The Antichrist in a Brave New World

The Christian conception of God – God as god of the sick, God as a spider, God as spirit – is one of the most corrupt conceptions of the divine ever attained on earth.  It may even represent the low-water mark in the descending development of divine types.  God degenerated into the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes!  God as the declaration of war against life, against nature, against the will to live!  God – the formula for every slander against “this world,” for every lie about the “beyond”!  God – the deification of nothingness, the will to nothingness pronounced holy!

Friedrich Nietzsche The Antichrist


I used this quote in class today along with some quotes by Karl Marx and Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials).  I referenced them in the context of a discussion of the book Brave New World - specifically the question: When does Christianity become soma?  I happen to think the end of Brave New World is brilliant - the Savage hangs himself - in some ways crushed beneath the weight of the Brave New World.  I asked the Gen 300 students if that should be the fate of the Christian community ... trampled by the brave new world around us.  Or - has Christianity become more like Mustapha Mond - hell bent on gaining power in the form of efficient control and manipulation...keeping the masses in a perpetual state of numbness.  


Obviously Nietzsche believed that Christianity is hostile to life - forcing humanity into an upward posture in which we try to break away from our humanity, away from passion and emotion, always looking toward something else.  We become enslaved to a form of divine determinism that erodes our humanity and the vitality of earthly life.  While I may not be able to go with him the full way, I believe his critique is important.  Religion - Christianity included - can become a means of control.  Walter Brueggemann refers to this as the "Royal Consciousness" - the domestication of God for the sake of military, economic, and cultural power... the sacrifice of life, passion, and vitality for the sake of stability. 


I raised this with the students today as an attempt to jolt us out of our slumber.  It is easy to read a book like Brave New World and think that its not talking about us - that it refers to some future danger or at least the "world out there."  But certainly it doesn't refer to us...we are Christians after all.  My purpose today was to suggest that not only is the Brave New World upon us... but that we have unknowingly fallen prey to bouts of the "feelies", "orgy porgy", and "soma."  


Martin Luther, in the context of scholasticism, referred to the god who is not God - warning against the domestication and idolatry that results from the absolutizing of doctrinal systems.  Such a god may be used to enslave, corrupt, and numb... but it is not the God of the bible.  Brueggemann suggests we follow the example of the Old Testament prophets who lamented, raged, poetically and passionately proclaimed the word of the Lord in the face of the Brave New World.  The question I left for students to struggle with - What does it mean to follow a crucified Christ in a Brave New World?  Did they understand the question?  Do I understand the question?  Not sure...

Christ-ianity

When does a belief system become unhooked from the thought of the person it was originally based upon? That was the question I had as I listened to the spring convocation address a week or so ago.  The speaker used the occasion to argue for just war theory - suggesting that only college freshmen should be excused from the naiveté of non violence.  The rest of us who might have such leanings are just dumb.  We're dumb because we don't know how the world works.  After all, evil is real - Nazis were real.  Isn't it interesting that it's always Nazis - its always Hitler.  What about the German Christians who allowed, dare I say supported, Hitler's rise to power?  I'm sure Romans 13 was invoked to legitimize the establishment of the Third Reich.  Is it possible that the very arguments used to support a "just war" against the Nazis provided the justification for the Nazi party?  Just a thought...

Funny thing about war... it seems like those who actually have to fight in them don't like them very much.  My grandpa would never talk about WWII - until he inexplicably started talking into the tape recorder.  Four to five tapes later what I remember most were the tears in his eyes as he talked about coming onto the beaches of Normandy after the D-Day invasion.  And when he said the only people who like to play dress up and march in the memorial day parades were the pencil pushers... the ones who didn't actually have to kill anyone.  My father says the same thing.  The big difference between my grandpa and my dad is that my dad won't talk about Vietnam.  He told me where to put the tape recorder in no uncertain terms.


Yet there we were - the faculty of a Christian college being lectured on the merits of just war.  Very little mention of the teachings of Jesus.  No discussion of whether the teachings of Jesus are normative for the Christian community.  It seems we've done Jesus a great service - we've taken his teachings into the 21st century.  We've used him to justify military retribution in the name of liberal democracy and freedom.  Divine justification for weaponized drones and military occupation.  When does a belief system detach itself from its teacher?  When we begin thinking we know better...