GOD IS DEAD – LONG LIVE NIETZSCHE

by Adam Harbinson

I remember as a boy being told about a bad man called Friedrich Nietzsche. According to my teachers, he said things that were almost too terrible to repeat. Nietzsche, a nineteenth-century German philosopher was as the devil himself, he stood against everything we believed, he sought to undermine the very foundations of our Christian way of life, and preachers declared that this man was to be treated with utter disdain, a target of ridicule. Why? Because he proclaimed, ‘God is dead!’

‘How dare he?’ said the preacher man, and we all nodded wisely in agreement, for we were Christians, and we knew better.

Years later I read Nietzsche for myself and I made up my own mind. I concluded that he was right, and that he wasn’t a bad man. Here’s what he wrote; ‘God is dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives…’ Nietzsche was weeping for what the Christian religion had done to the true God.

Then I went to a different church and I heard another preacher say, ‘The Holy Spirit is here, we welcome him. But there are churches out there from which the Holy Spirit withdrew years ago and nobody has noticed that he’s gone.’ In a way, that’s what Nietzsche was saying; those churches had rejected the true God of unfathomable grace and love in favour of a god to whom they could pay homage once a week and then lock him up safely in the church building until next week.

Again Nietzsche was right, for he went on to say that when religious people put God out of their lives, they said, ‘What sacred games shall we have to invent?’ – and the traditional Sunday service was born.

The central character in Nietzsche’s book; ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ was called ‘The Madman.’ He ran from church to church making a nuisance of himself by asking awkward questions, and they threw him out, and the Madman said; ‘What are these churches now if not the tombs and sepulchres of God?’

And then I discovered something else. The pastor who berated the ‘churches out there from which the Holy Spirit withdrew years ago’, had also killed the true God of unfathomable grace and love, and replaced him with a demanding legalistic god, one who will forgive, but only if you forgive others, one with whom you have to keep a ‘short account’, one who loves you if… They did that because to control people you have to control their god, and you can’t control the true God.

Nietzsche died in 1900; he was way ahead of his time. He saw the direction in which society was headed. He understood that when people ditch God, as his did, and as ours has, no longer does society have accepted standards of morality, no longer do people have a sense of purpose, not longer do they have a moral compass; they don’t know right from wrong.

So if Nietzsche was right, how do we find this true God of unfathomable grace and love that religious people have

murdered? The first step is to recognise that he wants you more than you want him. The second step is to stop thrashing around looking for him. The third step is take time to listen to the inner voice, and trust him, he will find a way to communicate, but be prepared for a surprise.