God is Dead. Now What?

"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him." - Friederich Nietzsche

A few years ago, a Christian movie came out entitled "God's Not Dead." In that movie, a young college student debates his atheist professor over the existence of God.

It provided a life affirming, faith-positive movie that was safe for the whole Christian family. Yay. Kudos. Nothing wrong with that.

What it didn't do, however, was engage with what Nietzsche was actually saying.

We live in a messy world. And I don't just mean that bad things happen, I mean that our culture looks like my 2 year old daughter after eating spaghetti. It's a mess, and it's a mess by our own doing.

But these sorts of messes don't just happen. You don't just go to sleep in an idyllic, moral society and wake up to sex robots, transgender toddlers, and hundreds of thousands of babies cut into little pieces for the crime of being inconvenient. Something has to happen first.

You have to kill God.

If you do that, you can justify anything.

"What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds? For one life thousands would be saved from corruption and decay. One death, and a hundred lives in exchange--it's simple arithmetic! Besides, what value has the life of that sickly, stupid, ill-natured old woman in the balance of existence!" - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

For Nietzsche, it wasn't a question of whether or not God was real. He was, in his eyes, already dead. That was settled business. The question he was befuddled with "what happens now?" This is the same question that Dostoyevsky wrestled with in his famous novel Crime and Punishment.

If you take away the ultimate law-giver, there is no ultimate law.

Both Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky saw the establishment of situational ethics as the inevitable outcome of this line of thinking. And that, they rightly understood, was problematic. There's nothing we couldn't reason our into. Who's to say that murder isn't ok, given the right reasons? And if the person could make the case, who's to say the a culture can't make the case?

And culture did make the case in 1930's Germany.

That was bad.

And, as Christians, we can say that it was definitely bad because the creator of the universe, the only ultimate authority, declared it so.

Nietzsche was afraid of losing that ability. He saw it coming. And that ability was, indeed, lost within his own culture only a few decades after his passing.

"This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars -- and yet they have done it themselves."

It is interesting, then, that we find ourselves a few miles down that same road. You don't have to look for to see the way the death of God (the abandonment of Christianity) has manifest. In one regard, the world we are standing in is a stronger apologetic argument for God's existence that one can make. If you take God out of the equation, the moral decay is inevitable. And the stench is horrid.

That should tell us something. It doesn't, but it should. And that is total depravity in a nutshell.

"...seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand." -Jesus (Matthew 13:13)

If he was able, I think Nietzsche would look at us now, look at what has happened over the past hundred and some odd years since his death, and simply say, "You've become a meme."

What happens after God dies? The world falls apart. And we're already there.

"Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us -- for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto." -Friedrich Nietzsche