From TAC:
Dr. Anne Jeffrey is a professor of philosophy at Baylor University. In my previous interview, we discussed the explanatory role God plays in moral normativity and moral epistemology. In this interview Dr. Jeffrey and I will discuss four arguments that God plays a significant explanatory role in moral motivation. The first of these four arguments is based on a forthcoming paper by Dr. Jeffrey titled, "Divine Friendship and Moral Motivation."
In Charlottesville, Virginia, within the hallowed halls of the University of Virginia, there exists the peculiar Division of Perceptual Studies. DOPS researches questions some consider outside the domain of a respectable university. They are interested in the academic investigation of reincarnation, psychics, altered states of consciousness, and near-death experiences (NDEs). DOPS holds that mainstream science has presumptuously concluded that the mind simply is the brain and therefore, by the force of mere assumption, ruled out the existence of the so-called “paranormal.” That is, according to the Oxford Dictionary, an adjective “denoting events or phenomena such as telekinesis or clairvoyance that are beyond the scope of normal scientific understanding.”
If we think of the paranormal as “beyond the scope of normal scientific understanding,” then a robust vision of morality would also fit into that category. After all, objective moral values are usually thought to have some transcendent, otherworldly ground. Maybe, as some moral philosophers suggest, the Good exists in some heavenly and immaterial realm. J. L. Mackie, an atheist philosopher, notes that from his perspective, objective moral values would be “of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe.” [1] Perhaps, then, Unsolved Mysteries should feature, along with their UFO and ghost stories, a reading from Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals? That would be a truly bone-chilling episode, indeed.
Morality may also be broadly paranormal in another sense. Morality can also imply immortality and the existence of a soul—life beyond death. This idea is first developed philosophically by Immanuel Kant. David Baggett and Jerry Walls give a concise summary of Kant’s motivation for believing in life after death:
Since perfection obviously can’t be attained in this life, and because of the Kantian deontic principle ought implies can, death must not be the end. We must be able to continue the quest subsequent to death. This posthumous dimension is Kant’s argument for immortality.[2]
Kant’s suggestion is that the moral law demands that we keep it perfectly, that we be fully and finally transformed people who live consistently under the moral law. But there’s a couple of problems. First, humans just can’t meet the moral demand on their own and, second, they die before they can meet it. So, if the moral life is truly possible, life must continue after death and some divine assistance must be provided in order to be morally transformed.
Others, like C. S. Lewis, think that morality implies everlasting life. It is where the Good can finally be attained and where injustices are at long last made right. In heaven, we find “Love Himself, and Good Himself” and we are therefore happy, says Lewis.[3] And all the pain we have known will “sink out of sight.”[4] Of course, Lewis here thinks of God as the Good, but that is not the primary point. The Good, whatever form it may take, cannot be wholly found here, and so it must be somewhere else. If the moral life is truly possible, if we will truly have the Good, then we must continue to exist in that somewhere else where it can be had, where morality and rationality are finally reconciled.
This makes morality and the paranormal partners in a couple of ways. First, a robust morality is “strange” in Mackie’s terms, and beyond the realm of science, just like the paranormal. Second, certain paranormal phenomena, like NDEs and ghosts, implies that life continues after death. Since they’re partners in this limited sense, it may make one wonder whether the investigation of the paranormal can give any help to morality and the moral argument. I think so.
DOPS argues that some are closed off to the possibility of the paranormal because of certain epistemological and worldview commitments. If we assume that physicalism is true, then we can know without doing any actual research that people cannot survive the death of their bodies. People just are their bodies, so when the body dies, the mind also ceases to exist. But what does the evidence show?
Here we must tread carefully, but it may be worth the trip considering the potential rewards. Perhaps the most evidential and fruitful category of DOPS’s research concerns NDEs. DOPS and other researchers are primarily interested in “veridical NDEs.” These are cases where there is strong testimonial evidence that a person has survived their own brain death and, on occasion, have experiences outside their physical body. That testimony usually includes verifiable information that the NDE experiencer could not have known if she were in her body and unconscious. Here is a good example from Gary Habermas:
For instance, in a well-documented incident, a young girl had nearly drowned, not registering a pulse for 19 minutes. The emergency room physician observed that he “stood over Katie’s lifeless body in the intensive care unit.” A CT scan showed that she had massive brain swelling, and she was without a gag reflex, while being “profoundly comatose.” Dr. Melvin Morse reported, “When I first saw her, her pupils were fixed and dilated, meaning that irreversible brain damage had most likely occurred.” Her breathing was performed artificially and she was given very little chance to survive.
But only three days later, the girl surprisingly revived and made a full recovery. Katie began repeating an incredible wealth of specific facts regarding the emergency room, her resuscitation, and even physical descriptions of the two physicians. Morse confirmed that, “a child with Katie’s symptoms should have the absence of any brain function and therefore should comprehend nothing.”
Katie recalled these recent details for almost an hour. Further, during her comatose state, she said that an angel named Elizabeth allowed her to view her family at home. Katie correctly reported very specific details concerning the clothing and positions of each family member, identified a popular rock song that her sister listened to, observed her father, and then watched while her mother cooked dinner. She even correctly identified the food: roast chicken and rice. Later, she shocked her parents by relating details from just a few days before (see Melvin Morse and Paul Perry, Closer to the Light (N.Y.: Random House, 1990), 3-14 and Transformed by the Light (N.Y.: Random House, 1992), 22-23).[5]
And there are many more cases like this. The DOPS website provides a list of several other academic and popular publications. Capturing Christianity recently hosted an interview with Dr. Eben Alexander, who had his own NDE. Netflix recently produced a documentary series, Surviving Death, with one episode devoted to recounting and evaluating some of these cases.[6]
So, investigation of paranormal NDEs has yielded a boon of verifiable testimonial evidence which strongly suggests that we do, in fact, survive the death of our own bodies. And that is highly consistent with the intimations of morality; specifically, that we are immortal and that there is something beyond this life. Morality may be strange, but sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction.
[1] J. L. Mackie, Ethics, Kindle location 464.
[2] David Baggett and Jerry Walls, The Moral Argument: A History, p. 23.
[3] C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, Kindle location 1820.
[4] C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, Kindle location 1820.
[5] Gary Habermas, What Can Be Learned from Near-Death Experiences?, The Table. https://cct.biola.edu/can-learned-near-death-experiences/
[6] For those interested, I would recommend watching the whole series Surviving Death. It examines NDEs as well as psychics, seances, and other paranormal phenomena. I recommend it in part because it shows the difference in the evidential quality between NDEs and other paranormal phenomena.
The Managing Editor of MoralApologetics.com, Jonathan has been a vital part of the Moral Apologetics team since its inception. Currently, he serves as adjunct instructor of philosophy for Grand Canyon University and Liberty University. Prior to these positions, he was ordained as a minister and served as spiritual life director. He is the author or co-author of several articles on metaethics, theology, and history of philosophy. With a Master’s in Global Apologetics and a graduate of Biola’s Master’s program in philosophy, he is currently in the throes of finishing his doctoral dissertation in which he extends a four-fold moral argument from mere theism to a distinctively Christian picture of God. Jonathan, his wife Sara, and their two children presently live in Lynchburg, Virginia. JonathanRPruitt.com
Editor’s note: This article was originally posted at MandM. It has been posted here with permission of author.
I have been discussing the dualism of practical reason. As I understand it, this is an inference from three premises:
[1] We always have most reason to do what is morally required
[2] An act is morally required if and only if it is impartially demanded: demanded by rules justified from a perspective of impartial benevolence.
[3] If there are cases where, what is impartially demanded of a person, is an action contrary to their long-term self-interest, then the strongest reasons do not always favour what is impartially demanded.
The conclusion: unless we assume that requirements of self-interest never substantially conflict with impartial demands, we can only coherently affirm [1] and [2]. Seeing [1] is a plausible thesis about the authority of requirements, and [2] is a plausible thesis about their content. Our fundamental moral intuitions about morality cannot be reconciled.
One response to this argument is to deny [3]. This involves contending that impartial requirements are overriding: If impartial and prudential requirements clash, the former always take precedence. In my last post, I mentioned an argument made by Stephen Layman against this contention. Layman asks us to consider the case of Ms Poore;
Stephen Layman
Ms. Poore has lived many years in grinding poverty. She is not starving, but has only the bare necessities. She has tried very hard to get ahead by hard work, but nothing has come of her efforts. An opportunity to steal a large sum of money arises. If Ms. Poore steals the money and invests it wisely, she can obtain many desirable things her poverty has denied her: cure for a painful (but nonfatal) medical condition, a well-balanced diet, decent housing, adequate heat in the winter, health insurance, new career opportunities through education, etc. Moreover, if she steals the money, her chances of being caught are very low, and she knows this. She is also aware that the person who owns the money is very wealthy and will not be greatly harmed by the theft. Let us add that Ms. Poore rationally believes that if she fails to steal the money, she will likely live in poverty for the remainder of her life. In short, Ms. Poore faces the choice of stealing the money or living in grinding poverty the rest of her life. In such a case, I think it would be morally wrong for Ms. Poore to steal the money; and yet, assuming there is no God and no life after death, failing to steal the money will likely deny her a large measure of personal fulfillment, i.e., a large measure of what is in her long-term best interests[1].
Layman takes this case to illustrate that impartial requirements are not overriding. If there are cases where impartial demands require us to make a great sacrifice that confers relatively modest benefits on others, the strongest reasons do not support complying with impartial demands.[2]
Peter Bryne has criticised Layman’s example. He writes:
Layman’s way of approaching his moral argument suggests the following picture: rational agents are aware of a variety of reasons for action. They see prudential reasons vying with moral reasons. They measure whether moral reasons for doing something outweigh prudential reasons for not doing it, and they follow that set of reasons which is stronger overall. Now it is time to ask the question “From what standpoint does Layman’s rational agent weigh or measure reasons for action?[3]
Bryne thinks this is question raises an important challenge:
The unclarity in the language of weighing reasons for action, and of judging which reasons are stronger than others, lies in the fact that such language implies a common, neutral means of measuring the reasons. The very contrast, however, between morality and self-interest suggests that there can be no such means. The agent is faced with a choice between points of view and perspectives. From within a point of view or perspective, there can be weighing. What remains a mystery is how any agent could measure the relative strengths of the two kinds of consideration from neither the moral or prudential point of view but from a neutral standpoint.[4]
Bryne’s criticism seems to be this. Layman example imagines an agent “weighing” impartial reasons against prudential reasons against each other and attempting to answer the question as to which reasons are stronger or take precedence. This implies there is some rational perspective, which is neutral between prudence and impartial demands, which can weigh and adjudicate them in a conflict.
Bryne thinks this is misleading. The clash between prudential and impartial reasons involves a clash between requirements justified by incommensurable points of “points of view” or “perspectives”. These points of view are perspectives on what interests to take into account and how much weight to give them. The impartial point of view is a perspective that takes into account everyone’s interests and forms a conclusion based on giving these interests equal weight and consideration. From this point of view, you always have decisive reasons to do what is impartially required. By contrast, the prudential point of view is a view that only gives takes into account the interest of the individual agent and gives equal weight to the future and past interests of this individual agent. From this perspective, you should always act in your long-term self-interest.
Because these are differing perspectives on what interests to take into account and how much weight to give conflicting interests, there can be no question-begging way of weighing the conclusions of each procedure against each other. You can weigh reasons for and against actions in accord with one or more of these perspectives. You can have allegiance to one or both perspectives, and weigh from that perspective. One can also give up allegiance to one perspective in favour of another. But, when they clash, you cannot accept both perspectives simultaneously and weigh them against each other.
I am inclined to think Byrne’s response here misses the point. Consider how Ms Poore’s case appears on Bryne’s analysis. Ms. Poore “faces the choice of stealing the money or living in grinding poverty the rest of her life”. However, you analyse this; she still has to choose what to do in this situation; she must act one way or the other. In Bryne’s terms, we can ask Which perspective should she use in making the decision and weighing the relevant factors. Which point of view should she give allegiance to? Which should she give up allegiance to? Bryne’s analysis seems to imply there is no reason one can give for or against either answer. There is no “rational” or “neutral point of view” by which she can make this choice. The implication is that Ms Poore does not have stronger or weightier reasons to do what is impartially required. This isn’t because prudential reasons sometimes outweigh or trump impartial reasons, but because one cannot coherently claim one is weightier than the other without begging the very question at issue.
Concerns about the dualism of practical reason are concerns about a specific sort of practical dilemma. Suppose it is not always in one’s long-term self-interest to act according to impartial demands. This will mean impartial demands sometimes come into conflict with prudential requirements. When they do, we face the question: What reason is there to act impartially, rather than in one’s self-interest. What reason do we have for assuming that impartial demands are always stronger or weightier than prudential requirements when the two clash? The concern is that no answer to this question is forthcoming. If impartial and prudential requirements cannot be weighed against each other, then its hard to see how the former can always be weightier or take precedence in a clash. If they are incommensurable, we cannot have reasons for preferring one to the other.
Several commentators argue that this is precisely Sidgwick’s point when he agonised over the dualism of practical reason[5]. Note the argument Sidgwick gives for [3]
[U]nless the egoist affirms, implicitly or explicitly, that his own greatest happiness is not merely •the rational ultimate end for himself but •a part of universal good; and he can avoid the ‘proof’ of utilitarianism by declining to affirm this. Common sense won’t let him deny that the distinction between himself and any other person is real and fundamental; so it puts him in a position to think: ‘I am concerned with the quality of my existence as an individual in a fundamentally important sense in which I am not concerned with the quality of the existence of anyone else’; and I don’t see how it can be proved that this distinction ought not to be taken as fundamental in fixing the ultimate goal of an individual’s rational action… If an egoist isn’t moved by what I have called proof, the only way of arguing him into aiming at everyone’s happiness is to show that this gives him his best chance of greatest happiness for himself. And even if he admits that the principle of rational benevolence is self-evident, he may still hold •that it is irrational for him to sacrifice his own happiness to any other end;[6]
Here, Sidgwick imagines an “egoist”: someone who has “given allegiance” to the prudential point of view and weighs reasons in accord with this perspective. This egoist discovers that an impartial point of view would prohibit some action. Does the egoist have any reason to heed this prohibition? Sidgwick argues that, unless it can be shown that doing so is in his interest, the answer is no. From the egoist’s “perspective” or “point of view,” the effects of the action on his long-term interests is the only factor that carries weight in the decision. Providing does not implicitly give allegiance to an impartial point of view, or he is willing to give up any allegiance he does have to it; he will have no reason to do what is impartially required. Nor does he have any question-begging reason why he should switch allegiance to this point of view.
On this interpretation: the dualism of practical reason is the problem that impartial and prudential requirements are requirements justified from incommensurable points of view. Because human beings recognise both prudential and impartial reasons for acting in their practical reasoning, they implicitly give allegiance to both. This is not a problem if their requirements are consistent. But if they contradict each other, we will be rationally committed both to both doing and not doing the same action. The incommensurability of these perspectives means there is no rational basis for resolving the contradiction in favour of impartiality. Sidgwick writes:
[W]here we find a conflict between self-interest and duty, practical reason, being divided against itself, would cease to be a motive on either side. The conflict would have to be decided by which of two groups of non-rational impulses had more force. So we have this: •The harmony of duty and self-interest is a hypothesis that is required if we are to avoid a basic contradiction in one chief part of our thought.[7]
We can put it this way: Either prudential and impartial reasons are commensurable, or they are incommensurable. If they are commensurable, then when these requirements clash, we will need some reason for thinking that impartial reasons are always weightier. The Ms Poore case suggests this is not the case. By contrast, suppose that prudential and impartial requirements are incommensurable perspectives, and we cannot weigh them against each other. If they clash, we will have to choose which perspective to follow, and we will have no reason to follow one or the other. It will simply be an arbitrary act of allegiance. Either way, we will lack decisive reasons always to do what is impartiality required.
[1] C. Stephen Layman “God and the Moral Order” Faith and Philosophy, 23 (2006): 307
[2] Layman, “God and the Moral Order” 308
[3] Peter Bryne “God and the Moral Order: A Reply to Layman” Faith and Philosophy, 23:2 (2006): 201
[4] Bryne, “God and the Moral Order: A Reply to Layman” 206-207:
[5] See for example, Derek Parfit On What Matters (Volume 1) (Oxford: Oxford University Press : 2011) 130-134. See also Francesco Orsi, “The Dualism of the Practical Reason: Some Interpretations and Responses” Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics, 10:2 (2008): 25-26
[6] Henry Sidgwick, The Method of Ethics, 242 available at https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/sidgwick1874.pdf accessed 20/3/21
[7] Henry Sidgwick, The Method of Ethics, 284 available at https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/sidgwick1874.pdf accessed 20/3/21
Many moral apologists hold that the moral argument ultimately points beyond mere theism to the truth of Christianity in particular. Such a view is held by David Baggett, Jerry Walls, H.P Owen, and C.S. Lewis. But if that’s the case, then we should discover that Christianity really does explain the moral facts, facts about moral value, moral knowledge, and moral rationality, better than not just secular atheistic theories, but alternative religious explanations as well. Today, I give some suggestions about why Christianity is a better explanation than Mormonism.
Some may be perplexed that I would draw such a sharp distinction between Christianity and Mormonism. Isn’t, after all, Mormonism just another Christian denomination? In that case, it might be like saying Methodism better explains the moral facts than does Catholicism. Such confusion is understandable, especially given that in recent memory, the LDS church, the largest of many different restorationist Mormon denominations, has seemingly tried to represent themselves as just another Christian denomination, even officially dropping the “Mormon” moniker in 2018.[1] They now wish to be known simply as the “Church of Jesus Christ.” So, to make the distinction clear, it will help to lay out, briefly, a few key facts about the Mormon religion.
Mormon Theology and Metaphysics
Most know that Mormonism is a religion founded by Joseph Smith, who claimed to be a prophet, seer, and revelator. Smith claims that “God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to him in a grove of trees near his parents’ home in western New York State when he was about 14 years old.”[2] Smith went into the woods to pray, partly to find out which church he should join, frustrated by the “war of words and the tumult of opinions” among the Christian denominations.[3] Smith wanted to know which church was right, but in the grove he learned that none were. A few months later, Smith claims that he was visited by the angel Moroni, who directed him to the location of some buried gold plates, which contained an account of “the former inhabitants of this continent” and “the fullness of the everlasting Gospel.”[4]
Later, Smith supposedly found and translated these golden plates, the resulting work being the Book of Mormon. Christian critics of the Book of Mormon note that despite its unusual provenance, its “theology is largely orthodox in nature.”[5] However, Smith had started a new religious movement, one that would evolve and develop new doctrines, largely supported by its commitment to ongoing revelation. Through continued revelation and inspired translations, Smith would build upon the mostly benign theology of the Book of Mormon and would include, infamously, the doctrine of plural marriage (polygamy) among others.
I suspect that most with at least a passing awareness of Mormonism know these basic facts, but many are not familiar with some of the more exotic teachings of Prophet Joseph. In the late 1830s and into the 1840s, Smith produced a “translation” of some Egyptian papyri. Smith claimed that the documents he bought from traveling salesmen Michael Chandler was actually a lost, first person account from Abraham himself, about his days in Egypt.[6] In this “Book of Abraham,” we learn that there are eternally existent “intelligences” (3:18). God is said to dwell in the midst of these; these intelligences were “organized” before the making of the world (3:22-23). The Book of Abraham is clear that all human beings are organized from these eternal and pre-existing intelligences. Such a view raises important questions about God’s relation to these intelligences. Are they, though eternal, nevertheless ontologically dependent upon him in some way?
Fortunately, in 1844 Joseph Smith would answer this question directly in a sermon given shortly before he died. In his “King Follet Sermon,” Smith proclaimed that “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens!” He adds that God is “like yourselves in all the person, image, and very form as a man.”[7] Smith provides further detail, explaining how God came to be God: “We have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity. I will refute that idea, and take away the veil, so that you may see… He was once a man like us; yea, that God himself, the Father of us all, dwelt on an earth, the same as Jesus Christ Himself did; and I will show it from the Bible.”[8]
LDS scholar Richard Bushman says that in this sermon, Joseph taught that “God was one of the free intelligences who had learned to become God.” Bushman adds that this interpretation is “obvious.”[9] Bushman further comments that Joseph Smith’s “words evoked a hierarchy of gods, succeeding to higher stations of greater glory as kingdoms are presented to them and as rising souls below them ascend to godhood… He [God] is their teacher, not their maker.”[10] Additional clarification and endorsement of this doctrine was given by later church president and prophet, Lorenzo Snow, who said, “As man is God once was, as God is man may be." A church produced magazine comments on this couplet that “it is clear that the teaching of President Lorenzo Snow is both acceptable and accepted doctrine in the Church today."[11]
The moral argument is an argument for the existence of God. Proponents of the moral argument understand this God to be the only God, eternally existent, the ground of all that exists, singular, and that there is none other like him. Many moral apologists adopt a broadly Anselmian understanding of God as the Greatest Conceivable Being, the sort of being that possesses all great making properties in a maximal way. He is all good, all powerful, and all knowing. This point is critical and not merely incidental to the moral argument. God must be maximally great, and therefore sui generis, or else God cannot be the explanation of morality.
The Problem of God’s Goodness
Plato’s famous Euthyphro Dilemma can highlight the difference between Christian monotheism and Mormon theology.[12] Plato argued that either the Gods love what is good or something is good when it is loved by the Gods. If the Gods love what is good, then morality doesn’t need the Gods. We can have morality without appeal to the Gods. We simply love the good and we will be moral. But if something is good just because it is loved by the Gods, then morality is arbitrary and irrational. Christian moral philosophers like David Baggett have argued that theism can “split the horns” of the dilemma. One can identify the good with God, so that morality depends on God but is not arbitrary. Theists can also think of moral obligations as identical to God’s commands so that what is morally right is determined by God.
However, such an option is not available to Mormons. Since the person they call “God” is an uncreated intelligence, and the same kind of thing as all other persons, he cannot be identified with the good. No finite and concrete thing like an intelligence would rightly fill that role. If we pose the Euthyphro dilemma to the Mormon, the answer can only be that God loves what is holy. God is simply an exalted man and cannot be the ground of what is moral. Therefore, on the Mormon view, objective morality would exist whether God exists or not.
Certainly, the Mormon God may issue commands to us, but why should we obey them? And the Mormon God may even be good; he might have a perfected moral character, but he cannot identical to the good; he is not Anselm’s Greatest Conceivable Being. He is, as Smith said, an exalted man. He is not the creator of human beings, merely their organizer.
In my view, this issue about the Mormon God’s relation to the good is the central challenge to morality on a Mormon view of the world. But there are other formidable issues. I want only to mention two more.
The Problem of Moral Knowledge
First, there is the problem of moral knowledge. On the Christian view, God is omnipotent and makes the world ex nihilo. He has meticulous control over the world and over the creation and development of our minds. Since he is good and capable, it is natural to think he would make us to know moral truth. However, on the Mormon view, we have always existed as “intelligences” and God’s power is limited. He can form us, but does not create us. Our minds, in particular, seem to exist from eternity past as “intelligences.” Why think, then, that our cognitive abilities are able to discern moral truth? If we are able to know moral truth, one possibility would seemingly be that it is an inexplicable, brute fact about our status as uncreated intelligences. Intelligences just know what is moral and that is the end of the explanation. This would not be a satisfying explanation of how we can rationally have moral knowledge.[13]
The Problem of Moral Rationality
Second, there is the problem of justice and of the ultimate reconciliation between happiness and morality. Kant, in his moral argument for theism, argues that we must presuppose that God exists if for no other reason than to guarantee that justice is ultimately done. God judges, rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked. And he has the power to balance the scales in the final judgment. However, the Mormon God, limited in power and subject to the eternal laws of the universe, cannot guarantee the ultimate victory of good over evil. How things work out in the end are beyond his control. Certainly, we can grant that the Mormon God, as an exalted man, may have, relatively speaking, a tremendous amount of power. But not all power and not all knowledge. As Joseph Smith said, God is subject to the eternal laws of the universe, including the principles of exaltation and eternality of matter.[14] It would seemingly be a happy coincidence that God, given his limitations, was able to bring about the ultimate harmony of morality and happiness. Even if obedience to the Mormon God could, somehow, count as fulfilling our moral obligations, it remains to be seen how the moral life can be ultimately rational.
In conclusion, then, I want to reiterate I intend this short essay to be merely suggestive, one that probes potential issues with the Mormon worldview considering morality. I think these three issues, related to the goodness of God, moral knowledge, and moral rationality, are likely indicative of some serious shortcomings in Mormonism’s explanatory power regarding the moral facts and they give us at least a prima facie reason to think that Christianity better explains the moral facts.
[1] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/church/news/mormon-is-out-church-releases-statement-on-how-to-refer-to-the-organization?lang=eng
[2] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/first-vision-accounts?lang=eng
[3] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/pgp/js-h/1.5-20?lang=eng#p5
[4] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/pgp/js-h/1.5-20?lang=eng#p5
[5] Carl Mosser, “And the Saints Go Marching On” in The New Mormon Challenge.
[6] However, it is very likely that the papyri had nothing to do with Abraham and were a collection of well-known texts. These have since been translated by Egyptologists and no connection to Abraham is evident. Cf. https://coldcasechristianity.com/writings/how-the-book-of-abraham-exposes-the-false-nature-of-mormonism/
[7] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1971/04/the-king-follett-sermon?lang=eng
[8] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1971/04/the-king-follett-sermon?lang=eng
[9] Richard Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling, 534.
[10] Bushman, 535.
[11]The comment was made in 1909, but reprinted in 2002. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/2002/02/the-origin-of-man?lang=eng
[12]Some LDS scholars argue that LDS doctrine is not polytheistic. They say such a term is “pejorative, inaccurate, and inappropriate.” Cf. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Mormonism_and_the_nature_of_God/Polytheism#Question:_Are_Christians_monotheists.3F
Note, however, that the FAIR explanation of monotheism seems to be functional rather than ontological. They are monotheists because they worship one God. However, this would be, at best, an idiosyncratic use of the terms monotheistic and polytheistic. The article further incorrectly defines “social trinitarianism” as the denial that the Trinity is one substance. They also try to argue that the Christian doctrine of theosis, which has some biblical basis, is the same as the one taught by the LDS church. That is also simply incorrect; orthodox Christians have never taught that human beings can become God in exactly the same way as God is God, even if they held that there is some mystical union between a human person and the divine.
[13] There are potentially some other explanations for grounding moral knowledge, which I consider here.
[14] https://abn.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1971/04/the-king-follett-sermon?lang=eng
The Managing Editor of MoralApologetics.com, Jonathan has been a vital part of the Moral Apologetics team since its inception. Currently, he serves as adjunct instructor of philosophy for Grand Canyon University and Liberty University. Prior to these positions, he was ordained as a minister and served as spiritual life director. He is the author or co-author of several articles on metaethics, theology, and history of philosophy. With a Master’s in Global Apologetics and a graduate of Biola’s Master’s program in philosophy, he is currently in the throes of finishing his doctoral dissertation in which he extends a four-fold moral argument from mere theism to a distinctively Christian picture of God. Jonathan, his wife Sara, and their two children presently live in Lynchburg, Virginia.
The question haunts many, if not all, of us: “What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun.... For all their days are full of pain, and their work is a vexation; even at night their minds do not rest. This also is vanity.” What fascinates is not only the query itself, but the question within the question: Why does this question arise in one creature of the solar system, Homo sapiens, and, why is the creature burdened by it?
Ancient Israel’s King Solomon is uniquely positioned to raise such a query. His material resources know no bounds. Solomon, like few others, has the opportunity both to live life to its ultimate, and the brilliance to contemplate it. Dominating the region from the Euphrates to the Gaza, King Solomon’s daily board consists of a thousand bushels of fine flour and meal, thirty oxen, and one hundred sheep plus deer and fowl. His annual gold income of 50,000 pounds amounts to $1.4 billion dollars. With over one thousand women in his possession, he can enjoy the company of a different woman every day for nearly three years. His wisdom is reputed to have surpassed the wisest from Egypt to the East.
After contemplating an experiment toiling and pleasuring with his materiality, his conclusion is as startling as it is counterintuitive: “Whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them. I kept my heart from no pleasure, for my heart found pleasure in all my toil, and this was my reward for all my toil. Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had spent in doing it, and again, all was vanity and a chasing after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.”
Bring to mind Solomon’s question: “What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun?” The word ‘gain’ means profit or surplus; it is the amount of value gained exceeding value expended. ‘Toil’ is work and labor but more broadly portrayed in Ecclesiastes as the human struggle for a satisfying and fulfilling life. The temporary gain Solomon finds for all his toil is “pleasure in all my toil.” Specifically, “what I have seen to be good and fitting” is “to eat, to drink and enjoy oneself in all one’s labor in which he toils.” From the ancient philosopher Epicurus to guitarist Dave Matthews, “eat, drink and be merry” is a common rule for making the most of our toiling lot. Certainly, we like-minded laborers are one with Thomas Jefferson whom Daniel Webster observes “enjoys his dinner well, taking with meat a large proportion of vegetables.” Today we may alter it to “taking with our French fries and salad a large proportion of ribeye steak!”
For the time being, Solomon concludes, the most gain this natural, cosmic order can offer is taking pleasure in fulfilling natural biological needs. The difference between us and the other creatures, like the grey squirrel or white-tailed deer, is we are aware of enjoying the satisfaction that results from our toil. So far, Solomon’s conclusion agrees with modern-day, non-theistic naturalism. The sole return Homo sapiens can expect for the sweat of the brow is of this natural world; this is all there is. There is nothing more.
Solomon foresees naturalism’s viewpoint as inadequate. “What do people gain from all the toil?” Not enough. “All human toil is for the mouth, yet the appetite is not satisfied,” laments Solomon. Does the pleasure of eating and drinking not just offset, but provide a surplus of benefit to the pain and suffering of the struggle to secure fulfilling existence? Truth be told, eating and drinking and enjoying ourselves is but unsatisfying satisfaction! Like no other creature in the universe, given the satisfaction of eating and drinking, some of us have a taste for something more – something beyond the givenness of this fixed natural order.
Given the assumptions of naturalism—(a) the natural order is a closed system; (b) there is no reality – no God – outside of it; and (c) humans are creatures of this natural order—we would expect Homo sapiens, like every other creature, to have its needs met within the natural order. The fact that humans seek something beyond the satisfaction of natural needs raises its own question: “Why”? Why are some of us, even one of us, unlike other animals, not satisfied with only the fulfillment of natural, bodily needs? Could our unfulfillment be due to not having enough of this natural world? Apparently not. John D. Rockefeller, whose net worth was one percent of the US economy, could have anything and everything in any amount. Yet he confirmed Solomon’s experience. “His eyes were not satisfied with riches” when he said enough money was having “just a little bit more.”
Others like mid-twentieth century, sultry jazz singer Peggy Lee croons the human quest when she sings, “Is that all there is? ... As I sat there watching I had the feeling that something was missing. I don’t know what, but when it was over, I said to myself, ‘Is that all there is to the circus?’” Mega rock singer Bono of U2 attests to the human search for something absent when he wails, “And I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”
Why do humans bear witness to the absence of ultimate fulfillment when they enjoy complete, bodily satisfaction? Why even raise the question, “What do people gain from all the toil?” Like a carpenter’s dovetail, the “tail” of absence attractively fits the “pin” of the presence of the supernatural God. The abiding absence is the beautiful entre to supra-natural fulfillment in the God of eternity. The question and its question within have an appealing reply in the supply of an eternal God. He is the countervailing reality needed to offset the troubled striving for the fulfilled life. God provides an abundance of true “profit” and surplus exceeding the painful and grievous struggle for fulfillment in this temporal world. Solomon sees it through a glass dimly: “God has also set eternity in their heart …. Fear God.” The satisfaction of real gain and advantage from life’s toil anticipates the summons of the Coming One, “Come to me all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest…. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”
Tom is currently a retired Elder in the Virginia Annual Conference. He has pastored churches in Virginia, California and England. Studying John Wesley’s theology, he received his Ph.D. and M.A. degrees from the University of Bristol, Bristol, England and his Master of Divinity degree from Asbury Theological Seminary. While a student, he and his wife Pam lived in John Wesley’s Chapel “The New Room”, Bristol, England, the first established Methodist preaching house. Tom was a faculty member of Asbury Theological Seminary. He has contributed articles to Methodist History and the Wesleyan Theological Journal. He and his wife have two children, daughter Karissa, who is an attorney in Richmond, Virginia, and, John, who is a recent graduate of Regent University. Being a part of the development of their grandson Beau is a rich reward. Tom enjoys a good book by a crackling fire with an English cup of tea. His life text is, ‘Jesus, confirm my heart’s desire, to work and speak and think for thee’
In earlier installments we discussed our deep need for forgiveness and moral transformation—justification and sanctification, respectively—but there is one more step: Not just to be wholly forgiven and radically transformed, but for the process to culminate. We need the good work that has been begun within us to be completed, which God promises to do at the day of Christ Jesus for those who trust him. And so what we are talking about now is the Christian category of glorification, when we are entirely conformed to the image of Jesus, morally beautified to the uttermost, every last vestige of sin having been excised and expunged.
This answers to a deep intuitive recognition of a third basic moral drive or need, or maybe aspiration—yet one, once more, beyond the reach of our own capacities without divine grace—the hunger to be perfected, turned into the best versions of ourselves, delivered entirely from the power and consequences of sin. Christianity assures us, and we have principled reasons to believe, that this is no Pollyannaish pipe dream, but a reality we can look forward to with a hope that will not disappoint.
Interestingly, Immanuel Kant thought that human beings would never achieve a “holy will,” which he considered reserved for God alone. The process of moral perfection was thus something at best approached asymptotically—we get closer and closer throughout eternity but never fully arrive at it. It is a process that is never completed, he thought, so this served as the basis of his argument for immortality, since the process must continue forever.
Christian theology, I suspect, suggests that Kant was both right and wrong. He was wrong to think we will not be perfected. The Christian doctrine of glorification is about the process of sanctification reaching an end point. Ultimately sin will be completely defeated within us, and we will find complete deliverance from its power and consequences. That is a glorious hope.
Still, Kant was also likely right that there will remain a movement, a dynamism, even after the point of glorification. For one thing, the prospect of beholding the glory and beauty and goodness of God is an unending process. For another, once full deliverance from sin comes is when the fullest life for which we were created can really begin, which even the present life already intimates at.
A. E. Taylor wrote eloquently about this in his Faith of a Moralist. Here is just one example:
The moral life does not consist merely in getting into right relations with our fellows or our Maker. That’s only preliminary to the real business: to live in them. Even in this life we have to do more than unlearn unloving. We have to practice giving love actual embodiment. This is continuous with what is morally of highest importance and value in our present life…. Heaven must be a land of delightful surprises. We should have learned to love every neighbor who crosses our path, to hate nothing that God has made, to be indifferent to none of the mirrors of His light. But even where there is no ill-will or indifference to interfere with love, it is still possible for love to grow as understanding grows.
Combining all the discussions of our last three installments, what we have here is a three-pronged moral argument based in God’s grace. It is by God’s grace we can find the forgiveness we desperately need for having fallen short of the moral standard, which we all do. It is by God’s grace we can be set free from both our subjective feelings and objective condition of guilt, and it is by God’s grace that we will be eventually entirely conformed to the image of Christ and delivered completely from sin’s power and consequences. From first to last, what answers our deepest moral needs—for forgiveness, for change, and for perfection—is the astounding grace of a good God perfect in holiness and perfect in love.
David Baggett is professor of philosophy and Director of the Center for Moral Apologetics at Houston Baptist University.
Does the right life lead to the happy life? The question arises for me in ‘Belgravia’, Julian Fellowes follow-up cable TV series to ‘Downton Abbey’. In ‘Belgravia’, Lord Edmund Bellasis, handsome heir to the Earl and Countess of Brockenhurst, and Sophia Trenchard, daughter of a moneyed London business-man, love each other; their eyes lock as they waltz together at Lady Brockenhurst’s ball in 1815 on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo. Sophia’s mother, Anne Trenchard, is dead set against the match; she knows that while she and her husband James travel in aristocratic circles, they are ‘trade’ not nobility
Interrupting the ball, Britain’s Duke of Wellington calls his dancing soldiers to report immediately for the march to Napoleon at Waterloo. Sophia’s love, soldier Lord Bellasis, rides off to his death in battle, never to return; come to find out, he and Sophia had married secretly. As Sophia carries their child, she has reason to believe Lord Bellasis tricked her into a fraudulent marriage leaving no husband and no certificate - only a child. As Sophia dies giving birth to their son, her parents, the Trenchards, accept the baby boy is a bastard.
The immorality of a believed-to-be fraudulent marriage producing a bastard sets in motion a twisting narrative; characters counter the fallout from the evil with their own bad, moral choices one after another in an effort to secure for themselves good. Does responding with evil after being victimized by evil only further evil? Does one lose control of one’s life and the good one seeks by attempting to secure good by a pattern of choosing badly? Can one control one’s destiny for good by responding to evil with a pattern of good, moral choices?
The preponderance of characters in ‘Belgravia’ makes bad, moral choices with John Bellasis leading the way. Since Earl and Lady Brockenhurst’s only child, Lord Edmund Bellasis, was killed at Waterloo, John Bellasis, their nephew, stands to inherit the title and estate. John Bellasis becomes alarmed when his aunt, Lady Brockenhurst, showers favor on a mysterious young cotton merchant, Charles Pope. What John does not know but Lady Brockenhurst does is that Charles Pope is her believed-to-be illegitimate grandson, the son of her deceased son Lord Bellasis and Sophia. Not content with ignorance, John Bellasis is determined to solve the mystery of Charles Pope and deal appropriately with this menace to his inheritance; at stake is nothing less than one of the noblest and wealthiest estates in England.
So, John Bellasis begins making a chain of bad, moral choices which tend to escalate as he goes about securing for himself the desired good of a noble fortune: he pays servants of both the Trenchards, and the Brockenhursts to betray their masters by surveilling them and prying into their affairs; he wants to unearth information about Charles Pope. Next, he seduces the Trenchard’s daughter in law with an eye to obtaining desired information. He insinuates himself into Charles Pope’s workers and finds a disgruntled employee who points him to a false report that maligns Pope’s character.
By the time his plot seems to crescendo to success, John Bellasis and his bad moral choices are suddenly unmasked and revealed when he attempts to murder Charles Pope. He implodes as his bad, moral choices are exposed and bring evil on the lives of those he enlisted to do his bidding: the servants’ betrayal of their masters is revealed, causing their disloyalty to jeopardize their standings and positions; the woman he seduces realizes John hates her and disowns their baby she carries; the malignant report against Charles Pope turns out to be quite the opposite; and the Earl of Brockenhurst’s inheritance will definitely not go to John - but to Charles Pope. John Bellasis flees to Europe a wanted criminal.
Choosing moral evil, John Bellasis loses control of himself and the ultimate good he desires. He believes each evil choice will put him in control of securing his inheritance. Contrarily, each evil choice moves him a step further away from obtaining his desire. By making bad moral choices he loses control of the good desired for himself and lets evil manipulate and shape him into its image. Rather than being esteemed by others as a morally, good person who brings grace and benefit to others, his immoral actions make him into a persona non gratis who brings harm to all.
The narrative of John Bellasis is illustrative of the moral structure of the universe: bad, moral choices inevitably lead one not to good and happiness, but to dystopia and harm. Responding to an evil with an evil ultimately produces evil. As Augustine said, ‘We must lead a right life to reach a happy life’.
The biblical character Joseph is the antithesis to John Bellasis. When Joseph’s brothers victimize and sell him as a slave, he makes good, moral choices: he chooses to trust and be dutiful, conscientious, courageous, honest and trustworthy to his master Potiphar. When Potiphar’s wife tries to seduce him, rather than entering into the evil he makes the good, moral choice to be faithful to her husband, his master Potiphar. Though his good action seems to counter my thesis and is rewarded by another evil victimization - he is sent to prison - he responds to this evil by making the good, moral choice not to be vengeful or bitter; rather, he chooses to be a dutiful, conscientious, compassionate, trustworthy and responsible prisoner.
The successive evil injustices that come against him do not control him; he does not become evil seeking to counter evil with evil; he does not become a vengeful, bitter, selfish person but embraces virtuous, moral actions. Like drips of mineral laden water filtering through a rock cavern form successive, mineral deposits into a conical stalactite, Joseph’s successive good, moral choices mold him into a person of good, moral character. He is one who acts consistently with beneficent traits of compassion, moral courage, honesty, faith, responsibility and perseverance of which all persons want to be recipients. Rather than capitulating to and being controlled by the evil so that he becomes one with it, he exercises control over his ‘becoming’ through good, moral choices and faith in God. The result is a good life discontinuous with and independent of the evil which assails him.
If you will exercise control over your life, no matter what evil is perpetrated against you, every time respond with good, moral choices which all persons recognize are a benefit to others. Joseph controls his life parrying the evil through good, moral choices and transcends evil producing a good, virtuous character which puts him at just the right position at just the right time to act to save not only Egypt, but God’s own people. ‘We must lead a right life to reach a happy life’.
Tom is currently a retired Elder in the Virginia Annual Conference. He has pastored churches in Virginia, California and England. Studying John Wesley’s theology, he received his Ph.D. and M.A. degrees from the University of Bristol, Bristol, England and his Master of Divinity degree from Asbury Theological Seminary. While a student, he and his wife Pam lived in John Wesley’s Chapel “The New Room”, Bristol, England, the first established Methodist preaching house. Tom was a faculty member of Asbury Theological Seminary. He has contributed articles to Methodist History and the Wesleyan Theological Journal. He and his wife have two children, daughter Karissa, who is an attorney in Richmond, Virginia, and, John, who is a recent graduate of Regent University. Being a part of the development of their grandson Beau is a rich reward. Tom enjoys a good book by a crackling fire with an English cup of tea. His life text is, ‘Jesus, confirm my heart’s desire, to work and speak and think for thee’.
In Love with the Word: A Charge to Christian Literary Critics
Marybeth Baggett
Back when I decided to become an English major during an American Literature class at the local community college, I was overwhelmed by many of the wonderfully creative pieces that we studied. Chief among the works that captivated my attention was Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. I don’t mean to overstate the situation, but I teach English today in no small part thanks to that book. It’s a tragic story, so its positive effect on me may be a bit surprising. But anyone who has read it can testify to Crane’s ability to use mere words to bring to vivid life the fully realistic character of Maggie and to garner sympathy and concern for her and those like her.
Somehow these marks on the book’s pages filled my mind with empathy for the less fortunate, challenged my preconceptions about poverty, and—among other things—helped me better understand American history and culture. Reading this novel impressed upon me what an astounding thing is language. Used well it fills us with joy and enobles our existence. Language can entertain us through stories and verbal games. It can delight us through brilliant literary expression. We can use it to convey our internal experiences and to get a peek into the experiences of others. In short, we can do wonders with words.
I felt as much when I wrote my end-of-term paper on Crane’s novel. I found such satisfaction in engaging Crane’s story, having responses to it formed in my mind, and turning those inchoate thoughts into something structured, something readable and understandable by another person. That was my first experience, I think, in writing an essay of which I was truly proud. What was true at that time remains true now: for me, there is little better than bringing ideas to heel in a well-crafted sentence. If I may engage in hyperbole, it sometimes feels like a miracle.
But as valuable and worthwhile as language and literature is, there is a danger of overvaluing the written word for those like us who spend our time dwelling on it. We risk overestimating literature’s worth and putting on it a burden it simply cannot bear. As we think about our love for literature, we can understand sentiments of writers like Samuel Coleridge who elevate literary expression to the apex of human activity. In Biographia Literaria, he says that “poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.”[1] Emerson, in his quintessential grandiosity, takes this notion a step further, making poetry foundational to reality itself and placing it beyond humanity’s comprehension or control:
For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, or a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem.[2]
On Emerson’s terms, we are unworthy mortals who can only glimpse poetry’s greatness.
Still others have put much hope in poetry as the means of personal or communal salvation, as does Matthew Arnold who, Culture and Anarchy, stakes his social agenda on advancing transformative cultural education:
Again and again I have insisted how those are the happy moments of humanity, how those are the marking epochs of a people’s life, how those are the flowering times for literature and art and all the creative power of genius, when there is a national glow of life and thought, when the whole of society is in the fullest measure permeated by thought, sensible to beauty, intelligent and alive.[3]
It’s an enchanting vision to be sure, of society in full cooperation and prosperity. But literary genius as the source of such conditions strikes the ear as a bit of wishful thinking.
Yes, Coleridge, Emerson, and Arnold affirmed the existence of God and saw poetry or cultural activity as in some way or other directly tied to a divine source, but in their writings that so highly elevate poetry, we can see the makings of a disconnection between the two, a displacement and eventually an elevation of one for the other—and the wrong one. In Screwtape Letters through the mouth of his titular demonic character, C. S. Lewis warns of such a temptation regarding social justice. Rather than the so-called “patient” prioritizing Christian doctrine with social justice concerns flowing from that, Screwtape wants him to reverse the order: “The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice.”[4] The temptation process he describes to Wormwood could work just as easily for literature. What this amounts to, of course, is idolatry, a status for poetry that Wallace Stevens makes explicit in Adagia: “After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.”[5]
Christians would, of course, assiduously avoid embracing Stevens’ conclusions, not least of all because we retain a belief in God. But Christian or no, we’d do well to pause for a moment and consider the absurdity of Stevens’ claim. Poetry is wonderful, but life’s redemption? What a bunch of nonsense. In the face of death, disease, war, atrocities, we’ll respond with figurative language and some prosody. Grievous loss? Here’s a sonnet to remedy the situation. To offer lyricism alone as rectification for horrific abuse is frankly grotesque. Justice may at times be poetic, but poetry is far from justice’s source. At best it is a salve for sorrow, an intimation of a world set right.
But before we start patting ourselves on the back for recognizing the error of Stevens’ ways, I wonder if we don’t sometimes verge the same idolatrous thinking about our vocation. It’s often the subtle errors that are the most perilous and insidious. Do we ever ourselves prioritize literature and language at the expense of something more vital? Do we ever use it to overindulge our own longings or boost our own ego? Does our love of literature ever interfere with or displace our deeper callings, especially our highest calling as Christians to love God and love our neighbor? Do we mine literature’s truths as means for self-advancement instead of with kingdom-building aims? Have we ever allowed our God-given gifts for appreciating and analyzing literature to look down on others who don’t share those gifts? Are we guilty of imperialistic thinking, believing our discipline the most important, implicitly saying to another part of the body of Christ that we have no need of them?
In a poignant passage, William James well articulates the danger of mishandling literature:
All Goods are disguised by the vulgarity of their concomitants, in this work-a-day world; but woe to him who can only recognize them when he thinks them in their pure and abstract form! The habit of excessive novel-reading and theatre-going will produce true monsters in this line. The weeping of the Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the play, while her coachman is freezing to death on his seat outside, is the sort of thing that everywhere happens on a less glaring scale.[6]
Again, literature is a beautiful thing; prizing it over actual human beings is abhorrent.
In the literary field, we also sometimes see self-indulgence of a different kind, that which is practiced from a critical stance where a scholar or reviewer uses the work of another as merely a soapbox for self-promotion. W. H. Auden captures the temptations to pride involved in literary criticism:
If good literary critics are rarer than good poets or novelists, one reason is the nature of human egoism. A poet or a novelist has to learn to be humble in the face of his subject matter which is life in general. But the subject matter of a critic, before which he has to learn to be humble, is made up of authors, that is to say, of human individuals, and this kind of humility is much more difficult to acquire. It is far easier to say — “Life is more important than anything I can say about it” — than to say — “Mr. A’s work is more important than anything I can say about it.”[7]
A piece of literature is no human being, of course, but treatment of a book or literary work surely has implications for treatment of the one who wrote it and who poured so much of themselves and their time into it. It also has implications for our own character formation.
Christian literary critics must center our Christian identity as primary, with our study of literature flowing from that. John 13:35 says that love is the distinguishing mark of disciples of Christ. In Matthew 22, Jesus identifies love of God and love of neighbor as the two greatest commandments, ending with the profound but mysterious truth that “[a]ll the Law and the Prophets hang on [them].” Alan Jacobs uses this claim as a springboard for his worthwhile book, A Theology of Reading, which is intriguingly subtitled A Hermeneutics of Love. An adaptation of a well-worn scripture passage might frame our thinking here:
If I read through the lens of Marx or of Greenblatt, but do not have love, I am only a noxious judge or a nagging critic. If I have the gift of soliloquy and can fathom all poetry and all fiction, and if I have a style that can stir passions, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I pen all I perceive to the crowds and give over my essays to journals that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient reading, love is kind interpretation. It does not envy another writer’s gifts or troll another’s work, it is not vain about its own intellectual blessings. It does not dishonor others in the guise of criticism, it is not self-promotional, it is not easily angered when edited or evaluated, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails. But where there are novels, they will cease; where there are odes, they will be stilled; where there is critique, it will pass away. For we read in part and we analyze in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
The challenge I want to pose—as Christians studying literature and language—is for us to contemplate what loving participation in the literary discipline looks like. What kinds of words do we use; when and how do we use them? What kinds of stories do we tell; why do we tell them? How do we handle the words and stories of others?
Literary studies today can give us critical frameworks for reading, terminology for literary criticism, insights into the creative process and lives of poets. It can provide us with untold lists of books to read, ways to understand them, and thematic angles for interpretation. But it cannot instill in us love for God or others. Even politically charged theories, concerned as they are with questions of justice, have no mechanism for personal transformation—they can tell us to be good but cannot make us good, as Jacobs points out in regards to cultural studies.[8]
What makes a difference for literary studies as for life—what makes possible our love for one another—is that God first loved us. He entered into our world to redeem his creation, thus enabling our free responses to his overtures of love. A belief in the incarnation, as Roger Lundin argues, should make all the difference in how we conceive of “the nature, scope, and power of words.”[9] Our words have value, they have meaning, they have purpose because of the Living Word, the Word made flesh who chose to dwell among us. This truth should ground our engagement with human words, our own and those of others. Done well and right, even our study of literature, if subsumed under the lordship of Christ, can become a way for us to fulfill the great commission and the great commandment, to discharge our God-given vocations, to do the good works for which we were intended.
Marybeth Davis Baggett lives in Lynchburg, Virginia, and teaches English at Liberty University. Having earned her Ph.D. in English from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Marybeth’s professional interests include literary theory, contemporary American literature, science fiction, and dystopian literature. She also writes and edits for Christ and Pop Culture. Her most recent publication was a chapter called “What Means Utopia to Us? Reconsidering More’s Message,” in Hope and the Longing for Utopia: Futures and Illusions in Theology and the Arts. Marybeth's most recent book is The Morals of the Story: Good News about a Good God, coauthored with her husband, David.
notes:
[1] Coleridge, Samuel. Biographia Literaria. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6081/6081-h/6081-h.htm.
[2] Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The Poet.” https://user.xmission.com/~seldom74/emerson/the_poet.html.
[3] Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. http://public-library.uk/ebooks/25/79.pdf.
[4] Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters. London: Centenary, 1944, Chapter XXIII.
[5] Stevens, Wallace. Adagia, section 1. Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, edited by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997.
[6] James, William. Psychology. London: Macmillan, 1892, p. 124.
[7] Auden, W. H. Dyer’s Hand. New York: Random House, 1962, p. 8.
[8] Jacobs, Alan. A Theology of Reading. New York: Routledge, 2001, p. 124.
[9] Lundin, Roger. Beginning with the Word. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2014, p. 8.
Waiting
Tom Thomas
I used to see a red, retro-Ford Thunderbird in my neighborhood with the license plate, “Why Wait?” It always triggered a reaction in me. “Why wait? Waiting is the way,” I said to myself. “Everyone must wait…on something…on someone.” We are waiting on dinner, to pass the course, a good job opening, to find Mr. Right or the “dream girl,” for test results, or for gratification. Who likes waiting?! Observed the late Henri Nouwen, “Waiting is a dry desert between where we are and where we want to be.”
Waiting for my mother to pick me up after baseball practice at Miller Park in Lynchburg was surely a dry desert. As the afternoon shadows deepened, the field was long abandoned. I was the last one left. Cell phones did not exit. I did not even have a dime to call on the pay phone. Bored, there was nothing to do. Vulnerable, I was alone. Fearful, I might get picked on by older boys. Had she forgotten me? What would I do? How could I get home?
Waiting…must we? Yes, waiting is the proactive way. Is there a good way to wait? How and why do we wait? In Psalm 27 King David urges us to wait and tells us how and why. “Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord,” he urges. Let me draw out several lessons from David’s moral encouragement to wait. Godly waiting is (1) staying in place unrealized; (2) staying in place being courageous; and (3) staying in place because God is the One coming to deliver you.
In Psalm 27, David finds himself in an anxious predicament. It might have been life threatening. You might feel yourself in a life-threatening situation. Adversaries bring false accusations against David and “breathe out violence.” His adversaries are trying to ruin his reputation and destroy him. Pretty serious business. There is no immediate relief in sight. He tells himself to “wait.” Waiting is the way. Waiting is what the children of Israel did in the Sinai wilderness for forty years. Waiting on Samuel is what Saul was told to do. Waiting on the bridegroom to arrive is what the ten bridesmaids did. “To wait for the promise of the Father” is what Jesus charged his disciples. Waiting is what we are doing for the second coming of Jesus Christ. On what else are you waiting?
For the people of God, to wait is “to stay in place in expectation.” The military general David tells himself to “wait for the Lord.” Stay where you are. Stay in what state you are. Stay there until God comes. Henri Nouwen observes, “Impatient people expect the real thing to happen somewhere else, and therefore they want to get away from the present situation and go elsewhere. For them, the moment is empty.” This is a good description of how I have felt. You too? Patient people dare to stay where they are: waiting. Waiting is the way.
What makes waiting such a challenge is how we must wait. We must remain temporarily neglected and unrealized. David is in this unrelieved state in Psalm 27. He is finding no defense from adversaries lobbing grenades at will at him. While waiting on their Messiah Israel was subject to hundreds of years of empires’ domination. Jesus is a prime example of waiting seemingly neglected. Jesus, appearing deserted and undone on the cross, cries out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
Does waiting neglected and unrealized mean one must wait in a nervous state, insecure and anxious? No. King David urges emphatically how we are to wait: “Be strong and let your heart take courage.” Inherent in waiting is a need for strength and courage. Courage is waiting in place, withstanding the present danger. One of Scripture’s best pictures of courage is Moses and the children of Israel backed up against the Red Sea. Trying to escape Egypt, their backside is hard against the boundary of the Red Sea. Pressing down upon them from the front side is the driving Egyptian army with its charioteers. Martin Luther describes them as a caged parrot. God’s word to Moses is, “Fear not and stand firm.” Wait. Be strong. Hold your ground looking the approaching danger square in the face. “Courage,” said John Wayne, “is being scared to death but saddling up anyway.” God echoes the same word to Joshua as Joshua readies himself to confront the great walled city of Jericho: “Be strong and of good courage.” Likewise, Jesus commands his disciples, “Do not let your heart be troubled.”
The English have a “bitter,” a beer, called “Courage.” Courage’s logo is a rooster with the slogan, “Take Courage.” In almost every film I have ever seen courage is pouring yourself a drink when facing an uncomfortable situation. A shot of “Courage” is no courage. In fact, it is not waiting at all! How then does one who has no courage “take courage”!? Simply telling me to take courage when I have no courage makes me even more nervous! I would not be anxious if I knew how to not be anxious!
How can David’s exhortation “Be strong and take courage” be effectual to scared people like us? The strength to wait and the reason we wait derives from the knowledge of Him for whom we wait: we “wait for the LORD.” Only in the knowledge that we “wait for the LORD” can we have confidence. Only for this reason can we wait unrealized. Only for this reason does the courage come to withstand present danger. Staying in place is predicated upon waiting for God. In waiting for God, we are waiting for the One David describes in Psalm 27 as “my light and my salvation” and “the stronghold of my life.” We wait in faith, confident that “my light,” “my salvation,” and “my stronghold” will deliver us. “He will hide me in his shelter” and like a Middle Eastern tribal chief “will conceal me under the cover of his tent.” Even though an army besieges us, surely we are confident we shall see “God’s goodness in the land of the living.”
Batman assesses the adversaries amassing against him. He says to Robin, “There are six of them against us…odds slightly in our favor.” How do we wait? With courage. Why do we wait? Because of Him for whom we wait: we wait for the Lord, “my light and my salvation.” With the Lord the odds are always in our favor!
“Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord.”
Tom is currently a retired Elder in the Virginia Annual Conference. He has pastored churches in Virginia, California and England. Studying John Wesley’s theology, he received his Ph.D. and M.A. degrees from the University of Bristol, Bristol, England and his Master of Divinity degree from Asbury Theological Seminary. While a student, he and his wife Pam lived in John Wesley’s Chapel “The New Room”, Bristol, England, the first established Methodist preaching house. Tom was a faculty member of Asbury Theological Seminary. He has contributed articles to Methodist History and the Wesleyan Theological Journal. He and his wife have two children, daughter Karissa, who is an attorney in Richmond, Virginia, and, John, who is a recent graduate of Regent University. Being a part of the development of their grandson Beau is a rich reward. Tom enjoys a good book by a crackling fire with an English cup of tea. His life text is, ‘Jesus, confirm my heart’s desire, to work and speak and think for thee’.
"If Only To Appear Worthy of It”: A Christian Contemplation of Nietzsche’s New Image of Man (Part 2)
Dorothy Rhoads
Biblical Image of God
In light of Nietzsche’s presentation of his new image of man, a Biblical contemplation of the image of God is relevant. The Biblical data unequivocally identifies man as being created in the image of God, but nowhere does Scripture offer an explicit definition or description of what possession of the image involves.[1] Rather than being presented with a concise picture, the Christian is invited to explore the intricacies and nuances of the mystery, and in doing so, discover a dynamic, living reality. Though the topic is dense, several points are clearly established. The first pages of Scripture present the fundamental fact that man, having been created in the image of God, is distinct from the animal.[2] It follows, then, that a survey of the Biblical text reveals that the image of God in man is inextricably related to the moral order reflecting the moral God.
The Biblical picture is for man, created in God’s image, to mimic God’s person and thus participate in his power. Undoubtedly, every human individual possesses the image of God, but it seems to be the Biblical portrayal that it is those redeemed by the blood of Christ and cooperating with the inner work of the Spirit that most properly and appropriately reflect it. To this point, a robust embodiment of the image of God is directly linked to moral transformation produced by knowledge of God. Since Nietzsche adamantly rejected God, the divine and morality, he was unwilling and unable to claim the inherent difference between man and animal, and his philosophy reflects his attempt to establish a distinction that is granted at the very baseline of Christian theology. Nietzsche’s new image of man, embodied by the Ubermensch, reflects his craving to be like God, but by grasping for the power and glory of God apart from knowledge of the moral person of God, he failed.[3] In these ways, Nietzsche craves and fabricates an existence of meaning and substance for his new image of man that has been granted and supplied only by God himself.
Knowledge and Moral Transformation
As the result of Jesus appearing for men as, “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15), all of his image bearers are able to be redeemed, restored and transformed in knowledge of God.[4] “If the image is that which believers and God share, then to be like God must be to have that image fully restored,”[5] and appropriately, Ephesians 4:24 specifically identifies “righteousness and holiness” as the attributes of God that are to be produced in his image bearers.[6] According to Colossians 3:10, the new self, righteous and holy, is renewed “in knowledge of its Creator.” In his song of praise following the birth of John the Baptist, Zechariah rejoiced that the redemption of God’s people was near, the effect of which would be rescue from their enemies and enablement to serve God “in holiness and righteousness” (Lk. 1:75). Evidently, the incarnation of God marked the inauguration of a new era when humanity would be more dynamically empowered to fulfill its created purpose by living like him in holiness and righteousness. There is an explicit sense in which the Biblical picture depicts knowledge of God as the simultaneous first and last steps of being made like God.
The direct result of knowing God is being made like him, a transformation which is explicitly moral and relationally transformative.[7] Given the created order established in Genesis and now being perfected through the Spirit, the individual has a fundamental responsibility to mirror God’s character. The Apostle Paul, for example, exhorted Colossian believers regarding their image marked by moral transformation. Each individual bears God’s image, but only those redeemed by Christ appropriately and robustly reflect it. Paul speaks in descriptive language, essentially instructing the believers to spiritually take off their old, tattered clothes and put on the new. With the “old self” put off and the “new self” put on, the image of God “is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator” (Col. 3:10). Those who live according to the image imprinted on their nature are then marked by the characteristics of God himself. In light of God’s compassion, they are to be compassionate; his kindness, humility and gentleness must produce the same in them, and his long-suffering and forgiveness is to be replicated in both motive and operation. Due to the living, working reality of the Spirit, man’s resemblance to God is to be profound.[8]
It is worth emphasizing that the directive to “put on the new self” is not a command for ethical modification, but an invitation to put on, more clearly and completely, the very image of God (Rom. 13:14; Col. 3:3-4). Christians are not to possess the moral characteristics Nietzsche despised simply because doing so builds a certain society and benefits other people, but because it is a fundamental Biblical fact that doing so is a cooperative reflection of the presence of God himself. To this point, the Apostle Paul names the attributes that are to be possessed by those whose created image has been restored and renewed by God: “compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another…forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive,” and as a type of overcoat that encapsulates it all, “above all these put on love” (Col. 3:12-14). To the one who knows God, the command is only natural, for “God is love” (1 John 4:8). Christians are to live as Christ by living through Christ, putting his image on display by experientially knowing his nature and power.
When the pages of Scripture are turned back, it becomes obvious that Paul did not make a random selection of virtuous characteristics here. The New Testament epistles’ list of qualities finds its carbon original not only in descriptions of Jesus (Phil. 2:1-11), but first in God’s declaration of his own nature to Moses. Encountering God’s image is the source of transformational knowledge and the moral pattern for man’s proper possession of his own image. Alone with God at the top of Sinai, Moses, painfully aware of his own weakness and that of Israel, asked in humble desperation to actually see God. He could settle for nothing less than really knowing and powerfully experiencing the one he had determined to follow. The language Moses used in Exodus 33, and the language God used in response, suggests interesting insight on the larger issue of the image of God. Moses asked to be shown God’s “ways, that I may know you” (33:13), and when God agreed, Moses further asked to see God’s “glory” (33:18). In cooperation, God declared that he would show Moses his “goodness” and proclaim to him his “name” (Ex. 33:19).[9] Moses, it would seem, in asking to know God’s ways and see his glory, asked to understand God’s motives and his brilliant character. To accomplish this, and to produce something lasting in Moses, God responded by revealing to him his very value system, his goodness, and his intimate person, his name.[10]
Interestingly, the text does not paint a picture of what Moses saw. Instead, the reader is given the recording of God’s spoken declaration, a pronouncement sufficient to satisfy these requests. God showed himself as: “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty…” (Ex. 34:6-7). Almost to the letter, the attributes characterizing God’s self-disclosed nature inspires exhortations to believers in the New Testament. By being characterized by compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forgiveness and love (Col. 3:12-13) the believer more clearly reflects the image of God. In fact, it is conceivable that the master list from which the virtues are taken is the one both dictated and possessed by God himself at Sinai: mercy and graciousness, long-suffering patience, love, faithfulness, forgiveness and justice (Ex. 34:6-7).[11] Paul’s directive to the Christian readers is undoubtedly inspired by a careful reflection on the person of God. These moral and interpersonal virtues are to characterize the believer because they depict the glorious, good and personal likeness of God. By possessing these virtues, believers more brilliantly reflect the image of God.
Given his revelation to Moses,[12] God himself links his glory and image to his communicable attributes. It is no surprise, then, that 2 Corinthians 3:17-4:6 suggests that God’s glory and his image are conceivably interchangeable. As the glory of God was displayed in the face of Jesus (2 Cor. 4:6), it is to be displayed in the face of the image-bearing believer (3:18), affecting moral transformation and inter-personal restoration. “As the image of God is increasingly perfected in redeemed humanity, persons are enabled not only to relate more adequately to God but also to other people.”[13] In the act of reconciliation at the cross, God put his image on display and restored a clearer depiction of image in those willing to be redeemed (Col. 1:15, 19-20).[14] In doing so, he brought men back into harmony with himself, thereby enabling them to operate functionally and relationally as his image bearers.[15] Nietzsche wanted the life, authority and power of God apart from the person of God, and he thought that knowledge of himself would be a fine substitute for knowledge of the Divine, but he was mistaken.
Grace as Power
Whereas the will to power is the lifeblood of Nietzsche’s new image of man, the one convinced of his identity as the image of God anchors sure hope for victory in divine grace. The reality of divine grace through the work of the Spirit enables the believer to live a life of power, which is divine both in origin and operation. Without grace, the image of God is shrouded in confused self-effort. Living as a reflection of the image of God is not a call to attempt to mimic God and manufacture personal versions of Christianity’s favorite attributes. It is a call to reflect God at an organic level, as one possessing and reflecting his image and therefore taking part in the divine life to a fuller and more perfect extent. Therefore, the grace of God displayed through the work of the Spirit is the exclusive means of fulfilling God’s design and experiencing a powerful existence. Inevitably, Nietzsche’s philosophical propagation that the Ubermensch is one who has learned self-mastery proves to be an empty promise that perpetuates frustration. Submitting to God’s design for the image of God, on the other hand, grants this goal not as a possibility but as a guarantee (Heb. 4:16).
Nietzsche’s attempt to exercise power over his humanity and distinguish himself from the masses was not achieved in his new image of man. His last act as a sane man was a display of compassion that he would have despised and condemned in anyone, including himself, and in terms of his uniqueness and recognized distinction, he never did sense that he was properly understood and praised.[16] A Christian contemplation of this reality takes into account the fact that those things which Nietzsche sought are only fully attained when man knows and operates according to his created purpose. Nietzsche’s desire for value, distinction and power over self reflects the appetite given to every individual. Nietzsche attempted to satisfy his cravings with his new image of man, particularly embodied in the Ubermensch, will to power and eternal recurrence, but satisfaction is found when the image of God in man is recognized and experienced through transformational and experiential knowledge of God.
Joy in Perfection
The Christian counter to Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence is, most naturally, eternal life, and interestingly, a close examination of the two doctrines reveals a fundamental distinction related to morality. Initially, there is a sense in which Nietzsche’s means-to-an-end view on suffering is, superficially, not far from the Christian belief in suffering. To the Christian, pain and suffering are embraced not for the purpose of living in misery, but because of the reality that they actively and effectively achieve for the individual a strength of character that more clearly reflects God’s and is able to persevere (Rom. 5:3-4; James 1:2-4).[17] Suffering is to be endured with confidence and faith because God has granted hope that perfection and eternal joy will be the result. Yet it is at that point, where hope is born out of a confidence in moral perfection, that Nietzsche decidedly makes his nihilistic break.
Nietzsche was determined to present a captivating alternative to nihilism, but by rejecting morality, he relinquished his right to aspire to perfection and thus perpetuated the meaninglessness he despised. The divine promise for the image of God is not only eternity, the hope of joy, but eternal perfection. Where Nietzsche’s new image of man hoped for power, the one recognizing his possession of the image of God hopes for perfection. As a result, at each point where Nietzsche was disappointed, the Christian is satisfied.[18] By turning himself into God, rejecting divine grace in place of the will to power and embracing power in eternal recurrence rather than perfection in eternal life, Nietzsche’s new image of man embodies and perpetuates hope-defying nihilism.
Conclusion
Though Nietzsche is heard articulating an existence for man that functionally is void of every vestige of meaning and inspirational hope, he does seem to be expressing desires fundamental to humanity. At the root, though, the issue is the fact that Nietzsche embarks on a quest for meaning, power and joy that is entirely independent of God. Nietzsche desired transformation, both of himself and of his humanity, but what Nietzsche could not achieve, God affords. Nietzsche attempted to escape nihilism, which he detected both in the admission that God does not exist and that he might.[19] In an effort to pull himself up by his own amoral bootstraps, Nietzsche blazed his own trail by presenting the new image of man as God’s successor and trading knowledge of God for knowledge of himself. [20] This new image of man, then, is seen to be a sad corruption of the image of God. Nietzsche inadvertently reminds the Christian that knowledge of God is the catalyst for experiencing the depths of his power and beautifully and captivatingly reflecting the image of God.
Had Nietzsche known God and thus had a proper view of God and of himself, he would not have been desperate to create a new image of man that possessed some possibility for relative meaning. He would have recognized that the very imprint of God on his nature made him capable of infinite power, a possessor of inconceivable worth and a resident of a perfect eternity. Nietzsche would have been convinced that it is the very life of God that gives to man infinite and personal meaning. He would have seen that where the will to power fails, grace succeeds, and he would have been able to answer his own cry for eternity with the assurance that one day night would give way to perpetual day when all would be well and he, God’s image bearer, would be eternally whole.
Notes:
[1] R. Ward Wilson and Craig L. Blomberg, “The Image of God in Humanity: A Biblical-Psychological Perspective,” Themelios 18, no. 3 (1993): 9.
[2] Ibid., 8.
[3] While he was certainly dedicated to embodying his philosophy to the best of his ability, Nietzsche’s own words reveal that he lived a tortured existence that sought after what did not exist in his reality. If the life of the Ubermensch could achieve Nietzsche’s ideal, certainly, he would have been the one to know. While the Christian experiences frustration because of personal failure to experience the very real and available abundant life through the powerful Spirit, Nietzsche’s frustration seems to stem from a desire for what cannot be achieved, that is, mastery of himself by himself alone. Frustration is common to all people, but the Christian’s frustration is born out of laziness in aspiring to much less than what can be experienced, while Nietzsche was frustrated by aspiring to something other than what can be experienced.
[4] Wilson and Blomberg, “The Image of God,” 8. Along with Augustine, Thomas Aquinas is responsible for some of the fundamental Christian conceptions of what is entailed in man being made in God’s image. Aquinas identified three ways in which God’s image is reflected in humanity, one of which being man’s ability to know and love God by conformity with his grace.
[5] Ibid., 9.
[6] Ibid., 9. According to Luther and Calvin, the capacity for righteousness and holy living make up the essence of possessing God’s image (Col. 3:10; Eph. 4:24).
[7] Ibid., 9.
[8] The Spirit works in the image bearer, producing both the “desire and power to do what pleases him,” Phil. 2:13. Nietzsche complained that Christ was the only Christian, but the Biblical expectation is that believers intentionally “put on” Christ, living just like him. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ (New York: Tribeca Books, 2010), 50.
[9] 2 Peter 1:3 states that men are called by God according to his “glory” and “goodness.” It is surely in keeping with God’s ways that men are called to God’s name according to God’s glory and goodness.
[10] Wilson and Blomberg, “The Image of God,” 9.
[11] Direct quotations of the divine personality profile of Exodus 34 is repeated in eight other Old Testament passages (Num. 14:18; Neh. 9:17; Ps. 86:15, 103:8, 145:8; Joel 2:13; Jon. 4:2; Nah. 1:3).
[12] It is worth contemplating that this grand revelation involved Moses, the one with whom God was pleased to speak, “face to face, as a man speaks to his friend” (Ex. 33:11). The ability to know God intimately and thus be made like him prefigures Jesus’ declaration that this intimacy is now normative for those who have been restored to better reflect the image of God: “I no longer call you servants…Instead, I have called you friends, for everything I learned from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15). Evidently, friendship is contingent upon knowledge, and Biblically, this knowledge is transformational.
[13] Wilson and Blomberg, “The Image of God,” 9. In Leviticus 19:1, God commands his people to be holy as he is holy, and he then goes on to enumerate a specific list of attributes that echoes the traits given in Exodus 34:6. In the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew records Jesus’ reiteration of Lev. 19:1 with the command that his hearers, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48). In Luke’s account of this message, he substitutes Matthew’s “perfect” with “merciful,” It is worth considering whether this replacement is synecdochic, given that mercy is the first quality God discloses in Exodus 34:6-7. According to Joel Green, Luke’s birth narrative establishes the mercy of God as his primary characteristic. “Here we find the fundamental basis for God’s behavior in any time, and it is surely significant that Jesus will later identify mercy as the primary motivation behind God’s activity and as the basis for ethical behavior for the community of disciples,” Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke, New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 117.
[14] 2 Corinthians 3:7-18, a clear reflection on the event described in Exodus 33-34, reflects on the glory of God revealed in the Old Covenant in light of the transformation of those redeemed by Christ. “And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image (eikōn) with every-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:18). The same word eikon appears in the LXX Genesis 1:26. Those made in the essential image of God are designed to be further transformed through the sacrificial activity of God.
[15] James D. G. Dunn, The Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon: A Commentary on the Greek Text, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI; Carlisle: William B. Eerdmans Publishing; Paternoster Press, 1996), 221.
[16] Hollingdale, Nietzsche: Man and Philosophy, 131.
[17] James’ language is particularly striking. Those who allow suffering to accomplish its purpose are made “perfect and complete.”
[18] Interestingly, an argument can be made that, despite his writings, Nietzsche himself could not practically bear up under the burden of what he taught. Though he preached isolation, he despised his own loneliness, and though he endured, with great strength, a lifetime of suffering and illness, he seemed to be tortured by his own existence. Nietzsche does appear to embody his philosophy, but the point made here is that he was miserable doing so. He argued that the will to power produces joy, but his life suggests that the belief in power without perfection produces meaninglessness.
[19] Walter A. Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 101. “To escape nihilism – which seems involved both in asserting the existence of God and thus robbing this world of ultimate significance, and also in denying God and thus robbing everything of meaning and value – that is Nietzsche’s greatest and most persistent problem.”
[20] Ronald E. Osborn, Humanism and the Death of God: Searching for the Good After Darwin, Marx and Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online, 2017), 175.
Lord of the Dance: Dionysian Aspects of the Christian Experience (Part 2)
Michael Mendoza
NIETZSCHE MISUNDERSTOOD CHRISTIANITY
Admittedly, the Christendom of Europe that Nietzsche observed was at a low point spiritually. The German Enlightenment grew out of rationalism in conjunction with German Idealism. Nineteenth-century German theologians personified the barren Apollonian culture against which Nietzsche rebelled. Christianity had become sterile and arid. Theological Liberalism, left with nothing miraculous or authoritative, emphasized ethics over doctrine. The higher critical method of interpretation chipped away at the biblical standard for morality leaving moral issues up to individuals, the church, or the state. In the words of the Old Testament, “everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”[i] Thus, Nietzsche called Christianity Nihilism. The culprits were the priestcraft that included ministers, theologians, and philosophers.
Concerning the philosophical cognoscenti of the previous two centuries, Nietzsche wrote, “German intellect is my foul air: I breathe with difficulty in the neighborhood of this psychological uncleanliness that has now become instinctive – an uncleanliness which in every word and expression betrays a German.”[ii] He had no sympathy for philosophers such as Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Schleiermacher, or even Schopenhauer, calling them “unconscious swindlers.”[iii] Nietzsche attacked David Friedrich Strauss, for example, as a “type of German Philistine of Culture and a man of smug self-content.”[iv] Yet, he accepts without question the fundamental presuppositions of German theologians that deny the historicity and authority of the New Testament. Because of this Nietzsche completely misinterpreted Jesus and Paul. Though he despised Strauss, Nietzsche acceded to Strauss’ rejection of the divinity of Jesus Christ.
Walter Kaufmann obsequiously defended Nietzsche’s atheism as “a corollary of his basic commitment to question all premises and to reject them unless they are for some reason inescapable.”[v] However, Nietzsche did not challenge the theological premise that created the European Christendom he opposed so passionately. If Nietzsche had questioned the underlying rationalistic presuppositions of the German Enlightenment concerning the nature and authority of the Bible, he might still have rejected Christianity; however, he would at least have had a clearer understanding of what it meant to have an existential encounter with the risen Christ. From Nietzsche onward, modernism and postmodernism have seen Christianity as a “bad fiction”[vi] based on a set of bad ideas. Nietzsche’s fatal flaw was that he had no concept of Christianity as a relationship with the Creator of the universe. He could not conceive of any Dionysian aspects of the genuine Christian life. An encounter with the risen Christ fills the follower with a joy that passes understanding and overflows with music and dance.
DIONYSIAN ASPECTS OF CHRISTIANITY
The metaphor of Dionysian ecstasy in music and dance can easily be seen in the lives of those who have encountered Christ. The Christian’s Holy Scripture is replete with examples of people who experience a joyous encountered with, as Francis Schaeffer put it, “the God who is there.”[vii] Though the Bible does present a Christian philosophy, it is not primarily a philosophical book. Evangelical Christians believe the Bible is divine revelation from God in propositional form. In any case, it is a written record of people’s experience with God. Believers throughout history lived the Dionysian life-affirmation Nietzsche hoped to achieve. Examples from the Old Testament and the New Testament demonstrate the positive aspects of Dionysian enthusiasm.
The book of Exodus records the historical events of God’s deliverance of the people of Israel through the Red Sea. Once safely across the sea, Moses and the people broke out into ecstatic celebration.
I will sing to the Lord,
For He has triumphed gloriously!
The horse and its rider
He has thrown into the sea!
The Lord is my strength and song,
And He has become my salvation.[viii]
Immediately after the Song of Moses, Miriam could not contain her enthusiasm. “Then Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took the timbrel in her hand; and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances.” In a truly Dionysian life-affirming style of celebration, she danced and sang. Nietzsche’s experience at Bayreuth in 1876 convinced him that Wagner’s attempt to make a religion of the art of music could not work. Safranski explained that Nietzsche “experienced firsthand how a hallowed art event could deteriorate into banality.”[ix] Miriam’s dance, however, was a spontaneous improvisation.[x] Music welled up from within the crowd and compelled the women into a unifying dance. The jubilation was not drug or wine induced. The people experienced Dionysian ecstasy in its purest and most positive form.
2 Samuel 6:1-17 provides another example of exuberance resulting in an encounter with the Living God. King David brought the Ark of the Covenant into the City of Jerusalem. The Scripture understates his delight saying he brought, the “ark of God from the house of Obed-Edom to the City of David with gladness.”[xi] He took six steps and then overcome with euphoria, the Bible says, ““Then David danced before the Lord with all his might.”[xii] David’s Dionysian fête had an Apollonian effect on his wife. “Michal, Saul’s daughter, looked through a window and saw King David leaping and whirling before the Lord; and she despised him in her heart.”[xiii] She called his display of passionate merriment “shameless” (נִגְל֖וֹת). As indicated earlier, Apollonian art is sterile and represents restraint. Michal’s response left her barren for the rest of her life. She represents the somatophobia that Nietzsche observed in nineteenth-century European Christendom. In simple terms, European church goers believed the spiritual is good, and the physical is bad because it left nature “bloodless and passionless.”[xiv] Nietzsche wrote, “The Christian is an example of exaggerated self-control: in order to tame his passions, he seems to find it necessary to extirpate or crucify them.”[xv] David responded with Dionysian passion in music and dance, “I will play music before the Lord. And I will be even more undignified than this.”[xvi] Iselin and Meteyard express the duality as an epistemic clash. “When reflecting on their personal epistemology, or individual ways of knowing God and his truth, many Christians today distinguish between so-called head-knowledge and heart-knowledge.”[xvii] David blended both Apollonian and Dionysian culture. His rational and experiential understanding of God led him to coin the phrase praise the Lord.
The Apostle Paul, whom Nietzsche called “that pernicious blockhead,”[xviii] demonstrated a Dionysian exuberance which Nietzsche completely overlooked. Suffering from a severe beating and shackled hand and foot to a prison wall, Paul and Silas jubilantly sang.[xix] They did not sing out of a lack of hope or from despair over an eternally repeating tragedy. Their music was not a desperate attempt to embrace their fate – amor fati. They sang because they had a genuine relationship with the God of creation. Saints like Paul did not need to reject this world. They did not merely look toward the next world for hope. They lived a life of joy embracing the present world. They said yea to life as an existential encounter with the God who exists which included both this world and the next. The metaphor of Dionysian – Apollonian duality can be seen in other passages in the Bible. In the parable of the Prodigal Son, Jesus told about two sons. The younger son squanders his inheritance and in desperation returns home to his father who greeted the wayward son with a jubilant celebration of music and dance. The older son, representing the Apollonian attitude, responded in anger toward the revelry. His life was spent in self-denial desperately hoping for some future inheritance.
From the creation narrative in Genesis to the last chapters of the book of Revelation, history is portrayed as a great dance performed by the Creator. Genesis chapter one is written in poetic form, perhaps as an ancient Hebrew song of creation. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The Spirit moved across the water. I might paraphrase it as the Spirit danced across the waters. The book of John chapter one tells us that Jesus, the Word, was there in the beginning participating in the dance of the Triune God.
According to Jerry Walls, the doctrine of the Trinity explains the eternal nature of love. God is one in three persons. He did not need to create in order to express his love. Yet, he created “us out of love, and his choice to create us is an overflow of who he is in his eternal nature.”[xx] Walls invoked the words of C.S. Lewis to explain what this means. God is not a static thing, but rather a “dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance.”[xxi] The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit existed from all eternity in a relationship of mutual love, joy, and delight. God wants us to join him in “the dance of joy that energizes the three persons of the Trinity.”[xxii] In the final chapters of the Bible, George Frederic Handel heard the music of the angelic hosts at the culmination of history when he penned the Hallelujah Chorus. From before the beginning of time and throughout eternity, God desires for us to share in the Triune dance. Walls concluded that some, like Nietzsche, rather than embracing the opportunity to dance, “choose to reject the offer and attempt to construct their own substitute for joy... In so doing, they reject the only possible source of deep and lasting happiness, and thereby consign themselves to frustration, misery and suffering.”[xxiii] Nietzsche personified the results of choosing not to dance with the Creator. He manufactured a hopeless eternal recurrence whereas God offers a joyous eternal dance.
CONCLUSION
Nietzsche’s philosophy was not a radical departure from the dry, lifeless dogma of German intellectualism. He represents the culmination of all Enlightenment thinking. If the atheists are correct and God does not exist, then Nietzsche’s conclusions follow naturally. Life is meaningless leading to a worldview of despair. If Nietzsche’s fundamental assumption that God is dead, however, is not the case, then the entire structure of his philosophy falls like the house built upon the sand. Nietzsche’s understanding of Christianity, according to Horton, is “insipid” and a “caricature.”[xxiv] If God exists, Nihilism will not be the result of genuine Christianity as Nietzsche predicted. Francis Schaeffer concluded that Christianity “differs from Nihilism, for Nihilism, though it is correctly realistic, nevertheless can give neither a proper diagnosis nor the proper treatment for its own ills.”[xxv]
Ultimately, Michael Horton correctly concluded that “the definitive power for the Christian community is neither Apollo (resignation to defeat) nor Dionysus (the will to power) but the Lamb who was slain for others but now is alive.”[xxvi] Christianity is not Romanticism, Mysticism, or an Existentialist leap of faith which have abandoned the authenticity and authority of Scripture. Experiencing the life-affirming God revolves around God communicating in propositional statements that are true. St. Jerome wrote, “For if, according to the Apostle Paul, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God, and the one who does not know the Scriptures does not know the power of God and his wisdom, [then] ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.”[xxvii] As I apply the metaphor of Apollo and Dionysus, I see no tension between the existential encounter with the risen Christ and the propositional truth found in his Word. Christianity provides the reason for tragedy in the world but also allows access to the One who can bring joy in this world and the next. Those in despair need only to embrace the God who is there. In the words of Zarathustra, “I should only believe in a God that would know how to dance.”[xxviii] As Walls concluded, “that God wants to dance with Nietzsche, and he will do everything he can to get Nietzsche... in the dance.”[xxix] Even the death of Jesus Christ on the cross is “God’s ultimate statement that he wants us to come home to him and learn to dance.”[xxx] Since Nietzsche is wrong about the non-existence of God, it is possible to embrace a relationship with the God who is there. Jesus does more than know how to dance. He is the Lord of the Dance.
notes:
[i] Judges 17:6, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Judges+17:6&version=NKJV
[ii] Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Thoughts Out of Season, translator: Anthony M. Ludovici, Horace B. Samuel, John McFarland Kennedy, Paul V. Cohen, Francis Bickly, Herman Scheffauer, and G.T. Wrench, (The Modern Philosophy Series, http://www.e-artnow.org/, 2017), 661. Digital version.
[iii] Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 661.
[iv] Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 661.
[v] Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 134.
[vi] Brian Ingraffia, Postmodern Theory and Biblical Theology, (UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 2.
[vii] Francis Schaeffer, The Francis A. Schaeffer Trilogy, (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossways Books, 1990), 47.
[viii] Exodus 15:1-2 NKJV.
[ix] Safranski, 140.
[x] Exodus 15:20-21 NKJV.
[xi] 2 Samuel 6:12 NKJV.
[xii] 2 Samuel 6:14-15 NKJV.
[xiii] 2 Samuel 6:16 NKJV.
[xiv] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 133.
[xv] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 133.
[xvi] 2 Samuel 6:21-22 NKJV.
[xvii] Darren Iselin and John D. Meteyard, The ‘Beyond in the Midst’: An Incarnational Response to the Dynamic Dance of Christian Worldview, Faith and Learning, Journal of Education & Christian Belief 14, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 33–46. doi:10.1177/205699711001400105.
[xviii] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 105.
[xix] Acts 16 NKJV.
[xx] Walls, 160.
[xxi] Walls, 160. Quoted from C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, (San Francisco: Harper, 2001), 175.
[xxii] Walls, 161.
[xxiii] Walls, 162.
[xxiv] Michael Horton, “Eschatology After Nietzsche: Apollonian, Dionysian or Pauline?” International Journal of Systematic Theology, vol. 2, number 1, March 2000, 59. 29-62.
[xxv] Schaeffer, 46.
[xxvi] Horton, 59.
[xxvii] The Commentary on Isaiah By St. Jerome,1. Ancient Christian Writers, The Works of The Fathers in Translation, Translated and Introduction by Thomas P. Scheck, (New York: The Newman Press, 2015). https://biblia.com/api/plugins/embeddedpreview?resourceName=LLS:JEROMECOMMIS&layout=minimal&historybuttons=false&navigationbox=false&sharebutton=false#
[xxviii] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Dover Thrift Edition, Translated by Thomas Common, (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1999), 24.
[xxix] Walls, 164.
[xxx] Walls, 163.
Lord of the Dance: Dionysian Aspects of the Christian Experience (Part 1)
Michael Mendoza
Friedrich Nietzsche introduced his philological study of the Ancient Greek’s Apollonian and Dionysian duality in 1872 with his first published book, The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music. His interpretation of the two Greek gods underpinned his philosophy of the will to power, the Übermensch, and eternal recurrence throughout his career. I contend that Nietzsche’s philosophy would have some merit as a metaphor for Greek culture and the German society in which he lived if his underlying assumption about atheism is correct. His explicit rejection of Christianity, however, led to a fatal flaw in his reasoning because the existence of the Christian God can be rationally defended as the inference to the best explanation[i] in an Apollonian manner. Anyone can also experience a Dionysian life-affirming existential encounter with the Living God. Jesus declared, “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.”[ii]
Nietzsche’s assessment of Christendom in late nineteenth-century Europe was essentially correct. Christianity in Europe had become stale and spiritless. German Protestantism, especially, gave in to the temptations of anti-Semitism, racism, and misogyny. Nietzsche even showed some of these traits. Because of the failures of German religiosity, Nietzsche felt Christianity represented the negative aspects of the Apollonian denial of life. He held that Christianity would necessarily lead to Nihilism, and “the Christian doctrine is the counter-doctrine to the Dionysian.”[iii] Jerry Walls described Nietzsche’s view of the Christian doctrine of heaven and hell as “a way for weak, dishonest people to get vengeance on their powerful enemies.”[iv] The German philosopher could not conceive of any Dionysian aspects of the Christian life. An encounter with the risen Christ fills the follower with a joy that passes understanding and overflows with music and dance. A genuine existential experience with the God of the Bible, however, fulfills the positive elements of Dionysian life-affirmation Nietzsche sought.
Others have taken up the question of whether Nietzsche’s evaluation of Apollos and his brother Dionysus is accurate;[v] therefore, I will not delve into the matter. I also do not suggest that the genuine Christian experience is Dionysian in the sense of chaotic or uncontrolled frenzy. Nor is Christianity solely an intellectual assent to a set of philosophical ideas. Instead, I use the Apollonian and Dionysian duality as a metaphor not only for Greek culture but as a foundation for understanding modern Christianity. I will demonstrate how embracing Christianity is both an intelligent and life-affirming choice – a true will to power. I begin with a summary of Nietzschean Apollonian and Dionysian duality focusing on the so-called life-affirming aspects of Dionysus. Next, I examine the fatal flaw in his understanding of Christianity. I provide examples of Dionysian Christians in the Old and New Testament as well as current trends in Christendom. I conclude with Dionysian elements of Christianity by defending the claim that the positive aspects of Nietzsche’s Dionysian life-affirmation are found in a genuine relationship with the God of the New Testament. A balance of Apollonian and Dionysian elements brings music, art, science, and Christian faith into a joyful dance.
NIETZSCHE’S APOLLONIAN AND DIONYSIAN DUALITY
Nietzsche described Apollo and Dionysus as the “two art deities of the Greeks.”[vi] Anne-Marie Schultz summed up Nietzsche’s view of the Apollonian aspect of human experience. She wrote, “the Apollonian is associated with reason and rationality, intellectual vision, healing, and dreams.”[vii] He is the god of calm stability and self-control. Apollonian art represents the motionless aspect of the Platonic ideal. Apollonian art is symbolic. Walter Kaufmann pointed out that Nietzsche used Apollo as a symbol for the aspect of Greek culture that “found superb expression in classical Greek temples and sculptures: the genius of restraint, measure, and harmony.”[viii] Thus, paintings and sculptures in Apollo’s domain represented the static or motionlessness endurance of life. Nietzsche held that the colorless marble of Greek statues and architecture characterized Apollonian culture as sterile and dreamlike. He is the god of the “beautiful illusion.” In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche wrote, “This joyous necessity of the dream experience has been embodied by the Greeks in their Apollo: Apollo, the god of all plastic energies [bildnerischen Kraefte], is at the same time the soothsaying god.”[ix] Thus, he is also the god of the inner world of fantasy, “ruler over the beautiful illusion.”[x] Apollonian art is a denial of this world. Nietzsche compares this to the Christian focus on the next life. Apollonian and Christianity are life-denying.
On the other side of Greek culture, Nietzsche understood that the Dionysian art of music and dance referred to the world of frenzied intoxication. According to Ulfers in his introduction to Nietzsche’s The Dionysian Vision of the World, this intoxication is not a narcotic stupor, but an exhilarating “rush,” a Rausch “that spells unboundedness.”[xi] Ulfers further explained that “Speech – conceptual language (the Begriff) – is replaced by singing, and the measured steps of walking are overtaken by dancing.”[xii] Dionysus is the liberator, and the intoxicating ecstasy tears down the boundaries of the Apollonian. Schultz explained that the Dionysian “resides in the disruption of everyday experience” and “in ecstatic moments where one loses a sense of self in communal experience.”[xiii] In the Dionysian festival the individual’s self-control is lost. The euphoric experience of this side of Greek culture in its ritualistic music and dance was, as Kaufmann pointed out, “barbarous by comparison and found expression in the Dionysian festivals.”[xiv] According to Nietzsche, Greek Dionysian festivals happened under the influence of a narcotic draught or the “potent coming of spring that penetrates all nature with joy.”[xv] The emotions intensify, and in the frenzied state everything is subjective; for example, the Apollonian principium individuationis disappears into “complete self-forgetfulness.”[xvi]
Regarding Dionysian music, Nietzsche held that other cultures such as Egypt and Babylon celebrated similar festivals which centered around “sexual licentiousness, the annihilation of all familiarity through an unbounded hetaerism.”[xvii] The Greek celebration of Dionysus, as seen in Euripides’ The Bacchae, differed from them in that “from it flows that same charm, the same musically transfiguring intoxication, that Skopas and Praxiteles concretized in statues.”[xviii] Nietzsche’s focus was on the euphoric experience of the music and dance rather than the orgiastic nature of the Dionysian ritual. The point of the ceremony was for people to join as a unified whole. Safranski describes Nietzsche’s view of Dionysian music as the ecstasy that “melts away the masks representing specific characters to expose an emphatic sense of unity.”[xix] The music draws people into a oneness that communicates more fundamentally and profoundly than words. Safranski explained that music was, “the oldest universal language, intelligible to all people, and yet impossible to translate into any other idiom.”[xx] Music is the voice of the cosmos. The Christian parallel for the cosmic voice is Λόγος (Logos). The cosmic language is the Word and the cosmic activity is the dance. Sokel added, “It is the union of universal energy and individuated form or shape which the Dionysian orgiastic dance triumphantly enacts by projecting as an individual image the force that binds all together.”[xxi]
In his essay Attempt at Self-Criticism, Nietzsche urges Christians to learn the art of this worldly comfort and laugh to “dispatch all metaphysical comforts to the devil.” Then he adjures Christians in the words of Zarathustra, “Rise up your hearts, my brothers, high, higher! And don’t forget your legs! Rise up your legs, too, good dancers; and still better, stand on your heads.”[xxii] Dance is an expression of Dionysian life-affirmation. In the book The Birth of Tragedy, he wrote, “In song and in dance man expresses himself as a member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk and speak and is on the way toward flying into the air, dancing.”[xxiii] Enthusiasm in pure rapturous music compels the Dionysian to dance and embrace life. Dionysian art “gives us the power of grand attitudes, of passion, of song, and of dance.”[xxiv]
Yet, Nietzsche saw how Dionysian drama turns into tragedy. It is through the Dionysian tragedy that hope is abandoned, and the will must intercede. Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power, as well as eternal recurrence, is born out of the symbolism of the Dionysian Greek tragedy. The Dionysian must accept the fact that life is meaningless and painful. Sorrow and suffering are inevitable. Nietzsche’s formula for embracing life’s pain is amor fati. “The Dionysian affirmation of the world, as it is, without subtraction, exception, or choice – it would have eternal circular motion.”[xxv] Nietzsche insisted the tragedy of the world is that even though nothing matters because everything is doomed to recur, the superior man will say yea rather than nay. Nietzsche concluded his discussion of Dionysus in The Will to Power with these words:
The tragic man says yea even to the most excruciating suffering: he is sufficiently strong, rich, and capable of deifying, to be able to do this; the Christian denies even the happy lots on earth: he is weak, poor and disinherited enough to suffer from life in any form. God on the Cross is a curse upon Life, a signpost directing people to deliver themselves from it.[xxvi]
Only through tragedy can the will to power be exercised. For Nietzsche, the greatest tragedy is that life repeats itself in the eternal recurrence. Since there is no hope, the will to power must seize life and embrace the tragedy.
Nietzsche, however, did not intend for Apollonian and Dionysian duality to be considered antithetical. They are not opposites in a Hegelian sense of thesis and antithesis. In Section 1 of Ecce Homo, Nietzsche looked back at his earlier work, The Birth of Tragedy, and said it “smells offensively Hegelian.”[xxvii] Nietzsche’s position is that both the Apollonian and Dionysian are “conditions in which art manifests itself in man as a force of nature... Both of these states let loose all manner artistic powers within us, but each unfetters powers of a different kind.”[xxviii] Apollonian art produces the power of vision and poetry. Nietzsche held that Socrates sprang from Apollonian intellectualism and thereby developed into all philosophers who devise the fiction of an unseen world or thing-in-itself.
Christopher Cox pointed out that although Nietzsche’s duality looks like a dialectic in the sense of Hegel or Socrates, it is not. “Were it so,” Cox explained, “the Dionysian would be sublated in a higher form. But tragedy does no such thing. Rather it thoroughly affirms the Dionysian.”[xxix] In Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, tragic pessimism is superior to the optimism of Socratic and Hegelian dialectic, and thus it is preferred to Apollonian culture.
Years after he published The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche added an essay titled, An Attempt at Self-Criticism. He made it clear that even though he did not mention Christianity, it was nevertheless written as an attack on the Christian faith. He wrote, “Perhaps the depth of this anti-moral propensity is best inferred from the careful and hostile silence with which Christianity is treated throughout the whole book – Christianity as the most prodigal elaboration of the moral theme to which humanity has ever been subjected.”[xxx] His atheism and antipathy toward Christianity is well documented in many of his works. In The Will to Power, for example, he railed against the “falsehood and fictitiousness of all Christian interpretations of the world and its history.”[xxxi]
At this point, Nietzsche’s fatal flaw about Christianity must be examined.
Notes:
[i] David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls, God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
[ii] John 10:10. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+10%3A10&version=KJV.
[iii] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power: Including Autobiography and Selected Personal Letters, translator: Anthony M. Ludovici, Horace B. Samuel, John McFarland Kennedy, Paul V. Cohen, Francis Bickly, Herman Scheffauer, and G.T. Wrench, (The Modern Philosophy Series, http://www.e-artnow.org/, 2017), 554.. Digital version.
[iv] Jerry Walls, “How Could God Create Hell?” God is Great, God is Good: Why Believing in God is Reasonable, Edited by William Lane Craig & Chad Meister, (Downers Grove, Il: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 158.
[v] Silk, M., & Stern, J. (2016). Nietzsche on Tragedy (Cambridge Philosophy Classics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781316534786. See also, Nickolas Pappas, “Nietzsche’s Apollo,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Vol. 45, No.1 (Spring 2014), pp.43-53. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jnietstud.45.1.0043.
[vi] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music, Translated and Edited, with Commentaries, by Walter Kaufmann, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, (New York: The Modern Library Edition, 1992), 4.
[vii] Anne-Marie Schultz, “Nietzsche and the Socratic Art of Narrative Self-Care: An Apollonian and Dionysian Synthesis,” Socrates and Dionysus: Philosophy and Art in Dialogue, Edited by Ann Ward, (UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 139.
[viii] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music, Translated and Edited with Commentary by Walter Kaufmann, The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, (New York: Modern Library Edition, 1992), 8.
[ix] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 35. Bildnerischen Kraefte is better translated, artistic energies. The word plastic was first coined in 1907. Nietzsche would not have had that in mind.
[x] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy,35.
[xi] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dionysian Vision of the World, Translated by Ira J. Allen, Introduction by Friedrich Ulfers, (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2013), 9.
[xii] Nietzsche, The Dionysian Vision of the World, 9.
[xiii] Schultz, 140.
[xiv] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 35.
[xv] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 36.
[xvi] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 36.
[xvii] Nietzsche, The Dionysian Vision of the World, 31.
[xviii] Nietzsche, The Dionysian Vision of the World, 31.
[xix] Rüdiger Safranski, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, Translated by Shelley Frisch, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003), 100.
[xx] Safranski, 101.
[xxi] Walter H. Sokel, “On the Dionysian in Nietzsche,” New Literary History, Autumn 2005, 36, 4; ProQuest, page 501.
[xxii] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 26.
[xxiii] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 34.
[xxiv] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 546.
[xxv] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 540.
[xxvi] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 546.
[xxvii] Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Translated and Edited with Commentary by Walter Kaufmann, The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, (New York: Modern Library Edition, 1992), 726.
[xxviii] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 432.
[xxix] Christopher Cox, “Nietzsche, Dionysus, and the Ontology of Music,” in A Companion to Nietzsche, Edited by Keith Ansell Pearson, (UK: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., 2009), 498.
[xxx] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 23.
[xxxi] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 17.
Subscribe to the NEwsletter
“The message of the gospel—God’s act of forgiveness and salvation in Jesus—is rooted in hesed. Hesed describes the disposition of God’s heart not only toward His people but to all humanity. The love of God extends far beyond duty or expectation. His forgiveness of sin fulfills a need that is basic to all other needs in the relationship between human beings and God—the restoration and continuation of fellowship with God in Jesus Christ. God’s hesed manifested in forgiveness makes a relationship with Him possible. That forgiveness comes to us freely as a gift from God based on the sacrificial act of Christ.”
Browse the Archives
MoralApologetics.com is a function of the Center for the Foundations of Ethics at Houston Christian University
