The God We Thought Was Dead
The God We Thought Was Dead
Paul Anleitner
For some mysterious reason that still eludes me to this day, the world I inhabited of 90’s Evangelical youth group culture made some fierce and strange attempts to package the message of the gospel into witty t-shirt designs. There seemed to be a belief that pervaded the times, that the profound, transformative, and hauntingly beautiful Good News of Jesus Christ could be condensed into tritely cliched and parodied t-shirts and other wares that occupied the shelves of my local Christian bookstore.
I could walk the halls of any youth group lock-in, or survey the sea of adolescent Jesus freaks sitting in the pews as they watched a strongman rip a phonebook, and find at least one person wearing an orange shirt that looked like it said Reese’s—with the unmistakable peanut butter cup logo and font—but upon closer inspection, revealed the word Jesus in that same patented branding. Look around a bit more and I’d likely find at least one adult youth leader that never skipped bicep day, wearing a black t-shirt that said Lord’s Gym, clearly parodying Gold’s Gym, with a body-builder Jesus doing a push-up, the cross resting precariously on His back.
Though the intended outcome of these shirts remain a mystery to me, there was one specific standard 90’s youth group shirt that completely fascinated me. It was typically all black with white font. Each side had a brief quotation.
The front of the shirt read:
“God is dead.” — Nietzsche
While the back said:
“Nietzsche is dead.”— God
Philosophy was not an enterprise that my particular Christian context celebrated. In fact, in many Evangelical Christian schools or student ministry programs, one’s first exposure to any proper philosopher at all was likely to only occur in the latter years of high school, typically through an apologetics course or Christian worldview class.
As a result, by the time I entered early adulthood, I was only familiar with the 19th Century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche through the lens of the facile own-the-atheists apologetics—a methodology that typically accomplished its aims through the easily burned straw men of atheist caricatures.
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It was in my early adult years, when I was confronted by the startling dissimilarities between the Jesus of the Scriptures and the parody, dare I even say idolatrous, caricatures of a Reese’s Jesus, (along with the stark realization of the sheer ineffectiveness of offering a hurting world such vapid cliches) that I began to feel within me a growing thirst for depth and a courage to confront a world far more complex than t-shirt cliches.
I studied history in undergrad and became obsessed with the shifting movements of thought in Western civilization. Eventually, I went on to graduate school and studied philosophical theology and theology of culture. Though it may sound odd, Nietzsche became my favorite atheist. As I immersed myself in his work, the story that contains his famous “God is dead” quotation came to be, from my new vantage point, one of the most important and profound insights in the history of Western civilization.
Understanding Nietzsche’s point is pivotal to understanding our current cultural moment and the new epoch that is dawning. To be serious about the Good News requires us to wrestle with what the shape of that Good News will look like in the day and time that we inhabit.
In Nietzsche’s 1882 Parable of the Madman, a man comes into the town square announcing that God is dead, not with joyous evangelistic zeal, mind you, but with a panicked combustion of woe, fear, and dread.
"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?
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.
“How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?”
The crowd looked at him as if he were mad, thus the madman concludes:
“I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its
way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men.”
As I survey the landscape of history over the last two centuries, and look around at this current cultural moment that is unfolding in the real-time experiment that we call social media; or when I turn on my tv; or meet the people I pastor and disciple; or even when I pick up something as innocuous as a comic book, I see all the signs of another death on the horizon…
Let me explain.
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It’s obvious as one reads Nietzsche that the parable was not some ontological death of God, as if Nietzsche was making a metaphysical argument against God’s existence. What we have here instead is the parable a prophetic madman foretelling a definitive shift in theological, philosophical, and narrative perspective in Western civilization. This shift would mean the death of the West’s belief in God and the death of Christendom.
Though the crowd could not see it, this prescient prophet could see the bleeding edge of the radically shifting cultural curve. The idea of the God of Christianity was dying in the West, and this madman, with such a prophetic perspective—with this death so inevitable—he declared it as being a present tense fact, even though that future had not yet fully arrived in the minds of the masses.
Not long after the madman sang his funeral dirge for God in Nietzsche’s 19th-century parable, there came the unimaginable onslaught of humanity’s two worst wars, death camps, and the atom bombs of the 20th century. After all the horrors the world had seen, where baptized men from the nations of Western Christendom went out and killed each other by the tens of millions, the crowds no longer mocked Nietzsche’s madman. For the first time in recorded human history, to not be “religious” became a viable option for entire civilizations.
Certainly, the West has never completely untethered itself from the Christian story entirely, but as the philosopher Charles Taylor noted in his seminal work A Secular Age, Western thought long before Nietzsche had begun to split reality into two boxes: transcendence and immanence. In the transcendence box, we placed all that we now typically deem as spiritual. In the immanence box went nature, science, physics, math, logic, the humanities, politics… and that box kept growing while the transcendence box kept shrinking. Transcendence became a private sphere of personal practice, acceptable as long as it doesn’t infringe upon those trustworthy domains of immanence that actually disclose reality to us.
If we killed God, it was by suffocation.
Even the most earnest Christians became unaware of this narrative programming. We incorporated words like supernatural into our vocabulary despite the complete absence of any such word existing in our Bible. We became willing combatants in an imaginary war between science and faith. Christian schools developed curriculum focused on “biblical integration” where teachers could somehow learn how to connect a concept in algebra to a Bible verse. Our imaginations depleted by the secular vision, we struggled to conceive of the God of the Christian Scriptures who is at once wholly transcendent and simultaneously immanent. Instead of the metanarrative of the Christian story being the philosophical support system that allowed math and science to exist and function at all (as was the opinion of many great early mathematicians and scientists like Isaac Newton), we struggled to figure out how to shoehorn Biblical proof texts into lessons about mathematic equations because we couldn’t allow Christians to just do secular math.
Despite this interesting and devastating splintering, I believe a new day is dawning…
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At the risk of appearing like I have a peculiar sense of hubris, allow me to come to you today as a different sort of madman announcing not the death of God, but what I see as the death of the Secular Age. Charles Taylor always knew that all that was good about immanence and the affirmation of the value of the here and now could not forever act as an impenetrable shield to the transcendent. Like the alleged “ghost” who would knock over the books on Murph’s bookshelves in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, the transcendent God has a funny way of haunting us and disrupting our tidy immanent frame. Usually, that haunting disruption comes to us in the form of beauty, but somewhere along the way many of us learned to suppress our sense of wonder as we look out on the constellations in space with cold calculations and scientific descriptions. Maybe that beautiful piece of music is nothing more than sound waves triggering our dopaminergic system. Often, we are uncertain of what to do with beauty.
We have strayed into the infinite nothing and felt the cold empty abyss of meaninglessness. The secular priests claimed that the death of God would mean the liberation of humanity from ancient superstitions. They told us how, untethered from the oppressive chains of religious thought, humanity would be able to tap into pure, unadulterated reason and eventually reorganize the world into a utopia of human progress. But even the most ardent of new atheists are beginning to see now that this myth was a lie.
Secularity claimed it was building “religionless” neutral spaces, but because religion has to do with what 20th-century theologian Paul Tillich said was of ultimate concern, it seems humans can never truly be non-religious. We always have ultimate concerns. If God is not enthroned atop your hierarchy of ultimate aims, concerns, ambitions, and values, then some other god will fill that void of power. Perhaps it will be that ancient god of greed called Mammon. Or maybe it’s a god which beckons you to sacrifice your children so you can secure a better now, like that ancient pagan god Molech? We cannot relegate the transcendent to some private box, for the spiritual permeates everything. Many other cultures across the non-Western world have long understood this better than we. As Bob Dylan sang, “You’re gonna have to serve somebody.”
In the idolatrous worship of Mammon and Molech, there can be no room for beauty. The old gods of greed and consumption do not give us beauty to behold. They attempt to turn all that is beautiful into all that can be objectified and consumed. In the place of wonder, they give us lust. This is because they know what the ancient Christian saints and mystics from our rich theological past knew—beauty is the doorway to knowledge of God. In the 4th century, Gregory of Nyssa believed that all of evil and sin could simply be understood as a “retrocession of the soul from the beautiful.”
If his posthumously released Silmarillion is any indication of his theological commitments (and I think it is), Tolkien believed that all of creation was caught up in the composition of a divine symphony, of which even those discordant melodies and rebellious notes of every fallen principality and power would somehow be woven into the cosmic song of beauty in the end.
The idols of our Secular Age wanted us to settle for the created thing instead of the Creator, as all idols do. Idols tell us that, “All you need is this here,” but because genuine beauty is always an invitation to wonder, an invitation to continue onward and upward, it can never be commodified into cheap propaganda or an empty commercial jingle that’s trying to get you to buy a Buick.
As creatures who bear the divine imprint in our hearts, we long for communion with the transcendent fount of all beauty. Our absence from that communion produces in us a crisis of meaning, and this present meaning-crisis is exposing the gods of our Secular Age as impotent idols. The Secular Age is dead.
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If you look around, you will be able to see the signs of a new Post-Secular Age emerging all around. The resurgence of interest in psychedelics as a way to taste some measure of transcendence, the shift from hostility and distrust of religious experience among “secular” people to an openness in seeing its social utility, the return of explicitly pagan religious worship, and the mainstream popularization of pseudosciences like astrology—which Christianity and the Scientific Revolution had once banished to niche sections of used book stores—are just a few signs that the secularism once touted by Richard Dawkins is all but dead.
There’s too much beauty for immanence alone to contain it all, and so the psychonaut experimenting with magic mushrooms and the DIY spiritualist reading their horoscope alike, set out on the search for beauty, transcendence, and meaning in places beyond the bounds of the scientism of the Secular Age. But as Charles Taylor also foretold, we have found too much truth, goodness, and beauty in immanence for a wholesale rejection of what is in front of us to ever be a part of the journey towards satisfying our longing for transcendence. A re-enchanted vision of the world will require a re-unification of the transcendent and the immanent.
If the story the Apostles told is true—that God has come in the flesh, a Slain Lamb is enthroned as king of the cosmos, and the Spirit of God has been poured out in the here and now as a down payment of a future reality, where the transcendent God would make a permanent and seamless union of heaven and earth (and I believe it is true!)—then the Christian story offers the sojourners of a new Post-Secular Age the most beautiful story to inhabit.
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Our Great Story offers the world the framework for the celebration of beauty in the immanent through domains such as science because we affirm a good God who made, sustains, and indwelt a good world full of discovery; but our Great Story also affirms that we were made for communion with the ineffable. There is an invitation for all, into an infinite journey of communion with that which is ultimately transcendent. So, we call out to the scientist, “Undertake your spiritual discipline of discovery!” We call out to the poet, “Help us to see the beauty we miss all around us!” We beckon the musician, “Lead us into wonder and awe!” In each of these things, we don’t merely settle for the description of the molecule, the metaphor and rhyme scheme, or the sound waves and lyrics alone to satisfy, but like John the Revelator, we see each of these as the door into a journey of discovery with God and hear the voice of our Beloved say, “Come up here, and I will show you…”
Consider this moment a call to recover our Christian vocation, to reject the incessant culture war which only serves to scar the world, obscuring the view of the Beautiful from the hungry eyes that long to see her. Instead, let us plant vineyards in Babylon and grow something beautiful, just as the prophet Jeremiah urged the people of God in exile well over two millennia ago. In a Christian subculture in America consumed with an incessant cycle of intramural debates and culture war cannon fodder, to tell a more beautiful story may make you sound like a madman or madwoman, but hold fast. Perhaps some of you can recall the character named Prince Myshkin in Fyodor Dostoevksy’s The Idiot—a simple man that most considered an “idiot.” “The world will be saved by beauty,” this simple man proclaimed; and I doubt that there has ever been uttered a more true prediction than this.
Paul Anleitner
Pastor & Podcaster
Paul is a pastor in an old church, exploring the intersection of theology & culture, science, philosophy. He has a Master's in Christian Thought and hosts the podcast Deep Talks
Photography by Clay Banks
