary Jesus

by Thomas J.J. Altizer

The Contemporary Jesus is the first critical study integrating a contemporary understanding of Jesus with the most powerful, imaginative visions of Jesus in our history. The book imaginatively engages many views of an apocalyptic Jesus, gnostic Jesus, Buddhist Jesus, Pauline Jesus, Crossan's Jesus, and the Catholic, Protestant, and nihilistic views found in writers such as Dante, Joyce, Milton, Blake, Dostoyevsky, and Nietzsche. Altizer also examines the Jesus who emerges from the Jesus Seminar. Seldom, if ever, has there been such an intense public and critical engagement with Jesus, as our New Testament scholarship is wholly isolated from both our imaginative and our conceptual traditions, and likewise isolated from all genuine theological or even religious understanding. The Contemporary Jesus bridges that chasm, this alone making the book unique, but the book is also an embodiment of a contemporary radical theology which is Christian and universal at once. It intends a critical recovery of the original Jesus that can be integrated with our deeper history, a history which is finally a universal history, but a universal history that is wholly opaque to our given and established theological understanding.

225 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 1997

About the author

Thomas Jonathan Jackson Altizer was a radical theologian who is known for incorporating Friedrich Nietzsche's conception of the "death of God" and G. W. F. Hegel's dialectical philosophy into his systematic theology.

Reviews

[David]

Difficult book, as always with Altizer, but perhaps the most accessible I've yet read. This doesn't have the poetic, incantatory language of Genesis and Apocalypse: A Theological Voyage Toward Authentic Christianity, but it provides the ample rewards of Altizer engaging in a series of focussed reflections (Crossan's Jesus, Protestant Jesus, Catholic Jesus, Buddhist Jesus, etc). He's such a careful and illuminating reader that these reflections are powerful and fascinating even on their own, but it also becomes a mosaic that, by the end, quite clearly expresses his complex overarching project and his claims. (It also benefits, perhaps, by coming here so far along into his theological project. He can draw from, what, 30 years or more of work? And he just keeps going along after this, up until this present moment of July 2018.)

Highly recommended if you are at all curious about radical theology and/or so-called "death of God" theology.

[Alex]

This book surveys different perspectives of Jesus, from the view points of literary figures such as Dante, Joyce, Blake and Nietzsche. The portraits of Jesus given here by Altizer are by definition universal or perennial philosophies. Altizer's achievement is to take the reader to the very heart of the human imagination with his unfolding of various portraits before painting a brand new picture as equally dazzling. Especially illuminating are the chapters on the Buddhist Jesus; this is not a mere conflation of similarities but a unification of the two figures in the human imagination.

This book is not so much for people wanting a theology that is relevant to contemporary times-Don Cupitt would be more recommended-but Altizer's book is very much more the mystic text and more purely religious.

The book begins with an examination of modern critical perspectives of Jesus, including those of John Crossan. These are of interest to the specialist but not essential. There are also two chapters that bookend the work which are purely personal theological treatises that are highly idiosyncratic and quite turgid. They are perhaps more illuminating to himself and his close readers.