CHRISTIAN DISCOURSE IN A NIETZSCHEAN AGE:
MAPPING A THEOLOGICAL LOCATION FOR
PERSUASION
Kenneth R. Chase
Department of Communication
Center for Applied Christian Ethics
Wheaton College (IL)[1]
This essay sketches an alternative location from which Christians can begin thinking about how to speak influentially in contemporary Western culture. This is not an essay of social criticism, for I presume far too much about—and examine far too little of—current cultural artifacts, political discourses, and cultural commentary. Rather, I stake a claim in some broad shifts in the discourses saturating contemporary social life, and I presume to think Christianly about those shifts and the implications of those shifts for socially-informed persuasive discourse.
My approach to contemporary social life involves three lines of analysis. First, I overview the difficulties faced by Christian discourse when it seeks to influence secular social life. Second, I provide a theological starting point for thinking about Christian lives in the world. Third, I examine some current theological approaches to a central facet of contemporary social life—Nietzschean thought—from the vantage point of the first two lines. Space considerations prevent me from developing a full theological and rhetorical model; nonetheless, the three lines followed herein pave the way for such a model. Overall, I seek to map a theological and social location from which the Christian advocate can seek to be influential in the contemporary age.
Given the necessary incompleteness of this project, a few additional introductory comments about this essay may be helpful. The three lines are presented sequentially, yet they cannot be held independently, for the theological starting point influences my orientation to the contemporary difficulties, and my experiences and reflections on the contemporary difficulties influence the articulation of the theological starting point. This hermeneutic circle—or more properly a rhetorical circle, given my emphasis on the circulation of influence—sets the coordinates for rhetorical action in the world. Theology and social life will be read in terms of each other. This means, practically, that I will value some facets of contemporary social life that many would disparage. Specifically, I will display a rhetorical relationship with Nietzsche in which the Christian advocate, rooted in evangelical theological premises, learns from Nietzsche’s insights into a pagan social life, and also learns how to conceptualize persuasive discourse in ways that speak to this pagan age. Thus, I intend my theological work to simultaneously defend and be defended by some (but certainly not all) of the Nietzschean moves in secular thought and practice.
Why Nietzsche? Why select one of the great antagonists of the faith as a fruitful conversationalist about how to live that faith in today’s world? Aside from the not-so-inconsiderable pleasures of irony, I maintain that Nietzsche anticipated (perhaps hastened) some central impulses animating contemporary cultural practices. Consequently, he is a fertile field for suggestions (implicit and explicit) on how to engage that world. In Section I, for instance, I outline how Nietzschean thought factors into contemporary culture; furthermore, in Section III, I reflect on how Christian thinkers have approached Nietzsche’s work, and I suggest an alternative approach rooted in the infinite abundance of God’s grace.
The organization of this essay bespeaks its commitment to a rhetorical-hermeneutical circle involving contemporary social thought and Biblically orthodox theological reflection. The theological foundation appears in the middle (Section II) as the central feature of social mapping. It develops from within the context of, on the one hand, Nietzschean social trends and, on the other hand, current thinking about the place of Christian discourse in the public sphere (Section I). Furthermore, the theological foundation leads to specific reflection on how other Christian thinkers have treated Nietzsche’s thought (Section III). The distinctiveness of a new rhetorical location should emerge in the Conclusion.
On several fronts, our contemporary age is an age of Nietzsche. I say this recognizing that of all the influential thinkers and writers within our age, Nietzsche is probably the one most like a philosophical and cultural Rorschach blot: the shape and the significance of the blot are highly susceptible to disagreement. Bernd Magnus characterizes the various interpretations of Nietzsche as analogous to the widely divergent interpretations of a single subject by different artists: “disagreements about Nietzsche are rather more like Rembrandt’s, Jackson Pollock’s, and Andy Warhol’s depictions of the same subject. . . . [I]dentity seems to dissolve altogether. Sometimes nothing is recognizable any longer” (218). Nietzsche is alternately considered the culmination of a modernist philosophy of man (Barth, Heidegger), a nomadic anti-dialectician (Deleuze), a philosopher advocating a particular view of truth (Schacht, Clark), the foundation for a postmodern sociology of everyday lived experience (Stauth and Turner), a radical relativist caught in the tangle of self-referential inconsistency (Habermas, McIntyre), and a rhetorical stylist challenging our views of language (De Man). Debates rage concerning a proper interpretation; he serves as the foil for any philosophical or anti-philosophical perspective conceivable.
Yet despite the broad disagreement, there remains a Nietzsche that serves as signifier for the elements within our cultural moment that have catalyzed conservative activists to a nostalgia for less pagan days of yesteryear and have fueled the agendas of left-leaning academics to craft new (anti)moralities and new theories of social (dis)organization. Nietzsche is the philosophical pivot for the ethos of our age; he is simultaneously the grounding and the inspiration for celebration and attack. The name appears with the post-Christian shifts in attitudes and values, and he is widely (popularly) read as the philosopher who gives permission to think free from the constraints of religion, convention, and self-discipline. It is on his name as signifier that I base my observation that we live in an age of Nietzsche. Not that we ought to ignore the substantive philosophical differences circulating around his work, but we can profitably acknowledge the dominant use of Nietzsche that fuels the interest in those important philosophical treatises. Nietzsche is a coin within our symbolic currency, and we must be acquainted with its use if we seek to participate in contemporary discourse.
Our Nietzschean age looks as follows. Our appeals to morality—in personal life, in social justice, and in world discourse—are arbitrary, resting thinly on the discourses of rights and harms. The work of the will-to-power is no longer sedimented beneath elaborate layers of religious justification, but is widely understood and often, with ironic detachment, acknowledged. Many of our legitimating discourses—for public policy, for education, for life-style—are post-Christian and post-moral. We even recognize that beneath this flimsy veneer of legitimation rests a larger motor of ethical motivation, the economic calculations of global capitalism; we live with the recognition that identities and virtues are a function of material consumption, and our attempts to escape the desiring discourses of merchandising lead us headlong into discourses of the self that someone else, or some other corporate entity, are promoting. We know all this, and whereas some seek pleasure within the play of identities—surfing the cultural waves—others desire to pull from within—from somewhere untrammeled by the cacophony of pleas—some resources for living above and beyond the wrangling demands and consumerist promises. We are in the throes of a Nietzschean moment, predicted in the third essay of The Genealogy of Morals:
Thus Christianity as dogma perished by its own ethics, and in the same way Christianity as ethics must perish; we are standing on the threshold of this event. . . . It is by this dawning self-consciousness of the will to truth that ethics must now perish. This is the great spectacle of a hundred acts that will occupy Europe for the next two centuries, the most terrible and problematical but also the most hopeful of spectacles. (#27[3])
The demise of the Christian hold on culture, lamented by many as a slip toward cultural oblivion, provides contemporary Nietzscheans with an opportunity for celebration. We are on the precipice of a new morality, looking askance from the ashes of Western rationality and the remains of the Christian God. Michel Foucault, acknowledging his Nietzschean heritage, advocates an aesthetic construction of the self-revolving around the pleasure of self and the other. We are to deny any “necessary link” between personal ethics and the success of larger social structures; rather, we are free to pursue the style of one’s life: “we have to create ourselves as a work of art” (“The Genealogy of Ethics” 350-351). Traditional moral language applies no more. Attempts to reinstate the old will be met with a Nietzschean dismissal—“the whole of history is the refutation by experiment of the principle of the so-called ‘moral world order’” (Ecce Homo 328). Attempts to develop ethical rules can be met with a Nietzschean definition: “Morality [is] the idiosyncrasy of decadents, with the ulterior motive of revenging oneself against life—successfully” (Ecce Homo 333).
Thus, to characterize the present age as Nietzschean does not mean his thought has free reign or that it goes unchallenged. Philosophers, pundits, educators, and religious leaders provide ample evidence that morality (Platonic and Christian) remains vital for huge sections of social discourse. Yet the voices often sound shrill, as if a plaintive wail against the onslaught of darkness. Despite the rational critique assuring us that Nietzsche is misguided, his name grows as a symbol for the Dionysian temptations of our current culture. Even those who have never heard his name have internalized the scripts for refusing traditional and Christian ethics. One script runs like this: “questions of right and wrong are boring—morality fatigues the mind and body”; another script like this: “the search for a rationally-grounded ethics is irrelevant to the construction of one’s own life and counterproductive to the exploration of one’s own body as art and desire.”
In the history of ideas, the rationale for these scripts comes primarily from Nietzsche. The Genealogy of Morals is a central text, for Nietzsche writes this with a verve, clarity, and coherence that make it a convenient vehicle for the reader seeking to break from traditional morality. The contours of his thought, here, are well known. Nietzsche envisions an ethic of human action that is freed from the religious apparatus driving the human into a perpetual self-surveillance, freed from cycles of guilt and redemption and free to engage life with all its vicissitudes, sufferings, and daily pleasures. He desires an affirmation of life as it is, with its hierarchy of powers and its opportunities for overcoming the pettiness of traditional morality. The adversary of the new ethic is the Platonic-Christian ethic, which celebrates the servile virtues of humility, gratitude, patience, obedience, etc. In Nietzsche’s famous reading, the traditional morality developed out of a lower class ressentiment toward the aristocratic powers. In a cunning subterfuge, the lower class majority managed to turn their own weakened condition into the dominant ethic for living, thereby delegitimating the aristocratic rule. Christianity’s genius was precisely its promotion of this revolt of the values. Indeed, the domination of Christianity in European history resulted from its infiltration into the very psychology of the human being, such that morality could not be thought outside of Christian categories and values. Nietzsche's task, then, is to transvalue Christian values by celebrating anew the aristocratic life modeled in the ancient Greeks of Homer and of the god Dionysius.
One of Nietzsche's targets, from beginning to end, is Christianity. He makes this unmistakably clear in Ecce Homo, his last work of his productive years. While reviewing all his works to date (Fall 1888), he summarized the three essays of GM in three short paragraphs, each one reviewing how a central feature of the Christian life—morality, conscience, asceticism—arose not from divine input, but from psychological processes rooted in self-centered and self-disciplinary efforts (“The Genealogy of Morals”).
The genealogical method is the process of historical inquiry he uses to ground his provocative conclusions. Unlike other forms of inquiry surrounding him, which McIntyre identifies as encyclopedia and tradition, Nietzsche’s method is saturated with suspicion. As Shawn Smith points out, genealogical method does not merely track a family tree, but reconstructs the origins of concepts, such as the elements of Christian morality, that are not suspected of having a natural-psychological history (487). Thus, the branches of the family tree are traced to a previously unrecognized root structure. Nietzsche views the promotion of a supernatural ethic suspiciously, as being a product of the Christians’ vested interest in obscuring origins so that Christianity gains social and political power (Smith 489). Nietzsche himself describes the genealogical method as a doing of history that sees the socially stated purpose of any idea, concept, or practice as a function of a larger work of power operating to promote specific interests. “No matter how well we understand the utility of a certain physiological organ (or of a legal institution, a custom, a political convention, an artistic genre, a cultic trait) we do not thereby understand anything of its origin” (xii [2]).[2] Thus, identifiable purposes are malleable and untrustworthy; Nietzsche historicizes the expressed purposes of Christian morality by placing the morality itself within an alternative historical frame, that of will and power. His new ethic, therefore, affirms the vital human process of the will to power.
From Nietzsche’s vantage point, the Christian commitment to morality is fundamentally reactive; Christian virtues are initiated in opposition to competing moral choices. Any kind of positive purpose Christians identify for their morality, such as the loving desire to help one another, is reinterpreted—with suspicion—into a different moral context in which Christians are seeking to elevate the practice of love from its lowly status to the pinnacle of a dominant value system. Thus, what looks like an affirmative stance within Christianity is, actually, a negative stance, a reaction against some other value system. Christianity, thus, is a negative ethical movement that builds a system of life and thought through ressentiment. Nietzsche writes: “All truly noble morality grows out of triumphant self-affirmation. Slave ethics, on the other hand, begins by saying no to an ‘outside,’ an ‘other,’ a non-self, and that no is its creative act . . . Slave ethics requires for its inception a sphere different from and hostile to its own. Physiologically speaking, it requires an outside stimulus in order to act at all; all its action is reaction” (GM x[1]). Nietzsche uses this kind of analysis to further distinguish between the “active man” and the “vindictive man” (ressentiment man). The former, due to his strength, boldness, and nobility, “has at all times had the better view, the clearer conscience on his side.” The latter, though, “has the invention of ‘bad conscience’ [guilt] on his conscience.” Consequently, the active man “is a hundred steps closer to justice than the reactive one, and the reason is that he has no need to appraise his object falsely and prejudicially as the other must” (xi[2]). Due to the work of ressentiment, the Christian’s eyes are prejudiced, perverted by envy and animosity.
So much is clear in GM, yet what I have sketched above is a baseline interpretation, and it opens quickly into a quagmire of philosophical problems. For instance, what is the status of Nietzsche's own genealogical analysis? Is his reading of Christianity merely another attempt to impose will on history (namely, his own)? And if this is so, then why should we accept his diagnosis of the Christian illness at all? What is the will to power, and does it have metaphysical status as an ultimate reality? Is Nietzsche discovering a new truth, or does his celebration of historicism mean that even the will to power is merely an historical concept?
The debates on these questions are tireless, which is not to say they are valueless. Nonetheless, such debates do little to modify the general ethos of Nietzsche's name as a signifier of our age. Our age is Nietzschean because it resists Christianity as a legitimating discourse for moral action. Christianity is another mechanism of oppression within a world that has seen no lack of totalitarian forces. The tragic brilliance of Christianity, according to Nietzsche’s diagnosis, is that it promotes an individual’s totalitarian monitoring of the self, and from that basis the Christian seeks to rule the world. Milbank writes: “The secular episteme is a post-Christian paganism, something in the last analysis only defined, negatively, as a refusal of Christianity and the invention of an ‘Anti-Christianity’” (Theology 280). To resist Christianity, in a Nietzschean age, is to choose freedom over oppression.
For many Christians, the movement of Nietzschean thought into social life is not a matter of freedom over oppression, but the reverse. It is the Christian who bears the brunt of social antagonism rather than the one who instigates it. In response to this perceived hostility, Christians have sought to counter the Nietzschean thought with Judeo-Christian values. They have entered the social arena seeking to influence public life by advocating a return to traditional morality.
Yet their entry into public persuasion is typically untheorized; their action is rooted in received moral commitments and status quo political action. Many thinkers sensitive to the decline of religious commitment in the public sphere, though, have sought a theoretical rationale for persuasive action. The prominent theoretical location for validating the presence of religious discourse in civic life is within a category labeled culture, which in turn is rooted in the Western political tradition of liberalism, as founded in Hobbes and Locke. As a label, the term culture functions to reduce the larger body of liberal assumptions into a rhetorically salient unit of social life embodying social values and struggles. To struggle within culture, then, is to operate within the terrain marked out by political liberalism. The coordinates of political and social action are pre-set, involving the ideals of equality and liberty, the separation of public and private spheres, and the presumption of self-determination.[3] Underlying these coordinates is a view of social life that highlights human similarities and differences, and the challenges of cultural life result from the interface of the private with the public.
Christians reveal their commitment to this politically liberal location when they make statements such as: “Our culture is deteriorating in that sin is widely accepted and Christian values are roundly rejected; we need, therefore, to work for a more Christian culture”; or, “Our culture is experiencing a breakdown in moral authority; we are losing any sense of right and wrong; we need to generate a mode of discourse that can allow Christians a place at the table.” These statements reflect a view of culture as ideologically contested ground; to operate as Christians in culture, then, is to operate with a view toward ideological victory.
These statements are not only common, but understandable. In our current social system, in which mass entertainment and public education reach most children, religious and moral differences seem to work into the fabric of our families, affecting our children’s choices and values. Christians, in particular, are rightly concerned that much of what passes for cultural progress actually is the celebration of rebellion against biblical moral standards.
The strategic move within this type of cultural thinking, then, is to identify the overall fabric of social discourses and practices as hostile to Christian interests. The use of culture as a terminological screen for viewing social life seems to invite an “us vs. them” mentality. Once we make this theoretical move, we are pulled into a realm of thinking that involves—requires—metaphors of victory and defeat. These lead easily into metaphors of war and cultural domination, and the sociological apparatus describing the struggle for hegemony becomes an apt analysis for the factions battling over social practices. Public discourse, according to this diagnosis, is in a crisis because of balkanization, incommensurability, or culture wars. James Davison Hunter’s thesis, as developed in his book Culture Wars, is representative of this line of thought. Due to the technology of public discourse—such as direct mail from special interest groups, advertising constraints on the media that privileges polemics and controversies, and sound-bite politics—deep cultural divisions among U.S. citizens are exacerbated such that a citizen who wants to dispute some cultural practice has only harsh discursive practices as resources. The cultural divisions, explains Hunter, take on a life of their own; consequently, average citizens are caught up in a war of positions, seeking hegemonic control of the cultural terrain.
No one wants a civil war, though, so theorists and activists have advocated a way out of the morass: our culture needs some sort of discourse, either a practice or a moral content, that will have common acceptance among all parties. Thus, we need to find a more civilized and vigorous form of public argument that will warrant rational acceptance on the part of disputing factions. From the Christian perspective, of course, this means that believers should find discursive common ground with unbelievers so that persuasion can take place; namely, the kind of persuasion that is acceptable by all cultural warriors, but which nonetheless results in unbelievers recognizing the immoral trajectory of culture.
The solutions present for Christian discourse within this model, then, are solutions identified within the cultural problematic of a “crisis” in public discourse. For Christians to advocate a solution on this level implicates Christians in accepting the diagnosis of the problem. Once believers have framed the issue in terms of cultural struggle, then they have set their telos and are locked into certain kinds of solutions that, assuming they do not want to be involved in an actual war, will require a model of persuasive discourse that facilitates a non-violent resolution to conflict. Consequently, Hunter (to take a recent and prominent example) recommends several norms for managing dispute through discourse. The norms themselves do not challenge the political liberalism underlying his cultural analysis; on the contrary, they are system modifications to combat the peculiar problems of the contemporary cultural struggle. The underlying commitments and values of liberalism remain firmly entrenched: the desire to maximize political equality and liberty, the preservation of the public sphere, and the cultivation of personal and collective virtue (318-325).
Other authors recommend similar lists of discourse norms, all designed to add procedural peace to the violent clash of positions: e.g., listen and respect one another, be rational, preserve free choice, respect diversity, practice tolerance.
Christians ought not—Christians cannot—separate themselves from the cultural practices saturating social life in the world. Yet to speak as advocates within the theoretical terrain of cultural analysis, with its underlying assumptions of hegemonic struggle, may do more harm than good to the name of Christ. Such a rhetorical stance reproduces the negative image of Christianity as merely another competing discourse within the fray, another discourse regime seeking hegemonic dominance within the public. By speaking from within the theoretical terrain of culture, Christians perpetuate the very critique of Christianity that serves to delegitimatize its moral claims, namely, that Christianity is an oppressive discursive structure, and its spiritual disciplines and material actions are violent.
Therefore, we need to theorize Christian
discourse in a location not driven by the commitment to a cultural level of
analysis; we need to theorize a practice of persuasion that affirms the Gospel
while avoiding the trappings and intellectual moves of a cultural war.
Where will the Christian stand when speaking to a world in need of the Gospel? To stand in the tradition of political liberalism positions the Christian as a cultural warrior, and the Christian’s discourse comes under suspicion as an attempt to win a social battle. Furthermore, to withstand the cultural trajectory of moral freedom and the radical equality of all transcendental or religious beliefs positions the Christian as a reactive moral agent, and one whose advocacy of personal morality serves to reinforce the critique of Christianity as totalitarian.
The place where Christians ought to stand must be deeply scriptural, yet we cannot read scripture in a social or historical vacuum. We are currently reading Scripture within the wholesale critique of Christianity launched, on the one hand, by the Nietzschean forces that have delegitimated Christian morality, and, on the other hand, by the contours of political liberalism that see the distinctive Christian voice as an act of public violence. We always read in a place, yet the place from which we read must itself be examined from the reading of scripture. To map the location for persuasive discourse, I will start with Scriptures referencing the awkward position of believers called to live in a world that has not yet been fully redeemed.
Yet a little while, and the wicked will be no more;
though you look diligently for their place, they will not be there.
But the meek shall inherit the land,
And delight themselves in abundant prosperity.
(Psalm 37:10-11)[4]
Psalm 37 is wisdom literature designed for instructional purposes: due to its acrostic construction, where the Hebrew alphabet sequences each unit, the Psalm promotes memorization; due to its character as a collection of proverbs, the Psalm promotes wisdom. The Psalm’s teaching is straightforward: the evil in the world will be eclipsed by the good. As the righteous Jew observed the successes of the surrounding pagan cultures, or observed the fellow Israelite whose successes occurred through the oppression of others, the question would naturally arise, “Why do the evil prosper?” This Psalm answers by noting a trustworthy cycle of God’s activity of retribution and reward.[5]
Whereas the Psalm’s teaching is straightforward, its implications for Hebrew life and faith require much additional reflection: Psalm 37, for better or for worse, does not provide an explanation for the emotional anguish and physical pain of a suffering righteous one. Therefore, many scholars supplement its interpretation with reference to Job, where the experience of suffering raises the question of evil in a different way. Job illustrates how the felt experience of suffering is not easily remedied by the hope of eventual prosperity. Although Job ends with the rewards of the righteous, the answer to suffering lies not in that reward, but in the unknown wisdom and knowledge of God. The answer to the existence of evil in the world, then, is to be discovered as God unfolds history, outside of the believer’s full knowledge, such that the wicked perish and the righteous live.
Job, then, deepens and expands the teaching of Psalm 37. Together, these two texts provide a “representative anecdote,” to borrow Kenneth Burke’s phrase, for the Old Testament teaching on suffering, evil, and the future of the righteous. The believer’s task, according to these texts, is to live faithfully, even in the midst of suffering, with the hope that God’s ongoing work in history will eventually lead the righteous to life, and the wicked to death.
This scriptural portrait of suffering outlines consequences for the wicked and the righteous; it also serves as warning to the former and comfort to the latter. The portrait does not, of course, legitimate either a wicked lifestyle or the hostile treatment of the righteous, as if the wicked are necessarily so for the benefit of the eventual redemption of the righteous. Nor does the portrait—and this is the more important point—indicate that the righteous are to respond retributively to the wicked. The knowledge of ends does not justify a pattern of behavior that triumphantly exalts the righteous over the wicked. On the contrary, by locating the ends exclusively within God’s knowledge and actions, the scriptures disavow the efforts of the righteous to turn the tables of human experience. For the righteous to pursue retributive or triumphalist action would be to act outside of the faithfulness required of them.
The scriptures on the relations of the wicked and righteous, then, are not manuals for interpersonal, social, or political behavior. Political triumphalism, cultural arrogance, or personal animosity are not acceptable inferences drawn from this OT portrait of cultural evil. Rather, these passages encourage God’s righteous children to act within the sphere of trust.
Despite the ancient context of their teaching, these passages are exceptionally relevant to the ongoing struggles evangelicals face in carving out of everyday life a desirable mode of action within social life. To fully understand the relevance, though, we must recognize that the New Testament both affirms and extends the Old Testament portrait.
The Christ event--his life, death, burial, resurrection, and ascension—simultaneously reaffirms the O.T. picture (Mat. 5.5, 6.8; 1 Pet. 5.6-7; 1 Thess. 5.23-24) and extends it by indicating Christ as the guarantor and judge of righteousness. To the evangelical, the suffering of Jesus is the central text on the problem of evil in the scriptures; the constellation of evil effected on the person of Christ, and the subsequent victory in the resurrection, become the beacon light through which all other biblical teaching is to be viewed. In Christ, the cycle in Ps. 37 is played out. The Christ event is an act of demonstration of God’s power, in which the promises of justice for the righteous are accomplished (cf. Ps. 37:28). It also is an act of vicarious substitution, in which people are placed within the realm of the righteous (Rom. 5:19). Through the mysteries of the LORD’s wisdom, those same mysteries through which Job’s suffering was contextualized, human beings receive eternal life through means and in ways that they can only understand dimly (1 Cor. 4:1, 13:12). In the Christ event, the N.T. emphasis falls squarely on God’s giving; humanity only receives; it can never acquire. Through Christ, people live through a gift. The O.T. teaching on suffering, then, finds its fulfillment in the doctrine of God’s grace. It is due to God’s unwarranted gift that people are granted righteousness; in turn, the righteous are granted life. Those who reject God’s gift are abandoning the gift of life; their end is destruction—the ultimate flight from God.
The Christian’s location within this world is a location determined by the gift of God. What is the nature of His giving? The Christ event is rooted in the capacity of God to give Himself without expecting a return and without anticipating a boundary or limit. The gift of God’s grace is never exhausted. It extends to all creation for all time--it is infinite. It is a genuine gift; no return is expected. No gift of equal value can be given to God as an acknowledgment of His gift to humanity. The gift arrives from the plenitude of God, from the fullness and abundance of His grace for the sinner.
The wonder of the gift invokes awe, and its material manifestation in the death and resurrection of Jesus provokes a joyful acceptance. The ways that such awe and joy work themselves out in the Christian life varies according to the personality, culture and historical trajectory of an individual. I hazard two broad generalizations, though, that describe two modes of gift reception.
On the one hand, Christians live in the mode of God’s abundance, and their lives take on the qualities of creatures sharing in the plenitude of their creator. Thus, God’s gift affects the believer’s experiences and actions. Recall that the Psalmist’s observations about the wicked and the righteous are driven by the underlying work of God’s plenitude in the life of the faithful. Images of growth, fruitfulness, and abundance characterize the righteous, whereas the abundance, growth, and fruitfulness of the wicked are short-lived and cut-off. The righteous live within the sphere of God’s gracious and abundant giving; the wicked live in rejection of that gift, so their efforts can only be temporary and limited. The wicked’s abundance is false, for it thrives on exploitation of resources and oppression of others. The righteous one’s abundance is enduring, for it comes from an enduring God, One whose giving is independent of temporal circumstances and material exchanges.
The N.T. ethic, emerging out of the new creation (2 Cor. 5:17), is consistent with the O.T. teachings about the prosperity of the righteous. Christians ought to live from within God’s abundance (Rom. 5:17), knowing they have an unlimited reservoir of spiritual, material, emotional, and physical resources on which to draw and through which they serve others. God’s commands depend on the lives of abundance enabled by God’s gift (John 10:10). For instance, Peter had not yet understood the plenitude underlying God’s commands when he suggested that an enemy be forgiven only seven times (Mat. 18:21-22). In his mind, the person following the law had a limited reservoir upon which to draw forgiveness. At some point, the ethical action is depleted, and the injury done by the other would have to stand unforgiven and, consequently, be treated as an action either to be recompensed by reciprocal injury or by avoidance. Christ instructs Peter, though, that forgiveness is to be offered seventy times seven; the limit is inexhaustible. The ethic of treating enemies, of those who treat Christians badly, is grounded in the infinite grace of God.[6]
Similarly, Paul instructs the Romans to “owe no one anything, except love” (Rom. 13:8). The love in which Christians engage others is rooted in God; thus, it can never be completed or accomplished in another’s life. Believers can never pay off the debt toward others. Scriptures instruct the Christian to live within the resources of God’s grace, not out of the scarcity of human resources. Christians are not to act in response to the wicked, as if they counter the evil through an equal measure of good; rather, they act positively in the face of wicked, testifying to the positive goodness of the God whose grace abounds. The ethic is positive; it is an ethic of action, not reaction (Milbank 228-229).[7]
So, on the one hand, Christian lives take on the characteristics of God’s abundance. They live out the plenitude through which they have life itself, and this living involves testifying about their lives and about the God who gives life to them. Yet, on the other hand, God’s plenitude means that the believer’s mode of discourse about God remains oddly situated in relation to God. To speak about God’s plenitude means that while Christians represent God, they do so without being able to fully capture God within the speaking. As they live within the abundance of His gift, they are able to consider it reflectively and generate talk about its manifestations in the world. Yet the discursive accounts of God’s grace are inevitably plural (infinite number of descriptions) and never completed (never expressed with finished adequacy). This is not surprising, though, for if God’s giving is infinite and abundant, then the capacity to speak about it is profoundly limited.
The limitations of discourse work themselves out in two ways. First, speaking is limited in that a believer can never produce the definitive account of God’s giving. The Psalms are replete with poetry that reaches beyond itself to speak of humanity in relation to God. In Ps. 37, for instance, the acrostic construction is a pleonastic device; it enables the poet to amplify description of the righteous. Each letter provokes a new description of how God’s abundance overwhelms the abundance of the wicked. Rather than seeing the poetic device as limiting the poet’s talk, we recognize that God’s work demands our full verbal resources (see Milbank, Word 71). The entirety of the Hebrew alphabet functions synechdocally for the entirety of human speaking. Believers must use all their resources—to the ends of the very alphabet—to portray what is inexhaustible.
The Psalter does not limit the account of God’s abundant giving to verbal description, though, for all of creation, from the products of human craftsmanship to every breathing thing, is stretched to its capacity when acknowledging God. In Ps. 150, for instance, a list of musical instrument is called to give praise, yet even the listing itself is insufficient, for the poet concludes the list by repeating and extending the praise offered by cymbals. As if having run out of instruments, the poet urges that an even greater noise be made by the existing instruments. Due to God’s greatness and his accomplishments (v. 2), he is worthy of praise from “everything that breathes” (v. 6). Believers are to praise God, and see his work, in all circumstances. His being is not absent from any place, nor can it be exhausted through voices and actions.
The plenitude of God does not imply, though, that believers can never say anything accurate about God. We must distinguish between two possible conclusions about our discourse that result from an understanding of God’s plenitude: this truth about God has implications for what we say about Him, and it has implications for how much we say about Him. My analysis so far lends support primarily for the latter. Our discourse is limited not in that it cannot say anything, but that it can never say enough. God’s Holiness, for instance, can and should be said. But we are fooling ourselves if we think that saying it once, twice, or three times is sufficient. Scriptures teach that created beings will say it over and over again for eternity, all the while recognizing that God’s holiness will forever and always exceed the praise.
That we cannot say enough, however, has implications for what we say about God. Yes, God is holy, but he has far more holiness (an eternal amount, if you will) than can possibly be glimpsed in a single assertion. God has far more grace toward the believer—abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine” (Eph. 3.20—than can be possibly captured within an assertion about the abundant grace of God. A simple assertion, predicating an attribute or an action to God, can never be a final assertion simply because it is rooted in human finitude. Reinhold Niebuhr’s claim, in his Beyond Tragedy (3-6), that any Christian talk, including the talk of Scripture, is necessarily in error makes this same point, but to a far more extreme length than do I. To say that an assertion is necessarily insufficient is a far cry from saying, with Niebhur, that an assertion is necessarily in error. The latter claim would countenance any statement about God, even statements contrary to his divine revelation. Following Niebuhr’s reasoning, we could claim that God’s actions toward us are miserly, not abundant, and we would have no language of error to distinguish between the inherent finitude of saying that God’s grace is abundant and the contrary statement that God is miserly. If the finitude of an assertion makes that statement in error, then it must be an altogether different quality of error than that of a statement that is contrary to the teaching of scripture. The error of a finite statement is one of quantity, whereas the error of a statement contrary to scripture is one of quality.
Given the quantitative differential between the God of abundance and the assertion that predicates abundance to God, we can draw implications for what is said about God, not just how much is said. Due to God’s abundance, the believer pushes to describe God’s attributes or actions in ever-new ways. As the Hebrew poets recognized, God’s infinity calls out for repeated and varied assertions. To play with a term borrowed from the rhetorical tradition, we can speak of God’s grace as an inventional inspiration for human talk. Christians talk about God’s grace in new contexts, through new applications, with new people, and with new terms.
A noteworthy instance of the divinely inspired inventiveness is the description of Christian redemption in the N.T. Christ himself used a variety of ways to talk about his offer of salvation: as following him, as being born again, as fulfilling the Greatest Commandment, as eating and drinking his body and his blood, as being purchased for a great price, as being invited to a wedding feast, etc. Truly, believers can never say enough about God’s salvation through Jesus Christ, but just as clearly, they can describe it (they ought to describe it) using different predications.
God’s abundant grace is the location from which Christians speak about God, but this location also cautions them not to speak with finality on God’s work. For instance, methods of theological or sociological inquiry that presume God’s work can be known definitively are reducing God to a function of the methodological system. By cautiously approaching philosophies of finality and definitiveness, Christians are protecting themselves from establishing the creaturely discourse as co-extensive with the divine.
Whereas the first limitation of discourse is that people cannot provide a definitive account of God’s giving, the second limitation of discourse follows logically from the first, namely, that the finitude of human speaking finds a logical, if only temporary, resting point in absolute silence. Thus, at certain times, the fallibility of human discourse is best acknowledged through remaining silent in the awe of God’s giving. Job’s silence in the wake of God’s discourse—as Job glimpsed God’s abundant knowledge and creative work—could not have been otherwise (40.4-5). The human incapacity to capture God’s work within discourse becomes the impetus for recognizing God’s magnitude and sovereignty. Through these moments of helplessness, Christians glimpse the fully unmerited giving in which they are given life as God’s children. Through silence, believers are overwhelmed by God’s Otherness; they cannot conceive of anything that comes from within them that is worthy of ascribing to God. By their silence, Christians recognize that their feeble attempts to speak about God’s plenitude risk locating God within the confines of discourse, of turning the Otherness of God into the sameness of their own thoughts and words.
Habakkuk warned the wicked:
What use is an idol
once its maker has shaped it--
a cast image, a teacher of lies?
For its maker trusts in what has
been made,
though the product is only an
idol that cannot speak!
Alas for you who say to the wood,
“Wake up!”
to silent stone, “Rouse yourself!”
Can it teach?
See, it is gold and silver plated,
and there is no breath in it at all.
But the LORD is in his holy temple;
let all the earth keep silence
before him! (2:18-20)
The prophet urges silence before God as a contrast—an antidote and an act of repentance—to the restless activity of idol-making, the process of creating speechless gods in a human image. Because God is Other than idols, he commands the cessation of human talk. Because the idols are dead, they have no extension beyond a limited material existence; they are human products and are instruments of ineffective agency. It is God who lives and whose reach extends to the entire earth. Christian talk about God, then, is not the chatter that brings God into being, that brings him into the play of culture, as if he is an idol that submits to human desires and demands. Rather, Christian talk ought to proceed from an awareness of the silence that affirms God as wholly Other.
The contrast between the speechlessness of the idols and the speechfulness—speech granting and speech honoring—of God pushes the righteous into proclamation. Richard Engnell has noted that humanity’s relation to God as wholly Other constitutes the occasion for discourse—discourse of prophecy, testimony, and praise. The silence of the idols urges the voices of the believers. The error of making deities in a human image cries out for an announcement of the living Deity that makes humans in his image. The silence that grounds the believer’s discourse also becomes the impetus for a believer’s discourse.
Recognizing, first, that the what of God cannot be fully grasped in discourse has led to the second observation—supported through scriptural teaching, such as in Habakkuk—that silence is the ground for discourse about God. Yet this second observation spills back onto the first, such that the two together constitute a topography of the Christian’s location as one who speaks of God. Namely, the primacy of silence haunts what is said such that the believer’s discourse is stripped of arrogance. The humility necessary for the very saying of anything about God shadows every assertion, every predication. The confidence required of the believer’s testimony of a living God must be a confidence that is rooted only in the recognition of dependence, not in the haughtiness of one’s own agency.
Christian discourse, then, emerges out of a double humility: the humility that comes from acknowledging the inexhaustibility of God’s abundant grace, and the humility that arrives from a posture of silence before the Almighty.
God’s infinite grace provides the location for the Christian’s discourse in the world. The righteousness granted through life in Jesus Christ does not establish political authority, nor does it grant a cultural hegemony of values; it does, though, establish an orientation toward values and authorities that is situated within the being of God. According to the texts on suffering, Christians are pulled out of the cultural battle and located within the sphere of God’s abundant, excessive, and infinite grace. In this location Christians will find an ethic for social involvement that bespeaks their status as a humbled and suffering church, yet also an ethic that encourages them to speak influentially about the goodness of God for all humanity.
In Section I, I identified some central currents of contemporary social thought that position the Christian advocate at a disadvantage. In Section II, I refused to accept the reading of this disadvantaged position as an opportunity for reaction and ideological battle; rather, Biblical teaching on suffering leads to an alternative stance, rooted in the abundant and infinite grace of God. In this section, I return again to Nietzsche, a central figure in contemporary thought and practice. We are completing the rhetorical circle, then, by thinking again about culture from an alternative theological location.
In the midst of a Nietzschean age, God’s grace has not ceased to be abundant. The gift of grace has no limits, marking every historical moment with an opportunity for redemption. To speak in the current climate, Christians must locate their voices within the complex mix of relativism and pluralism, of consumerism and cynicism. From the theological location of plenitude, we will find in the social life signified by the name of Nietzsche—what is for many a dark place in the trajectory of history—the trace of God’s grace. By tracking this path of truth, perhaps we will open up a new search for content and strategy within Nietzschean thought itself. Merold Westphal asks rhetorically, “The Spirit that speaks to the church also blows where it will. Is it possible that the Spirit would speak to the church through its worst enemies?” (Suspicion 12). In short, we can begin to see Nietzsche as a “theological resource” (Westphal, “Nietzsche”).
Theologians and Christian philosophers have identified in Nietzsche the resources for a vigorous shaking of our faith; they hope that Nietzschean thinking might knock loose some encrusted layers of poor theology or ineffective belief, or both (cf. O’Flaherty 6). What is shaken loose, and how, varies according to the differing purposes of the authors. I have identified two overall approaches, and I will place authors in each approach, all the while recognizing that any such scheme will involve much slippage and overlap. But the limits of such a scheme are outweighed, I trust, by the function of the categories to open-up a slightly different approach to Nietzsche as a theological resource. The reconsideration of Nietzsche also will distinguish further the rhetorical stance I advocate from that identified in Section I.
#1: Nietzsche as Foil
One approach considers Nietzsche as a foil for highlighting Christian thought. I note two versions of Nietzsche as foil: (1) Nietzsche as enemy, and (2) Nietzsche as lamp. The second is far more subtle, and of much more value, for locating Christian discourse in a Nietzschean world. The former simply sees Nietzsche as Christianity’s chief antagonist within modern philosophical and social thought. He becomes the ultimate expression of relativism, and this will eventually lead, if it has not already, to complete moral and social breakdown. Whereas some commentators and preachers may hold to such an extreme dismissal of Nietzsche, very few who have read Nietzsche would hold to this reductionist approach. Whereas Arthur Holmes’s account of Nietzsche comes close to this position, his sensitivities as a trained philosopher add sophistication to his charge that Nietzsche is the enemy.[8] Holmes constructs a master narrative of philosophy’s commitment to an objective moral order, an order which Christians understand more truly through the divine Logos. Within this narrative, Nietzsche plays the villain, launching a mode of discourse outside of truth and order that has deleterious effects on contemporary cultural thought. Due to Nietzsche, the history of ideas has been infected with a moral disease. In Holmes’s treatment, we must combat Nietzsche, and return the discussion of right and wrong to its objective moorings.
Hans Küng also tends toward version one in some of his writing (346-352),[9] although his concern is more straightforwardly with the evil in the world resulting from Nietzschean thought, and less on the surrounding philosophical troubles. Nietzsche, then, is a force to be reckoned with, and with whom to do battle. If Küng and Holmes are correct in their (relatively straightforward) interpretations of Nietzsche, and correct in their cultural diagnosis of his effects, then we have much reason to think carefully about the prospects of large-scale spiritual battle over the direction of contemporary culture.
Karl Barth represents the second view of Nietzsche as lamp. Nietzsche provides the ultimate statement, according to Barth, of the individual, qua individual, accomplishing works of power and mastery on earth. Nietzsche's view of the human is of one without a “fellow-man,” without needing the assistance or service of others.
The new thing in Nietzsche was the fact that the development of humanity without the fellow-man, which secretly had been the humanity of the Olympian Goethe and other classical figures as well the more mediocre, reached in him a much more advanced, explosive, dangerous, and yet also vulnerable stage—possibly its last . . . [T]he man who is utterly inaccessible to others, having no friends and despising women; the man who is at home only with the eagles and strong winds; the man whose only possible environment is desert and wintry landscape, the man beyond good and evil, who can exist only as a consuming fire. (370)[10]
Unlike Goethe, and every other classical superman, Nietzsche had the courage to express his achievement, and he did so in the face of the greatest enemy to that achievement, Jesus Christ, the one crucified.
The boldness with which Nietzsche articulated his station is precisely that boldness that throws the genuine commitment of Christianity into relief. Nietzsche had to oppose Christianity because it advocates “suffering man.” Rather that extravagant independence, Christ teaches extravagant service and sacrifice. “With the discovery of the Crucified and His host he [Nietzsche] discovered the Gospel itself in a form which was missed even by the majority of its champions, let alone its opponents, in the nineteenth century” (373-374). Nietzsche, then, does us a service through his vigorous self-aggrandizement; he is an ally, of sorts, from whom we are enabled to see true Christianity more clearly. Nietzsche is a lamp held up to faith, to help Christians see its character and its depth.
Treating Nietzsche as a foil involves reading Nietzsche as antithetical to Christianity: through examining the contours of darkness, Christians can more fully appreciate the light. Or, to be more consistent with Barth’s thinking here, after sensing the darkness Christians can grasp the fundamental nature of light.
As valuable as this antithetical thinking is for insight into culture and faith, it pushes the Christian interaction with Nietzsche into a corner. Christians are left with very few options regarding the work that Nietzsche can do for their thinking and living. Of course, Holmes, Küng and Barth exceed the category of foil at key points; even they realize that to settle for an antithetical Nietzsche is to do an injustice to the wealth of his work. Each of these thinkers recognizes that Nietzsche also is a goad to push Christians into more profound engagement with their faith and its outworking in culture.
#2: Nietzsche as Goad
By acknowledging that many in the nineteenth century who professed Christ may be missing the kernel of the Gospel, Barth moves from treating Nietzsche as foil to a goad, for now Nietzsche becomes a catalyst for a rediscovery of faith. Küng, however, states this provocation much more directly. He reasons that Nietzsche's direct attacks on Christianity provoke Christians into critical reflection about who they are and what they believe. “How many Christians even ask about the authentic, original Christianity? The main charge brought by Nietzsche deserves all our attention[!]” (343). In order to combat Nietzsche's view of Christianity, Christians must school themselves in the nature of the church, the priesthood, the idea of God. Christians must, in short, gain sufficient and accurate knowledge of faith so that Nietzsche's critique will be recognized as misguided. Reading Nietzsche, therefore, is “a provocation for Christians which can be salutary” (344).
Treating Nietzsche as Barth and Küng treat him, at least in the brief excerpts of their works I review here, is to treat him almost exclusively as an antagonist.[11] Nietzsche's value, then, is rooted in the intellectual cleansing that comes from reading error. This reading of Nietzsche remains negative. Is there a more positive approach to Nietzsche? Indeed, Nietzsche can goad Christians to think about faith more positively, by establishing certain intellectual positions and attitudes that a Christian could accept. Merold Westphal’s scholarship describes this mode of reading Nietzsche, so to his work I turn.
In Westphal’s work, Nietzsche goads Christians into seeing the ways that faulty religious thinking may have infiltrated their faith. Nietzsche, thus, reveals where theology goes awry and, consequently, assists in the process of keeping it aright. Westphal writes: “Because their critique of religion is so deeply biblical, in spite of their own unbelief, Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche can help us to recover the meaning of the biblical critique of religion” (Suspicion 12). Westphal illustrates this observation by demonstrating how Nietzsche's critique of religious thinking parallels closely the utterances of Jesus against the Pharisees (Suspicion 265-274). Therefore, Nietzsche can sensitize contemporary Christians to the pharisaical thinking in their own theologies; in this sense, Nietzsche is being biblical even in the midst of his own anti-Christian discourses. Nietzsche is anti-religious, and his expose of religious foibles and follies can goad Christians into a more authentic use of the Bible, “the most anti-religious of all the world’s scriptures” (Suspicion 265).
To examine Westphal’s argument more closely, I will turn to a recent essay in which he outlines the specific ways that Nietzsche becomes a theological resource (“Nietzsche”). Overall, Westphal claims, Nietzsche is helpful in warning theologians about idol building, about the tendency to equate theological thoughts about God into the Truth of God. Nietzsche accomplishes this warning by offering two “prophylaxes.” Prophylaxis #1—the hermeneutics of finitude. Nietzsche reminds us that humans are always embedded within a particular perspective—we are finite—and thus we cannot achieve the kind of knowledge that exists outside of a specific place or time. Theologians need to be reminded of this, according to Westphal, for theology is tempted “by the fallacious assumption . . . that since it speaks of the Absolute it must speak absolutely” (“Nietzsche” 217). The ultimate implication of this hermeneutical practice is that theologians are to speak with humility, avoiding the conceit that when they speak of God, they are thereby adequately explaining the world.[12] Prophylaxis #2—the hermeneutics of suspicion. As explained in section I above, Nietzsche treats expressed purposes as a function of the will to power. Similarly, the theologian needs to be wary of the interests underlying theological work. Certainly the will to power can operate beneath the theological consciousness, but Westphal does not limit our suspicions to Nietzschean language. It is sin that lurks within the motives, functioning unconsciously to distort theological work. “Self-deception occurs, not simply because there are interests at work in our believings [sic], but because these interests so often are those we cannot acknowledge without shame” (223). This hermeneutic is necessary for the theologian, according to Westphal, because it is linked strongly with the doctrine of the fall; it is an “indispensable [tool] for any theologian who takes sin seriously” (224).
By equipping themselves with these two prophylaxes, Christians will protect themselves from theological arrogance, from the “theological equivalent of syphilis or aids, a deadly virus that kills theology by transforming what would be discourse about God into discourse about ourselves and by transforming altruistic virtues into egoistic vices” (216). Nietzsche is a goad, therefore, for safe theology. He warns us, with alarming insight, about the dangers of thinking about God without the proper protection against our sinfulness. Therefore, our claims to truth must be appropriately humble and our claims to understand must be appropriately limited
Westphal’s approach to Nietzsche is fundamentally different from Holmes, Küng, or Barth. Rather than using Nietzsche as a point of contrast, an oppositional figure, Westphal uses Nietzsche as point of similarity, an affirmative figure. He sees Nietzsche as an ally, helping theologians to think more carefully about theological pronouncements. Of course, Nietzsche does not actually make those pronouncements; rather, his stinging [TCF1]critique of the Church exposes the weaknesses and hypocrisies in theological thinking. His method of critique—his hermeneutics for interpreting the Church—is a method worthy of imitation, by Christians and by their theological talk. Christians can “appropriate” (Westphal’s term) Nietzsche to help them see their own religiosity, and they can use Nietzsche's methods to perpetuate self-critique even beyond what Nietzsche himself exposes. Taking the axiom of the church fathers seriously, Westphal finds God’s truth to be evident in Nietzsche’s truth.
In Westphal’s analysis, however, Nietzsche’s truth is of a particular kind; it is truth about the presence of sin. Nietzsche effectively exposes the sinfulness of the human condition and the sinfulness of a human church. Like a prophet of old, Nietzsche calls to account the deceitfulness and hypocrisy of religiosity.
At this point in understanding Westphal—at the point of seeing Nietzsche functioning as a prophet—I see much to applaud yet much that warrants modification. Nietzsche is an odd sort of prophet, for his rebuke originates from within the premises of his own misunderstanding of Christianity. Yes, Nietzsche notices the foibles of Christian people and of the Church, but Nietzsche’s analysis of those foibles is so intimately tied with a deeply flawed view of Christianity that to affirm those foibles is to undermine Christian teaching. To support Nietzsche’s diagnosis as an exposé of sin is to give Nietzsche too much theological credit. Thus, although Westphal opens the door for a more positive use of Nietzsche, Westphal also opens the door for the ongoing critique of Christianity from within Nietzschean premises. To demonstrate this, I will consider the two conclusions Westphal draws from his appropriation of Nietzsche: the hermeneutics of suspicion and the hermeneutics of finitude. Based on my critique of these two Nietzschean contributions, I will summarize my broader concern with Westphal’s use of Nietzsche.
Nietzsche’s affirmation of the hermeneutics of suspicion rests on a view of Christian ethical action as rooted in ressentiment. As I discussed in Section I above, Nietzsche advances the interpretive practice of genealogy by presuming that Christians’ expressed motivations are actually deceptive, masking their true will to power. Nietzsche treats Christian profession, therefore, suspiciously, seeking the ulterior motivation lying beneath the surface explanation. Nietzsche’s own morality is a celebration of the will to power, so his attack on Christianity is not that Christians pursue power, but they do so vindictively, by reacting against the true nobility. To interpret Christians suspiciously is to interpret them as reactive moral agents—what appears to be a positive morality on the surface is actually vindictiveness and negativity. Nietzsche, writes Milbank, defines “Christianity as negation” (Theology 286).
Given the origins and assumptions of Nietzsche’s hermeneutics of suspicion, how desirable is it for theologians to practice a hermeneutic of suspicion for interpreting their own theological work? To be suspicious of one’s theology, in Nietzschean terms, is to accept the analysis that a Christian’s life and witness is first and foremost an act of vindictiveness and negativity; ressentiment would be implicitly accepted as the wellspring of Christian theology.
Therefore, to advocate this hermeneutic for Christian theology is to perpetuate Nietzsche's assessment of Christian morality as primarily reactive rather than affirmative. Indeed, Westphal himself seems to recognize the inherent undesirability of suspicion as a primary mode of operation for interpretive work. He warns against overly negative and cynical attitudes resulting from a rigorous application of this hermeneutic (Suspicion 283-289).[13] One must ask, though, what is the desirability of a theological practice that comes with a warning attached? If, on the other hand, Christian theologians do their work from within God’s graciousness, the operative hermeneutic is not suspicion but charity.[14] It seems far less necessary to warn against the rigorous application of Biblical charity than against the rigorous application of suspicion. Certainly Scripture cautions the believer about love, but the caution pertains to the cost of love—the extent of sacrifice—and not to sinful outcomes resulting from the full life of love (e.g., Luk 14:24-34).
Certainly sin mars all human work, but an awareness of sin ought not to be a primary hermeneutical stance for the theologian; rather, the hermeneutical practice results first and foremost (ontologically and existentially) from the magnitude of God’s grace that makes the theologian aware of sin. An awareness of sin does not lead humanity to God, but it is God who graciously leads humanity to an awareness of sin.[15] The theological caution results from the eternity and plenitude of God’s giving. Nietzsche’s error is to advocate a mode of interpretation that foregrounds the Christian’s depravity; Westphal follows Nietzsche too closely in premising theological humility—a spiritual virtue—on the awareness of spiritual vice[TCF2]. When Christians alter their view of Christian virtue, their hermeneutic will change accordingly.
Nietzsche’s erroneous assumptions also work their way into Westphal’s other contribution to a theologian’s hermeneutic practice, the hermeneutic of finitude. Nietzsche’s insight into finitude, similar to his insight into suspicion, is grounded in a view of humanity independent from God. Consequently, when Westphal pulls epistemological insight from Nietzsche, he is pulling from a deeply flawed theological position.
Westphal develops the hermeneutics of finitude from Nietzsche’s perspectivism, i.e., from humanity’s ability to reflect on its own limited perspective. Nietzsche effectively describes the limitations of human knowledge; so, Westphal argues, Nietzsche goads Christians into recognizing the limitations of their own theological assertions. Yet the measure of finitude, within Nietzschean thought, is due to the peculiarity of the human perceptual apparatus, the tricks of cognition by which we place ourselves at the center of the universe. [16] Nietzsche de-centers us by exposing not only our limitations but our inability to have any clue about reality—such that reality becomes a fictitious concept. To make such an argument, though, Nietzsche actually privileges the human as a locus of perceptual uncertainly and ontological ignorance. It is the human who cannot know.[17] Ironically, since it is reflection on humanity that produces the conviction of human finitude, Nietzsche is actually establishing humanity as the epistemological arbites of its reality; we build our lives around our own capacity to see that we do not see, to know that we do not know. Note one of Nietzsche’s many attacks on the idea of an objective constitution of things:
That things possess a constitution in themselves quite apart from interpretation and subjectivity, is a quite idle hypothesis: it presupposes that interpretation and subjectivity are not essential, that a thing freed from all relationships would still be a thing.
Conversely, the apparent objective character of things: could it not be merely a difference of degree within the subjective?--that perhaps that which changes slowly presents itself to us as “objectively” enduring, being, “in-itself”—that the objective is only a false concept of a genus and an antithesis within the subjective? (Will 560 [Spring-Fall 1887], emphasis in the original).[18]
The human subject becomes central in the defense of perspectivism. Our function as arbiters, then, marks us as totalizers, seeking to (dis)unite all epistemological and ethical activities within an understanding of our finitude.
Conversely, for the Christian, the measure of finitude is not the human subject but the transcendence of deity, by which we experience our own limitations. Isaiah’s eloquence on the finitude of human existence is prompted by his exaltation of the LORD’s sovereignty and eternity (Is. 40:6-8, 21-26), not on our perceptual limitations. Paul’s acknowledgment that “we see in a mirror, dimly,” develops out of his insistence on the eternity of love and on a divinely initiated telos of seeing “face to face” (I Cor. 13.8-13). Nietzsche’s perspectivism, contra Westphal, does not echo Paul’s (“Nietzsche” 217), but originates in a field of human arrogance seeded with a will to totalize.
Overall, therefore, Westphal too willingly accepts Nietzsche's hermeneutical practices without critically assessing Nietzsche's foundational assumptions. Consequently, Westphal encourages theological work grounded in the very misunderstanding of Christianity on which Nietzsche built his criticism. The consequences of Westphal’s intellectual recommendations are, at best, strategically misguided: by accepting Nietzsche’s hermeneutic of suspicion, Westphal unwittingly lends support to the critique of Christianity as negative and oppressive; by accepting Nietzsche’s hermeneutic of finitude, Westphal raises the ugly specter of a Christianity that promotes the totalitarian and ethnocentric impulses of the human subject.
To accept Nietzsche as goad in Westphal’s sense, then, is decidedly a mixed bag. Yet the extended attention toward Westphal’s work is warranted, for he, more than any other Christian thinker, seeks to engage Nietzschean thought in a way that opens the Christian to the otherness of Nietzsche. Nietzsche is more than simply an oppositional figure, and he is more than simply a thorn in the side of theological work. He also can inspire a certain kind of theological activity. More specifically, we can tap Nietzsche as a resource for theological thinking about the conditions and directions of our contemporary age. My reading of Westphal, though, indicates that attempts to pull specific theological cautions from Nietzsche—to hear him as a prophet—are dangerous. We must approach him another way. We must reject Nietzsche’s atheism, yet not limit his work to specific theological positions or categories. Our task is to hold rejection and openness simultaneously. Westphal’s “appropriation” of Nietzsche does not fit this bill—it casts Nietzsche into the category of offering useable (read: consumable) theological conclusions, and values Nietzsche’s work only for its potential restatement of what is already accepted by the Christian reader.[19] There remains no contribution of Nietzsche to life and faith, only a voice--like a Greek chorus--that adds an exclamation point to what is already affirmed.
Like Westphal, however, I sense that Nietzsche offers something “quasi-scriptural” for our theological work (“Nietzsche” 216), yet we ought to approach Nietzsche with the anticipation of being surprised by a fresh understanding of what faith could be like in a post-Christian age. We ought to approach Nietzsche—and those who invoke his name-- from our stance as people who live lives marked by God’s grace, and who are eager to see in others the traces of God’s grace that mark even the darkest corners of human existence[TCF2].
Our Nietzschean age saddles the Christian advocate with a bundle of assumptions that undermines the genuine love and grace that ought to characterize Christian discourse. Yet on this count Nietzsche’s thought cannot be dismissed, for to do so is to act toward Nietzsche from a rhetorical stance that is already indicted in culture as reactionary and violent. The challenge is to act rhetorically within Nietzschean culture in a way that treats culture, including the thought of Nietzsche himself, as an opportunity for articulating the Christian vision with insight and theological shrewdness. Of those Christian responses to Nietzschean thought surveyed here, only Westphal seeks to engage Nietzsche with a degree of positive attention commensurate with the positive reception of Nietzsche in today’s culture. In Westphal’s creative reading, we hear the impulse of a Christian who wishes to speak within the contemporary era, and from this platform open the possibility that Christians can speak to the contemporary era, as well.
Where Christians stand in culture shapes the legitimacy of what they hope to convey to culture. Despite Westphal’s significant step toward Nietzschean culture, his defense of Nietzschean finitude and suspicion is an unattractive place to stand, for these “insights” are rooted in views of Christianity that are tragic, and, unfortunately, all too common in today’s world. We need a much more dynamic theological reading of Nietzsche in order to approach his thinking in ways that avoid reducing him to foil or goad. Our reading must avoid the twin limitations of Westphal’s analysis. First, by seeing Nietzsche as an appropriatable resource, Westphal places Nietzsche into pre-existing theological categories. Nietzsche becomes less of an invitation for rethinking how the Gospel ought to be placed in contemporary society and more of a source for confirming what has already been acknowledged and practiced. Thus, Nietzsche becomes instantiated into a particular position, suitable for shoring up our theological thinking before we enter the rough and tumble world of theological and cultural dispute. Second, by seeing Nietzsche as providing prophylaxes, Westphal continues the tradition of other Christian thinkers by considering Nietzsche as primarily a negative resource. Although more positive than Holmes, Küng, and Barth, Westphal still cannot get outside of Nietzsche as one whose theological contributions are directed toward the critique of public Christianity.
What I have hoped to glimpse in this essay is an alternative location from which the Christian can approach our Nietzschean age. The stance I note is more positive and forward looking. It recognizes in Nietzschean thought not only a hostile moment in a war of positions (many opponents of Christianity, including Nietzsche himself, advocate his thinking for just such a purpose) but a productive challenge and an imaginative resource. This stance avoids placing Christians as speaking from the position of cultural warrior, with the connotations of hegemonic warfare fostered by a politically liberal and cultural level of analysis. Instead, Christians stand within scriptural teaching on suffering and grace. These same teachings propel us to approach the current age more enthusiastically—not as a battlefield to be lost, but as an opportunity for discovering grace and truth. This is not to diminish the genuine spiritual warfare in which the Christian participates. But it is to retain a vigorously Biblical focus on spiritual warfare by letting the Gospel of peace and life guide our discourse in a violent world.
In his theological defense of human artistic production, Jeremy Begbie describes the process of cultural engagement that aptly summarizes the rhetorical stance I advocate herein:
True artistic creativity will be more a matter of an intensive but appropriate engagement with the world in which we are set, in which there is not only discovery and respect, but also a concern to develop and (in some cases) redeem what is given to hand. (212)
Working
with contemporary Nietzschean thought is a practice of artistic creativity:
there is “discovery and respect” while recognizing that full theological
insights cannot be pulled from the intellectual products of the age without “a
concern to develop and . . . redeem.”
How
then do Christians speak in today’s world?
In this essay, I have laid only some initial groundwork, yet a direction
begins to emerge. Christian discourse
should be saturated with abundant life.
Speaking out of the abundance God provides, the Christian will speak in
a way that promotes forgiveness and charity, and these without limit. Thus, Christian discourse ought not to
operate according to a hermeneutics of suspicion, at least not as its primary
mode. When deliberating on the merits
of other’s positions or practices, the believer’s discourse ought not to focus
on unconscious motives, underlying rationales, and the will to power. Such a focus may be necessary at times, but
it is never a first step and never a prerequisite. Instead, Christians ought to approach others from within the
abundant grace of God, so persuasive discourse to others, and about others,
begins with the resources of God’s abundant forgiveness and faithfulness. The approach to the Other is first and
foremost a positive engagement, not based on a reactive morality.
Ironically, Nietzsche’s development of ressentiment provides insight into the kind of discourse Christians ought to practice. Discourse mired in revenge and subterfuge is morally and aesthetically unattractive. Nietzsche, whose work cannot escape the marks of God’s grace, seeks to celebrate the life of absolute affirmation. Although Nietzsche’s full concept of life is generated through a dramatic misreading of Christianity, he nonetheless paints vivid pictures of life free from negation and hypocrisy.