Ultimately, Friedrich Nietzsche is an iconoclast, someone who longs to smash even the most sacred idols of a culture. That is a sentiment that every true Christian should embrace and practice. Now, it is true that Nietzsche felt that Christianity involved possibly the worst kind of idolatry, the idolatry of the will to truth; but if Christians are honest with themselves, they will admit that sometimes we have made idols of our neat little theological categories and “truths” that just explain everything. As my former professor Gordon Fee used to say, “Evangelical Christians have made an idol out of their theology.”
Indeed, I think modern day Evangelical Christians have unknowingly imbibed the arrogant yet false certainty of the Enlightenment worldview. Just as Enlightenment thinkers found themselves actually slaves to the claim that “science and reason has explained everything,” many Christians today have become enslaved to slogans like, “The Bible gives us answers to everything! It’s all there!” Ironically, that kind of “certainty” is unbiblical and completely out of step with Church Tradition. Claiming mental adherence to a series of theological statements or Enlightenment claims is exactly what Nietzsche derided as a slave morality and the will to truth. Therefore, Nietzsche’s challenge to Christians, as Lucy Huskinson says, is this: “It is not enough to express one’s allegiance to the Christian faith; one must embody it and continually test one’s faith to determine whether it is necessary and genuine, or habitual and idolatrous” (84).
One of the most frustrating stereotypes (and unfortunately a true criticism) of Christians is that they are too afraid and defensive when anyone questions their faith. Chosen ignorance is seen as a virtue. I remember my Bible teacher in high school one time actually warning us students from having an open mind: “Like I’ve always said, if you have an open mind, the devil can jump right in!” I also remember a certain Baptist pastor who often spoke in chapel at a Christian school at which I worked start every single one of his chapel talks with something like, “Now y’all, I’m not a smart man…but I love Jesus and I trust the Bible!” It was as if he was actually taking pride in the fact that he was ignorant. The impression I got in high school, and those students got in chapel was that “thinking” was dangerous, so avoid it…just love Jesus.
I never got that kind of mentality. If one’s faith cannot withstand to honest questioning and doubt, then it is a faith in some sort of blind, deaf, stupid idol, and it deserves to be mocked, ridiculed, and destroyed. Does that sound harsh? Tough, deal with it. If there is one thing I’ve learned in my life about following Christ, it is this: Christ is no fluffy bunny and the Christian life is not easy. It’s not enough to love God with your whole heart. It takes all your mind as well.
Nietzsche would agree. As Huskinson says, “Life, Nietzsche argues, is not this simple or cheap! Indeed, such an approach to Christianity has, he claims, brought about ‘the euthanasia of Christianity’ (D 92). A genuine faith is one embodied in struggle and hardship, in which question s must be asked but no definitive answer is expected or sought” (84). Think about that phrase, “the euthanasia of Christianity.” When statistics show that upwards of 75% of students who have gone to Christian schools end up walking away from the Christian faith by the time they graduate from college, if that doesn’t speak of the euthanasia of Christianity, I don’t know what does. But that’s the thing—it’s not the euthanasia of Christianity; it’s the euthanasia of the idolatrous, slave-mentality, will to truth religious parasite that has sucked the life out of many churches in America today. And when the life is sucked out, it becomes almost impossible to truly live within this difficult and chaotic world that God has made.
The “answer” that Christianity gives is not some nice and tidy explanation of God, or some promise of leisurely bliss as long as you say the “sinner’s prayer.” The answer that Christianity gives is the very thing that Nietzsche yearned for, but missed because he mistook the 19th Century idolatrous notion of Christian etiquette for the historic Church Tradition and practice.
The Christian answer is one that empowers one to walk on the waters of chaos, to reel in Leviathan, to bathe in rivers of truth, to run and not be weary, to mount up on wings like eagle’s, and to paint the new creation on the canvas of the old, to where it seeps into every crack and crevice, and Christ is all in all, and we are one with him. That is not some “truth” to which you merely give mental adherence; it is not something to check off with our intellect. It is something to be lived and struggled for…and it involves death and resurrection every day. Any Christian who fails to take hold of his suffering and offer it as a living, daily sacrifice is someone who is a weak slave to that suffering, for that suffering is sacrificing him, and not the other way around.
Suffering and death are part of this creation…they are inevitable. How we react to them will determine whether or not we truly live. As Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh said, “People who are afraid of death are afraid of life. It is impossible not to be afraid of life with all its complexity and dangers if one is afraid of death. If we are afraid of death we will never be prepared to take ultimate risks; we will spend our life in a cowardly, careful and timid manner.” I think Nietzsche would have agreed, and perhaps he would have been attracted to the Orthodox Church Tradition in which it was said.
What this all comes down to is an understanding of what faith truly is. The kind of “faith” that Nietzsche condemned is a weak, idolatrous and slavish thing. It is afraid of suffering, questioning, and death. But as Church Tradition has proclaimed for the past 2,000 years, true faith embraces doubt and questioning, suffering and death—for it knows that is the only—the ONLY—path to resurrection and new creation. As Bishop Kallistos Ware has said, when talking about the death of faith, it is a “…loss of our root certainties (or seeming certainties) about God and the meaning of existence. But this too is a death-life experience through which we have to pass if our faith is to become mature. True faith is a constant dialogue with doubt, for God is incomparably greater than all our preconceptions about Him; our mental concepts are idols that need to be shattered. So as to be fully alive, our faith needs to continually die.”
Such is the Christian walk of faith. If Nietzsche can be used to shatter the idolatrous shackles that keep us from walking that Christian walk of faith, then God bless Friedrich Nietzsche.
I believe there is another famous person who is like Nietzsche who is as you describe as an iconoclast, George Carlin. When i heard one of his comedy routines, he sounded just like Nietzsche when it came to Christianity.
Appreciate the clarification of the ‘euthanasia of Christianity’ it has clarified a major point for my thesis