Nietzsche theorized that people turn to religion to take revenge on time. People are born, other people control their lives, pain and sadness come. Life sucks. Everyone is sad inside.
Christianity redeems the past. Christianity takes revenge on the evil by bringing hope and theoretical healing.
Nietzsche had a problem with this.
Mostly he had a problem with this because he thinks this keeps people from their full potential, from their “greatness” or from exercising their wills to create their own destinies. But also because it heaps up more sadness. For example, the past sucks, but people think, “oh boy, but that’s okay. Because Jesus is going to come back.” And people suck up their wills, suck up their sadness, and don’t do whatever it is that makes them really happy.
In order to make sense of the past, people end up staying stuck in that past by not controlling their future.
(Incidentally, Nietzsche criticized modern secular philosophy with the same charges as Christianity. He thought that Marxism, liberalism, etc, looked to take revenge out of the past by creating a world that would get better and better. Except that better never happens. So he says, get over it. We’ll never ultimately redeem the whole earth.)
Today I went to church. And I found that all the verses and quotes said exactly what Nietzsche was saying. That is, people turn to religion to drown out a sadness of sorts.
Here’s some quotes and verses that were preached from the pulpet today.
One of the characteristics of true spirituality is that it supersedes lesser desires and issues. The Biblical, as well as practical cure for ‘wordliness’ among Christians is so to fill the heart and life with the eternal blessings of God that there will be a joyous preoccupation and absent-mindedness to unspiritual things. – Lewis Sperry Chafer
There we have it. In Christianity we suppress our lesser desires (and how timely of Chafer to mention desire when desire is a key discussion of Nietzsche’s), all for eternal “blessings.”
The sermon also turned to some of my favorite scriptures.
Oh God, You are my God; I shall see you earnestly; My soul thirsts for you, my flesh yearns for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water. – Psalms 63:1
In this scripture we see a large gap in man’s spirit, and crying out for revenge of time’s past. “Lord, redeem it.” See also Psalms 42, pretty much the whole thing. And Isaiah 55.
We’ve sold Christianity with bad goods. “If your life sucks, come here.” “If your life sucks, let me give you a bunch of rules,” sort of bit.
The greatness of man comes when we believe and fight and create meaning despite the circumstances. The greatness of man is seen when we get on the bike and ride into the sky despite the depression.
I would take it further than Nietzsche. I would say the ultimate greatness is found in man when he or she helps his or her fellow mankind despite the results.
See, I agree with Nietzsche that the world may never get better. I may cry out to God, “Lord, let your will be done on earth as it is done in heaven,” but I know that may never take any physical roots.
I learned this the hard way in SE Asia. One day I went to this super remote refugee camp. When we got there, thousands of orphan kids were lined up by the river, greeting us, waiting to hug us, eager to learn. They lived without electricity, so forth, and we were a jewel to them. At 5 a.m. they would crawl in my bamboo house that had no door, just to sit at my feet, as if I was Jesus himself. (Yes, they treated me as if I was the best thing that every happened on the planet.)
I went back to my home, the hell home, the place where teens raged at me, the place where I used to tell my friends, “If we keep these kids from prison, we have done good.” That bad.
I had to tell people, “No one greets me with hugs. My kids greet me with pain.”
And that was the biggest courage I faced in my life, the courage to love despite how these kids might not get better. And the courage to love knowing that even if these kids do get better that there are thousands of others who slip through the cracks. The courage to love knowing that the world is not getting better.
Courage is looking at broken people hurting broken people, and continuing anyway.
Courage is finding happiness and “joy” (Nietzsche’s words) not as a means to take revenge on what’s back there, not as a means to drown out the evil and depression, not even as a means to redeem the past per se (the world is not getting better), but as one who takes control of our own histories, as one who chooses a personal history of love and joy.
Nietzsche is right that one of the key messages of Christianity is redemption. And I think we are redeemed of our pasts, but I think we are redeemed in ways that require us to step out of the boats, throw ourselves into the struggle, and keep going.
As Jesus said, we have to pick up the mat.
I include myself in this challenge. Because I don’t always pick up the map. Sometimes I prefer to kneel in front of it and ask God to pick it. And we know how far that gets me.
This line is a hard-line to walk. On the one hand, rules never satisfy us or make us happy. Rules never redeem us. Rules never help. On the other hand, grace does not always come. Sometimes we cry out to God, and the only answer we get is more snow falling in our faces.
That’s why I propose that Nietzsche was both wrong and right. He was right that we have to create value and meaning. But he was wrong that we should leave everything behind, even other people, to do it. Nietzsche’s Superman – the person to will it all – came back to haunt him. Because the man who fights for himself, ultimately dies to himself, alone.
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For further reading see:
Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, both by Nietzsche. Or the fourth chapter called “Nietzsche: Revenge and Redemption” of this book.