Civil Commotion

God save us from His publicists.

I’ve remarked often over the years that — with the possible exception of Ayn Rand, who shared a lot of his ideas — few philosophers have been so grievously misunderstood as Friedrich Nietzsche. A longtime reader sends this video prepared by Slate that helps correct some of the commonplace mistakes.

Nietzsche can be understood only if he is properly located in Western thought, which begins with Plato. Plato believed, to radically simplify matters, that for everything we encounter in the temporal world there is an ideal, eternally-existing “form” in some other world. Consider, for instance, dogs. There are big dogs, little dogs, dogs with long narrow faces and dogs with smooshed-in faces. I have two Boxer dogs, and a neighbor has a Yorkie; it’s hard to believe they are the same type of mammal. Plato believed that, somewhere, there is an ideal dog in which my dogs and the neighbor’s dog somehow participate, that they are all poor copies of the ideal dog found somewhere else.

Eight-hundred years elapse. Christianity successfully suppresses Epicurus’ theory of evolution, and suppresses Aristotle; there is only Plato and his deranged idea of forms. Then, St. Augustine comes along and, in 420 A.D., suppresses the Pelagian heresy by layering-on Original Sin, explaining why that other place where the forms are is inaccessible to us. Supposedly, the Garden of Eden was the home of the perfection, the ideal, of everything

Many people still take this seriously: take a look at this tweet from Monday by John Piper’s organization.

Our ‘home’ is that place where the ideal ‘forms’ are — Heaven, or Eden.

In 1670, a Dutch philosopher named Baruch Spinoza published Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, which argued that ancient texts such as the Torah should be read according to the understandings prevailing at the time they were written. That seems like common sense today, but was radical at the time; then, the Torah and the Bible were to be read only devotionally. Spinoza’s Tractatus was suppressed, and his ideas went underground.

In the 1850’s, with the idea of the secular state firmly established (if not always scrupulously observed), Spinoza’s approach to reading ancient texts was revived in Germany. And then, in 1859, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published.

Origin? Species? Species were created at the founding of Eden, and we now lived amongst corrupted (By Sin! Sin-Sin-Sin!) versions of those species. Everybody knew that!

Nietzsche’s academic career began in the late 1860’s, and he was uniquely situated to grasp that the confluence of Spinoza’s ideas about reading ancient texts — the work in Germany had already shown that much of the Old Testament was untrue and simply make-believe history — and Darwin’s idea of evolution couldn’t possibly end happily for Christianity, whose metaphysics had governed the world for 1600-years. Species, Darwin showed, came and went according to an apprehensible mechanism. Highly organized structures could evolve naturally. Darwin didn’t show or claim to show that there is no Invisible Wizard with a long beard sitting on a cloud someplace, but he showed dispositively that he wasn’t needed to explain the diversity of life.

A huge, epochal, paradigm shift was afoot — and it fell to Nietzsche to be the first to grasp that or, at least, to be the first to say so. All of Nietzsche’s writings then focused on avoiding the nihilism which he believed would follow upon Christianity’s inevitable, unavoidable, collapse.

The churches, too unintelligent to understand what was happening all around them, focused on destroying Nietzsche, with the result that he gets beat-up from two directions — by those Holy Men whose livelihood he threatens, and those dullards who are simply incapable of understanding the world without the aid of hobgoblins and fairy tales.

One of our local preachers got to howling-out one Sunday a list of writers that no decent, godly person would ever permit in his home. Imagine my surprise when I realized I had all of them in my home library except ol’ Friedrich! So, next visit to Barnes & Noble, I picked-up a copy of Twilight of the Idols. The only reason I had for selecting that particular title is that I liked it, but it was a fortuitous choice; the book was written in the last year of Nietzsche’s working life, and serves as a sort of survey course in his thought. It’s a good place to start.

Lifeway, the Southern Baptist bookstore, has pulled author Jen Hatmaker’s books from their shelves in response to her support for same-sex marriage.

LifeWay Christian Resources decided to stop distributing the books of best-selling Christian author Jen Hatmaker due to the comments she made in support of same-sex marriage.

“In the past, LifeWay Christian Resources published several resources with Jen Hatmaker. In a recent interview, she voiced significant changes in her theology of human sexuality and the meaning and definition of marriage — changes which contradict LifeWay’s doctrinal guidelines,” said LifeWay spokesman Marty King in an interview with Baptist Press.

Well … ho-hum. It is the SBC’s store, the SBC’s club, et cetera, et cetera. It’s worthwhile, though, to take a moment to understand why they are so immovable on this issue.

Though they will swear up and down that it isn’t so, and will never admit the contrary in a million years, the bottom-line here is that Southern Baptists don’t believe in marriage at all. What the Southern Baptists believe in is animal husbandry, in a cosmic grant of permission to procreate. They affirmatively condemn the mutual loyalty and shared ambitions that make a relationship a marriage, because those are presumptions upon the absolute sovereignty of Our Invisible Friend, who alone is worthy of your loyalty and who will tell you what are your ambitions. The Southern Baptists have degenerated into a cult, and they literally cannot comprehend a life that isn’t concerned with the cult’s perpetuation.

Bruce Gerencser reprises a point I’ve made many times over the years — many preachers undoubtedly know they’re preaching untrue and sometimes harmful nonsense but, once in, leaving the ranks of the clergy is almost impossible and comes at the cost of tremendous upheaval.

In many ways, these defenders of inerrancy are similar to atheist pastors, people who have invested their lives in promoting and defending Evangelicalism. Admitting that what they teach is untrue would quickly and viciously destroy their livelihood. When men have spent their lives pastoring churches or teaching seminary classes, how will they earn a living if they suddenly lose their job? So, Evangelical and atheist pastors alike continue to promote the inerrancy myth, hoping to run out the clock before they are exposed. For some of them, the personal and ethical costs are too high, so they out themselves, causing tremendous heartache and loss.

Just as many parents groom their sons from infancy to be pastors, many little girls are raised to be a pastor’s wife. The cost of leaving, with a set of skills ill-suited for any work but preaching, can be staggering.