Which One of Us is Dead?
An Overview and Interaction with the Basic Ideas of Frederich Nietzsche
The Man
“Frederich Nietzsche was born in rural Prussia, the son and grandson of Lutheran pastors.” A brilliant philologist, he became a professor at just 24 years old at the University of Basil. While his career was short, cut off in 1889 due to a mental breakdown from which he never recovered, he still is read as one of the most important thinkers of the 19th century, and the modern period.
In this paper I want to address three aspects of Nietzsche's thought, and contrast them with a biblical perspective. These three areas are the genealogy of morals, the death of God, and the nature of humanity. Together they help display his desire to make a radical break with the assumed Christianity of his day.
From Whence Come Morals?
In his book The Genealogy of Morals (1887) Nietzsche “sets out to challenge our most basic assumptions, especially our notions of good and evil.” Nietzsche hates transcendent truth claims, and argues, in the words of Carl Trueman, “that both Christianity and Kant [must] realize that their claims to truth are not ultimately claims about objective reality but claims about how they want the world to be in order to suit their own particular ends.” Nietzsche believed that the true dichotomy was between good and bad, not good and evil. Further, Christianity had, by attributing goodness to weakness and tying up evil with strength, inverted the natural order and created a false morality. Thus, “we might say that while for a man like David Hume Christianity is epistemologically indefensible, for Nietzsche it is morally repugnant.” And in his disgust, he wants to overthrow those morally repugnant ideals. As Nietzsche writes in Ecce Homo, “Overthrowing idols (my word for “ideals”) -- that comes closer to being part of my craft.”
This is significant, because as Trueman points out later in the above quoted page, it anticipates the modern distaste for Christianity and Christian virtues. How do we respond to this as Christians? The words of the apostle Paul come to mind,
For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men. (1 Corinthians 1:22-25)
Paul is not surprised by the accusation that Christianity is simply foolishness. Christianity isn’t a religion created to simply cover for the weak, the idea that such a religion would have taken hold in the upper class parts of Greco-Roman society is nearly laughable. But it surely will look weak to those who want to define their own morals. Paul makes clear in Romans 1:18-25 that the rejection of a Creator God who would have rights to determine our behavior and dictate an authoritative right and wrong is something will willfully reject (see also John 3:19, “And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their deeds were evil”).
C.S. Lewis notes that Christianity is a revealed religion, providing us not with affirmation of our previous biases, but a truth which will cut contrary to our desires. “Christianity does not simply affirm or simply deny the horror of death; it tells me something quite new about it. Again, it does not, like Nietzsche, simply confirm my desire to be stronger, or cleverer than other people.” Ironically, while Nietzsche chastises Christianity for being a religion that justifies weakness, he seeks to create a belief system meant to justify his own preference: the “will to power.”
Is He Dead?
The lay Christian may be most familiar with Nietzsche’s claim that God is dead. They may be less familiar with the way this is presented in The Gay Science.
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried: “I will tell you. We have killed him--you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?...Do we hear nothing yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
The idea here is not simply a bald statement of atheistic belief, but rather is meant as an indictment of post-Enlightenment Europe. In the Enlightenment God was intentionally rendered unnecessary and/or implausible in the eyes of many of the educated class, and yet it takes Nietzsche’s madman to see the reality that to do away with God is to “unchain the earth from its sun.” The earth orbits the sun, and life on earth depends entirely upon the sun. In the pre-Enlightenment West, Christianity served as that sun. After the Enlightenment many still wanted to function as if Christianity and its sun-like functions were still in operation, while denying the underlying reality. “God continued to inform the social imaginary, and Nietzsche wants to put an end to this.”
In this intellectual consistency, Nietzsche is to be admired. Those who reject the presence of God and yet seek to administer some absolute set of rules, right and wrong, and to believe in things like human rights really are trying to build mansions on the seashore. One good wave and they come crashing down. Nietzsche believes the foundations are gone and rejoices in this fact. He cannot grasp why so many are playing around as if they are still in place.
Of course, from a theistic (and specifically Christian) point of view, it is Nietzsche who has built his house upon the sand (Matthew 7:24-27). His intellectual consistency is to be admired, and yet he never recognizes how genuinely unworkable and unlivable it is. And while you may believe you’ve created an intellectual and moral system which does not need God, your conscience will nonetheless bear witness (Romans 2:15-16, though Nietzsche denies this experience in Ecce Homo), and to quote the old spiritual, “sooner or later, God’ll cutcha down.” The subway graffiti is perhaps too flippant, but is nonetheless correct:
“God is dead.” --Nietzsche.
“Nietzsche is dead.” --God.
What Does It Mean to Be Human?
Nietzsche rejected the concept of human nature as we know it. “At root, Nietzsche’s attacks on metaphysics, morality, Christianity, and Kant are really attacks on the concept of human nature.” This is tied to his rejection of any outside moral standard, any authority outside of the great and self-made man himself. He is not a nihilist, believing that every moment held significance and should be treated that way. However, he rejected any transcendent meaning, any idea that there is an essential standard to which humans ought to seek to conform. “Freedom for Nietzsche is freedom from essentialism and for self-creation.”
Are humans meant to simply chart their own way, to cut their own course? Should one be self-seeking? Nietzsche would say, yes, selfishness is the key to the good life: “At this point the real answer to the question, how one becomes what one is, can no longer be avoided. And thus I touch on the masterpiece of the art of self-preservation--of selfishness.” He believes that “He is the master of his fate; he controls his destiny.”
But Christianity has different ideas concerning freedom and the good life. When Jesus speaks of the Son giving true freedom (John 8:31-32) he is speaking of a Spirit-borne freedom to obey God. This can be clearly seen in Romans 6:20-23,
20 For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. 21 But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. 22 But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. 23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
The fruit of following God - living as a creature under the authority of a Creator - is true freedom. This service, this slavery to righteousness, is a freedom to be who we are meant to be. To live in keeping with our true nature as human beings made in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26-28). Experience bears this out, and - not to put too fine a point on it - to some extent Nietzsche’s own life does. He rejected the authority of God and he went mad. To risk over-interpreting an individual life, it is eerily reminiscent of the death of Herod in Acts 12:20-23.
Conclusion
What do we make of Nietzsche? Perhaps it would be wise to conclude with Sproul, “If at the earliest stages of intellectual reflection a person denies the existence of God, then the more brilliant he is, the farther his thought will move away from God.” He had an unquestionably brilliant mind, and a wonderful gift for language. But his gifts were used in an effort to escape from his Maker, an escape none of us can pull off (Hebrews 9:27).
Bibliography
Aiken, David W. 2003. “Nietzsche and His Zarathustra: A Western Poet’s Transformation of an Eastern Priest and Prophet.” Zeitschrift Für Religions- Und Geistesgeschichte 55 (4): 335–53.
Martindale, Wayne and Jerry Root, eds. The Quotable Lewis. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1989.
Nietzsche, Frederich & Walter Kauffman, translator. Basic Writings of Nietzche. New York: Modern Library, 1992.
Papineau, David, ed. Western Philosophy. New York: Metro Books, 2004.
Sproul, R. C. The Consequences of Ideas. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2000.
Trueman, Carl R. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Wheaton, IL: Crossway. 2020.
Comments
Post a Comment