Publishing Altizer's Nightmare

A book sent to me by the State University of New York Press caught my attention in a way I wish it hadn't. It's Living the Death of God: Theological Memoir by Thomas J. J. Altizer, with a foreward by Mark C. Taylor. The press notice accompanying the volume points out that 40 years ago, April 1966, Time magazine asked on its cover, "Is God Dead?" Altizer, "then a young faculty member at Emory University and a leading death-of-god theologian, was named in the issue as a primary author of the deity's obituary."

I looked into the volume to see what it could possibly say and came upon one creepy passage. He relates how he had "unexpectedly and totally failed" a psychiatric examination as a prerequisite for his canddiacy for the priesthood of the Episcopal Church. "I was seriously advised that I could expect to be in a psychiatric institution within a year." Failing the exam had been preceeded by "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 a 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. Few who read me know of this experience, but it is not accidental that I am perhaps the only theologian who now writes of Satan, and can jokingly refer to myself as the world's leading satanologist; indeed, Satan and Christ soon became my primary theological motifs....

Well, with his new book, apparently people are now being informed about this experience. I wonder, had he told Time magazine about it, would they have reported it? (He doesn't date it in the book, but it occurred at least 12 years before the Time story, while at the University of Chicago, where he was a student from 1947 to 1954). It sounds like another instance of 1 Peter 5:8 to me. The book has a strong odor of sulfur about it and I won't be reading it.