time for a trend to die
That's it; I've had it. Every once in a while, a T-shirted or bumper-stickered slogan appears one too many times and I can't leave it alone anymore.
Today, it's the familiar one in evangelical circles: the quoted phrase "God is dead," attributed to Nietzsche, followed by the phrase "Nietzsche is dead," attributed to God.
Leaving aside for the moment the obvious truth that, in the Christian worldview, Nietzsche's immortal soul is just getting started, let's set the record straight on what he said.
He never claimed that there was once a living being named God, who has now ceased to exist. His famous phrase refers not to the literal death of a real living being but to the death of an idea. In European society — and that's the only society he was talking about — people's idea of the summum bonum had gradually shifted by the late nineteenth century, so that the average educated person's view of the cosmos didn't include a God presiding over it. And he was right, though he spoke a bit too soon: most people then at least paid lip service to the existence of God. But he's really right now. In Europe, and Europe only, as distinct from Asia and Africa and the Americas, all of which are becoming more religious, God is indeed dead in the Nietzschean sense.
So get another T-shirt.
Today, it's the familiar one in evangelical circles: the quoted phrase "God is dead," attributed to Nietzsche, followed by the phrase "Nietzsche is dead," attributed to God.
Leaving aside for the moment the obvious truth that, in the Christian worldview, Nietzsche's immortal soul is just getting started, let's set the record straight on what he said.
He never claimed that there was once a living being named God, who has now ceased to exist. His famous phrase refers not to the literal death of a real living being but to the death of an idea. In European society — and that's the only society he was talking about — people's idea of the summum bonum had gradually shifted by the late nineteenth century, so that the average educated person's view of the cosmos didn't include a God presiding over it. And he was right, though he spoke a bit too soon: most people then at least paid lip service to the existence of God. But he's really right now. In Europe, and Europe only, as distinct from Asia and Africa and the Americas, all of which are becoming more religious, God is indeed dead in the Nietzschean sense.
So get another T-shirt.
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