I think I should do a series on ways that modernity has infilterated the church or just life. But instead I’ll just write about it when I spontaneously cross paths with it.
Today I want to talk about values.
According to Canadian historian George Grant, Nietzsche understood modernity more than any other thinker. He understood that we were temporal creatures, that every second will never happen again, that there is no stable human nature, and no permanent form of human beings, individually or collectively. As Nietzsche said, “Only that which has no history can be defined” because time is history for Nietzsche. Nietzsche believed that we had to give up the idea that the species is definable. We know that there was a day when the human race did not exist, and there will be a day when the human race no longer exists. Because in the shortest moment we are never the same, nothing can be limited or defined.
This is what led Nietzsche to say that we change the world and that values and fate are in our hands. Nietzsche saw the self as creative; it upsurped the role of God.
Nietzsche understood that people need horizons (big Truths) in order to live, but the tragedy of modern science was that it taught man that there were no horizons. This tragedy is really what Nietzsche was getting at when he said, “God is dead . .and we have killed him.” People no longer had that this big horizon to live and define their lives by. In the passage of God is dead, Nietzsche runs into the market place, and he laughs at the atheists for not giving God a burial. Nietzsche was not mocking Christians; it was a lament that people no longer have a horizon.
For Nietzsche the self-created horizon becomes our own destiny – not anything metaphysical. We overcome our fate by imposing our will onto nature – or will to power, our creative energies. This allows human beings to establish conditions that foster human life.
Before Nietzsches we believed facts had a stable reality. After Nietzsche, there is only values. Values are something we create, we do. Values are our pure potentiality.
And this is the modern condition of the world. It’s interesting because as Grant points out, everyone uses the world “values” today to describe the way that we make the world. Homeschoolers do this. Christians do this. Atheists do this. Capitalists do this. Socialists do this. We create the world, and this is just a given assumption.
But as Grant points out, it’s important to realize that before Nietzsche and his immediate predecesors, people did not think that way. They thought that we particpated in the goodness of the world. We don’t create it. We partipate in it.
This is what is so tragic in the church. Christians believe that God is goodness and that God sustains the world. To be human is to partipate in God’s glory, in his might and his power. To love mercy and walk humbly with our God as Micah says.
The church will say this while then rambling on about how it’s our job to shape the values of the culture and protect God’s reputation. I saw this just to day on a public FB page:
“My Hosanna is born on a furnace of doubt” says Fyodor Dostoevsky. Perhaps you’re in the furnace of doubt and feeling the heat of the process, perhaps you’re on the other side – wherever you are I have to believe that there is a God whose reputation is at stake in this very process. A God who watches and waits to hear “Hosanna” and proclaim your faith “solid gold”
How different would it be if we saw life as participating in God’s goodness instead of creating his reputation. We are not the creater of God’s reputation. He doesn’t need us. Read Acts.
The tragedy is that Nietzsche is right. He understood what it meant to be a modern individual more than any other thinker. He understood that there is no human nature, only what we create it to be. That there is no horizons, only what we create. He understood that freedom is tragic without the will to power.
But there are alternative ways of thinking although we are not there yet. The modern individual is too enamored by what we create and what we do. In one of my classes, we were talking about how Heidegger says that we turn nature into objects at our diposal. We mass farm chickens, people are human resources, and technology is at our finger tips. The professor asked how that could ever change – how we can see the world around us something beyond objects. I raised my hand and said, “We have to first dismantle progress.”
I’ve now changed my mind. Nietzsche rejected progress too, but he also saw everything at his disposal because there is no set human nature, only pure potentiality and pure becoming.
If we are to overcome the modern man, we must first dismantle our notion of fate and temporality. Time is not neutral under modernity. Time is at our diposal. We can reorder the past in order to create the future we want. We can lie about the past in order to create the future. For example, we lied; God did not give us America; we took it ourselves. Every moment is a tick on the clock. Again, we see this in Christianity too. If we don’t tell someone the gospel today, they may never hear, says the modern individual.
For God time is eternal. We experience time as history, and that is okay. But I suggest that we think countercultural here. God became flesh and dwelt among us nd we beheld his glory, the glory of the only begotten. In so doing he changed the paradigm of history. History is not a state of progress, or a state of temporality. Everything for temporal creatures begins, ends, and exists in the death and resurrection of Christ.
There are still other secular answers, and I recommend Homi Bhabha. But it’s interesting that secular postmodernism is getting no where in our culture, and neither is premodern Christianity or postmodern Christianity. This is because Nietzsche is right. We still think we are the creators of all that lives, breathes, and exists. The premoderns and postmoderns have answers, but we are not interested.
This is tragic because we will have no rest as long as we must strive. And as long as we must strive to create, blood will be shed when my value bumps against yours. And things will continue to be objects of our disposal. You are my resource, and I am yours. Make no mistake. God did not create these bloody World Wars. Modernity did it.
Lord, Jesus, may your glory fall in this place, and may it go forth from here to the nations.