June 5, 2006

Dear Colleague,

    On the wall of a college campus were the graffiti, "God is dead," Nietzsche, followed by the retort, "Nietzsche is dead," God.

    In 1999, A. N. Wilson published the book, God's Funeral. It is about the rising tide of agnosticism and atheism in the nineteenth century, thanks to Nietzsche, thinkers like him, as well as the growing confidence in human achievement, for it was a century when technological triumphs briskly followed one after another.

    Yet on the very last page of his book, Wilson expressed the opinion that it might indeed be Nietzsche who is dead, not God:

"One of the most extraordinary things about the twentieth century has been the palpable and visible strength of the Christian thing, the Christian idea. Just as Nietzsche's generation was declaring the death of God and Thomas Huxley was witnessing his burial, religious thinkers as varied as Simone Weil, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Nicholas Berdayev, and Teilhard de Chardin were waiting in the wings... The immense strength of the Catholic idea played a demonstrable role in the collapse of the Soviet Communist system in Eastern Europe. In other parts of the world, the roles played in the spiritual war against racism by the Southern Baptist minister Martin Luther King and by the Church of England monk Trevor Huddleston showed that there was immense potency, not just in the Christian ethical ideal, but in their biblical sense of God coming to earth with His winnowing fork in His hand, ready to clear His threshing floor. These world-changing men and women decided to ignore the death of God in the nineteenth century."

    In the last third of the twentieth century, however, God does seem to be in rapid decline. Witness the rise of mindless Christian fundamentalism, a secular faith that promotes church attendance and family values rather than Resurrection and the Life Everlasting. Intellectually, giants of theology such as Reinhold  Niebuhr and Paul Tillich (in addition to the ones Wilson mentioned) have been totally eclipsed by the giants of  PR and communal self-righteousness such as Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson, and their ilk.

    Socially, the image of man is brought so low in recent decades that the best models we offer the young for emulation are Rock Stars, football players, and CEOs, rather than--than what? Who ought to be our model? Fortunately, there is still Mother Teresa who urged her followers "to aim very high, not to be like Abraham or David or any of the saints, but to be like our heavenly Father." And Nelson Mandela says something similar. When he was inaugurated president in 1994, he said: "Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world." Christian humility, as you can see from these quotations, is curiously like pride--pride so glorious that it puts even Roman Stoic pride in the shade. (By the way, can you imagine Bush saying something so theologically profound in his inauguration? The best he could come up with was to change the Constitution and ban gay marriage.)

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu