Colin Lyas on the Coherence of Christian Atheism

Abstract

IN A stimulating article 'On the Coherence of Christian Atheism'1 Colin Lyas claims that Gabrial Vahanian and Harvey Cox use the expression 'God is dead' non-literally in a theistic sense, that William Hamilton and Paul van Buren use it non-literally in an atheistic sense, and that Thomas Altizer uses it literally in an atheistic sense that purports to be Christian. Lyas finds Altizer's use of the expression particularly intriguing. He takes Altizer to mean that 'God, as a matter of fact, irreversibly died in Christ. This actually happened' (p. 7). 'God annihilated himself' (p. 9). 'The proposition has annihilated entails the proposition, could at one time and at a later time might no longer exist . . . If we ask X to annihilate himself we are asking that he should at one time and then bring it about that he does not at a later time' (p. 10). 'Once we concede that God does not any more, then since by definition a necessary being could not begin to exist, God's death is final' (p. 13). There is some confusion here. To say someone is dead is not to say he has been annihilated, certainly not that he has annihilated himself. Death usually leaves us with a corpse on our hands. The concept of self-annihilation has little empirical warrant. Even if one were to suppose that God annihilated himself, it would not follow that he could at one time and at another not. To apply, temporal predicates to God is inappropriate. The proposed divine selfannihilation must be atemporal. -it is in any case difficult to conceive annihilation as a temporal event. I cannot think of 'God' nor of 'God's having died' as 'a matter of fact'. The use of this latter expression deserves further attention. It seems a far cry from 'a matter of fact' to the classical notion of 'Pure Act'. The definitive evaluation of Altizer's Christian Atheism must await a satisfactory account of the ontological status of facts and matters of fact together with their conditions of possibility and some further elucidation of the notions of death and annihilation with reference to the Christian concept of God. Lyas thinks Altizer's language is 'often very obscure'. Sometimes it 'has a purely imaginative force'. His book 'poses a great problem to the ordinary understanding'. 'It is not clear exactly what Altizer's position is, nor what one could say to him that would lead him to see the falsity of his position', since he 'appears to reject both the law of identity and the law of contradiction' (pp. 4-5). The Gospel of Christian Atheisni expresses in words a coincidentia oppositorurn more suitably conveyed in images and symbols. 'It is the image as such, as a whole bundle of meanings, that is true and not any one of its meanings, nor one alone of its many frames of reference. To translate an image into a concrete terminology by restricting it to any one of its frames of reference is to do worse than mutilate it-it is to annihilate, to annul it as an instrument of cognition. We are not unaware that in certain cases the psyche may fixate an image on one single frame of reference-that of the concrete; but this is already a proof of psychic disequilibrium.'2 Salesian College. Battersea.