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Christian atheist


Christian atheism is a system of ethics which draws its beliefs and practices from the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, as recorded in the Gospels of the New Testament and other sources, while rejecting the supernatural claims of Christianity at large. Christian Atheism takes many forms - some Christian Atheists take a theological position, in which the belief in the transcendent or interventionist God is rejected or absent in favor of finding God totally in the world (Thomas J. J. Altizer), while others follow Jesus in a godless world (William Hamilton). Hamilton's Christian atheism is similar to Jesuism.

Thomas Ogletree, Frederick Marquand Professor of Ethics and Religious Studies at Yale Divinity School, lists these four common beliefs:

According to Paul van Buren, a Death of God theologian, the word God itself is "either meaningless or misleading". He contends that it is impossible to think about God. Van Buren says that

"We cannot identify anything which will count for or against the truth of our statements concerning 'God'".

The inference from these claims to the "either meaningless or misleading" conclusion is implicitly premised on the verificationist theory of meaning. Most Christian atheists believe that God never existed, but there are a few who believe in the death of God literally.Thomas J. J. Altizer is a well-known Christian atheist who is known for his literal approach to the death of God. He often speaks of God's death as a redemptive event. In his book The Gospel of Christian Atheism he speaks of how

"Every man today who is open to experience knows that God is absent, but only the Christian knows that God is dead, that the death of God is a final and irrevocable event, and that God's death has actualized in our history a new and liberated humanity".


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