Journalists in the mid 1960s gathered four American Protestant theologians under one label, death of god theology, and the label has stuck ever since, but the four did not agree with one another and some resisted the label outright. Thomas J. J. Altizer's position was the most metaphysically committed: God, in the Incarnation and above all the Crucifixion, poured himself wholly and irreversibly into the world, so that the transcendent God of classical theism no longer exists anywhere to be found, having become fully identical with a sacred, ever changing historical process. William Hamilton's position was narrower and more experiential: he did not claim to know whether God exists in himself, only that God had, as a matter of the modern believer's actual experience, stopped being a live possibility one could pray to or wait on, so that Christian ethics had to proceed as action in the world without that expectation.
Gabriel Vahanian, whose 1961 book gave the movement its name, is regularly misread as a member of this same camp, but his actual claim was different again and considerably more conservative: not that God had died in any sense, but that a secularized modern culture had made God irrelevant to it, a diagnosis of Western culture rather than a constructive theology of God's nonexistence, and Vahanian himself objected to being grouped with Altizer's far more radical claim. Paul van Buren pursued a fourth, largely separate project, restating Christian ethical language in the empiricist terms of contemporary secular language philosophy without asserting or denying anything about a transcendent God at all. Treating the four as a single school states the media reception of the 1960s accurately and states the theology inaccurately.