“Who Could Kill God?”

By: Chris Johnson

“God is Dead, and we have killed him.”

This sensationalist exclamation by the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche resounds a little differently this time of year, as we remember the events of Good Friday two thousand years ago.  It is often misunderstood as a celebratory proclamation of victory, but in truth, Nietzsche simply understood the motivation and implication of “killing God”.

Elsewhere, he explains: “When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident… Christianity is a system, a whole view, of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands. Christianity presupposes that man does not know, cannot know, what is good for him, what is evil: he believes in God, who alone knows it. Christian morality is a command; its origin is transcendent; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticism; it has truth only if God is the truth – it stands and falls with faith in God.

“When the English actually believe that they know ‘intuitively’ what is good and evil, when they therefore suppose that they no longer require Christianity as the guarantee of morality, we merely witness the effects of the dominion of the Christian value judgement and an expression of the strength and depth of this dominion: such that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, such that the very conditional character of its right to existence is no longer felt. For the English, morality is not yet a problem.”

Nietzsche’s point was that Christianity was definitional to the West, and by ridding Western culture of its foundational faith in the Christian God – which we replaced with faith in humanity itself – we were knocking out the basis for our entire culture’s understanding of right and wrong. If God is dead, Nietzsche says, who or what gets to decide what is good and what is evil?

The White House provided it’s answer through the presidential proclamations it released, leading up to Easter last week.

On Good Friday, when the church calendar focuses our attention on the crucifixion of Christ, President Biden issued a proclamation, as presidents do to recognize upcoming days of import to their constituencies. But, it wasn’t for Good Friday, nor was it for Easter. In fact, eleven proclamations came out of the White House that day to recognize “important” occasions: proclamations for Second Chance Month, Month of the Military Child, Care Workers Recognition Month, National Child Abuse Prevention Month, National Public Health Week, Arab American Heritage Month, National Cancer Prevention and Early Detection Month, National Donate Life Month, National Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month, Cesar Chavez Day, and Transgender Day of Visibility.

Those last two were specifically for Sunday the 31^st, which the Christian world recognizes as Resurrection Sunday, yet there was no Easter proclamation accompanying those proclamations. There was a three-paragraph blurb of an Easter proclamation released on the day itself, however, once the attention had worn off from Friday’s proclamations. In contrast, the White House’s remembrance of the migrant worker hero Cesar Chavez spanned ten paragraphs, and its opining on transgenders went on for seven.

This was the heart of Biden’s message to the T in LGBT: “Today, we send a message to all transgender Americans:  You are loved.  You are heard.  You are understood.  You belong.  You are America, and my entire Administration and I have your back.”

Here’s what he had to say to the millions of Americans whose faith he claims to share: “Jill and I send our warmest wishes to Christians around the world celebrating Easter Sunday.”

As if that stark contrast doesn’t say it all, children submitting designs for the annual White House Easter Egg roll this year were prohibited from including religious themes… on a religious holiday which only affects Christians.

In response to all this, Blaze columnist and host Auron MacIntyre, echoed the above quote from Nietzsche: “There’s no such thing as a secular state. If you drive Christianity from the public square something will replace it. Something horrific.”

“Horrific” is an apt description for an ideology which results in permanently disfiguring and sterilizing confused young people – an ideology which places happiness for these children across the unbridgeable expanse of “passing” or being recognized as the opposite sex, an ideology which calls the affirmation of this barbarism “acceptance” and its condemnation, “hate.”

Dr. Albert Mohler explained the “visibility” strategy in his April 1 edition of The Briefing, “You say the more you make these sexual minorities, as they are sometimes described, visible… the more you make such things, such lifestyles, such identity claims, such relationships visible, the…idea is you will break down resistance and you will push social change, and eventually you will end up with total acceptance of your agenda.”

But, he says, there’s reason to be encouraged, “The more Americans look at the visible transgender claims and also the visible evidence, the more they have to decide if Christians can play the game of delusion and denial. Increasingly, the answer to that has to be no. In other words, there has to be a clarity and a courage on the part of Christians to say, ‘No, that’s just not true. We can’t go along with this. We can’t join in the delusion. We cannot become complicit in the denial.’ As we look at this, we need to recognize that, well, to put it another way, the more the transgender movement insists on being visible, the more the truth is going to show itself.”

Charles Spurgeon, commenting on Deuteronomy 28:13, said this: “It is for saints to lead the way among men by holy influence: they are not to be the tail, to be dragged hither and thither by others. We must not yield to the spirit of the age, but compel the age to do homage to Christ. If the Lord be with us, we shalt not crave toleration for religion, but we shall seek to seat it on the throne of society.”

The White House’s treatment of Christians on Easter this year demonstrates how our faith – the foundation of our culture and our nation – has fallen out of political and cultural favor. When Nietzsche said, “for the English, morality is not yet a problem,” he was looking ahead to our day. The question of where morality originates is the root of every symptom of decay in our culture and the Church needs to stand firm on the Word of God and remind our world that, “its origin is transcendent; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticism; it has truth only if God is the truth.” Nietzsche was an atheist whose presupposition was that God, in fact, was not truth. But Easter proved beyond all shadow of doubt that He is.

“God is dead, and we have killed Him” – what a ridiculous statement; who could kill God?  And it’s almost too rich that on the day we remember and celebrate His resurrection, our pagan president is “plotting in vain,” as if Christ had stayed in the tomb, as if He had not ascended to the right hand of God, as if He would not “break the nations with a rod of iron.” (Ps 2:9) Let we Christians “compel the age to do homage to Christ.,” the resurrected King, “lest He be angry, and [they] perish in the way, for His wrath is quickly kindled. Blessed are all who take refuge in him.” (Ps 2:12)

 

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