Until a few days ago I had taken it for granted for a long time that Nietzsche denied the existence of God by declaring Gott ist tot or God is dead. But if God were almighty, he could resurrect himself. If Jesus were God before he arrives on the Earth, he or God experienced human's inevitable destiny through the crucification.
If so, the real meaning of Gott ist tot is different from what I thought. God experienced death because he wanted to give his best creature, that is all humans, an eternal life in Eucharist and wanted to share the same suffering all humans once had to experience, that is death -sharing in other words, Communion.
So real meaning of Gott ist tot is God experienced death through which he was able to give us an eternal life and also share the same suffering. The real meaning of faith was giving and sharing.
God is dead was an ultimate expression of God cares for you.
Hmmm...
ReplyDeleteIt depends what do you mean under "God". To the opinion of most theologies, even the most primitive ones, God is a reality that transcedes our physical, "touchable" reality. Our experience is the only source of information about Universe. All our experiences have very similar pattern: object appeares, lives and dies; our senses have a physical messenger and are limited in space and time. The smartest of us can observe and describe the transformation and interconnection of objects. The later are sometimes referred to as scientists. These created Euclidian geometry, Aristotelic logic, Newtonian mechanics and Einstein's relativity - the process of exploring the World is endless*. They admit though that all these facts are teared out of global context not percievable to normal human being at its fullest. And this is God. The endlessness itself. A non-material and non-personal one. It is immanent with the world but transcedes it.
*exploring the World in the way the western people used to do.
Nietzsche most likely meant that the idea of God was no longer tenable. Hence "We have killed him - you and I"; our research; our knowledge makes the idea of God - the kind of God that created the world, and Man and Woman separately from the rest of creation - implausible.
ReplyDeleteSome kind of God is still possible, such as a Pantheistic God that is co-existent with the universe, but the old Transcendental God of the main religions is looking somewhat shaky.
It is possible to read into the phrase something like the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, but Nietzsche's emphasis is that the whole decent into Christianity was a wrong turning. Christian assumptions of equality are incompatible with noble values, and the pre-eminence of the creative genius. The emphasis of morality shifts from cause to effect, and from an emphasis of creating new moral wealth to deviances from an uncreative "perfection" that is the state of no sin.
We don't know what God thinks. Maybe he likes us and maybe he doesn't. Anyway, Jesus thought animal sacrifices were stupid and immoral, much less human sacrifices.
ReplyDeleteWhy should be there any difference between the two? I see none. One can involve the other, or at least they don't exclude one another.
ReplyDeleteI agree that Nietzsche didn't really mean the Eucharist, but Mercedo did understand the Eucharist at least -- that is in fact the central message of Communion: God's death is intended to share our lives with us.
However, Nietzsche's criticism of Christianity, I should point out, tended to attack a very narrow Protestant version of Christianity. There are many, many other strains of Christianity that contain quite different models of viewing our relationship with God, free will and so on that he barely was aware of or touched on. I believe he made the mistake of viewing Christianity very nearly as a monolith, which it isn't and hasn't been almost since it began (there is really only unity in some very basic things, but in the rest there is an extraordinarily wide range of opinion, almost by design).
Cheers,
Ethelred
"If so, the real meaning of Gott ist tot is different from what I thought. God experienced death .."
ReplyDeleteThat presupposes the idea that Jesus was God, something he - throughout his ministry - consistently denied. He insisted he was "son" of God, not God himself. Even at his baptism, when God spoke, He called him "son". Jesus then, was a divine human - according to the traditional Christian belief.
I agree that Nietzsche's viewpoint was a narrow one - and from that point, he was right, God was dead, in that he abandoned the wrong practices of those claiming to follow Him. His followers lost "Love" (Agape), therefore God, to them, was dead - for the Bible says, "God is Love.."
No, the two are exclusive. If God is one with nature, he is not beyond nature. In particular, he is not the creator of the universe.
ReplyDeleteWith regards to Nietzsche, he drew from Schopenhauer's conception of the world as will and representation; arguably a form of pantheism. He later discovered Spinoza. I take after Spinoza in theistic outlook, and although I value Nietzsche's insights, I am certainly not Nietzschian, although I used to think that I was a few years ago.
Nietzsche's view of Christianity was certainly informed by his experience of religion, but he was strongly informed by the Bible itself in his critique, and much of it was directed against Jesus's teaching. Nietzsche was infamous for his attack on pity, for example, which he viewed as love mixed with contempt. Christianity was, to Nietzsche profoundly unnaturalistic, and by nature opposed to nobility. Any realistic interpretation takes the highest level of self-definition out of the hands of the individual, and therefore leads to a contempt for greatness.
I don't know how far I go with this reasoning myself, for I believe that there is natural law and natural right rooted in human nature and the nature of human interaction. However, natural law has a voluntary character: it is a law for society rather than individuals. That said, it does limit the ability of 'creators' to fashion society as they will.
Being fair to Nietzsche, the last thing that he wanted was society to be ruled. The will to power was to him an engine for competition rather than monopoly, so it is possible for his scheme to find natural law through the rejection of conventional law.
Thank you for a very poetic prose that is your comment.
ReplyDeleteMy assumption was if humans were dead, they would just return to soil since they were born from soil. Any humans are mortal, with limited knowledge and power. So when I heard the expression ' Gott ist tot' I though God was dead and disappeared for good, but on second thought I realised I had forgotten God is almighty, limitless, immortal when I asserted God was gone.
The truth was God just experienced death to redeem human error, thus through this -the death of God, humans can now acquire the eternal life once humans had before Eden. This idea consists in central theology of Christianity whatever the dominations might be.
God gives back life to humans through experiencing death and sharing the same destiny humans came to experience accidentally by having the forbidden fruits.
God is a reflection of humans in the future. Now we are heading for God that trans-cedes.
Nietzsche couldn't get out of the realm of Christianity. By saying Gott ist tot, Ubermensch, Eternal recurrence, he mad another theology similar to Christianity. According to his theology, God is dead but since he is almighty, he resurrected himself. If he were an atheist, he definitely ought to have said that God doesn't exist.By saying Ubermensch or Super-man, he created another man who try to overcome any situation he faces, he had known that the ultimate form of Super-man was God. If he were an atheist, he just should have said that men only exist.By saying eternal recurrence, he tried to understand the notion of eternal life. For Nietzsche, eternal life was just an unbearable thing. He went too far to say there would be an eternal recurrence, which is just the expression that is more nihilistic than eternal life.
ReplyDeleteEven if we have aims, eternal life was too long to pursue our objectives.
If he were an atheist, he would have pointed out that humans have only limited time to live.God exists, God, eternal life are all an ultimate form of nihilism, and he tried to get over those nihilisms by advocating those three new theologies.
Can you show some Bible reference on that matter?
ReplyDeleteIn unitarian theology that is arianism, Jesus is human. In trinity theology that is athanasian creed, Jesus, as well as Holy Spirit and Father consists of one God.For non-believers, he is merely a human, but a human that intended to redeem all sins humans had made, so as you pointed out he was indeed a divine human.His followers lost "Love" (Agape), therefore God, to them, was dead - for the Bible says, "God is Love.."Totally new perspective we ought to hark.
ReplyDeleteUntrue. God can create Nature in the sense of a parent, yet maintain that connection of having Nature be within and part of God. The two need not be entirely separate.
ReplyDeleteAs a simple, basic example, you create new parts of yourself all the time, even if you aren't aware of it. New cells. Not a terribly useful parallel to God and the Universe, but still, you get the idea.
Nietzsche's view of Christianity was certainly informed by his experience of religion, but he was strongly informed by the Bible itself in his critique, and much of it was directed against Jesus's teaching.
Yes, but to go strictly "from the Bible itself" is a very Protestant way of thinking (sola scriptura) and rips the Bible out of its actual context. It is a very primitive way of viewing the Bible, easily viewed with contempt. Had he tried viewing the Bible through the lens of the Church Fathers, the early Councils and so on, he would have had a very different picture of what the Bible means.
His critique of Christianity makes far less sense if you line it up against Orthodoxy, Anglo-Catholicism or Roman Catholicism. You can tell he simply wasn't familiar with those traditions.
Cheers,
Ethelred
"Pantheism" means that (one believes that) Nature and God are essentially synonymous; that God is in, and beyond the universe is a common belief, but Pantheist wouldn't be the term for someone who believed this.
ReplyDeleteI believe that the universe has emergent intelligence, or at the very least, there is intelligence other than that exhibited by neurons. Natural selection is an example of this, as is the simultaneous arrangement of atoms in a quasicrystal, which cannot be done with classical "sticklebrick" chemistry.
I agree that the universe's intelligence could be a small part of an intelligence beyond what we call universe, but that intelligence would itself need a medium in order to operate; ie. we initially defined our universe too small.
With respect to Nietzsche, I will certainly give you that the bulk of his writing is against the Protestant faith, but surely his conception of nobility is incompatible with pretty much any faith which is more than just a belief about the universe.
Nietzsche had a theology, but it was anti-theistic and pantheistic.
ReplyDeleteNietzsche thought that transcendental theology is false, and that this universe was a war; the war of wills seeking dominance, including will that manifests in the mass, rather than the individual. Nietzsche decidedly sides with the individual against the mass, and therefore in favour of genius against mass religion.
Nietzsche puts the self-defining man first, and considers the idea of a common god not only false, but harmful, for the mass is defined as "good", and the groundbreaking individual as "evil", being separated from the god of the mass by his deviance. To the theist, Hell is separation from God; but to Nietzsche, Hell is other people; that is: the mass, as opposed to the friend.
If God existed, Nietzsche would be his enemy, seeking to wrest self-determination in the face of God's design. The eternal recurrence has a dual meaning in my view. First, there is a simple misunderstanding born of the deterministic physics of the time, where it was believed that the universe would repeat itself over immense stretches of time; but I think that there is another aspect that hasn't been outdated with advances in physics, and that is simply what is meant by the phrase "history repeats itself".
Nietzsche's conception of the Overman represents one who has expelled religion from his being, replacing god's will within with his own will to power, and to transcendence of that same will, so that he rises beyond good and evil; a place where he can see several islands of morality "from above".
To Nietzsche, it is Christianity that is nihilistic, for it denies this life, diluting it in eternity. Nietzsche's conception of the Eternal Recurrence is to multiply up the present so that it contends with eternity: to replace the diluting presence of an infinite God and an infinite life with a repetition of the same choices, the same actions, so as to replace the humbleness of the believer with the arrogance of genius.
I do not agree. If you accept the basic precept that the writers of the Bible were "inspired (breathed in) of God .." then God directed them to write what He felt was needed. If that is the case, the Bible itself is not only a complete guide, but the only one!
ReplyDeleteIt is when men, with their PHDs and DDLs, as well as power-hungry kings and emperors began to meddle in "religion" that the "inspiration" became human. Directed by self-inflated egos, by desire for power over others, by demands to conquer and slaughter "unbelievers". Men are led by their biases, they emphasize that which they themselves believe - a glaring example of this is the so-called "New World Translation" of the Watchtower.
No longer led by God but by men. It may be "primitive" by the standards of the "scholars", but, the question we need to ask - is it wrong? Has men's interference in the Scriptures brought peace, love, security? Or, would the primitive clinging to Bible standards tend to bring the desired results?
It does not follow. There is no logical or historical basis for this claim.
ReplyDeleteGod may choose to reveal more to us through other sources. We simply do not know. Furthermore, any argument for the inerrancy of the Bible rests on parts of the Bible itself, which is a circular argument -- inherently illogical. Not to mention the fact that the Bible is not actually one book, but a collection of books written down over a period of many centuries.
To try to understand the Bible as one book does great violence to the text and its meaning.
Cheers,
Ethelred
Ah! But that is exactly my point. See, I said "IF" "if you accept ..
ReplyDeleteThere lies the crux. Trust blindly in faith in God, or rely on the wisdom of learned men.
It seems to me Nietzsche relied too much on his own "wisdom" and it led him astray. I do not - after playing a bit of a Devil's Advocate - believe the truth lies in any extreme - extremism begets bigotry and bigotry begets hate.
Basically I agree with many of your points.
That's not exactly true. He simply didn't equate himself with God the Father. Going beyond that and denying His divinity or that He is part of the Trinity (or the Trinity itself) on the strict basis of the Bible itself is skating on extremely thin ice. The moment you leave the Bible and get to the Church Fathers (who are our primary source for understanding the early Church), you fall through the ice.
ReplyDeleteI think it is worth noting that even those Christian fundamentalists who insist on sola scriptura by and large don't deny the Trinity.
Cheers,
Ethelred
His problem, as I understand it, arises from Protestant notions of predestination. Those concepts are so different in Catholic theology (as opposed to Calvinism) that Nietzsche's vehement resistance against the idea of an eternal God collapse. There is no need to resist the God that grants us free will, which ultimately gives rise to our own nobility.
ReplyDeletePredestination is simply nonexistent in traditional Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican theology; free will is much more the order of the day.
Cheers,
Ethelred
Actually, I agree that there's no conflict between belief and nobility.
ReplyDeleteIt's still my view that there is a conflict between Nietzsche's concept of nobility and a faith that makes demands (ie. does not allow full self-definition). Also, Nietzsche himself believed that world to be deterministic, for he believed that Newton was correct.
Still, this is getting to be a game of ping-pong. Suffice to say: I am not a Nietzschian.