Nietzschean Christianity?

Posted by Ty Fischer on Dec 15, 2008 3:37:25 AM
December 15, 2008 
 
The modern world is all about power. If you scratch much of what is done today when you get down to the root motivation you find some person or a group of people lusting after power and control. Whether it be by controlling Congress and pushing through your agenda or by using marketing or advertizing to affect the behavior of others or by shouting down your opponent in some debate—or better yet on talk radio, almost everything is done to make “my kingdom come.” We want to use other people as objects (perhaps batteries) to reach our ends (which are, no doubt, the best ends possible). This hideous cultural default setting points to the influence of the philosopher Fredrick Nietzsche who taught that life was simply a quest to have power. 

I am increasingly convinced that our Christianity is being affected by this dangerous thinking as well. . . .

It pops up in the weirdest places. I hang around amongst people who are committed to things like multigenerational approaches to our faith and building institution that will help us to gain “dominion” in our culture. Sadly, too often this commitment when scratched actually ends up having little to do with Christ. It is really just appropriating the faith to gain control and to apply some version of our own plan for the future of others. We are building our own little empires.

 

The saddest part of this is that it stems from a deep misunderstanding about the nature of God—a misunderstanding that people like me (ones that connect tags to themselves like reformed and Calvinistic) are particularly prone to fall into. Here is the root of it, I believe. Reformed folks have this majestic view of God’s sovereignty and believe that the world and all people are made to glorify God. God is the giant, massive fountainhead of power and He is after His own glory. This means (to these folks) that the world is an exercise in God crushing us down and getting us to see how powerful He is. Believing this to be what God is like, misguided folks go out and try to live like this caricature of their power-hungry deity. They become Muslims who celebrate Christmas and Easter. They enter into the power game to execute their overarching plan that will establish the

kingdom
of
Christ

(one that oddly looks exactly like their own deepest prejudices and preferences). It strikes me during this season that this picture of God is horribly wrong. It misses the fact that God is a Trinity. He is always reaching out to the other—Father to Son and Spirit; Son to Father and Spirit; Spirit to Son and Father; Trinity to world. His glory is established not by everyone groveling or falling in line. His glory is established by the distance that His love covers. He could have walked away from our rebellious race. He could have crushed us down and damned us all. He could have made us see His power and glory this way. He did not. He came down. He entered into our fallen lives and brought restoration. Instead of crushing us, He was crushed for us. Instead of making us grovel, He sits us at His table and nourishes us. Instead of pushing us down to our knees, He reached into the sewer of our world and called us sons. Any version of the faith, any Christian organization, any leader who claims the name of Christ, who does not exhibit this sort of love and humility, is counterfeit no matter how beautiful its brochure or website is, no matter how persuasive its leader is or how many Christian sounding catch-phrases he employs. Jesus Christ humbled Himself and came down from heaven to suffer with us and for us. We must conform ourselves to this picture of humility and love—love that reaches out to others—if we want to reflect God’s glory. If we seek to glorify God, then the great question for us then is not how much money we have or how many people we control, rather it is how far down our love reaches and how much of ourselves we are willing to give away.