January 27, 2020

Editor's Recommendation: Pulpit Apologetics by Thomas J. Gentry

January 27, 2020/ Managing Editor

“Who better than a churchman and scholar, a theologian and preacher, an experienced pastor and seasoned apologist, to remove the intimidation of incorporating apologetics into preaching—tearing down the artificial dichotomies in the way and showcasing the power that comes from the resulting synergy? Kudos to T. J. Gentry for an erudite, philosophically and biblically informed case for integrating practice and theory, head and heart.”

— David Baggett, Executive Editor

More Recommendations

January 24, 2020

"If Only To Appear Worthy of It”: A Christian Contemplation of Nietzsche’s New Image of Man (Part 2)

January 24, 2020/ Dorothy Rhoads

Part 1

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.

January 20, 2020

Lord of the Dance: Dionysian Aspects of the Christian Experience (Part 2)

January 20, 2020/ Michael Mendoza

Part 1

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.

January 17, 2020

"If Only To Appear Worthy of It”: A Christian Contemplation of Nietzsche’s New Image of Man (Part 1)

January 17, 2020/ Dorothy Rhoads

While the Christian call is to live worthy of the life of God,[1] Nietzsche’s call is to live worthy of the death of God. In his Parable of the Madman, Nietzsche challenged the modern man to proportionately respond to God’s demise: “Must we not become gods ourselves, if only to appear worthy of it?”[2] Nietzsche did his best to dictate and embody this existence. He enumerated a standard against which individual worth is determined and he established a bar by which the success of an attempt can be measured. In a desperate attempt to provide meaning to nihilistic Europe in the wake of Darwinism, Nietzsche presented his philosophical new man as the sole possessor of vision and worth in light of God’s death.

Though Nietzsche’s new image of man is a strategic contradiction of the Christian picture, it represents his aspiration to goals embodied in the divinely granted image of God. In this way, Nietzsche’s new image of man is a corrupted picture of the image of God. In place of God and knowledge of him, Nietzsche established the Ubermensch. He traded divine grace for the will to power, and he sacrificed eternal perfection for eternal recurrence. Upon each of these philosophical substructures, Nietzsche built his new image of man, but at the foundation, he lacked the meaning, power and joy that is inherent to the Biblical model.

Nietzsche’s New Image of Man

Among other reasons, the brilliance of Nietzsche’s philosophy is that it is both innovative and reactive. Having judged that previous conceptions of reality had collapsed with the death of God, Nietzsche formulated his own. In what Hollingdale calls Nietzsche’s “new image of man,”[3] Nietzsche painted a picture of what he judged to be the sole embodiment of a meaningful and successful existence. His philosophical picture represents his attempt to distinguish man from the animal through the will to power. Rather than being subject to God, nature or any force including himself, Nietzsche’s man is empowered to be creator, determining his own reality and establishing his own standard. Nietzsche’s ideal man is embodied in the Ubermensch, who is driven and defined by the will to power over every threatening force and who embraces life to its fullest extent, even to the point of delighting in the prospect of eternal recurrence.

Ubermensch

Having become concerned that Darwin had nailed shut God’s coffin and obliterated the distinction between man and animal, Nietzsche sought to produce a contemplative solution that was independent of the supernatural and explicitly void of morality; by creating the Ubermensch, Nietzsche granted meaning and substance to man by distinguishing him from the animal and making him God. Humanity, Nietzsche explained, is simply a bridge between the animal and the Ubermensch, and those who are incapable of possessing the qualities of the Ubermensch possess no more worth than an animal.[4] Most of humanity is bound in the prison of morality and constrained by religious and societal prejudices, but the Ubermensch knows no such restrictions.[5] He is, Nietzsche proudly declared, the greater man, the overcomer, the Ubermensch; he is the “new ‘image of man.’”[6] This new image denies the existence of God and finds in himself the ability and power to create a life worthy of such a figure.

With honest contemplation that his contemporaries lacked, Nietzsche recognized that the result of “the disappearance of the ‘regulating finger of God’ from the world” would be chaos.[7] Nietzsche reckoned that the death of God would result in vacuous living and inescapable meaninglessness unless the Ubermensch rises to the occasion by fixing his own goal, aspiring to his own ideal and creating his own reality. Essentially, Nietzsche’s philosophy “was an attempt to produce a new world-picture which took Darwinism into account but was not nullified by it.”[8] In an act of rising to this task, Nietzsche formulated his new image of man in order to “stand against the growing nihilism of modern Europe” and effect a transformation of certain men that turned them from being equivalent to an animal into being equivalent to God.[9]

With God dead, the Ubermensch is his successor.[10] Standing over God’s grave, Nietzsche took up the divine mantle and declared that God’s authority, value, creative power and privileged autonomy were in his own hands and in the hands of fellow overcomers. If the reader listens closely, the thrill in Nietzsche’s voice can be heard as he explained this new reality to the few who were capable of understanding his war cry and joining in his brigade. “Once you said ‘God’ when you gazed upon distant seas; but now I have taught you to say ‘Ubermensch.’”[11] Practically, this is accomplished when the Ubermensch’s will to power is operative, and both his own humanity and the external forces warring against him are mastered.

Will to Power

Nietzsche’s new image of man revolves around his fundamental commitment to cooperate with and be driven by the will to power. Though the will to power is philosophically unique to Nietzsche, it developed as a partial divergence from Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Schopenhauer identified an antithesis between the intellect and the will.[12] Since the nature of the will to life is to exist in perpetual conflict with other wills simultaneously seeking their own advancement, willing results in striving and subsequent conflict and suffering. The will, then, is identified as the cause of inevitable unhappiness because the will to life and its miserable consequences are unavoidable. The intrinsic, inescapable and incurable evil of life characterizes Schophenhauer’s philosophy as one of pessimism.[13] While in many ways Nietzsche, too, was pessimistic, he broke with Schopenhauer at a monumental juncture. Whereas Schopenhauer’s philosophy of the primacy of the will taught that the will produces suffering and must be escaped, Nietzshce believed in the will and the drive to power as the very meaning of life. The will is not, according to Nietzsche, the will to life, but the will to power.[14] Nietzsche agreed that much of life is suffering, but suffering itself is the key to happiness, because suffering positions the will to exert power, and the meaning of life is power in operation.[15] The will to power is especially operative in the Ubermensch’s knowing and mastering of himself and exerting dominance over every external force.

As God’s successor, the new image of man must be mastered by and dependent upon no one. The death of God marked the death of the metaphysical need for other worlds and the ability to get in touch with an outside being. As a result, everything needed by man must come from within.[16] Naturally, then, rather than placing confidence and hope in divine grace to effect transformative power over personal deficiencies, Nietzsche’s hope was in man’s own will to power. Nietzsche acknowledged that even the Ubermensch was far from perfection, so his existence needed to be one of continual striving, overcoming and overpowering. The Ubermensch would never achieve perfection, but he would achieve perpetual opportunities for power.

Eternal Recurrence

In light of the supremacy of the Ubermensch and the central place of the will to power in his philosophy, Nietzsche conceived of a culminating theory to explain the world and simultaneously accept it.[17] Fascinatingly, Nietzsche recognized that the human heart possesses a craving for eternity, and his doctrine of eternal recurrence creates an eternity conditioned for his new image of man.[18] Nietzsche’s philosophy required a doctrine that both legitimatized an embrace of suffering for all of eternity and glorified the possession of power to bear up any circumstance. His solution was eternal recurrence.

Eternal recurrence is Nietzsche’s self-conceived doctrine that all events repeat themselves an infinite number of times for all of eternity. All that has been experienced, is being experienced and will be experienced is part of the cycle that will continue forever without change or improvement. The doctrine first emerges in The Gay Science and features most prominently in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.[19] When life is lived to the fullest, eternal recurrence is embraced. In a sense, then, Nietzsche established eternal recurrence as a litmus test judging a person’s attitude toward life.[20] The Ubermensch is neither discouraged by nor fearful of eternal recurrence, but instead accepts and relishes in the endless repetition as a way to say an eternal “Yes” to life.[21] He invites and embraces the recurrence of pain because with it comes the increase of power and thus the recurrence of happiness. Though Nietzsche prided himself in his unflinching embrace of pain, it is noteworthy that pain is not welcomed for pain’s sake but because it is understood to be an irreplaceable component of a joyful life.[22] Pain achieves for man something greater by conditioning him to bear up under what is difficult. Pain sharpens the Ubermensch’s ability to exercise the will to power, and so, he is then properly placed to also experience what is pleasant.[23] Eternal recurrence has been named the crown of Nietzsche’s philosophy and the culmination of his alternative to nihilism. Yet rather than solving the problem of nihilism with eternal recurrence, Nietzsche magnified it. By rejecting morality and therefore closing the door on the hope for perfection, Nietzsche was left with no alternative but meaninglessness. Nietzsche’s new image of man represents a perverted attempt to reach what is only provided in the Biblical image of God.

Part 2

Notes:

[1] Eph. 4:1; Col. 1:10.

[2] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Kevin Hill (London: Penguin Classics, 2018), 134.

[3] R.J. Hollingdale, Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 163.

[4] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Clancy Martin (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005), 11. “Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the superman a rope oven an abyss.”

[5] Giuseppe Fornari, A God Torn to Pieces: The Nietzsche Case (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013), 99.

[6] Hollingdale, Nietzsche, 163.

[7] Hollingdale, Nietzsche, 167. One problem with Nietzsche’s theory, as the history of the twentieth century demonstrated, is that the existence of goals and determined purpose alone does not minimize chaos but rather focuses and localizes it.

[8] Ibid., 73.

[9] Ibid., 163.

[10] Ibid., 163.

[11] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 75. It should be emphasized that Nietzsche did not disbelieve in the need for God, but rather judged the Ubermensch as the one fit to his task. Nietzsche saw the Ubermensch as the only hope to lift man out of a meaningless existence produced by the death of God.

[12] Julian Young, A Philosophical Biography Friedrich Nietzsche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 93.

[13] Hollingdale, Nietzsche: Man and Philosophy, 69.

[14] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 101.

[15] Hollingdale, Nietzsche: Man and Philosophy, 70, 183.

[16] Duane Armitage, Heidegger and the Death of God (Scranton: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 2.

[17] Hollingdale, Nietzsche: Man and Philosophy, 145. “Nietzsche arrived at the theory of the eternal recurrence as a consequence of two requirements: the need to explain the world and the need to accept it.”

[18] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 279. “’But all joy wants eternity, wants deep, deep, deep eternity!’”

[19] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 220.

[20] Nietzsche did not insist that this doctrine reflects reality, but he challenges every individual to contemplate how they would react if it did.

[21] Robert Solomon, Living with Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford Scholarship, 2005), 13.

[22] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 278. “Did you ever say Yes to one joy? O my friends, then you said Yes to all woe as well. All things are chained and entwined together.”

[23] Hollingdale, Nietzsche: Man and Philosophy, 167. Hollingdale describes Nietzsche’s belief this way: “The evil and pain in his life then become a positive good, since they were necessary for the achievement of this one supreme moment: if one event were subtracted, everything following would be different…The life to aim for is the life containing the greatest amount of joy – and joy is the feeling that power increases, that an obstacle is overcome.”

January 15, 2020

Snow White, the Seven Dwarfs, and Simplifying the Abortion Debate with One Question

January 15, 2020/ Stephen S. Jordan

As the father of three young children, a good bit of my spare time is spent eating popcorn and watching Disney movies and superhero films. Although scenes from these movies oftentimes leave impressions upon me, there is one scene that I have thought about for quite some time—especially in light of the abortion debate.

In Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the Magic Mirror reveals to the Queen that Snow White is now “the fairest” in the land, which sparks jealousy in the Queen and motivates her to instruct the Huntsman to take Snow White into the forest and kill her. As proof of Snow White’s death, the Huntsman is ordered to return to the jealous Queen with Snow White’s heart in a jeweled box. However, the Huntsman, in a moment of clarity, simply cannot bring himself to kill Snow White. Overcome with emotion, he tearfully pleads for Snow White’s forgiveness, disclosing to her that the Queen wants her dead. Therefore, he urges her to flee into the woods and never return.

Lost and afraid, the princess eventually stumbles upon what appears to be an empty cottage deep in the forest. In reality, the cottage, which is rather untidy upon Snow White’s arrival, is occupied by the Seven Dwarfs who are away from their home while working at a nearby mine. As the Dwarfs return to their home after a full day’s work, they are alarmed when they notice that the lights in their cottage are on and the inside of the cottage is now clean and tidy, leaving them to suspect that an intruder has broken into their home while they were away. Carefully searching through their home, beginning with the downstairs and eventually moving to the upstairs, the Dwarfs find “the intruder” completely covered with a sheet and asleep across several of the beds on the upper floor. Surrounding “the intruder” and arming themselves with weapons of their own choosing—from clubs to mattocks—the Seven Dwarfs raise their weapons in the air and prepare to eliminate “the intruder,” when Happy loudly exclaims three words that cause the other Dwarfs to immediately stop in their tracks.

These three words, actually forming a question, are the most important words in the entire abortion debate. Everything rises or falls on the answer to this question:

“What is it?”

Before the Seven Dwarfs killed Snow White, they answered the question raised by Happy: “What is it?” Then, upon realizing Snow White’s identity as a human being, they lowered their weapons. She wasn’t an “intruder” after all; she was “a girl.”[1] This reveals an important principle: Before killing something, we must first determine the identity of what we are killing.

We must apply the same question—“What is it?—to the abortion debate. One of America’s leading bioethicists, Scott Klusendorf, maintains that we can simplify the debate by focusing on the one question that matters more than all others: “What is the unborn?”[2] Elsewhere, Greg Koukl writes, “Whether or not it’s right to take the life of any living thing depends entirely on the question what it is” (emphasis added).[3] If the unborn are members of the human family, then killing them is morally wrong because it treats distinct human beings, possessing intrinsic moral worth, as nothing more than disposable objects. On the flip side, as Klusendorf and Ensor indicate, “[I]f the unborn are not human, killing them for any reason requires no more justification than having a tooth pulled.”[4]

Earlier I mentioned that I am the father of three young children, one of whom is a boy. Although both of my older children enjoy playing with all kinds of bugs and insects, my son is known to inflict what he calls the “Hulk smash” on these tiny creatures from time-to-time. For a moment, consider this scenario:

Imagine my son coming to me with something behind his back and asking, “Daddy, can I kill it?” My question to my son would be, “What is it?” If it was a bug or insect, I might say something like: “Sure, just not in the house and not in front of your mother.”

If my son came to me again with something behind his back and asked the same question, I would again respond by asking, “What is it?” If it was a small dog belonging to my neighbors, I would be upset that my son would even consider killing the puppy as an option. “No, we can’t kill the neighbors’ dog,” would be my response.

Now, think about my son coming to me a third time with something behind his back, inquiring, “Daddy, can I kill it?” Yet again, my question would be: “What is it?” This time, if it was his baby sister, I’d immediately stop what I was doing and take him to counseling, because it is obvious to virtually everyone that taking the life of a small child is morally reprehensible.[5]

The above scenario, along with the scene from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, makes clear that the most important question we must ask and answer when deciding whether we should kill something is: “What is it?” Again, before killing something, we must first determine the identity of what we are killing. With the abortion issue, are we talking about a disposable clump of tissue and cells or a human person possessing intrinsic value? If the former, then abortion is permissible for any reason; if the latter, virtually no reason for aborting an unborn child is justified.

Here’s the point: Before deciding where you stand on the abortion issue, you must first ask yourself, “What is the unborn?” If you do your research, carefully examining both the science of embryology and the arguments of philosophy, you might come to the same conclusion as Doc in Snow White: “It’s a girl!”[6] or “It’s a boy!” In other words, you’ll come to the conclusion that the unborn, even “[f]rom the earliest stages of development…are distinct, living, and whole human beings. Therefore, every ‘successful’ abortion ends the life of a living human being.”[7]

Stephen S. Jordan currently serves as a high school Bible teacher at Liberty Christian Academy in Lynchburg, Virginia. He is also a Bible teacher, curriculum developer, and curriculum editor at Liberty University Online Academy, as well as a PhD candidate at the Liberty University Rawlings School of Divinity. Prior to his current positions, Stephen served as youth pastor at Pleasant Ridge Baptist Church in State Road, North Carolina. He and his wife, along with their three children and German shepherd, reside in Goode, Virginia.

notes:

[1] In response to Happy’s question, Doc responds by shouting, “It’s a girl!”

[2] Scott Klusendorf, The Case for Life: Equipping Christians to Engage the Culture (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2009), 22. As a side note, on at least one occasion, I had the privilege of having Mr. Klusendorf in my classroom at Liberty Christian Academy, where he spoke to my students on the abortion issue.

[3] Greg Koukl, Precious Unborn Human Persons (Lomita, CA: STR Press, 1998), 7.

[4] John Ensor and Scott Klusendorf, Stand for Life: A Student’s Guide for Making the Case and Saving Lives (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2012), 8.

[5] Ensor and Klusendorf share a similar scenario in Stand for Life, 21. I’ve also heard Scott Klusendorf use this same scenario in a number of debates, lectures, etc. Interestingly, Klusendorf admits that he actually borrows this example from Koukl in Precious Unborn Human Persons, 7.

[6] Again, this was Doc’s answer to Happy’s question.

[7] Klusendorf, The Case for Life, 35.

January 13, 2020

Lord of the Dance: Dionysian Aspects of the Christian Experience (Part 1)

January 13, 2020/ 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.

Part 2

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.