The main proponents of this radical theology included the Christian theologians Gabriel Vahanian, Paul Van Buren, Dorothee Sölle, William Hamilton, John Robinson, Thomas J. J. Altizer, Mark C. Taylor, John D. Caputo, Peter Rollins, and the rabbi Richard L. Rubenstein.
In his intricately engraved illuminated books, Blake sought to throw off the dogmatism of his contemporary Christianity and, guided by a lifetime of vivid visions, examine the dark, destructive, and apocalyptic undercurrent of theology.
Most notably, Blake refused to view the crucifixion of Jesus as a simple bodily death, and, rather, saw in this event a kenosis, a self-emptying of God.
As Altizer writes, Blake "celebrates a cosmic and historical movement of the Godhead that culminates in the death of God himself.
[3] Though he preceded the formal Death of God movement, the prominent 20th-century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich remains highly influential in the field.
[citation needed] Thomas J. J. Altizer offered a radical theology of the death of God that drew upon William Blake, Hegelian thought and Nietzschean ideas.
Altizer concluded that God had incarnated in Christ and imparted his immanent spirit which remained in the world even though Jesus was dead.
[6] Although the direct linkage between the Lacanian-Marxist critical theory of Slavoj Žižek and Death of God thought is not immediately apparent, his explicitly Hegelian reading of Christianity, defended most conspicuously in the 2009 The Monstrosity of Christ, strongly lends itself to this tradition.
Initially, reviewers vigorously rejected this connection, but following the publication of The Monstrosity of Christ as well as subsequent co-paneled sessions,[7] the direct relation between Žižek and Thomas Altizer has become clear.
[8] Vahanian, Van Buren, and Hamilton agree that the concept of transcendence had lost any meaningful place in modern thought.
Van Buren and Hamilton offered secular people the option of Jesus as the model human who acted in love.