“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
The idea that God is dead appears first in Friedrich Nietzsche’s book The Gay Science.1 My read of Nietzsche is that his death of God claim was not meant to be a declarative statement about God but rather a commentary on society. Nietzsche is speaking about how the entire Enlightenment experiment has centered humans, particularly human reason, as the source of knowledge rather than God. Under this human-centered way of believing, western civilization assumed that humanity could find answers to all the questions of life through reason. Thus the Enlightenment period was also known as The Age of Reason.
Now we only need a cursory reading of twentieth-century history to see the failures of this Enlightenment experiment. Human reasoning did not prevent people from killing each other in wars and concentration camps. Humans figured out how to land on the moon, but peace was too difficult of a task. Humans made great strides with education and economic prosperity, but racism and classism remained. Twenty-three years into the new century and millennium, it doesn’t seem like people have learned much from our history because the need to center ourselves remains.
That is to say, people still seem ever-bent on centering life in the self and thereby living as though there is not any need for God. One example is found in the way people handle the notion of truth. Over time, our society has started adding adjectives to the word truth, so that “my truth” becomes the “absolute truth.” Both phrases, my truth and absolute truth, are attempts by people to define truth for themselves. Ironically, such attempts have only furthered the pervasive relativism that is part of our culture.
Before I continue, I’ll state my own bias here: I am unapologetically a follower of Jesus because I believe that Jesus is the crucified, resurrected, and exalted Lord and Messiah (Christ). So that means I seek to read the Bible in light of Jesus and read culture in light of Jesus. I don’t always do so well, but from my point of view, as a follower of Jesus, it seems like Nietzsche was right. “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”
The people still believe in God, but there’s a big difference between intellectually believing in God and functionally living as though God exists and is the source of knowledge necessary to answer the questions of life.
In broad terms, Nietzsche offers a good commentary on our own society and also the people we read about in Genesis 11:1-9:
Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.2
This is a story of people centering themselves so that they won’t be scattered abroad. Fear, self-preservation, and aspirations for upward mobility also seem to be at work3 in the motive of the people acting for themselves by building this tower.
In the meantime, God has completely disappeared from what the people are doing. God is not a part of the equation in their desire to build this tower. The people still believe in God, but there’s a big difference between intellectually believing in God and functionally living as though God exists and is the source of knowledge necessary to answer the questions of life.
If we’re honest, there are probably a lot of intellectual theists who live as functional atheists. Some of these functional atheists even profess the Christian faith and attend Sunday worship gatherings. To be quite honest, I have lived as a functional atheist at times, and you likely have done so too. The problem isn’t just forgetting about God. Rather, the problem is going about life without God, which always leads to bad things happening in life.
The good news is that the story of creation doesn’t end with Babel. God is redemptive and will act for the redemption of his creation. The redemptive response of God will find fulfillment in Jesus Christ and is proclaimed on Pentecost. In Genesis 11, the people are scattered with many languages, but in Acts 2, people are gathered from every nation where the Spirit of God is poured out on everyone as they hear the good news in their own language. What the people hear on Pentecost is that God has raised the crucified Jesus from death and exalted him as Lord and Messiah. The people are then invited to live under the reign of God once again by submitting to Jesus Christ through repentance and baptism, living life in the name of Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.
The redemptive response of God says that life doesn’t have to be a bunch of babel. Life must not be a state of confusion, filled with that mixture of fear, self-preservation, and aspirations for upward mobility that never satisfy and may even result in disasters.
Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.” That choice comes down to whether we will allow our lives to be centered in God or center ourselves. Whether we will follow Jesus or whatever suits our interests is a question.
So to circle back to Nietzsche’s claim about God, we might ask the question of whether God is dead. In some people's lives, it sure seems as though God is dead, but life doesn’t have to be this way. The crucified, resurrected, and exalted Jesus Christ says that God is not dead.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Random House, 1974; Vintage Books Edition, 1974, 181.
Unless otherwise noted, all scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Clause Westermann, Genesis 1-11: A Continental Commentary, trans. John J. Scullion S.J. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), 546, “This concluding step renders the decision audacious, beyond anything that is normal. It is an expression of the will to greatness, to something ‘over and above.’”