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...