God is dead
“You know we’re just having fun, right? Like, there’s no God. There’s no... anything. We’re just people, in rooms, trying to be happy.”
That’s a quote from Succession, an HBO dramedy. In context, it’s said in reply to a question about personal philosophy. Nietzsche was mentioned; the daughter in the show replied, “I don’t know, isn’t that Nietzsche or something?”
I’m a former philosophy major, before changing to something even less practical, and I have about three or four years of intense study under my belt, so I like to think I know a thing or two about philosophy. And certainly a thing or two about Nietzsche (for the record, I’m a fan).
Nietzsche was human, though, and thus flawed. We have to put his work into context. Read this excerpt from Wikipedia, because it states the matter perfectly:
After his death, Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth became the curator and editor of his manuscripts. She edited his unpublished writings to fit her German ultranationalist ideology, often contradicting or obfuscating Nietzsche's stated opinions, which were explicitly opposed to antisemitism and nationalism.
His sister perverted his works. Her perversions of his works were latched onto by bad actors. Because of all the baggage around that, Nietzsche gets a bad rap from my hometown crowd, us evangelicals. And I get it. But when we mischaracterize Nietzsche’s body of work, we do the same thing his sister did; we edit his words to fit our own agenda. Case in point: Evangelicals love to quote Nietzsche saying, “God is dead,” but they stop there, punctuating his remark with a period. That’s not the way the quote goes. And, it wasn’t even Nietzsche who said it, but a fictional character from the mind of Nietzsche! Darth Vader said a lot of objectionable things, but we don’t go after George Lucas with pitchforks and torches!
The phrase is, “God is dead... and we killed him.” His sister would have it understood this way: “God is dead, and the Jews killed him.” But that’s not it either. Read the full quote. In 1882, Nietzsche wrote these now infamous words: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?” Nietzsche’s argument has been misunderstood, misrepresented, chopped up and turned into bumper sticker slogans by so many people that it’s all but meaningless now.
I want to bring meaning back to that infamous line, “God is dead,” on this, the week after Good Friday. The day our Lord was killed.
When Nietzsche penned those awful words, he was speaking of our age of enlightenment, our age of reason, of science, and of technology. He supposed that in all our doing, we out-did God. In all our working, we worked God out. In all our technology, and through all our advancements and progress, Nietzsche supposed that we somehow eliminated our need for God.
If a man writing in 1882 could recognize this, how much more so should you and I, in the Information Age? After all, who needs God when I’ve got Google? We sing, “Take it to the Lord in prayer.” But why, when I can receive immediate answers from WebMD?
Nietzsche’s conclusion was that if God has become obsolete, then there is no supreme moral agent to ‘set the rules,’ so to speak, and therefore, good and evil are ultimately meaningless. That’s where shows like the one quoted above come in. They take off with this idea, glorify it, and use it justify all manner of wickedness. “You know we’re just having fun, right? Like, there’s no God. There’s no... anything. We’re just people, in rooms, trying to be happy.”
The indie rock band Superdrag put it this way: “Nothing’s real, nothing matters.” This belief, rooted in Nietzsche’s work, came to be known as nihilism, from the Latin root nihilo, meaning ‘nothing.’ “There’s no... anything.”
Good Friday is the day we acknowledge that God in the flesh, the greatest something--Jesus Christ, the incarnate One--was killed. We acknowledge that we killed him. Mankind. All of us. And though you and I weren’t there on Calvary’s hill, we acknowledge that, perhaps by our own sin, we played a role in the killing. If by one man’s sin all this came to be, as Paul argued.
Our world does not share this awesome belief, that God came and died for us and that through his death, we were given new life. In fact, the truth of the gospel is foolishness to them (1 Corinthians 1:23). And in the Information Age, you might recognize, as I do, that the next generation has become alarmingly nihilistic in their thinking. ‘Nothing matters’ is their theme. Talk to a teenage kid sometime--ask them, no judgment, what they believe. More and more, I’m hearing existential angst. More and more, I’m hearing cynicism and world-weariness. More and more, “What’s it matter?” becomes the refrain. I’m also seeing the adoption of a new sort of liturgy of internet memes, a kind of new bible for the disenchanted.
This line of thinking didn’t end well for Nietzsche. I love Webster’s summary of his life, taken from the New Office Dictionary, 1962 edition. Webster’s dictionary records these simple words: “He died insane.” Nietzsche lived out the remainder of his days in such doubt concerning the nature of reality that he refused to leave his sister’s guest bedroom; she cared for him as he was bedridden in his despair. I’ve heard it said that he was afraid to walk out the door, for fear that the door-frame would collapse in on him and with it, all reality.
His god remained dead. Yours doesn’t have to.
On Good Friday we confront the ghastly image of our Lord slain, atop Calvary’s hill. But we also look to Easter Sunday, to the image of our resurrected Lord, triumphant over even the grip of death. If it sounds too good to be true, think about the story for a bit. Sit with it. Read and reread the accounts.
You don’t have to believe the story of the resurrection--not right now, not at first. Credible as it is, it is incredible. But you must consider the death of this enlightened bible teacher, Jesus of Nazareth. I want you to consider ways in which you might be killing God daily, in your thoughts, your beliefs, your hopes, or in the world-wisdom to which you appeal. Putting God to bed so that us grown-ups can talk. We kill God in our lives by submitting to anything and everything but our Creator. In so doing, we lose our ultimate sense of right and wrong, each doing “what is right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25). Insanity.