God Is Dead

Good Friday of the Lord’s Passion
John 18:1—19:42
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/040326.cfm

In college, I became very fascinated with continental philosophy. One philosopher I liked a lot was Fredrick Nietzsche. Even though a lot of people are very critical of him and his critique of Christianity, a lot of his ideas, philosophies, and criticisms have helped form and grow my faith. One of his most famous quotes is, “God is dead.” The excerpt if from Gay Science Book III section 125:

God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife, - who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater event, - and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history hitherto!"

In this passage, it is commonly believed that Nietzsche is speaking about the age of enlightenment when individuality and reason began to superseded faith-based understandings of the world. During this period, humankind began to subscribe more on the scientific method of understanding over superstition or because God said so, the church said so, or the Bible said so. 

Nietzsche’s philosophical dilemma was to find value in existence without resorting to blind-faith or nihilism, or that existence is pointless. Where Nietzsche lands is that one must live one’s life in such a way for the betterment of future generations. He also spoke of the optimal life being one where a person is willing to infinitely repeat one’s life over without any regret or any remorse. To live a truly good life is to fully accept your decisions and how you dealt with times of suffering and thriving that you would ultimately be willing to repeat all of it without any adjustments.

“God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!” To these words of Nietzsche, I say , “Yes, we have and so did Jesus.” Jesus saw that people of his day were misguided in their understanding of God. They put God in the position of being otherworldly. God had different rules. God could order the murder of others, but we had the ten commandments that outlawed it unless God ordered it. They lost sight of their God because of their overt focus on the law. Jesus’s God was not otherworldly. He referred to God as Abba, as “father” or a more accurate translation would be “dad.” God for Jesus was familial and relational.

As far as the law and prophets go, Jesus took it a step further and went to the source of where the law and the prophets were pointing, to the Abba behind it. As is written in 1 John 4:7-8, “Let us love one another, because love is of God; everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God. Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love.” The Abba behind the law and the prophets is Love. God is love. We often lose sight of that. The law and the prophets do not supersede love, love supersedes the law and the prophets. Thus, Jesus summed up the law and the prophets to loving God and loving others. Jesus was killing an idea of God where the law and prophets superseded God. For Jesus, God transcends it. God is not going to ask us to do anything that God doesn’t will. God is going to do what God wills and God is calling us to the same. God’s will supersedes all our religious practices and creeds. Our practices and creeds should be a means to it, when they aren’t they lose their intended purpose. Jesus subscribed to his tradition while pointing to the deeper message behind it.

Jesus wanted us to believe in Abba, the love behind his religious tradition, the law and the prophets. For that, we killed him. It was something that we weren’t willing to accept. It’s not that anything changed, Jesus was pointing to what was there, hidden in plain sight, but we couldn’t see it. We wanted the law and prophets so we could judge. We wanted the law and the prophets so we could exclude others. In paraphrasing the gospel, Jesus says to us, “Why can’t you see the truth? You’re using these things to do the exact opposite of their intended purpose! Now, wake up! Love God and love your neighbor, that’s it! The rest of it is noise.” So we killed him because we didn’t want to hear it.

I don’t believe Enlightenment killed God. It killed a false image of God we had put in place. Reason points to God as much as faith should. God’s imprint is throughout history and we misunderstand it. We use our images of God to our own ends and own means. But, we are called to destroy these idols, our false images of God, to gain a deeper understanding. The gospel points us in that direction. On Good Friday, we tried to kill a new understanding of God that was always already there. But, that understanding, in human form, was resurrected in three days. May we continue to kill our false gods to resurrect the God that has universally always been here, new and refreshed within ourselves!