Death Becomes Us

So here is the paper that I wrote about Nietzsche's statement "God is dead." PLEASE DO NOT COPY IT AND POST IT ELSEWHERE. IF YOU USE PORTIONS OF IT PLEASE ASK ME (hint: I'll say yes! I just want to know who's using it!) AND CITE ME.

Death Becomes Us

By
Sharon McQueary
B.A. - Bowling Green State University, 2003

Submitted to Dr. Edwin Crawford, Professor
for PL 551 Philosophical Foundations of Ministry
at Northwest Nazarene University
February 21, 2009

“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?” These are the words of Friedrich Nietzsche in his work, The Gay Science, in which he makes the extraordinary claim that God is dead and that He died at the hands of His most prized creation.
Since written Nietzsche’s words have catapulted him to infamy. Either regarded as a pioneer in modern atheism or as a blasphemous heretic who had no respect for God. With careful reading one might see that Nietzsche was not delighting in the death of God. In The Gay Science it is very clear that he is indeed lamenting the death of God. In the story of The Madman, the portion of The Gay Science that contains this claim that God is dead, the madman that proclaims this tragedy is met with an audience that does not understand his plight leading him to claim that he has “come too early.” He was “not yet at the right time. This prodigious event is still on its way and is traveling.” This paper will attempt to show that over 100 years later the madman’s foresight of the death of God has come to fruition. “God is dead! And we have killed him...What are these churches now, if they are not the tombs and monuments of God?”
We will begin with looking at how it is that modern science has redefined the meaning and purpose of humanity and how this incorrect perception has delivered the fatal wound. Then we will move towards two visible symptoms of death that plague the Church today. Lastly, this paper will attempt to guide towards a revival, the resurrection for the Church today.
Several philosophers, including Nietzsche not only claim that God is dead but they also know how it is that he has come to be murdered. Walter Stace proposed that religion cannot survive the science of purposelessness. “The real turning point between the medieval age of faith and the modern age of unfaith came when the scientists of the seventeenth century turned their backs upon what used to be called ‘final causes.’ The final cause of a thing or event meant the purpose which it was supposed to serve in the universe, its cosmic purpose.”[1] Death has come because we have been talked out of living a life of purpose. The message of the Bible is that there is meaning and purpose in life. We were created to be in relationship with God. We have a divine purpose. When that purpose is laid aside, we are in outright defiance of our Creator, God. Modern science says not only that there is no creator to be called to account to, but more poignantly that there is no purpose in life at all. Humanity’s existence is random and pointless. “In Nietzsche’s view, developments in modern science and the increasing secularization of western society had effectively ‘killed’ the Christian God, who had served as the basis for meaning and value in the West for more than a thousand years.”[2]
This concept of living a life that is meaningless and random has caused a great dilemma for Christianity. “The thought that man is not free, that he is the helpless plaything of forces over which he has no control, has deeply penetrated the modern mind,”[3] including the Church. If life is a random sequence of events, in which we have no control, there is not much sense in living as if there is purpose and for sure, it’s idiotic to live as if we have a specific purpose. It is in this vein that “Nietzsche announces that God is dead and it is we who have killed him.”[4] It is this view that “his claim must be taken seriously”[5] and that one can vividly see the symptoms of death in the Church today. Let’s discuss just two of those symptoms.
Symptom 1: Death is evident in our worship. “If Nietzsche was to walk into one of our churches, he might watch what we do and claim that our behaviors and our values give sufficient evidence that, for us, God is dead.”[6] For many, much of worship is spent watching the clock, reading the bulletin, doing all that we can to not express any form of gratitude or emotion towards God. One standing and watching, as if behind a screen, hidden from those they are observing, would see people who claim to be worshipping. Yet they are not singing praises to the living God, their King as the Psalmists did. They are not showing signs of the awe-filled experience that happens when one comes spirit-to-spirit with a living God. Even amidst all the excitement of Sunday morning worship today we are somehow missing the glory, the majesty and the splendor of a living God who has indeed created us for a divine purpose with his moral values.
Symptom 2: Death is evident because our faith has become something we do on Sunday mornings, instead of our faith defining who we are in every waking breath.” Today, the world has become an all about me society, a modern day Babylon, in which we spend our lives serving ourselves in an empty vacuum that sucks our spirits of any hope and meaning. Sadly, many Christians today have taken a first class ticket on this train to nowhere, bringing our ‘needs’ to worship on Sunday, expecting that God somehow fill them up to make it through the week, until they return next Sunday for their refill. God is dead to us in our daily lives. Our faith is just another notch on the belt of life and holds no real meaning in our day-to-day activities.
My proposal is that this has occurred because we have spent time trying to combat the little daggers that modern science/thought has thrown at Christianity and have neglected to tend to the hacksaw that has been slowing, for generations, sawing away at the jugular of Christianity: the life of purpose and meaning that we were created for. These little daggers have effectively smoke-screened the real attack, the attack that has ended in death. We have spent time masterminding dogmas and doctrines to protect our faith from these little daggers and have overlooked the need to be firmly grounded in our faith through the Holy Spirit and God’s Word. “When our faith is reduced to nothing more than doctrinal statements or dogmatic positions--void of the relational and inspirational activity of the Holy Spirit--then church buildings, indeed, become little more than mausoleums...”[7]
Indeed, Nietzsche could say today that “God is dead! And we have killed him...What are these churches now, if they are not the tombs and monuments of God?”[8] Now is the time that purposelessness has plundered and savagely killed. However, it is not God who has died. It is us. It is humanity that has died and our hope is in our Resurrected God, our living Savior, Jesus Christ. Modern science/thought cannot claim the final victory. The final victory is in Jesus Christ. Our resurrection is found in rekindling our faith. It lies in our refocusing and reestablishing our faith in the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and God’s Word.

[1] Walter T. Stace, Man Against Darkness.
[2] Wikipedia.org, Friedrich Nietzsche, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_nietzsche.
[3] Walter T. Stace, Man Against Darkness.
[4] Dr. Edwin Crawford, Week 3, Thursday Lecture for Philosophical Foundations for Ministry.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Rich Hadley via electronic communication.
[8] Nietzsche, The Gay Science.