#lisa mccullough
The least understood premise of Altizer’s death of God theology is its central paradox: that death alone makes God ‘alive.’ God is ‘alive’because God has died, hence the death of God is the ground of all life and the light of the world. If God is truly God (the absolute primordial), then nothing less than absolute death can transform God into a ‘living’ God, for it is death that grounds and conditions life, or actuality. To become actual, actually to ‘live,’ God must ‘die,’ must predestine death as an irreversible destiny. As every life lives by the principle of dying or perishing, actually consuming itself, dying away from its first dawning toward its final end, so the advent of death actually inaugurates life qua life. Because of their dialectical unity, to affirm life is to affirm death in equal measure, and any conatus toward life that would dispense with its grounding in death is finally seeking a fantasy image of life, an unreal, inactual illusion; whereas to desire actual life is to desire death as its intrinsic concomitant.
Lisa McCullough, “Theology as the Thinking of Passion Itself”
