Once upon a time, we all believed in God. In an earlier epoch, we believed in God (or gods) as effortlessly as we believed in the firm ground beneath our feet and the expanse of sky above our heads. An ancient Greek poet expressed it like this in a hymn to Zeus (later reappropriated by the apostle Paul): āIn him we live and move and have our beingā (Acts 17:28). For the ancients, the divine was as immanent as the air they breathed. But that was before everything was on fire. That was before the conflagration of world wars, before the skies over Auschwitz were darkened with human ash, before the ominous mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, before the world witnessed twin pillars of smoke rising into the September sky over Manhattan, before long-venerated institutions were engulfed in the flames of scandal, before the scorched-earth assault on Christianity by its cultured despisers. Today, itās harder to believe, harder to hold on to faith, and nearly impossible to embrace religion with unjaded innocence. We live in a time when everything is on fire and the faith of millions is imperiled.
So, is Christian faith still viable in an age of unbelief?
Yes, it is possible. I can bear witness. My own faith has passed through the flames of modernity and is alive and well. Iāve faced the most potent challenges to Christian faith head-on and lived to tell the tale as a believing Christian. A healthy, flourishing faith is possible in the twenty-first century, but we need to acknowledge that we are passing through a time of rising skepticism, cynicism, and secularism. Our age is no friend to faith, and the challenges we face are real. I hear the melancholy whispers of Galadriel at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings: āThe world is changed: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it.ā1
āMuch that once was is lostāāmany of us resonate with that sentiment. The loss has been sudden and precipitous. The Western world entered the twentieth century still tethered to a much older worldāa world where people felt the immanence of God. But somewhere along the way through that tumultuous century, the cord was severed and we entered a new worldāa world where God seems to have gone missing. The ethos of our age might be described as the felt absence of God. Something has been lost and in the Western world, Christianity is in decline. Most denominations are losing membership and the fastest-growing religious category in America is ānone.ā For believers who, in their anxiety and frustration, recklessly frame this phenomenon in culture-war terms, this has produced considerable consternation. But their culture-war-induced rage only adds fuel to the fire of post-Christian attitudes. Being angry with modern people for losing their faith is like being angry with medieval people for dying of the plague. Something has happened in our time. Just as something happened in the Middle Ages that imperiled the lives of medieval people, something has happened in late modernity that has imperiled the faith of modern people. Something has crippled shared religious belief in the Western world over the past century. And no one foresaw it more clearly than Friedrich Nietzsche, the famed German philosopher and vehement critic of Christianity.
In 1882āseven years before his descent into madnessāFriedrich Nietzsche published a parable called The Madman. In the parable, a madman comes into a village on a bright, sunny morning holding aloft a lantern and crying, āI seek God! I seek God!ā This absurdity elicits laughter and mockery from the villagers. The madman then jumps into their midst with a wild look in his eyes,
āWhither is God?ā he cried; āI will tell you. We have killed himāyou 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? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as 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.ā2
After his rant, the madman smashes the lantern on the ground before his astonished listeners and says, āI have come too early, my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way.ā3 The parable ends with the madman going into churches and singing a requiem for God.
Itās a remarkably powerful and clairvoyant piece of imaginative writing that foresaw the decline of Christian faith in the twentieth century. Nietzscheās madman smashing the lantern might be seen as something like Mrs. OāLearyās cow kicking over the lantern in the barn. OāLearyās cow set Chicago on fire, and Nietzscheās madman set the Western world on fire. I donāt mean Nietzsche caused what is happening to Christian faith in Western Europe and North America, but he foresaw it with such clarity that itās as if he were present for the first flickering of what has become a raging inferno. In 1882, Nietzsche proclaimed that āGod is dead,ā though at that time the vast majority of people in Europe called themselves Christian and attended church. But by 1966, things had changed. That year, Time magazine put this controversial question on what is probably its most famous cover: Is God Dead? What seemed like the ravings of a madman in the 1880s became a legitimate question in the 1960s. In Nietzscheās parable, when the madman saw that the villagers were not prepared to hear his prophecy, he simply said, āI have come too early, my time is not yet.ā But his time has now come. Is God dead? Today, itās an even more relevant question than when it first appeared on the cover of Time.
LUNCH WITH NIETZSCHE
I have a fantasy of having lunch with Nietzsche at some cozy cafĆ© in Basel, Switzerland. If my fantasy were to come true, I would have to spend the first fifteen minutes catching him up with what has happened over the past century or soāfrom the rise of mechanized warfare in the First World War to the rise of weaponized disinformation in the digital age and the steady rise of atheism all along the way. I donāt think Nietzsche would be surprised. He saw most of it coming. Iāve read much of Nietzscheās work and have to admit I have a fondness for this troubled and provocative philosopher. He was a towering intellect, a tremendous writer, a savage polemicist, and the most formidable critic of Christianity in the modern era. And if one is offended by his hostile disposition toward Christianity, it should be remembered that his caustic assaults were more of an attack on moribund Christendom as a cultural artifact than on a faith centered on the life and teachings of Jesus. Indeed, Nietzsche at times seems to have a begrudging admiration for Jesus of Nazareth.
I readily admit to agreeing with a good deal of what Nietzsche writes. His critique of nineteenth-century European Christianity is often as accurate as it is scathing. Even if in the end, Nietzsche is tragically wrong about many important things, I still respect his analysis of the problem. So what does Nietzsche mean by what is probably his most famous aphorism: God is dead? In The Gay Science (or The Joyful Wisdom)āthe book that contains the parable of the madmanāNietzsche says, āThe greatest recent eventāthat āGod is dead,ā that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievableāis already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe.ā4
Even though itās now associated with him, Nietzsche didnāt coin the phrase God is dead. As the son of a Lutheran pastor, he would have heard that line in a Lutheran Holy Saturday hymn. And although Nietzsche had become an atheist, in his aphorism āGod is dead,ā he doesnāt simply mean that God doesnāt exist. Rather, he means that he foresees how belief in God will soon cease to be the organizing principle of European civilization. Nietzsche perceived that the Christian bourgeoisie already lived as if God did not exist, even if their religious philosophy had not caught up with their actual practice. PKs (pastorsā kids) like Nietzsche are often keenly aware of the hypocrisy of parishioners. Nietzsche understood that people often live as practical atheists before they come out of the closet as professed atheists. In the 1880s, Nietzsche was saying that Western civilization had already in practice become atheistic, even if most people didnāt know it yet. With the prescience of a prophetāalbeit a mad prophetāNietzsche anticipates the rise of a secular age where faith is increasingly pushed to the periphery. And he was entirely correct in his prophecy.
Yet unlike the smug new atheists, Nietzsche did not gloat over the demise of Christianity. Rather, he feared that it would leave nothing but the void of nihilism that he described as āan infinite nothing.ā He spoke of the loss of Christian faith as a sponging away of the horizon, meaning that Western culture would suffer a crisis of moral vertigo, unable to define what constitutes the Good. Nietzsche knew that if culture becomes atheistic without supplying a new organizing center to replace what was once occupied by God, that culture is doomed to drift into cold and empty nihilism. He describes it as the earth being unchained from the sun. Unlike the zealous new atheists, Nietzsche didnāt say āHooray! Weāve got rid of God! Now everything will get better!ā Nietzsche was much more sober and feared that life in a world that had abandoned God would become petty and pointless.
Nevertheless, Nietzsche was ready for the world to take the bold step and move on without God. Nietzsche was a kind of John the Baptist preparing the way for a new secular age. Nietzsche hoped that this new age would see the rise of the Ćbermensch, the overman, the superman; he hoped that through what he called the will to power heroic men (and yes, it would be men) would lead humanity into a new dawn of greatnessāa theme the Nazis would exploit to horrific ends.5 Nietzsche hoped that men as gallant gods would rise to occupy the place previously occupied by the Judeo-Christian God. But he also feared that instead of the superman, the future would belong to what he called āthe last man.ā In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he writes,
Behold! I show you the last man.
āWhat is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a starāāso asks the last man and he blinks.
The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man who makes everything small. His species is ineradicable like that of the flea; the last man lives longest.
āWe have invented happinessāāsay the last men, and blink.6
For Nietzsche, the last man (his metaphor for the final development of a failed humanity) is an incurious utilitarian who can only see value in terms of commerce. The last man has no grander ambition than a kind of sedated happiness, and Nietzsche thought that making happiness our prime objective was an unworthy goal for human life. The Ćbermensch wants much more out of life than mere happiness. For the Ćbermensch, the struggle itself brings more meaning to life than personal contentment. From Nietzsche, we get the famous saying āWhat doesnāt kill me makes me stronger.ā7 Nietzsche, who was a mountaineer himself, would have appreciated George Malloryās famous answer to the question of why he was climbing Mount Everest: āBecause itās there.ā
But the last man can never understand the value of a noble struggle. For the last man, climbing a mountain or exploring the ocean or creating art or gaining an education can only be worth the effort if it serves a utilitarian end. The last man has no interest i...
