Thomas J. J. Altizer

Thomas Jonathan Jackson Altizer (May 28, 1927 – November 28, 2018) was an American university professor, religious scholar, and theologian, noted for his incorporation of Death of God theology and Hegelian dialectical philosophy into his body of work. He regarded his philosophical theology as also being grounded in the works of William Blake and considered his theology to have come into its own with his extended study of Blake's radical visionary thinking: *The New Apocalypse: The Radical Christian Vision of William Blake* (1967); indeed he regarded himself as the first and only fully Blakean theologian. Altizer was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and grew up in Charleston, West Virginia. He attended St. John's College and the University of Chicago, where he earned his advanced degrees. His master's thesis focused on Augustine of Hippo, and his doctoral dissertation examined Carl Gustav Jung's understanding of religion. After failing a psychiatric test for ordination as an Episcopal priest, he experienced a profound spiritual event in 1955, which he described as a conversion to the death of God, a reversal of an earlier terrifying experience of Satan. He taught at Wabash College, Emory University, and Stony Brook University, where he was Professor Emeritus until his death. His controversial views on God's death gained national attention through *Time* magazine in the mid-1960s, leading to backlash and death threats, which he argued were misplaced, as he saw God's death as a self-extinction and culmination through Jesus Christ. He drew on Hegel, Blake, Owen Barfield, and Mircea Eliade. He engaged in debates with figures like John Warwick Montgomery and Walter Martin. In his later work, *Godhead and the Nothing* (2003), he explored the nature of evil as an absence of will, deeply connected to God. He lived in the Pocono Mountains, Pennsylvania, from 1996 onwards.